Not only was W. Arthur Lewis a Nobel Laureate, he also was the first black Nobel Laureate in a field other than peace or literature. It is interesting that he was treated as an African American, even though he was neither African nor American; he was born in the British Caribbean and became a British citizen. Lewis taught at Princeton University in later years, and he resented being incorporated into the American racial system.
Lewis did not want to be caught in the Jim Crow movement, and the New Jim Crow is not much better. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “A society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you [my black son] with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.”1
I discuss the history of race in America at the outset of the political analysis in part II because race plays an important part in discussions of policies related to inequality in the United States. The FTE sector includes the top 20 percent of earners, and the low-wage sector has the other 80 percent. Blacks make up less than 15 percent of the American population. Even if they were all in the low-wage sector, they would still be less than one-fifth of the low-wage sector members, as I keep emphasizing. It seems odd that much of the public discussion of public policies designed to help the poor is directed to blacks, but the power of the American racial system dictates that it is so. Gender discrimination enters this story as well, providing a useful comparison with racism and revealing an important problem of American education.
Attitudes toward race in the United States have become divorced from scientific and historic evidence that races do not exist. Even though people from different areas may look different from one another and have other different characteristics, there is too much diversity within groups and too much similarity between groups to provide the basis for any biological definition of race. In America, racism has become racecraft, analogous to witchcraft. We no longer believe that witches ride on brooms, but we continue to believe that races have powers that we should fear. “Racecraft is a ready-made propaganda weapon for use against the aspirations of the great majority of working Americans. Sooner or later, tacitly or openly, any move to tackle inequality brings racecraft into play.”2
Witchcraft made its last appearance in the future United States in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Accusations against the presumed witches were made in the context of Puritan religion, but there was a curious geography to the process. The individuals accused of witchcraft came from the eastern part of Salem, near the Atlantic coast that offered mercantile possibilities; the accusers came from the western part of Salem where fertile land encouraged traditional farming. Perhaps the furor over witchcraft and the dark arts even then was only the means to express the social conflict between the lure of commercial activity and the resistance to change among back-country farmers.3
We no longer use the criminalization of witchcraft to express the differences in the community, but racecraft has endured. The reasons for this persistence are connected with American history, starting at the same time as the Salem witch trials. When Southern farmers first began to expand farming in the seventeenth century, they employed white and black workers equally, subject to restrictions held over from medieval practices. The farmers’ problem was not Africans, it was lack of labor to work their abundant land. They encouraged European immigration by loaning immigrants the money to get to America with their farm labor obligations as security. That is, the European workers would be indentured servants, who would regain their freedom of action when they had paid back their loan and their indentures were over. The farmers could not apply this approach to African immigrants because the Africans did not come to America voluntarily. Most English and Dutch migrants came because they wanted to come, while African migrants were purchased and brought to America against their will. As Oscar and Mary Handlin stated in a classic article, “To raise the status of Europeans by shortening their terms would ultimately increase the available hands by inducing their compatriots to emigrate; to reduce the Negro’s term would produce an immediate loss and no ultimate gain.”
