Afterword: Darkest Before the Dawn

“The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around.” Martin Luther King Jr. was giving what would be the last sermon of his life, on April 3, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

“But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding—something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up.”

The masses of people that King saw rising up included Americans of all races and from every walk of life, pushing for change. King was in Memphis to support a labor strike, part of his shift toward connecting the fight against racism to the struggle to alleviate poverty and economic exploitation, while linking both to ending United States imperialism and militarism.

As I write this, it is April 3, 2019, exactly fifty-one years later. Donald Trump is president. His popularity among Republicans is at record highs. “Trump’s Takeover of the Republican Party Is Almost Complete,” a headline from the day’s New York Times declares.1

If King were still with us, looking out from that Memphis pulpit, he would see a vista not much different from the scene he described half a century ago: racism, economic exploitation at home and abroad, militarism on behalf of extractive industries, all still trouble the land. And, yes, masses of people are rising up.

More than five decades later, however, we can conclude that King was mistaken, in the darkness of that long-ago night, to think he saw the stars of radical change. It’s not that nothing shifted for the better; it would be our mistake to minimize the fervent hunger for change that King and the civil rights movement stirred. But the fundamental restructuring of society to lift up the poor and people of color did not occur. Instead, we’ve crossed peaks and labored across valleys. We won major advances in civil rights. We elected a Black president. And yet we stagger through the war on crime, state disinvestment in the public infrastructures of civic life, and a rewriting of government economic rules that leaves most Americans worse off while it grossly rewards the wealthy top 1 percent.

It’s hard not to wonder if, like King, we too are mistaken to think that in the midst of our own era’s deepening darkness there’s a glimmer that might be a new dawn. After all, some of the nation’s most powerful economic and political forces have a vested interest in public division. And millions of white people seem more committed to the perks of white identity than to joining hands across the color line to demand a broad and shared prosperity.

A new freedom, if we can build it, won’t come easy. But still, I think there is reason to hope—more reason to hope now than in decades past, when the civil rights movement achieved much only to see the racial fearmongering of dog whistle politics take much away.

Fifty years ago, Rev. King understood the need for multiracial coalitions. His approach was rooted in a concept that white people could rally around; one that would draw them into the civil rights movement by emphasizing not just its moral force but its pragmatic potential to protect them. The threat then was not so much economic, though many whites remained trapped in poverty. More looming in the minds of most whites was the risk of metastasizing violence as fury in response to racial oppression surfaced and spread.

Nonviolence was the essence of King’s theory of social change. King called for the masses to rise in the name of human brotherhood. By battling racial hatred with public professions of love, King telegraphed the comforting message to whites that Black people were not the enemy. He made “we are all God’s children” a marker of our shared identity and a promise of security and safety. And from that foundation—a fusion of justice and peace—he expanded the movement to embrace broader human rights issues: structural changes to battle entrenched poverty, fair wages for working people, an end to militarism.

Fifty years later, the playbook hasn’t much changed. Now, as then, it’s not just racism we need to address, but also poverty, fair wages, militarism, plus climate collapse as well. And now, as then, the hard work cannot be done by communities of color alone.

People of color cannot simply sum up all of the different nonwhite groups and declare ourselves a near numerical majority ready to take power and transform society. It is more than a numbers game. The truth is that whites as a group remain dominant in wealth, power, and status. And anyway, people of color are no more a solid homogeneous bloc than white people are. They hold a mix of reactionary as well as progressive views on race, government, and the marketplace.

Fundamental change requires support from large swaths of the white racial group. In turn, this makes the fulcrum of whether fundamental change is possible what the labor historian David Roediger calls “the wages of whiteness”—the benefits that whites receive from the mere fact of being white.2

Roediger adopted and amplified that notion by drawing upon one of the truly great intellectuals in American history, W. E. B. DuBois. DuBois’ crowning work of scholarship was the magisterial Black Reconstruction in America, a seven-hundred-page tome originally published in 1935, in the early years of the New Deal. The title might suggest a narrow focus on African Americans in the South immediately after the Civil War. Instead, the book surveyed the national conflict between capitalism and labor in the decades before and after that great cataclysm. In this enduring class struggle, waged across industry and agriculture, in the cities of the North, on the plantations of the South, and across the plains of the Midwest, the crucible dividing the masses was racism manufactured by the oligarchy.

