Throwing the Words "White Supremacy" Around Doesn't Do Anything About Racial Disparities
Talking about race is the antithesis of doing something about racism
It has become a cliche in America that what we need is a “national conversation” about race. Some people say that conversation should be led by Black people; indeed, by some accounts, white people need to shut up and listen, or constrain themselves to taking responsibility for their unearned privilege. Others are more open to a discussion between members of different races, but want the discussion to focus on abstractions such as “the pain and trauma and violence that Black people face every day”. And, of course, the scourge of “white supremacy”.
I was reminded of this ongoing conversation when I read a question and answer between Matthew Yglesias and a reader, on Yglesias’ excellent substack. Here it is in full:
Trg56: A few weeks ago Jon Stewart had Andrew Sullivan on his new show to talk about race and had a rather shambolic conversation. I like both of them but thought Sullivan and Stewart were each arguing with straw men. It’s weird and depressing two smart people who probably voted for Biden feel like they are so far apart. (Makes me think Trump could win again) To me their differences seem to be mostly semantics. Curious what you thought of the exchange?
[Yglesias:] Their conversation exemplified a lot of what I find frustrating about the past few years of political dialogue in the United States, which is that it’s all kicking around these giant abstractions rather than talking about some specific ideas.
Should we expand Medicaid? Do more automatic traffic enforcement? Improve zoning laws? Invest in pandemic prevention? Expand production of zero-carbon electricity? These are all things that seem important to me, I think they would make Americans’ lives better, and I think they would help remediate the racial gaps that we see in income and health and other major indicators. But it’s actually not true that to accomplish those goals we either need to “dismantle white supremacy” or else somehow “fix” some supposed pathologies of Black culture. What we need to do is make better policy on specific questions, and that means talking about those questions in specific ways.
I think Matt is right, and indeed, I think that he is so self-evidently right that I think it’s worth trying to figure out how the entire world of elite discourse has gone so wrong on this point. In that regard, I think what has happened to the term “white supremacy” exemplifies the entire enterprise.
“White supremacy”, until about 15 or 20 years ago, had a pretty well-established meaning. It meant the form of racism where people actually expressed the belief in an explicit racial hierarchy, with whites at the top. So, obviously, people who thought that whites were more intelligent or capable than Blacks were white supremacists. So were segregationists who thought that exposure to Black children would “poison” white youth. And so were members of groups like the KKK who believed in terrorizing Black citizens with violence and threats of violence.
But here’s the thing- it didn’t mean any form of racism. There were other terms for other forms of racism that were not premised on an expressed belief of white superiority. For instance, some racism was institutional and structural, such as where people lived and their access to capital. Some racism was attitudinal, such as the assumption of cops that young Black males were more dangerous on account of their race. Some was just personal- preferences in who people associated with. Some took the form of stereotypes- unfair generalizations about the supposed habits and cultural practices of Black people. We didn’t used to call any of those things “white supremacy”, and when someone said “a bunch of white supremacists met in that banquet hall last night”, one would assume you were talking about the Klan or some other white nationalist groups, rather than, for instance, the local school board.
So what obviously happened to “white supremacy” was that there was a deliberate choice by activists to up the ante and to equivalence the local Klan chapter with practices that involve most of society. You can see, in their own mind, why they wanted to do this: the notion is that the other forms of racism in fact played significant roles in perpetuating the dominance of whites and subjugation of Blacks in American society. So why aren’t they “white supremacy” too?
Put that way, it makes a certain amount of logical sense, and it certainly makes sense to activists in trying to raise the profile of their issues. But the problem is the same problem that infects a lot of people in politics on a lot of issues: language simply isn’t as important as they think it is.
Let’s consider what factors go into the gaping and persistent gaps between Blacks and whites in terms of income, wealth, education, and other measures. The most obvious point is that Blacks simply start from a more impoverished place. Literally, many Black Americans started from a starting line where not only did they not own anything, but did not even own their own labor. And over time, while a thriving Black middle class did develop, de jure and de facto segregation ensured that for many decades, many Blacks did not have access to white wealth. As a result, many Black communities in America are still poorer than white neighborhoods in the same region. In Los Angeles terms, Torrance is richer than Watts, and the two places are not far away from each other.
