Structural Racism and American Democracy Historical and Theoretical Perspectives
Manning Marable
United Nations Research Institute for Social Development
(2001)
The fundamental problem for the viability of American democracy, therefore, may be the problem of what can be termed structural racism whether the majority of American people, its leaders, political organizations and institutions, have the capacity and vision to dismantle the complex structural barriers which severely curtail the democratic rights and socioeconomic opportunities of millions of their fellow citizens who are African American, Latino, American Indian, Arab American and Asian and Pacific Island Americans. Does this nation possess the political courage to affirm these truths as self-evident, that all citizens regardless of race are born with certain unalienable rights, and that first among these is the right to exist as human beings? Can democracy be more than an abstract ideal, when tens of millions of its citizens feel alienated and marginalized by what have become the normal and routine consequences of American racialization in daily life?…
Racism always manifests itself among its proponents as an all-encompassing worldview, away of interpreting and understanding phenomena. Balibar observes that racism is a philosophy of history, or better yet a historiosophy, by which I mean a philosophy that merges with an interpretation of history, but makes history the consequence of a secret hidden and revealed to men about their own nature and birth; a philosophy that reveals the invisible cause of the destiny of societies and peoples. The philosophy justifying racial hierarchy thus not only provide an explanation for the continuation of racial conflicts throughout the world, but also a historically-grounded method for thinking about the real differences in physical appearance that separate human beings from each other. In this mental universe, some people are simply destined to live in the netherworld of inferiority. Others can claim a ìnaturalî superiority, which is validated by the forces of history. The entire logic of racism points toward the inevitability of conflict between racial groups, and the ultimate inability to negotiate a long-term agreement with the racialized Other. Because the Other doesn’t share our biological origins, values and culture, it can never be trusted to fulfill its promises. Coercion is ultimately the only language it understands...
Over several centuries, as America’s political economy has evolved and matured, there have been several important changes in how the racialized Other was socially controlled. American Indians were subjected to a series of genocidal wars that marginalized them to specific reservations, a kind of territorial apartheid, to the point of near extermination. People of African descent were almost universally defined as chattel slaves, that is, the physical property of whites. Throughout the colonial and early national periods of Americans, most white Americans did not own slaves. In fact, on the eve of the Civil War, only one in four white Southerners owned slaves. Nevertheless, enslavement was what could be termed the defining factor of social control which governed American race relations. Ninety percent of all African Americans were slaves, and even free blacks in the northeast and midwest were subjected to severe restrictions regarding their civil rights, social and economic opportunities. In the language of the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court in 1857, the Founding Fathers never intended for the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to embrace the Negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized governments and the family of nations and doomed to slavery. Black Americans were generally regarded as beings of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. It was from this inherently contradictory position on race that America’s master narrative on democracy was forged. (emphasis added)
The marvelous work of Michael Harriot, whose words are the first part of the title of this diary, explicates in devastating detail how poverty has been manufactured through generations of conscious policy making (and enforced through state-sponsored violence) since the first Europeans ‘settled’ the Americas:
Was Tim Scott Right When He Said 'America Is Not a Racist Country'? An Investigation
Michael Harriot/ The Root
April 29, 2021
It is inarguable that America is a political system founded on the racist principles of slavery, the genocide of Indigenous Americans, and a Constitution that officially declared that a Black life to be worth 60 percent of a white person’s. But that only means that America was racist.
Here are the facts:
Economics
- The typical Black American family is worth 10 percent of the average white family.
- Black people are more likely to be denied a mortgage or an auto loan, even when they have the same credit and employment history.
- A home in a Black neighborhood is worth $48,000 less than an identical home in a white neighborhood, even if both neighborhoods have the same resources, amenities and crime rate.
- For 50 years, the Black unemployment rate has hovered between two and 2.5 times the white unemployment rate.
- Black men earn 87 cents for every dollar a white man earns. And, if you think the pay gap is due to a lack of education, Black women, the most educated demographic in America, are among the lowest paid. A Black woman with a master’s degree makes roughly the same salary as a white man with an associates degree.
- Even when wages are controlled for education, years of experience, occupation and other compensable factors, Black workers earn about $2,000 less per year, a difference in salary that Jackson Gruver, a data analyst at compensation data and software firm PayScale, said is “likely attributable to race.”
- In fact, according to math, the gap in median annual earnings increases with education…
As difficult as it has been for many self-described progressives to accept, economic inequality is simply one aspect of structural racism in the US, not a unique or independent societal condition. It is more accurate, in fact, to view manufactured economic inequality as one method of maintaining the White supremacist state.
