Inequality, alienation, rage

The US implosion regurgitates its chequered history

At his death two months back, Joseph Lowery, the firebrand pacifist preacher and a close associate of Martin Luther King, could not have imagined that King’s “Dream” of equality would be frustrated so soon. Yes, there are pockets of phenomenal Black success including the Obamas, professionals who live along 16th Street directly north of the White House, the high society of Atlanta, or the finally recognised slave family that Thomas Jefferson, author of US’s 1776 Declaration of Independence and the third US president, fathered.1 But deterioration in the condition of the US Blacks at societal level has been a centuries-long continuum. 

For some years after the 1861-65 Civil War and abolition of slavery, the Blacks improved their condition through entrepreneurial and agrarian skills. Soon, however, there began a systematic closure of Black-owned banks in the southern Richmond-Atlanta belt, the obliteration of Black businesses in thriving Black communities in Oklahoma and western states, the gutting of socio-economic programmes including systemically refusing to give mortgage loans to Blacks in Baltimore and the eastern belt though owner-occupied housing was strongly encouraged, culminating in the Ku Klux Clan in the southern belt of Alabama and Louisiana, where total racial segregation was imposed, and Blacks were lynched regularly and burnt alive with impunity.

All this explains directly the slide into an irretrievable income and wealth gap during the past one and a half centuries and it has persisted and worsened over the past 50 years. Most recently, it has become worse during the Covid-19 pandemic. The rage was waiting to boil over. George Floyd’s murder, in yet another instance of police brutality, was the catalyst. 

I draw on Pew Research Center, known for surveys and statistics, beginning with inequality and then injecting racial inequality into the picture.2 Figure 1 demonstrates unequal income growth over the past 50 years across groups. And the incomes of the top 5 per cent grew at the fastest rate. The Blacks are scarce at the top and crowd the bottom, with only four Blacks in Fortune 500’s chief executive officers earning above $14.5 million in 2018. If he earns $60,000 annually, a Black individual gets to his top 10 per cent decile. It is $118,000 for the Whites and $135,000 for the Asians.3

 

 

Figure 2 reveals a similar trend for wealth. Figure 3 shows that the racial wealth divide has grown over the past three decades. The median Black family’s wealth declined by more than half from $7,323 in 1983 to $3,557 in 2016, the White family’s increasing from $110,160 to $146,984. Thus, currently it is 41 times higher. Between 2010 and 2019, the Black unemployment rate has remained more than twice that of the Whites.

A second dimension is to ask: Can the situation change? An insight is the starkly opposing opinions of the Republicans and Democrats in a Pew survey of 6,878 adults of September 2019. While 60 per cent of the Americans agree there is too much inequality, that figure hides the story — only 40 per cent Republicans in contrast to 80 per cent Democrats do so. The Republicans feel personal factors explain inequality more — life choices, working less hard, crowding by immigrants — while the Democrats emphasise racial discrimination, initial unbalance in opportunities, the educational system, the tax system, and the absence of corporate regulation. The Republicans assign much less responsibility than the Democrats to federal and state governments, corporations, wealthy individuals, or churches for reducing inequality. Thus attitudes to race remain deeply divided.

Continuing, measures such as ensuring acquisition of skills, increasing taxes on the wealthiest and transfers to the poor, eliminating college tuition and college debt, expanding medical benefits, increasing the minimum wage, and breaking up large corporations are viewed as significantly less important by the Republicans than by the Democrats, but the Republicans consider illegal immigration much more detrimental than the Democrats do. Finally, three-fourths of the Republicans say that “the poor have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return” as against one-fourth of the Democrats. Avarice seems tilted on one side.
 

The above trends are amplified when the pandemic is injected into the picture. Rounded, 53 African-Americans have died per 100,000, compared to 25 Hispanics, 22 Asians, and 20 Whites. Their higher than double the death rate reflects their continuation, despite health risks, in low-wage work in food-processing plants, grocery outlets, and suchlike. Yet the Blacks have weathered higher joblessness. 

Having lived in the US from 1972 to 2004 (with a few years abroad in between), driving across 40 states, an urban pioneer living in frontline neighbourhoods, crossing the railroad tracks to volunteer time, and witnessing many Black and Hispanic eruptions, I believe America’s racial prejudice is embedded in its very foundation. Jefferson wrote, “All men are born free,” and “slaves should be returned to Africa or the Caribbean.” But he considered “such massive deportation a logistical and economic impossibility (thus) ending it (slavery) was inconceivable.”4 When he died, he freed seven of the hundreds he owned.

Are Indians different? I recall Indian visitors from suburbia visiting me only during the day, fearing to enter Washington DC from Maryland or Virginia after sundown, expressing unfounded concern at my location of residence. Attitudes towards Africans resident in India are all too apparent pari passu with worsening caste separation.5 Inter-caste marriage can still lead to death.6 

A silver lining is the continued protests across the world by all races alike, “Black Lives Matter” etched into the global social consciousness. Will US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “transformative structural change” take shape? There is hope when there is denouncement of government’s actions, as of this writing, by the US president’s previous defense secretary and previous army chief of staff and Republican senators like Mitt Romney, apologies by a serving four-star general, and disagreement with the President expressed by the serving defense secretary.

1. Jefferson made derogatory notes on the physique of ‘negroes’, yet had a sustained relationship with Black slave Sally Hemmings, who bore him several children, their descendants comprising an extended family today. 

2. Middle income category comprises households with 2/3 to 2 times the overall median family income in 2018. The range comprises $40,100 to $120,400 for a three person household. Those above and below comprise high income and low income categories respectively. Median is where most families are clustered.

3. This reveals the top White decile earns twice, and top Asian 2.25 times, as much as the top Black decile. 

4. Encyclopaedia Britannica

5. See Anupama Rao, The Caste Question—Dalits and Politics, Permanent Black, 2019.

6. Even in the US, interracial relationships continue to be frowned upon. See, among many, Adwit Pundit’s novel, Potomac Turning, Partridge, 2016.