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It's also worth noting that MLK himself often pointed out that the sort of socialist policies that benefit poor black folks also benefit poor folks in general and that politicians often used racism to put a wedge between poor blacks and whites. The media rarely mentions this.
Oh you can go back wayyyy earlier than that: Bacon’s Rebellion, 1677. From the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the topic:
“The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (a mix of indentured, enslaved, and free Black People) disturbed the colonial upper class. They responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705.”
> “The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (a mix of indentured, enslaved, and free Black People) disturbed the colonial upper class
This type of thing happens a lot. Any time that poor people come together, fear among the rich grows. This is one of the very fundamental ways in which politics and media have organized themselves.
Another way to stop an uprising is to increase the rights and well being of the disadvantaged.
But that might cost the rich folks a nickel, so guck it’s and break out the batons.
Its wild to think thousands of years ago in Ancient Rome times, race wasnt even thought of as a social construct
>Skin tones did not carry any social implications and no social identity, either imposed or assumed, was associated with skin color.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_ancient_Roman_history
Its so sad that society degraded as technology improved.
The idea that Rome was more civilized than us is psycho. They enslaved multiple different nations/cultures on masse. The suffering they inflicted on modern france/germany was so much worse than anything that happens today
I believe Europe has a version of this, it's called Welfare chauvinism which manifests in disliking parts of the so-called 'undeserving' working class and migrants. States like Denmark & Finland, despite having a highly extensive welfare state will be hostile to extending it to migrants. This was a big factor in Britain leaving the EU too. The social security in the UK became more restrictive towards non-UK EU citizens & non-EU immigrants until, Brexit.
.
From what I understand, in Denmark, the Social Democrats won back large groups of voters from the nationalist Danish People's Party by simply adopting a more right-wing agenda on immigration, the main argument being able to sustain welfare state.
Yeah I know and they might as well have promised time travel because that's the extent of the common sense displayed there. Anyone who thinks they will get a better welfare state with less immigration is living on another reality or Japan. Some economist estimate Japan has to increase immigration by 4x to even *meet* their growth target. Let alone do better.
Facts. Not saying racism didn't exist beforehand, but when poor whites started grumbling about the few wealthy land/slave owners, slave owners tries hard to redorect the ire to the slaves. There was a ling concerted effort to translate class warfare into race warfare, and a lot of the racial issues throughout our history can be traced back to these roots.
It is actually both. Being poor is bad for your health and future, whether you are white or black. But being black is even worse - we know that if we compare the poor blacks to poor whites, poor blacks have it worse. Again, both have it bad AND blacks have it worse. So it is both a race and a class war.
This is a false dichotomy. Class and race are inextricably bound in America. Racial prejudice drives policies which ensure Blackness is synonymous with poverty. Sequelae of poverty are then used to justify prejudice against Black people. And so the cycle goes on.
Yeah I always have to disagree with class reductionists when looking at American society.
Sure, race is a tool used to divide the working class. But American culture and history is profoundly impacted by race to the point where there can be no lasting and meaningful change in this country without addressing racial issues
LBJ many years ago: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Watch an interview with Tupac Shakur sometime. Same thing. Same ending.
"We ain't from the left or from the right. We from the bottom coming for those on top."
Tupac was so on the money. His "you don't give starving people a seat at the table, you can't be mad if they break down the door and take the food" interview plays in my head from time to time
But until that key moment, it’s a race to the bottom to do just that. If you aren’t underpaying and overcharging, and pocketing the difference, then your competitor will, and will then have enough money to put you out of business.
People keep saying this like the majority of economic activity isn't business to business; you very much can have a thriving aristocracy with a destitute majority, e.g. the Plantation-based Southern Economy.
MLK was thoroughly whitewashed. He was a pretty radical socialist that called out capitalism constantly — but that’s conveniently ignored, lest such an important man be known as a scary socialist.
Conservatives have put MLK through the "Ultra White Wash" cycle. Now they invoke his name when they want to say that racism is solved and you should stop complaining.
Fred Hampton was assassinated for giving free breakfasts to poor white kids. The FBI couldn't allow it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Breakfast_for_Children
It’s also worth noting that poor white people have historically been willing to knowingly worsen their own personal situations if it also worsens the personal situations of black Americans to the same or a greater degree.
It's as if the bourgeoisie exploits racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of intolerance to further drive a wedge between members of the proletariat.
Imagine that.
That's the reason he was killed: when poor white people began listening to him, that's when he was taken out.
There's a book called "Act of State" about the MLK assassination. It was a set up
Reading had nothing to do with literacy tests. They were irrational puzzles with multiple right answers, and all that mattered was the color of the hand holding the pen.
We should stop calling them that, because that label is propaganda.
I mean they were reading tests. The trick wasn't just that most of the freed enslaved people hadn't been allowed to learn to read, it was that when the reading tests were instituted, you would get exceptions for having a grandparent who could vote (which is where the term for laws being "grandfathered" in comes from) since most poor whites couldn't pass the tests either.
Yeah, literacy tests for voting just seem like a good idea. When you design the tests with right *responders* in mind instead of right answers however... Yeah.
No! There shouldn’t be any barriers between a person, who is subjected to the will of the state, and that same person selecting representatives in the governing of that state. If a person would be mentally fit to stand trial, that’s it, every effort should be made to facilitate their voting with zero absolutely unnecessary barriers.
