Author’s Note Again: Originally written 2 years ago, but highly relevant after El Paso.
After a deadly rally by Neo-Nazis, far-right militias, and the Klu Klux Klan, white supremacy momentarily seemed to enter the media lexicon. Disappointingly, the conversation faded just as quickly as it appeared. That it took swastikas and klan regalia for a broad spectrum of America’s body politic to even briefly confront the nation’s abhorrent history of white supremacy is, perhaps, more revealing.
Although much of the focus centered on the apparent inability of the President of the United States to condemn Klansmen and Nazis, it is worth noting that doing so would be neither an impressive feat, nor a first step to redressing structural racism. A public denouncement of racist violence is, fundamentally, the least any American with a pretense of a belief in equal rights can do to be a decent person. Moreover, by degrading the expected standards of conduct for a public official, the President has only worsened the stubborn impression that white supremacy primarily takes the form of an angry mob asserting the genetic inferiority of religious minorities and people of color.
In 21st Century America, however, structural racism and white supremacy typically take an array of less explicit, yet equally insidious forms. Institutionalized disadvantages for those outside the nation’s cultural construct of Christendom and whiteness manifest themselves across its economy, politics, and society. These entrenched elements of racial and religious bias are serious, pervasive, and interconnected. While we would be remiss not to acknowledge the significant strides already made toward social progress, it is plainly evident that as old obstacles have been lifted, new barriers have been set in place. Not all bigotry is explicit, and much of it relies on the tacit acceptance of an ideological center whose commitment to preserving institutions too often outweighs its supposed belief in equal justice and opportunity.
Furthermore, the mutually reinforcing network of laws, practices, and attitudes that constitute modern white supremacy will restrain advancement without a dedicated, structural effort to rectify it. How and whether individual pillars of America’s lingering racial inequality can be solved by government is worth exploring, and yet the first and foremost step, of acknowledging that stark disparities are inextricably tied to race and religion, remains incomplete.
A White House
Perhaps no area of American life is as striking a reflection of its racial fault-lines as its political process and institutions. The basic tenets of a free, liberal, and democratic government are too often a promise to people of color, rather than a reality. Fundamental failures to secure the right to vote and fair representation remain a bitter irony in a country whose founding documents decry the denial of precisely those same principles.
In a plain rebuke to decades of activism on behalf of voting rights, the conservative majority on America’s Supreme Court in 2013 invalidated two key provisions of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Rather than rallying around the need to reinstitute the VRA, Republican politicians across the country exploited the law’s absence. In the aftermath of the decennial redistricting, state legislators packed and cracked communities of color into racially gerrymandered districts that “surgically targeted” African Americans and Latinos to dilute their political clout. The egregious, explicit racism in these electoral districts have forced the justice system to invalidate maps in North Carolina, Texas, Alabama, and Virginia in the last few years alone. Weighing the fact that dozens of others have slanted their electoral maps so as to pack the majority of their populations of color into a handful of seats, it’s apparent that this strategy is systematic.
Yet, devising bizarre electoral districts to insulate elected officials from non-white votes is only one facet of an orchestrated effort to restrict the franchise. State laws that enact severe cuts to early voting hours, including targeted efforts to eliminate the specific hours when people of color are most likely to vote, are growing more common. Closures of polling sites in minority-majority precincts and intentional underfunding of election day locations have created dramatic disparities that make the voting booth more difficult to physically access and the lines far longer for people of color. That the primary electoral reforms state governments are adopting are draconian new regulations under the pretense of “Voter ID”, while shutting down DMVs and reducing hours, is emblematic of the enduring legacy of grandfather clauses, poll taxes, and poll tests.
Even barring new barriers to the ballot, a host of long-term challenges have gone unresolved. There are still federal representatives in office who voted against the 2006 reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act or advocate legalizing discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, and religion. Prohibitions on voting for felons and ex-felons paired with America’s gargantuan incarceration state have rendered more than 1.6 million people, disproportionately people of color, ineligible to vote in Florida alone. Millions of American citizens in the non-white majority territories of the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands have neither voting representation in congress nor, excluding DC, the right to vote for President.
