Ending Poverty in the Richest Country on Earth – Common Dreams

Posted on May 29, 2021 by Danzig

This week, we introduced a congressional resolution asserting that we can end poverty in the richest country on Earth.

We've had the opportunity to study poverty deeply. Rep. Lee has chaired the Congressional Task Force on Poverty and Opportunity since 2013. Rep. Jayapal chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Both of us worked closely with the Poor People's Campaign to produce a "People's Agenda" for pandemic recovery.

Even before the pandemic, more than two in five people in this country were poor or low-income, just $400 or less away from financial ruin. That's 140 million of us. During the pandemic, it got even worse. By the fall of 2020, 8 million more Americans had been pushed into poverty.

We can't end poverty without attacking the interconnected injustices of systemic racism, inequality, militarism and the climate emergency. That's why our resolution calls for a comprehensive response that prioritizes the needs of these 140 million people.

The American Rescue Plan, the Biden administration's COVID-19 relief package, brought crucial relief. But millions of jobs that were lost have not returned. An astounding 30 million people were put at risk of homelessness, and experts warn that the American Rescue Plan will fall short of helping them all.

But being poor in this country means more than going without money, a job or a home. It also means experiencing the brunt of climate disasters. It means mass incarcerationand frequent contact with militarized police forces. And it means ever-increasing restrictions on your right to vote, join a union or see a doctor.

Poverty, in short, intersects with every other injustice in our country.

For instance, poor communitiesespecially Black, Latina/o, Asian and Pacific Islander communitiesare more exposed to air pollution that makes COVID-19 more dangerous. And they're more likely to work the front-line jobs that expose them to the virus.

While vaccines may eventually contain the pandemic, our costly and ineffective health care system will still leave us with the lowest life expectancy and the highest infant and maternal mortality rates among our peer countries. These crises most acutely affect poor and low-income Americans.

Meanwhile, poor people and communities of color are much more likely to be incarcerated or abused by police. Yet ballooning military spending and endless wars have siphoned resources from these same communitieswhile sending billions of dollars' worth of military equipment to civilian law enforcement, bringing the violence of those wars to our own streets.

And finally, with each passing day, new laws make it harder and harder for these impacted communities to vote. Hundreds have been introduced this year alone.

None of these problems stand alone. We can't end poverty without attacking the interconnected injustices of systemic racism, inequality, militarism and the climate emergency. That's why our resolution calls for a comprehensive response that prioritizes the needs of these 140 million people.

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Alongside expanded social welfare programs and unemployment insurance, we're calling for a national, universal single-payer health care program that puts people before profits.

We're calling for a living minimum wage, the right to form unions and a federal jobs guarantee.

We're calling for a housing guarantee that ends evictions and expands affordable housing options and accessible quality education at all levels.

We're calling to transform our climate chaos to a green and renewable futurewith equitable public transit, dramatic reductions in pollution and green jobs and infrastructure.

To root out systemic racism, we're calling on Congress to protect the right to vote, establish commissions on reparations for slavery and genocide and ensure the rights of Native people to their sacred lands. We must also enact comprehensive immigration reform that ends detentions, deportations and family separations. And we must end mass incarceration and the militarization of law enforcement.

Our nation has vast wealth and vaster inequality, which is why we're calling for fair taxation on the wealthyand cuts to our enormous military expenditures. We're calling to end our wars and reconsider the harm done by sanctions and forward military deploymentsand to transfer at least 10 percent of the Pentagon budget to fund community needs.

We call our resolution the "Third Reconstruction." During the First Reconstruction after the Civil War, Black Americans joined hands with white allies to build the power to rewrite state constitutions in most of the former Confederate states, winning the right to public education for all and other measures of progress. Multi-racial fusion coalitions were also key to the victories of the Second Reconstruction of the civil rights era in the 1960s.

Our current moment demands action of similarly historic proportions to heal and transform the nation. We need a Third Reconstruction.

