Tag Archives: racism

Race And American Inequality

This is Black History Month, but rather than a post on black history, I think it may be useful to share some depressing information about the current status of African-Americans vis a vis the White Americans who have occupied a privileged social position in this country even after most of the legal disabilities targeting people of color were repealed.

The Institute for Policy Studies recently issued a report on the wealth gap between whites, Latinos and blacks in the United States.The report looked at trends in household wealth among Black, Latino and White households over the past three decades.

Since the early 1980s, median wealth among Black and Latino families has been stuck at less than ten thousand dollars, while the median wealth of White households, adjusted for inflation, grew from $105,300 to $140,500. The median White family has 41 times more wealth than the median Black family and 22 times more wealth than the median Latino family.

The wealth gap has gotten wider as wealth in America has become extremely concentrated.The median American family of any color has seen its wealth drop 3 percent between 1983 and 2016–a period of time in which the richest 0.1 percent have seen their wealth jump 133 percent. The three wealthiest families–the Waltons, the Kochs and the Mars–have seen their wealth increase by nearly 6,000 percent.

Wealth held by members of the Forbes 400 equals that of all Blacks plus a quarter of Latinos.

The  report takes issue with analyses that treat the racial wealth divide and the growth of economic inequality as two separate issues; instead, it finds that they are mutually reinforcing outcomes of larger economic issues–issues that result from public policies that have favored–and continue to favor–both White Americans and the very wealthy.

Just one example: As this is being written, Mitch McConnell and the Senate GOP are proposing to eliminate what they like to call the “death tax,” and the rest of us call the estate tax.

The estate tax raises $20 billion dollars a year, which is a lot of money, but a pretty insignificant part of the federal budget. It applies only to estates worth more than $5.5 million dollars, and people with lots of money can pretty easily structure their wills to avoid it.

As the Atlantic points out, however, there’s more than money involved in this debate.

The tax code is more than a ledger. It is a national statement of values. And so this little law inspires a great commotion during each tax debate. To its opponents, it is the ultimate (literally) punishment on success and an affront to the family legacy that each striving individual hopes to leave. To its supporters, it is a necessary bulwark against inherited plutocracy, which offends the national virtue of merit over privilege.

The article goes through the arguments advanced in favor of repeal and in favor of retention of the estate tax, and is worth reading for a quick review of the debate. But the argument for retention most relevant to policy’s role in worsening inequality is that, in a period defined by the rising gap between rich and poor, we need to recognize the enormous role played by inheritance.

According to analysis byMatt Bruenig, a writer and the founder of the advocacy group People’s Policy Project, four out of 10 members of the wealthiest 1 percent inherited some money, with an average inheritance in the millions of dollars….

In the last half century, the average wealth of the bottom half has gone from about nothing to about $1,000 in debt. Meanwhile, the returns at the top have accelerated. In the 1960s, families in the top 1 percent were six times wealthier than families in the middle, according to the Urban Institute. By 2016, the 1 percent was 12 times wealthier than the typical family. As wealth inequality has soared, the estate tax has been diminished, with the number of estate tax returns declining by 76 percent between 2006 and 2015. There is little doubt that 21st-century tax policy has assisted the concentration of wealth.

When ostensibly color-blind tax policy benefits “haves,” that policy inevitably benefits Whites.

And let’s face facts: money is power.

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An Excellent Rant

My youngest son introduced me to Gin and Tacos a year or so ago, and it has become one of my favorite blogs, mostly because the blogger lets fly with whatever has most recently pissed him off, and I can really, really relate. The blogger has a name, of course, Ed Bermila, and has helpfully included a description of himself, written in third person and sarcasm.

Ed is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Midwestern Liberal Arts University after receiving his Ph.D. in political science from Giant Midwestern Public University and teaching for three years at Giant Southern Public University. He teaches Intro to American Government, Public Opinion, Elections, and The Presidency to a select group of very lucky boys and girls each semester. His academic research studies the spatial and geographic context of political behavior – partisanship, turnout, and public opinion. He also performs stand-up comedy on the regular and plays/played drums in a band called Tremendous Fucking. Like every band on the planet, they have a MySpace. It is highly recommended that you buy their latest album off of iTunes in order to get into heaven. Sometimes he stands on a stage and tells jokes as well, inasmuch as scathing social criticism can be described as a joke.

There’s more, but you get the tone.

