Not racist white people or lazy black people (Between Obama and Coates: the plight of black America)

Trotsky

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I highly suggest everyone read this recent (brilliant) article by Dr. Touré F. Reed on the economic conditions of black Americans.

Despite what right-wingers might insist, Barack Obama's position on racial stratification was pretty darn conservative, moralistic, and in-line with conservative white thought. In this article, Reed opines that it is neither black culture (Obama) nor white racism (Coates) that is the primary driver of racial inequality. It's economic policy history.

In the article, Dr. Reed outlines an extremely comprehensive and thoughtful history of economic policy making and its disparate impact on black Americans still reeling at the margins from slavery, economic exclusion, and legal discrimination of previous decades.

Here are some highlights.

Whether the culprit is African Americans’ cultural pathologies or whites’ ingrained contempt for blacks, each of these frameworks divorces what we tend to think of as racial inequality from the political economy. Both Obama and Coates abstract African American poverty from the economic and social policies that have, indeed, impacted blacks disproportionately — including the decline of the trade union movement and the retrenchment of the public sector — even if their impetuses often have little or nothing to do with race. Rather than providing policy prescriptions that might redress the material sources of racial disparities, then, the race reductionism that informed Obama’s post-racialism and informs Coates’s reparations agenda aids and abets a liberal politics that has been complicit in decades-long wage stagnation and the widening material gulf that separates the nation’s haves from its have-nots, whatever their race.



Rather than advancing a progressive agenda targeting the working and middle classes, Obama’s economic vision — like Bill Clinton’s before him — dashed the hopes of many working people for earning more than pocket change. While union members turned out for Obama in 2008 and 2012, President Obama did little to earn their support. Presidential candidate Obama courted unions with the promise of signing the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) and health care reform into law. EFCA would have made it easier for workers to unionize by making card check national law, brushing aside a major barrier to unionization established by Taft-Hartley (1947). Union leaders assured their members that the election of Obama along with an enlarged Democratic majority in the Senate ensured that EFCA would become law; however, Obama, after months of temporizing, officially pulled his support for the bill a little more than a year into his first term. Obama would, of course, follow through on his pledge for health care legislation, but rather than helping unionists, the Affordable Care Act undermined them. 24 Inspired by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and Republican governor Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts Health Care Act, the ACAthreatened to bankrupt union health care funds via a $63 tax imposed on each trade unionist’s insurance policy. The revenue generated from the so-called Cadillac tax financed subsidies for private, for-profit insurance companies, intended to offset the expense associated with the extension of coverage to individuals with preexisting conditions. Unions’ nonprofit insurance plans, however, were denied these subsidies. 25

Obama would also go on to champion the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which he hailed as “the most progressive trade deal in history.” Though Obama claimed that the TPP would enhance national security and strengthen workers’ rights and environmental regulations, it would have granted more than 9,000 foreign corporations the right to circumvent regulations pertaining to labor, food and drug safety, and the environment. In other words, the TPPwould have undermined democratic governance. The TPP would have also increased the US trade deficit, resulting in the further erosion of America’s manufacturing sector and an estimated loss of more than 320,000 manufacturing jobs a year. 26

Union leaders lobbied Obama to use his bully pulpit to press for EFCA, amend the ACA, and reject the TPP, warning the Obama administration that its failure to look out for an important Democratic constituency might result in electoral backlash. As Unite Here’s Donald “D” Taylor remarked in response to the administration’s refusal to amend the ACA: “you can’t just order people to do stuff. If their health plan gets wrecked, why would they then go campaign for the folks responsible for wrecking their health care?” 27 Obama ignored their entreaties. In fact, even as the Sanders and Trump insurgencies demonstrated bipartisan circumspection about free trade policies — a reality that ultimately pushed centrist Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to reject the TPP — a tone-deaf Obama continued to stump for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

By attributing Trump’s presidential victory simply to a racist backlash against Obama, Coates elides the implications of Obama’s policies for those who rejected the third Obama term promised by Clinton. To be sure, Trump’s campaign and presidency have emboldened the so-called alt-right. Former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan turned neo-Nazi activist David Duke’s explicit affirmation of this fact the morning that neo-Nazi James Fields murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, VA, only confirmed the obvious. 28 Still, the GOPhas been the preferred party of organized white supremacists since Reagan — if not Nixon. So while Trump has animated an element that has long been wed to Republicans for both ideological and opportunistic reasons, he did not escort them to the Grand Old Party.

Hillary Clinton lost the Electoral College and, by extension, the election because she failed to win key counties in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that Obama had carried in 2008 and 2012. If one reflects on the full implications of this fact, it is hard to imagine that racism would have been the principal reason that whites who had voted for the nation’s first black president would have decided, four to eight years later, to vote for its most crassly racist president in recent memory.