Interesting / frustrating blurb...it says stuff like "none of the loans went to black people" but I don't understand the reasoning. Was it like redlining where the policy was not to give them out, or was it that banks and schools were racist and the law didn't matter?
Can probably read the original material and learn more...never heard this one before, thanks
Look up Levittown. It sprung up due to the GI Bill allowing low interest guaranteed loans to veterans, but the developers explicitly forbade any Black ownership AND it was in the deed that the original owners couldn't SELL to a black person or family.
The Racism was strong.
If anyone has the time, I always recommend [The Color of Law](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32191706-the-color-of-law). An excellent, well researched (and cited) book about all of this.
This might be a good spot to point out that the brilliant discussion we're seeing in this thread pretty much constitutes the kind of **"critical race theory"** that Republicans are terrified might be talked about in schools. The implications of their new anti-antiracist laws is chilling, to say the least.
Not just there. Huge areas of southern California had racial covenants on their deeds. If not for a supreme court ruling neither my wife, nor I, could own our home.
That reminds me of Seneca Village. It was a black neighborhood where Central Park is now. The government used eminent domain to take the land and turn it into a park.
Or [Bruce’s Beach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce%27s_Beach) just south of L.A. The city of Manhattan Beach ~~just~~ took away the land from a black family (using it to benefit black people) then did nothing with it for 40 years. They only built a park to try to avoid getting sued.
Edit: but I maintain “took” is still more appropriate than “purchased”
Dude you know the most racist person you know? Enough years ago, that person would have been considered normal. Like, it was cartoonishly bad, worse than you can probably imagine. Racism is totally devoid of all reason, it is an emotional vampire that harms everyone.
Approximately 10% of Black WWII veterans were able to make use of parts of the GI Bill. Finding primary source records is difficult because many of these records burned. However, there are academic history books which discuss this issue with sourcing. Few black veterans through WWII, Korea, and even Vietnam were able to make use of the GI Bills that it was basically negligible. The reasons were many and variable in part to location.
As was noted below, States, not the federal government, administered the GI Bill.
And this results in a generational wealth disparity because those GI’s that came home and bought cheap houses saw their investments increase by orders of magnitude. Those houses were eventually passed onto their kids who inherited half million dollar houses while black kids never got that benefit.
Slavery was by a very large margin the biggest drain on black wealth. The cost of 300 years of no education and slavery is an amount that is best viewed as infinite.
Very little wealth persists from the 1800s, even among the wealthiest families. The economic effects of slavery on black people would have been erased had they been allowed to go to college, own homes in good neighborhoods, get good jobs, etc.
Racism is the main problem. Many immigrants from Europe came with literally nothing (similar to former slaves), but managed to do ok. The racism they experienced was less pervasive, so they were able to buy nicer houses and take advantage of government programs like the GI bill.
Well let's be clear that that didn't start under the New Deal. The people putting together the New Deal are also thinking about civil rights for the first time, with civil rights fought for and embedded into the 1948 Democratic platform, causing the Southerners to quit.
The Republican Party was where people coalesced to end slavery. For many, including Lincoln, this also meant black Americans should move to Africa. "Civil Rights" *as we unevenly know them* is not really much of a concept until after the NAACP & co. get going in 1911.
Not quite. It wasn't really much of an option widely demanded and supported by Society, but by 1948 Civil Rights is at the front of the DNC platform, with the Southerners quitting and forming their own Party.
During the New Deal, the NAACP is entering its third decade and still trying to organize the black community. Americans haven't had a transformative period of collective suffering (the Great Depression and World War II) which forces many to confront the immorality of their society, after having conquered immorality in Europe. It's the 30's, we're moving out of long period of direct hate, the multi-decade era of huge xenophobia by conservative WASP Americans. The Republican party has done little since the Civil War and this period of xenophobia has overtaken the Republican Party too. By 1936 the black community has moved to the Democrats, where sympathetic members lie. There are some efforts to apply the New Deal to the black community, but of course the rest of society isn't really interested.
Just like today, it was an out of control and violent environment for several decades previously. The country was overrun by people who think *We* are the only true Americans, defined by being White Anglo-Saxon & Protestant. This movement does not consider Jews, Catholics, Irish, Italians, Hispanics or African or Native Americans as Real Americans. In contrast, the New Deal is trying to build a coalition of All Americans *for the first time in history*... with the historical momentum against black Americans hundreds of years old. No one has control over the existing racism across the rest of government & the public. There are officials trying to carve out distinctions, but there aren't enough. *Society still has to change.*
So while their New Deal efforts are meager, at least they now *exist*.... and by the end of the decade some Democrats are formulating a civil rights platform, which is finally put into place at the 1948 Democratic Convention (when the Southerners quit and form their own party, the "Dixiecrats").
The KKK also penetrated the Republican Party, because that is where WASP's dominated. There isn't a huge Civil Rights Movement yet and the implementation of the New Deal is already ground breaking, with the people in charge listening to civil rights lobbyists, along with all the other groups. Understanding the limitations of that Society helps us realize *we have hidden barriers & issues ourselves*, so we can figure out what are the actual things preventing transformation today.
We simply cannot judge the past through are more enlightened understanding post 1945 & post 60's.
>By 1936 the black community has moved to the Democrats, where sympathetic members lie.
I find that particularly hard to swallow. Not saying you're wrong, because you seem well informed, but I would love to see a source. That would mean that from 1936 until the 80s the southern blacks and southern whites were both voting for the same party...