The expansion of the African slave trade at the end of the seventeenth century provided Southern planters with abundant labor in a framework that had developed to differentiate between whites and blacks. The difference that had opened up between European and African immigrants led to fears of “plots and conspiracies” among the black immigrants and restrictions on black workers. “At the opening of the eighteenth century, the Black was not only set off by economic and legal status; he was ‘abominable,’ another order of man.” The increasing need to get the consent of European workers during the eighteenth century contrasted sharply with decline in the independence of African workers—who went from villeins to chattels. “When, therefore, Southerners in the eighteenth century came to think of the nature of the rights of man they found it inconceivable that Negroes should participate in those rights. It was more in accord with the whole social setting to argue that the slaves could not share those rights because they were not fully men, or at least different kinds of men. In fact, to the extent that Southerners ... thought of liberty as whole, natural, and inalienable, they were forced to conclude that the slave was wholly unfree, wholly lacking in personality, wholly a chattel.”4
The statement in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” meant that all white men were created equal. Black slaves were not included. And when slavery was abolished after the Civil War, the presumption that blacks were abominable and lacking in personality endured. Reconstruction faltered after the assassination of President Lincoln and ended finally in 1877. It was followed by Jim Crow laws and social controls that were created to reproduce something close to the antebellum relations between whites and blacks.5
The continuation of discrimination against African Americans has been described as white rage by some historians. It seems hard to explain the long reach of old quarrels between the North and South without some such emotion. White rage is the other side of racecraft. This rage could be seen in the 2016 presidential campaign. The Democratic National Convention contained many kinds of people: white, black, and brown. And the National Review responded with a blast of white rage, identifying this diversity as anti-white, “a celebration of lawlessness and racial mythology that has led to violence.”6
The federal government did little to disturb Southern discrimination in the first half of the twentieth century since Southern Democrats had ample power to block any federal intervention. Southern congressmen represented only white Southerners as few blacks were able to vote. Jim Crow laws and violence kept black Southerners from exercising the rights given to them in the Fourteenth Amendment. Congressional representatives and senators were selected by the local elites since there was no opposition in the general election. And, once in Congress, they gained leadership positions and political power by the long tenure provided by this system.7
Southern lawmakers exercised their power by leaving African Americans out of the federal programs of the New Deal. Instead of excluding them directly, they excluded occupations in which blacks were highly engaged, like farming and domestic service. They insisted that all federal social welfare programs be administered by state officials so that Southern officials were free to perpetuate Jim Crow standards. And they prevented Congress from including any antidiscrimination clauses into federal social welfare programs that distributed money to the South.
This system meant that poor Southerners, white and black, were left out of the relief offered to Northern workers during the Great Depression. Their living conditions were described vividly in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which united James Agee’s powerful prose with Walker Evans’s vivid photographs.8
Social Security did not extend to blacks for the first quarter-century of its existence. The GI Bill provided educational benefits for veterans of the Second World War, but it did not guarantee admission to colleges. Few blacks were admitted to Northern colleges and universities due to bad Southern schooling. Blacks therefore applied to Southern black colleges—being excluded from Southern white colleges—which did not have capacity to take them. States refused to expand the facilities of black colleges, particularly dormitories, and much of the black demand for college education went nowhere. Black veterans also were not helped to get good jobs by the GI Bill. Local employment agencies funded by the bill directed them to traditional black jobs, ignoring learning that had occurred in the army, and often refused loans to black veterans because they lacked capital or credit ratings and lived in undesirable neighborhoods.
African Americans responded to the pressure on them in Southern states by moving north and west in the Great Migration. As described in chapter 2, black workers moved out of the oppressive South to better their lives and employment opportunities. But this move was not always successful, and blacks lost ground relative to whites after the Second World War. The national unemployment rate for blacks and whites was the same in 1930; the black rate was double that of whites in 1965. The unemployment rate for black teenage boys went from being slightly less than whites in 1948 to being almost twice as high in 1965. And the median income of black men declined to 53 percent of the income of white men in 1965.9
The lower incomes and employment rate of blacks reduced their accumulation of wealth. Senator Elizabeth Warren recently gave an impassioned summary of black exclusions: “Entire legal structures were created to prevent African Americans from building economic security through home ownership. Legally enforced segregation. Restrictive deeds. Redlining. Land contracts. Coming out of the Great Depression, America built a middle class, but systematic discrimination kept most African-American families from being part of it.”10
The oppression of blacks, increasing rapidly after the war, began to meet opposition in the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement that Johnson supported led to legislation that granted blacks legal rights to equal citizenship, but these laws were followed by the War on Drugs that generated a new system of mass incarceration that continued the Jim Crow tradition. By 2000, one out of three black men was spending time in jail. The rise of mass imprisonment put great pressure on many black families, and led to social as well as economic problems.11
Nixon proclaimed the War on Drugs just as the Great Migration ended. Reagan and state governments expanded the war in the 1980s as the crack epidemic grew. Blacks were (and are) far more likely to be arrested for drug offenses than whites. At the same time, industry began to decline in the American Midwest, in what is now called the Rust Bowl, and the jobs that blacks came north to find began to disappear. They found conditions in the North better than in the South, but not as good as they had hoped.
