Categories
asides

The Death of White America Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

From The Death of White America Has Been Greatly Exaggerated:

During a rant about what he perceived as left-wing giddiness over the “extinction of white people,” [FOX News commentator, Tucker Carlson] asked, “Where did all these people go?” The millions of missing white Americans did not, in fact, go anywhere. And they are not being replaced by minorities. Growing numbers of white Americans have multiracial children and grandchildren. Others were recategorized in 2020 as multiracial themselves, instead of single-race white.

In other words, White America is only going extinct if you maintain the illusory violence of the “one drop rule.

Categories
politics

Andrew McCarthy Demands Proof But Denies Reality

I follow The National Review on Facebook because I like to keep an eye on what passes for intellectualism on the right. I don’t read every article, but I read the headlines, and if something seems particularly saucy, I’ll dive in.

They recently published an essay by Andrew McCarthy titled, Systemic Racism? Make Them Prove It, in which he argues that systemic racism does not exist, and if it does, it is the fault of progressives, since “they are the system.”

The judges, the top prosecutors, the defense bar, the experts who craft the sentencing guidelines and the standards of confinement — overwhelmingly, they are political progressives.

To be sure, he doesn’t accuse these political progressives of racism; instead, he sees them as “professionals [who are] doing the best they can.”

He continues:

Still, the legal elites will insist there is systemic racism…because the outcomes the system produces are not “equal” — equality being a utopia in which the racial composition of those arrested, convicted and sentenced aligns perfectly with the proportion of that race in the overall population, as if all racial and ethnic groups committed crimes at exactly the same rates.

I had to stop reading at that point. 

Notice how McCarthy conflates arrests, convictions, and sentencing with the committal of crimes as if the former somehow gives us a real sense of the latter.

We currently have a President of the United States who brazenly violated the Hatch Act and certainly obstructed justice (not to mention the complete catalog of his criminal acts and cruelties), and yet, after 50+ years of criminal activity, this bonafide conman and historically recognized practitioner of systemic racism has never been charged with a felony

No member of Big Tobacco spent a night in jail for knowingly giving cancer to millions upon millions of customers. No member of Big Oil will do time for lying to consumers about the economic realities of recycling, thereby encouraging the continual production of virgin plastic and the continuing degradation of our planet.

You don’t have to look any further than the FinCEN Files to see the vast criminal activity taking place in the financial sector ($2 trillion worth of dirty transactions), and yet how many felony convictions will this scandal likely result in? None.

McCarthy’s conflation reveals his deep misunderstanding of systemic racism. He’s incapable of noticing the crimes that don’t result in arrests, convictions, and sentencing, the crimes that the dominant caste generally gets away with. 

McCarthy wants to force progressives to prove systemic racism (and to be sure, it’s easy to prove), but for evidence, he’s only willing to accept information produced by the system as it exists, which is racist. If a white-collar criminal destroys the lives of thousands of people, as President Trump did with Trump University, the chance of them being arrested, convicted, and sentenced is next to zero, but a black man selling loose cigarettes can be murdered on camera by law-enforcement officers who in turn will not be charged with a crime.

Unfortunately for those who want to rebut Mr. McCarthy, it is impossible to provide reliable information regarding the commitment of criminal acts broken down by race. If no one is arrested and charged with a crime, or no accusation is made to a reporting authority (as is the case for most sexual violence), how could we know a crime was committed? 

The charge of systemic racism comes from a 400-year-long collection of lived experiences. It comes from anecdotes, memories, past and present traumas, cell phone footage, investigative journalism, documentary films, songs, and local, state, and federal policies (past and present). It is supported by a wide range of statistical evidence relating to the different (and sometimes starkly tragic) challenges a person is likely to face in their life simply because of the color of their skin. 

According to the systemic racism argument, law enforcement in the United States (as well as other systems and institutions) reinforces the unwritten rules of our racially divided caste system. It argues, among other things, that rich, white men generally get away with committing whatever crime they want, while poor persons of color get arrested, charged, and sentenced for crimes they did not commit.    

But to prove such an argument, Mr. McCarthy would like progressives to produce evidence that rich, white men commit just as many crimes as poor, black men. The only way to do that would be to interrogate their priests for confession rates, and I recall a papal law against that.

Mr. McCarthy writes that, for progressives, “equality [is] a utopia in which the racial composition of those arrested, convicted and sentenced aligns perfectly with the proportion of that race in the overall population, as if all racial and ethnic groups committed crimes at exactly the same rates.”