The lack of capital manifests itself in lots of ways. There are fewer jobs in the community, and the jobs that exist don’t pay as well. (This latter point is then exacerbated by racism among employers, as better paying jobs are sometimes allocated to whites.) The most likely population to be unemployed is young less skilled males; when the labor market is not tight, they are often unemployed, and unemployed young males are the population most likely to get involved in crime (due to a combination of boredom and the need for money). So poor neighborhoods have more crime. This in turn leads to police abuse and mass incarceration as well (and these are exacerbated in turn by police racism and the targeting of Black males). And then, once many young Black males are incarcerated, you end up with a lot of single mothers raising kids. Extensive research shows that children from two parent families do better on a variety of metrics.
Moreover, the impoverishment of Black communities itself feeds racism. White people see the crime rates and single motherhood and make racist assumptions about “Black culture” (in fact, in parts of the country where there is a lot of white poverty, you see the same sorts of crime/drugs and single motherhood trends). And more importantly, they don’t want their kids to go to school with kids who were raised in that environment. Like it or not, decry it or not, white parents do not want to turn their kids into what they see as sociological experiments, and feel they would be doing so if their neighborhood schools are diversified, especially since they often chose the neighborhood they lived in partly because of the quality of the schools. We saw this in the 1970’s school busing fights in many urban areas.
So you end up with two Americas- separate and unequal. And, as I said, giving the activists their due, you can see how one might label this “white supremacist”, because the end result of all of this is that many Black Americans are stuck in terrible, unsafe neighborhoods with inferior public services, while many whites live high on the hog.
But here’s the thing: labeling it “white supremacist”, at best, does nothing about the problem, and at worst is counterproductive. Coming up with new names for the problem doesn’t get at the reasons it was intractable. Parents didn’t oppose busing because school segregation wasn’t officially labeled “white supremacist” by elites; they opposed it because they held negative stereotypes about Black kids and didn’t want them bused to their own kids’ schools. At the end of the day, you still have to either (1) persuade white parents that the sky won’t fall if de facto desegregation occurs, or (2) persuade white people to make bigger investments into Black America. Using the term “white supremacy” doesn’t get us any closer to either of those goals.
In fact, it may well get us farther away, because the average white American simply does not consider herself a Klan member. She believes she is making reasonable choices to protect her kids, and generally does not feel responsible for decisions to deprive Black Americans of capital that were made over 100 years ago. She thinks de jure segregation was awful and Brown v. Board of Education was rightly decided. She thinks the right side won the Civil War. So when you call her a “white supremacist”, you just alienate her and drive her to the party with the platform that America should do very little to fight racism.
So back to Yglesias’ reader’s question, and the ballyhooed Sullivan-Stewart encounter. As Yglesias points out, the real problem here was the level of abstraction- a discussion between someone who wants to talk airily about white supremacy and white people’s privileges, and someone who wants to blame Black people’s problems on nefarious “cultural” factors, does not serve the material interests of Black Americans one bit. Yet this is the “conversation on race” that our elites insist on having, over and over again. A Marxist might predict this- elites, the Marxist would say, love to distract us with airy theory while the material needs of the masses are ignored. And that hypothetical Marxist would have a point. Our discourse these days is dominated by a lot of people for whom language is very important; they are obsessed with concepts of “privilege”, but they have somehow missed that the base level of material prosperity necessary to live in comfort while worrying about the words people are using is itself a significant form of privilege.
Black America doesn’t need more conversations on race. Black America needs investment. Black America needs social programs. Black America needs better law enforcement- law enforcement that protects Black citizens and deters crime while also not incarcerating large segments of Black male youth for long periods of time. Black America needs its schools to receive adequate funding, its hospitals to be kept open and expanded, and its housing stock increased so more people can afford to rent or own a home. The people who pontificate about race on televised talk shows and podcasts fiddle, while our society continues to burn.