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September 4 - September 4, 2023
African Americans just don’t buy that our gain has to come at the expense of white people. And time and time again, history has shown that we’re right. The civil rights victories that were so bitterly opposed in the South ended up being a boon for the region, resulting in stronger local economies and more investments in infrastructure and education.
colonies would not have been able to afford their War of Independence were it not for the aid provided by the French, who did so in exchange for tobacco grown by enslaved people.
In New Hampshire, for instance, he counted 2,381 public schools; in Mississippi, just 782. Maine had 236 libraries; Georgia, 38. The disparity was similar everywhere he looked.
“societies that began with relatively extreme inequality tended to generate institutions that were more restrictive in providing access to economic opportunities.”
When slavery was abolished, Confederate states found themselves far behind northern states in the creation of the public infrastructure that supports economic mobility, and they continue to lag behind today.
can’t create my own electric grid, school system, internet, or healthcare system—and the most efficient way to ensure that those things are created and available to all on a fair and open basis is to fund and provide them publicly.
council decided to drain the pool rather than share it with their black neighbors. Of course, the decision meant that white families lost a public resource as well.
Even in towns that didn’t immediately drain their public pools, integration ended the public pool’s glory years, as white residents abandoned the pools en masse.
When the people with power in a society see a portion of the populace as inferior and undeserving, their definition of “the public” becomes conditional. It’s often unconscious, but their perception of the Other as undeserving is so important to their perception of themselves as deserving that they’ll tear apart the web that supports everyone, including them. Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.
“Dog-whistle politics is gaslighting on a massive scale: stoking racism through insidious stereotyping while denying that racism has anything to do with it.”
There’s something so morally sanitized about the idea of fiscal restraint, even when the upshot is that tens of millions of people, including one out of six children, struggle needlessly with poverty and hunger.
Reagan cut taxes on the wealthy but raised them on the poor, waged war on the unions that were the backbone of the white middle class, and slashed domestic spending. And he did it with the overwhelming support of the white working and middle classes.
The Republican Party has won those votes through sheer cultural marketing to a white customer base that’s still awaiting delivery of the economic
goods they say they want.
percent of Republicans polled in the summer of 2020 actually supported a total government takeover of health insurance, Medicare for All—even after a Democratic primary where the idea was championed by a Democratic Socialist, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. Zero Republican politicians support this policy, and almost all voted in 2017 to repeal the relatively modest government role in healthcare under the Affordable Care
Republican Congress of 2017 reduced taxes by more than a trillion dollars, mainly on corporations and the wealthy.
Race isn’t a static state; it’s better understood as an action, and one of its chief functions is to distance white people from people who are “raced” differently.
At forty years old, I’m still paying it all off,
Because wealth is largely shaped by how much money your parents and grandparents had, black young adults’ efforts at higher education and higher earnings aren’t putting much of a dent in the racial wealth gap.
how is it smart to price a degree out of reach for the working class just as that degree became the price of entry into the middle class?
There is neither fairness nor wisdom in this system, only self-sabotage.
A third of developed countries offer free tuition, and another third keep tuition lower than $2,600.
By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on jails and prisons than they were on colleges and universities.
Dehumanizing and unpitying stereotypes about the dangers of drug use in the inner cities fueled a new era of harsher sentencing
White and black people are equally likely to use drugs, but the system is six times as likely to incarcerate black people for a drug crime.
She worked four jobs while studying, to keep her borrowing low, but still graduated with $70,000 in private and public student loans. Four years after graduation, making payments of $600 a month, she has paid off $28,000, but because of interest rates close to 10 percent, her remaining balance is $65,000. “This is madness,” she says. “How can I keep up with this? And for how long?” Unfortunately for Emilie, more than three million senior citizens who still owe $86 billion in student loans can attest that the “madness” doesn’t really end. Seniors with student loans are more likely to report
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The saddest, most common refrain in dozens of interviews and testimonials from borrowers is “I wish I had never gone to college.” If growing cynicism about higher education is the result of this sudden and total shift from public to private, then our entire society will bear the cost.