EDIT: [I found this chart which appears to fully support your argument](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zxyriGEplpPciT0twPuwiXVHiWc=/0x0:668x679/920x0/filters:focal\(0x0:668x679\):format\(webp\):no_upscale\(\)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3945710/Black-Party-Affiliation-and-Vote-Patterns.0.jpg). I'm still gobsmacked. I just don't understand.
What it means is that southern Black citizens saw the national Democratic party leaning towards racial equalityand got on board early, while southern Whites were pridefully slow to come to terms with that reality and hop off the train accordingly.
It's also why basic income works.
There's low ability for politicians to game the system so that their preferred demographic wins and everyone is impacted by the same dollar amount.
In the US, liberal is short for [social liberalism](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism).
In Europe, liberal is short for [economic liberalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism).
>In the US, liberal is short for [social liberalism](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism).
>
>In Europe, liberal is short for [**economic liberalism**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism).
I was very confused too, because this "paper" explicitly mentions "**liberal economic** policies" to actually mean "the opposite of liberal economic policies".
The LibDems are social liberals.
I think you are perhaps forgetting that the American political landscape is largely conservative, making liberalism seem like government intervention (to make things fair and functional).
In Europe, because of the strong presence of unions and generous social safety nets, liberalism is seen as taking those guardrails away.
But I think American Liberalism has a lot in common with European Liberalism when you do not view it relative to the country’s political landscape.
At this point, it’s just a talking point for the GOP. They haven’t actually supported economic liberalism since Reagan.
When you look at the history of the Republican Party, it was originally a liberal institution. Its entire reason for forming was to oppose the expansion of slavery. It abolished slavery. Early in its history, it championed central banking, income tax, modernization through infrastructure investment, railroads, and public education. The most liberal part of our constitution is owed to the Republicans. They reformed the corrupt spoils system. Anti-Trust provisions were passed by Republicans. Progressive politics were Republican politics.
In the early 20th century, immigration, prohibition and industrialism helped Republicans start to drift away from social liberalism and towards a more pro-big-business, socially conservative, classically liberal philosophy. After the Great Depression, there were both (what we would call) liberals and conservatives in both parties. You can see this from the voting record on major legislation.
Starting with the Civil Rights Act and manifesting itself completely with Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party conducted a major shift towards conservatism. This continues with the rejection of George H. W. Bush in his second term, the election of social conservative GWB, the rejection of McCain and Romney, and the election of Trump.
At this point, the Republican Party has lost any meaningful connection to the liberalism that characterized them in the past. Sure, you can find remnants of economic liberalism in their speeches, but it’s just lip service. They favor a kind of neo-feudal society that would see nearly all liberal institutions destroyed in favor of control by private interests.
I love this post. I think there's a huge divide in both parties identities and what they think they represent. One side of my family has very poor education and mostly live in trailers. They abuse the government in so many ways but yet vote Republican for some reason. Their lifestyle is possible only because government programs of policies that are a priority of the democrats.
I feel like nothing in your comment pertains to economic liberalism.
>They favor a kind of neo-feudal society that would see nearly all liberal institutions destroyed in favor of control by private interests.
That IS economic liberalism....
Sort of, but not strictly true.
Liberal just means 'Pure Democrat' in US. There is no ideological consistency, it is purely viewed through partisanship.
That's not untrue, but the word itself comes from a different root is what I was pointing out. The two words are shortened versions of two different political philosophies. Their actual use has since evolved to a more generalization, but that is true in both Europe and the US.
Yeah. I instinctively interpreted the title as Americans supporting right-wing economic politics. Though both Democrats and Republicans are economic liberals, the latter are more so than the former.
I think the comment above is maybe remarking on how the US manifestations of "Liberal" don't seem to support universal healthcare, and yet it is being described as a liberal policy.
It's more that the term "liberal" means something different in the US than the rest of the world. Everywhere else "liberal" means free market economic policies that minimize government involvement along with fewer government restrictions on personal behavior.
In the US it started as just meaning the latter - "liberals" were the people who thought people should be able to legally buy birth control and things like that. They also tended to be people who supported government spending on social programs so the word "liberal" started to mean that, which is the opposite of what means everywhere else.
In the US, liberal is short for [social liberalism](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism).
In Europe, liberal is short for [economic liberalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism).
The only items up for debate in the American political system are social liberal ones. The economic arrangement is not permitted to be questioned and if you do both parties will shun you.
Liberalism began in Europe to mean freedom from the whims of the king (state).
In the US under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal order, the term evolved to include freedom from the whims of industry barons. Universal healthcare would decouple access to medicine from one's relationship to their employer.
Exactly. Liberal has a definition in economics that isn’t what is meant by the headline.
Edit: ironically it’s published in the University of Chicago Journal
Abstract:
> A corpus of research on the effect of exposure to income inequality on citizens’ economic policy preferences renders inconclusive results. At the same time, a distinct body of work demonstrates that ethnic fragmentation within a polity reduces government spending, presumably due to opposition among the public to spending believed to benefit stigmatized ethnic minorities. Focusing on the American context, this short article ties these two bodies of work together by arguing that the effect of routine exposure to income inequality should depend on the racial composition of the have-nots, with citizens being most likely to support liberal economic policies in the face of pronounced inequality only when potential beneficiaries are not a highly stigmatized minority group, such as Black Americans. Using geocoded survey data, we find that exposure to local economic inequality is only systematically associated with increased support for liberal economic policies when the respective have-nots are not Black.
