America in Black and White – Part II – Is it Just Race?
then, as now, if you were born without wealth, you were likely to die without wealth.
Race-based chattel slavery was put in place to solve both problems. It imported and then bred black people from Africa as human capital, as property, to perform the labor. As a result, black people were on the bottom. Poor whites may have struggled, but the racial lines drawn by slavery allowed them to believe that unlike black people, they had the potential to become wealthy. This economic hierarchy and illusion of opportunity that slavery and its tentacles created and enabled persists today.
The ability to move up the economic ladder is a bulwark of our society. It is the American Dream encouraged by the powerful in both politics and commerce. It works brilliantly for those who invented it – but not so well for the dreamers.
In the Real America, the chances of leapfrogging ahead are miniscule compared to the mythical size and strength and belief in the power of the Dream. Now, as the illusion melts away for more and more of Middle America, the racial antagonisms of many whites have intensified. They blame their failure to succeed and lack of opportunity on reverse discrimination, or on immigration. It is a familiar manufactured fear.
As in the past, when violence erupted in conflicts between the enslaved and poor whites, or in relationships between new immigrants and newly freed slaves, today there are rifts between downwardly mobile members of the shrinking middle class and the chronically un- and under-employed. Cycles of competition for scarce jobs and fear of the future escalate. As long as a certain degree of order is maintained, however, business proceeds and prospers. Whatever casualties occur are seen by those on top as acceptable costs. Poor white and black people can fight as much as they like as long as they wear clothes made in China.
In the Real America, the vast majority of people are little more than figures on a balance sheet. Downsizings, mass incarceration, perpetual war, planned obsolescence and the like mean little aside from their effect on stock prices and corporate bonuses. What happens to children and families in the process is not personal. It’s just business.
But let’s take race out of the equation. What would America look like if it were all white? According to the Federal Reserve’s 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances, 70 percent of the country’s wealth is controlled by 10 percent of the population. And a whopping 30 percent of the white population has no wealth at all. It’s not because of black people or immigrants; it’s just business.
I agree, of course, with one caveat. It seems to me that the biggest hurdle for white working and poor people, is to see that their fates are much more determined by balance sheets than they are by race.