It seems more likely that the voters Trump flipped did so because they were disillusioned with Obama’s failure to advance a policy agenda that they believed benefited them. The three counties in Pennsylvania — Erie, Northampton, and Luzerne — that Trump flipped were largely blue collar. Likewise, the dozen counties Obama carried that Clinton lost in Michigan included the Detroit suburb of Macomb, and the lower-middle-class swing counties of Calhoun and Monroe. And in Wisconsin, the nearly two dozen counties Trump flipped included a few with the highest unemployment rates in the state — Sawyer, Forest, and Adams. 29 Clinton’s flaws as a candidate only exacerbated this problem. Her promise of a hybrid third Clinton-Obama term would have been of cold comfort to those with bitter memories of NAFTA, Obama’s betrayal on EFCA, and the ACA. And while Clinton reversed her position on the TPP, did anyone actually believe her — especially after she tapped Senator Tim Kaine, who supported both so-called right to work legislation and the TPP?

Given that Trump not only won a higher share of the black vote than either Romney or McCain but also performed nearly as well with black voters as George W. Bush in 2000, some African Americans may have also had bitter memories about NAFTA, EFCA, and the ACA, while those who sat out or cast protest ballots may likewise have recalled the Omnibus Crime Act, Ricky Ray Rector, and maybe even HOPE VI and welfare reform.

None of this is to deny that many white Trump voters — not just the Nazis — harbor noxious views about race. Treating race as if it exists in a world apart from class, however, deprives those of us who would like to live in a more egalitarian society the ability to distinguish between committed ideologues — like Nazis and Klansmen — and reflexive racists who might be won over via platforms based on common interest. Just a few months after President Trump’s inauguration, Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel argued in the Nation that fear of racial diversity trumped class anxiety as a motive among voters who flipped from Obama to Trump. The authors ultimately suggest that class is no longer a meaningful political category, noting that despite the fact that Democrats continue to advance progressive economic policies, non-college-educated whites trended for Trump while upscale blacks trended for Hillary Clinton. 30 As I discuss above, however, few unionists would argue that Democrats have advanced a progressive economic agenda in more than a generation. More to the point, the authors ignore the fact that “diversity” has long been synonymous with affirmative action, which conservatives have successfully — though largely disingenuously — equated with quotas and, by extension, white displacement. To whatever extent it is fair to cast fear of diversity as merely a cultural or identity issue, then, is owed largely to the fact that liberals — initially with some prodding from conservatives — have embraced a social-justice discourse centered on inclusion and acceptance of group distinctiveness as an alternative to platforms centered on economic equality. This is an approach that civil rights leaders like Randolph and Rustin anticipated would not only leave most African Americans behind, but it would foster the kind of racial animus that concerns Coates as well as McElwee and McDaniel.

The Underclass, Post-racialism, and Neoliberalism
If Coates’s characterization of the progressive implications of President Obama’s economic agenda misses the mark altogether, his critique of Obama’s emphasis on personal responsibility is better. However, his commitment to black cultural distinctiveness ensures that Coates is only able to graze the central problem.

In recent years, Coates has been one of the more visible critics of what he calls “respectability politics.” Coates is, on the whole, appropriately critical of Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which he notes proceeds from the erroneous assumption that African American youth can brush aside the obstacles in their path by simply acting right. Coates is likewise appropriately critical of Obama’s admonitions to poor blacks — like in his Father’s Day address — to watch less TV, stop eating Popeye’s for breakfast, and stop “blaming white people for their problems.” Drawing from Obama’s own words, Coates attributes the former president’s naïve commitment to “respectability politics” to his atypical upbringing. Obama explained to Coates that the commonplace assumption among blacks, “that white people would not treat me right or give me an opportunity or judge me [other than] on the basis of merit” was less “embedded in my psyche than it is, say, with Michelle.” 31This experience, according to Coates, not only fueled Obama’s commitment to the race-neutral, means-tested initiatives that he described as “universal” programs, but it has imbued the former president with a misguided faith in individual solutions to societal problems.

Coates’s frustration with personal-responsibility ideology gives voice to a long-standing problem in discourse about inequality. Still, his formulation is inadequate. While Obama’s personal experiences with the decent, professional-class whites who raised him may have informed his particular take on this issue, black politicians, scholars, and commentators who have been raised by black parents — including Jesse Jackson, Cory Booker, William Julius Wilson, Roland S. Martin, Oprah Winfrey, and a list that could probably fill a phonebook of a Midwestern town — have espoused the same rhetoric. The problem here, then, is not reducible to Obama’s loving white mother and grandparents. In fact, if one views Obama’s commitment to personal-responsibility ideology in its broader political and historical context, it becomes clear that —whatever his upbringing’s contribution — Obama’s emphasis on individual solutions to structural problems is the product of underclass ideology.