“It must be remembered,” wrote DuBois, “that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.” Focusing in particular on poor southern whites, DuBois emphasized that they were nearly destitute, yet the planter class contrived to pay them in racial pride, making superiority over Blacks compensation for economic straits. “They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools,” DuBois wrote. “Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them.”3

The elite manipulation of racism has ebbed and flowed across American history since capitalism invented “white citizens,” “Black slavery,” and “red savages.” Over the subsequent centuries, “races” have persisted and evolved not in response to some instinctive tendency among people to fear strangers. Instead, the primary driving force constantly imbuing the ideologies of racial differences with renewed vigor has been the opportunity for profit. Profit for some of society’s wealthiest segments is the hidden-inplain-sight engine of whiteness.

With profit for the elites as the principal engine, ordinary white people have been shortchanged on the ride. The benefits of being white have never been much more than tidbits compared to the harvest reaped by the rich, white crumbs of the sumptuous meal of white supremacy consumed behind high gates on gilded plates.

DuBois could see this clearly, especially when looking at the largely shared desperation of the great masses of whites and Blacks in the South up through the Great Depression, when he was writing.

Yet even then, when the dividends paid to whites were primarily deference, due regard, and a sense of superiority, there were also concrete material advantages to being white. As DuBois noted, for instance, “White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools.”

Writing in the first half of the 1930s, DuBois chronicled the psychic wages of whiteness at the historical moment the material wages of whiteness were about to explode upward for the majority of whites. The New Deal was gaining steam. Just over the horizon were economic booms that would be fueled by war spending in the 1940s, federal home loans and the suburban expansion of the 1950s, and Social Security and the GI Bill—government programs that would lift millions of families into home-owning middle-class security. By rule, design, and practice, these benefits would accrue in color-coded fashion; overwhelmingly, the families lifted would be white. Over the next few decades after DuBois wrote Black Reconstruction, government, unions, and the regulated market would put the vast majority of whites beyond the immediate reach of desperate poverty.

This was the landscape when King stood at that pulpit in Memphis in 1968. Then, as now, the wages of whiteness were the linchpin of change. The power to actually shift society’s direction depended on great masses of whites finding common cause with mobilized people of color. It is here that the wages of whiteness matter. If those wages are high, most whites will prefer to defend them and to defend them viciously, rather than sacrifice those benefits for the speculative promises of a different social order.

King called for a radical downward distribution of wealth to address widespread poverty, combined with a sundering of the walls of racism and an end to military mass violence abroad. With hindsight, it’s easy to see not just the justice of his vision but the pragmatic salvation it offered for tens of millions of people of every color. But as King found when he went to the neighborhoods of suburban Cicero, south of Chicago, instead many whites heard in his words and demands damnation. They rioted rather than allow housing integration, just as they would throw stones and hurl racist slurs to fight busing and school integration in Boston, and rampage through the streets of Manhattan to protect de facto whites-only union jobs. The rejection of King’s vision was not monolithic among white people, but those loud and angry voices carried the day. The wages of whiteness were too high. There would be no mass movement of whites shifting to build common cause with people of color against the interests of elites in maintaining the status quo.

What gives us the idea that today might be different? After all, the Trump rallies look and sound reminiscent of those white mass gatherings of fifty years ago.

But when we pair hopeful cultural changes over the last half century with the ever-more-evident realities of rule by the rich, we can glimpse a ray of hope. What might the wages of whiteness look like for Matt and Tom, the two white men from Ohio we met at the beginning of this book?

For many, the psychic wages of whiteness have been losing value as important cultural shifts impelled by the civil rights movement continue. Inspired originally by the moral demands and courageous actions of civil rights activists, integrationist sentiment has increased sharply. The visibility and cultural stature of Black entertainers, athletes, and public intellectuals has played an enormous role in the mindset shift. So too have the Black politicians elected to ever-more-prominent positions, at once symbolizing the rising status of African Americans and driving it further. The nation elected and reelected a Black president, and through Barack Obama and his family people of every color came to see the absurdity of racist stereotypes.

Demographic changes and the rising visibility of many different racial groups have also reformed America’s historically racist culture. Civil rights reforms went beyond formally prohibiting racial discrimination in employment and housing, to ending express racial barriers in immigration, opening the country’s doors to millions of new Americans without direct family ties to Europe. The presence of new faces, languages, foods, and customs has spurred a cosmopolitan culture of curiosity and fusion.

On the material side, the decline in the wages of whiteness is more equivocal. The canyon between African Americans and whites has remained wide in rates of employment, home ownership, income, and health outcomes. It’s still far better from a material point of view to wear white rather than nonwhite skin.

But the overall material position of whites has worsened significantly since Rev. King’s last sermon. This is the story of surging wealth inequality, declining jobs and pensions, hollowed-out cities, broken rural towns, and the Great Recession. This is the narrative of deaths of despair from suicide and opioid abuse spreading across the country.

