The racial wealth gap "worsens political and economic outcomes for the entire country."

[Garrett78]

I've written before about how social justice encompasses economic justice, which runs counter to the understanding of many. So, of course social justice and economic justice both matter, but not quite for the reason some seem to think. The latter is one component of the former.

I wrote about how it's important to have a proper appreciation for how historical injustices (both race-based and sex-based) continue to impact the present if one hopes to win the Democratic Party nomination. Institutional/structural racism and sexism (both past and present) continues to impact wealth/assets, advancement opportunities, access to certain jobs and schools, access to housing, loan contracts, dealings with law enforcement, court proceedings, health, and on and on and on.

As the subtitle to The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates reads, "Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole."

I've also pointed out that the vast majority of Trump supporters are Birthers, which should make clear how absurd it is to suggest that only a fraction of his supporters are motivated by white identity. Not to mention the abundance of other clues.

And I've most recently written about the dog whistling that's behind |the "working class whites" narrative, about how Democrats need to create a new narrative and not further the existing one.

Now, I'm encouraging everyone to read an article on just how stark the racial wealth gap is and why addressing it, specifically, matters. Excerpts follow:

The typical black household now has just 6% of the wealth of the typical white household; the typical Latino household has just 8%...

The median white homeowner’s house is worth $85,800 compared to $50,000 for black homeowners and $48,000 for Latino homeowners.

Much of that disparity comes from the gap in the home values in white neighborhoods versus the neighborhoods where people of color live. The roots of the gulf stem at least as far back as the 1934 National Housing Act, which redlined black neighborhoods, marking them as credit risks. Though redlining was outlawed in the ’60s, the effect persists today in the form of neighborhoods consisting mostly of people of color that have high poverty rates, low home values and declining infrastructure.

Discriminatory lending also exists today: Mortgages obtained by households of color tend to have higher interest rates.

“Even if you graduate from college, as a black college graduate, you’re faced with discrimination. So you might have done everything right, achieved the skills you need to succeed, but you won’t see a higher return. The other issue with education is that black college graduates come out with higher debt levels so they start out behind in terms of asset building,” says Ruetschlin.

Causes include the fact that blacks and Latinos are less likely to have jobs that include employer-sponsored health care, a retirement plan or paid time off. The net result is that families of color spend more of their savings on dealing with life’s emergencies such as out-of-pocket health care. Or, they have fewer wealth-building vehicles, such as tax-advantaged accounts, available to them.

Other factors stem back to homeownership and education: A child whose parents were steered into a low-income neighborhood with a low-quality school has decreased chances of obtaining a four-year degree, which also then cuts off future job opportunities. Additionally, although it is illegal, discrimination on the basis of race or national origin endures, whether unconsciously or overtly.

Those who are truly concerned with wealth inequality will grasp that the "rising tide lifts all boats" approach is insufficient.

[Rex]

1. We just installed a true blue blooded plutocrat into office.

We are fucked.

[karynnj]

2. Great post

I like the detail of your statistics and that they show that even after years when things were suppose to change - the difference is opportunity is enormous.

[True_Blue]

3. K&R

Great post! Thanks for sharing!

[Garrett78]

4. Thanks.

[JCanete]

5. The " rising tide lifts all boats" approach is total bullshit, but has nothing to do with

class warfare. That's trickle-down Reaganomics nonsense.

I absolutely agree with you that social and economic justice are intrinsically tied together, and I don't think it is valuable to place economics over social justice. That said, thinking that we can fix social justice without tackling the mechanisms that make social injustice so lucrative, is a losing battle. (note though: everything in your post is exactly some of the ways in which each message lends itself to the other..the way we should be talking to people in these voter communities...wow, a Forbes article?)

This is a puzzle of human psychology and we can't ignore how humans think...not if we're going to change how they think.

