This diary was prompted by J. Phillip Thompson’s essay in Pacific Standard, which provides a necessary survey of W.E.B. DuBois’ analysis of capitalism and the American political project. It is also a continuation of my efforts to articulate a broader conceptualization of progressive political concerns and aims, and the intersection of social and economic justice.
Prior diaries I’ve written that address these themes include: ‘Racism without Racists’: pretending the election wasn’t about white supremacy won’t help. (Nov. 29, 2016), which highlights the work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and the essential concept for comprehending American society, structural racism; White privilege and white entitlement give rise to white supremacy— Whiteness as Property (Sept. 6, 2017), is based on legal/historical research of Prof. Cheryl Harris, appearing in the Harvard Law Review; and which traces how the categorization of Black and White were codified (then reified) within the framework of American law; and ‘Black Marxism’: To fight economic inequality, fight systemic economic racism. (Long Read) (Nov. 1, 2017), a brief introduction to the work of Prof. Cedric J. Robinson, which cannot be truly summarized, as its scope is so vast, it can be fairly characterized as the deconstruction of the entire Western intellectual canon. An excerpt from that diary serves as something of a conceptual preface:
...structural racism resides at the very foundation of American society— leads to a very specific conclusion: there can be no successful fight for economic justice that does not explicitly address racial justice.
Among the implications for those who sincerely wish to pursue racial, gender and economic justice, is that we must understand how they are intertwined, and how these categories rest upon an edifice of philosophical pretenses and maneuvers, so fully ingrained in every Western academic and professional discipline as to be rendered invisible, just as anyone not white, male or heterosexual is rendered invisible in most academic, political and professional settings (this conceptual invisibility is in fact part of the mechanism for enforcing the social invisibility of ‘others’). (For a comprehensive and searingly incisive critique of the legal reification of Whiteness in American legal and political culture, see also the work of Prof. Cheryl Harris, whose work I outline in my diary White privilege and white entitlement give rise to white supremacy: Whiteness as Property.)
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If we learn to see the pervasive presence of these philosophical pretenses and maneuvers, and how they perpetuate systems of inequality, how they are a crucial element of white male heterosexual dominance in society, we arrive at another conclusion: to dismantle systems of inequality and dominance, we must dismantle the intellectual edifice upon which they are constructed.
Cedric J. Robinson sets about to do just that in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
Robinson explicates the intent of his book this way in his preface:
This work is about our people's struggle, the historical Black struggle. It takes as a first premise that for a people to survive in struggle it must be on its own terms: the collective wisdom which is a synthesis of culture and the experience of that struggle.The shared past is precious, not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness,of knowing, of being. It cannot be traded in exchange for expedient alliances or traduced by convenient abstractions or dogma. It contains philosophy, theories of history, and social prescriptions native to it. It is a construct possessing its own terms,exacting its own truths. I have attempted here to demonstrate its authority. More particularly, I have investigated the failed efforts to render the historical being of Black peoples into a construct of historical materialism, to signify our existence as merely an opposition to capitalist organization. We are that (because we must be) but much more.
J. Philip Thompson demonstrates why any progressive response to the economic and political status quo must be based on a complete understanding of how economic class is situated within the social, legal and political framework of race:
Unlike Marx, Du Bois made both race and the state constitutive of capitalism. Black Reconstruction presented a two-sided view of the state. The U.S. and Europe constituted a global (viciously repressive) white supremacy. Yet democracy—which poor whites had fought for—was real; it provided white workers with choices and responsibilities toward their own group and colored workers.
In Du Bois' account, the supremacy of capitalism had as much or more to do with the political orientation and actions of white workers as with the bourgeoisie. Putting equal or greater responsibility for capitalist oppression on workers (the political majority) themselves—as one must in a democracy—is a major shift in orientation from blaming the bulk of the ills of society on "the ruling class." It may run the risk of excusing wealthy elites for their misdeeds, but it more importantly highlights labor and grassroots politics, and it demystifies how the ruling class rules.