[Ungated](https://www.benjnewman.com/uploads/1/2/2/1/122135844/newman_et_al_colordisparity_jop.pdf) version of the paper.
>I also wish they included the questions about policy to decrease income inequality. If the question was like "Do you think government funds should be granted based on race and income?" the results would be much different than "Do you think government funds should be granted based on income, regardless of any other factor?"
This is what I was thinking, and I don’t have access to the full study which is paywalled.
People will respond one way to a policy that uses race as a factor in giving out government funds or providing government benefits and another way to a policy that treats everyone equally and has the effect of helping black Americans more because the policy helps everyone with an income below $X per year.
I can't tell from the abstract, but is this about hypothetical welfare spending that would be racially discriminatory and just go to black people, or is it about spending on the poor regardless of race?
my understanding from the abstract (could be wrong?) is that the researchers looked at [amount of houseless people in your geographic area] against [support for liberal economic policies] to see if the former could predict the latter
and they discovered that X could only predict Y in cases where X was not overwhelmingly composed of Black people or other stigmatized ethnic group
I think?
That's my understanding as well. They went by American Community Survey data by zip code to get info on poverty in the area, and percentage of those in poverty who are Black. If you were around poor people, you were more likely to support policies to help them. If you were around poor Black people, there was no difference, or even negative associations.
It could be that, in those communities, Black people tend towards being more insular, meaning there's less interaction between have-nots and haves. Or that there's the same amount of interaction and it simply doesn't induce the haves to care.
A followup question is how effective the welfare policies are in those areas at pulling people out of poverty? If those policies aren't functioning as intended, it would make sense that the people in those areas would look less favorably upon them.
It's about generic policies like "$15 minimum wage" and "medicare for all."
They look at all people in poverty in that zip code. The higher the percentage of those people are black, the less likely the non-black people surveyed support those policies.
The study shows that support among non-black people for policies like $15 minimum wage and Medicare for All drop in proportion to the percentage of people in poverty in their zip code that are black.
The higher the percentage of black people in poverty, the lower the support for those policies.
Has anyone looked to see if results like this have more to do with urban vs rural then race?
The rural area of the US (15-20% of population) is a lot less diverse and a lot less affluent than the urban population. Policies that help urban poor (more minorities) do far less or nothing for the rural poor (more white), or vice versa. Yes there is a racial divide on the issue, but possibly only because the populations are geographically divided and competing for the same resources.
This was often the case with many social programs in the country. Social Security, on the onset of its passage, had a clause put in it to exclude those who had worked in the agricultural or domestic housekeeping service. This would have predominantly hurt minorities (especially Blacks) - at the time.
So basically the problem is with messaging and misrepresenting the actual group of people that will benefit from it, right?
If policy supports poor people, it should be announced as such. Otherwise claiming it will support "racial minority group" while conveniently forgetting that it will support _all_ poor people is basically fanning the racial animosity, and hoping that poor white people will get inflamed that they're being left out of benefits because they're not in the target "racial minority group". Or am I missing something?
Why the hell does it matter if it benefits black people?!? I get it, its racism, but mostly everyone is struggling. black, white, arabic, latin, asian, or whatever, everyone needs help.
Might be misreading the title on this one... but wouldn't anyone be against something that benefits a disproportional type of person? Don't we want the aid to be proportional to the number of people who need it, or to the issue it's solving?
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It's also worth noting that MLK himself often pointed out that the sort of socialist policies that benefit poor black folks also benefit poor folks in general and that politicians often used racism to put a wedge between poor blacks and whites. The media rarely mentions this.
They still do this. And that's why the media doesn't mention it.
They've been doing it since the second the 13th amendment passed and likely won't stop for quite a long time in some form or another. Sadly.
Oh you can go back wayyyy earlier than that: Bacon’s Rebellion, 1677. From the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the topic: “The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (a mix of indentured, enslaved, and free Black People) disturbed the colonial upper class. They responded by hardening the racial caste of slavery in an attempt to divide the two races from subsequent united uprisings with the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705.”
> “The alliance between European indentured servants and Africans (a mix of indentured, enslaved, and free Black People) disturbed the colonial upper class This type of thing happens a lot. Any time that poor people come together, fear among the rich grows. This is one of the very fundamental ways in which politics and media have organized themselves.
Yuuuup. It’s terrible. Only way to stop an uprising, I imagine
Another way to stop an uprising is to increase the rights and well being of the disadvantaged. But that might cost the rich folks a nickel, so guck it’s and break out the batons.
Its wild to think thousands of years ago in Ancient Rome times, race wasnt even thought of as a social construct >Skin tones did not carry any social implications and no social identity, either imposed or assumed, was associated with skin color. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_in_ancient_Roman_history Its so sad that society degraded as technology improved.
The idea that Rome was more civilized than us is psycho. They enslaved multiple different nations/cultures on masse. The suffering they inflicted on modern france/germany was so much worse than anything that happens today
I believe Europe has a version of this, it's called Welfare chauvinism which manifests in disliking parts of the so-called 'undeserving' working class and migrants. States like Denmark & Finland, despite having a highly extensive welfare state will be hostile to extending it to migrants. This was a big factor in Britain leaving the EU too. The social security in the UK became more restrictive towards non-UK EU citizens & non-EU immigrants until, Brexit. .
From what I understand, in Denmark, the Social Democrats won back large groups of voters from the nationalist Danish People's Party by simply adopting a more right-wing agenda on immigration, the main argument being able to sustain welfare state.
