Biden, the Democrats and a Time for Healing

 

Biden, the Democrats and a Time for Healing

I wrote in 2009 that the United States was not one nation, but two, and that the forces of populism were animating those two very different notions of what it meant to be American. Fueled by Bernie Sanders from the left and Donald Trump from the right, the two poles of populism have deeply influenced the base of both great American political parties since 2016. At those poles, are irreconcilable views regarding not only what it means to be an American, but who is and who can’t be; and with that totally divergent views over the direction and emphasis of public policy.

 

Joseph Biden emerged from this tumultuous year victorious in perhaps the most important presidential election since 1860. Biden has pledged to lead the nation on the path of healing in the aftermath of fissures over response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the crisis in policing fostered by the execution of George Floyd.

 

Focusing just on race, the discourse on healing and racial reconciliation is well-known in racial justice advocacy work among progressives, but it is not a routine part of policy debates around Capitol Hill. The last presidential initiative on race, that of Bill Clinton in 1997-98, occurred in the absence of national racial turmoil, was plagued by Clinton’s impeachment, and in any case sat on the shelf without any follow through.

 

John Judis (The Populist Explosion) has argued that, since the 2008 Great Recession, political elites must craft a new political consensus that tends to the needs of middle and working class constituencies who were hurt badly. White middle and working classes have been Republican since the 1960s. They tend to see Black and Brown people who “take” government “handouts,” and immigrants who “take” jobs as their enemy in a zero-sum economy. The Republican Party, always the party of big business, is now also the repository of “disgruntled white people.”

 

Indigenous, African, LatinX and Asian Americans of all classes have grouped around the Democratic Party. The party was able to shepherd civil rights legislation through Congress in the 1960s with Republican help, against the opposition from its own Southern wing. As Southern segregationists and  whites elsewhere moved to the Republican Party, Democrats have been the stronger of the two parties on race and civil rights issues.

 

Pragmatism --- doing what works with a spirit of innovation facing unchartered territory --- is an American cultural value and the hallmark of the way our political  system works. Politically, it requires finding a center where the moderates of the left right, and most Americans, can broadly agree on policy direction.

 

Joe Biden has pragmatic political instincts. He talks of healing and rebuilding a political center in the wake of a Trump presidency which was not concerned about that political center, or national unity. As a typical populist, he favored his “real Americans” against of the lazy or opportunistic Black and Brown “takers” who support Democrats. The bad news is Trump won over 47%  of the popular vote and 57% of the white vote after four years of racist rhetoric and executive orders.

 

Biden cannot tack to the middle without the multiracial base of the Democratic party. He must see which moderate Republicans will tack with him to create that broad political center, but he mustn’t go too far to find common cause with a party who’s base includes white nationalist. In a recent column David Brooks said that the future of both parties lies in a multiracial working class base. The Democrats have a huge lead in that regard, because that’s already who it’s base is.  Moreover, polls consistently show that most Americans support universal health care, more aggressive action on climate change, and policing reform to curb the use of excessive force in Black and Brown communities. These are Democratic Party issues. So in the pursuit of pragmatic reforms, it’s Republicans who’ll have the farther distance to travel.

 

Democrats should be hardheaded, but at the same time, willing to compromise a little to nudge things a little to the left in terms of policy outputs. As for healing to bridge the cultural divide, that would be great. But the incentives for people funded by big monied interests and tied to our electoral cycle don’t run toward directing legislation, budgets and staff time to “healing conversations.”

 

Actors in civil society have already taken the lead closer to the ground to engage in face-to-face racial reconciliation in real communities where people live. Two outstanding examples of this kind of work are Repairers of the Breach and the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Project.

 

Repairers of the Breach was founded by Reverend William Barber in North Carolina. It works from a religious foundation through faith-based organizations to foster interracial understanding and a moral common ground. Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation is a program of the Kellogg Foundation, which takes a more secular approach to the same issues. Both of these initiatives are national in scope, and they are an example of many other more localized projects of this kind currently underway. If Biden and Harris are serious they will tap into these kinds of efforts. Perhaps this work could be charged to a revitalized Community Relations Service in the Department of Justice. Or, as many communities, including some local governments, have declared systemic racism a public health problem, the Department of Health and Human Services might take on a healing project.

 

Healing, particularly along racial lines, is important to address if we are to reunify into one nation this century. But if national level actors can’t muster the resolve to do it, local actors must take up the project make strides in every corner of the country, and change our national discourse and our national destiny from the ground up.

