Month: January 2018

How We View Welfare

Posted on by jabittan
In my last post I wrote about the Republican party’s shift in the 1970s to be more focused on race, and to draw a line between white people and black people in terms of identity politics. Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow explains that this was done to create a political coalition of white voters across the socioeconomic spectrum and to break apart potential alliances with low income black and white people.  Alexander continues in her book to show how specific policies became racialize and how stereotypes of black people became attached to policy.

Alexander writes, “During this period, conservatives gave lip service to the goal of racial equality but actively resisted desegregation, busing, and civil rights enforcement. They repeatedly raised the issue of welfare, subtly framing it as a contest between hardworking, blue-collar whites and poor blacks who refused to work. The not-so-subtle message to working-class whites was that their tax dollars were going to support special programs for blacks who most certainly did not deserve them.”

Alexander shows that policies which should have been neutral in terms of race and policies which would have helped both poor whites and poor blacks were used against black people. Higher income white people who had an interest in keeping more of their money and not directing their money toward low-income black and white people were able to frame welfare as a negative and stigmatize it as a program for lazy black people and not as a program for individuals who have been exploited, who have had bad luck, or for people who lacked the opportunities of more affluent individuals. I have written in the past about the randomness of material and fiscal wealth and success, but the racialized framework from the 1970s is so powerful because it played into beliefs that our actions drive our success and that only lazy (minority) individuals will need assistance. The rhetoric developed by the republican party ultimately worked to drive a wedge between white people and black people all while claiming to be race neutral.

The Responsibility of Those Affected

Posted on by jabittan
About a one or two years ago I remember hearing an interesting fact. There are more white people living in poverty in the United States than there are black people. But when you ask someone to picture a person living in poverty, most people vision a black person struggling to get by. In her book The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander gives us some background of how racial attitudes developed in our country, particularly in how race was used as a political tool to shape ideas and thoughts regarding low income black people. She explains the ways in which black people were framed as dangerous, flawed, and undeserving and how these descriptions were used politically to establish political attitudes based on race within the United States. Overtime, these attitudes have persisted, and have been intentionally used to split low socioeconomic status white people in our country from black people and minority populations.

Alexander writes, “by 1972, attitudes on racial issues rather than socioeconomic status were the primary determinant of voters’ political self-identification. The late 1960s and early 1970s marked the dramatic erosion in the belief among working-class whites that the condition of the poor, or those who fail to prosper, was the result of a faulty economic system that needed to be challenged. As the Edsalls explain, ‘the pitting of whites and blacks at the low end of the income distribution against each other intensified the view among many whites that the condition of life for the disadvantaged—particularly for disadvantaged blacks—is the responsibility of those affected, and not the responsibility of the larger society.’”

The quote from Alexander shows us that race, racial attitudes, and the systems of support we develop in our country are flexible and open to manipulation. There is no reality behind race, but racial ideas have been used for political purposes throughout our countries history. Alexander argues (and her argument has been supported by other researchers) that bottom-up movements that placed lower classes against upper classes in the United States have been countered and broken up with the use of racial prejudices and attitudes. In the 1970’s President Nixon pushed the idea that black people were dangerous, and that the state needed to crack down on black crime. From these ideas and from this desire to break up a coalition of low socioeconomic status black and white people came racial exploitation and discrimination, leading to the start of a mass incarceration system in the United States.

What I have found particularly interesting in our country is the belief that people hold about becoming rich. We like to believe that we will all somehow reach the top socioeconomic status groups, and we tend to believe that hard work and smart decisions are all that are needed to reach those upper echelons.  While it is certainly true that hard work and smart decision making is necessary to be materially and financially successful, we should not over inflate the importance of those factors and decrease the importance of luck, familial income level at birth, and of social attitudes and thoughts about you and people who share your identities.  We must recognize that financial and material success are not solely the responsibility of the individual, and by the same logic failure and poverty are not inherently the responsibility of the individual poor. How we structure society, how we allow or bar individuals from participating in the economy, and how we treat certain groups and individuals matters in terms of who succeeds and who does not. Aspiring to become successful does not mean that we should treat the highest socioeconomic status groups differently, simply because we believe we will somehow be there and will somehow benefit from policies that clearly disadvantage us and the rest of society.

Creating Racial Resentment

Posted on by jabittan
Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow argues that racial caste systems have been maintained in the United States by stoking up racial attitudes to create a racial hierarchy that distracts us from economic hierarchies. She suggests that white people who have benefitted from racial caste systems in our country are less likely to take action to reverse the situation because of the social benefits of not being black or brown and not living in our country’s lowest social class. She focuses on how political support for African American’s in our country has been diminished to prevent low socioeconomic status (SES) black and white people from joining together and creating a coalition.

