Beyond the Rising Tide: Reparations for Slavery Have to Be More Than a Symbol
Sen. Cory Booker, left, and Sen. Kamala Harris listen during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 28, 2018.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP
WHEN HIP-HOP radio host Charlamagne tha God asked Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris if they had a “specific agenda” for black Americans on his show, “The Breakfast Club,” earlier this month, it was clear that neither did.
“I have a specific agenda for the American people,” started Booker. But for Charlamagne, and many other black Americans, a generalized American agenda isn’t a substitute for a plan that specifically addresses the needs of black folks.
“They always say a rising tide lifts all boats,” Charlamagne interrupted, “but we don’t really see that in our communities.”
Charlamagne elaborated on this idea during his interview with Harris: “I think when it comes to black people in America, Democrats, for whatever reason, when you ask them … usually we get that whole ‘rising tides raise all boats’ or ‘all Americans’ rhetoric, and I think black people just want to hear specific things for them, and I always wonder, ‘Why are people afraid to say what they would specifically do for black people?’”
The desire expressed by Charlamagne is understandable and legitimate. After committing overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party for decades, black Americans have seen the racial wealth gap
widen, not shrink. As a result, some are increasingly skeptical of the value of programs that aren’t narrowly tailored to accrue to our benefit.
While it is true that the neoliberal strategies embraced by the Democratic Party since the 1980s have failed to close the racial wealth gap, the growing disdain for programs that don’t accrue to the
exclusive benefit of black Americans is a red herring.
The problem isn’t that universal or economically driven programs can’t significantly close the racial wealth gap. It’s that the means-tested programs backed by the Democratic Party simply don’t go far enough.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS was buffeted repeatedly by criticism that he didn’t do enough to connect with black Americans in the course of his 2016 presidential run. Much of that criticism was fair. But Sanders’s failure was in articulating
how his policies would benefit black Americans, not in advancing policies that
would benefit us.
Prior to the 2016 election, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who ultimately voted for Sanders,
wrote, “Sanders’s basic approach is to ameliorate the effects of racism through broad, mostly class-based policy — doubling the minimum wage, offering single-payer health-care, delivering free higher education. This is the same ‘A rising tide lifts all boats’ thinking that has dominated Democratic anti-racist policy for a generation.”
But the Democratic Party has never backed anything approaching the redistributive goals contemplated by Sanders’s 2016 agenda. The party’s economic plan has historically focused on economic mobility, “access” to “opportunity,” and removing barriers to participating in a capitalist economy. Child care programs, paid sick leave, and job training initiatives are promoted as strategies to ensure that all Americans can participate in what most Democrats see as a fundamentally functional system.
By contrast, politicians like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren challenge the system itself, because they view it as fundamentally inequitable. Leftists support traditional interventions that meaningfully ease the burdens of those struggling under capitalism. But they also seek to change the fact that profits in this country currently flow disproportionately to a privileged few at the very top — at the expense of wage growth for the workers whose labor generates those profits. As Sanders argues, if 90 percent of profits go to the top 1 percent, having technical “access” to the 1 percent isn’t enough; the system itself must change.
This structural approach is a game changer for African-Americans. Because the value of wealth compounds, capitalism rewards the historical possession of wealth; the ability to invest today is worth more than the ability to do so in the future. That being the case, how can black Americans, first enslaved and then legally barred from participating in capitalism for the overwhelming majority of this country’s history, begin to catch up with a systemic adjustment to the system?
The answer is we can’t. There will be no racial equality under capitalism.
It would take an estimated
228 years for black Americans to earn as much wealth as white Americans possess today, at which point blacks still would not have drawn even, because whites would presumably have accrued more wealth during that time as well. Simply put, closing the racial wealth gap demands a systemic approach.
IT IS TRUE that universal programs without race-specific interventions are not enough. The failures of the New Deal illustrate how universal solutions can inadequately provide for the needs of the marginalized. But the reality that universal programs don’t always go far enough should not be perverted into an argument that universal programs aren’t integral to the task of closing the racial wealth gap.