This formulation offers a jarring rebuttal of naive and uniformed (ahistorical) appeals for progressives to align with the and pursue the idealized White Working Class (WWC), appeals that ignore the role of the WWC in enforcing the race-class hierarchy of American society (for example, White police officers, and their community supports and advocates, like Blue Lives Matter, as instruments for enforcing racial and economic inequality):
The last 120 years of black struggle against racist attitudes, physical segregation, repressive policing, denial of basic goods like quality education and decent income (needed for effective political participation), and lack of voter protection are best understood, in my view, as movements for uniting the two proletariats—by breaking down the structures that divide them. If there are indeed two proletariats, such anti-racist movements should be seen as exhibiting a higher degree of "class consciousness" or universalism than labor unions and "critical Marxisms" that downplay or ignore racist structures.
Thompson elucidates clearly why purported class consciousness, in the absence of racial consciousness, actually undermines its own stated purposes:
Another dispiriting consequence of not recognizing the two-proletariat structure is a consequent blindness to revolutionary white liberalism. There are many white leaders (Wendall Phillips, Viola Liuzzo, Henry Foner, even Hubert Humphrey—a long list) and movements largely of whites (abolitionist, anti-apartheid, Central-American sanctuaries) that grasped the logic of the two proletariats and dedicated themselves to fighting the structures dividing the two classes—in order to create a non-racist democracy. These individuals and movements are not often seen as part of labor history or as anti-capitalist. But, as revolutionary anti-racist liberalism (along with revolutionary black nationalism), they posed more consistent political challenges to capital than socialist movements or labor unions in the U.S.
This is, in essence, a criticism of White socialist pretenses as much as it is of capitalism:
Across the globe, it is still true that workers of color live hard lives, often in misery, compared to Western white workers. The latter often enthusiastically supported capital in militarily repressing workers of color. Nonetheless, the U.S. white proletariat is now moving to oppose "globalization"—the drawing in of more and more workers of color into highly exploitative labor relations. Their opposition is for the "wrong" reasons: to keep good "American" jobs as opposed to working in solidarity with colored workers...
As Thompson makes plain, it is the observations of W.E.B. DuBois that offer the appropriate corrective to these pretenses, and historical blindness of many self-described progressives.
In applying the thought of DuBois to the political landscape of the United States, c. 2018, some premises need to be made explicit:
1) economics cannot be meaningfully distinguished from socioeconomics; that is, social and cultural facts determine economic stratification, in part because social and cultural characteristics are incorporated in economic policies and institutions (e.g., banking regulations that favor segregation);
2) the racial caste (two-proletariat) system is embedded in our economic framework, and (literally) codified in our political (constitutional) framework.
The racial caste system is most visible in the racial ‘wealth gap’, which Dwyer Gunn, writing for Pacific Standard, makes abundantly clear:
In 2016, the average white family in America held about $919,000 of wealth. The average black family, by contrast, held just $140,000; the average Hispanic family held only $192,000. What's worse, this disparity has remained essentially unchanged since the early 1960s.
Gunn, highlighting the research of William Darity and his colleagues at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, also shows why addressing economic inequities from a purportedly ‘purely economic’ perspective will leave the racial caste system intact. Prof. Darity and his colleagues debunk ‘pernicious and damaging myths surrounding the racial wealth gap‘:
- More education or more work effort can close the racial wealth gap.
- Saving more, or making better financial decisions, can close the racial wealth gap.
- Family structure, namely the higher rates of single motherhood among African Americans, is driving the racial wealth gap.
None of these are assumptions are true.
As Prof. Darity notes:
It would be great for these kinds of disparities to be eliminated by different kinds of actions that black people could take unilaterally. But that simply is not the case. These inequalities are baked into the system through the process of transfers that take place across generations. It's those intergenerational transfers—which are not merit-based, they're affectional and familial based—that set up sustained racial inequality and wealth. That's not bridged by getting more education…
Keep in mind, the American saving rate is low relative to the rest of the world, but if we want to try to claim that the reason for the black-white wealth gap is because black folks are more profligate, there's really no evidence to support that, even if people believe it strongly.