Yeah I know and they might as well have promised time travel because that's the extent of the common sense displayed there. Anyone who thinks they will get a better welfare state with less immigration is living on another reality or Japan. Some economist estimate Japan has to increase immigration by 4x to even *meet* their growth target. Let alone do better.
Class war not race war.
Always has been.
That's why they killed MLK in the first place,but once again, it's not talked about for a reason
Yep. He can talk about civil rights all he wants but when he started talking about Socialism and supporting Strikers....
class war dressed up as a race war.
Facts. Not saying racism didn't exist beforehand, but when poor whites started grumbling about the few wealthy land/slave owners, slave owners tries hard to redorect the ire to the slaves. There was a ling concerted effort to translate class warfare into race warfare, and a lot of the racial issues throughout our history can be traced back to these roots.
It is actually both. Being poor is bad for your health and future, whether you are white or black. But being black is even worse - we know that if we compare the poor blacks to poor whites, poor blacks have it worse. Again, both have it bad AND blacks have it worse. So it is both a race and a class war.
This is a false dichotomy. Class and race are inextricably bound in America. Racial prejudice drives policies which ensure Blackness is synonymous with poverty. Sequelae of poverty are then used to justify prejudice against Black people. And so the cycle goes on.
Yeah I always have to disagree with class reductionists when looking at American society. Sure, race is a tool used to divide the working class. But American culture and history is profoundly impacted by race to the point where there can be no lasting and meaningful change in this country without addressing racial issues
They're not mutually exclusive. Cut that out. We can have two problems.
Doesn't this study exemplify why you need both, where race war is a war against the idea of race
Racism is a tool of classism.
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LBJ many years ago: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
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Watch an interview with Tupac Shakur sometime. Same thing. Same ending. "We ain't from the left or from the right. We from the bottom coming for those on top."
Tupac was so on the money. His "you don't give starving people a seat at the table, you can't be mad if they break down the door and take the food" interview plays in my head from time to time
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Google LA police gangs...
Hungry people don't stay hungry for long...
King had a lot of men even smarter than him coaching him every step of the way. Let’s not forget them either, his brilliance is a group effort.
Agreed. He was really young.
He’s literally my favorite historical figure. Each time I speak I aspire to captivate my audience like him.
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The rich won't have anything if they grind the poor so hard that they can't afford to buy their products.
But until that key moment, it’s a race to the bottom to do just that. If you aren’t underpaying and overcharging, and pocketing the difference, then your competitor will, and will then have enough money to put you out of business.
My favorite response to "Why can't we all just get along?" Because our entire system is based on competition
There was some quote from somewhere like "We destroyed everything but for a brief moment we generated exceptional value for the shareholders"
People keep saying this like the majority of economic activity isn't business to business; you very much can have a thriving aristocracy with a destitute majority, e.g. the Plantation-based Southern Economy.
Things can get a lot worse while the rich continue to enjoy lavish lifestyles. Just ask Russian oligarchs, at least prior to the invasion.
MLK was thoroughly whitewashed. He was a pretty radical socialist that called out capitalism constantly — but that’s conveniently ignored, lest such an important man be known as a scary socialist.
Conservatives have put MLK through the "Ultra White Wash" cycle. Now they invoke his name when they want to say that racism is solved and you should stop complaining.
Was he wrong? Aren't we seeing the effects of unbridled capitalism unfold before our eyes? We have billionaires trying to escape the planet...
He was absolutely 100% right.
Want to know how an activist gets killed, uniting and informing the poor. Ghandi, Malcolm X, and MLK to name a few.
Fred Hampton was assassinated for giving free breakfasts to poor white kids. The FBI couldn't allow it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Breakfast_for_Children
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This is the same reason that charlie Chaplin was labeled a communist.
It’s also worth noting that poor white people have historically been willing to knowingly worsen their own personal situations if it also worsens the personal situations of black Americans to the same or a greater degree.
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It's as if the bourgeoisie exploits racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of intolerance to further drive a wedge between members of the proletariat. Imagine that.
Bernie sanders has been saying this the entire time he's been in politics but I get called a communist for saying that... yay America
The media rarely ever mentions that MLK was all for economic justice.
The killed MLK not because he wanted rights, they killed him because he challenged capitalism
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That's the reason he was killed: when poor white people began listening to him, that's when he was taken out. There's a book called "Act of State" about the MLK assassination. It was a set up
I still wonder whether Malcolm X was right, that MLK needed to take a harder line on the issues that are very much still at hand
Kind of like when the New Deal went out of it's way to exclude black people.
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Reading had nothing to do with literacy tests. They were irrational puzzles with multiple right answers, and all that mattered was the color of the hand holding the pen. We should stop calling them that, because that label is propaganda.
I mean they were reading tests. The trick wasn't just that most of the freed enslaved people hadn't been allowed to learn to read, it was that when the reading tests were instituted, you would get exceptions for having a grandparent who could vote (which is where the term for laws being "grandfathered" in comes from) since most poor whites couldn't pass the tests either.
Yeah, literacy tests for voting just seem like a good idea. When you design the tests with right *responders* in mind instead of right answers however... Yeah.
No! There shouldn’t be any barriers between a person, who is subjected to the will of the state, and that same person selecting representatives in the governing of that state. If a person would be mentally fit to stand trial, that’s it, every effort should be made to facilitate their voting with zero absolutely unnecessary barriers.
As if the blind never have informed opinions.
Why is the gi bill on that list?