A resolution is just the first step. Actually fulfilling it will require pressure from faith communities, unions, workers, immigrants and the racial justice, climate and peace movements. The Third Reconstruction is backed by the Poor People's Campaign, which will not rest until we achieve this goal.

Let's be clear: poverty exists because we allow it to exist. But in November, the people of this country gave their elected officials a new mandate to change that. With this resolution as a roadmap, we can do what needs to be done and deliver for people across America.

Jason Stanley on critical race theory and why it matters – The Economist

Posted on May 29, 2021 by Danzig

May 24th 2021

by Jason Stanley

Editors note: Twelve months on from the killing of George Floyd, The Economist is publishing a series of articles, films, podcasts, data visualisations and guest contributions on the theme of race in America. To see them visit our hub

POLITICIANS USE critical race theory (CRT) in much the same way that they use Keynesian economics: as cudgels in a propaganda campaign to advance their cherished political goals, with little regard for the actual philosophies at issue. CRT, a doctrine more caricatured than understood, rests upon the distinctly unradical claim that American institutions have systematically fallen short of the countrys egalitarian ideals due to practices that perpetuate racial hierarchies. It began in the 1970s as a way to analyse the intersection of American law and race; its creators were legal scholars such as Derrick Bell and Kimberl Crenshaw. It has since expanded its purview to analyse American institutions more broadly.

CRT stems from the need to provide a language for what institutions actually do, rather than how people in those institutions describe themselves. CRT thus seeks to explain the fact of persistent racial injustice by analysing the practices of American institutions. Such practices are racist because they perpetuate racial inequality, not because people within them seek deliberately to oppress individual and specific black people. Mortgage lending, for instance, can function in a racist way, even if the lenders themselves harbour no personal bigotry against non-whites.

CRT holds that such institutional practices are difficult to change and endemic to American institutions, and that they, rather than the malice of individual bigots or the supposed pathologies of black American behaviour, are primarily responsible for racial inequality. CRT is thus not about peoples individual characters. It is rather a claim about the structures, practices, and habits that perpetuate racial inequality. Even the most avowed anti-racist can participate in an institution with racist practices.

Martin Delany, a political philosopher and black abolitionist, writing in the year 1852, noted that even in Anti-Slavery establishments, by which he means institutions in Northern cities devoted to the abolition of slavery and the elevation of the colored man, by facilitating his efforts in attaining to equality with the white man, black citizens only occupy a mere secondary, underling position. Even whites most devoted to the cause of the advancement of racial equality hired black Americans for inferior jobs.

Such whites might have argued for a distinction between political and professional inequalitythey might have felt, in other words, that the law should treat everyone equally, but also that American citizens of African descent are best suited for menial work. But this is explicit racism, which no avowed anti-racist could accept. The professions of anti-racism from these whites, whom Delany called the truest friends, might have been sincere, but they coexisted with obviously racist practices. Delany denounces this faux liberal equality, declaring, There is no equality of persons, where there is not an equality of attainments.

Almost 170 years later, how has the American polity done on Delanys measure of equality? Consider the criminal-justice system, decried in W.E.B. Du Bois 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk as a a double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and the practical immunity of red-handed criminals, and erred on the black side by undue severity, injustice, and lack of discrimination. As of this writing, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Black Americans are incarcerated in state and federal prisons at five times the rate of white Americans.

It is true that rates of violent crime among black Americans are higher. But just as higher covid-19 death rates among black Americans are best explained by differences in environmental conditions, higher crime rates are also due to racial disparities, such as harsher policing (a racial disparity not explained by differential crime rates), lack of decent job opportunities, homelessness, and poverty. Thus the longstanding American practice of addressing crime spikes through increased policing rather than, say, more job-training programmes is an example of a practice that perpetuates racist outcomes.

Inequalities in the justice system are mirrored, unsurprisingly, in inequalities in wealth. In 2016, the median black family had 10% of the wealth of the median white family. This is an improvement from 1963, when the median non-white family had only 5% of relative wealth. But it is a far cry from equality of attainment, 170 years after Martin Delany set that down as the standard for racial justice.