Repairers of the Breach

https://www.breachrepairers.org/

 

Kellogg Foundation, Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation

https://www.wkkf.org/news-and-media/article/2017/06/wkkf-announces-14-truth-racial-healing-and-transformation-engagements-throughout-the-united-states

 

 

Discredit Violence/Dump Defund Discourse

 

As the national conventions of the two major political parties unfolded these last two weeks the events surrounding the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin are the latest racial justice punch in the face this country has endured. In these pages, I’ve often advanced my thesis of America as two nations, one traditional and conservative, and the other progressive. And we all know two things: This election in November is the most important one in any of our lifetimes. And secondly, how the country comes down on the issue of race will be a central question in determining the outcome.

 

If the Biden/Harris ticket wins and Democrats can manage to regain control of the Senate, we have a chance to nudge the needle in the direction of the vision of progressivism. However, if Donald Trump wins, we face the specter of the wholesale trashing of our constitutional protections and outright fascism, a fate from which I fear the left will never recover.

 

Recent national polling from a number of organizations shows that, following the murder of George Floyd, a haymaker has landed squarely in the jaw of white America regarding race.  Majorities of Americans now believe that policing needs to be reformed to achieve racial equity. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll in June found that 95% of all Americans believe that police officers should be required to intervene when fellow officers use excessive force. This includes 97% of all Democrats, 96% of Independents and even 95% of Republicans.

 

During the same period A Monmouth University poll found “that 76% of Americans now say that racial and ethnic discrimination is a big problem in the United States.  This includes 57% of conservatives, 71% of whites, and 69% of whites without college degrees.  In both cases these data show significant shifts in white opinion regarding race from the period after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 (See both polls in bibliography below). Part of the reason large swaths of white America are changing their views about “systemic racism” is also because of the data showing the disparate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic among POC.  

 

But it is against this backdrop that we’ve seen Trump escalate tensions by sending federal forces into cities and reviving the old Nixon calls for “law and order.” Then we get the Blake shooting in Kenosha, and 17 year-old Trump supporter Kyle Rittenhouse crossing state lines from Illinois and killing two people in a misguided attempt to restore law and order. And we are now getting anecdotal reporting from Wisconsin (a key swing state) and elsewhere, that people in the suburbs are on the fence regarding the elections as they perceive chaos in the cities that Democratic politicians can’t seem to control.

 

But on Saturday morning we also saw overwhelmingly, “white Kenoshans” painting murals on walls near the Rittenhouse killings accompanied by “Black Lives Matter” slogans. So enough of white America is now “woke’ on the need for systemic racial changes. And in order to keep them in the fold and casting their votes against fascism in November, progressives led by the BLM movement must do three things.

 

First, peaceful protests must be separated from violent actions. In the first moments of outrage against yet another senseless police or vigilante killing, vandalism and clashes with the police are understandable. But over the days and weeks, outside observers and even residents of the impacted communities begin to wonder what is the point? What is the point in smashing windows and burning down businesses that serve the neighborhoods where the vandalism is occurring? In the 60s, after rounds of violent rebellion in 1967, and again in 1968 with the assassination of Marin Luther King, my neighborhood in Cincinnati was never the same. White merchants were pushed out, and despite the rhetoric about Black economic empowerment, nobody, black or white, made any serious investments to rebuild the community. It remains a low-income, rust-belt area that like so many others, is experiencing gentrification, which brings back services, but pushes the longstanding black residents out.

 

But in the context of the November elections, another “very important” reason to stop the violence is that while majorities of Americans recognize that police misconduct and broader racial discrimination are problems, most Americans don’ think the violence makes sense. Peaceful protest to end systemic racism gains public support. Uninstigated violent protest loses support. Some of those lost supporters will vote for Trump out of fear. We can’t risk that right now.

 

Secondly, I believe that most of the after dark violent protesters are white radicals who are alienated from the sterile white middle-class worlds they grew up in and relish this opportunity to “rage against the machine.” There have been some scenes where we see black leaders arguing with white anarchists about tactics, but not being able to control what those white activists do after dark. Black leaders of the movement must aggressively take charge, make it clear to the anarchists that violent actions, unless motivated by police action, are not welcome, and if necessary, publicly denounce those white radicals as not part of our movement!

 

White nationalists have also brought their violence into the fray in Portland, Kenosha and other locales. The BLM leaders must let the dueling white folks clash and even kill each other in the streets and turn to the media and say “these are not our peeps!”

 

Third, and this may be a hard sell, but the BLM movement must get off the “defund the police” discourse. The polls also show that most Americans want reform, but they still want police protection. And black communities are also divided on this issue, with many organizations in places like Seattle likewise, calling for reform, not for policing to go away (see Shapiro, 2020). Perhaps we should open a conversation about Re-Imagining Public Safety in which resources can be appropriately shifted into mental health and other social services, and stop scaring middle America with the language of defunding. This is especially urgent in Seattle in the wake of four shootings and two deaths during the life of the “self-governing” CHAZZ Commune.