And then on the topic of payday lenders, I think the reason people use lenders described as predatory is because those are the lenders they have access to. And so folks who are not making use of more predatory lenders do so because they've got the capacity to obtain loans from lenders that offer far better terms. I don't think it's a matter of making bad choices, it's a matter of what choices are available to you. There's a different set of constraints. And those constraints are not unique to black borrowers, those constraints are heavily driven by the income level and the wealth level of the individual house. It just happens to be the case that blacks are disproportionately at the bottom of the wealth distribution.
W.E.B DuBois identified the basic elements of the racial economic caste system in Black Reconstruction in America, originally published in 1935:
Above all, we must remember the black worker was the ultimate exploited; that he formed that mass of labor which had neither wish nor power to escape from the labor status, in order to directly exploit other laborers, or indirectly, by alliance with capital, to share in their exploitation. To be sure, the black mass, developed again and again, here and there, capitalistic groups in New Orleans, in Charleston and in Philadelphia; groups willing to join white capital in exploiting labor; but they were driven back into the mass by racial prejudice before they had reached a permanent foothold; and thus became all the more bitter against all organization which by means of race prejudice,or the monopoly of wealth, sought to exclude men from making a living. (pg. 15)
The opportunity for real and new democracy in America was broad.Political power was at first as usual confined to property holders and an aristocracy of birth and learning. But it was never securely based on land. Land was free and both land and property were possible to nearly every thrifty worker. Schools began early to multiply and open their doors even to the poor laborer. Birth began to count for less and less and America became to the world a land of opportunity. So the world came to America, even before the Revolution, and afterward during the nineteenth century, nineteen million immigrants entered the United States.The new labor that came to the United States, while it was poor, used to oppression and accustomed to a low standard of living, was not willing, after it reached America, to regard itself as a permanent laboring class and it is in the light of this fact that the labor movement among white Americans must be studied. The successful, well paid American laboring class formed, because of its property and ideals, a petty bourgeoisie ready always to join capital in exploiting common labor, white and black, foreign and native. (pg. 17, emphasis added)
For the immediate available jobs, the Irish particularly competed and the employers because of race antipathy and sympathy with the South did not wish to increase the number of Negro workers, so long as the foreigners worked just as cheaply. The foreigners in turn blamed blacks for the cheap price of labor. The result was race war;riots took place which were at first simply the flaming hostility of groups of laborers fighting for bread and butter; then they turned into race riots. For three days in Cincinnati in 1829, a mob of whites wounded and killed free Negroes and fugitive slaves and destroyed property. Most of the black population, numbering over two thousand,left the city and trekked to Canada. In Philadelphia, 1 828-1 840, a series of riots took place which thereafter extended until after the Civil War.The riot of 1834 took the dimensions of a pitched battle and lasted for three days. Thirty-one houses and two churches were destroyed.Other riots took place in 1835 and 1838 and a two days' riot in 1842 caused the calling out of the militia with artillery.In the forties came quite a different class, the English and German workers, who had tried by organization to fight the machine and in the end had to some degree envisaged the Marxian reorganization of industry through trade unions and class struggle. The attitude of these people toward the Negro was varied and contradictory. At first they blurted out their disapprobation of slavery on principle. It was a phase of all wage slavery. Then they began to see a way out for the worker in America through the free land of the West. Here was a solution such as was impossible in Europe : plenty of land, rich land, land coming daily nearer its own markets, to which the worker could retreat and restore the industrial balance ruined in Europe by the expropriation of the worker from the soil. Or in other words, the worker in America saw a chance to increase his wage and regulate his conditions of employment much greater than in Europe. The trade unions could have a material backing that they could not have in Germany, France or England. This thought, curiously enough, instead of increasing the sympathy for the slave turned it directly into rivalry and enmity.The wisest of the leaders could not clearly envisage just how slave labor in conjunction and competition with free labor tended to reduce all labor toward slavery. For this reason, the union and labor leaders gravitated toward the political party which opposed tariff bounties and welcomed immigrants, quite forgetting that this same Democratic party had as its backbone the planter oligarchy of the South with its slave labor. (pp. 18-19)