People are too easily led by fear. Loss avoidance and insecurity in the face of scarcity(real or perceived) do not make people more rational and capable of being humane, or of abandoning the foundations that their realities have been built around. That's just too damn scary. Under these circumstances, in those rare cases where they do suffer cognitive dissonance about how they think they and the world ARE, versus what actually presents itself, their own efforts to resolve that dissonance only further drives them to accept stereotypes or other justifications for continuing inequality. The limbic system is in charge, and the Cerebral Cortex entirely its bitch.

So making the mistake of not giving these people something to actually focus their fear and anger at, while simultaneously telling them that people of color are not getting a fair shake, is all kinds of triggering, because what they hear is that we are coming for "THEIR" stuff, and its already getting harder and harder for them in this Kleptocracy we call America, and while this has absolutely nothing to do with immigrants or minorities, they've been told the opposite their entire lives. And now they're feeling the crunch too, and our economy is a fucking bubble. People make less than they did 20 years ago and they're in about 20 thousand more dollars of debt than they were back then. Our economy is living on credit.

In fact, the only good number I've seen is that poverty rates for black Americans has decreased, while on the flip side poverty rates for white Americans has increased...but even that's an incredibly deceptive number because people of color do not have more actual wealth than they used to, and in this unequal society, as you and the article pointed out, minorities always get shit on the hardest. The ways in which these communities are being taken advantage of by financial institutions is certainly a crime against humanity.

But that all brings us full circle to forces of economic injustice and the fact that predatory Capitalism fuels social injustice out of greed. In turns, scapegoating or making communities invisible and vulnerable is all about the bottom line..it's all about the big con. Are some of the fuckers racist as hell? Yes...but there's one color they believe in above and beyond all else. Everything else is a means to that end.

We can erode racism. We can do it big. But we have to do it by being clear about what we're going to get for everyone(otherwise the rich will continue to use welfare and immigration as wedge issues). We need to do it by being clear and loud about how we're going to give people what they are ENTITLED TO, and that we're going to do it by taking it from the people who have hoarded the world's wealth from all of us. And because that is part of our narrative, talking about racism and inequality is no longer perceived as a threat...it's no longer about raising taxes on the middle class to give to the poor...its about making their lives better by taking our worth back, and its about making the rich institutions that are bleeding all of us, the actual racists...because they're the ones using tactics and propaganda to make us kick down and not look up.

People generally think of themselves as good. They want to be good. Their own self-worth is tied to that, which is why they work so hard to make others sub-human when they intend to exploit them, or feel like they are threatened by them. It's part of the human narrative structure. That's why us channeling that opposition away from scapegoated communities and towards the rich who have gotten away with branding themselves as geniuses and job-creators and philanthropists for far too long, is so damn key.We do that and we can change people's paradigms. We brand a system that is screwing everyone as racist and people can start distancing themselves from anything with that characterization, because we didn't already put them under that umbrella to take umbrage at even while they grip its handle tightly.

Am I being too Pollyanna here? Oh yeah. I don't actually know that this is a winnable fight. Money is power and the top 20% have 80% percent of it at their disposal, and they will certainly invest highly in maintaining the status quo. I'd love to see the fight waged though.

[Garrett78]

6. I refer again to...

...my thread on social justice and economic justice. The former encompasses the latter; it forms the umbrella. From that thread: "Social justice is the fair and just relation between the individual and society. This is measured by the explicit and tacit terms for the distribution of wealth, opportunities for personal activity and social privileges."

Anyway, some relevant quotes (emphasis mine) from articles Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about a year ago:

That is to say that black individuals are not simply poorer and less wealthy than white individuals. Because of segregation, black individuals and white individuals of the same income and same wealth do not live in communities of equal wealth.

By this broader measure, blacks and whites inhabit such different neighborhoods that it is not possible to compare the economic outcomes of black and white children who grow up in similarly disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Liberals have dared to believe in the seemingly impossible—a socialist presiding over the most capitalist nation to ever exist. If the liberal imagination is so grand as to assert this new American reality, why when confronting racism, presumably a mere adjunct of class, should it suddenly come up shaky? Is shy incrementalism really the lesson of this fortuitous outburst of Vermont radicalism? Or is it that constraining the political imagination, too, constrains the possible? If we can be inspired to directly address class in such radical ways, why should we allow our imaginative powers to end there?

