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August 21, 2024 - January 4, 2025
On the day
Left off here. The author described how she had left out racism in her previous work.
the Trump agenda—from repealing the Affordable Care Act to cutting taxes for big corporations and the wealthy (apparently the concern about the national debt expired with the Obama presidency) to stopping action on climate change, which would have catastrophic economic and social costs for the country and the world—was going to do damage across the board.
The authors concluded that “making the changing national racial demographics salient led white Americans (regardless of political affiliation) to endorse conservative policy positions more strongly.”
the 350 biggest corporations pay their CEOs 278 times what they pay their average workers, up from a 58-to-1 ratio in 1989, and nearly two dozen companies have CEO-to-worker pay gaps of over 1,000 to 1.
“Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing,”
(Notwithstanding the black president, 90 percent of state, local, and federal elected officials were white in the mid-2010s.)
In the seventeenth century, influential Europeans were starting to create taxonomies of human beings based on skin color, religion, culture, and geography, aiming not just to differentiate but to rank humanity in terms of inherent worth. This
The death toll of South and North American Indigenous people in the century after first contact was so massive—an estimated 56 million lives, or 90 percent of all the lands’ original inhabitants, through either war or disease—that it changed the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
particularly after the bloody Bacon’s Rebellion, in which a black and white rebel army burned the capital of colonial Virginia to the ground—colonial governments began to separate the servant class based on skin color.
E. Jones-Rogers’s They Were Her Property: White Women Slaveholders in the American South
They Were Her Property
Because the southern “oligarchs of the lash,” as he called them, had done so little to support education, innovation, and small enterprise, slavery was making southern whites poorer.
counties that relied more on slave labor in 1860 had lower per capita incomes in 2000.
Homestead Act of 1862
thirteen-year-old black boy named Tommy Cummings
Montgomery, Alabama, the Oak Park pool
but the Supreme Court, in Palmer v. Thompson,
held that a city could choose not to provide a public facility rather than maintain an integrated one, because by robbing the entire public, the white leaders were spreading equal harm.
This is so incredibly stupid. It is hard to believe...
Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America,
Over the next decade, millions of white Americans who once swam in public for free began to pay rather than swim for free with black people; desegregation in the mid-fifties coincided with a surge in backyard pools and members-only swim clubs. In Washington, D.C., for example, 125 new private swim clubs were opened in less than a decade following pool desegregation in 1953. The classless utopia faded, replaced by clubs with two-hundred-dollar membership fees and annual dues. A once-public resource became a luxury amenity, and entire communities lost out on the benefits of public life and civic
...more
“We compute that voter racism reduced the income tax rate by 11–18 percentage points.” They conclude, “Absent race as an issue in American politics, the fiscal policy in the USA would look quite similar to fiscal policies in Northern Europe.”
When you cut government services, as Reagan strategist Lee Atwater said, “blacks get hurt worse than whites.” What’s lost in that formulation is just how much white people get hurt, too.
The novel idea of flourishing public colleges—at least one in every state—took shape in the 1860s, when the U.S. government offered the states over ten million acres of land taken from Indigenous people to build on or to sell for institutions of higher education for their citizens.
The start of public colleges.
in 1947, veterans made up 50 percent of U.S. college admissions. (Racist program administration and educational segregation left black veterans in the South largely excluded from these opportunities, however.)
This represents an alarming stealth privatization of America’s public colleges.
“debt-for-diploma system,”
A third of developed countries offer free tuition, and another third keep tuition lower than $2,600.
Between 1979 and 2019, tuition and fees at the four-year public colleges increased eight-fold.
By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on jails and prisons than they were on colleges and universities.
Truman was the first president to champion civil rights since Reconstruction, desegregating the armed forces and forming a President’s Committee on Civil Rights.
He also ran an experiment to try to disassociate health reform proposals from Obama. “The experiments…revealed that health care policies were significantly more racialized when they were framed as part of President Obama’s plan than they were for respondents told that these exact same proposals were part of President Clinton’s 1993 reform efforts.”
Eric Knowles, Brian Lowery, and Rebecca
find this research
the highest hospital closures have in common is that their legislatures have all refused to expand Medicaid under Obamacare.
if you make as little as four thousand dollars a year, you’re considered too rich to qualify for Medicaid in Texas, and even that has exclusions, as McBeath explained.
Alabama: $3,910; Florida: $6,733; Georgia: $7,602; Mississippi: $5,647; Texas: $3,692—these are the paltry annual amounts that a parent in a southern state must earn less than in order to qualify for Medicaid in 2020;
(A typical assessment reads: “The neighborhood is graded ‘D’ because of its concentration of negroes, but the section may improve to a third class area as this element is forced out.”)
Federal Housing Administration, created in 1934.
Of all the African Americans in the United States during the decades between 1930 and 1960, fewer than 2 percent were able to get a home loan from the Veterans Administration or the Federal Housing Authority.
Fair Housing Act of 1968
and lose everything if they missed a single payment. Unlike
land contracts did not allow buyers to build equity; indeed, they owned nothing until the final payment was made.
1975 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA),
1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which required financial institutions to make investments in any community from which they received deposits.
That’s why, today, most of your credit card statements come from South Dakota and Delaware, states with lax lending laws.
Knights of Labor.
“When everything else had failed, the bond of poverty united the white and colored mechanics and laborers.”
American Federation of Labor
A more radical faction of unions split off from the AFL to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)
The victories these unions won reshaped work for us all. The forty-hour workweek, overtime pay, employer health insurance and retirement benefits, worker compensation—all these components of a “good job” came from collective bargaining and union advocacy with governments in the late 1930s
Of course,
So far this chapter has talked about the origins of unions and how race played a role.
