Teagan’s Reviews > The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together > Status Update

“Irish attacks on blacks became so common in New York City that bricks were known as Irish confetti.” (Michael Miller Topp, historian)

After the 1863 Civil War Draft Riots in NYC, during which more than a thousand Irish immigrants in mobs attacked the Black community, the population of NYC decreased by 20 percent.

It was zero-sum logic at work—abolition meant more competition for Irish-held jobs.

“At Nissan in Canton, the antiunion forces won in part by turning the union into a sign of weakness, a refuge for the ‘lazy.’ Messages linked the union with degrading stereotypes about Black people, so that white workers wouldn’t want any part of it. Even Black workers might think they were too good to ‘need’ a union.”

Shocked but not surprised:

-Less than half of private employers offer health insurance (2019).
-Only 12% of private-sector workers have the guaranteed retirement income of a traditional pension (2019).

*43% have a retirement savings plan, usually something like a 401(k)
**Thirty-eight percent of workers in private-sector pension plans in 2019 were in plans that were closed to new entrants. -Pension Rights Center

Had no idea that one of the major differences* between the AFL and the faction that would later become the CIO was that the AFL allowed affiliates to exclude black workers, seeing them as strike breakers.

*craft unionism being the principal difference

We could eliminate child poverty twice over by spending the same amount as the 2017 Republican tax plan (cuts). Spend 12% more than the cuts, and we could eliminate *all* poverty.

Secondary source: https://talkpoverty.org/2017/12/12/u-...

“…65% of white people 1956 believed that the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living in the country.” -American National Elections Studies survey

And this is in the wake of the Red Scare and McCarthyism?!

*support “cratered” for these ideas between 1960-1964 and remains low. Black Americans “have remained enthusiastic.”

On the legality of draining public pools after integration: …”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.” The Court took the purported race neutrality of policy at face value and ignored the racial animus behind the decision.

(2/2) … In a society where the law traditionally considered married women unable to own property separate from their husbands’, these women were often able to keep financial assets in human beings independent from their husbands’ estates (and debts).”* Footnote: Approximately 40% of slaveholders were white women.
* from Jones-Rogers’ They Were Her Property: White Women Slaveholders in the American South

On race relations’ origin as a zero-sum competition: “Racial hierarchy offered white people a reprieve from the class hierarchy and gave white women an escape valve from gender oppression. White women in slaveholding communities considered their slaves ‘their freedom,’ liberating them from farming, housework, child rearing, nursing and even the sexual demands of their husbands. (1/2).

(2/2) The authors [of the studies, Craig & Richeson] concluded that ‘making the changing national racial demographics salient led white Americans (regardless of political affiliation) to endorse conservative policy positions more strongly’” (xviii).