Toward and More Just and Equitable Society: How to be an Ally in the Fight for Racial Equity

 The Two Tracks

There are two tracks that white people can follow to be allies in the fight for racial justice and equity in our society. On one track, we can support the efforts of people of color in the explicit fight for racial justice. On the other track, we can as white people work for a more just and equitable distribution of wealth and income in our society. On this track, we deal with issues that are not explicitly racial but that have racial implications.

Allies in the Explicit Fight for Racial Justice

Most writers on the subject of how we can work as allies agree that  white people should not attempt to lead the fight for racial justice but should support the efforts of people of color. As allies, we must first of all educate ourselves in the history and effects of racism in our country.  This is not simply a matter of learning facts but of changing deeply held opinions and attitudes. For many, the process of education is difficult and even painful, and it takes place over years.  As we learn, we can must share what we have learned with others.

We can in addition, offer forums in which people of color can express their concerns and their demands. We can contribute financially to the fight, and we can participate in marches and demonstrations to show our support. We can vote for political candidates of color and for those who support reforms. We can participate in multiracial groups that work to get local governments to appoint people of color to committees and commissions. We can also push the organizations to which we belong to look for ways to become more inclusive.

Working for a More Just Society

All of these things are useful, but they do not exhaust the possibilities.  We can also fight for a more just society in ways that are not explicitly antiracist but that have the effect of reducing the economic gap between white people and people of other races. People of color are much poorer on average than white people.  This relative poverty of people of color is not a matter only of people who are poor in the sense that they have very low incomes and almost no wealth. The relative poverty of people of color extends through almost all levels of our society. People of color with college degrees, professional qualifications and good jobs are paid less on average that white people with similar resumés; people of color carry heavier burdens of student debt than white people; and they have far less inherited wealth than white people. Consequently, their relative poverty reproduces itself in each generation across almost all levels of our society. The relative poverty of people of color is not itself racism, but it is an effect of racism.[i]

To mitigate this effect of racism, we need to think about ways of redistributing wealth and income in our country, and in doing so, it helps to remember that racial inequality is not the only kind of inequality that we have. We live in a society in which most of the wealth is held by a very small percentage of the people, and we can develop policies that increase the fairness of our society as a whole.

If we do that, we will also decrease the wealth gap between people of color and white people because people of color are overrepresented in the poorer levels of our society and therefore, they will benefit disproportionately from policies that redistribute wealth or income down. Thus, reducing the economic effects of racism is bound up with the task of making our society as a whole more equitable. If we do that, we will reduce the wealth gap between white people and others, and we will at the same time make most white people better off. Thus, the struggle for a just and equitable society is not exclusively a racial struggle. It is a struggle for all of us.

We Must Work on Both Tracks

As allies in the struggle against racism, we white people must work on these two parallel tracks. On one track, we support the political struggles of people of color. Such struggles might include the struggle for reparations, the struggle against police violence, the struggle for immigration reform and the struggle against environmental injustices. Elements of the struggle for prison reform also appear on this track. In those struggles, we follow the leadership of people of color.

On the second track, we struggle for a more just and equitable distribution of income and wealth in our society. Such struggles might include the struggle to raise the minimum wage, the struggle for affordable child care, the struggle for free post-secondary education, the struggle for affordable housing, and the struggle for a decent, national system of health care. Some elements of the struggle for prison reform may also appear on this track.  Here, we act independently for justice and equity for all people in our society.

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[i] William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2020

The Radical Right Undermines Our Democracy for Partisan Advantage

The Radical Right is Deliberately Undermining Our Democracy for Partisan Advantage.

Mr. Trump’s claim that our presidential election was won by fraud is patently false, and it has been rejected out of hand by dozens of judges as well as several state governors. In spite of the claim’s absurdity, it has done great harm to our country because millions of Americans believe it, and as a result, they deny the legitimacy of our government and of our basic, political institutions.

Our Government Survives Because We Believe It is Legitimate

Our democracy, like any government, has not survived for two centuries on brute force alone. It has survived because most of us accord legitimacy to it and to the electoral processes by which our leaders are chosen. Our government has survived because we accept it and follow its rules most of the time. We do not actively oppose it or attempt to overthrow it. We believe that submitting to the government is right and just even when it does not act justly. We express that belief in the principle that we are a nation of laws, and that it is an obligation of a citizen to obey the laws. We believe this because we believe that our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed just as our Declaration of Independence says that it should, and the way that “the consent of the governed” is expressed is through fair and open elections.

It is true that we also have a strong tradition of civil disobedience in which people deliberately disobey what they see as unjust laws, but even in civil disobedience, we accord legitimacy to our institutions. Thus, the civil rights demonstrators of the nineteen sixties allowed themselves to be arrested and taken to jail. They placed their trust in the legal institutions of our country. They demanded change, but they did not propose revolution.

The Claim of Fraudulent Elections Legitimizes Violence

Claiming that our elections are fraudulent shatters the consensus on which the legitimacy of our government depends and thus legitimizes violent, armed resistance. Violent resistance in the United States is a real possibility. Our country has many, organized armed groups that claim to represent the real will of the people. It is not clear how many members these groups have, but the number is estimated at several tens of thousands. Today, the groups are fragmented and have little power, but their members have shown a willingness to commit extremely violent acts and to promote violence against public officials.  If the groups were to be brought together in a national movement, they would become a real threat to our democracy.