Within the ranks of the working class, DuBois observes, there was stratification, a racial hierarchy that aligned White laborers with White capital:
The propaganda which made the abolition movement terribly real was the Fugitive Slave—the piece of intelligent humanity who could say: I have been owned like an ox. I stole my own body and now I am hunted by law and lash to be made an ox again. By no conception of justice could such logic be answered. Nevertheless, at the same time white labor, while it attempted no denial but even expressed faints ympathy, saw in this fugitive slave and in the millions of slaves behind him, willing and eager to work for less than current wage, competition for their own jobs. What they failed to comprehend was that the black man enslaved was an even more formidable and fatal competitor than the black man free.Here, then, were two labor movements: the movement to give the black worker a minimum legal status which would enable him to sell his own labor, and another movement which proposed to increase the wage and better the condition of the working class in America,now largely composed of foreign immigrants, and dispute with the new American capitalism the basis upon which the new wealth was to be divided. Broad philanthropy and a wide knowledge of the elements of human progress would have led these two movements to unite and in their union to become irresistible. It was difficult, almost impossible, for this to be clear to the white labor leaders of the thirties. They had their particularistic grievances and one of these was the competition of free Negro labor. Beyond this they could easily vision a new and tremendous competition of black workers after all the slaves became free. What they did not see nor understand was that this competition was present and would continue and would be emphasized if the Negro continued as a slave worker. (pp. 20-21)
The trade unions were willing to admit that the Negroes ought to be free sometime; but at the present, self-preservation called for their slavery; and after all, whites were a different grade of workers from blacks. Even when the Marxian ideas arrived, there was a split; the earlier representatives of the Marxian philosophy in America agreed with the older Union movement in deprecating any entanglement with the abolition controversy. After all, abolition represented capital.The whole movement was based on mawkish sentimentality, and not on the demands of the workers, at least of the white workers.And so the early American Marxists simply gave up the idea of intruding the black worker into the socialist commonwealth at that time. (pp. 24-25)
In this caste system African slaves were commodities beyond sources of labor:
From an economic point of view, this planter class had interest in consumption rather than production. They exploited labor in order that they themselves should live more grandly and not mainly for increasing production. Their taste went to elaborate households, well furnished and hospitable; they had much to eat and drink; they consumed large quantities of liquor; they gambled and caroused and kept up the habit of dueling well down into the nineteenth century.Sexually they were lawless, protecting elaborately and flattering the virginity of a small class of women of their social clan, and keeping at command millions of poor women of the two laboring groups of the South.
Sexual chaos was always the possibility of slavery, not always realized but always possible: polygamy through the concubinage of black women to white men; polyandry between black women and selected men on plantations in order to improve the human stock of strong and able workers. The census of 1860 counted 588,352 persons obviously of mixed blood—a figure admittedly below the truth. (pg. 35)
Recall how in the research of Prof. Darity, cited above, one of the myths of the persistence of racial wealth disparities is presumably due to ‘[f]amily structure, namely the higher rates of single motherhood among African Americans, is driving the racial wealth gap’. That is, the deliberate destruction of family, marital and parental bonds and structures of African slaves, by White slave holders, is to the present day held to be a cause racial wealth disparities. The victims of systematic and sustained abuse are to blame for their ongoing deprivation, in other words. This sort of formulation is familiar to anyone who has focused on social justice, and the myriad manifestations of White hetero male dominance in this country.
