Equality and Equity

 Equality Before the Law

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ….” These inspirational words, written by Thomas Jefferson, are among the basic principles of our society and our laws, but what did they mean when they were written, and why do we now worry not only about equality but also about equity?

When Jefferson wrote these words, he was referring to equality before the law. He lived in a time when all people were not equal before the English law. Members of the English aristocracy had rights and privileges that ordinary people did not have. They were hereditary members of Parliament, and they controlled the country and its laws. They used their privileges to protect their ownership of most of the wealth of the country.  They claimed that this situation was right and just because it was divinely ordained. People said, “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate.”

Jefferson declared that this kind of inequality was wrong. It was contrary to the laws of “Nature and Nature’s God.” In America, he said, everyone would be equal before the law.  Unfortunately, this lofty principle was not applied consistently. In Jefferson’s time, black people were not equal, and neither were women or Native Americans. Those inequalities had consequences that have reverberated throughout our history, which has been marked by continual struggles to obtain legal equality.

Equality of Opportunity

The struggle for legal equality has been and continues to be important to us because it is a condition of equality of opportunity, which is an important American value.  We believe that all people should have equal opportunities to prosper in life. Moreover, for us, equality of opportunity justifies the inequality of wealth that is an obvious feature of our society. It is acceptable to us that some people should be rich and others poor if we all have the same opportunity be rich, and we know that equality of opportunity requires at least legal equality.

Equity

Unfortunately, legal equality by itself cannot really guarantee equality of opportunity because people are born into unequal circumstances. Some people are born to wealth, and others are not. Some people face barriers created by both historical and contemporary racial discrimination while others do not.

For example, it has been well-documented that on average, black families in the United States have only about one eighth of the wealth of white families. This means that on average, black children face a harder struggle than white children to obtain professional or technical training. To overcome this handicap, black people end up carrying a heavier burden of student debt than white people do on average, and that burden becomes a drag on their economic prospects throughout their lives. Thus, the race for economic prosperity is not really fair, or as we now say, it is not equitable. That is why we worry today about equity as well as equality.

Equity and Real Equality of Opportunity

If we want our country to be one in which all people really have equality of opportunity, we must address the sources of inequity in our society. As far as we can, we must remove the practical, non-legal barriers that deny equality of opportunity to millions of people. We will never eliminate all of the inequalities of wealth or race but we can make them less important than they are today.

For example, we could make post-secondary education free for all students so that people who have not been born into wealth would not have to take on heavy debts to earn technical or professional certifications.  We could provide affordable child-care so that families who are poor would not need to impoverish themselves still further to provide for their children. We could develop a decent, national health care system so that no one needs to avoid taking her children to the doctor when they are sick.

These kinds of services – education, child care, health care – would not be charity. They would help people to help themselves. They would increase the equity of our society, and they would move us a little closer to real equality of opportunity.

Capitalist Dominion and the Culture Wars

 Cultural Issues in American Politics.

Anyone observing the United States could be forgiven for thinking that cultural issues are important movers in American politics, but such an observer would be wrong.  It is true that cultural issues generate a lot of heat and that it is not difficult to gin up a political movement based on people’s fears of cultural change. However, fears of cultural change do not by themselves make a political movement. In order to turn vaguely felt fears into an organized, political movement, money is needed. Lots of money. If we want to understand why cultural issues play such a large role in our politics, we must ask ourselves who provides the money, and why they do it? Who benefits? That is the question.

The Capitalist Class Benefits

The answer is simple. The members of the capitalist class benefit. They benefit because they have been able to use cultural fears to divide the working class politically along cultural lines. Some very wealthy people have understood that deliberately stimulating and nourishing cultural fears can effectively divide the working class along cultural lines and prevent its members from acting in their own interest. This is important because if the working class acted in its own interest, taxes would rise and business would be more heavily regulated.

Is there a danger that our country might opt for a real, tax-supported national health care system? That danger can be averted if working people can be induced to vote their fears instead of their interests. Is there a danger that our citizens might opt for a system of post-secondary education that did not leave millions of people hopelessly indebted? That danger, too, can be averted if people can be persuaded to vote their fears.

Wealthy People Fund the Culture Wars

So, people of great wealth provide the money that is needed to turn people’s vague prejudices and fears into focused, political movements. The money pays for the production of the necessary propaganda. The money pays for rallies and marches. It pays for the campaigns of political candidates who can be counted on to know which side of their bread is buttered, as we can see in NARAL’S. “The Insidious Power of the Anti-Choice Movement,” which documents the growth and reach of the anti-abortion movement and the sources of its support.