I particularly liked his post–rant?– from mid-December, titled “Who is ‘we’?”which he introduced as follows:

My least favorite genre of journalism is the retrospective “How did we miss this?” piece that comes after years of the profession sticking its head in the sand and refusing to see something inconvenient. The New York Times actually had the balls to print a headline like “The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It.”

Who missed it? That’s a serious question. Who makes up the demographic “Did not see a disturbing rise in explicitly racist and xenophobic politics” and where were these people during the eight years Obama was president? It seems unlikely that an even mildly observant person could have failed to notice that about 20% of the people in this country came psychologically unmoored over the idea of having a black president.

I think the answer to “who missed it?” is: people who were intentionally obtuse. I still recall a conversation with the husband of one of my many cousins, not long after Obama was elected. I said something about how dispiriting I’d found the emergence of racist rhetoric, especially on line, and he looked at me blankly and said “Really? I haven’t noticed anything like that.”

This guy is a high-priced lawyer, and there really was no way he could have avoided coverage of the phenomenon, even if he had somehow escaped the online onslaught. During our conversation, it became clear that he wanted to attribute the growing concerns about racism to “Democrats playing the race card.”

As Bermila notes, the self-identified “centrists”in the media are obsessed with what he calls “Decorum and playing nice.” People will chastise you if you point out that the king really does seem to be naked.

“It’s rude and unproductive to call people you disagree with politically racists or Nazis, tut-tut!” Yes, well, these people are really racist and some of them are taking that to the logical extreme of becoming actual Nazis. Like, with swastikas and stuff….

Add to that the seriously misplaced priorities of the establishment media, which values blaming nobody and everybody equally (Both sides are wrong!) over identifying problems and assigning responsibility even when it’s patently obvious. The only way to miss right-wing extremism’s rise is to operate your media outlet while more afraid of being chided by right-wingers than of totally missing a crucial story.

And for those “retrospective” stories, the ones where you can almost picture the reporter wringing his hands in dismay while asking how “we” missed this, Ed has an appropriate response:

“We” didn’t miss it. You did.

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A Day Of Reckoning…..

Americans go to the polls today. When those polls close, and the results are announced, we’ll know whether we live in the America whose motto is e pluribus unum or Trump’s “Christian” America (note quotation marks) that wants to be White again.

Paul Krugman often speaks truth to power, and his recent column in the New York Times  pulled no punches.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re in the midst of a wave of hate crimes. Just in the past few days, bombs were mailed to a number of prominent Democrats, plus CNN. Then, a gunman massacred 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Meanwhile, another gunman killed two African-Americans at a Louisville supermarket, after first trying unsuccessfully to break into a black church— if he had gotten there an hour earlier, we would probably have had another mass murder.

All of these hate crimes seem clearly linked to the climate of paranoia and racism deliberately fostered by Donald Trump and his allies in Congress and the media.

Killing black people is an old American tradition, but it is experiencing a revival in the Trump era.

Krugman titled his column “Hate is on the ballot next week,” pointing out that the perpetrator of the synagogue massacre had been motivated by a widespread Neo-Nazi conspiracy theory that was part and parcel of Trump’s despicable attacks on the would-be immigrants who are still some 900 miles from our Southern border.

The fearmongers aren’t just portraying a small group of frightened, hungry people still far from the United States border as a looming invasion. They have also been systematically implying that Jews are somehow behind the whole thing. There’s a straight line from Fox News coverage of the caravan to the Tree of Life massacre.

The main target of Krugman’s ire was what he termed “whataboutism” and “bothsidesism”–a refusal to distinguish Republican White Nationalism from Democratic garden-variety bullshit.

False equivalence, portraying the parties as symmetric even when they clearly aren’t, has long been the norm among self-proclaimed centrists and some influential media figures. It’s a stance that has hugely benefited the GOP, as it has increasingly become the party of right-wing extremists.

This election season, arguing for equivalence takes real effort. Republicans haven’t even tried to dampen the racist rhetoric being spewed by many of their candidates, or hide their efforts at vote suppression. In a column that in many ways echoed Krugman’s, Michelle Goldberg focused on the Governor’s race in Georgia.

Right now America is tearing itself apart as an embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority. The divide feels especially stark in Georgia, where the midterm election is a battle between Trumpist reaction and the multicultural America whose emergence the right is trying, at all costs, to forestall.

Abrams’ Republican opponent, Brian Kemp, is the Georgia secretary of state–an office responsible for overseeing the election in which he is a candidate.