DuBois exposes the reality that affording full political and economic equality for African-Americans was never the intention of White elites, even some who fancied themselves ‘enlightened’ in their views:
… before the time of Washington and Jefferson down to the Civil War,the nation had asked if it were possible for free Negroes to become American citizens in the full sense of the word.The answers to this problem, historically, had taken these forms:
1. Negroes, after conversion to Christianity, were in the same position as other colonial subjects of the British King. This attitude disappeared early in colonial history.
2. When the slave trade was stopped, Negroes would die out. Therefore,the attack upon slavery must begin with the abolition of the slave trade and after that the race problem would settle itself. This attitude was back of the slave trade laws, 1808-20.
3. If Negroes did not die out, and if gradually by emancipation and the economic failure of slavery they became free, they must be systematically deported out of the country, back to Africa or elsewhere,where they would develop into an independent people or die from laziness or disease. This represented the attitude of liberal America from the end of the War of 18 12 down to the beginning of the Cotton Kingdom.
4. Negroes were destined to be perpetual slaves in a new economy which recognized a caste of slave workers. And this caste system might eventually displace the white worker. At any rate, it was destined to wider expansion toward the tropics. This was the attitude of the Confederacy.It is clear that from the time of Washington and Jefferson down to the Civil War, when the nation was asked if it was possible for free Negroes to become American citizens in the full sense of the word, it answered by a stern and determined "No!" (pg. 133, emphasis added)
Emancipation shifted the political landscape, but the brutal reality for former slaves was that they were anything but free and equal participants in American society:
Another most singular notion still holds a potent sway over the minds of the masses—it is, that the elevation of the blacks will be the degradation of the whites. . . . "The emancipation of the slaves is submitted to only in so far as chattel slavery in the old form could not be kept up. But although the freedman is no longer considered the property of the individual master,he is considered the slave of society, and all independent state legislation will share the tendency to make him such. The ordinances abolishing slavery passed by the conventions under the pressure of circumstances will not be looked upon as barring the establishment of a new form of servitude."Carl Schurz summed the matter up:"Wherever I go—the street, the shop, the house, the hotel, or the steamboat—I hear the people talk in such a way as to indicate that they are yet unable to conceive of the Negro as possessing any rights at all. Men who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors, will cheat a Negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor. To kill a Negro, they do not deem murder; to debauch a Negro woman, they do not think fornication; to take the property away from a Negro, they do not consider robbery. The people boast that when they get freedmen's affairs in their own hands, to use their own expression, 'the niggers will catch hell.' "The reason of all this is simple and manifest. The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and however much they admit that the individual relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and by the President's emancipation proclamation,they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large." (emphasis added)
DuBois, relying on the remarkable words of a petition produced by the National Convention in Syracuse, NY in 1864 (whose members included Frederick Douglass), shows us the political and psychological topography at the time of the Civil War— a topography that has changed little in the one hundred and fifty years since:
"The weakness of our friends is strength to our foes. When the Anti-Slavery Standard, representing the American Anti-Slavery Society, denies that the society asks for the enfranchisement of colored men, and the Liberator apologizes for excluding the colored men of Louisiana from the ballot-box, they injure us more vitally than all the ribald jests of the whole pro-slavery press . . .
"In the ranks of the Democratic party, all the worst elements of American society fraternize; and we need not expect a single voice from that quarter for justice, mercy, or even decency. To it we are nothing; the slave-holders everything. . . . "How stands the case with the great Republican party in question? We have already alluded to it as being largely under the influence of the prevailing contempt for the character and rights of the colored race. This is seen by the slowness of our Government to employ the strong arm of the black man in the work of putting down the rebellion;and in its unwillingness, after thus employing him, to invest him with the same incitements to deeds of daring, as white soldiers; neither giving him the same pay, rations, and protection, nor any hope of rising in the service by meritorious conduct. It is also seen in the fact,that in neither of the plans emanating from this party for reconstructing the institutions of the Southern States, are colored men, not even those who had fought for the country, recognized as having any political existence or rights whatever. . . .