While he doesn’t say it outright, his statement implies an affinity for the countering thesis: racial and ethnic groups commit crimes at different rates. He doesn’t develop this counter thesis, however, because: a) it’s racist as fuck, and b) he can’t demonstrate evidence for it. Like me, all he can do is demonstrate evidence of convictions and not the committed acts. 

Instead of supporting his terrible, racist counter-thesis with evidence he can’t provide, he transitions to accusations of systemic racism in academia, calling the Middlebury College President a “doyen of higher education” whose observation that racism occurs on her campus seems to have really troubled Mr. McCarthy.

He asserts that those who claim to see evidence of systemic racism are practicing “Marxism and voodoo, mainly.” This is how he denies the concept of disparate impact, which recognizes that a system designed to be neutral can still have discriminatory effects. 

For an example of disparate impacts, look at the Fair Housing Act of 1934. A creation of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, the act was designed to make homeownership more accessible to Americans,  but it did so in ways that reinforced the 300-year-old caste system. Nothing in the Fair Housing Act of 1934 would have predicted this effect. The act is, in essence, race-neutral, but in effect, it was incredibly harmful to black Americans.

Though Mr. McCarthy writes for a supposedly intellectually rigorous publication, his argument misunderstands the basic premises of systemic racism and reveals his desire to maintain a status quo where “professionals [who are] doing the best they can” continue to be given the benefit of the doubt over the subordinate caste members who have been crying out for 400 years for relief. 

Categories
politics

Combining Reparations & Universal Basic Income

I believe the United States of America owes reparations to the descendants of the individuals who were kidnapped from their homeland, shipped across the Atlantic Ocean aboard slave ships (where an estimated 15% of prisoners died at sea), sold in flesh markets, beaten, tortured, raped, their children and parents and spouses ripped from their arms, their wombs turned into slave mills, and their descendants relegated to the lowest caste in American society for four-hundred years and counting.

I believe the United States of America owes reparations to the descendants of the individuals whose labor was stolen from them, whose right to own property was denied them, whose right to vote continues to be challenged by white-supremacist power brokers in the Republican party, whose right to healthcare continues to be withheld lest upper-caste doctors, pharmaceutical brokers, and insurance executives see their profits diminish, whose bodies continue to be objects of fear and scorn to publicly-funded security professionals, whose freedoms have been curtailed and whose ability to earn an honest income has been stolen by a prejudicial justice system, whose families have been broken by ghettoization, unjust imprisonment, untreated mental illness, and the need to self-medicate after a life of continuing, constant trauma caused by nothing more than their subordinate role in the caste hierarchy.

I do not know how to determine which living individuals in the United States deserve to be the recipient of these reparations, nor do I know how the cost of reparations could be funded, but I believe the bill is long past due.

H.R. 40: An Attempt to Make Congress Deal with the Question of Reparations

In June 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing on H.R. 40, which is a bill named after the “forty acres and mule” promise made by General Sherman during the Civil War. H.R. 40 aims “to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery.”

The bill was originally introduced by Rep. John Conyers in 1989 and reintroduced by him every year until he left Congress in 2017. Rep. Conyers passed away in 2019 without ever getting the bill to a vote.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee took up Conyers’ cause last year and introduced it to the 116th Congress. The bill is now cosponsored by 154 other representatives, including every member of “The Squad” and my representative, Peter Welch, but not including a single Republican politician.

The Juneteenth hearing on H.R. 40 held in 2019 lasted three hours. If passed, the bill  would “authorize $12 million for a 13-member commission to study the effects of slavery and make recommendations to Congress.”

As of today, that Juneteenth hearing is the only action taken on the bill. It still sits in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, waiting for a vote.

There is a version of H.R. 40 in the Senate as well. S. 1083 was introduced by Senator Cory Booker in April 2019 and cosponsored by 19 other senators, including my senator, Bernie Sanders, and again, not including a single Republican politician.

Neither H.R. 40 nor S. 1083 will move forward until Sen. Mitch McConnell’s leadership of the Senate is removed, which all good Americans hope will happen this November.

The Cost of Reparations

There is no consensus yet on the cost of the moral, physical, and financial debt accrued by the United States’ white-supremacist policies, but there have been plenty of proposals.

The Black Manifesto of 1969:  $500 million ($3.53 billion in 2020 dollars)

The Black Manifesto of the National Black Economic Conference of 1969 was penned by James Forman, an active member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a Black Panther, and a member of the League of Revolutionary Workers, as well as an author and professor.

