How to Be an Antiracist (16 page)

A
S THE EDITOR
and I stared each other down, I had a heated conversation—and conversion—in my mind. Eventually, the silence broke and the editor excused me from his office. I received an ultimatum before the end of the workday: Terminate my race column for
The Famuan
or be terminated from my internship at the
Tallahassee Democrat
. I terminated my column in absolute bitterness, feeling as if I terminated a part of myself.

And I did begin to terminate a part of myself—for the better. I began to silence one half of the war within me, the duel between antiracism and assimilation that W.E.B. Du Bois gave voice to, and started embracing the struggle toward a single consciousness of antiracism. I picked up a second major, African American studies.

I took my first Black history course that fall of 2003, the first of four African and African American history courses I would take over three semesters with FAMU professor David Jackson. His precise, detailed, engaging, but somehow funny lectures systematically walked me back through history for the first time. I had imagined history as a battle: on one side Black folks, on the other a team of “them niggers” and White folks. I started to see for the first time that it was a battle between racists and antiracists.

Ending one confusion started another: what to do with my life. As a senior in the fall of 2004, I found that sports journalism no longer moved me. At least not like this thrilling new history I was discovering. I ended up abandoning the press box for what Americans were saying was the most “dangerous” box.

CLASS RACIST:
One who is racializing the classes, supporting policies of racial capitalism against those race-classes, and justifying them by racist ideas about those race-classes.

ANTIRACIST ANTICAPITALIST:
One who is opposing racial capitalism.

E
XCITED TO BEGIN
graduate school in African American studies at Temple University, I moved to North Philadelphia in the early days of August 2005. Hunting Park to be exact, steps away from Allegheny Avenue and the neighborhood of Allegheny West. My second-floor one-bedroom apartment overlooked North Broad Street: White people driving by, Black people walking by, Latinx people turning right on Allegheny. None of the people outside my building, a drab chocolate tenement adjoining an Exxon station, could tell that a few windows up over its vacant ground-floor storefront was home to a real human life. Its covered windows looked like shut eyes in a casket.

Death resided there, too, apparently. My new Black neighbors had been told for years that Hunting Park and Allegheny West were
two of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Philadelphia—the poorest, with the highest reported rates of violent crime.

I unpacked myself in the “ghetto,” as people flippantly called my new neighborhood. The ghetto had expanded in the twentieth century as it swallowed
millions of Black people migrating from the South to Western and Northern cities like Philadelphia. White flight followed. The combination of government welfare—in the form of subsidies, highway construction, and loan guarantees—along with often racist developers opened new wealth-building urban and suburban homes to the fleeing Whites, while largely confining Black natives and new Black migrants to the so-called ghettos, now overcrowded and designed to extract wealth from their residents. But the word “ghetto,” as it migrated to the Main Street of American vocabulary, did not conjure a series of racist policies that enabled White flight and Black abandonment—instead, “ghetto” began to describe unrespectable Black behavior on the North Broad Streets of the country.

“
The dark ghetto is institutionalized pathology; it is chronic, self-perpetuating pathology; and it is the futile attempt by those with power to confine that pathology so as to prevent the spread of its contagion to the ‘larger community,’ ” wrote psychologist Kenneth Clark in his 1965 book,
Dark Ghetto
. “Pathology,” meaning a deviation from the norm. Poor Blacks in the “ghetto” are pathological, abnormal? Abnormal from whom? What group is the norm? White elites? Black elites? Poor Whites? Poor Latinx? Asian elites? The Native poor?

All of these groups—like the group “Black poor”—are distinct race-classes, racial groups at the intersection of race and class. Poor people are a class, Black people a race. Black poor people are a race-class. When we say poor people are lazy, we are expressing an elitist idea. When we say Black people are lazy, we are expressing a racist idea. When we say Black poor people are lazier than poor Whites, White elites, and Black elites, we are speaking at the intersection of elitist and racist ideas—an ideological intersection that forms class racism. When Dinesh D’Souza writes, “
the behavior of the African American underclass…flagrantly violates and scandalizes basic codes of responsibility, decency, and civility,” he is deploying class racism.