"Do you, then, ask us to state, in plain terms, just what we want of you, and just what we think we ought to receive at your hands? We answer: First of all, the complete abolition of the slavery of our race in the United States. We shall not stop to argue. We feel the terrible sting of this stupendous wrong, and that we cannot be free while our brothers are slaves. . . .
"We want the elective franchise in all the states now in the Union,and the same in all such states as may come into the Union hereafter.We believe that the highest welfare of this great country will be found in erasing from its statute-books all enactments discriminating in favor or against any class of its people, and by establishing one law for the white and colored people alike. Whatever prejudice and taste maybe innocently allowed to do or to dictate in social and domestic relations,it is plain, that in the matter of government, the object of which is the protection and security of human rights, prejudice should be allowed no voice whatever. . . .
"Your fathers laid down the principle, long ago, that universal suffrage is the best foundation of Government. We believe as your fathers believed, and as they practiced; for, in eleven States out of the original thirteen, colored men exercised the right to vote at the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution. . . (pp. 233-4, emphasis added)
Even after Emancipation rendered former slaves nominally free, the enforced poverty and deprivation of African-Americans within the economic framework of American society was rooted in a racist ideology (‘the prevailing contempt for the character and rights of the colored race‘). That ideology may not be susceptible to moral persuasion, and in fact it has shown itself to be every bit as virulent and pervasive today (although party affiliations of those who hold fast to the racist ideology inverted following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965); for contemporary examples, see here, here and here.
DuBois surveyed the social, political and economic landscape in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War:
… early in 1865, the war is over. The North does not especially want free Negroes; it wants trade and wealth. The South does not want a particular interpretation of the Constitution. It wants cheap Negro labor and the political and social power based on it. Had there been no Negroes, there would have been no war. Had no Negroes survived the war, peace would have been difficult because of hatred, loss and bitter grief. But its logical path would have been straight. (pg. 238)
The presence of free African-Americans was not a circumstance to be celebrated by White Americans, but a problem to be resolved, or for liberal Whites in the North, to be ignored. At every step, and in every state, African-Americans were blocked and thwarted in efforts to achieve full and equal participation in political and economic life. At all times, the power conferred by one reinforced the power of the other; DuBois makes explicit that capitalism was (and is) the enemy of democracy, and the only path to dislodge the wealth accumulators from their perch of economic and social dominance is political:
In the North, a new and tremendous dictatorship of capital was arising. There was only one way to curb and direct what promised to become the greatest plutocratic government which the world had ever known. This way was first to implement public opinion by the weapon of universal suffrage… (pg. 239)
The notion that the poor and working classes would unite around shared economic concerns, and the common enemy— the plutocracy— proved to be a mirage:
Once universal suffrage was achieved, the next step was to use it with such intelligence and power that it would function in the interest of the mass of workingmen.To accomplish this end there should have been in the country and represented in Congress a union between the champions of universa lsuffrage and the rights of the freedmen, together with the leaders ofl abor, the small landholders of the West, and logically, the poor whites of the South. Against these would have been arrayed the Northern industrial oligarchy, and eventually, when they were re-admitted to Congress, the representatives of the former Southern oligarchy.This union of democratic forces never took place. On the contrary,they were torn apart by artificial lines of division. The old anti-Negro labor rivalry between white and black workers kept the labor elements after the war from ever really uniting in a demand to increase labor power by Negro suffrage and Negro economic stability. The West was seduced from a vision of peasant-proprietors, recruited from a laboring class, into a vision of labor-exploiting farmers and land speculation which tended to transform the Western farmers into a