Early in her book she writes, “Time and again the most ardent proponents of racial hierarchy have succeeded in creating new caste systems by triggering a collapse of resistance across the political spectrum. This feat has been achieved largely by appealing to the racism and vulnerability of lower class whites, a group of people who are understandably eager to ensure that they never find themselves trapped at the bottom of the American totem pole.”

I have come across this theory in other books, podcasts, and mediums and I believe that it is accurate. We support policies in this country that appear to be race neutral at face value,  but have disparate impacts on African American and Latino populations in the Untied States. Policies that have been suggested to reduce these disparate impacts will often times improve the SES of not just black and brown people, but of low SES white people as well. However, these measures often don’t find much political support from white members of groups that would benefit from them. Alexander argues that this is a reflection of the fact that white people will lose status relative to black people if we achieve more racial parity, and to prevent this loss of status white people will vote against legislation and will not support policies that reduce inequality and improve their economic outlook.

The main reason I think Alexander’s claim is an accurate description of our politics is because I see identity, as opposed to economics or ideology, as the main driver of political behaviors. During his campaign and throughout his time in office President Trump capitalized on his ability to represent a certain American identity that is distinctly non-black or brown. He does not have any consistent ideologies or economic policy preferences,  but he does express a consistent white identity and has enjoyed overwhelming support from white demographics across the board including low SES white groups as well as higher SES white groups. Low SES white people would have likely seen greater benefits from a candidate who expressed more equitable political and economic ideologies, but such policies would not have appealed to their identity and would have diminished the small but real status advantage that white people have over black people at all SES levels in America.

I think my position is supported and can be demonstrated by the reality that most American’s don’t have consistent and intelligible policy ideologies, even those who are well informed. By policy ideologies I do not mean liberal or conservative, but rather policy ideologies formed by specific policy evaluations. Few people truly understand what any given policy does and fewer understand the research and data behind a policy and the specifics of a given policy’s implementation plan. What we do understand, are the signals provided when leaders and officials discuss policy. When looking at such policy discussions abandoning the pretense that we are actually discussing policy specifics, one can see that we are more often signaling to each other what groups and what identities should support a policy. We are voting based on identity, but telling ourselves that we are voting based on ideology. Political game theory and identity are better predictors at this point of human voting preference and behavior than self reported ideology or what we have come to describe as liberal and conservative.

What Moves us to Action

Posted on by jabittan
Economic decisions drive human decision making more than we like to admit. We are not often driven and motivated by causes that are larger than ourselves, and at the end of the day, we fall back on economic decisions and can’t seem to escape questions about money, about possessions, and about whether we as individuals get more or less from a decision. Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow looks at how economic decisions are shaping the criminal justice system and finds that concerns about fairness and justice fall short of the impact of economic outcomes when we think about how the system should change. As an American, I want to believe that things such as a concern for individuals and families should drive our considerations of how the criminal justice system operates, but nevertheless, these factors do not seem to be able to influence the system the way that economic arguments are able to. Alexander writes,

“Many of the states that have reconsidered their harsh sentencing schemes have done so not out of concern for the lives and families that have been destroyed by these laws or the racial dimensions of the drug war, but out of concern for bursting state budgets in a time of economic recession. In other words, the racial ideology that gave rise to these laws remains largely undisturbed.”

I think that Alexander’s quote ties in nicely with a lesson from John Biewen’s podcast, Scene on Radio, and his series, Seeing White. Biewen looked at the history of slavery, especially American slavery, and explains the ways in which slavery and racism followed from the desire for economic exploitation. People had the ability and opportunity to subjugate others and to exploit people for economic purposes. From that exploitation followed excuses to rationalize those exploitative behaviors. Racism, in other words, followed from a desire to subjugate other people and to hold them down for economic benefit.

The war on drugs and our system of policing has disproportionately affected communities of color. We have incarcerated black and brown men to a much greater degree than we have arrested white men, but crime and drug use rates between white men and black men are almost identical. Alexander explains that we see changes in the criminal justice system in states where maintaining massive prison populations is becoming economically unsustainable. We are not changing our behavior out of moral principles, but out of economic hardships.

Looking at Alexander’s and Biewen’s work together reveals a common theme. Racial exploitation and subjugation follow economic incentives, and racial parity and justice is only possible in our country today if it is obviously economically beneficial. Our attitudes about others, about fairness, about justice, and about race take a back seat to our attitudes about our personal economic situation, allowing us to maintain mass incarceration systems today, and allowing our nation’s founders to exploit slaves two hundred years ago.