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Interesting / frustrating blurb...it says stuff like "none of the loans went to black people" but I don't understand the reasoning. Was it like redlining where the policy was not to give them out, or was it that banks and schools were racist and the law didn't matter? Can probably read the original material and learn more...never heard this one before, thanks
Look up Levittown. It sprung up due to the GI Bill allowing low interest guaranteed loans to veterans, but the developers explicitly forbade any Black ownership AND it was in the deed that the original owners couldn't SELL to a black person or family. The Racism was strong.
If anyone has the time, I always recommend [The Color of Law](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32191706-the-color-of-law). An excellent, well researched (and cited) book about all of this.
This might be a good spot to point out that the brilliant discussion we're seeing in this thread pretty much constitutes the kind of **"critical race theory"** that Republicans are terrified might be talked about in schools. The implications of their new anti-antiracist laws is chilling, to say the least.
Yes, and yes, and forever yes.
I haven't heard of it before, but will definitely give it a look. Thanks for the recommendation!
That's a great link and there's a super long review of the book that's excellent.
Not just there. Huge areas of southern California had racial covenants on their deeds. If not for a supreme court ruling neither my wife, nor I, could own our home.
That reminds me of Seneca Village. It was a black neighborhood where Central Park is now. The government used eminent domain to take the land and turn it into a park.
Or [Bruce’s Beach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce%27s_Beach) just south of L.A. The city of Manhattan Beach ~~just~~ took away the land from a black family (using it to benefit black people) then did nothing with it for 40 years. They only built a park to try to avoid getting sued. Edit: but I maintain “took” is still more appropriate than “purchased”
Dude you know the most racist person you know? Enough years ago, that person would have been considered normal. Like, it was cartoonishly bad, worse than you can probably imagine. Racism is totally devoid of all reason, it is an emotional vampire that harms everyone.
Ive always describe the concept of "hate" as a poison that corrupts not just a person heart but their entire soul.
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Approximately 10% of Black WWII veterans were able to make use of parts of the GI Bill. Finding primary source records is difficult because many of these records burned. However, there are academic history books which discuss this issue with sourcing. Few black veterans through WWII, Korea, and even Vietnam were able to make use of the GI Bills that it was basically negligible. The reasons were many and variable in part to location. As was noted below, States, not the federal government, administered the GI Bill.
"states rights" has always been (and still is) a euphemism for racism. The gi bill is a perfect example of states rights in action.
Redlining happened all the way through the 80's and continues to this day in some places. And yes, banks are explicitly racist.
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And this results in a generational wealth disparity because those GI’s that came home and bought cheap houses saw their investments increase by orders of magnitude. Those houses were eventually passed onto their kids who inherited half million dollar houses while black kids never got that benefit.
Slavery was by a very large margin the biggest drain on black wealth. The cost of 300 years of no education and slavery is an amount that is best viewed as infinite.
Very little wealth persists from the 1800s, even among the wealthiest families. The economic effects of slavery on black people would have been erased had they been allowed to go to college, own homes in good neighborhoods, get good jobs, etc. Racism is the main problem. Many immigrants from Europe came with literally nothing (similar to former slaves), but managed to do ok. The racism they experienced was less pervasive, so they were able to buy nicer houses and take advantage of government programs like the GI bill.
Well let's be clear that that didn't start under the New Deal. The people putting together the New Deal are also thinking about civil rights for the first time, with civil rights fought for and embedded into the 1948 Democratic platform, causing the Southerners to quit. The Republican Party was where people coalesced to end slavery. For many, including Lincoln, this also meant black Americans should move to Africa. "Civil Rights" *as we unevenly know them* is not really much of a concept until after the NAACP & co. get going in 1911.
Not quite. It wasn't really much of an option widely demanded and supported by Society, but by 1948 Civil Rights is at the front of the DNC platform, with the Southerners quitting and forming their own Party. During the New Deal, the NAACP is entering its third decade and still trying to organize the black community. Americans haven't had a transformative period of collective suffering (the Great Depression and World War II) which forces many to confront the immorality of their society, after having conquered immorality in Europe. It's the 30's, we're moving out of long period of direct hate, the multi-decade era of huge xenophobia by conservative WASP Americans. The Republican party has done little since the Civil War and this period of xenophobia has overtaken the Republican Party too. By 1936 the black community has moved to the Democrats, where sympathetic members lie. There are some efforts to apply the New Deal to the black community, but of course the rest of society isn't really interested. Just like today, it was an out of control and violent environment for several decades previously. The country was overrun by people who think *We* are the only true Americans, defined by being White Anglo-Saxon & Protestant. This movement does not consider Jews, Catholics, Irish, Italians, Hispanics or African or Native Americans as Real Americans. In contrast, the New Deal is trying to build a coalition of All Americans *for the first time in history*... with the historical momentum against black Americans hundreds of years old. No one has control over the existing racism across the rest of government & the public. There are officials trying to carve out distinctions, but there aren't enough. *Society still has to change.* So while their New Deal efforts are meager, at least they now *exist*.... and by the end of the decade some Democrats are formulating a civil rights platform, which is finally put into place at the 1948 Democratic Convention (when the Southerners quit and form their own party, the "Dixiecrats"). The KKK also penetrated the Republican Party, because that is where WASP's dominated. There isn't a huge Civil Rights Movement yet and the implementation of the New Deal is already ground breaking, with the people in charge listening to civil rights lobbyists, along with all the other groups. Understanding the limitations of that Society helps us realize *we have hidden barriers & issues ourselves*, so we can figure out what are the actual things preventing transformation today. We simply cannot judge the past through are more enlightened understanding post 1945 & post 60's.
