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Arizona’s SB 1070 and the State’s Minimum Wage
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U.S. citizens uncertain about Arizona’s new immigration law would do well to remember who has been doing the actual hard labor under the hot desert sun long before Arizona became a state in 1912. Like the rest of the U.S., Arizona was initially Native American land. It used to be part of the Territory of New Mexico. During Lincoln’s administration, Congress made it a separate territory in 1863. Both Arizona and New Mexico have been territories of the U.S. since 1848, following President Polk’s two-year war with Mexico. At that juncture, Arizona had less than 1,000 Hispanics, 4,040 “Indians,” and 2,421 whites. 1848 was the same year the famous Kit Carson rounded up the Navajo with the help of American soldiers and the Ute. After, 8,000 Navajo were forced to undertake the Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo Reservation in New Mexico. The Navajo were permitted to return in 1868, but the Apache continued to resist until the Chiricahua were forcibly relocated to Florida in 1886. Today, more than 14 tribes live on 20 reservations, and Arizona reminds us of Geronimo and Cochise, the great chiefs who fought Indian removals. Although initially sparsely populated, Arizona has been slowly transformed from the wild, unbearably sun-scorched terrain it used to offer residents to the moment the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix air-conditioned the hotel in 1962. Indeed, the air-conditioner is most responsible for turning Arizona into a tourist destination, enhancing the state’s economic engines in copper, cotton, cattle, citrus, and electronics. Two-thirds of the U.S.’s copper is still mined there, and mining has been king since gold and silver dwindled and electricity gave the metal value in the 1870s.
When mining, cotton, cattle and citrus were introduced, who largely provided the work force? Arizona’s economy has always depended on the region’s minority people for cheap common labor, on Native Americans and on the Spanish-speakers who have lived in the desert long before Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. Arizona has always offered more work opportunities than residents can handle, and for that reason it used to welcome and even encouraged Mexicans to cross the border to help upgrade its ranches and farms. That commerce progressively altered Arizona from a suffocating wilderness used by outlaws into a chic, spa-and-golf environment used by movie stars and the rich since Marilyn Monroe lounged at the Biltmore.
That is why Arizona’s recent SB 1070 law is so stunning and incomprehensible. Arizona, of course, is not the only state or part of the country that has relied on immigrant, cheap labor to turn our economies into global world market leaders. Texas, California–name most states or U.S. regions–and economists will tell us that cheap, foreign-hands labor has been in there doing the hard manual work needed to transform society’s infrastructure, promoting and giving visibility to “Progress.” Since many “illegal aliens” historically leave their countries to throw in their fates and the futures of their children with the regions that have employed their skills and talents for generations, isn’t it rather thankless now to disinvite and actually to throw them out of the U.S.? These workers have long survived on pauper’s wages. Our country has labeled them “illegal,” allowing our citizens to pay the “aliens” whatever we have wanted. But since January 1, 2009, Arizonians have had to pay them at least $7.25 per hour of work, too. Illegal workers interviewed by Univision now say that not enough people are hiring them off the curbs where for years they used to be picked up to cut grass, repair homes, and provide other services. How fair is it to use language–to mix our good, reliable workers with “terrorists” and “drug gangsters,” as Arizona’s new immigration law does? What SB 1070 underscores is that whites who voted for it enjoy being domineering.
Marco Portales is a Texas A&M professor and author of Why Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata Wore Cananas: A 100th Year Photo History of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1928. (Copies available from mportales@tamu.edu)
Black Unemployment in the U.S.: So Bad the UN is Investigating
Posted by: | CommentsThe level of black unemployment in the U.S. is so bad that the United Nations is launching an investigation. And, indeed the figures on unemployment by race are grim for blacks, especially black men. The latest unemployment figures show a stark racial disparity. For black men, the unemployment rate was 20.2%, compared to 9.6% unemployment for white men. (Of course, these numbers are low given that “discouraged workers,” those who are no longer looking for employment, are not included, nor are those who are incarcerated.) The outrageously high unemployment among black Americans means the United States has failed to live up to commitments it made under United Nations human rights agreements, a coalition of advocacy groups charges (pdf), according to a recent report by City Limits.
In a filing to the UN’s Human Rights Council last week, a group that includes New York’s Urban Justice Center and National Employment Law Project, casts “the over-representation of women and racial and ethnic minorities in unemployment, underemployment, and poverty” as a human rights issue and calls on Washington “to take specific steps to create employment opportunities for these groups.” Thus far, the U.S. permanent mission to the U.N. has not commented.
