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 20th 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.