Last week, Rolling Stone obtained audio of Kemp telling donors of his “concern” about what might happen in Georgia “if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote.” As the secretary of state overseeing his own election, he’s taken steps to make that harder. His office has frozen new voter registrations for minor discrepancies with official records, and, starting in 2012, purged around 1.5 million people from the voter rolls — some simply because they didn’t vote in previous elections.

It isn’t a coincidence that the vast majority of registrations Kemp found “questionable” were from African-Americans.

Kemp is the candidate of aggrieved whiteness. During the primary, he ran an ad boasting that he drives a big truck “just in case I need to round up criminal illegals and take ’em home myself.” (That would be kidnapping.) A person who claimed to be a Kemp canvasser recently wrote on the racist website VDare, “I know everything I need to know about what happens when blacks are in charge from Detroit, Haiti, South Africa, etc.” Kemp cannot be blamed for the words of his volunteers, but he’s made little discernible effort to distance himself from bigots. This month he posed for a photograph with a white nationalist fan in a T-shirt saying, “Allah is not God, and Mohammad is not his prophet.”

It’s no accident that Trump has emboldened the haters. His intent has become so obvious that last week, Florida’s former Republican state chairman called him out for an outrageous anti-immigrant ad.

“You are a despicable divider; the worse social poison to afflict our country in decades,” Cardenas wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning. “This ad, and your full approval of it, will condemn you and your bigoted legacy forever in the annals of America’s history books.”

Voters aren’t going to the polls today to choose between candidates or parties. They are choosing between incompatible versions of America.

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“But I’m Not Racist!”

Many of you probably saw the news reports–or the video–of the man on a Ryanair flight who engaged in a rant during which he called a black woman seated next to him an “ugly black bastard.”

You may have missed reports of his subsequent apology, which included his assertion that he “is not a racist.”

A man who subjected a fellow passenger on a Ryanair flight to a racist tirade has apologised publicly for the first time a week after the incident, claiming that he is not a racist and lost his temper “a bit”.

Then there was the fine fellow who tried to enter a black church in Kentucky, was unable to gain access, and settled for shooting two African-Americans he’d never met who were shopping in a nearby Kroger store. 

A white man with a history of violence fatally shot two African American customers at a grocery store in Kentucky and was swiftly arrested as he tried to flee, police said Thursday. They said it was too soon to say what prompted Wednesday’s shooting, responding to an earlier account from a witness that when confronted with another white man during the incident, the suspect said: “Whites don’t shoot whites.”

It’s always comforting to attribute these senseless, horrific acts to “disturbed” individuals, and obviously, these are people with significant mental/emotional problems. But if we ignore the impetus for these acts, we risk even more civil disorder and tragedy. In the wake of the recent rash of pipe-bomb deliveries to people that Trump has identified as “enemies,”and the horrific shooting attack on Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue, we need to heed the recent warning by a columnist for the Guardian:

Political violence in the United States has tended to come in two forms. The first consists of simply unhinged acts, like John Hinckley Jr shooting Ronald Reagan in the hope of impressing the actress Jodie Foster, or Timothy McVeigh hoping to bring down the government with a bomb. The second is more systematic and sinister: the violence used to keep down groups who threaten the social and political order. This is the violence of strike breakers and the KKK. It is the violence that killed Emmett Till, an African-American teenager who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after allegedly wolf-whistling at a white woman.

A key feature of the second type of violence is that it has often been perpetrated by private individuals while serving the interests of public authorities. This is why the authorities encourage it. Till’s killers walked free because Mississippi’s court system would not convict them, understanding that their act reinforced white supremacy at a time when it was under threat from desegregation. This was violence of the people, by the people, for the government.

As the writer noted, America currently has a president who “frequently and vividly” talks to enthusiastic supporters about the desirability of a violent response to those who oppose him.

As Paul Krugman recently reminded us, this use of invective and demonization didn’t start with Trump. It’s a strategy the right has been using for decades. By promoting culture war issues, and religious and (especially) racial antagonisms, they’ve been able to distract working-class voters from policies that hurt them. Trump is simply the blunt instrument of a strategy that has been cynically pursued for many years.

That doesn’t make him any less dangerous, however. Nor does it excuse the shameful efforts currently being made to excuse his proud embrace of Nationalism–to pretend that the omission of the word “White” somehow modified the clear meaning of that embrace.

Former GOP strategist Steve Schmidt cut through the lame efforts to soften and dismiss Trump’s message: 

While discussing the racial politics of the Florida gubernatorial election, ex-Republican strategist Steve Schmidt argued Thursday that the whole party has been dragged down into a dangerous association with racists because of President Donald Trump’s rhetoric and policies.