These stark numbers unemployment figures reflect an egregious reality of ongoing discrimination and historical structural inequality in the U.S. that has placed an especially harsh burden on the shoulders of black men, according to a report from the Center for American Progress called “Weathering the Storm” (pdf):
Black men’s ability to access high-paying jobs in the manufacturing sector played a significant role in building the black middle class after World War II. Yet those jobs have steadily declined in the past several decades. A study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimated that the share of African Americans in manufacturing jobs fell from 23.9 percent in 1979 to 9.8 percent in 2007. Blacks were actually 15 percent less likely than other groups in 2007 to have a job in manufacturing. These jobs have also been among the first cut in this recession, accelerating the decline of available positions with decent pay for black men.
Black men have also been disproportionately affected by the instability in the automotive industry. A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that African Americans have above average employment and earn much higher wages in auto industry jobs than in other industries. If one or more domestic automakers were to file for bankruptcy, more than 3 million jobs could be lost within the next year, a result that would be especially devastating for African Americans.
Black workers have not only suffered from a severe decline in decent employment opportunities, but they have also faced decreasing rates of unionization related to the shrinking manufacturing industry. Unionized African-American workers on average earn higher wages than nonunion black workers with similar characteristics. From 2004 to 2007, the median unionized black worker earned about $17.51 per hour, compared to $12.57 per hour for the median nonunion black worker. Unionized black workers were also more likely to have health insurance and pension plans than nonunion black workers.
The employment rates of African-American men remained stagnant even during the economic booms in the 1980s and 1990s. The group’s continued high unemployment rates and inability to achieve prior employment peaks even after many years of a strong economy are influenced by multiple factors, including high rates of incarceration, limited education, child support arrearages, and discrimination.
Ongoing discrimination is a factor as well. As Joe Feagin and Melvin Sykes note in their book, Living with Racism (1993), even highly educated, middle class blacks face routine, persistent discrimination in employment and a host of other arenas of everyday life. Devah Pager’s research of nearly 1,500 employers in New York City found that black applicants without criminal records are no more likely to get a job than white applicants just out of prison. The statistics from the study also suggested that employer discrimination against people of color and ex-offenders has significantly undermined the job opportunities for young black men with little education and training. And, more recently, Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow (2010), details the system of mass incarceration that contributes to keeping black men trapped in a subordinate status.
This systemic oppression gets multiplied when there is any sort of downturn in the economy and the current recession has hit black men particularly hard, with unemployment rates expected to rise even higher.
The fact is that the population of out of work black men is not monolithic. It includes young guys and middle-aged men, ex-convicts and aspiring entrepreneurs, the college educated and those who didn’t finish high school. Yet, the fact remains that there is a systemic difference in unemployment rates that’s so egregious, so pervasive, so persistent over decades in the U.S., that it’s now an issue worthy of examination as a violation of international human rights by the United Nations.
Institutional Racism in Employment and Unemployment, Again
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Aaron Glatnz has a good but too brief article at NewAmericaMedia on the continuing racial impact of the Bush recession/depression on the US, with its still 9.7 percent unemployment rate:
The unemployment rate for whites held steady at 8.8 percent compared to February and went down for Asians from 8.4 percent to 7.5 percent. But it rose to 16.5 percent for blacks from 15.8 percent. Hispanics showed a slight increase as well from 12.4 percent to 12.6 percent.
White and Asian Americans, according to these statistics, are not hurting as much as groups of workers as black and Latino Americans. One major reason for the differential is that governments are now cutting public services on a huge scale, as a quote from Seth Wessler, a researcher at the Applied Research Center, indicates:
“If the bus line you depend on is cut, it’s impossible to look for a job or even hold onto the one you have . . . and we know that across the country – from New York to Los Angeles – bus service is being cut and fares are increasing.”
Glatnz also quotes Peter Edelman, director of the Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy at the Georgetown University, about where job growth will come as the economy presumably recovers:
“The jobs that we project over the next decade that are reasonably well paying involve a degree of skills and a degree of preparation…and people of color have disparate educational attainment,” and will be less able to land that work without an associates degree or certificate from a local community college.
Census jobs may help some communities, but only temporarily and with modest paying jobs. They will be gone soon. And inequality in education looms again as a large factor in maintaining the systemic racism still foundational in this society.