petty bourgeoisie fighting not to overcome but to share spoils with the large land speculators, the monopolists of transportation, and the financiers.Wherever a liberal and democratic party started to differentiate itself from this group, the only alliance offered was the broken oligarchy of the South, with its determination to re-enslave Negro labor.The effective combination which ensued was both curious and contradictory.The masters of industry, the financiers and monopolists,had in self-defense to join with abolition-democracy in forcing universal suffrage on the South, or submit to the reassertion of the old land-slave feudalism with increased political power.Such a situation demanded an economic guardianship of freedmen,and the first step to this meant at least the beginning of a dictatorship by labor…
"Do not these facts furnish an explanation of Johnson's life? Do they not show why he had the courage to go up against caste and cheap aristocracy, why he dared to stand for the under-dog, whether Catholic, Hebrew, foreigner, mechanic, or child; and to cling like death to the old flag and the Union? . . . " 'Gladly I would lay down my life,' he wrote, 'if I could so engraft democracy into our general government that it would be permanent.'" 3 To all this there is one great qualification. Andrew Johnson could not include Negroes in any conceivable democracy. He tried to, but as a poor white, steeped in the limitations, prejudices, and ambitions of his social class, he could not; and this is the key to his career…
"As for the Negro I am for setting him free but at the same time I assert that this is a white man's government. ... If whites and blacks can't get along together arrangements must be made to colonize the blacks. .. (pp. 239-40, 244)
But no alignment of Black and White Labor would occur:
… the Southern poor white had his attitude toward property and income seriously modified by the presence of the Negro. Even Abraham Lincoln was unable for a long time to conceive of free, poor, black citizens as voters in the United States. The problem of the Negroes, as he faced it, worried him, and he made repeated efforts to see if in some way they could not be sent off to Africa or to foreign lands. Johnson had no such broad outlook. Negroes to him were just Negroes, and even as he ex- pressed his radical ideas of helping the poor Southerners, he seldom envisaged Negroes as a part of the poor.Lincoln came to know Negroes personally. He came to recognize their manhood. He praised them generously as soldiers, and suggested that they be admitted to the ballot. Johnson, on the contrary, could never regard Negroes as men. "He has all the narrowness and ignorance of a certain class of whites who have always looked upon the colored race as out of the pale of humanity." 15 (pg. 248)
We hear echoes in DuBois’ observations in the words of those who today admonish us to pursue the ‘White Working Class’ [WWC], with whom we are presumed to share common cause, because they are trapped within the system of economic exploitation, subordinate to the plutocracy. But as in the time of Reconstruction, the allegiance to poor Whites today remains with their identified race, rather than economic class, as research by Prof. Diana Mutz published just this month makes plain:
… status threat is not the usual form of prejudice or stereotyping that involves looking down on outgroups who are perceived to be inferior; instead, it is borne of a sense that the outgroup is doing too well and thus, is a viable threat to one’s own dominant group status. As a highly visible indicator of racial progress, a well-educated, Harvard Law trained African American president is indeed threatening to dominant white status (54, 55), whereas immigrants arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs apparently are not. For a dominant group to be threatened by an outgroup, the outgroup needs to be perceived as powerful. Traditional racial stereotypes of poor, uneducated, or unintelligent minority groups do not fuel the sense that one’s dominant group status is being challenged.As a result, immigration is unlikely to trigger dominant group status threat, particularly in a country with relatively few new immigrants. However, a sense of threat is triggered by racial progress in a majority–minority America; an increasingly powerful country, such as China; or an America that is no longer the dominant economic superpower. The rising sense of racial and global threat in the United States could not be more opportune for a candidate seeking to capitalize on status threat-based issues. (pg. 8)
The WWC, as they have for the past half-century, align themselves and support a fundamentally racist political structure, because they see the potential for African-Americans to achieve greater socioeconomic status than they.