The Black Manifesto demanded “white Christian Churches and Jewish Synagogues, which are part and parcel of the system of capitalism” pay $500 million to the estimated 30 million black people in the United States, or as Forman formulated it, “$15 a n****r.”

The NBEC manifesto called for the $500 million to be spent in the following ways:

  • $200 million for a Southern land bank for black people “who want to establish cooperative farms but have no funds”
  • $130 million for the creation of an all-black university in the South
  • $80 million for black-controlled media groups to be set up in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Detroit “as an alternative to the racist propaganda” and “the white-dominated and controlled” publishing, printing, and television fields
  • $40 million for the creation of research-skills centers that focus on “the problems of the black people” and communications-skill centers that teach community organization, movie-making, television-making, photography, radio, etc.
  • $20 million for a National Black Labor Strike and Defense Fund to protect black people who fight racist working conditions
  • $20 million for the establishment of the International Black Appeal, an organization committed to establishing cooperatives with African countries and African Liberation Movements, as well as the establishment of a Black Anti-Defamation League
  • $10 million to organize the recipients of welfare to advocate for their rights

The Roosevelt Institute Report of 2020: $12 trillion

Written by William Darity, Jr., a professor of Public Policy, African and African-American Studies, and Economics at Duke University, and A. Kirsten Mullen, a writer, folklorist, museum consultant, and lecturer on race, art, history, and politics, the Roosevelt Institute Report, titled Resurrecting the Promise of 40 Acres: The Imperative of Reparations for Black Americans, expands on the work the writers completed for a book on reparations.

Darity and Mullen contend that the United States government is “the culpable party” who must pay a debt worth $10-$12 trillion (in 2016 dollars) to “black American descendants of persons enslaved in the U.S,” a group whose number they estimate to be around 40 million Americans.

To qualify for reparations, an individual must have “self-identified as black, negro, or African-American on an official document—perhaps making public the self-report of their race on the U.S. census—for at least 12 years before the enactment” of reparations.

The claim anchors on General Sherman’s Civil War-era promise in Special Field Orders 15 to provide the former slaves of the South with “a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground” of confiscated Confederate land, but it does not rest on that claim. It brings into focus three eras for which reparations are due, each of which individually would make a compelling case, and as a group, are undeniable.

  1. The era of chattel slavery, which produced white supremacy in the U.S.
  2. The era of Jim Crow, which created an American-style apartheid
  3. The era following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which continues to include mass incarceration; police brutality and murder; discrimination in employment, housing, and credit; and “the immense black-white wealth disparity.”

The $10-$12 trillion figure is based on closing the gap in the black-white (pre-tax) wealth differential (though don’t ask me to explain the math).

With that being said, they argue that however the figure is calculated, “the racial wealth gap is the economic measure that best captures the cumulative effects of the full trajectory of American white supremacy from slavery to the present,” and the final tally ought to be indexed to it.

The Unremunerated Labor Formula of 2015: $14 trillion

In an article published in the journal Social Science Quarterly, Professor Thomas Craemer from the University of Connecticut placed a value on the unremunerative hours the slaves labored (18 hours a day in some instances) and multiplied it by historical free labor market wages, compounded by 3% interest. Craemer’s results ranged from $5.9 to $14.2 trillion (in 2009 dollars).

The amount, however, does not take into account the emotional and physical trauma suffered by the slaves or their descendants, the colonial era preceding the creation of the United States, the inequalities of the Jim Crow era (since his estimation ends with slavery), nor the inequalities following the Civil Rights era and continuing today.

The Minimum Wage Formula of 2018: $97 trillion

In the 2018 book, The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist with the London School of Economics, goes further than Craemer’s formula by including the colonial era in his estimate of unremunerated labor.

He writes that “the United States alone benefited from a total of 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and the abolition of slavery in 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that is worth $97 trillion today.”

Like Craemer’s formula, however, Hickel does not take into account anything that happened following President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

The Asheville Resolution of 2020: ~$10 trillion

On July 14th of this year, the City of Asheville, North Carolina, unanimously passed a resolution “Supporting Reparations for Black Asheville.” Along with apologizing for a variety of offenses against the city’s black residents going back to the time of lawful slavery, the resolution directs the City Manager “to establish a process within the next year to develop short, medium and long term recommendations to specifically address the creation of generational wealth and to boost economic mobility and opportunity in the black community.”