There are many angles to this sorry story, and one recent one is how poorer American students are increasingly dropping out of college or seeking out the weak diploma mill colleges as a solutions to soaring costs. One recent investigative report by Peter Byrne discusses this issue in connection with an assessment of the situation of the University of California’s wealthy regents who are business investors, such as the chair of the regents who
has an abiding interest in education—a financial interest: while serving as chairman of the Regents, and head of the investment committee, he took control of a very profitable, national network of “diploma mills,” worth about $3 billion. These “career education” schools rely on federally subsidized student loans to generate profits that are then privately invested. Some of Blum’s schools have been investigated by government agencies (and sued by individuals) for, allegedly, delivering substandard educations, and, allegedly, concentrating on generating government-guaranteed student loan revenue at the expense of providing students with quality educations.
This article discusses the “creeping privatization of the University of California system,” a reality that means
as the UC system becomes increasingly expensive (and racially exclusive), lower income students are turning toward diploma mills.
The same is likely true for other major universities across the country. This is a structural and national problem, not just a local one, as the country becomes ever more unequal along racial and class lines.
Racist Employment Practices in a Recession
Posted by: | CommentsThe New York Times has a useful article touching on some recent research on discrimination in employment against black workers with college degrees:
College-educated black men, especially, have struggled relative to their white counterparts in this downturn, according to figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate for black male college graduates 25 and older in 2009 has been nearly twice that of white male college graduates — 8.4 percent compared with 4.4 percent. Various academic studies have confirmed that black job seekers have a harder time than whites. A study published several years ago in The American Economic Review titled “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” found that applicants with black-sounding names received 50 percent fewer callbacks than those with white-sounding names. A more recent study, published this year in The Journal of Labor Economics found white, Asian and Hispanic managers tended to hire more whites and fewer blacks than black managers did.
The focus seems to be just on black men. But black women also face much racial discrimination, as well as gendered-racist discrimination in workplaces, doing business, and elsewhere.
The journalist adds this about the well-educated black men featured in the article:
It is difficult to overstate the degree that they say race permeates nearly every aspect of their job searches, from how early they show up to interviews to the kinds of anecdotes they try to come up with. “You want to be a nonthreatening, professional black guy,” said Winston Bell, 40, of Cleveland, who has been looking for a job in business development
The article reports that many black men hide their racial identity in their resumes because that reduces the discrimination, at least initially, against them.
Not once in the article, however, are the main and major perpetrators of this employment discrimination, mostly white male managers and executives, featured as the central creators of this deep U.S. problem. There is a tone here and there of “they say race permeates,” which softens the analysis of racism. There is of course much evidence and research such journalists could have examined on the white racist framing in the heads of many white executives, whose racialized thinking and action out of that framing needs to be the center of such stories. Such racist practices are old, foundational, and systemic. For even the more “liberal” analysts, yet, they still mostly get presented as episodic and/or tacked on to an otherwise unproblematical society, with white perpetrators seldom problematized.
Systemic Racism as Economic Depression
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The Center for Social Inclusion has a useful new report–Race, the Job Market, and Economic Recovery: A Census Snapshot. This should be useful for classes and other teaching purposes. It summarizes data on some impacts of the current economic depresssion (which is what it is for many groups) on
photo credit: Kieran Bennett
white, black, and Latino Americans.
As they point out in their summary press release from the report, recent Census data show that
rising poverty and unemployment, and decreasing access to healthcare are undermining recovery in communities of color, slowing the engine of America’s struggling economy.
• Unemployment is 26.5% for young Black men, 14.2% for Young Latino men, and 11.7% for young White men. • Wages dropped 5.6% for Latinos, 4.4% for Asians, 2.8% for Blacks, and 2.6% for Whites.
• Poverty has reached 24.6% among African Americans compared to 23.2% for Latinos, 11.6% for Asians, and 11.0% for Whites.
. . . Greater than 1 in 10 white men aged 20-29 are now unemployed, up from approximately 1 in 20 when the recession began November of 2007. Those are sobering numbers. Graver still, a devastating 1 in 4 Black men and 1 in 6 Latino men, aged 20-29, have become unemployed.
Especially in hard economic times, racial inequality is quite obvious, as these Americans of color pay a very heavy price for the poor corporate and other political-economic decisions of the mostly white and male capitalistic elites and their political allies. The report points out that losing jobs also means losing health insurance for many workers. So,
• The percent of uninsured is 30.7% among Latinos, 18.9% among African Americans, 17.1% among Asians, and 10.8% among Whites.
