American slavery was as evil as it gets on the planet, and the ugliness and violence of white supremacy carried forth from there, through the Jim Crow laws and the lynchings, the bombings and the beatings and the segregation in all its forms. It is absolutely true that America has never properly reckoned with this despicable legacy. To the extent that they are finally initiating such a process, the George Floyd protests bring welcome progress.
It is also true that systemic racism is very much alive in America today. This seems most apparent not just in certain cop shootings but maybe even more so in the criminal justice system, in the mind-boggling numbers of young, black men railroaded into American prisons. To the extent that they are pushing for reform of these corrosive systems, again, the protests are necessary and good.
That said, it would be a mistake to assume or imply, as the protests surely do, that systemic racism is the biggest problem, or even the biggest injustice, facing America in 2020.
Our biggest problem, and our biggest injustice, for blacks and whites alike, is economic inequality. This might be considered an inconvenient truth in our current moment. But it is the truth.
My point here is not to downplay the reality or significance of racism. It’s real and it deeply impacts the lives of black people. It’s just that income inequality has become so massive that it surpasses even race (again no small feat) as an oppressive force in America today.
On June 19 the New York Times published an opinion piece outlining the gaps between white and black people in a range of categories: median income; home ownership; life expectancy; prison time; and unemployment.
Of course there were significant gaps between white and black across all categories. But what happens when we compare these race gaps with the gaps generated by wealth disparity?
Honestly? The race gap seems almost quaint by comparison.
Does the New York Times expect us to be shocked and outraged that the average white person lives 3.5 more years (78.8 to 75.3) than the average black person?
Do they know what the gap in life expectancy is between the richest people in our society and the poorest?
How about 10 to 15 years.
The life expectancy gap between the races is less than the gap between women and men, which runs closer to six years, favoring women of course.
It is also less than the gap between all Americans and residents of many comparable developed nations. To be an American in the first place, black or white, may sometimes be more hazardous to your health than being black as opposed to white within our borders.
But, come on, what about prison? That’s all about race, right?
According to the Times, black people are six times more likely to be sentenced to prison. Definitely a problem there.
But not as big a problem as we see with the wealth disparity, where males born into families in the bottom 10 percent on the economic scale are 20 times more likely to go to jail than their counterparts from families in the richest 10 percent.
As Vox Media put it: “Want to stay out of prison? Choose rich parents.”
Note, they didn’t say, “Choose white parents.” That would assume that race matters more than class.
And the evidence simply does not support that.
Same goes for college graduation rates. White people are not quite 1.5 times more likely to complete four years of college than black people (36 percent to 26 percent). Wealthy people are eight times more likely to graduate than the poor.
And while there’s a three point gap between the races in unemployment (3.5 percent for whites; 6.5 percent for blacks), a report in 2019 found that unemployment rates for the poorest American families (those earning less than $20,000 per year) exceeded 21 percent, near Great Depression levels, as opposed to a negligible 3.2 percent for wealthy families.
And this was prior to the global pandemic, which may very well push the gap between rich and poor even higher.
(No need to run through median income and home ownership, as these categories pretty much speak for themselves.)
Again, the point is not to deny the presence and power of racism in America. It’s just to say that wealth inequality has risen to such obscene levels that it is now a more reliable predictor of life outcomes than race.
One could make the argument that the biggest problem for black people is that they are disproportionately poor, or certainly less than wealthy. Now of course one could argue in return that black people are disproportionately poor due to systemic racism. No doubt race and wealth work together. Inequality is complex. But it undeniably has powerful limiting effects on both whites and blacks, regardless of how the mechanisms at work may differ in each case.
Either way, if we’re looking for solutions, I can think of about a thousand ideas more promising than “defund the police.”
How many black lives would universal access to health care save each year? Tens of thousands.
How about drug legalization, or at the very least decriminalization, as a way to decrease black imprisonment? Why is nobody talking about that?
The protesters seem to be on to the idea of investing in the inner cities, but why are they so stuck on paying for it by defunding the police? How about defunding the plutocracy by raising taxes on the uber rich? That’s where the money is, folks.
Free college. Job programs. Social services. There is so much to think and talk about, so many things we can do. In order to be truly effective, however, we have to open up the conversation to make room for the fact that racism is not the only factor. Economic inequality is a massive part of the problem, and addressing it is an utterly necessary part of the solution.
And here’s the good news: you could get there much faster by uniting blacks and non-wealthy whites rather than pitting them against one another.
As much as the past and the present, the right and now the left, would conspire to drive wedges between the races, the crucial reality is that their fates are wholly intertwined.
There is no doubt that the weight of history bears heavily on these protests. Perhaps one could argue that it is irrelevant what the ultimate source of our problem is today. We need to atone for the past.
Again, do we need to reckon with our history on race? Yes we do. Tearing down Confederate statues is a beautiful start.
Do we need to completely rethink and reform policing and criminal justice? Absolutely.
But there is an opportunity cost to focusing on race at the expense of all else.
If you really want to improve the lives of black people, it could be a mistake to let justified rage, built up over centuries, distort the central fact that, in this important moment, black people have a lot more in common with their fellow non-wealthy Americans, yes even the white ones, than this movement as yet seems willing or able to acknowledge.