Over 160 Years After Abolition, Anti-Black Racism Still Structures US Economy

More than 400 years have passed since the first white colonists arrived in North America to establish a settlement, and more than 160 years since slavery was abolished, yet structural racism is still alive and kicking in the U.S. In the interview that follows, two economists, Michele Holder and Jeannette Wicks-Lim, co-authors of a new book titled The Political Economy of Racism: The Persistence of Anti-Blackness in the United States, discuss how anti-Black racism developed and the role that it continues to play in the contemporary United States. Michelle Holder is professor of economics at the City University of New York’s John Jay College, and Jeannette Wicks-Lim is research professor at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

C. J. Polychroniou: Systemic racism has shaped the history of the United States. That’s a well-documented fact despite current attempts by President Donald Trump and his political acolytes to whitewash U.S. history. In that context, the publication of your new co-authored book The Political Economy of Racism: The Persistence of Anti-Blackness in the United Statescould not have come at a better time. It examines how anti-Black racism in particular developed and sheds light on how it works to promote the interests of a politically dominant social group. May I start by asking one of you to discuss the construction of race in the United States? Also, does it differ from other case studies of racism?

Jeannette Wicks-Lim: I really appreciate this question because it gets at a key takeaway of our book: that race is a social construction. What we mean by this is that race is only loosely — and inconsistently — related to superficial biological markers such as skin tone and hair color, and that its real meaning comes from how society uses it to put people into different social groups. Really, the entirety of the book is our effort to explain the political and economic rationale for why the nation we live in — the U.S. — chose, and continues to choose, to organize itself around this social concept, “race,” and anti-Black racism, in particular.

That’s why we dive right away, in Chapter 2, into tracing how the concept of race developed out of political and economic choices made by English colonists of the “New World,” starting in the 17^th century. In particular, they made the choice to enslave people from Africa. We document how these colonists turned to enslaving people because they couldn’t get free workers or indentured servants to do the type of grueling labor that the colonists wanted for their commercial enterprises. And, to maintain their practice of enslaving people, the colonists withheld virtually any legal rights from the primary supply of people colonists had access to enslave: people from Africa. Colonists also supported this practice by imbuing profound meaning to superficial physical differences between African and English people, and attached this meaning to the concept, “race.” In other words, race developed into a crucial social marker for the legal status of slave — a legal status that this society maintained for more than 200 years.

In terms of your second question — I want to steer it in a somewhat different direction because my knowledge of how racism operates outside the U.S. is thin. Instead, I want to talk about different types of racism within the U.S. Take, for example, racism and Asian Americans — a topic I’m exploring in current research. The premise of my research is that while racism may operate for, or against, different groups in different ways, it serves the same purpose: it’s a political device that socially defined groups use to influence how economic, political, and social advantages and disadvantages in a society are created and doled out. I would expect this basic feature of racism to be the same in case studies of other countries. How racial groups are defined, characterized, and positioned in a country’s social hierarchy, on the other hand, are ways I would expect racism to differ across countries.

My thinking reflects the basic tenets of stratification economics — a relatively new approach in economics. In a nutshell, stratification economics examines how social groups compete with each other in order to gain greater access to social, political, and especially, economic resources — that is, to achieve favored positions in a social hierarchy.

Do you understand the particular brand of racism explored in your book as a consequence of the role of slavery in the U.S. economy, or is anti-Blackness simply ingrained within white supremacist thought?

Michelle Holder: As Jeannette’s response suggests, throughout the book we draw lines directly linking anti-Black racism to the institution of slavery. We believe that contemporary anti-Black racism in the U.S. evolved out of negative ideas about Africans promoted by American colonists to justify Black enslavement, as well as to ameliorate guilt whites may have felt at benefiting from the peculiar institution of slavery or tolerating it. In response to a part of the question as it is posed, we believe that white supremacist thought implies anti-Blackness. However, from our perspective, one need not be a white supremacist to engage in anti-Black behaviors. Indeed, Justice Clarence Thomas is a prime example of a Black person whose work on the Supreme Court repeatedly involved rulings which are contrary to the interests and needs of the Black American community.

While we do not dispute the notion that discrimination against and stereotypes about Black people existed prior to founding of the U.S., the present-day brand of anti-Black racism in the country has traceable roots that lie primarily in the implementation of slavery, and, with the abolishment of slavery, the desire of white Americans to preserve privileges that were exclusive to their racial group in antebellum America, in line with the tenets of stratification economic theory. In addition, discrimination against and stereotypes about many racial and/or ethnic groups exist throughout world history, so such experiences are not exclusive to Black Americans.

How does anti-Blackness stratify the U.S. economy?

Holder: Anti-Blackness stratifies the U.S. economy by the assignation of a positive value to a white identity alongside the assignation of a negative value to Black identity. These value assignations have been crafted and culturally cultivated over centuries, initially to justify the enslavement of Africans in America while imbuing whites with the notion that they were divinely chosen by a creator to control other groups.

After emancipation, the value assignations continued to be propagated by whites to preserve their primacy in an American racial pecking order. Contemporary audit studies conducted to assess the existence and extent of anti-Black racism in the U.S. labor market have repeatedly shown that white job applicants are preferred more than Black job applicants, all else being equal. As such, a Black identity appears to place a job applicant at a disadvantage with regard to income-generating employment.