In addition to showing once again that this is far from an egalitarian country, these data help explain why the demonstrators in Washington, DC, yesterday (Sept. 12), estimated around 50,000, against President Obama and his health care plan were almost all white. Whites as a group simply are not hurting nearly as much as black and Latino Americans, and many other Americans of color, are when it comes to jobs and health care.
The report calls on government to make federal and state “stimulus” efforts extend realistically to all communities of color, which they currently do only in a very limited fashion. It also calls for a much “better job” of government reporting on just how the stimulus money is being spent, and for whom.
“It’s time to act. Economic recovery will exist in name only for too many of our neighbors if we don’t put in place the policies that are needed to reach everyone,” said Maya Wiley, executive director of the Center for Social Inclusion. “The newly poor are disproportionately women, children, Black, Latino and Asian. We can not let a massive recovery effort bypass the hardest hit.”
The Failure of Capitalism: How Americans of Color Pay
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Over at New America Media, Linnie Frank Bailey is doing an excellent three-part series on “Aging in the Inland Empire: Redefining Poverty & the ‘New’ Poor.” The data for California show that the majority of African American seniors and many other seniors of color are in very serious economic and/or health care trouble, many because of the huge budget cuts coming in the California state and local budgets imposed because of poor taxation and management in that state over decades now:
Elder advocate Jackie Melendez reports seeing a new kind of elder abuse these days. It doesn’t involve those who usually prey on elders — the abusive caregiver or financial scam artist. This time it is the seniors who are the abusers. Their target? Themselves.
“Self-abuse among elders is a growing problem in the Inland area,” says Jackie, founder of Inland Seniors Caring Connection, a nonprofit that raises money for Meals-on-Wheels and other elder support programs. “They give up,” she says. “They stop taking their prescriptions, they stop shopping for food, they stop cleaning their houses and they let their appearance go. Many times it is the physician who first notices something is wrong.”
Melendez attributes most of the elder self-abuse she sees to angst over the deteriorating economy in the Inland area and fear about what the future holds. This fear of the future is exasperated by recent budget cuts in California affecting senior services and programs. Many are living a retirement with much less money than they planned, and they don’t know where to turn for help. Melendez says her organization is one of many that tries to help seniors find resources. But this is becoming increasingly more difficult as programs are cut.
Welcome to the “most affluent country” in the world, as our politicians have often bragged. This is a series well worth circulating to students and others around the country. Very revealing on how capitalism works today, and who actually pays for its recurring crises. And revealing too on how none but the progressive media deal with capitalism as a human failure?
Is the Recession Killing Off the Black Middle Class?
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The dominant white racial framing downplays social realities that contradict its notions, including that of a “postracial America” where black Americans are doing as well as whites in regard to jobs, education, health care. (For data, see Chapter 1 here.) Contradicting such foolish notions with data, Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad have analyzed how this super-recession is now badly hurting the black middle class. They note that most are not like those black Americans (Henry L. Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby) who get so much mainstream media attention these days:
According to a study by Demos and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy, 33 percent of the black middle class was already in danger of falling out of the middle class at the start of the recession. . . . Millions of the black equivalents of Officer Crowley — from factory workers to bank tellers and white collar managers — are sliding down toward destitution. For African Americans — and to a large extent, Latinos — the recession is over. It occurred between 2000 and 2007, as black employment decreased by 2.4 percent and incomes declined by 2.9 percent. During the seven-year long black recession, one third of black children lived in poverty and black unemployment — even among college graduates — consistently ran at about twice the level of white unemployment.
They mean that blacks and Latinos are now in an economic depression:
Black unemployment is now at 14.7 percent, compared to 8.7 for whites. … the Economic Policy Institute estimates that 40 percent of African Americans will have experienced unemployment or underemployment by 2010, and this will increase child poverty from one-third of African-American children to slightly over half.
They note several explanations for this economic crisis and its job decline. These include the export of manufacturing and other blue collar jobs overseas and the reality that past discrimination has put many black workers in least-seniority positions in workplaces. There is also the export of jobs out of cities into suburban areas where African Americans (and Latinos) do not live. All these and other societal processes that operate differentially across racial lines have been proceeding aggressively in recent decades.
