Systemic Racism is the Chokehold on America’s Flourishing
Let’s ban lethal chokeholds and stop spending billions to make our police look like imperial troops occupying hostile land — ASAP. But virtually every American adult knows that is not going to stop the wrenching inequality of opportunity that has left African Americans with a minuscule percentage of national wealth, incarceration rates that exceed college graduation rates and a lethal virus that is out of control in more than 20 states killing them at a rate multiples greater than white Americans.
For more than 20 years I have had my desk MLK’s 1967 book “Where Do We Go From Here” that Charles Blow references in the NYT Op-ed below that is entitled the “Civil Rights Act of 2020.” For last five years MLK’s final vision of a multi-racial coalition making an effective majoritarian demand for social and economic justice has sat next to Francis Fukuyama’s two volume master work: “The Origins of Political Order & Decay.” Fukuyama is the Director of The Center for Democracy & The Rule of Law at Stanford whose parents endured the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. His magisterial examination of human political history more than makes up for his youthful confusion in neo-conservative circles (which now abhor him) that made him a global intellectual celebrity as author of “The End of History” in 1990.
Fukuyama massive tome is aligned MLK and Charles Blow. Fukuyama’s master work concludes that the basis of collective human flourishing from Manadarin China 2,500 years ago to the to global rise of Islam to the global rise of Europe and then America is the social trust that depends on the competence of the largely autonomous, meritocratic, administrative state — i.e. what our incumbent President calls the “deep state”. Which is always subject to being captured and destroyed by the rapacious oligarchy it exists to explode.
During America’s most rapid economic growth and growth in worker productivity in the post WWII years 1950–1980 we taxed the top 1% income earners an average of 81% (meanwhile Britain taxed them 89% over those years) and more than 50% of pre-tax national income flowed to the bottom 50%. Why since 2010 has that been reversed so that ZERO income gains have flowed to the bottom 50% and more than 80% of income gains has flowed to the top 1% — now taxed at an effective rate (including investment returns) of less than 30%? (see the anayslis likely to impact history in Thomas Piketty’s 2020 “Capital & Idealogy”).
I submit that the reason is systemic racism. Long after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the USA has taken the obviously unacceptable racIsm of segregation enforced by attack dogs and firehouses in the South and replaced it with the full blossoming and legacy of Richard Nixon’s (and Roger Ailes) “Southern Staretegy ” which reacted to the 1964 Civil Rights Act by race baiting the racist George Wallace (that proudly racist Governor of Alamaba that Lynyrd Skynard sang of) supporting Democrats into the GOP. Few remember that Wallace won 14 states in his 1972 presidential bid including Michigan.
The “strange fruit” of the GOP’s. “southern strategy” was not night lynchings in the Deep South but an economic and political strangling of the bottom 33% American income earners. Who were and are disproportionately people of color. Some Democrats -especially Bill Clinton and his benighted “Third Way” politics born in right to work states of the former confederacy — reacted to the economic devastation of urban African Americans brought on by the collapse of US Manufacturing that began in the 70s and was unforgettably described by Juliuis Wilson in 1996 in “When Work Disappears“ — with deluded neo-liberal policies that provided de jure protections for minorities while global economic trends provided de facto devastation for all those poor in America. Who were and are disproportionally minorities. In this way, attack dogs and firehouses were replaced by animosity towards any sort of German or Japanese like industrial strategy, ridiculously irresponsible “free trade” deals and an outrageous slashing of tax on the mega rich and global corporations. Which damned the majority of workers in the US who are high school educated wage earners to fight over declining scraps.
Now in 2020 most my small company’s global corporate clients do not pay taxes on a rate equal to 1/4 what my tiny company does. Moreover most affluent investor friends legally pay near zero or zero in taxes — like our President. Meanwhile, people of color in America are very publicly vilified as “illegals” or even murdered by rogue police officers on video for every child to see. AND poor white Americans commit suicide at rates without known precedent in history. This is how I’ve seen racism become more systemic in America in my adulthood to the grave disadvantage of both people of color and poor whites in America.
Where do we go from here? Well, I have a book and an op-ed I would suggest. Please see below. And please at least imagine an America with a small business supporting industrial policy and publicly supported living wage jobs, health care and retirement enjoyed by more than 200 million in Northern Europe in German and Nordic countries and more than 200 million in a growing East Asia anchored by Japan and South Korea. The USA can regain our lead in the world — economically, educationally and environmentally — if we can overcome our systemic racism. Which is why America has not yet responded as well as our international “knowledge work” economic competitors like Germany and Japan to the triple threat of Covid-19, income inequality and environmental justice. First, we have decide that we want to triumph — together.