In addition, policies implemented upon the end of slavery further limited the ability of Black individuals and families to accumulate wealth, as the enslaved could not accumulate wealth. Contemporary income and wealth inequality in the U.S. tracks very closely with race, with Black Americans in the least favorable economic position compared to whites. This places the Black community at a disadvantage regarding equitable access to educational attainment, good health care, home ownership, safe and environmentally sustainable communities, as well as the ability to influence policy change given the power of money in elections. These constraints on the Black community make it harder for Black families and individuals to attain economic mobility to the degree that white families and individuals have for generations, thus resulting in continuing economic stratification along racial lines in the U.S.

Can you elaborate a bit on how anti-Blackness applies in particular to the education and employment arenas?

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Wicks-Lim: Let me start with education since Michelle has already talked a bit about employment and because I want to highlight how stratification economics is particularly useful in understanding how anti-Blackness operates in education.

As I said earlier, the main focus of stratification economics is how social groups compete with one another to gain access to resources, especially economic resources, in a hierarchical society. Education is arguably one of the most coveted resources in U.S. society — not only because of the social status which educational credentials impart, but also the economic opportunities that educational credentials help to unlock.

U.S. history and its current education system is full of examples of how white Americans actively sought ways to bar Black Americans access to educational resources. Most people with any familiarity with U.S. history are well aware of the racial animus that animated these efforts. What might be less well-known are the efforts of Black people to access educational resources — even those who were enslaved during the antebellum period. We document these efforts, including how newly freed Black Americans basically organized the Southern public school system into existence after the Civil War. Stratification economics shines a light on these processes: how social groups in the U.S. have competed with one another to control — or gain access to — educational credentials and to use these credentials to obtain economic resources for in-group members.

Turning now to the role of anti-Blackness in the labor market — this is hard to miss when you see the connection between the widely recognized racist hoarding practices among white Americans of educational resources and the racial disparity in access to good jobs. Conventional economists still tend to view the well-documented racial disparities in the labor market as being due to something other than racism. The late, great, economist Bill Spriggs poked fun at this theoretical position by calling it the “the two-bus theory” because it effectively requires busing out the people making obviously racist decisions about education (and housing!) and busing in new actors to make all other economic decisions, such as on jobs.

Is structural anti-Blackness something that benefits only the white society in the U.S.? Indeed, isn’t there a history of Latinx and Asian racialization and engagement with anti-Blackness?

Holder: Anti-Black attitudes and behaviors on the part of Latinx and Asians in the U.S. should not necessarily be conflated with the idea that these groups may benefit, alongside whites, due to anti-Blackness. Critical race theory points out that policies and practices in a variety of institutions — educational, penal, health, etc. — have embedded within them the likelihood that outcomes will be more favorable to white people than Black people. Such policies and practices — for example, the war on drugs or welfare reform — were designed over decades to lead to outcomes that would be the most beneficial for white Americans. We talk about this extensively in our book. Latinxs who identify as white (and, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, the majority of Latinxs in the U.S. identify as such) may enjoy economic benefits that accrue to a white identity, but the former group likely did not play a significant role in the design of policies, practices, and institutions that possess anti-Black underpinnings.

In addition, the racialization of Asians in the U.S. over the last six decades underwent processes unrelated to anti-Black sentiments in the country; the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act prioritized admitting immigrants that possessed high skills which, in turn, impacted the perception of Asian immigrants in the U.S. as being “model minorities.” Thus, any shared or “adjacent” identities Latinx or Asian communities have or feel towards white Americans may not necessarily embody anti-Black attitudes. This, however, is not meant to suggest that Asian or Latinx communities in the U.S. should not engage in self-reflection regarding the economic benefits they may enjoy which Black communities may not due to white Americans’ perceptions about, and treatment of, each of these communities. It is also not meant to suggest that some Asians and Latinxs in the U.S. are not prejudiced against Black people; certainly, that element exists, alongside some Black Americans who are prejudiced against Asians and Latinxs as well.

Why does structural racism in the U.S. economy persist, and what will it take to end it?

Wicks-Lim: I think it’s easy to understand why structural racism persists in the U.S. economy when we consider the following facts.

First, for the first 350 years of this nation’s development, starting in the early 1600s with the first English colonies until the mid-1960s, public policy explicitly codified and enforced racial discrimination. It took the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Housing Rights Act of 1968 to remove state-enforced, explicit, racially discriminatory policies. Those passed only 60 years ago. In other words, this land has developed and operated for 350 out of its roughly 410 years of history (since European colonization) with state-enforced, explicit, racially discriminatory policies. Institutions and practices that perpetuate racial disparities have accumulated over this long history.

Second, as I mentioned earlier, racism materially benefits white Americans, the dominant racial group in the U.S., and getting rid of structural racism in the U.S. would eliminate these advantages. As a really straightforward example, imagine what would be required to eliminate the extreme level of racial wealth inequality that was largely built on the basis of racist, state-enforced policies over the course of this nation’s more than 400-year history. This would require a radical redistribution of wealth away from white households toward Black households since, as we note in our book, the average white household had more than 10 times the wealth of the average Black household in 2019.

Ending structural racism will require immense political will. I doubt that an adequate level of political will can exist unless a majority of those living in the U.S. accepts — deeply — that race is a social construction; that race is, at its core, a social concept developed as a means for white Americans to monopolize economic and political resources. In other words, the only way that I can imagine really challenging structural racism is if white Americans broadly and actively work to eliminate the advantages they receive from their racial identity. And, the only way I can imagine them having the political will to do that is if they see that their whiteness is meaningful only as a means to achieve racial injustice.

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