There is no fallback position for most African Americans, because of the society’s massive racialized wealth gap. Recent Federal Reserve studies show huge differentials in household wealth between white and black families. White families’ net worth is ten times that of black families’ net worth, with much of that in housing equities built up over 9-15 generations of slavery, Jim Crow, and contemporary discrimination severely limiting black access to housing equities and other family wealth-building resources. Social inheritance mechanisms are imbedded in society and disguised to make intertemporal inheritance appear fair. For example, almost all the federally assisted home mortgages provided on a large-scale to soldiers returning after World War II went to white soldiers and their families. Large-scale mortgage and other housing discrimination was commonplace and overt until the late 1960s. Much housing discrimination has continued, if more subtly, since then.
Most significantly, the white wealth built up in these housing equities fostered by discriminatory federal programs has often been passed along to children and grandchildren. Each new generation of whites has inherited an array of racial privileges and substantial socioeconomic resources. A central societal process producing this reality can be called the societal reproduction of wealth, a concept that is linked fundamentally to the societal reproduction of racial oppression and in my view needs to be central to theories of race and racism.
Customers Choosing White Men
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An article in the June 23, 2009 issue of the New York Times’ Science section discusses the results of a study to be published in a future issue of The Academy of Management Journal.
The researchers divided 86 college students into three groups and showed each group one of three video clips about sales clerks. The sales setting details in the clips were identical, with one important exception: the demographic characteristics of the sales clerks varied. In one clip the sales clerk was a white woman, in the next a black man, and in the last a white man.
There were substantial numbers of women and nonwhites in each group, but the students rated the white man’s performance highest.
The study’s lead author stated in an interview that
Everyone –white, black, men, women—think the white man is more valuable. Someone needs to call customers out on their biases.
It’s a noble suggestion, but in all likelihood the outcome will not be the one hoped for: Customers will be more cautious about expressing in public their true beliefs on sex and race.
Systemic Racism in Banking: The Wells Fargo Case
Posted by: | CommentsThere is a piece in the New York Times today is reporting on their investigation into the explicitly racist practices of Wells Fargo in their subprime mortgage business ( photo credit: TheTruthAbout… , h/t Schiffon Wong). According to the NYTimes, Wells Fargo created a unit in the mid-Atlantic region to push expensive refinancing loans on black customers, particularly those living in Baltimore, southeast Washington and Prince George’s County, Md.
According to a former employee of the banking giant quoted in the article, the company viewed the black community as fertile ground for subprime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation’s home-owning mania. Loan officers, she said, pushed customers who could have qualified for prime loans into subprime mortgages. Another loan officer stated in an affidavit filed last week that employees had referred to blacks as “mud people” and to subprime lending as “ghetto loans.” The employee, a Ms. Jacobson, who is white and said she was once the bank’s top-producing subprime loan officer nationally, goes on to reveal:
“We just went right after them. Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches, because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”
The NYTimes backs this anecdotal evidence with their own more systematic investigation:
The New York Times, in a recent analysis of mortgage lending in New York City, found that black households making more than $68,000 a year were nearly five times as likely to hold high-interest subprime mortgages as whites of similar or even lower incomes. (The disparity was greater for Wells Fargo borrowers, as 2 percent of whites in that income group hold subprime loans and 16.1 percent of blacks.)
To understand the Wells Fargo case, it’s important to understand the broader context of this banking institutions’ policies as part of a larger pattern.
Sociologists Doug Massey and Nancy Denton in their ASA-award-winning book, American Apartheid, document the systematic pattern of housing discrimination in the U.S., as well as the dire consequences of such enforced segregation. Part of Massey and Denton’s argument is that segregation in housing leads to “social dislocations” (William J. Wilson’s term) in other areas like high school drop-out rates, increased rates of drug use, delinquency and crime, in other words, “the making of an underclass” (the subtitle of their book).
Massey and Denton’s work was path-breaking for the way that it clearly and painstakingly documents the “construction of the ghetto,” but their findings were not exactly new. The Kerner Commission Report from 1968 famously concluded:
“What white Americans have never fully understood— but what the Negro can never forget— is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
The report from today’s NYTimes and the evidence of explicitly racist practices of Wells Fargo do not mean that everyone that worked there agreed with these policies or harbored explicitly racist views. Indeed, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva as recounted in his Racism Without Racists, the continued operation of white supremacist system does not require the presence of extreme racists in that system. In fact, I’m sure that many of the people that worked at Wells Fargo would never consider themselves racists but rather well-meaning and liberal in their views on race.