Though the term “underclass” was coined in the 1960s, it did not become part of popular use until the 1980s. Underclass ideology traced poverty to the specific cultural traits of the poor themselves. Extrapolating from anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s culture of poverty thesis, proponents of underclass ideology alleged that 10-20 percent of the urban black and Latino poor were in the grip of a debilitating dysfunctional culture. Some proponents of the concept, like Charles Murray, argued that the War on Poverty’s expansion of social services compounded the problem by fostering a culture of welfare dependency and a host of related antisocial behaviors — drug and alcohol dependency, promiscuity, a disregard for education, and criminal activity — among poor minorities. The underclass concept meshed with Reagan’s unambiguous repudiation of the idea that democratic governments should intervene in private affairs for the public good. 32 Indeed, it is no coincidence that Reagan’s pro-welfare reform quip “we waged a war on poverty [in the sixties], and poverty won” echoed a central theme of Charles Murray’s Losing Ground. While the broad coalition of Americans who embraced universal programs (entitlements) as a citizenship right forestalled the neoliberal assault on Social Security and Medicare, no such breadth of support existed for the poor, disproportionately black and brown, beneficiaries of the War on Poverty’s and even the Nixon administration’s means-tested and targeted programs. Reagan thus set his sights on dismantling jobs programs like the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), social services like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), and, of course, affirmative action. Underclass ideology was pivotal to this front of the Reagan revolution, as it provided the respectable source material for racist tropes like “the welfare queen.”

By the early 1990s, underclass ideology would become bipartisan consensus. In the late 1980s, black sociologist William J. Wilson, a self-identified social democrat, helped remove the taint of racism from the underclass concept. In fact, Wilson would play a pivotal role in rehabilitating Moynihan. Wilson claimed the backlash to the Moynihan report made liberals reluctant to acknowledge the cultural consequences of concentrated poverty, leading them to cede crucial political ground to conservatives. Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged(1987) thus set out to generate support for a progressive anti-poverty agenda via resurrection and update of Moynihan’s culture of poverty thesis. 33 Unfortunately, the election of centrist-Democratic President Bill Clinton, would reveal the inadequacy of Wilson’s strategy. Bill Clinton’s 1992 platform left little doubt that the Democratic Party of the 1990s owed more to Reagan than Roosevelt or Johnson. Clinton — who carried a copy of The Truly Disadvantaged with him on the campaign trail — echoed Wilson’s concerns about crime, welfare dependency, and the prevalence of female-headed households in ghetto communities. Citing Wilson, Clinton was careful to attribute the root causes of ghetto underclass behavior to deindustrialization. 34 But instead of pursuing a legislative agenda centered on bolstering the manufacturing sector or promoting unionization, President Clinton jailed the underclass via the Omnibus Crime Act (1994), limited their access to federal financial assistance via the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996), and razed their homes via HOPE VI (1998). If the Keynesian consensus produced an inadequate War on Poverty, the neoliberal consensus sparked a war on the poor themselves.

Though Coates recites the oft-repeated claim that Moynihan’s advocacy of benign neglect in the Nixon years and his 1994 remarks about poor blacks’ speciation are evidence of Moynihan’s post-backlash conversion, this contention erroneously treats Moynihan’s shift from optimist to pessimist as if it were a transformation of his conceptual framework. The Negro Family proceeded from the explicit view that sustained poverty could generate a self-perpetuating culture that would foil any government effort to eliminate poverty. In the 1960s, this notion —which equated culture with race — was contested. By the time that Hurricane Katrina made landfall in the Gulf Coast in late August 2005, however, underclass ideology had become hegemonic. In fact, even as underclass ideology was at the heart of the Bush administration’s and New Orleans city officials’ formal rationale for shuttering New Orleans’s public housing projects, the term “underclass” was scarcely used, as poor black and brown people had now become synonymous with dysfunction.

By 2008, “serious” black Democratic and Republican politicians — biracial or not — reflexively traded in underclass narratives. Barack Obama, however, did so with a finesse and polish that political commentators and fellow Democrats alike believed augured a transformative post-racial era of American politics. Indeed, Obama’s election promised to harmonize political discourse on racial and economic inequality, as his presidential campaign and presidency would further legitimate underclass ideology’s project of racializing economic inequality via attribution of poverty to the dysfunctional culture of the minority poor themselves rather than political economy. Obama’s contribution would take two forms. First, like a long line of Democrats before him, Obama would emphasize — albeit with quick nods to institutional racism and a soupçon of compassion — the impact of ghetto residents’ dysfunctional behavior on contemporary disparities as a pretext for stressing individual solutions to structural problems.