DuBois offers insights about this dynamic that might have been written as a companion piece to Prof. Mutz’s findings:
"While they [the colored people] have been naturally tenacious of their newly acquired privileges, their general conduct will bear them witness that they have shown consideration for the feelings of the whites. The race line in politics would not have been drawn if opposition had not been made to their enjoyment of equal privileges in the government, and under the laws after they were emancipated.'"In other words, the colored people had manifested no disposition to rule or dominate the whites, and the only Color Line which had existed, grew out of the unwise policy which had previously been pursued by the Democratic Party in its efforts to prevent the enjoyment by the newly-emancipated race of the rights and privileges to which they were entitled, under the Constitution and laws of the country…
"You certainly cannot expect them [the Negroes] to resort to mob law and brute force, or to use what may be milder language, inaugurate a revolution. My opinion is that revolution is not the remedy to be applied in such cases. Our system of government is supposed to be one of law and order, resting upon the consent of the governed, as expressed through the peaceful medium of the ballot. In all localities where the local public sentiment is so dishonest, so corrupt, and so demoralized, as to tolerate the commission of election frauds, and shield the perpetrators from justice, such people must be made to understand that there is patriotism enough in this country and sufficient love of justice and fair play in the hearts of the American people to prevent any party from gaining the ascendency in the government that relies upon a fraudulent ballot and a false return as the chief source of its support.(pp. 448, 450)
It is impossible not to hear an eerie rebuke of our political situation in the present day, in the words ‘In all localities where the local public sentiment is so dishonest, so corrupt, and so demoralized, as to tolerate the commission of election frauds, and shield the perpetrators from justice...’
We are fighting precisely the same political, social and economic battles that have been fought since the founding of the nation, and virtually every political ‘debate’ hews to the same lines of demarcation. For instance, consider the ‘school choice/school voucher’ (so-called) ‘movement’:
The rise of private schools in the South and the diversion of public funds to those private schools through vouchers was a direct response of white communities to desegregation requirements.42
Now compare this to DuBois’ analysis:
In nearly every state, the question of mixed and separate schools was a matter of much debate and strong feeling. There was no doubt that the Negroes in general wanted mixed schools. They wanted the advantages of contact with white children, and they wanted to have this evidence and proof of their equality…
This raised a fury of opposition among the whites, but for reasons of economy and democracy it was obviously the best policy. The propaganda of race hatred made it eventually impossible, and the separate school systems so increased the cost of public education in the South that they resulted in the retardation of the whole system and eventually in making the Negro child bear the burden of the increased cost; so that even to this day throughout the South, the Negro child has from one-half to one-tenth as much spent on his education as the white child, and even then, the white child does not receive sufficient funds for a thorough elementary education. (pp. 662-3)
To emphasize the point as strongly as possible— the social and political domination of African-Americans by Whites is maintained through economic means, such as denying equal and adequate funding for schools, but no purely economic measures would eradicate this disparity, as the research of Prof. Darity cited earlier demonstrated.
To restate the two premises of this diary:
1) economics cannot be meaningfully distinguished from socioeconomics; that is, social and cultural facts determine economic stratification, in part because social and cultural characteristics are incorporated in economic policies and institutions (e.g., banking regulations that favor segregation);
2) the racial caste (two-proletariat) system is embedded in our economic framework, and (literally) codified in our political (constitutional) framework.
I’ll conclude with the searing (and to this day uncomfortable, even to many who consider themselves progressives and egalitarian socialists) assessment of the political, social and economic reality of what of nation has always been:
It must be remembered and never forgotten that the civil war in the South which overthrew Reconstruction was a determined effort to reduce black labor as nearly as possible to a condition of unlimited exploitation and build a new class of capitalists on this foundation…
The lawlessness in the South since the Civil War has varied in its phases. First, it was that kind of disregard for law which follows all war. Then it became a labor war, an attempt on the part of impoverished capitalists and landholders to force laborers to work on the capitalist's own terms. From this, it changed to a war between laborers, white and black men fighting for the same jobs. Afterward, the white laborer joined the white landholder and capitalist and beat the black laborer into subjection through secret organizations and the rise of a new doctrine of race hatred…
… in the case of civil war,where the contending parties must rest face to face after peace, there can be no quick and perfect peace. When to all this you add a servile and disadvantaged race, who represent the cause of war and who afterwards are left near naked to their enemies, war may go on more secretly, more spasmodically, and yet as truly as before the peace. (pg. 670)