So, then it becomes necessary to understand Wells Fargo’s banking discrimination — and the housing segregation such discrimination creates — within an even broader context. For that, it’s important to understand the white racial frame that sustains systemic racism, as Joe has described here and in his important book by the same name. Note the loan officer mentioned in the NYTimes piece that referred to blacks as “mud people” and to the subprime lending as “ghetto loans.” These statements reflect thinking within the white racial frame and the result is the maintenance of systemic racial segregation in housing and further economic devastation of black families that might otherwise be homeowners.
That’s the real tragedy of this story, to my thinking. Families that worked hard, tried to buy a home and provide a better life for their kids, are now facing foreclosure – and maybe worse – because of the systematic racism in Wells Fargo’s banking practices. The question really becomes then if we, as a nation, are so “tragically bound to that starless midnight of racism,” as Dr. King said, that we can never move beyond it. It’s time, I think, to begin holding institutions accountable for racist practices like these.
White Supremacy, Racism, and the Obama Administration, Pt.2
Posted by: | CommentsThese are the final two provocative theses from Clarence J. Munford. He is Professor Emeritus, Department of History, University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada. Among his books are Race and Civilization: Rebirth of Black Centrality (Africa World Press 2001) and American Crucible: Black Enslavement, White Capitalism and Imperial Globalization (Africa World Press forthcoming, June 2009).
THESIS THREE
At this moment antiracists and other progressives need be circumspect in our criticism of the agenda and policies of the Obama administration ( photo credit: couturiere7 ). First, because it is
figuratively the only game in play. Second, because bad-tempered faultfinding would alienate nearly the entire African American community, still enthralled as it is in the historic symbolism and adulation of a black presidency in the “world’s most powerful country.” Third, because the only likely alternative to Barack Obama to emerge from the 2012 election will be the neo-Nazi, closet-KKK types and religious fundamentalists nesting under the Republican Party “tent.”
Yet we would be remiss in our duty if we failed to offer constructive critique that fosters progressive social reform. For instance, was the decision to boycott the United Nations antiracism conference in April 2009 indicative of the administration’s true stripes? Was the shunning – to paraphrase Shakespeare – a whiff of something rotten in Washington, DC’s Denmark? Must U.S. foreign policy remain forever hostage to Israeli hawks? America’s absence from the Geneva conference had even the Congressional Black Caucus – Obama’s most rock-solid legislative ally – wondering. The concept of modernization of the oppression of African Americans aids comprehension. It suggests that second class citizenship resists cosmetic changes regardless of the personnel in the White House.
During his “First Hundred Days” Obama’s “crisis management” aimed to reduce unemployment through job creation. His stimulus program included funds and measures to lessen mortgage foreclosures. Threatened homeowners were promised mortgage renegotiation along more favorable terms. At least as talking points, the government put environmental improvement, alternative energy and strategic raw materials savings on the table. Cooperation between the federal government, organized labor and the private sector is seen as a kind of magic wand. Sought is equilibrium between the national economy and the basic components of civil society.
Meanwhile corporate capital continues to manipulate the organs of state to distribute the national income in ways favorable to itself. Obama has set sights on reviving the stock market and talks in populist terms of affordable health care (but only in the dubious insurance scheme, not in the universal, single-payer form) in order to maintain political capital. The challenge is to speed the capitalist periodical cycle into a recovery phase while juggling big bonuses at firms that have swallowed billions of bailout dollars, auto industry meltdown, the AIG fiasco and growing demands for nationalization of the country’s most dysfunctional banks.
The depression has exposed widespread immiseration that can no longer be “spin”-glossed away by the mouthpieces of U.S.-dominated raciated global supremacy. More than merely turning the country around economically, progressives want Obama to face up to the system’s all-round failure to meet human needs. Job opportunities are unfilled due to unskilled or untrained applicants, while growing millions are being laid off. And what spooks the powers-that-be is the fact that now the jobless are not just blacks and Hispanics, but so-called mainstream whites as well. Grappling with neglected human needs, progressive forces demand from Obama more than just swift, but temporary, stimuli. They call for staunch and permanent government intervention. Only the state can harmonize mass employment, the need for trained workers and social needs. Barack Obama’s program looks to quicken the job market through health insurance spending, home mortgage assistance and infrastructure repairs and initiatives.