The enduring reach of racecraft can be seen in the treatment of immigrants, even though biologists have not been able to provide a satisfactory definition of race that includes all members of a given race and excludes all others. The reach of racecraft was limited in the colonial period as white Americans came mostly from the most advanced countries of Western Europe and Africans were not permitted to express cultural differences between themselves. Attitudes were stretched in the nineteenth century as varied immigrants came to the United States and are being stretched again now as Latino immigrants have become more common.
New immigrants typically were poor, and they were grouped with African Americans in the binary world of racecraft. Some immigrants fared so well in America that they graduated from being “black” to being “white.” Other immigrants did not fare so well, whether because of cultural attributes or the American context when they came. But the enduring influence of racecraft meant that the record of their American success was calibrated by racecraft.
A great many Irish came to America in the nineteenth century in response to the Irish famine at mid-century. They were grouped initially with blacks as despised manual workers. The new Irish immigrants joined with abolitionists to oppose slavery out of sympathy with their attempts to free Ireland from English rule. Only when many Irish Americans had abandoned this stance were they considered whites, who then joined other whites and adopted their racecraft. This racial identification was still valid almost a century later. A boy growing up poor and Irish American in South Boston in the 1970s tried to figure out where he fit into this scheme: “Of course no one considered himself a nigger. It was always something you called someone who could be considered anything less than you.”12
Jews followed a similar immigrant path when they began to arrive at the end of the nineteenth century in response to pogroms in Eastern Europe. They were discriminated against, and restricted in where they could live, work, and sometimes simply stay during the first half of the twentieth century—from the age of mass immigration from Eastern Europe to the end of the Second World War. There were a few rich Jews—the heirs of earlier court Jews—but they were the exception to the general rule. Most Jews were lumped in with blacks even though they were not black. After the tragic effects of the Second World War and in postwar prosperity, Jews began to be accepted everywhere; they had become white. But while they had made the transition, their movement did not affect the structure of race relations in America. Being white in America meant being superior to blacks, and many Jews adopted racecraft with their newly white status. Those who did shared its conventions of exclusion, while others remembered past discrimination and tried to help people who had not made it into the American mainstream.13
As the dual economy developed in the late twentieth century, large numbers of Latinos began immigrating to the United States in response to chaos in their homelands. There has been what might be called a second Great Migration of Latinos from Mexico and other Central American countries that followed the Great Migration of African Americans before 1970. The number of Latinos in the United States has grown from around 5 percent in 1970 to 17 percent today. The Latino population now exceeds the black population in the United States.
As with the Great Migration, Latinos moved north to escape repressive political regimes that denied them a path to economic advancement and security. American interventions in Central America to dislodge governments we did not approve of were followed by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. NAFTA exposed Mexico to the effects of globalization that had affected United States workers by then. But Mexican workers had an option that American workers lacked: they could move north to better their position.
This movement was international, not like the interstate movement of the Great Migration of African Americans. Just as the changing immigration laws of the 1920s led employers to look to the American South for workers, the end of internal U.S. migration led employers to look south of the American border for workers. The influx of Latinos, however, became entangled with the War on Drugs as Central America became a prime source for drugs. Attempts to stem the inflow of drugs led to stiffening of the Mexican border, leading in turn to an increasing number of unauthorized immigrants who have become a political football. The tension between American employers who want a new source of labor and American workers who are suffering already from the ills of globalization has kept the United States from updating its immigration policy for these new conditions.
Latinos now are overwhelmingly in the low-wage sector of the dual economy. They are concentrated in cities that lack resources for education; they are facing the same kind of social dysfunction of African American communities. There is the same perception in the white population that anyone in a Latino neighborhood is up to no good. Latinos are on the wrong side of racecraft.
