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February 1 - February 18, 2023
Racism got in the way of all of us having nice things.
I am well aware that the ledger of racial harms is nowhere near balanced.
The coronavirus pandemic is a tragic example of governments and corporations failing to protect black, brown, and Indigenous lives—though, if they had, everyone would have been safer.
unalloyed
the wealthy and the powerful are still selling the zero-sum story for their own profit, hoping to keep people with much in common from making common cause with one another. But not everyone is buying it.
“Solidarity Dividend,”
There is a psychic and emotional cost to the tightrope white people walk, clutching their identity as good people when all around them is suffering they don’t know how to stop, but that is done, it seems, in their name and for their benefit. The forces of division seek to harden this guilt into racial resentment, but I met people who had been liberated by facing the truth and working toward racial healing in their communities.
the majority of white voters still supported an impeached president who lied to Americans on a daily basis, whose rhetoric and policies made him a hero of white supremacist terror groups, and who mismanaged and downplayed a pandemic that cost more than 200,000 American lives in less than a year.
the 2020 election raised new questions about how much suffering and dysfunction the country’s white majority is willing to tolerate, and for how elusive a gain.
Nothing about our situation is inevitable or immutable, but you can’t solve a problem with the consciousness that created it.
A bad spell, and I’d notice the mail going unopened in neat but worrisome piles on the hall table.
why did so many people seem to blame the last folks in line for the American Dream—black and brown people and new immigrants who had just started to glimpse it when it became harder to reach—for economic decisions they had no power to influence?
colonizers shaped their racist ideologies to fit the bill. The motive was greed; cultivated hatred followed.
immiserate
In fact, by the time war loomed, New York merchants had gotten so rich from the slave economy—40 percent of the city’s exporting businesses through warehousing, shipping insurance, and sales were Southern cotton exports—that the mayor of New York advocated that his city secede along with the South.
The racial zero sum was crafted in the cradle of the New World.
as the threat of cross-racial servant uprisings became real in the late 1600s—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.
In a land marked by the yearning for religious freedom, enslaved people were forbidden from practicing their own religions.
In sum, the life of a black American under slavery was the living antithesis of freedom, with black people subject to daily bodily and spiritual tyranny by man and by state.
Racial hierarchy offered white people a reprieve from the class hierarchy and gave white women an escape valve from gender oppression.
It was as if they couldn’t imagine a world where nobody escaped the tyranny they had known in the Old World; if it could be blacks, it wouldn’t have to be whites.
whenever the interests of white people have been pitted against those of people of color, structural racism has called the winner.
The narrative that white people should see the well-being of people of color as a threat to their own is one of the most powerful subterranean stories in America.
When it comes to per capita government spending, the United States is near the bottom of the list of industrialized countries, below Latvia and Estonia.
why Americans are so singularly stingy toward ourselves:
people have fuzzy ideas about government,
counties that relied more on slave labor in 1860 had lower per capita incomes in 2000.
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. These deficits limit economic mobility for all residents, not just the descendants of enslaved people. —
What would it mean to white people, both materially and psychologically, if the supposedly inferior people received the same treatment from the government?
“Let’s build bigger, better and finer pools. That’s real democracy. Take away the sham and hypocrisy of clothes, don a swimsuit, and we’re all the same.”
the fight to integrate America’s prized public swimming pools would demonstrate the limits of white commitment to public goods.
for white Americans, the word public did not mean “of the people.” It meant “of the white people.”
The 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.
To defy desegregation, Montgomery would go on to close every single public park and padlock the doors of the community center. It even sold off the animals in the zoo. The entire public park system would stay closed for over a decade. Even after it reopened, they never rebuilt the pool.
courts will not invalidate legislation based solely on asserted illicit motivation by the enacting legislative body.”
the limits of the civil rights legal tool kit
there are no plaques to tell the story of how racism drained the pools. But the spirit that drained these public goods lives on.
the specter of the typical white moderate has perennially trimmed the sails of policy ambition,
racism based not on biology but on perceived culture and behavior.
increased majestically
white people with high levels of resentment against black people have become far more likely to oppose government spending generically:
Public goods, in other words, are only for the public we perceive to be good.
2014 book Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.
Plutocrats use dog-whistle politics to appeal to whites with a basic formula,” Haney López told me. “First, fear people of color. Then, hate the government (which coddles people of color). Finally, trust the market and the 1 percent.”
the rhetorical weight of the welfare stereotype—the idea of a black person getting for free what white people had to work for—helped sink white support for all government.
Whether it’s the more subtle “47 percent” version from millionaire Mitt Romney or the more racially explicit Fox News version sponsored by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, it works.
In 2016, the majority of white moderates (53 percent) and white conservatives (69 percent) said that black Americans take more than we give to society. We take more than we give.
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. The fact of their suffering is a shame, but not a reason to vote differently to allow government to do something about it.
conservatives like President Reagan told white voters that government was the enemy, because it favored black and brown people over them—but
The majority of white voters have voted against the Democratic nominee for president ever since the party became the party of civil rights under Lyndon Johnson.