Yet it is a matter of debate whether the reformers in Obama’s corner realize that in contemporary racist capitalism mass unemployment (twice as heavy among blacks than among whites) is at once conjunctural and structural. It is a product of the periodical cycle and of deindustrialization in favor of service industries, of “off-shoring,” and of swelling social emphasis on communications-electronics. At issue are fundamental processes of capital accumulation. The Obama administration has grounds to expect jobs to be created through new investments, thus justifying all the talks of a “New New Deal.” But large-scale devalorization of much black male labor power has been long underway before the present economic bubble burst. That devalorization demonstrates that capital accumulation never has as its goal the protection or creation of jobs.
Capitalists accumulate, expand, rationalize and modernize enterprises in order to garner high profits. This generates schizophrenia for the Obama stimulus. On one hand, to mollify his electorate and pay political IOUs, the president must save homes and put people to work through health, energy, regulatory and infrastructure measures. On the other hand, as the administrator of state capitalism, he must protect and revivify the existing system of white supremacist capitalism. Once troubled enterprises are “stress-tested,” trimmed, modernized and regulated, once they are ready to yield stable high profits, they must be returned to the private sector free of federal government sway. On behalf of private capitalists the administration is mandated to manage, invest taxpayer dollars, partially nationalize and break UAW labor contracts. Such is the real meaning of rationalization, efficiency and higher productivity under racist capitalism. Success for this agenda would be long-term elimination of work places, not more jobs. As currently projected, the Obama stimulus and regulation of financial institutions down the road will shrink the demand for living labor power.
To keep this from happening, progressives and antiracists must inject radical elixir in the Obama White House. That is the only way to expand well-paid, secure employment, particularly for the sorely-tried African American community. Programming, projections, French-style dirigiste planning for express rail links, energy independence and other “leftist” concepts not heard in Washington, DC since the 1930s and the New Deal, have now become common currency inside the Beltway. These are manifestations of capitalist reformist jitters. Short of an impact by a strong radical public, they most definitely are not the “transformative” harbingers of an equitable, antiracist society designed to meet the needs of all of its citizens that many first-time voters thought they heard in the Obama campaign rhetoric. The president wants to intensify the role of the federal government merely enough to enliven the economy. But why must the affair stop there? What if a broad neo-Abolitionist coalition of blacks, browns and antiracist whites can be forged in time to intervene? Its pressure could induce Americans to realize that it is not necessary to bribe the corporate and financial moguls with bailouts, bonuses, interest and profits to obtain the necessities of life.
THESIS FOUR
Global white supremacy would lose what remains of its integral character without the seemingly limitless malleability of second class citizenship in the USA coupled with ongoing modernization of oppression of the black world as a whole. Though nearly five hundred years old, the African Diaspora in the Americas has yet to experience true liberation. What has been endured in the last two hundred years is a series of refurbishments of bondage, disguised as “emancipations.” Each modernization has occurred at a critical turning point in history when the system of black servitude was in crisis and seemed threatened with collapse. The Obama administration appears to be one such turning point.
Hitherto each revamp has involved some great confrontation like the Civil War or the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Each regeneration has saved the day for white supremacy by discarding the unnecessary frills of white domination (i.e., the “petty apartheids”), while rescuing the essentials of black subjugation. Each update has revealed the bitter truth that social equality and racially proportionate economic parity can never be accomplished without breaking the back of white supremacy. The staged incremental progress African Americans are alleged to have benefited from in the course of the twentieth century, culminating in the election of Barack Obama, is, in fact, contingency-rooted, episodic streamlining of the forms of second-class citizenship. The kernel of black oppression has remained stable, regardless of the election of black officials, and regardless of leeway for civil rights, intermarriage, integrated housing, voting rights and limited job opportunities. The notion of modernization of second-class citizenship for African Americans is an elaboration and articulation of the fundamental thesis of a series of modernizations of enslavement experienced in all parts of the black world during the last half-millennium.
Nonetheless, there is a serious alternative to white supremacist capitalist society. That vision postulates an end to global white supremacy, the heart of global capitalism. It requires a concerted political effort by progressive forces to build an economy that binds government control of the commanding heights of the economy with small private enterprises and community firms in an organic fashion. In order to qualify as truly post-racist, America would have to install a human and constitutional rights system in place of the travesty we now endure. It would have to impose social equality, evenhanded justice and socioeconomic parity. Black political empowerment proportionate to population percentage would have to be enshrined in the Constitution. Policy would have to ensure “equality of results” for the black community and other racialized minorities.