For those who take their right to vote for granted, these barriers may seem trivial, but for anyone who understands how tenuous democratic systems can be, eliminating such roadblocks should be a first order priority. Inequality in political power between ethnic and racial groups manifests itself in the officials who are elected, the policies every layer of government adopts, and the economic and social outcomes that are inevitably their consequence.
It is unsurprising that, as a result of these obstacles to the ballot, politicians tend to represent American diversity in neither demographic composition nor tone. Roughly eighty percent of members of congress and more than ninety percent of state governors self-identify as white, compared to just sixty percent of the American population overall, with African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Indigenous Americans underrepresented. More shockingly, over three quarters of the Presidential cabinet and the chairs of all thirty six congressional committees are white Christians. The polarized and poisonous rhetoric of race and religion, particularly in recent years, has only seemed to put an exclamation point on those facts.
In contrast to the reemergence of political white nationalism, legitimate concerns and issues facing communities of color are castigated across the ideological spectrum as a brand of “identity politics” not worth pursuing, because white swing voters might find them alienating. Even self-identifying progressive politicians frequently shunt aside issues of race and religion, with the handful of elected officials who do make it a priority touting legal reform over the possibility of changing hearts and minds. Faced with the rising tide of far-right populism, this timorous approach to racial justice risks backsliding on social progress. The loss of political power in marginalized communities thus fosters a national political climate that further entrenches structural inequality in a vicious cycle.
Andrew or Harriet?
Parallel to its political creed, the promise of an American Dream where hard work will be rewarded obscures the bifurcated reality of the economy of the United States. Although a “free market” is ostensibly colorblind, the data highlight precisely the opposite conclusion. Race dictates opportunity, mobility, and outcomes to an extraordinary degree. Still, fiscal conservatives frequently argue that discrimination cannot exist in a capitalist system, because anything less than meritocratic actions by a firm toward its workers or consumers will give another firm the opportunity to capitalize. Yet, it is never clearly articulated why profit motives and market forces that could not manage to uproot slavery, segregation, or Jim Crow will suddenly materialize in the present day.
However, the argument is correct in one respect; Bad morals are even worse economics. Bias and prejudice can create an inefficient allocation of labor, talent, and resources, generating a deadweight loss and lowering total surplus throughout an economy. In this respect, discrimination can be just as distortionary to the marketplace as bad government policies and is a market failure worth addressing. After all, an economic system where birth determines outcome jeopardizes its own growth and stability.
Having emerged from the Great Recession, sluggish growth, deepening structural inequality, and waning income mobility have exacerbated progress to a more equitable economy. Opportunity is tethered strongly to zip code, which due to de facto housing segregation shackles it to race. The racial wealth gap soared during the recession, with African Americans and Latinos losing far higher shares of their household net worth than white families. Spiraling income inequality and stagnant poverty rates have been exploited along racial lines by the political process, rather than ameliorated. Worse still, the divide compounds from generation to generation through the educational system.
More than a half century after Brown v Board of Education, de facto school segregation endures. Along vast swaths of the United States, arcane property tax systems for local education coupled with white flight have perpetuated decades old gaps in funding and school quality by race. Taken in light of standardized testing systems that reward students with resources and penalize those without them, our school system is failing its students in a manner tinged strongly by race. Even admissions to institutions of higher education, a common target for conservative criticism of affirmative action, are influenced by countervailing practices like donation driven admissions and legacy admittance that unfairly tilt the scales against qualified students of color and minority faiths.
Different starting points are later aggravated by the persistence of discrimination in the labor market. Callback studies for identical resumes using names as racial and ethnic proxies illustrate clearly how implicit bias can hamper opportunities for non-white workers. Likewise, evidence on the intersection of race and incarceration highlights the dire reality that even white workers with a criminal history have greater callback rates for jobs than African Americans with identical qualifications and no criminal history. Given that gaps begin at the entry level, it’s not difficult to imagine how double standards, stereotypes, and prejudice relegate people of color to a minute fraction of leadership in business.
Similarly, the availability of capital is tainted by racial bias. Echoes of redlining are visible in modern loan discrimination and, where and when capital is available for people of color, it is often at exorbitant interest rates or with unfair terms. Because of exploitation by the payday loan industry, subprime mortgage lenders, and for-profit colleges, sizable debt loads in minority-majority communities hinder opportunities to build wealth and find employment. Hence, in working-class communities of color, time becomes a liability rather than an asset.