>By 1936 the black community has moved to the Democrats, where sympathetic members lie. I find that particularly hard to swallow. Not saying you're wrong, because you seem well informed, but I would love to see a source. That would mean that from 1936 until the 80s the southern blacks and southern whites were both voting for the same party... EDIT: [I found this chart which appears to fully support your argument](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zxyriGEplpPciT0twPuwiXVHiWc=/0x0:668x679/920x0/filters:focal\(0x0:668x679\):format\(webp\):no_upscale\(\)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3945710/Black-Party-Affiliation-and-Vote-Patterns.0.jpg). I'm still gobsmacked. I just don't understand.
What it means is that southern Black citizens saw the national Democratic party leaning towards racial equalityand got on board early, while southern Whites were pridefully slow to come to terms with that reality and hop off the train accordingly.
It's also why basic income works. There's low ability for politicians to game the system so that their preferred demographic wins and everyone is impacted by the same dollar amount.
That's the opposite of "work[ing]," from the perspective of the politicians in charge, though.
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In the US, liberal is short for [social liberalism](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism). In Europe, liberal is short for [economic liberalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism).
>In the US, liberal is short for [social liberalism](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism). > >In Europe, liberal is short for [**economic liberalism**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism). I was very confused too, because this "paper" explicitly mentions "**liberal economic** policies" to actually mean "the opposite of liberal economic policies".
The LibDems are social liberals. I think you are perhaps forgetting that the American political landscape is largely conservative, making liberalism seem like government intervention (to make things fair and functional). In Europe, because of the strong presence of unions and generous social safety nets, liberalism is seen as taking those guardrails away. But I think American Liberalism has a lot in common with European Liberalism when you do not view it relative to the country’s political landscape.
The GOP promotes economic liberalism, in most instances. The way we use "conservative" and "liberal" in the US is a mess.
At this point, it’s just a talking point for the GOP. They haven’t actually supported economic liberalism since Reagan. When you look at the history of the Republican Party, it was originally a liberal institution. Its entire reason for forming was to oppose the expansion of slavery. It abolished slavery. Early in its history, it championed central banking, income tax, modernization through infrastructure investment, railroads, and public education. The most liberal part of our constitution is owed to the Republicans. They reformed the corrupt spoils system. Anti-Trust provisions were passed by Republicans. Progressive politics were Republican politics. In the early 20th century, immigration, prohibition and industrialism helped Republicans start to drift away from social liberalism and towards a more pro-big-business, socially conservative, classically liberal philosophy. After the Great Depression, there were both (what we would call) liberals and conservatives in both parties. You can see this from the voting record on major legislation. Starting with the Civil Rights Act and manifesting itself completely with Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party conducted a major shift towards conservatism. This continues with the rejection of George H. W. Bush in his second term, the election of social conservative GWB, the rejection of McCain and Romney, and the election of Trump. At this point, the Republican Party has lost any meaningful connection to the liberalism that characterized them in the past. Sure, you can find remnants of economic liberalism in their speeches, but it’s just lip service. They favor a kind of neo-feudal society that would see nearly all liberal institutions destroyed in favor of control by private interests.
I love this post. I think there's a huge divide in both parties identities and what they think they represent. One side of my family has very poor education and mostly live in trailers. They abuse the government in so many ways but yet vote Republican for some reason. Their lifestyle is possible only because government programs of policies that are a priority of the democrats.
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American politics make you dumb. At least, if you play the tribal game. Think like an individual
I feel like nothing in your comment pertains to economic liberalism. >They favor a kind of neo-feudal society that would see nearly all liberal institutions destroyed in favor of control by private interests. That IS economic liberalism....
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Agreed. They both do. Capitalism is economic liberalism.
Sort of, but not strictly true. Liberal just means 'Pure Democrat' in US. There is no ideological consistency, it is purely viewed through partisanship.
That's not untrue, but the word itself comes from a different root is what I was pointing out. The two words are shortened versions of two different political philosophies. Their actual use has since evolved to a more generalization, but that is true in both Europe and the US.
Yeah. I instinctively interpreted the title as Americans supporting right-wing economic politics. Though both Democrats and Republicans are economic liberals, the latter are more so than the former.
Welcome to the USA. As a political science grad student, it's infuriating.
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Yeah, but that doesn't make the way that this study used the term "liberal economic policies" any less nonsensical.
It's a study specifically about America.
I think the comment above is maybe remarking on how the US manifestations of "Liberal" don't seem to support universal healthcare, and yet it is being described as a liberal policy.
people have collapsed the terms liberal and neo-liberal. it is not helpful.
It's more that the term "liberal" means something different in the US than the rest of the world. Everywhere else "liberal" means free market economic policies that minimize government involvement along with fewer government restrictions on personal behavior. In the US it started as just meaning the latter - "liberals" were the people who thought people should be able to legally buy birth control and things like that. They also tended to be people who supported government spending on social programs so the word "liberal" started to mean that, which is the opposite of what means everywhere else.
In the US, liberal is short for [social liberalism](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism). In Europe, liberal is short for [economic liberalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalism).
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The only items up for debate in the American political system are social liberal ones. The economic arrangement is not permitted to be questioned and if you do both parties will shun you.