Why We Don’t Talk Honestly About Mobility

Posted on by jabittan

A hidden conversation is constantly taking place in the United States. It is a conversation about who is deserving, who is successful, and who has done better for themselves than other people. The measuring stick for these conversations is financial wealth, and we don’t have this conversation out in the open. Instead, we have this conversation covertly, by expressing who we are with the things we have and the places we go. Having the most stuff, the most expensive car, the biggest house, and taking the best trips is a sign of success, and all these factors allow us to compare ourselves to those who have and do not have as much as we do. Our country tells us that material wealth is what we should desire, and we tell ourselves that anyone can achieve great wealth as long as they try hard. Those who don’t achieve great wealth, in this conversation, obviously are not hard working, and didn’t get the memo that bettering themselves and working hard is the way to be successful in our country.

Michelle Alexander would like to change the way this conversation takes place. Specifically, Alexander wants to address caste systems in America and highlight the lack of mobility in our country. In The New Jim Crow she writes,

“Conversations about class are resisted in part because there is a tendency to imagine that one’s class reflects upon one’s character. What is key to America’s understanding of class is the persistent belief—despite all evidence to the contrary—that anyone, with the proper discipline and drive, can move from a lower class to a higher class. We recognize that mobility may be difficult, but the key to our collective self image is the assumption that mobility is always possible, so failure to move up reflects on one’s character. By extension, the failure of a race or ethnic group to move up reflects very poorly on the group as a whole.”

By anchoring success around financial wealth, we create a zero sum system where more wealth for one person means less wealth for another. This is a broad overstatement to be sure, but it is the way that many people feel, and it is accurate when comparing success defined by material wealth with success defined by many religious ideals, or success defined by service and impact within the community. We avoid talking honestly about mobility challenges, because to remedy the problem means to give up some level of material success so that others may join in. This reduces our measuring stick of success and gives others an unfair leap up the ladder of financial success, at least as we understand it.

Our nation will never see racial equity if we continue to think of success purely in financial terms and if we ignore the ways that our society has embraced racial and economic castes. We must be honest about the lack of mobility within our society and recognize that a drive toward material wealth is a drive toward a goal that we cannot control on our own. Individuals and groups may be hard workers, but not all hard work is rewarded with wealth. The impact of our effort is not always reflected by our salaries, and the total of our bank account is often impacted by factors beyond our control. In a nation that in its history has implemented policies to minimize the wealth accumulation of black people while enhancing the wealth accumulation of white people, we should be honest about our caste system and about the ways in which economic mobility has been denied to certain people. Our current system ignores the reality of financial wealth, encourages sometimes dangerous competition in a zero-sum world, and pretends that everyone can be upwardly mobile as long as they have the right character traits.

Avoiding Race

Posted on by jabittan
Michelle Alexander in her book, The New Jim Crow, directly addresses inconsistencies and inequities within our criminal justice system. The prison population in the United States has exploded relative to other countries, and minority racial populations have taken the brunt of our unusually high number of arrests. Alexander focuses throughout her book on the unequal levels of policing in white, black, and brown communities in the United States and the ways in which inequality has lead to policing patterns that favor white people and disadvantage black and brown people. Alexander also looks at the ways in which people with criminal backgrounds are excluded from society, and how exclusion shapes people’s behavior. She describes the ways that this then feeds back into group behaviors and creates a cycle of continually greater policing and arresting. Despite the evidence to demonstrate that our policing is out of control and unfairly targeting minority populations, our country has trouble addressing the reality of our system, and Alexander has ideas as to why.

 

In her book she writes, “The language of caste may well seem foreign or unfamiliar to some. Public discussions about racial caste in America are relatively rare. We avoid talking about caste in our society because we are ashamed of our racial history. We also avoid talking about race. We even avoid talking about class.” We believe that today race is not a limiting factor for individuals. White people have an idea in their mind that there are almost no racist individuals in the country. The success of many black and brown individuals in our country demonstrates that we have reached a place beyond racism, where individual effort, not race determines our success. The election of a black president and black sports figures and celebrities is a clear indication to white people that we have reached a post-racial point in society and this allows for the false view that black people bringing up race is the only thing preventing us from leaving race behind. This view however, is drawn entirely upon individuals, and neglects the way that race is shaped by institutions and larger groups. Individually we may have been able to move beyond racism, but as a larger society and within public and private institutions, we have not been able to eliminate disparate impacts for racial groups.

 

Policing and our prison populations demonstrate the way that we have not moved beyond racism within our institutions. Policies related to policing do not direct officers to over-police black and brown neighborhoods and do not instruct officers to arrest black and brown men at rates far higher than they arrest white men, but that is what we see happening when we look at the data describing who is arrested and where our police officers spend their time and effort. We find ways to explain the disparate outcomes that black and brown people face in our criminal justice system that have nothing to do with race, but our explanations avoid any discussion about the racial history that these groups have faced in our country’s history. For years our country allowed racial discrimination in employment, education, and housing, and these policies limited the economic mobility of racial groups while favoring and advantaging white groups. Wealth accumulation was far more challenging for black and brown people, and the effects of such discrimination have not completely gone away. Policing those who we placed in ghettos and policing those who we did not allow to grow economically is not a directly racists decision within our criminal justice system, it is just a side effect.