Showing Their True Colors
Although popular representations in media, culture, and social life may appear shallow relative to the economic and political implications of white supremacy in 21st Century America, they are perhaps the most critical to striking at the heart of racial and religious bigotry. Whitewashed, stereotyped, and pigeon-holed depictions of people of color and religious minorities are often the primary exposure people in white, Christian communities have to America’s demographic and cultural diversity. Instead of presenting an accurate representation, media dealing with non-whites and non-Christians routinely opt to portray one-dimensional illustrations of their lives, exclude their narratives from leading roles, or fetishize and commodify their bodies and culture.
That may not directly harm individuals, but it is nonetheless important, because the images and attitudes Americans form toward groups of people they do not meet on a routine basis are generally a direct consequence of their exposure to media. Put succinctly, images form a narrative, and those narratives color the prism through which people view policy, finance, and society. Once again, the evidence on social attitudes toward minority groups are a scathing indictment of the United States’ racial climate.
Forty two percent of Americans, according to the General Social Survey in 2016, agreed with the statement that the reason economic disparities exist between black and white Americans is “because most blacks just don't have the motivation or will power to pull themselves up out of poverty”. Another fifty-six percent agreed that it is at least somewhat likely that “a white person won’t get a job or promotion while an equally or less qualified black person gets one instead” in their workplace, despite reams of data proving the contrary. Moreover, majorities of white Americans believe that the justice system and police departments are not biased against racial minorities, that people of color have the same job and borrowing opportunities as white Americans, and that educational opportunities and funding are already equal across racial lines. While outright hostility is now uncommon in polling in part because of social desirability bias, the erasure of non-white and non-Christian narratives creates a media landscape where negative perceptions of a community are foregrounded, but serious obstacles to equality are downplayed.
Take, for example, issues of racial and ethnic bias in healthcare. There are more than a few patients with serious conditions or emergencies who are willing to risk their lives to avoid being treated by a healthcare provider who happens to be a person of color. Communities of color are also regular targets of racist zoning laws that preserve white-majority neighborhoods’ environmental quality, but place heavy industrial sites next to housing in minority-majority neighborhoods. Tobacco, alcohol, and fast food companies explicitly target youth among African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Indigenous Americans in their marketing and distribution. It is small wonder with this confluence of factors that asthma rates, lead poisoning, infant mortality, and maternal mortality are elevated for people of color and yet, apart from a week of coverage of the Flint water crisis, these stories generally do not penetrate the headlines.
Consider too that white America’s social attitudes toward people of color have direct implications for the nation’s justice and immigration systems. Given that legality is a construct of the state and white Americans by and large hold most positions of the state’s power, it is foreseeable why patterns of criminalization, sentencing practices, and punishments are often rooted in stereotypes and fear, rather than fact. Failures to address police brutality, mass incarceration, mass surveillance, sentencing disparities, and racial profiling policies like stop and frisk, ”routine” traffic stops, and SB 1070 represent just a fraction of the legal apparatus that puts a target on the backs of people of color. The cruel irony of modern white supremacy is that while eight hundred thousand DREAMers are being slated for deportation, a Presidential pardon was granted to a Sheriff convicted of criminal contempt, locking up innocent people because of their race, and creating a desert prison he called “my little concentration camp”.
Conclusion
White supremacy is not limited to Neo-nazis, Klansmen, and armed militia groups. While flashpoints of white supremacist violence like Charlottesville, Charleston, Overland Park, and Oak Creek draw public attention in short bursts, they must be understood and addressed in the larger context of a political, economic, and social system where people outside of Christendom and whiteness routinely have their concerns, wellbeing, and lives devalued. To rectify inequity that stretches back centuries will require affirmative steps by people of all backgrounds, not indifference or triangulation. If the political, economic, and social system are so fragile that they cannot handle making equal rights and respect a priority, then they are not worth preserving in their present form.
”Why is it that the death of a white woman at the hands of a white supremacist group has finally gotten the attention of white folk? Why have we been turning our heads the other way for so long? How many black families, Latino families, Asian families, Native-American families before us have been left broken from this ugly vein of hatred in our country?” — Diana Ratcliff, cousin of Heather Heyer