If we see economic inequality clearly, comprehensively, in its full historical context, we see that it is a tool— one tool among many— used to establish and perpetuate White dominance in every domain of our society:
WHAT RACISM COSTS US ALL
JOSEPH LOSAVIO/ International Monetary Fund
Fall 2020
A multiracial nation since its independence, the United States has struggled to overcome what many refer to as its “original sin”—slavery—and the de jure and de facto racial discrimination that followed its abolition. Systemic racism continues to burden the United States, and Black Americans have borne the brunt of its legacy.
Racism in local American police departments is a deep-seated problem. According to analysis by the Washington Post and the Guardian, Black Americans are twice as likely as whites to be killed by police while unarmed. Although this is one of the most widely known forms of systemic racism, the problem runs much deeper…
For example, racism is rampant in medicine—in 2016, the US National Academy of Sciences found that 29 percent of white first-year American medical students thought that Black people’s blood coagulates more quickly than white people’s, and 21 percent believed that Black people have stronger immune systems. Such misunderstanding often leads to inadequate preventive care and inferior treatment, resulting in worse health outcomes for Blacks than whites across the board…
Racism has restrained Black economic progress for decades. The benefits of the post–World War II GI Bill, which fueled the growth of the American middle class, were largely denied to Black people at the insistence of white members of Congress from the South desperate to enforce racial segregation—war heroes or not. “Redlining,” a Federal Housing Administration policy that refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods, shut Black Americans out of one of the most common avenues for accumulating wealth, home ownership. These factors have all played a role in a persistent Black-white wealth gap. According to a 2019 McKinsey report, median Black families have 10 times less wealth than median white families. (emphasis added)
Because the benefits of White supremacy (for even the poorest Whites) are so pronounced, it is no longer a mystery why the so-called ‘White working class’ has overwhelmingly supported White supremacist candidates and policies.
They see it as in their own immediate interests to do so:
Understanding how race is historically and structurally built into the workplace
Victor Ray, Assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies University of Iowa/ Harvard Business Review
November 19, 2019
Although the interests of workers and management are often portrayed as inherently antagonistic, throughout U.S. history white workers and management sometimes have put this economic antagonism aside in favor of a shared commitment to racial exclusion. For instance, the Reconstruction-era National Labor Union, according to W.E.B. Du Bois, “did not want the Negro in his unions, did not believe in him as a man…[and] asked him to organize separately.” Rejecting black workers allowed for some types of paid labor to become a white prerogative and forced nonwhites into the most degraded and dangerous jobs. In this environment, management often separated workers by race and expected people of color to labor in menial positions and defer to whites. Jobs were mapped onto stereotypical hierarchies with race as an often-literal qualification, such as when the refusal to hire black women as industrial laborers contributed to their concentration as domestic workers. Racial divisions also proved financially useful to management, as black workers were paid lower wages for the same work (a problem that remains with us today). Although black workers are now overrepresented among union members, incorporation came through hard-fought struggles stretching across the 20th century. From A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to the Memphis sanitation strike that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was supporting when he was murdered, black labor struggled for inclusion.
Even predominantly nonwhite organizations can ultimately be subject to white control. For instance, in her brilliant book The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, the legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran shows how segregation and the very capital that black people had accrued in black banks were ultimately used against them. Under Jim Crow, black banks were reliant on customers who were disadvantaged in the labor market relative to white workers, especially where segregation ensured that black customers could not patronize white banks. This reliance on relatively poorer customers left black banks less able to invest and accrue profits. Segregation between banks also put black organizations at a disadvantage. According to Baradaran, because banks often rely on one another for liquidity during crises, white banks’ refusal to lend to black banks set the latter up for failure. Following Jim Crow, black banks have remained relatively undercapitalized and thus more likely to fail. White banks are still able to leverage the racially unequal playing field to increase their profits at the expense of their black competitors…
There are no easy answers when it comes to creating more diverse and equitable environments. And given how deeply American organizations have been shaped by racial inequality, I am not hopeful that the type of structural changes needed to make organizations more equitable will appear on the horizon anytime soon. Colleges and universities are retreating from successful affirmative action policies, organizational segregation is persistent, and whiteness is a key credential for moving up organizational hierarchies. At a minimum, leaders should stop thinking about discrimination and inequality as rare events and understand that racial processes often shape behavior in the absence of ill-intent. Conversations about organizational inequality need to refocus from a narrow concern with feelings and racial animus to the massive inequalities in material and psychological resources that organizations distribute between racial groups. Recent calls for reparations can provide a model, as these have forced some organizations to reckon with how their roots in slavery contribute to continued racial inequality. Leaders could also begin to examine how their decisions about location and hiring, among other choices, exacerbate inequalities. White organizations have attempted to deal with racial inequality while wielding meager tools. Organizations that are serious about changing patterns of racial inequality need to move beyond diversity and inclusion and toward reparations and restitution. (emphasis added)
If a job is designated as a ‘Black’ job, it will also be defined as less skilled, or ‘unskilled’, not requiring an education, and/or not a role that leads to advancement. When jobs of any sort become less segregated, their earning potential drops for Black workers, but not for Whites.