The resolution also calls for the creation of a commission to make recommendations, and it imagines (though does not require) the following solutions recommended by the commission:

  • increasing minority homeownership and access to other affordable housing
  • increasing minority business ownership and career opportunities
  • strategies to grow equity and generational wealth
  • closing the gaps in health care, education, employment, and pay
  • neighborhood safety and fairness within the criminal-justice system

It does not give a cost to these priorities or solutions, nor does it provide any direct funding to the commission, but if we extrapolate from its priorities and assign them to the country as a whole, we will probably end up at a figure similar to the ones above: somewhere around $10 trillion.

A Modest Proposal: Reparations as a Pilot Program for a Universal Basic Income

In this year’s Democratic primary, one of the “political outsider candidates” was businessperson Andrew Yang, whose major policy proposal was the creation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for every American. Yang envisioned a new entitlement program whereby each American citizen over the age of 18 receives a “Freedom Dividend” of $1,000 a month.

Yang’s rationale for establishing a UBI focuses on the economy’s shift to automation. Over four-million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2015 due to automation, and “the smartest people in the world now predict that a third of all working Americans will lose their job to automation in the next 12 years.”

Yang’s Freedom Dividend hopes to cover the basic costs of living for most Americans. While $1,000 a month won’t cover everything (the average rent in the U.S., for example, is roughly $1,400/month), it would ease the paycheck-to-paycheck stress that forces Americans to allow their employers to exploit them.

The Cost of a UBI

The number of citizens over the age of 18 in the United States is roughly 255 million. At $12,000 per citizen, we’re talking a gross cost of roughly $3 trillion per year. The net cost, however, would be (according to some estimates) roughly $539 billion per year, or roughly 2.5% of the U.S.’s 2017 GDP.

But if we’re to reimagine reparations as a pilot proposal for UBI, we don’t want to do the math for every citizen. We want to do it for every black citizen. I don’t have a number for how many black Americans are above the age of 18 in the United States, but there are roughly 44 million black individuals in the country, which would give us a gross cost of roughly $529 billion per year. The net cost would be lower.

For comparison, the U.S. spends roughly $182 billion a year (2017) to support the nation’s mass incarceration policies.

How To Pay for a UBI

To pay for his proposal, Yang would like to add a Value-Added Tax (VAT) on the production of goods and services produced by American businesses. Every country in Europe already has a VAT, and 160 of 193 countries have one. He also adds that governments can’t tax the incomes of robots or software, so as automation increases, the country’s revenue from income taxes will decrease. A VAT, however, keeps the money flowing.

Yang estimates that the country could pay for a UBI through not just a VAT, but also a reduction in social-service expenditures (a citizen can choose the current array of social-service programs [welfare, food stamps, etc.] or the Freedom Dividend, but not both), a reduction in healthcare costs (since the dividend would be used to fund regular doctor visits), a reduction in prison costs (since people would be able to take better care of themselves, and thus not be forced into a life of crime), a growing economy (since every U.S. citizen over the age of 18 would have an extra $12,000 to spend each year), and changes to the tax system to draw in more money from top earners and big polluters.

Reparations As A UBI: ~$5 trillion over 10 years

Yang’s rationale for a UBI makes sense, and virtually every major Democratic politician (excluding V.P. Joe Biden, the party’s current standard-bearer) supports some version of either a UBI or a Federal Job Guarantee to offset the losses to automation and software. The same politicians (and still excluding V.P. Joe Biden) support some form of reparations.

The Democrats could combine these efforts to help reduce opposition to both UBI and reparations. If the Democrats take both houses of Congress and the White House in November, they should put forward a UBI pilot program that envisions paying black adults $1,000 a month and black minors $500 a month for the next ten years

Throughout the decade of reparations payments, researchers could study the effect of the UBI, and if it results in the rewards that Yang and other supporters predict (above and beyond the improvements in racial equity predicted by the supporters of reparations), Congress could use the data to inform the effort to pass a true Universal Basic Income for every American.

A cost of $5 trillion over 10 years (gross) is among the lowest proposals on the table. It would need to be accompanied by a national reckoning, apology, and truth-telling initiative to help Americans face our nation’s long history of institutionalized racism. This initiative would have costs of its own, but it would probably not exceed the $12 million requested by H.R. 40.

Combining UBI with reparations for slavery would allow the United States to (as a friend of mine likes to say) “feed two birds with one seed.” It won’t cure every ill facing the United States, but it will start to put the bloodiest stains of our nation’s past policies and actions behind us and urge us toward a better, more equitable future.