From sharecropping in the South to predatory lending in the North, white Americans have been materially invested in creating and maintaining racial domination. In addition to these material benefits of racial hierarchy, documented in a justly famous essay of Ta-Nehisi Coates, there is the desire to preserve what Du Bois in 1935 called the public and psychological wage of whiteness.

Jennifer Richeson and Michael Kraus, both psychologists, along with their co-authors, have documented a delusion among white Americans about the racial-wealth gap. They show that Americans estimate that in 2016 the median black family had 90% of the wealth of the median white familyrather than the true figure of 10%. Their research shows a bias towards what Ms Richeson calls a mythology of racial progress. As Ms Richeson writes in a recent article, People are willing to assume that things were at least somewhat bad 50 years ago, but they also assume that things have gotten substantially betterand are approaching parity. This belief that the present has come close to parity is longstandingin a Gallup poll from March 1963, 46% of white Americans agreed with the statement, blacks have as good a chance as whites in your community to get any kind of job for which they are qualified.

Many Americans believe that we are nearing racial equality after a long progression of positive change. That means that any attempt to push for structural change to address inequalities will be met by profound disbelief. Those who argue for such changes get painted as radicals with a devious and destructive hidden agenda. This sort of moral panic helps maintain the status quo.

But such panics might not happen if schools made more efforts to teach students how American institutions fell short of their ideals. Hence, in few arenas does the battle over CRT rage as strongly as in educationwhich fits the historical pattern. The aim of Du Bois 1935 work Black Reconstruction in America was to tell the true story of the end of Reconstruction (the brief period of racial progress that followed the end of the civil war), which is one of violent white backlash against emerging black political power. He denounces the teaching of history for inflating our national ego, and for years his work was overlooked in favour of an interpretation arguing that Reconstruction failed because black Americans were corrupt and incapable of self-governance.

More recently, Nikole Hannah-Joness 1619 Project, which seeks to illuminate how the legacy of slavery has shaped American institutions, was met by fury from the right, as well as demands for patriotic education. The same cycle again: illumination implying the need for structural change produces a moral panic seeking to reinforce a racist status quo.

The targets of the Republican attack on CRT reveal that the issue is not CRT, but something much broader. A recent education bill passed in Tennessee bans promoting division between, or resentment of, a racesubjective language that could easily bar teachers from discussing how race has shaped American institutions. In 1935, Du Bois explicitly argues that American history, properly taught, is divisive, as war and especially civil strife leave terrible wounds. White Americans enslaved black Americans, and shortly after the latter achieved their freedom during the brief period of Reconstruction, excluded them by legislation and force from civic and political life until the 1960s. American democracy is young. These facts are divisive. The Republican attack on CRTs aims is thus a broadside against truth and history in education.

CRT urges America to reform practices in virtually all of its institutions, including criminal-justice, education, housing, banking, and hiring. The United States has attempted this before most notably during Reconstruction, when the federal government poured large resources into empowering a newly free southern black population. That period saw formerly enslaved black legislators elected across the South, and free public education offered to children of all races. The response to these drastic changes was moral panic, widespread racist terrorism and rapid reversal of progress.

Decades later, in the 1960s, the civil-rights movement fought for major legal changes to end the era of legal segregation. During this fight, its leaders were denounced as anti-American communist sympathisers. It should come as no surprise now that the same Republican legislators who want to ban CRT are also advancing voter-suppression laws that target black communities.

Dramatic structural change is hard, and involves missteps. Diversity workshops that involve little more than people sharing feelings, or being told their race is the single most important and determinative thing about them, are no doubt examples. But critics vastly inflate the importance of these missteps, to make such calls, and CRT more broadly, seem outlandish. When such complaints dominate the discussion, they fuel moral panic that is cynically used to halt and reverse progress towards equality.

___________________

Jason Stanley is the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and is the author of several books, including How Propaganda Works and How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. For a contrary argument, please see John McWhorters essay here.

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Jason Stanley on critical race theory and why it matters - The Economist

A Resolution to End Poverty in the World’s Wealthiest Country | Opinion – Newsweek