Economic conditions in the United States are less hospitable than they were in the nineteenth century. This is a recent development, dating back only a few decades, unlike the far longer history of European immigration to the United States. But at this moment, Latinos are about the same proportion of the population as African Americans and occupy similar positions in the economy and the perceptions of the FTE sector.14
The effect of racecraft on redistributive politics has been described in many recent publications. A comparison of the United States with Europe concluded: “Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor. ... Opponents of redistribution in the United States have regularly used race-based rhetoric to resist left-wing politics.”15
A recent econometric analysis of American counties is worth quoting in detail: “Whites who currently live in counties that had high concentrations of slaves in 1860 are on average more conservative and express colder feelings toward African-Americans than whites who live elsewhere in the South. That is, the larger the number of slaves per capita in his or her county of residence in 1860, the greater the probability that a white Southerner today will identify as a Republican, oppose affirmative action, and express positions that indicate some level of ‘racial resentment.’”16
A vivid sense of what it means to be black in America today is expressed well in a prose poem by Claudia Rankine that describes a professional man who is taken out of his car by the police, brought to the police station in handcuffs, stripped, and then released to walk home, with the refrain: “And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.”17
The treatment of women is similar in some bodily aspects to current divisions about race. Women were citizens in a way that even free African Americans were not until very recently, but women’s relationship to the government has long been substantially different than that of men. Slaves were freed well before women were assured of a right to vote; the Nineteenth Amendment saying women were entitled to vote was fifty years after the Fifteenth Amendment tried to do the same for African Americans.
The early United States adopted English family law without much thought or change. Men understood how much they benefitted from the old law of domestic relations, and they did not choose to change it. Married women owed their obligations to their husbands, and husbands controlled much of what their wives could do. This system of coverture transferred a woman’s civic identity to her husband at marriage. Coverture denied that married women could have their own property and views independent of their husbands. They were denied bodily integrity and the ability to vote and to serve on juries.
Bodily integrity is a basic civil right underlying the right to vote and serve on juries, it is at risk for both blacks and women. The origins of the problems are different, as noted previously, coming from slavery and coverture, respectively. But the persistence of race and gender discrimination highlights the common risk to the bodies of blacks and women. For African American men it is the danger of being killed, while for many women of all colors it is the fear of being raped and of not having access to appropriate health care.
Across the country a number of police officers have killed many black people in recent years. Trayvon Martin in Florida, who was killed by a community watch captain, and Michael Brown in Missouri are only two of the most famous cases of young black men to be shot.18
Women have not been shot as often, but the bodily integrity of married women has been unstable over the years. Although husbands were expected to defend their wives from other men’s violence, their property right in their wife’s body was unfettered; rape was long defined as sexual assault on a woman “not his wife.” Some of these laws were changed in the 1970s, but marital rape was not a crime in all fifty states until the early 1990s.
Unmarried women are still at risk, as shown by decisions in two different rape cases. One was in Puerto Rico, where a student in a program run by Worcester Polytechnic Institute was raped by the security guard of their dorm. The rapist was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but Worcester College refused to take any responsibility for the rape, accusing the victim of making risky decisions. But if you cannot trust the security guard, who can you trust? The guard was hired by a subcontractor, a practice that has become common as described in chapter 3, and the parent company was unwilling to acknowledge that responsibility went up this ladder.
The other rape took place at Stanford University. A visitor to a fraternity party drank too much and passed out. She then was raped, with the charge lowered later to sexually assaulted, by a drunken Stanford student who was detained by other students for the police. Unlike the dormitory guard, the Stanford student was sentenced to six months. He received a slap on his wrist while the dorm guard was imprisoned for many years. The student’s father wrote a letter saying his son’s life had been ruined by his remorse for acting badly, and incarceration was unnecessary for his “20 minutes of action.” What is the message here? Is it any safer to go to a Stanford party than a Worcester mini-course?19
Women’s right to bodily integrity also is being threatened in the early twenty-first century as politicians turn against organizations like Planned Parenthood. Women’s bodily integrity seems to be threatened by denial of access to reproductive care resulting from inflammatory speech about abortion and women’s health care. Half the states have refused the provision in the Affordable Health Care Act that state health care plans cover abortion, and some employers are now exempted from covering expenses for contraception under the Affordable Care Act, increasing risks for many women.20