Categories
asides

Scholar Eve Ewing on Why She Capitalizes ‘White’

From Why I Capitalize “White”:

As long as White people do not ever have to interrogate what Whiteness is, where it comes from, how it operates, or what it does, they can maintain the fiction that race is other people’s problem, that they are mere observers in a centuries-long stage play in which they have, in fact, been the producers, directors, and central actors.

Categories
asides

Yes My Dear, All White People Are Racists

You can’t help you were born to racist parents, who were raised in a White Supremacist system.

You can help with tearing down the racist systems and structures that support you and kill me and my sons based on flawed science crafted by flawed White and European people. White people admitting they are racist is necessary for those individuals desiring to do something right now.

Marley, K., All White People Are Racist

Categories
life politics

What Makes Me White

All of my ancestors, according to my DNA, are from northwestern Europe. Most of them were Irish, a little over a quarter of them were English or Welsh, a little under a fifth of them were French, and about 3% of them were Swedish or Dutch.

But that’s not what makes me white.

Many African peoples, when northwestern Europeans first returned to the mother continent, referred to them not as “white people” or “fair-skinned people,” but as mzungu, which translates as “wanderer.”

So it’s not my skin’s contrast to theirs that makes me white.

My skin’s pigmentation is a product of my evolutionary chain. Its genetic heritage can (currently) be traced back to roughly 7,700 years ago, when at least seven individuals in southern Sweden had two gene variants that “lead to depigmentation, and therefore, pale skin” and a third variant, “which causes blue eyes and may also contribute to light skin and blond hair.” These gene variants were perhaps naturally selected to maximize vitamin D synthesis in the northern latitudes, where it is harder for the human body to get vitamin D thanks to a decrease of ultra-violet radiation in northern sunlight.

But my ancestors’ evolutionary journey into the northern latitudes does not make me white. If it did, the first northern Europeans to reach central Africa wouldn’t have been called mzungu.

What makes me white is the Atlantic slave trade, the belief by a population that would come to define themselves as white that they were more significant, more deserving, more…human than those they defined as not-white.

Race requires racism to exist. It is the excuse the powerful use to justify their power to themselves. It allows them to normalize for themselves their dominance over an entire population.

The first central Africans to see northern Europeans saw a people who were lost, people who were aimlessly moving across the land.

The northern Europeans, on the other hand, saw the central Africans as slaves to be used, as resources to be plucked up and burnt out. The difference in skin pigmentation did not create that difference in power

My skin doesn’t make me white. My DNA doesn’t make me white.

The need to justify my population’s social and institutional domination over cohabiting populations makes me white.

“You have to dominate,” my white President told the nation’s governors. “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.”

Fuck. That. Guy.

Black Lives Matter.

Categories
politics

Calling Out Racist Bullshit

I have, at several points during my 41+ years of existence, said the racist word, “n****r.” I’ve never said it with enmity or hurled it as a curse. I’ve said it ironically, like a “good white liberal,” or to shock people, like an inconsiderate white wiseass. I say this to say that I too am guilty.

Yesterday, I called out a family member on Facebook for sharing a racist joke that made fun of the way a subset of non-white immigrants sometimes have trouble enunciating particular letter combinations in English, and while the joke was funny enough for what it was, I felt obligated to call it out as racist.

Like me, my family member is not an overt racist, but like millions of white people, we were raised in a milieu that denigrated nonwhite people with unconscious effort, allowing individuals such as us to grow up as good Kennedy Democrats at the same time as we grew up as unconsciously systematized protectors of a predominantly white, predominantly English-speaking majority.

As good Kennedy Democrats, this was not our fault. The twentieth century was the twentieth century, and so many of us were victims of our colonial and imperial upbringings. We have all made mistakes, but we can all be forgiven.

What is our fault (and what will continue to be our fault) is if we allow that racist milieu to continue to exist.

Going forward into the third decade of the twenty-first century, white people such as me and my family member have to police ourselves. We have to be aware of what we say, how we act, what agendas we advance, what rights we defend, and what we call out for the racist bullshit it is.

Not because our words and actions may offend politically-correct “snowflakes.” But because our words and actions ought to be directed toward creating a better world where every individual feels valued and welcomed.

I am not upset with my family member; I hope they are not upset with me.

What I am upset with racism in all its forms, myself included. And that’s why I felt and feel obligated to call out racist bullshit for what it is, and to demand that we all, myself included, do better.