 

Once again, like Frederick Douglas, like Martin, we must reach deeper in this critical period to show Americans who know the system is corrupt that we come in peace and in good will, and that we wish to work together to find solutions to these chronic systemic problems. If the movement doesn’t immediately take these steps, we get four more yours of Trump and the end of the American democratic experiment.

 

Kaiser Family Foundation

https://www.kff.org/disparities-policy/report/kff-health-tracking-poll-june-2020/

 

Monmouth University Poll

https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/documents/monmouthpoll_us_060220.pdf/

 

Nina, Shapiro, “The future of policing in Seattle: How will we move forward?” Seattle Times, June

              14, 2020, p. 1.

The Political Economy of Systemic Racism

The Political Economy of Systemic Racism

In the wake of the killings of Ahmad Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd several media including the Seattle Times have recently published reading lists of titles for people wanting to learn about issues of systemic racism toward African Americans. The Times listings include fiction by luminaries like James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston, and non-fiction offerings by Seattle Black Panther Party Captain Aaron Dixon and University of Washington Emeritus Professor Quintard Taylor.

These listings are excellent in this time when more of us want to understand more about the racial challenges African Americans face in this country.  But here I would like to suggest a few titles that do a deeper dive into the historical roots of this “system” everyone is talking about. We frame this discussion as one about the political economy of systemic racism to illuminate the way that political and economic forces are historically intertwined in public policies, social conventions and routine processes that have subordinated and marginalized African Americans.

The economic part of our “system” is post-industrial capitalism. By post-industrial we mean an economy where manufacturing goods has been supplanted by one in which service industries of various kinds are the major kind of economic activity.

As post-industrial consciousness was first beginning to sink in around the late 1970s William Julius Wilson, Ph.D., Washington State, 1966) wrote The Declining Significance of Race (1978). In that text he argued that for the first time in American history legal racial discrimination was not the primary caused for African American socioeconomic disadvantage. The Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965), Fair Housing Act (1968) and a host of other federal statutes and court decisions had established a regime of legal racial equality before the law. But by the 1970s, a number of factors were converging that diminished the life-chances for the nearly 40% of African Americans then living in our largest metropolitan areas.

The primary culprit was the massive loss of manufacturing jobs due to flight of capital to the less unionized and lower wage Sunbelt states and overseas. This “de-industrialization” took work away from urban centers. This in turn had a spiraling effect of loss of tax base from business relocation and families forced into lower paid work, underemployment, or chronic unemployment. The deteriorating tax base caused budget cuts to education and other social services.  Many of these urban Black communities were suffering unemployment rates in the 20 30% range. And the National Urban League would regularly point out that those figures accounted only for those who were actually looking for work. Real unemployment in those communities often hovered close to 40%. This convergence of forces produced the urban Black “underclass,” thusly identified, because they structured out of the class system, if we determine class with what one does for work.

Many were troubled by Wilson’s assertion that class rather than race was the primary cause of African American inequality. Wilson’s colleague at the University of Chicago, Douglas Massey (B.A. Western Washington, 1974, Ph.D. Princeton, 1978) co authored with Nancy Denton American Apartheid (1993). That text argued that it was the conscious creation of the racialized urban ghetto by white elites across the 20^th century that was the basis upon which an underclass would emerge later in the century. Others argued that in Wilson’s complex structural analysis, the plight of the real Black people who are suffering is lost.

That compelled Wilson to pen When Work Disappears (1996) in which he described the decline of the Woodlawn section of Chicago over a four-decade period. Central to his argument is that work provides a basic structure to our lives, and when nearly half of the adults in communities are unemployed, the larger social organization of those communities is fundamentally undermined. Crime becomes the occupation for those who have no other means for income. And another structural force, the police, become the security forces to protect property from the teeming forces penned up in the ghetto.

Wilson, Massey and Denton propose what one might call progressive policy changes from what one might still call a social welfare reformist perspective. For supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders and other proponents of democratic socialism, Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America also provides a historical structural analysis unpacking class and gender divisions within African American communities.  He argues that the African American political class has become part and parcel of the capitalist system exploiting the working classes in their communities, and that democratic socialism is remedy for that exploitation.

Wilson offers us a complex multifactor framework for understanding how those urban communities became so unlike “the rest of us.” Massey and Denton remind us that conscious systemic racism acted to completely alienate those communities from access to the American Dream. And Marable poses wholesale systemic change to address that racially and class-defined reality.

The urban Black underclasses are the throw away people of our society. For a wholistic understanding of how they came to be that way and proposals for what might be done to alleviate that tragic condition, check these authors out.