With rare exceptions, we tend to discuss these trends in economic terms divorced from race. But the economic crises confronting the vast majority of whites is very much connected to whiteness. Dog whistle politics has made the majority of white voters unwitting co-conspirators in their own economic calamity. It is largely whites voting their racial anxieties who empower the politicians engineering surging inequality. Worsening economic insecurity is the true material wage of whiteness paid over the last half century.

Donald Trump’s election connects to these larger trends. His ardent supporters hear in “make America great again” the promise of restored racial status. Fifty-four percent of whites voted for Trump in 2016, many in response to rising racial resentment spurred by Obama’s victories and the very societal changes just described. Trump’s base also feels the tightening vise of economic desperation. They are squeezed in the market by worsening pay and evaporating benefits, and squeezed in the public sphere by eroding schools, crumbling roads and levies, and a disintegrating safety net.

Still, four in ten whites in 2016 rejected crude race-baiting appeals. And there’s reason to believe an energized Left can drive those numbers much higher, precisely because of Trump.

Trump exemplifies the personal disaster of clutching to the myth of white superiority. Over decades, the nation has been moving toward the conviction that racial chauvinism is morally bankrupt. Dog whistling encourages whites to reject this progress—but in doing so makes plain the ugly character of racial pride. Trump’s appeals to white fear and vanity carry him into lies, cruelty, braggadocio, mockery, sexism, xenophobia, and boorishness. The racial rage he encourages pops up on our phones in frightening tableaus: images of torch-bearing marchers yelling racist slurs, massacres at the speed of automatic gunfire, the slow processions of funeral marches. Trump illustrates on the national stage the individual destitution of racial supremacism.

Trump also personifies the economic costs for most whites of clinging to whiteness. His supporters make a Faustian bargain. Seeking false salves to their sense of imperiled white identity, they foreclose the possibility of decent livelihoods. They vote for border walls and Muslim bans, but get a White House cabinet of corrupt billionaires bent on looting the country for themselves and their titan friends. Trump’s election shows the collective disaster of using white pride to paper over class warfare. Trump epitomizes the connection between white racial spite and widespread economic ruination.

This is not how most whites see things—not the larger trajectory of the country, nor the horror of Trumpism. Nor is it exclusively white persons who fail to perceive this reality. Many people of color also accept and internalize the core stories woven by the Right about who deserves respect and who does not, about whether to trust the economic royalty or instead to build power collectively. The wreckage around us does not pile neatly into a giant arrow everyone can follow for the way forward.

But today’s crises do present a moment when an energized Left can seize the country’s imagination to achieve radical change.

Now may be the best opportunity in the long history of this society to break the weightiest chains of racial hierarchy. For the first time, it may be possible to convince the majority of whites—not nearly all, but at least a solid majority—that providing for their families requires relinquishing their attachment to supposed white superiority. This may also be the best chance to build cross-racial solidarity among nonwhites, a task ever more pressing as the country’s racial composition complexifies. Our research has shown that a huge chunk of the electorate straddles the progressive-reactionary line, and many are likely to merge left if economic and racial issues are appropriately and comprehensively intertwined.

The persuadable middle may not be persuadable for much longer. The curtain may be lowering day by day. Trends among whites threaten the solidarity necessary for democracy’s survival. The current president and the political party that leans on, learns from, and protects him see great benefits in stoking racial fear and resentment. With our next national election little more than a year away, either we seize the day with an inclusive message of racial solidarity, or we risk letting white nationalists aligned with economic elites drag us backward toward a replay of some of the ugliest chapters in our country’s history.

We’re deep in the chasm of the latest reaction against racial progress right now. It’s not clear we can dig out. It’s not certain we’ve reached the nadir. And many of us are still wondering how the country was dragged over this cliff. Yet the shock of the present might be the jolt that impels us to reach forward with renewed strength for a hopeful future. When racial communities of every color embrace cross-racial solidarity and government that is truly of, by, and for all the people, then we will take another firm step toward becoming the America our ideals proclaim.

I wish the advice and analysis in this book could offer a quick fix, but obviously nothing can. Changing the country’s direction will take powerful social movements and a radically transformed Democratic Party, human rights campaigns that build solidarity across many unjust social hierarchies, and aggressive litigation plus street agitation to restore voting rights and drive dark money out of politics. It will require hundreds of millions of dollars in donations small and large, plus an army of citizen-activists (whatever their formal citizenship status), their shoe soles worn bare by door knocking and protest marching.

Still, I believe this book and those convinced by it can offer yet more shoulders leaning into the shared task of building for all of us dignity and the practical opportunity to thrive. I hope the darkness of this current moment may herald the coming dawn.