The Republican Party and the Culture Wars

That is how today’s Republican Party works: political movements are ginned up to exploit people’s fears and garner votes for Republican candidates. When they have been elected, they vote against a decent national health care program; they vote against relieving the burden of student debt; they vote against any regulation of business that might interfere with profits; they vote against doing anything to combat climate change; they vote for low taxes and other “business friendly” policies. They do little for the people who elected them, but their voters don’t notice that as long as their attention is focused on cultural issues. Thus, a political movement that caters to cultural fears keeps the government firmly in the hands of the capitalist class.

We can see this process in operation in the work of Donor Advised Funds like the National Christian Foundation. The foundation takes in gifts in the form of cash, stocks, bonds, and other income producing assets, and it makes grants to various conservative, political causes including anti-abortion groups and anti LGBTQ groups. Why is the NCF so well funded? Are we to believe that wealthy donors lie awake at night agonizing over the fate of the nation’s fetuses or that they are so disgusted by the thought of homosexuality that they donate tens of millions of dollars to the fight against gay marriage? Of course not. They donate such sums because they have big interests of their own at stake. They know that the Republican Party can never garner millions of working-class votes by campaigning on its real legislative program, but it can garner those votes from working people who can be persuaded to vote their cultural fears.

We can also see this process at work in this story from the Washington Post that tells us about the $5.7 million that were raised to fund the manual recount of the 2020 election votes in Maricopa County, Arizona. Why did wealthy people donate big amounts to this cause? No one ever thought that the recount would change the national results of the election even if massive fraud were uncovered in Maricopa County. So, why did a few rich people fund the recount?

They did it to nourish the myth that the election had been stolen. The recount itself never mattered, but the widespread belief in the stolen election does matter because it divides the working class. The myth will be used in future elections to elect Republican candidates and prevent taxes from being raised and business from being regulated in the public interest.

Keeping the Working Class Divided

Thus, the culture wars, like the politics of racism, should not be seen merely as the expression of American fears and prejudices. In order to understand them and their role in our country’s politics, we must see them in the context of the class struggle for control of our government. The culture wars are funded and nourished by wealthy Americans to prevent the election of politicians who would vote for programs that would require taxes to be raised or business profits to be limited by regulations. The culture wars are funded to keep our government firmly in the hands of the wealthy.

What is the Fight Over Voting Rights and Gerrymandering About?

The Fight is About Class, Not Race 

The fight over voting rights and gerrymandering seems to be about race, but it is really about class. It is about preserving the control of our government by great wealth. It is about sacrificing the well-being of working Americans of all races to preserve the wealth and power of a few extremely wealthy people.

The Fight is About Preserving Republican Power

The Republicans are pushing gerrymandering and  restrictions on voting rights because they believe that, without such restrictions, they will not be able to win national elections in the future. So, we can see what this fight is about by examining the Republicans’ legislative priorities. The record shows that Republicans want low taxes and minimal regulation of business. Republican candidates run on cultural issues like abortion or gun rights that animate elements of our working class, but once in office, the Republicans do very little about those issues. Instead, they pass a big tax cut, gut environmental regulations and oppose programs like affordable child care, free post-secondary education or national health care that might actually benefit the working-class voters who put them in office.

The Fight is About the Well-Being of Ordinary Americans of All Races

Why do Republicans oppose such programs? They do it because they know that such programs will have to be paid for by raising taxes and by (choke, gasp) collecting the taxes that are owed. Republicans oppose such programs because they know that much of the money to pay for them will come out of the pockets of the party’s wealthy donors who use their power to make sure that the party’s priorities continue to be low taxes and minimal regulation of business.

The fight over voting rights is really about preserving the wealth and power of wealthy donors to the Republican Party. The fight is really about preventing our country from enacting programs to benefit members of the working class of all races.  The fight over voting rights is really about the well-being of ordinary Americans of all races. Do we want to have a decent national health care system? Do we want to preserve our Social Security system? Do we want a system in which young people are not saddled with crushing educational debts? Do we want affordable child care? If we want any of these things, we have to fight to preserve everyone’s right to vote. That is what this fight is about.

What Should We Do About the Tulsa Massacre?