The U.S. Supreme Court declared a Texas law that had sharply restricted access to abortions to be unconstitutional in June 2016. It found that Texas’s restrictions requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and clinics—purportedly to meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers—violated the Court’s previous prohibition on placing an “undue burden” on a woman’s ability to obtain an abortion. The decision was the Court’s most sweeping statement on abortion since 1992 and a strong reaffirmation of the constitutional right to abortion established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade. It took the anti-abortionists only a few weeks to respond that they would not retire from the field; they would continue their attack on the rights of women to maintain bodily integrity.21
But the law appears to have had strong effects while in force. Death rates for pregnant women in Texas doubled after the state defunded Planned Parenthood. It is now comparable to death rates in Russia and Ukraine. Clear cause and effect has not been proven, but the timing is highly suggestive. As black men and boys are being shot in the United States by government officials, pregnant women are dying from governmental actions.22
Suffragettes and abolitionists were quite distinct in the nineteenth century, but their concerns were combined in the Fourteenth Amendment by its reference to “persons.” While the application of the equal protection clause of the amendment was intended to reduce discrimination for African Americans, women successfully claimed its protection in the latter third of the twentieth century. It took the Nineteenth Amendment to ensure women the vote, but “the alliance of race and sex formed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ... relocated disparate treatment because of sex from the venue of tradition to that of discrimination.”23
Voting for blacks was supposed to be secured in law by the Fifteenth Amendment and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it is still under attack today. The Supreme Court invalidated parts of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, and Southern states have rushed to reinstate rules reminiscent of Jim Crow laws. Since the Fifteenth Amendment barred the use of race in voting regulation, poll taxes were used in its place, depriving poor whites—men and women alike—of the vote as well. Poll taxes were outlawed by the Twenty-fourth Amendment in 1964, when five states were still using them. New restrictions like identity cards now are being used to keep poor people from the polls, and the federal courts have approved many of the restrictions.24
The attempts to allow more people to vote had important political effects. Before 1963, racially conservative racial views among Southern white voters strongly predicted Democratic identification. But when Presidents Kennedy and Johnson supported civil rights for African Americans, these racially conservative voters became Republicans. The shift of these voters explains three-fourths of the decline in white Southern Democratic identification. In 1960, all the Southern senators were Democrats. Now only three out of twenty-two are Democrats, and Northern Democrats struggle to accommodate to these changes.25
While men got the right to hold public office when they obtained the vote, women had to wait for subsequent court actions to hold public office. Both women and blacks traditionally were excluded from juries. Legislation gave both blacks and women the right to be on jury lists, but also gave prosecutors great discretion in excluding jurors they did not want. Women jurors become common as a result of changing state statutes and attorney practices only in the 1960s and 1970s; and not until 1992 did the Supreme Court rule that peremptory challenges, which do not need to be explained, could not be used on the basis of sex.
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1986 that peremptory challenges may not be used on the basis of race, the practice has continued, and black jurors are still rare in the South and some other parts of the country even though Supreme Court opinions have said they may not be excluded because of their race. The Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that Georgia attorneys illegally struck potential jurors from the jury in 1987 because they were black. The prosecutor’s notes showed that black prospective jurors were highlighted in green and labeled “B.” Timothy Foster, an innocent African American, was sentenced to death and imprisoned for thirty years as a result.26
The work that women could do was limited up until the 1930s to work around the house and a few outside activities like teaching, nursing and cotton-textile production. Women were largely barred from law, medicine, and many other professional fields by formal and informal quotas. They were barred from many well-paying jobs by the practice of naming job advertisements as “men wanted” and “women wanted,” which reserved best-paying jobs for men. They were limited in the work force by “protective” laws that reflected stereotypes of women’s character and social roles, restricting them from work that they actually were competent to do and often—by excluding whole job categories from coverage—exposing women of color to exploitation.
Women’s work only begun to change in the last generation. Slowly and after severe and often risky struggle, “the complementary practices of substituting family duties for civic obligations slowly crumbled.” And in an odd interaction between race and gender, female police officers—part of the new freedom of women to choose varied occupations—are significantly less likely to fire their weapons, probably saving black lives.27
Women still face prejudice at work, however. Women’s median earnings remain about 20 percent lower than men’s. Education is not the reason—women now have education equal to those of men in similar occupations. Yet women doctors and lawyers earn less than their male counterparts. And when women achieve prominence in a field, the wage goes down. Scholars are actively seeking to understand the source of this wage gap, but it shows up even after correcting for observable differences.28