Schmidt asserted during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House” that Trump’s recent declaration of himself as a “nationalist” was a direct message to some of the most pernicious parts of the far right.

“When Donald Trump declares himself a ‘nationalist,’ the nationalists understand exactly what he means,” said Schmidt. “By the way, let’s stop calling them ‘white nationalists’ and call them by their names, which are ‘neo-Nazis’ and ‘Klansmen.'”

Whatever the motives of people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, I agree with my youngest son that there are two, and only two, categories of people who continue to support him: those in full agreement with his overt and virulent racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism, and those for whom his bigotry–and his incitement of violence against the targets of that bigotry –doesn’t matter.

Those in the second category may deny being racist. Those denials are about as persuasive as the protestations of the bigot who demeaned his seat mate on Ryanair.

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Hostile Sexism

In yesterday’s post, I basically vented about the sexism being displayed by the Senate GOP during the Kavanaugh confirmation process. Today, I want to follow up with a broader discussion of what a recent sociological study has dubbed “hostile sexism.

An article from Salon discussing the study began–predictably–with the Kavanaugh fiasco, and the remarks from Trump and Senate Republicans.

Republican elites are also defending Kavanaugh, with Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, going so far as to say that even if the rape allegations were true they might be excusable: “I think it would be hard for senators not to consider who he is today”. Once again, per America’s tradition, culture and habit, elite white men are protected from the consequences of their behavior.Toxic white masculinity is encouraged in America. White men are infantilized, while black and brown men and boys are pathologized.

The article described the relevance to these recent events of a recent study by University of Kansas sociologists David Smith and Eric Hanley. Their research wasn’t limited in its scope to sexism, although it did address what it called “a socially combustible mix of racism and sexism, in combination with anger and bullying.”

Writing in “The Anger Games: Who Voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Election, and Why?”, which appeared in a recent issue of the journal Critical Sociology, Smith and Hanley summarize their new research:

“We find that Trump’s supporters voted for him mainly because they share his prejudices, not because they’re financially stressed. It’s true, as exit polls showed, that voters without four-year college degrees were likelier than average to support Trump. But millions of these voters — who are often stereotyped as “the white working class” — opposed Trump because they oppose his prejudices. These prejudices, meanwhile, have a definite structure, which we argue should be called authoritarian: negatively, they target minorities and women; and positively, they favor domineering and intolerant leaders who are uninhibited about their biases.

The authors research confirmed what other research about the 2016 election, from political scientists as well as sociologists, has found: what unified Trump’s voters was not “economic anxiety” but prejudice and intolerance, and a significant dose of misogyny.

Smith and Hanley identified eight attitudes that interacted with each other and strongly predicted support for Trump: identifying as conservative; support for a “domineering” leader; Christian fundamentalism, prejudice against immigrants, African-Americans, Muslims and women; and “pessimism about the economy.”

The research demonstrates the ways in which racism and sexism reinforce each other, and predicts support for candidates willing to bully both women and people of color.

Most Trump voters cast their ballots for him with their eyes open, not despite his prejudices but because of them. Their partisanship, whether positive (toward Trump and the Republicans) or negative (against Clinton and the Democrats), is intense.

This partisanship is anchored in anger and resentment among mild as well as strong Trump voters. Anger, not fear, was the emotional key to the Tea Party, and that seems to be true for Trumpism as well. If so, the challenge for progressives is greater than many people have imagined. Hostility to minorities and women cannot be wished away; nor can the wish for domineering leaders. The anger games are far from over.

The Salon article included an interview with one of the researchers that is well worth reading in its entirety. This response to a question, especially, explains his disagreement with the approach of many liberals to Trump voters:

Many liberals are reluctant to believe that large numbers of people are as mean-spirited as their words and actions might suggest. They want to think that fear, not vindictiveness, drives support for vindictive rhetoric and policy. That’s generous, but I think it’s also a special kind of blindness.

In fact, we seem to have two opposite forms of emotional blindness. Many liberals can’t believe that large numbers of people are vindictive while many conservatives scoff at the idea that liberals are not vindictive. Liberals often make excuses for people who show signs of intolerance. Right-wingers, in contrast, often laugh at claims to “feel your pain.”

These attitudes shouldn’t be ignored. Right-wingers who hate liberals are problematic, and liberals whose reflex is to forgive them are problematic too.

This research helps explain the behavior of the Senate Republicans that set me off yesterday.

It doesn’t excuse it.

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