The Memory of Tulsa Should Drive Us to Act

Recently, the news has been full of stories about the horrendous massacre and destructive race riot that occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma 100 years ago this weekend. That event was among the worst and most shocking in the long, tragic history of racism in the United States. In a prosperous and peaceful neighborhood, hundreds of black people were killed, and millions of dollars of property was destroyed by a white mob. Families saw their children killed. Family wealth that was the product of years of struggle and labor was wiped out in a few hours.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should remember these tragic events, but we should also remember the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address because they apply to us now just as much as they applied to his audience in 1863:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us … that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

The work of building a just and equitable society in our country is far from finished. There is much still remaining to be done. The racism of the past has produced inequities in the present. We cannot go back and undo what was done in the past, but we can work to reduce or eliminate the inequities of the present, and remembering the events of Memorial Day Weekend in 1921 should reinforce our commitment to that task.

What Should We Do?

In his book, How to be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi shows us what that means.  He tells us that the job of an anti-racist is to reduce and ultimately eliminate “racial inequity.” And what is racial inequity?

Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. Here’s an example of racial inequity: 71 percent of white families lived in owner-occupied homes in 2014, compared to … 41 percent of black families.

The job of antiracists is to work to eliminate inequities of this kind. Two approaches to this work have been proposed. One is to focus on reparations. In this approach, payments are made to black people to counterbalance the effects of past racism. Pres. Biden’s proposal for payments to black farmers is an example of this approach. Ta-Nehisi Coates discussion of reparations for black Americans is a broader example.

The other approach to eliminating the inequities of our society is to focus on broad, redistributive policies that are not directed explicitly at black people but that reduce the racial wealth gap because black people fall disproportionately into the groups that are benefited by such policies. William Darity’s proposal for a publicly funded trust fund for every child is an example. Forgiving students’ debts is another example. It would reduce the racial wealth gap because black people carry more debt on average than white people do.

Both of these approaches are valid, and each of them has its place. Both require action, and we must act. As we remember the horror of the Tulsa Massacre, we must find in it a motive to act to reduce the inequities of our own time. It is not enough for us white people to recognize and accept that our prosperity has been built in part on such events. It is not enough to be “woke.” Ringing our hands and bowing our heads in shame will not do anything to reduce the wealth gap between black and white Americans. Purging our hearts of the sin of racism is good, but it is not the goal. The goal is to build a just society.

To do that, we must act, and our actions must be political. We must support policies like those mentioned above that deal with the inequities of our time. We cannot erase the injustices of our past, but we can make our society more just now, and that is what we must do as we remember the Tulsa Massacre.

Saving the Planet and Social Justice: the Logic of President Biden's Plan

 Is There a Connection?

How is the fight to against climate change connected to the fight for social justice? The answer is not obvious, and indeed, the two could conflict with one another. After all, if climate change is truly a threat to the survival of our society and economy, perhaps we shouldn’t worry right now about social justice. Perhaps, we should focus all of our attention on saving ourselves from the imminent destruction that Greta Thunberg and others have been warning us about, and later, when we have the leisure to do so, we can worry about making our society better.

From this point of view, the coal miners in West Virginia and the oil field workers in Louisiana are collateral damage in the fight to save our planet. It is unfortunate that they should suffer, but their suffering is for the greater good. By the same token, this is not the time to be worrying about racial justice. Of course, black lives matter, but right now, we cannot divert resources from saving the planet to retraining our police. Of course, we need to provide a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants, but right now, we have more pressing problems to deal with.

Why is this wrong? Why do we need to worry about social justice now? Why can’t we put off the difficult and frustrating fight for social justice until we have saved our planet?

Maybe, We Need a Revolution

There are two ways to answer this question. One is based on a fundamental critique of our society. That critique says that our environmental problems are merely the latest symptoms of our real problem, which is that our capitalist system is so exploitative at its heart that it can never provide either social justice or a solution to the problem of climate change. Holders of this view say that capitalism is based on an ideology of greed and short-term thinking, and unless we can replace capitalism with a better system, we are kidding ourselves if with think that we can save our planet. In effect, this approach says that we cannot solve the problem of climate change without a revolution.

Maybe, We Need a Coalition

The second answer to the question of why we should worry now about social justice accepts our system as it is and focuses on the need to build a political coalition to support solving the climate change problem. The fight to save our planet will demand much of our political system. Big changes will be required, and they cannot take place unless they are demanded by a strong political coalition. From this point of view, the problem is to design a solution to the climate problem that not only solves the problem but also provides immediate, tangible benefits to all of the groups that join the coalition. In effect, this approach says that we can save our planet without a revolution but only if we do it in a way that increases social justice in our society.

