Jim,
Our email this morning calls to mind your point several months ago about Biden and the Clinton Crime Bill when you said social programs had not worked.
I’d suggest those programs actually didn’t exist in terms of genuinely addressing racism in housing, education, finance, criminal justice…etc.
RFK and MLK were saying this during the time of Johnson’s Great Society program.
Hence King was organizing a mass protest for the summer of ’68 when the FBI and Memphis PD murdered him, (which was the conclusion of the civil trial in 1999 in which King’s family was awarded a symbolic $100).
RFK had working ties with Caesar Chavez as well as with King. I’d consider him a social democrat, though cold warriors may have seen him and King as “commies.”
Instead of the Great Society leading to a genuine role of government in dismantling systemic racism, a public assistance regime was created that fostered dependency, not black economic empowerment.
This included the “projects” of inner cities, white flight, and white-black sections of town isolated via freeways, engendering continued isolation by class and race, not solidarity for a more genuine democracy.
Great Society programs, flawed as they were, became an easy target for Republicans and also conservative Democrats.
That enabled an across-the-board scaling back of social democracy that has hurt the working and middle classes of all races and ethnic groups, beginning under Reagan, which his administration complemented with huge tax cuts for the rich, attacks on unions, crack cocaine brought into inner cities, deregulation of finance….etc
As productivity has risen in that period, the share going to the middle and working classes has declined. You like stats. Check it out yourself. Also see quality-of-life, standard-of-living metrics for masses of regular folk in the US. Compare that data with soaring profits for Wall Street, huge tax cuts and evasions for the super-rich and ballooning national debt. Who are the looters again 😉 ?
The War on Drugs, and tough-on-crime measures swelled the prison population, disproportionately with black men.
Meanwhile, militarized policing has been a function of divestments from our country’s human resources, hurting black people disproportionately.
You are an educated person. There are only two options: attribute the mass incarceration of black people to economic exploitation or attribute it to inherent inferiority within black people.
Apply that same causal question to the huge aggregate wealth gap between black and white folk that exists to the present.
It is one thing to denounce the boorishness of Trump or the lynching of George Floyd, yet quite another to recognize and care about the structural racism that exists right now in terms of housing, education, access to healthcare, equal protection under the law…etc.
The “problem of the white moderate” seems as true today as when MLK spoke about it in the early 1960s and again in the late 1960s when he gave it a more explicit economic context.
As part if its concern for its Cold War era international reputation, the federal government supported desegregation in the south against blatantly racist southern state and municipal governments. But it didn’t go that way in the north as King’s and Bobby Kennedy’s murders illustrate. As the US genocide against Vietnamese people intensified, the “winning hearts and minds” faction of the State Department and Defense Department evidently had lost the debate. For that and other reasons, Kings attempt to create a crisis of conscience in 1968 with which to undo defacto northern segregation would be much harder than it was in several years earlier concerning southern dejure segregation.
Then, as now, white moderates denounce and sometimes actively oppose racist brutality but have yet to actively promote economic racial justice.
As the US becomes majority non-white, the more noble path seems to be to strive for multi-racial economic justice and democracy, and reject appeals to white racism or racial fear and paranoia.
Doing that requires rejecting both the fascistic appeals to racism from elements within the political right while also rejecting the identity fetishes offered by corporatist liberals who tell us we’ll “make history” and somehow bring about economic justice in the US by electing yet another corporatist with the difference being that it involves a woman with brown skin.
MLK, RFK, and JFK seemed to have cared deeply about “we the people” and about US national interest. Then, as now, concentrated interests unaccountable to the public is at odds with that.
There are no assassinations now, maybe because democracy is so moribund as to pose no threat. Social movements such as BLM are prone to being coopted by the Democratic establishment.
“Defund the police” may be more likely to result in additional attacks on public goods and a rise of private security forces even less accountable to the public and more beholden to the rich than it is likely to lead to actual investments into education, healthcare and other services for marginalized black communities.
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