2020-6-18 Structural Racism: Structural Racism Version

Thinking about the “Structural” in Racism

When we talk about structural racism, we’re talking about policies, practices and their outcomes which, while identifiable, are often deemed so intractable, so embedded in our society that putting together any sort of plan – let alone implementing it successfully – to address structural racism in the U.S. is deemed hopeless right off the bat.

Critics frequently object that the descendants of slave-owners aren’t to blame for what their ancestors were/did – the thing is, though, nobody’s claiming they are, so this powerful and widely-circulated “argument” is the reddest of red herrings. It should be ignored as an argument, because it’s not what advocates are arguing.

Let’s think about the following for a minute:

“While the median black household income is about a third lower than the median white household income, blacks’ median net worth is radically lower: about 5 percent of the median white net worth. The median net worth for a single white woman in her prime earning years is about $43,000; the median net worth for a black woman in her prime earning years is about $5.”

Bring up the handy online calculator for a second: $5 / $43,000 = 0.01%.

This is systemic racism in dollars and cents: A single white woman in her “prime earning years” probably has gone to college; that $43,000 in wealth probably means she owns her dwelling-place (a house, a condo), and has some $$ in the bank for a rainy day – or a pandemic.  

Another item of interest: As of 2019, there were only 15 black-owned banks in America.

One of the most pressing issues involving structural racism is that of the racial wealth gap – if you don’t have wealth, your children won’t inherit any, and consequently every generation must start all over from the beginning. If you’re poor and black, that means that you won’t be able to afford to live in a neighborhood with high-level public and commercial services easily accessible; think “schools” (which are funded in most states primarily by property taxes) or “well-maintained public parks” and “grocery stores” (cf. food deserts) or “pharmacies”. If you’re poor and black, your children inherit your poverty, just as white middle-class children inherit their parents’ wealth in the form of attending better-resourced schools, growing up in safe neighborhoods, and enjoying easier access to loans once they begin their adult lives, not to mention a veritable host of other wealth-bestowing advantages incurred along the way.

Let’s consider how wealth might be re-distributed fairly rapidly, primarily although not exclusively via government initiatives at all levels. We believe federal action is preferable because it has the goal of universal equitable implementation (case in point: the states which opted out of Medicaid expansion when the ACA was implemented have ensured inequitable access by their residents to healthcare services).

Here are some issues of the inequitable-distribution challenge:

1. A Black-white wealth gap
2. A Black-white wage gap
3. A Black-white health gap
4. A Black-white incarceration gap
5. A Black-white homeownership gap
6. A Black-white status gap
7. A Black-white education gap
8. A Black-white gap in the risk of being killed by police

But these issues are all inter-related, and you can’t address any one of them effectively in isolation. For example, how can you make homeownership more accessible to blacks if they don’t earn as much as whites? How can they earn as much as whites if they don’t have comparable education and professional training? How can they do that if they’ve attended under-resourced K-12 schools? How can schools be fully-resourced if they’re supported primarily by property taxes? It’s a vicious cycle, but it has to be broken somewhere.

There are short-term, medium-term, and long-term approaches to these challenges, both standalone and comprehensive, and they all aim at achieving full equity at all stages of life for blacks (and not only, of course – they are really “full equity for all” policies).

We don’t believe “separate but equal” can ever be the solution – it’s the oldest racist shibboleth in the book, and in any case it was rejected in Brown v. Board of Education sixty-six years ago. Equality means full integration, period – no more lip service to integration, though – we must achieve actual integration.

While we at DSO have focused the past several years on health/healthcare, the environment, justice/injustice and education, our general conclusion is that segregation is America’s most enduring and serious issue; it is the antecedent ill to all others because it is the physical embodiment of “separate and unequal.”

Here’s Mehrsa Baradaran, writing about the Kerner Report (1968):

“The final report determined that the riots stemmed from poverty, racism, inequality, and other social ills, but that the underlying cause was segregation. ‘Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans,’ the report said. ‘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 was an unapologetic excoriation of white society, which the commission deemed guilty not just of racism, but of apathy toward black poverty”.

Baradaran notes that when she looked up the neighborhood where George Floyd was killed (Chicago Ave. and 38^th St. in South Minneapolis) on an old Home Owners Loan Corporation map, she “found that the area around this block was colored in red and labeled as grade D, which meant hazardous. The reason? It was ‘majority colored people’ as well as ‘poor Jews.’”

Here are some policies the U.S. needs, urgently:

• A $20 minimum wage (and that’s low)
• A Job Guarantee, perhaps preceded during a transitional period by a UBI
• The end of residential zoning laws permitting single-family zoning in cities (this needs to be federal policy)
• The end of residential housing in environmentally-hazardous neighborhoods (this is also a zoning issue and must be addressed at the federal level)
• The Community Reinvestment Act (1977) should be amended to acquire much stronger language (+ enforcement tools)
• HUD’s Section 8 (voucher) program needs to be massively expanded
• HUD must also return to its core (original)mission, that of building affordable housing and maintaining it long term  
• Following upon the previous, banks in majority-black areas need to be compelled by law to invest some standard percentage (or range, say 20-30% to start) both in homes and in businesses in the communities where they operate
• Lending needs to be made more equitable by changes to federal lending policies (redlining was outlawed in the seventies, but it’s still going on) and through mandating targeted loans in underserved communities
• The transformation of under-resourced neighborhood public schools into “community schools” with full wraparound services: meals, after-school activities (tutoring, mentoring, sports, fine arts / crafts), counseling, job and social service referral assistance for children’s families (vital for the short term)
• Federally-mandated parental / family leave of six months (minimum)
• Expansion of the K-12 system to full day care beginning when infants are six months old
• Expansion of minority scholarships to students from schools underrepresented in the public university system, in a combination of school-based, neighborhood-based, income-based funds to allow students to attend both four-year universities and community colleges without incurring crippling debt

All of the above could happen. In fact, some of the above has been done in the past and abandoned through defunding/neglect, some is being attempted now but is not universal ($15 minimum wage laws, introduction of community schools in some states/cities/neighborhoods), some is standard public policy in other countries (family leave, day care beginning in infancy), and some of what needs to happen is the direct result of a segregation– so, a peculiarly American social inequity which requires specific forms of redress.

What’s the no-1 objection to any/all of the above policies? “We can’t afford it.”

This is the identical response of Lyndon Johnson to the recommendations of the Kerner Commission Report:

“The Kerner Commission report is particularly important now because it marked the closest the United States ever came to a public admission of wrongdoing or ‘truth and reconciliation’ It also looked at the root cause of a domestic uprising and it pointed its finger directly at the quiet white suburbs, the ones not rioting in the summer of 1967, the ones terrified and confused by what was happening over there in the segregated black ghetto. Ultimately, the report was more truth than reconciliation. Johnson all but ignored its findings and later explained that it was a matter of funding. ‘That was the problem—money.’”

We can’t afford it to do it, you say? The real truth is we can’t afford not to do it.

Further Reading:

1. Mehrsa Baradaran, “No Justice. No Peace”
2. Nathan J. Robinson, “Why Reparations Should Be One of Today’s Top Political Demands”
3. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations”
4. “UN Human Rights Chief Calls for Reparations to Make Amends for Slavery”