During his “Breakfast Club” interview, Booker tried to explain that the issue with the “rising tides raise all ships” argument is not that the thesis is fundamentally flawed, but that universal programs historically were designed to either exclude African-Americans or, at best, were indifferent to structural reasons why African-Americans were less able to access benefits. “A lot of the programs that built the middle class in this country, African-Americans were excluded from,” said Booker, pointing to the Fair Housing Act and the GI Bill. “You had devaluations of American communities through mortgage lending and the like.”
But that’s not to say that a
new New Deal shouldn’t be a goal. After all, New Deal programs like the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps employed over 600,000 African-Americans. The Public Works Administration established quotas for the number of blacks to be hired for construction jobs, and New Deal education programs taught more than a million African-Americans how to read and write. It was in part because of the New Deal that African-Americans shifted their political allegiances to the Democratic Party in the first place. In the course of ensuring that we improve upon the New Deal’s mistakes, we shouldn’t lose sight of its benefits and the potential benefits of similar programs.
Unfortunately, in some circles, that’s exactly what’s happening.
SOME LIBERAL COMMENTATORS affect indifference to the racial implications of policies that directly target the wealth gap because they aren’t explicitly cast as race policies. “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?” Hillary Clinton famously asked in the course of her 2016 campaign. “I would love to wake up in the morning and have my first thought be ‘I hate Wall Street,’”
tweeted journalist Imani Gandy. “That’s the whitest shyt I’ve ever heard.”
Similarly, when Booker offered up his baby bonds plan as part of a black-centric agenda, Charlamagne was skeptical on the basis that it wouldn’t exclusively help blacks. It “addresses all Americans,” Booker explained, “but it actually helps the racial wealth gap in a significant way,” by creating a savings account for low-income students.
Booker went on to make the case for his criminal justice bill, the beneficiaries of which are overwhelmingly African-American: “When you fix the system, you help poor white folks who get screwed by the system as well, but disproportionately, you’re gonna help those people who are most affected by an unjust criminal justice system,” he argued.
Booker is right. The unfortunate overlap between poverty and some historically marginalized identity groups means that when programs are equitably designed, a rising tide
will disproportionately improve their fates: Since 1 out of 3 non-elderly Latinos and 1 out of 4 non-elderly blacks lack health insurance, those groups stand to be some of the biggest beneficiaries of “Medicare for All.” Blacks and Latinos are
more likely to rely on Social Security benefits as an exclusive source of retirement income than whites, meaning attacks on Social Security threaten those groups disproportionately as well. Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented among minimum wage jobs, meaning we stand to gain more from a $15 minimum wage. And on, and on, and on.
In fact, most programs embraced as “race-specific” are economic programs or criminal justice programs — many of which, like bail reform, are race-neutral. Various “welfare programs” may be coded as “for black Americans,” but few are narrowly tailored to exclusively benefit us.
Arguably, Affirmative Action is race-based, but the biggest beneficiaries have been
white women. And even though it was designed to address race-based disparities, it’s not clear that it has the intended reparative effect: The beneficiaries of Affirmative Action are disproportionately recent African and Caribbean immigrants, whose parents and grandparents were not victims of the pre-civil rights-era discrimination for which Affirmative Action is ostensibly supposed to compensate.
The one initiative that truly targets black people exclusively is reparations, for which Coates famously made a
compelling case. But although he was incredibly successful at proving why African-Americans
deserve reparations, at the end of his argument Coates is honest about not having a clear answer to how to deliver them, beyond Rep. John Conyers’s H.R.40 bill, which would provide resources to explore possible avenues for reparations. It’s a good start. But it’s just that — a start. That being the case, a push for reparations or any other unspecified, racially targeted policy shouldn’t come at the expense of the most radical redistributive policies this country has seen since the New Deal.
issa trap.
