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.