Grassroots/Hank Kalet

The Real Race Card

“Racist” can be a problematic word. It is badly misunderstood and can be overused. It lacks definition and has come to mean, for many, hatred for the other.

This formulation is limiting in its effect, obscuring the systemic nature of racism and transforming it into an individual failing. It erases the power dynamics that are central to how racism has been used, not just in the United States but around the globe. And it allows disingenuous, and usually racist, whites to make claims of racism against blacks that may be true on an individual level. An individual black man or woman can feel hate toward a white man or woman, but the systems that take that individual feeling and give it broad political and social power just do not exist. These social mechanisms remain, in the United States, the providence of the shrinking white majority.

Donald Trump is our chief embodiment of this sense of racism. He makes overtly racist comments, then proclaims himself not to have a racist bone in his body. He demeans black and brown people, offers backhanded compliments to Jews, and engages in the most reductive form of stereotyping, treating groups as monoliths and group members as interchangeable.

But he also points us at the other, more important meaning of the word — the use of racial and ethnic hierarchies as a system of control, one that apportions power based on race, gender, country of origin, sexual orientation, and religion. This is why racism — and not just slavery — remains the original sin of American history. Slavery — which was central to the creation of so many of our still-existing institutions — gave way to legal segregation across the south and de facto segregation throughout the north. And while legal segregation has been officially eliminated, the widespread theft of black bodies, labor and land continues to haunt the American project.

The numbers bear this out. The average white family has more than six times the accumulated assets as the average black family, as a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland explained earlier this year. “The fact that blacks, on average, have considerably less wealth than whites is troubling, not just because it is an inequality of outcomes, but also because it strongly suggests inequality of opportunity,” the report says. “The economic opportunities provided by wealth range from insuring consumption against disruptions to a household’s disposable income (such as surprise medical expenditures or unemployment spells) to enabling access to housing, good public schools, and postsecondary education.”

The causes of this are fairly straightforward. The massive disparity is “the consequence of many decades of racial inequality that imposed barriers to wealth accumulation either through explicit prohibition during slavery or unequal treatment after emancipation,” the Fed study says. Segregation in the South, which limited where blacks could live, work, go to school, put a very real cap on the ability of African Americans to build wealth. Red-lining, restrictive housing covenants, usurious loan rates, and other tactics created the same result in the North (read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” (The Atlantic, June 2014) or Mitchell Duneier’s book “Ghetto” for more on this).

Trump, as I said, embodies both senses of the word, in his real estate career, his early public statements and forays into politics, and his most recent iterations as birtherism’s chief salesman and now as president. His mid-July tweet storm was only the latest expression of his deeply held racism. He also offers cover for many who refuse to engage with race, allowing many of us to point to him and, to use his words, proclaim themselves free of the taint. This is convenient, of course, making us feel better and superior to Trump and his base. But does nothing to address the original sin, which remains alive and well in America.

Denouncing Trump’s racism — as important as that is — will not defeat it. Trump and the supporters who buy into the hateful rhetoric are not going to change. They will continue to hate and there is not a lot that can be done about that. What we need to do is strip our structures of their built-in biases. It is not the individual police officer that is the problem, but a system that has officers around the country operating as if they are in war zones, acting as occupying forces. It is the banks and real estate industry, the courts, schools, and businesses that appear to be operating without bias, but who rely on longstanding systems that were constructed to enforce bias. That is what we need to attack. That is what needs denouncing and deconstructing.

Hank Kalet is a writer and college instructor in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter @kaletjournalism; Facebook.com/hank.kalet.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2019

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