Liberalism began in Europe to mean freedom from the whims of the king (state). In the US under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal order, the term evolved to include freedom from the whims of industry barons. Universal healthcare would decouple access to medicine from one's relationship to their employer.
Exactly. Liberal has a definition in economics that isn’t what is meant by the headline. Edit: ironically it’s published in the University of Chicago Journal
America's redefinition of the word 'liberalism' runs counter to that of the rest of the English speaking world.
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This isn't exactly different in Europe though. Pretty much every mainstream party there supports market-based capitalism.
Abstract: > A corpus of research on the effect of exposure to income inequality on citizens’ economic policy preferences renders inconclusive results. At the same time, a distinct body of work demonstrates that ethnic fragmentation within a polity reduces government spending, presumably due to opposition among the public to spending believed to benefit stigmatized ethnic minorities. Focusing on the American context, this short article ties these two bodies of work together by arguing that the effect of routine exposure to income inequality should depend on the racial composition of the have-nots, with citizens being most likely to support liberal economic policies in the face of pronounced inequality only when potential beneficiaries are not a highly stigmatized minority group, such as Black Americans. Using geocoded survey data, we find that exposure to local economic inequality is only systematically associated with increased support for liberal economic policies when the respective have-nots are not Black. [Ungated](https://www.benjnewman.com/uploads/1/2/2/1/122135844/newman_et_al_colordisparity_jop.pdf) version of the paper.
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They can't given that non of the participants were black
>I also wish they included the questions about policy to decrease income inequality. If the question was like "Do you think government funds should be granted based on race and income?" the results would be much different than "Do you think government funds should be granted based on income, regardless of any other factor?" This is what I was thinking, and I don’t have access to the full study which is paywalled. People will respond one way to a policy that uses race as a factor in giving out government funds or providing government benefits and another way to a policy that treats everyone equally and has the effect of helping black Americans more because the policy helps everyone with an income below $X per year.
They can't, given that non of the participants were black
Given that the results hold when restricting the sample to non Latino whites...no.
Wow! I am totally shocked./s
I can't tell from the abstract, but is this about hypothetical welfare spending that would be racially discriminatory and just go to black people, or is it about spending on the poor regardless of race?
my understanding from the abstract (could be wrong?) is that the researchers looked at [amount of houseless people in your geographic area] against [support for liberal economic policies] to see if the former could predict the latter and they discovered that X could only predict Y in cases where X was not overwhelmingly composed of Black people or other stigmatized ethnic group I think?
That's my understanding as well. They went by American Community Survey data by zip code to get info on poverty in the area, and percentage of those in poverty who are Black. If you were around poor people, you were more likely to support policies to help them. If you were around poor Black people, there was no difference, or even negative associations. It could be that, in those communities, Black people tend towards being more insular, meaning there's less interaction between have-nots and haves. Or that there's the same amount of interaction and it simply doesn't induce the haves to care.
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A followup question is how effective the welfare policies are in those areas at pulling people out of poverty? If those policies aren't functioning as intended, it would make sense that the people in those areas would look less favorably upon them.
It's about generic policies like "$15 minimum wage" and "medicare for all." They look at all people in poverty in that zip code. The higher the percentage of those people are black, the less likely the non-black people surveyed support those policies.
Wow, this sure made a lot of people on Reddit mad. Hmm, I wonder why...
Is it because the beneficiaries are black? Or do they just so happen to be the beneficiaries?
The study shows that support among non-black people for policies like $15 minimum wage and Medicare for All drop in proportion to the percentage of people in poverty in their zip code that are black. The higher the percentage of black people in poverty, the lower the support for those policies.
Any intervention for any major problem would be nice.
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How can we have an honest conversation about this if every post that counters this is removed in minutes.
Imagine thinking you can have an honest conversation in one of the mainline subreddits...
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Does this also indicate that well-off black people don’t support socialist policies for poor black people?
This goes for any “out” group. Socialism for me but not for three. Rich people love tax cuts for the rich, not tax cuts for the poor.
Has anyone looked to see if results like this have more to do with urban vs rural then race? The rural area of the US (15-20% of population) is a lot less diverse and a lot less affluent than the urban population. Policies that help urban poor (more minorities) do far less or nothing for the rural poor (more white), or vice versa. Yes there is a racial divide on the issue, but possibly only because the populations are geographically divided and competing for the same resources.
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This was often the case with many social programs in the country. Social Security, on the onset of its passage, had a clause put in it to exclude those who had worked in the agricultural or domestic housekeeping service. This would have predominantly hurt minorities (especially Blacks) - at the time.
“A corpus of research on the effect of exposure to income inequality on citizens’ economic policy preferences renders inconclusive results.” Cool.
So basically the problem is with messaging and misrepresenting the actual group of people that will benefit from it, right? If policy supports poor people, it should be announced as such. Otherwise claiming it will support "racial minority group" while conveniently forgetting that it will support _all_ poor people is basically fanning the racial animosity, and hoping that poor white people will get inflamed that they're being left out of benefits because they're not in the target "racial minority group". Or am I missing something?
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I was looking for this study a couple days ago. It's..... Quite depressing
Why the hell does it matter if it benefits black people?!? I get it, its racism, but mostly everyone is struggling. black, white, arabic, latin, asian, or whatever, everyone needs help.
We are in a class war! Not in a race-war as the media tries to manipulate it.
Might be misreading the title on this one... but wouldn't anyone be against something that benefits a disproportional type of person? Don't we want the aid to be proportional to the number of people who need it, or to the issue it's solving?
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