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.
Failing to insure so many people leaves a lot of unpaid medical bills in the state, and that drains the Texas hospital system. The conservative majority in the Texas legislature has been so opposed to the idea of Medicaid that they shortchange the state’s hospitals in compensating for the few (mostly pregnant women) Medicaid patients they see. Then, by rejecting Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, they lose out on federal money that would insure about 1.5 million Texas citizens.
are the paltry annual amounts that a parent in a southern state must earn less than in order to qualify for Medicaid in 2020;
Why wouldn’t a state’s politicians take free money to have such amazing health and economic outcomes in their communities, including rural ones with disproportionate conservative representation and fewer options for economic activity? It’s not that it’s unpopular; expanding Medicaid has polled higher than Obamacare since the bill passed. The answer is all too familiar: racism.
public healthcare is often a benefit that white people have little interest in sharing with their black neighbors.
out of every five nonelderly Texans lacks health insurance, the highest percentage in the country.
highest uninsured rate for those making over $100,000 (who may qualify for middle-income subsidies under Obamacare). The uninsured are disproportionately Latino, but there are over a million white non-Hispanic Texans without any healthcare coverage.
“When we first started to collect postcards and signatures and support around this, I remember Latino organizers coming back to the office and [saying], ‘We’re not doing very well.’ Because a lot of the folks [in] Latino communities were like, ‘We don’t want a handout. We work for what we earn. We’re not asking for anything for free.’
the subprime loans we started to see in the early 2000s were primarily marketed to existing homeowners, not people looking to buy—and they usually left the borrower worse off than before the loan.
mortgage market would have learned its lesson about subprime mortgages earlier in the 2000s, and the worst excesses would have been checked before they spun out of control and toppled the entire economy, causing $19.2 trillion in lost household wealth and eight million lost jobs—and that was just in the United States. The earliest predatory mortgage lending victims, disproportionately black, were the canaries in the coal mine, but their warning went unheeded.
“many of these customers could have qualified for less expensive or prime loans, but because Wells Fargo Financial only made subprime loans, managers had a financial incentive to put borrowers into subprime loans with high interest rates and fees even when they qualified for better-priced loans.”
sure that most of the people involved in the industry would claim not to have a racist bone in their body—in fact, I heard those exact words from representatives of lending companies in the aftermath of the crash. But
man who’d made his fortune in financial information did not know that the mortgages at the root of the crisis were usually refinances, not home purchases, and that creditworthiness was often beside the point. But he knew enough of the elite conventional wisdom to blame the victims of redlining.
If they were so lazy, why were they doing all the hardest, most relentless and dangerous jobs, the ones that also happened to be the lowest-paying?
pay for the richest 1 percent has risen by 190 percent.
Negro was subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority. The result of this was that the wages of both classes could be kept low, the whites fearing to be supplanted by Negro labor, the Negroes always being threatened by the substitution of white labor.
White people today, particularly outside the South, often distance themselves from slavery and Jim Crow by insisting that their immigrant ancestors had nothing to do with these atrocities and, in fact, themselves faced discrimination but were able to overcome it.
But the Irish, Germans, Poles, Slavs, Russians, Italians, and other Europeans who came to the United States underwent a process of attaining whiteness, an identity created in contrast to the blackness of unfree and degraded labor. As immigrants, these groups had an opportunity to ally themselves with abolition and, later, equal rights and to fight for better social and economic conditions for all workers. They chose instead, with few exceptions, the wages of whiteness.
Think about it: if you came to a country and saw the class of people in power abusing another group, and your place in relation to both groups was uncertain, wouldn’t you want to align yourself with the powerful group, and wouldn’t you be tempted to abuse the other to show your allegiance?
a colored person touched it, it would be dirty. But I was dirty. Yet in those moments, the shame of poverty was lifted. I wasn’t poor anymore. I was white.”
In general, people gave money to those who had less—except for people who were in the second-to-last place in
the money distribution to begin with.
they were explicitly saying that overcoming racism was crucial to their class-based goal. They