In his breakthrough 2004 DNC keynote, for example, Obama expressed compassion for implicitly white blue-collar workers devastated by the offshoring of unionized jobs, sympathized with hardworking Americans who could not afford necessary prescription drugs, and empathized with suburban voters who objected to their taxes going to welfare or wasteful military projects. By contrast, Obama’s reflections on implicitly black “inner-city” residents stressed the need for African Americans to extricate themselves from dysfunction. “Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn.” Obama continued: “they know parents have to parent, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.” 35

Though Obama’s chastisement of “inner-city” residents could be read as a counter to Reagan’s welfare queen, “A More Perfect Union” — Obama’s much lauded March 2008 race speech — made clear that his admonitions were capitulations to the racist underclass trope. Delivered on the heels of the Reverend Wright controversy, Obama’s speech was intended to both sever his association with the “militant” minister and position Obama as a healer of racial wounds. To this end, Obama would paint a vivid landscape of transgenerational black social pathologies. Specifically, Obama would attribute Wright’s indefensible sermon — damning America for its history of racism in conspiratorial terms — to the psychic scars of wounds inflicted in the Jim Crow era. Obama claimed that many black men and women of Wright’s generation were trapped in a loop of traumas long since passed. While Jim Crow had been defeated during the 1960s, its traumatic legacy could be observed in America’s inner cities today. After making fleeting references to the long-term consequences of discriminatory mortgage policy and the dearth of employment opportunities for young black men, Obama would turn his attention to contemporary black dysfunctionality. Rather than stressing the material impact of poverty and unemployment on family dissolution, for example, Obama insinuated the shame felt by those black men who were inadequate providers was a major contributor to the erosion of the African American family. From there Obama went on to imply his support for Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform act, asserting “that welfare policies had for many years” undermined African American family formation. Obama continued with an acknowledgement that declining support for social services had contributed to the challenges confronting urban black communities. But rather than critiquing the neoliberal consensus that was at the heart of the decades-long retreat of the public sector, Obama asserted a link between the atrophy of social services and a self-perpetuating “cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continues to haunt us.” 36

Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day remarks before the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago read from much the same playbook. After reciting the litany of inner-city social problems — high rates of teen pregnancy, female-headed households, poverty and unemployment, crime, school dropouts, and incarceration — Obama once again delivered a short paragraph acknowledging that gun control along with increased funding for education, social services, law enforcement, and job-training programs might alleviate some of these problems. Obama then dedicated the next twenty-two paragraphs to lecturing African American fathers about the importance of personal responsibility, arguing that the failure of too many black men to instill values of excellence, empathy, hope, and self-reliance in their children was a key contributor to ghetto social malaise. 37

Obama’s disposition to scold inner-city minorities did not entirely preclude the helping hand of government. However, when combined with his Jedi-mind-trick-like assertion — like in his 2004 DNC address — that inner-city residents did not expect government to solve all of their problems, Obama’s embrace of underclass ideology signaled to Democrats and even conservatives that he, like Bill Clinton before him, had little interest in redressing the material roots of inequality.

The second contribution Obama’s post-racial presidency made to the ongoing project to divorce racial inequality from class inequality came in the form of his race and his biography. While Bill and Hillary Clinton’s whiteness left them, or any other nonblack president or presidential candidate, vulnerable to pushback from a reliable Democratic constituency, Obama’s actual blackness and his related “performance of blackness” insulated his accounts of African American social pathology and related calls for personal responsibility from the charge of racism. To be clear, I am not questioning Obama’s racial “authenticity.” To the contrary, since race is an ascriptive category, Obama is unquestionably black, in my view, irrespective of his personal predilections or behavior. But in order for Obama to be an effective post-racial champion of personal responsibility, his biography had to read like the underclass version of a Horatio Alger novel. This would require that Obama project what “blackness” had come to mean in the popular conscience. In other words, America had to accept Obama as a man who could haveeasily become “a statistic,” a stereotype, but managed to extricate himself from the tangle of pathologies that ensnared so many of his brothers and sisters. We had to see Obama as yet another black man who had struggled with frustration and anger, who had experimented with drugs, and who had been unsure of the value of formal education because he had been abandoned by his irresponsible black father and raised by his (white) single mother and (white) grandparents. We had to believe that Obama had the strength of character to overcome the odds and go on to earn degrees from two Ivy League universities and ultimately became the first black US president.

