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January 31 - February 4, 2023
Was it possible that even when we didn’t bring up race, it didn’t matter? That racism could strengthen the hand that beat us, even when we were advocating for policies that would help all Americans—including white people?
Contrary to how I was taught to think about economics, everybody wasn’t operating in their own rational economic self-interest. The majority of white Americans had voted for a worldview supported not by a different set of numbers than I had, but by a fundamentally different story about how the
economy works; about race and government; about who belongs and who deserves; about how we got here and what the future holds. That story was more powerful than cold economic calculations. And it was exactly what was keeping us from having nice things—to the contrary, it had brought us Donald Trump.
In my gut, I’ve always known that laws are merely expressions of a society’s dominant beliefs. It’s the beliefs that must shift in order for outcomes to change.
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.”
why white people would view the presence of more people of color as a threat to their status, as if racial groups were in a direct competition, where progress for one group was an automatic threat to another. And it was even more baffling to me how that threat could feel so menacing that these white people would resist policies that could benefit them, just because they might also benefit people of color.
But did white people win? No, for the most part they lost right along with the rest of us. Racism got in the way of all of us having nice things.
the town had drained its public swimming pool rather than integrate
racism is a poison first consumed by its concocters.
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.
On the other end, money is still being made: 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. The richest 1 percent own as much wealth as the entire middle class.
“It turns out that the average white person views racism as a zero-sum game,” added Sommers. “If things are getting better for black people, it must be at the expense of white people.”
One might assume that this kind of competitiveness is human nature, but I don’t buy it: for one thing, it’s more prevalent among white people than other Americans. If it’s not human nature, if it’s an idea that we’ve chosen to adopt, that means it’s one that we can choose to abandon.
Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.
There is neither fairness nor wisdom in this system, only self-sabotage.
By 2016, eighteen states were spending more on jails and prisons than they were on colleges and universities.
In 2016, the number of arrests for marijuana possession exceeded the total number of arrests for all violent crimes put together.
even though the closest thing we have to European-style single-payer care, Medicare for the elderly, is successful economically and popular with its beneficiaries.
Labor experts call this kind of stratification a tactic: create a sense of hierarchy and you motivate workers to compete with one another to please the bosses and get to the next category up, instead of fighting together to get rid of the categories and create a common, improved work environment for everyone.
The non-employee workers were not allowed to cast a ballot in the union drive, which silenced the voice of the lowest-paid and most precarious workers.
the positions got whiter as the jobs got easier and better paid.
management said the black workers were lazy, and that’s why they wanted a union. 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?
In the two-hundred-year history of American industrial work, there’s been no greater tool against collective bargaining than employers’ ability to divide workers by gender, race, or origin, stoking suspicion and competition across groups.
Knights of Labor. Their motto was “That is the most perfect government in which an injury to one is a concern of all.”
great black historian W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1948,
if unions were as common today as they were in 1979, weekly wages for men not in a union would be 5 percent higher;
since 1979, wages for the typical hourly worker have increased only 0.3 percent a year. Meanwhile, pay for the richest 1 percent has risen by 190 percent.
Most people will never get the kind of process that my colleagues and I went through at Demos, and now there’s a backlash telling white Americans it’s unpatriotic even to try. Like
the role that the largest religion in America has played in perpetuating American racism—and the way racial hierarchy seeps into religious institutions of all faiths.
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
It’s this history of the American church’s complicity with white supremacy that explains why, today, white Christians are about 30 percentage points more likely to hold racially resentful and otherwise racist views than religiously unaffiliated white people,
in the Quran in which Allah proclaims to humankind that “we…made you into nations and tribes [so] that you may know each other, not that you may despise each other.”
the news story of a local Bangladeshi Muslim family whose business, a restaurant named Gandhi Mahal, a few doors down from the Third Precinct of the Minneapolis Police Department, had caught fire in the protests. After losing his family’s business, the father, Ruhel Islam, reportedly said, “Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served.”
Ultimately, having millions of people with potential on the sidelines because they have too much debt and not enough opportunity saps the vitality of the entire economy. There’s a growing body of literature that shows that inequality itself impedes a country’s economic growth—even more than the factors policy makers have emphasized in the past: liberalizing trade policies, controlling inflation, and reducing national debt.
The ability of white families to count on inheritances from previous generations is the biggest contributor to today’s massive racial wealth gap.
What Carlson did there was a quick elision, from not sharing an ethnicity to not sharing values. In fact, it’s just the opposite, I discovered. When people have a chance to create a bond that’s not based on skin color or culture, what they actually connect on are the things they value in common:
This logic helps to explain both the upside and the downside of social diversity: people work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes.”
a six-year-old can be brave enough to walk through a violent mob of adults, but some white parents think their elementary school students are too delicate to even read about it.