President Biden's American Jobs Plan

The recognition of the need to build a coalition underlies Pres. Biden’s American Jobs Plan.  He has presented it not as a solution to the climate crisis but as a plan to stimulate the American economy. Under this plan, thousands of companies will profit; millions of workers will get good jobs; clean water will be provided to communities now suffering from water that is contaminated with lead; women and minorities will benefit from increased wages in home health services; displaced workers, members of minority groups and other workers will benefit from free post-secondary education; and oh, by the way, we will mitigate the effects of climate change by improving public transportation, supporting the development of electric cars and expanding the production and transmission of green energy.

I don’t know whether Pres. Biden’s effort will succeed, but I believe that he is right in principle. We cannot separate the fight to save our planet from the fight for social justice. We cannot save our planet unless we do so in a way that increases social justice by providing benefits for most of our people.

This is Our Chance

 We Can Overcome Hyper-Partisanship

We have a chance now to overcome the extreme partisanship that has poisoned our politics for decades. We can turn away from blind partisanship and toward a practical politics that is focused on doing what is right for the American people. Congress has recently passed the American Rescue Plan (ARP), which is very popular among the American people. It is of course supported by most Democrats, but it is also supported by a majority of Republicans according to a recent survey. In spite of the act’s popularity among Republican voters, it passed Congress without a single Republican vote in either the House or the Senate. Why did Republican senators and representatives vote against a bill that was so popular with their constituents?

The Radical Right is Vulnerable

The answer is that Republican politicians are afraid that if they break partisan ranks to vote for a measure like the American Rescue Plan, their party’s radical right will mount primary challenges against them. It doesn’t matter that the ARP is supported by most Republican voters. As long as it is supported by Democrats, it will be opposed by the radical rightists, and they will keep the Republican legislators in line. Now, however, the radical rightists are vulnerable. They have found no coherent way to oppose the American Rescue Plan, and their only hope is to divert our attention to other issues.

Keep the Focus on the American Rescue Plan

We must do all we can to prevent that. We must make sure that the ARP remains front and center in our political conversations. If we can do that, we may be able to overcome the barrier of hyper-partisanship. Pres. Biden has embarked on a national speaking tour to explain the ARP to the American People and to build on their support for it. If he is successful, he may be able to open a space in which Republican politicians can again act in the interest of their constituents instead of bending to the will of the radical right, which has always been a minority of Republicans.

We must do our part. We must engage in conversations with our friends and neighbors about the contents of the ARP. We must help them to see the ways in which in benefits them. We must not allow the radical right to divert attention to other issues, to personalities or to purely partisan matters. If we want our country to return to a reasonable politics of interest and compassion, this is our chance. If we want to turn away from hyper-partisanship, this is our chance.

Caste and Class in American Politics

A Masterful Work

Isabel Wilkerson’s recent book Caste is a masterful exploration of the meaning and ubiquity of caste divisions in American society. The author’s comparisons of our caste system with those of India and Nazi Germany are telling and accurate. Her descriptions of the horrors that have been visited on members of her caste are harrowing, and her recounting of her own experiences in pushing the boundaries of caste are authoritative in the way that only first-person experiences can be.

An Incomplete View of the Role of Caste

However, her discussion of the role of caste in American politics is incomplete because it fails to take account of the role of money and of the people who provide it. In Wilkerson’s view, issues of caste are the main drivers of political divisions in American politics. She sees the contemporary Republican Party as driven by the status anxiety of the members of the dominant caste. Speaking of the presidential campaign of 2016, she says (p. 6)

The campaign had become … an existential fight for primacy in a country whose demographics had been shifting beneath us all. People whose … ancestry traced back to Europe had been the dominant racial caste in an unspoken hierarchy since before the beginning of the republic. But …, in the summer of 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau announced its projection that by 2042, … whites would no longer be the majority ….

Then, that fall … an African-American … was elected president of the United States.

The effect of all this was to produce anger and anxiety among working class white people. As Wilkerson puts it (p. 183),

If a lower-caste person manages actually to rise above an upper-caste person, the natural human response from someone weaned on their caste’s inherent superiority is to perceive a threat to their existence, a heightened sense of unease, of displacement, of fear for their very survival. “If the things that I have believed are not true, then might I not be who I thought I was?” The disaffection is more than economic. The malaise is spiritual, psychological, emotional. Who are you if there is no one to be better than?