Obama did not lie about his background. However, Obama frequently pitched his biography at a level of abstraction that blurred the line between his truth and the mythical “Cousin Pookie.” Indeed, the details of Obama’s biography reveal the importance of class privilege to his success. Obama’s parents did not meet in high school or even “at the club” — they met in college. Obama’s father did abandon him and his mother — not because he was ashamed of his meager wages or because he had to do a bid in a state or federal penitentiary, but to attend graduate school at Harvard. Obama’s mother surely experienced financial struggles, but she would go on to earn advanced degrees after remarrying a well-educated and prosperous Indonesian businessman. Obama’s grandparents did help raise him, but they were solidly middle class or better. Obama may have had some doubts about the value of formal education as a young man, but he struggled with them in one of Hawaii’s most prestigious prep schools. And sure, Obama smoked weed while he was in prep school and college, but good luck finding a white graduate of an expensive liberal arts college or Ivy League University who did not experiment with drugs or alcohol as an undergraduate.

The particulars of Obama’s compelling biography should have undercut the sway of his underclass-inflected Horatio Alger success story. The abstract biographical sketch was, however, crucial to his star power as it not only made Obama the multicultural exemplar of the classic American success story, but it conferred to him the authority to admonish poor African Americans for their alleged cultural deficiencies. Indeed, the enthusiasm that Democrats and pundits like Senator John Kerry, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Bai, and conservative David Brooks expressed for him during the 2008 presidential campaign, made clear that Obama’s willingness to use his alleged moral authority to chastise black voters was a major source of the appeal of his post-racial presidency. 38

Since Obama’s class privilege could have left him open to questions about his racial authenticity with far too many African Americans — even if both of his parents had been black — his biographical sketch offered some cover with black voters. 39 There was, of course, no way to finesse the fact that Obama was a biracial man who grew up in Hawaii, which meant the sketch alone could not suffice. Obama’s efforts to position himself as a post-racial president thus required that he perform blackness. In other words, what Coates characterizes as Obama’s laudable decision to pay the price for living as a black man is better understood as Obama draping himself in tropes of “the black experience.” To have the kind of political career Obama wanted, he needed to join Trinity United Church of Christ, and he, as Coates put it, needed to marry a black woman who looked like Michelle. This is also why it was savvy of Obama to hang out with Common, Jay-Z and Beyoncé (three famous, “authentically black” rich people), and to “brush dirt off his shoulder” while the cameras were rolling. Had Obama failed to appreciate the fact that, at this point, far too many Americans conflate culture with race, black voters might have noticed — long before George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the Trayvon Martin murder trial — that the nation’s first black president had campaigned on a pledge to accommodate them to a Bill Clinton-like neoliberal agenda that would do little to redress the kind of material issues, such as poverty and unemployment, that disproportionately impacted African Americans.

Indeed, the combination of Obama’s use of the underclass metaphor and his actual and “performed” blackness, gave him a comparatively free hand with which to craft an agenda intended to right a listing American economy, absent the kinds of redistributive policies — like revitalization of the public sector, support for unionization, opposition to free trade, mortgage relief, etc. — that blacks would have benefited from disproportionately precisely because they are overrepresented among neoliberalism’s victims. To be sure, people who identify as “African American activists” — as opposed to, let’s say, those who might identify as black union organizers — are far more likely to make demands for issues such as mortgage relief in terms that center on racial grievance rather than economic inequality. This is one of the reasons that liberals, and even many conservatives, found the prospect of an Obama presidency appealing.

When Obama took office in January 2009, the nation’s economy was a wreck. If President Bush’s efforts to stimulate economic growth via policies designed to swell the ranks of homeowners created a housing bubble, President Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagall ensured that when Bush’s bubble burst its effects would ripple through the entire economy. Many Americans hoped that the high-minded Obama would respond to the crisis by drawing from the New Dealers’ playbook. Unfortunately, he would not. Obama did follow through on measures intended to stabilize the US economy. But while the banking and auto-industry bailouts and the stimulus package surely stemmed the bleeding and saved many jobs, they did not address the structural issues that were the root causes of decades of depressed wages. In fact, in contrast to the Roosevelt administration, the Obama administration eschewed labor and housing market reforms that might have shored up the nation’s precarious working and middle classes while opening pathways to the middle class for the working poor and unemployed. Unions, as I have already discussed, did not receive the support Obama had promised.

