Two diaries hit the rec list today based on comments CNN said that Hillary Clinton made during an interview in which she was asked about the "Black Lives Matter" movement:
"This (movement) is fueled in large measure by young people and it is a particular development in the civil rights movement that deserves our support," Clinton said. "By that I mean, there are some who say, 'Well racism is a result of economic inequality.' I don't believe that."
This is not the first time Clinton said she believes economic inequality is not the sole cause of racism. In a July 20, 2015, Facebook chat, Clinton said
"Black lives matter. Everyone in this country should stand firmly behind that," she replied. "We need to acknowledge some hard truths about race and justice in this country, and one of those hard truths is that that racial inequality is not merely a symptom of economic inequality. Black people across America still experience racism every day."
Some, including the CNN reporter, chose to construe her comments as a subtle dig at the Sanders campaign, which has centered around economic inequality. At NetRoots Nation, people affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement criticized Sanders for what they viewed as his almost exclusive focus on economic issues and shortchanging of racial issues. Sanders supporters have correctly pointed out that Sanders does not believe racial inequality is a symptom of economic inequality.
In fact, he says we need to deal with economic inequality and institutionalized racism. This underscores why Clinton's use of "some people" should not be taken as a reference to Sanders.They are not talking about the same connection between economic inequality and racism. For more, go below the fold.
(NOTE: Before launching into the meat of the diary, as an editor, I question whether the reporter omitted anything between the quoted statements. In starting the second sentence with "By that I mean," Hillary would be indicating that her belief that racism is not a result of economic inequality explains her view that Black Lives Matter is a civil rights movement fueled by young people. Without additional explanation, the juxtaposition does not even make sense. It wouldn't be the first time words were left out to manufacture a story.)
Clinton noted that some people say racism is a result of economic inequality and that she does not agree. She is right that "some people" have made that argument; they have been making the argument for a long time. Whereas Sanders has said we need to deal with income inequality and institutionalized racism, which shows he considers them separate yet related issues, the "some people" Clinton referred to are those who argue that racism exists because of income inequality. The "some people" are referring primarily to the income inequality among white people and how rich people cultivate racism to keep poor white people from holding the elites accountable for working class poverty.
Michael Reich, a professor of economics at Berkeley, wrote about two competing models of racism in 1974, when he was a professor of political economy at Berkeley. He expanded his argument in a 1981 book titled Racial Inequality: A political-Economic Analysis. In the 1974 paper, he describes the models thusly:
We have, then, two alternative approaches to the analysis of racism. The first [which Reich credits to Gary Becker] suggests that capitalists lose and white workers gain from racism. The second predicts the opposite—capitalists gain while workers lose. The first says that racist "tastes for discrimination" are formed independently of the economic system; the second argues that racism interacts symbiotically with capitalistic economic institutions. The very persistence of racism in the United States lends support to the second approach.
Reich offered examples of how rich white capitalists promote racism to shift the focus of poor whites away from discontent at their employers:
Through racism, poor whites come to believe that their poverty is caused by blacks who are willing to take away their jobs, and at lower wages, thus concealing the fact that a substantial amount of income inequality is inevitable in a capitalist society. Racism thus transfers the locus of whites' resentment towards blacks and away from capitalism.
According to Reich, by promoting racism, capitalists compromise the success of collective bargaining (because it is less collective), resulting in depressed wages and fewer grievances over working conditions. He wrote that promoting racial animus between poor whites and blacks lessens the desire of poor white parents to seek educational improvements for their children and reduces the ability of both groups to unite politically to advocate for better and equal education. (Poor whites are successfully persuaded that any gains poor blacks make will compromise their own gains.)
Thus, racism is likely to take firm root in a society that breeds an individualistic and competitive ethos. In general, blacks provide a convenient and visible scapegoat for problems that actually derive from the institutions of capitalism. As long as building a real alternative to capitalism does not seem feasible to most whites, we can expect that identifiable and vulnerable scapegoats will prove functional to the status quo.
On July 29, 2015,
Seth Ackerman wrote of his disagreement with Clinton's dismissal of economic inequality as the root cause of racism:
Like any good politician, Clinton knows what her audience wants to hear. She also knows how to put her opponent on the back foot. Because how could Bernie Sanders respond to that? What’s he going to say — racial inequality is merely a symptom of economic inequality? He’s not going to say that. Nobody would. Well, get ready for a hot take, ladies and gentlemen, because that’s exactly what I’ll say here...[I]f racial inequality isn’t merely a symptom of economic inequality, what is it a symptom of? What Hillary Clinton is really hinting at when she says that racism can’t be reduced to “economic inequality” is racial animosity.
Ackerman appears to make it clear just how unlikely it is that Clinton is attributing a perspective that many consider unrealistic to Sanders. He implies that her goal is to make it impossible for Sanders to rebut her remark. The second point Ackerman makes is that even if Sanders doesn't believe racial inequality is merely a symptom of economic inequality, he [Ackerman] does. He traces the notion that economic inequality is at the root of US racism at least as far back as Karl Marx:
Here’s Karl Marx in 1870, advising an activist friend in America about the Irish question:
England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their
domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.
In December 2014, Les Leopold of Alternet.org
wrote an article titled "How Runaway Economic Inequality and Racism Are Linked to Police Killings." Leopold wasn't merely talking about economic disparity, although he touches on it in the excellent article. He is also talking about how institutionalized racism via incarceration appears to be rising parallel to economic inequality and calls for us to examine this correlation.
Columbia University sociologist Shamus Khan has written frequently about the elites and inequality in America. In a December 14, 2013, blog post at the New York Times, Khan claimed that rich people secured support for their tax policies from middle class whites by convincing them social spending benefited black people at white surbanites' expense:
The rich thought, not incorrectly, that high tax rates were handicapping their capacity to advance. And they found common ground with suburbanites who didn’t see social spending as something that enhanced their lives and neighborhoods, but as something that transferred their tax dollars to a different kind of American — urban, of a notably darker hue — who had only recently gained political legitimacy. Through a tax revolt these groups went to work dismantling social programs.
In March 2013,
Dedrick Muhammad, who was senior director of the NAACP Economic Programs, also fingered economic inequality as a root cause of racism:
Racial inequality, then, has always been defined by economic inequality. As historian Eric Williams succinctly puts it: "Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the consequence of slavery." Specifically, throughout American history, racism has always been motivated by and defined as a way for white elites to control an unequal share of property...
Are white people more likely to be racist as their own economic situation declines? Analyses from these and other authors appear to suggest that is the case. Do rich capitalists foment racism where none would exist or do they exploit whites' inherent racism for personal gain? Does it matter which evil came first? Yes, if you believe eliminating economic inequality will eliminate racism. I wish I believed that, but like Hillary Clinton, I do not. I suspect some people are racist because they have an inherent dislike of anyone who does not look or think the way that they do.
All these "some people" make excellent points about the relationship between economic inequality and racism, however, and it is hard to come away believing the two are not related. But I don't believe Clinton or anyone one else on the democratic side is arguing that they are wholly disconnected; the question is to what extent they are related.
I would have liked to hear the rest of what Clinton said in that discussion on Black Lives Matter, but unfortunately all CNN gave us was a wildly spun tale of how Clinton could only be talking about Bernie Sanders. I would like to know the extent to which Clinton recognizes the relationship between economic inequality and racism. I don't think any of the democratic candidates (and certainly none of the republican ones) has gone far enough to highlight the gross injustices of racism going on in this country every day.