These and other questions were recently put to Sanders. His answer was underwhelming. It does not have to be this way. One could imagine a candidate asserting the worth of reparations, the worth of John Conyers H.R. 40, while also correctly noting the present lack of working coalition. What should be unimaginable is defaulting to the standard of Clintonism, of “Yes, but she’s against it, too.” A left radicalism that fails to debate its own standards, that counsels misdirection, that preaches avoidance, is really just a radicalism of convenience.

This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates. Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of the day. Neither are addressed in the “racial justice” section of Sanders platform.

Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.

One can’t evade these facts by changing the subject. Some months ago, black radicals in the Black Lives Matters movement protested Sanders. They were, in the main, jeered by the white left for their efforts. But judged by his platform, Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy. Jim Crow and its legacy were not merely problems of disproportionate poverty. Why should black voters support a candidate who does not recognize this?

If not even an avowed socialist can be bothered to grapple with reparations, if the question really is that far beyond the pale, if Bernie Sanders truly believes that victims of the Tulsa pogrom deserved nothing, that the victims of contract lending deserve nothing, that the victims of debt peonage deserve nothing, that that political plunder of black communities entitle them to nothing, if this is the candidate of the radical left—then expect white supremacy in America to endure well beyond our lifetimes and lifetimes of our children. Reparations is not one possible tool against white supremacy. It is the indispensable tool against white supremacy. One cannot propose to plunder a people, incur a moral and monetary debt, propose to never pay it back, and then claim to be seriously engaging in the fight against white supremacy.

And yet even a Forbes contributor pretty much gets it. Of course, there's the usual disclaimer about how the contributor's views don't necessarily reflect the views of Forbes.

[JCanete]

7. but your argument is just one of idealism and leaves out human psychology. My argument as all about

human psychology. Do you dispute that this is the way people think or not?

[Garrett78]

8. The argument is...

...that a class-first, color blind approach is not sufficient.

Simple as that.

I'm not sure what you think the argument is, but that's the crux of the point I'm making.

[JCanete]

9. well first, Sander's message isn't, so there's that. Neither was it my point that we should be

Last edited Fri Jan 6, 2017, 02:09 PM - Edit history (1)

class first and not address racism. In fact, in my post I said that both should be done together, and that what we need to do right off the bat, so that we can continue to talk about racism in society effectively and in a way that doesn't fall on deaf ears, redirect all the fear and anger at the source and away from immigrants and welfare and all the bullshit. Not first. Together.

As to reparations...

strategy does matter. I wish that weren't the case, but it does. This is about education. You want to start talking to people about gravity waves before they even understand the Earth revolves around the Sun. Do you actually think that that is an effective way to get progress? We can fix so much that it racist about our system without leading with that, for the very reasons I've been describing. We can alleviate so much of the pain and suffering actually delivered upon people of color in so many ways that are achievable right now, with the mindsets we're dealing with today, and we can address a racist system not after, but during the process. And the good news is that all moves us closer to making reparations an actual reality.If something is actually moving us in the right direction, not on some tenuous detour, but actually on the path to opening people to new paradigms, then why make the perfect the enemy of the good?

I have been saying that nothing is possible unless you advocate for it and make it a part of normal conversation, so I don't want to be hypocritical about my view on reparations, and I recognize that this is a contradiction. But the very call for reparations is something that triggers the limbic brains of way too many conservative white people. It feeds into the divide-and-conquer tactics already being waged upon us. It gives our enemies tools to use against us and shuts off ears to us before we can take that power away, and that's because without a whole lot of explanation(which people will not hear), it suggests again, that we are going to come for your stuff white people.

Could it be done? could we say from the get-go that we need reparations, but that we're going to take it just from the rich, who bear such a great responsibility in seeding and nurturing racism for their own financial gain? I feel like that's an advanced course on revolution, rather than the 101 class that we can get so many behind today,but I don't know, maybe.