Though Obama had earmarked $100 billion of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) for mortgage relief, by the end of his second term only $21 billion of these funds had been released. Consequently, fewer than 1 million of the 4 million mortgage modifications Obama had promised had been completed by President Trump’s election. Even the stimulus package was inadequate for the crisis at hand. In fact, economist Paul Krugman had warned as early as January 2009 that the $787 billion stimulus provided by American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) would surely help, but in taking such a conservative approach — not only was the package too small, according to Krugman, but 40 percent of the stimulus took the form of tax cuts — Obama would fail to stimulate meaningful economic growth and thus squander a political opportunity. Specifically, Krugman feared that the Right would cast an anemic recovery generated by a stimulus that was only large enough to arrest the economic slide but was too small to reduce unemployment and boost consumer purchasing power as yet another example of the failure of big government. 40

Just shy of a month into Obama’s first term, the call by CNBC’s Rick Santelli for a Tea Party movement — delivered on the floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange — would mark the realization of Krugman’s fears. Though the Tea Party’s roots stretched back to the 1990s, the Koch Brothers’ funded “movement” capitalized on the economic and racial anxieties of conservative voters. The Tea Party’s anti-tax, small-government agenda may not have been formally racist, but well before anyone imagined that Americans were willing to elect a black president, conservatives had succeeded in equating big government, high taxes, welfare, and Democrats with an approach to governance that benefited irresponsible African Americans and poor people at the expense of the implicitly white, sober middle class. Santelli’s condemnation of Obama’s mortgage-relief program as a boon to profligate losers financed at the expense of responsible, hardworking Americans thus only hinted at a conservative racial backlash. Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann, however, had no compunction about casting the financial meltdown in explicitly racial terms. 41

The combination of the Tea Party movement’s racist subtext, the Birther movement’s racist text, George Zimmerman’s shocking acquittal, and a seemingly interminable stream of video footage of police officers murdering or assaulting unarmed, disproportionately black, people literally broadcast the absurdity of post-racialism. Moreover, since Obama’s presidency would produce few material benefits for most blacks, the limitations of his symbolic racial victory became clearer even to African Americans who had initially accepted him as role-model-in-chief. Indeed, both because poverty rates were on an upward swing when Obama took office and because the Obama administration did little to redress the structural sources of economic inequality, the percentage of African Americans living in poverty was actually higher when Obama left office than when he assumed it. The cumulative effects of the racially inflected political backlash to America’s first black president along with perpetual disparities in the criminal justice system and in the nation’s poverty and unemployment rates led many African Americans and even some whites to conclude that Obama’s conciliatory post-racialism was not just naïve but it ignored entrenched, structural racism.

In this context, Coates’s insistence that so-called racial issues exist in a world apart from economic issues is not a critique of postwar liberalism, but it is, at best, a call for continuing along the same path that has failed most black Americans since the Johnson administration. At worst, it is a call for no more than ritualized acknowledgment of white privilege and black suffering.

Racial ideology does, indeed, inform how we perceive people and their place in the pecking order, as is its purpose. Racism, thus, influences inequities. It does so, however, within a larger political-economic framework. Efforts to redress racial disparities that do not consider the work that race does in American labor and housing markets will be doomed to fail, just as they have since the War on Poverty. So, while it is unlikely that Coates set out to be neoliberalism’s most visible black emissary of the post-post-racial era, his insistence that we must treat race as a force that exists independently of capitalism has, ironically, earned him this accolade

https://catalyst-journal.com/vol1/no4/between-obama-and-coates
 
(meant to be read between sections 1 &2)
Worse yet, Coates bristles at the suggestion that racial disparities should be viewed through the lens of political economy. When Senator Bernie Sanders dismissed reparations as politically infeasible, arguing instead that African Americans would be better served by universal health care, a return to taxpayer-funded (“free”) public higher education, a reinvigorated labor movement, revitalization of the public sector, a living wage, and employment programs targeting impoverished communities, Coates not only questioned Sanders’s bona fides as a progressive but also characterized Sanders as a coward. Coates, moreover, dismissed Sanders’s observation that the single-identity-group focus of reparations created no basis on which to build a political coalition, claiming that Sanders’s social-democratic politics were no less divisive than reparations. 15 Coates, of course, has never provided compelling historical precedents for reparations. Indeed, “The Case for Reparations” offers only two examples of successful bids for such recompense, neither of which — as I will elaborate on below — has any relevance to African Americans today.

Given Coates’s mischaracterization of Randolph and Rustin’s response to Johnson’s proposed War on Poverty, it is not surprising that his critique of Sanders ignored the fact that the Vermont senator’s platform not only overlapped the March on Washington’s demands, but looked a lot like Randolph and Rustin’s Freedom Budget. The parallels between Sanders’s proposals and the Freedom Budget reflect, in part, the prescience of Randolph and Rustin’s assessment of the implications of deindustrialization and the more recent retreat of the public sector for blacks.