None of these attributes of the workplace are inherent, necessary, or inevitable; they are instead constructed. They are constructed to privilege White workers at every level of the economic hierarchy, in every domain of public life.
Racism is so fundamental to our economic system, it’s barely possible to identify any form of economic activity in the US that doesn’t serve to reinforce the political dominance of White supremacy:
How America's Structural Racism Helped Create the Black-White Wealth Gap
February 21, 2018
…wealth in this country is unequally distributed by race—and particularly between white and black1 households.2 African American families have a fraction of the wealth of white families, leaving them more economically insecure and with far fewer opportunities for economic mobility. As this report documents, even after considering positive factors such as increased education levels, African Americans have less wealth than whites. Less wealth translates into fewer opportunities for upward mobility and is compounded by lower income levels and fewer chances to build wealth or pass accumulated wealth down to future generations.
Several key factors exacerbate this vicious cycle of wealth inequality. Black households, for example, have far less access to tax-advantaged forms of savings, due in part to a long history of employment discrimination and other discriminatory practices. A well-documented history of mortgage market discrimination means that blacks are significantly less likely to be homeowners than whites,3 which means they have less access to the savings and tax benefits that come with owning a home. Persistent labor market discrimination and segregation also force blacks into fewer and less advantageous employment opportunities than their white counterparts.4 Thus, African Americans have less access to stable jobs, good wages, and retirement benefits at work5— all key drivers by which American families gain access to savings. Moreover, under the current tax code, families with higher incomes receive increased tax incentives associated with both housing and retirement savings.6 Because African Americans tend to have lower incomes, they inevitably receive fewer tax benefits—even if they are homeowners or have retirement savings accounts. The bottom line is that persistent housing and labor market discrimination and segregation worsen the damaging cycle of wealth inequality…
The black-white wealth gap is a result of the institutionalized obstacles blacks face in building wealth. Take assets, for instance: The U.S. tax code prioritizes savings in certain assets over other savings. Retirement savings accounts such as 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts (IRAs), as well as mortgage borrowing to finance a primary residence, receive preferential treatment under the tax code. Yet blacks are less likely to work in jobs that carry benefits such as retirement savings due to historical occupational segregation.25 Similarly, blacks are much less likely to become homeowners due to systematic housing and mortgage discrimination.26 These obstacles translate into fewer tax advantages and fewer chances to benefit from recent stock and housing market gains, resulting in significantly less wealth for black than for white Americans.
Racial differences also exist with respect to debt. Typically, blacks have more costly—or high-interest—debt, such as auto loans, student debt, and credit card debt, than whites.27 Blacks also pay more for installment loans, such as car loans, than whites.28 These patterns of having more costly debt in part reflect credit steering—when people of color are steered toward particularly costly forms of credit— and credit market discrimination—when people of color are more likely to be denied loan applications for less costly loans, as is often the case with mortgage loans.29
The black-white wealth gap reflects differences both in assets and in debt. And while higher education and increased income offer some benefits, they are insufficient to close the wealth gap.
Recognizing how structural racism operates in every sphere of public life in America is necessary to undertake and serious effort to dismantle it:
No, I Won’t Stop Saying “White Supremacy”
ROBIN DIANGELO/ Yes!
June 30, 2017
I am white. When I give talks on what it means to be white in a society deeply separate and unequal by race, I explain that white people who are born and raised in the U.S. grow up in a white supremacist culture. I include myself in this claim, as I enumerate all of the ways in which I was socialized to be complicit in racism. I am not talking about hate groups, of which I am obviously not a member. And no, I don’t hate white people. I am addressing most of the audience to whom I am speaking, white progressives like me.
If it surprises and unsettles my audience that I use this term to refer to us and not them, even after I have explained how I am using it, then they have not been listening. That recognition should trigger some sense of urgency that continuing education is needed.
Yet invariably, a white person raises the objection: I really don’t like that term! I associate it with the KKK and other white nationalist groups. Why can’t you use a different term? As a classic example of white fragility, rather than stretching into a new framework, I am asked by a white participant to use language that is more comfortable and maintains their current worldview. (emphasis added)