 

Alexander argues that we should have more discussion about the role that race historically played in our country so that we can better understand our current moment. She argues that we should look at race and at socioeconomic status (SES) as indicators of caste, because race, SES, and caste systems can accurately describe the inequities and realities of our system today. Our discussions avoid race and the idea of caste, but the data the supports the reality of the ideas we hide from.

Colorblind

Posted on by jabittan
In her book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander is critical of our criminal justice system and the ways in which mass incarceration has impacted the lives of people of color throughout our country. Alexander argues that racial discrimination never truly faded away in our country after the end of the Civil War and after Jim Crow segregation. She points to disparities between white people and black people in regards to outcomes such as wealth accumulation, incarceration rates, and employment rates, arguing that institutions and systematic thought in our country have created a new form of racial discrimination that is as damaging as a racial caste system. However, this new racial caste system as described by Alexander is largely unnoticed in our country since outwardly racist displays of white superiority are scorned and an idea of colorblindness is emphasized. In her book she writes,

 

“The popular narrative that emphasizes the death of slavery and Jim Crow and celebrates the nation’s “triumph over race” with the election of Barack Obama, is dangerously misguided. The colorblind public consensus that prevails in America today – i.e., the widespread belief that race no longer matters — has blinded us to the realities of race in our society and facilitated the emergence of a new caste system.”

 

Our colorblind society is unable to see the dangers of racial disparities and inequities today. We see successful black people in entertainment, sports, and increasingly in politics and assume that racial barriers have been overcome and that we no longer live in a country defined by race and exploitation, but when we take a step back and look at the actual outcomes that people of color are likely to experience relative to white people, we can see that race still plays an important role in determining how society relates to individuals and how individuals experience their society. Because we all claim to be colorblind, and because we equate racism with individuals and their beliefs and actions, black people today cannot discuss racial resentment or discrimination. Their complaints against an unequal system fall on deaf ears, because no individual sees themselves as being guilty of racial bias, even if they operate within and support a system that was originally designed or unintentionally functions as a way to suppress minority populations and people of color.

 

Ultimately colorblindness leaves us in a position where we tell everyone that all people are equal on the surface, but then criticize some groups for not achieving the same level of success despite not having the same advantages and opportunities. We look at President Obama and see a black man who rose to the presidency by overcoming obstacles and assume that racial parity exists. When black people try to raise objections to the way that they are treated and when they try to point out the challenges that black people in this country have faced since our founding, their arguments are discredited by the same group that claims to be colorblind.

 

More than being neutral and meritorious, being colorblind means that we choose not to see the advantages white people have relative to black people. It means that we choose not to acknowledge the ways in which recent history limited the opportunities and possibilities for minority populations. Colorblindness also means that we ignore the realities that black people face in terms of systematic discrimination that dates back to times when discrimination was legal. Ultimately, it is a way to discredit claims of racial discrimination and the existence of disparate impacts from our policies and systems.

Racial Discrimination Today

Posted on by jabittan
“We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it,” Michelle Alexander writes in her book The New Jim Crow. Alexander focuses on our nation’s criminal justice system, its shortfalls, and how racial disparities exist within a system that is supposed to be colorblind. Early on in the book she writes about discrimination against criminals and compares todays discrimination against criminals to historical discrimination against black people. She writes,

“In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices e supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.”

Alexander’s quote shows the challenges we face today in a time with less explicit racism and fewer individually racist people. People themselves may make racist jokes in the company of friends, but outward displays of racism are rare. This gives us all the sense that racism is no longer a major factor in our lives and it allows us to feel that we have overcome a great challenge in treating people more equally in this country. What we miss when we focus only on explicit racism and individual level actions are the factors that comprise larger parts of our institutions and norms.

Our criminal justice system disproportionally impacts the lives of hispanic and black people. We arrest minorities at a far greater level than we arrest white people, even though levels of drug use and crime are similar among white, black, and latino people. The result of disproportionate arresting is that white people are allowed to move beyond their mistakes and crimes and can build wealth, while people of color are haunted by their crimes and face discrimination in areas like employment, housing, and financial investing. Pretending that the system is equal because we don’t outwardly express racism hides the fact that our system is entrenched in racism and hides the structural and institutional ways in which racism has shaped our society and created disparate outcomes for people based on race. Because these issues go beyond individuals, we must work to change entire systems and policies to move beyond the current outputs of the system. Changing who we arrest is one step, but we must also shift housing and development policies, and changing housing and development requires that we take a new look at those we label as criminals. Ultimately, it requires that we look at those around us as human beings first, and look at criminal history in a new light. Moving to a point where outward displays of racism are not acceptable is good start, but we need to move forward to a point where we acknowledge the disparate impacts our society has accepted.