The decline of unionized manufacturing work has devastated black and brown blue-collar communities in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Flint, Oakland, St. Louis, and Coates’s hometown of Baltimore. Though urban renewal helped some cities, notably Chicago, transition from manufacturing to global corporate cities, low-skilled workers benefited little from this iteration of growth politics. Indeed, the departure of unionized blue-collar jobs contributed to upticks in poverty and attendant social problems such as crime and family dissolution in communities whose residents lacked the skills for more attractive jobs in the postindustrial economy. At the same time, the War on Crime followed by the decades-long War on Drugs would, by the early 1990s, result in the United States incarcerating more of its citizens than any other nation. Today, African Americans account for 40 percent of the America’s inmate population, followed closely by whites. But while the militarization of law enforcement and draconian sentencing for drug offenses have contributed greatly to the growth in America’s prison population, here too, bipartisan indifference to structural sources of economic inequality and the related embrace of Moynihan’s contention that the poor, black or otherwise, could develop a distinctive culture that was impervious to external influence is also relevant.

The correlation between economic inequality and both violent and nonviolent crime has been well documented. However, poverty and neoliberal retrenchment have contributed to mass incarceration in other ways that are often obscured by a tendency to focus on racial disparities alone. While racism certainly plays a role in sentencing disparities, according to political scientist Marie Gottschalk, a perpetrator’s class background appears to exert greater influence over incarceration rates than race. Incarceration disparities in states with comparatively poor white populations, for example, are less pronounced than in states with more affluent white populations. Likewise, racial disparities tend to be greater in states that reserve incarceration for individuals convicted of the most serious crimes, such as drug and violent offenses — the types of crimes that are more commonly committed by poor people and, by extension, blacks. 16 Since African Americans are overrepresented among the poor, budget cuts to state public defenders’ offices further contribute to incarceration disparities. The decline in funding to state indigent legal services has led to a system in which 95 percent of criminal cases are settled by plea bargain. 17 Finally, mass incarceration has functioned as a dystopian accommodation to many of the problems wrought by deindustrialization and public-sector retrenchment. Large prisons not only “house” the reserve army of unemployed and — thanks to the stigma of a felony conviction — unemployable workers, but jails and penitentiaries have become major employers, particularly in rural communities. Indeed, penal Keynesianism is the lifeblood of towns like Forrest City, AR, Susanville, CA, and Marion, IL. 18

The bottom line is that because blacks have borne a disproportionate share of the damage inflicted on working people by deindustrialization and the subsequent neoliberal economic consensus, African Americans would have benefited disproportionately from Sanders’s platform despite the absence of the reparations “brand.” And while Coates claimed that Sanders’s dismissal of his signature issue revealed the Vermont Senator’s ignorance of “the argument” for reparations, Sanders understood something that Coates refuses to acknowledge. The 64 percent of Americans who happen to be white will not tax themselves for a welfare program that they cannot, by design, benefit from irrespective of the righteousness of the cause. Righteousness was not the basis for the movements that opened opportunities to black Americans. Emancipation and even Reconstruction were produced by a convergence of interests among disparate constituencies —African Americans, abolitionists, business, small freeholders, and northern laborers — united under the banner of free labor. The Civil Rights Movement and its legislative victories — including affirmative action and the War on Poverty — were the product of a consensus created by the New Deal that presumed the appropriateness of government intervention in private affairs for the public good, the broad repudiation of scientific racism following World War II, and the political vulnerabilities Jim Crow created for the United States during the Cold War. To be sure, Reconstruction, the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and even the Civil Rights Movement failed to redress all of the challenges confronting blacks. But the limitations of each of these movements reflected political constraints imposed on them, in large part, by capital.
 
Oh lovely, a whole thread devoted to identity politics. I'm absolutely shocked Trots

It's about economic policy and how "identity politics" is reductive when talking about racial economic stratification, you fucking moron.

EDIT: Good to see you just saw "white" and "black" and decided to post without reading. While I purposefully included "racist white people" in the title to attract viewers such as yourself, I should have guessed you wouldn't actually read the article.
 
It's about economic policy and how "identity politics" is reductive when talking about racial economic stratification, you fucking moron.

EDIT: Good to see you just saw "white" and "black" and decided to post without reading. While I purposefully included "racist white people" in the title to attract viewers such as yourself, I should have guessed you wouldn't actually read the article.

Lol you sound butthurt that I called you out on your consistent use of identity politics.

It appears like you see everything through the lense of race.