Our Democracy May Not Survive

That is the threat presented by the actions of our outgoing president and his supporters. They threaten to turn a fragmented collection of violent groups into the violent component of an organized, national movement with central direction and millions of members. Currently, the campaign against the legitimacy of Biden’s election is the national organization, and the violent radical rightist groups that support it form the basis of the development of an organization like SA. The violent groups by themselves cannot overthrow our system because they are too small and fragmented, but if they become the violent vanguard of a national movement with millions of members, our democracy may not survive. Our democracy could die as Germany’s did in 1932. In the election of that year, the Nazi Party received more than 11 million votes, but the SA, its paramilitary wing (the brownshirts), had only 400,000 members at that time, and a few years earlier, it had been far smaller.)

The effects of the nationalization of the violent groups have already appeared in threats to the lives of election officials and elected politicians, and I fear that the movement will become more violent and more extreme. The threat of violence is already being used to maintain Trump’s control of the Republican Party and to keep Republican politicians in line. The effect may well be that even if the forms of our democratic institutions survive, they will cease to function. If the radical right denies the legitimacy of Mr. Biden’s government, it may well become impossible for Republican legislators to engage in bipartisan work with Democrats, and our national government will be immobilized. We will be unable to take action against any of the serious, national problems that we face.

We must stand firm against the destruction of our democracy by the radical right and its armed gangsters.

Reducing Racial Inequity in the United States By Making Everyone’s Life Better

 We Must Reduce Racial Inequity in the Distribution of Wealth

Reducing the racial inequity in the distribution of wealth in the United States is an important task. Black people have on average a tiny fraction of the wealth and income of white people, and the difference is due largely to racist policies the history of which is exhaustively detailed by Darity and Mullen[i].  Black people today inherit less than white people do on average, and they have a harder time accumulating wealth during their lives because they are paid less on average than white people at every occupational level. This problem will not solve itself anytime soon. Some kind of action is needed.

Reducing Inequity Through Reparations

We cannot undo the racist policies of the past, but we can reduce their effects in the present by adopting policies designed to make it easier for black people to accumulate wealth. Among those policies are reparations. Reparations are cash payments or services that would be provided for black people as a way of making the wealth accumulation playing field more level in our country.  Reparations would be paid for by the federal government out of tax revenue, and a detailed and reasonable proposal for reparations has been laid out by Darity and Mullen.[ii]

Alternatives to Reparations

The moral case for reparations is unassailable, but politically, the idea has one great weakness, which is that it ignores class differences and consequently leads to the false idea that in order for black people to prosper, white people as a group must give something up.   Talking in terms of reparations leads people to think that in order to level the playing field, all white people must suffer, and of course, that generates opposition. Many white people say, “We didn’t own slaves; we didn’t redline black neighborhoods; we didn’t lynch people or terrorize them. Why should we pay?”

We can approach this problem in a different way if we remember that we live in a time of enormous inequality.  We live in a time in which the wealth gap between the richest white people and the poorest is at least as great as the gap between the median white person and the median black person. Most of the wealth of our society is owned by a small, upper class. In such a society, a graduated, progressive income tax system can guarantee that most of the money to pay for reducing the inequity in the distribution of wealth would come from people who now have substantial wealth and substantial incomes. Most white people would not suffer. In fact, they would benefit.

We can design policies that will have the effect of reducing racial inequity while also reducing class inequity. If we focus on increasing the fairness of our society generally, we will inevitably reduce the gap between black and white people because black people, being overrepresented among the poor and the working class in this country, will benefit disproportionately.

Focusing on fairness in our society in this way meets Ibram Kendi’s definition of an antiracist policy. In his book entitled, How to be an Antiracist[iii], Kendi defines a racist policy as “any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups,” and he defines an antiracist policy as “any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups.”[iv]

What then can we do to reduce unfairness in our society and thereby reduce the inequity between black and white people in the distribution of wealth?  A number of things have been proposed, and here are a few of them.

Create Public Trust Funds for All Children

William Darity and his colleagues have proposed that a publicly funded trust fund would be set up for each child that is born in the United States, and the amount in the fund would vary from $500 for children from well-to-do families to $50,000 for children from poor families. Trust funds of this kind would be especially beneficial for black children because black families have on average only about 10% of the wealth that white families have, but the funds would also benefit poor, white children.

Raise the Federal Minimum Wage to $15 or More

An article published by the Economic Policy Institute shows that raising the minimum wage would have a strong effect on the incomes of black workers, and that would increase their ability to save and build wealth. Black workers are overrepresented in minimum wage jobs, and in addition, black people are concentrated in states that have very low minimum wages. So, an increase in the minimum wage would help to reduce the wealth gap between black and white people.

Provide Publicly Supported, Affordable Child Care

The lack of affordable child care is one of our country’s largest barriers to economic equity. Affordable child care would make it possible for many women to go to work or to go to school to improve their skills and thereby increase their incomes. Affordable child care would also make it possible for working women to raise their living standards and to save money thereby increasing their wealth. Thus, affordable child care would benefit working class families of all races, but because black people are more likely than white people to be poor, black people would benefit disproportionately, and the gap between them and white people would be reduced.

Let’s Make Everyone’s Life Better

This article has described a few of the alternatives to reparations for reducing racial inequity in the distribution of wealth in the United States. They are not the only alternatives. Others might include creating a decent, national health care system, providing a reasonable supply of affordable housing or providing a guaranteed, annual income. All of these proposals have the advantage of providing an alternative to the narrative that says that any effort to improve the lot of black people must inevitably worsen the lot of white people.

We can make everyone’s life better!

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[i] William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2020

[ii] Darity and Mullen, pp. 256-70.

[iii] Ibram Kendi, How to be an Antiracist, One World, New York, 2019.

[iv] Kendi, p. 18.