For Wilkerson, this spiritual malaise and insecurity accounts for the strength of working-class support for Donald Trump in 2016 and for the victory of the Republican Party that year. She is correct as far as she goes, but her explanation is incomplete because it fails to account for the financial cost of turning widespread malaise and insecurity into a political movement.

It Takes Money and the Support of People Who Have It

The rallies that Trump held during his campaign had to be paid for. The propaganda that links “welfare” to the "laziness" of black people has to be paid for. The propaganda telling us that Mexican immigrants are gangsters and rapists has to be paid for. The people who spread racist propaganda on Fox News and talk radio earn six-figure salaries, and they have to be paid. 

The money for these things comes from people at the top of our society. The Koch brothers’ political action committee has contributed millions of dollars to Republican political campaigns, and the Kochs along with other wealthy people and corporations have also made large donations to the American Legislative Exchange Council. Betsy DeVos’s family has made millions of dollars of contributions to Republican political campaigns. Their contributions and the contributions of others like them supported the effort to build a movement based on racist fears. Why do people like these donate money to support such a movement?

Why Rich People Support Racist Politics

They don’t do it because of status anxiety. It is ludicrous to say that the likes of Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos or Rupert Murdoch act politically because they are suffering from status anxiety. Great wealth always confers high social status in the United States. Rich people are admired for their wealth. Our white billionaires are not threatened by the election of Barack Obama as president or by the fact that Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry are also billionaires. So, why do American billionaires support racist politics?

The short answer is that they do it to keep wages low, taxes low, the working class docile and government safely in the hands of people like themselves. They do it to divide the working class and thereby keep its members from joining together to act in their own interest.

Class and Caste in India and Nazi Germany

This was true in the past as it is today. Let us look at the cases that Wilkerson uses for comparison to our caste system. She mentions the Indian caste system. In Indian villages, the major landowners belong to the higher castes, while the tenant farmers and landless laborers are lower caste people and Dalits. Thus, the caste system bolsters the control that the wealthy exercise over the lives of the poor. It prevents the Shudras (members of the lowest caste) from allying with the Dalits (untouchables). The system provides divine legitimation for an oppressive class system.

Wilkerson also compares our system to that of Nazi Germany. In understanding the rise of the Nazi Party, we should remember that in the early nineteen thirties, the German capitalists were desperately afraid of communism. A successful communist revolution had taken place just next door in Russia only a few years earlier, and the German communist party was large and well organized. German capitalists supported Hitler and the Nazis as a bulwark against communism. For the wealthy, the Nazi caste system was a price they were willing to pay to maintain their wealth and power.

Caste and Class in American Politics

The same kinds of motives underlie upper class support of racist politics in American History. In the late nineteenth century, the planter class in the South promoted racial divisions not only to keep black people in line but also to prevent poor black and white people from joining together in the populist movement of that period. The restrictions on voting that were put in place eliminated millions of poor white voters along with the black voters, and the planters maintained their control in a region where they were a small minority of the total, white population.

Racial divisions in the United States have also been exploited to break strikes and to prevent the development of labor unions in many parts of our country, and racial divisions continue to be used that way today.

People like Robert Koch, Betsy DeVos or Rupert Murdoch exploit the racial fears of the working class in order to maintain their own wealth and power. They support racist politics to bring in votes for candidates who will pass right-to-work laws, oppose higher taxes, prevent environmental regulation and prevent the creation of a decent national health care system. They support racist politics not because they are worried about their caste positions but to advance their economic agendas. Rupert Murdoch has even turned supporting racist politics into a profitable business in Fox News.

We can see the outcome of this kind of cynical politics in the legislative actions of the Trump administration. It did very little to advance a racist agenda, but it succeeded in passing an enormous tax cut that benefits mainly rich people, and it rolled back many environmental regulations. The administration also succeeded in appointing judges who will limit voting rights in order to maintain the power of the rich. Above all, the racist politics of the Republican Party kept the members of the working class from getting together to advance their shared interests.

Isabel Wilkerson is right when she says that caste plays a huge role in American politics, but the Republican political movement based on caste did not spring spontaneously from the soil of American culture and history.  It cannot be explained solely as an expression of the American caste system. The movement was created and nurtured deliberately and cynically to split the working class and to prevent the emergence of a strong, working class political movement dedicated to improving life for all Americans and not just for the wealthy few.