<Fedor23>
 
Obama was in an impossibly tough spot with regard to chastising his own people while in office. It would amount to basically having the first black president turn around and stab them in the back.
 
The primary driver of racial inequality today is the discriminatory housing/lending practices which routinely occured during most of the 20th century. Home ownership has traditionally been the most accessible and reliable investment vehicle for lower class working Americans to build themselves up to middle class and beyond and blacks were pretty much denied that opportunity until relatively recently
 
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The trick is in convincing black people that only they are subject to this economic discrimination(anyone outside of policymakers who receive a paycheck from somebody else is subject to it) all the while convincing white people that they're not at all discriminated against economically(everyone can become a billionaire if you work hard enough derrrrrr).
 
The primary driver of racial inequality today is the discriminatory housing/lending practices which routinely occured during most of the 20th century. Home ownership has traditionally been the #1 means for Americans to build themselves up to middle class and beyond and blacks were pretty much denied that opportunity until relatively recently

But then when things swung the other way with housing/lending practices, it was considered predatory and still discriminatory no?
 
The primary driver of racial inequality today is the discriminatory housing/lending practices which routinely occured during most of the 20th century. Home ownership has traditionally been the #1 means for Americans to build themselves up to middle class and beyond and blacks were pretty much denied that opportunity until relatively recently
And now China and its citizens have snatched up over $1T in American real estate. Let's hope the Chinese are nicer landlords
 
But then when things swung the other way with housing/lending practices, it was considered predatory and still discriminatory no?
The cost of buying housing from the lot/land to the building materials has far outpaced normal inflation. Fees and taxes alone make the cost to purchase and maintain just out of reach for most Americans. With the rent prices nationwide I'm actually shocked we haven't had another crash yet- there's a serious crisis going on.
 
But the limitations of each of these movements reflected political constraints imposed on them, in large part, by capital.

Aaaaaannnnnndddd we finally get to the agenda
 
The cost of buying housing from the lot/land to the building materials has far outpaced normal inflation. Fees and taxes alone make the cost to purchase and maintain just out of reach for most Americans. With the rent prices nationwide I'm actually shocked we haven't had another crash yet- there's a serious crisis going on.

For the record I dont disagree. Just dont see race as the cause
 
But then when things swung the other way with housing/lending practices, it was considered predatory and still discriminatory no?

If you're referring to the recent housing crisis, then no. It was despicable what financial institutions did, but the reality is that the entire scheme relied on borrowers getting greedy. If it seems too good to be true, it is

Baiting someone into making a foolish decision is quite different from what was going on in the 1900s where blacks were refused mortgages and instead were forced to settle for contract sales where the seller retained the equity in the property. Or how HOAs across the country literally prohibited whites from selling their houses to blacks. Or how the FHA rated neighborhoods, for purposes of insuring private mortgages, based on racial demographics; if there were too many blacks in the neighborhood then you wouldn't get insured. So naturally neighborhoods wanted to exclude blacks

That shit is actual discrimination, and it was real
 
If you're referring to the recent housing crisis, then no. It was despicable what financial institutions did, but the reality is that the entire scheme relied on borrowers getting greedy. If it seems too good to be true, it is

Baiting someone into making a foolish decision is quite different from what was going on in the 1900s where blacks were refused mortgages and instead were forced to settle for contract sales where the seller retained the equity in the property. Or how HOAs across the country literally prohibited whites from selling their houses to blacks. Or how the FHA rated neighborhoods, for purposes of insuring private mortgages, based on racial demographics; if there were too many blacks in the neighborhood then you wouldn't get insured. So naturally neighborhoods wanted to exclude blacks

That shit is actual discrimination, and it was real

I actually agree. I meant many would call it discriminatory. Good points tho
 
If you're referring to the recent housing crisis, then no. It was despicable what financial institutions did, but the reality is that the entire scheme relied on borrowers getting greedy. If it seems too good to be true, it is

Baiting someone into making a foolish decision is quite different from what was going on in the 1900s where blacks were refused mortgages and instead were forced to settle for contract sales where the seller retained the equity in the property. Or how HOAs across the country literally prohibited whites from selling their houses to blacks. Or how the FHA rated neighborhoods, for purposes of insuring private mortgages, based on racial demographics; if there were too many blacks in the neighborhood then you wouldn't get insured. So naturally neighborhoods wanted to exclude blacks

That shit is actual discrimination, and it was real

The effects of the GI Bill on development of the white middle class can't be understated as well. It was basically a federal subsidization of the war time underclass that black people missed out on entirely. Compound that with the cumulative effects that lack of educational opportunities can put on a family, and it becomes pretty clear that there were going to be long reaching effects from that.
 
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