When a policy exploits poor people, it is an elitist policy. When a policy exploits Black people, it is a racist policy. When a policy exploits Black poor people, the policy exploits at the intersection of elitist and racist policies—a policy intersection of class racism. When we racialize classes, support racist policies against those race-classes, and justify them by racist ideas, we are engaging in class racism. To be antiracist is to equalize the race-classes. To be antiracist is to root the economic disparities between the equal race-classes in policies, not people.

Class racism is as ripe among White Americans—who castigate
poor Whites as “White trash”—as it is in Black America, where racist Blacks degrade poor Blacks as “them niggers” who live in the ghetto. Constructs of “ghetto Blacks” (and “White trash”) are the most obvious ideological forms of class racism. Pathological people made the pathological ghetto, segregationists say. The pathological ghetto made pathological people, assimilationists say. To be antiracist is to say the political and economic conditions, not the people, in poor Black neighborhoods are pathological. Pathological conditions are making the residents sicker and poorer while they strive to survive and thrive, while they invent and reinvent cultures and behaviors that may be different but never inferior to those of residents in richer neighborhoods. But if the elite race-classes are judging the poor race-classes by their own cultural and behavioral norms, then the poor race-classes appear inferior. Whoever creates the norm creates the hierarchy and positions their own race-class at the top of the hierarchy.

D
ARK
G
HETTO
WAS
a groundbreaking study of the Black poor during President Johnson’s war on poverty in the 1960s, when scholarship on poverty was ascendant, like the work of anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Lewis argued that the children of impoverished people, namely poor people of color, were raised on behaviors that prevented their escape from poverty, perpetuating generations of poverty. He introduced the term “culture of poverty” in a 1959 ethnography of Mexican families. Unlike other economists, who explored the role of policy in the “cycle of poverty”—predatory exploitation moving in lockstep with meager income and opportunities, which kept even the hardest-working people in poverty and made poverty expensive—Lewis reproduced the elitist idea that poor behaviors keep poor people poor. “People with a culture of poverty,” Lewis wrote, “are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life.”

White racists still drag out the culture of poverty. “
We have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular of men not working, and just generations of men not even thinking about working, and not learning the value and the culture of work,” Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan said in 2015. “So there’s a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

Unlike Lewis and Ryan, Kenneth Clark presented the hidden hand of racism activating the culture of poverty, or what he called “pathology.” In Clark’s work, the dueling consciousness of the oppression-inferiority thesis resurfaced. First slavery, then segregation, and now poverty and life in the “ghetto” made Black people inferior, according to this latest update of the thesis. Poverty became perhaps the most enduring and popular injustice to fit into the oppression-inferiority thesis.

Something was making poor people poor, according to this idea. And it was welfare. Welfare “transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant
spiritual
being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it,” U.S. senator Barry Goldwater wrote in
The Conscience of the Conservative
in 1960. Goldwater and his ideological descendants said little to nothing about rich White people who depended on the welfare of inheritances, tax cuts, government contracts, hookups, and bailouts. They said little to nothing about the White middle class depending on the welfare of the New Deal, the GI Bill, subsidized suburbs, and exclusive White networks. Welfare for middle- and upper-income people remained out of the discourse on “handouts,” as welfare for the Black poor became the true oppressor in the conservative version of the oppression-inferiority thesis. “
The evidence of this failure is all around us,” wrote Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James in 2018. “Being black and the daughter of a former welfare recipient, I know firsthand the unintended harm welfare has caused.”

Kenneth Clark was an unrelenting chronicler of the racist policies that made “the dark ghetto,” but at the same time he reinforced the racial-class hierarchy.
He positioned the Black poor as inferior to Black elites like himself, who had also long lived “within the walls of the ghetto,” desperately attempting “to escape its creeping blight.” Clark considered the Black poor less stable than the White poor. “The white poor and slum dweller have the advantage of…the belief that they can rise economically and escape from the slums,” he wrote. “The Negro believes himself to be closely confined to the pervasive low status of the ghetto.”
Obama made a similar case during his campaign speech on race in 2008. “For all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it—those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations—those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future.” This stereotype of the hopeless, defeated, unmotivated poor Black is without evidence. Recent research shows, in fact, that
poor Blacks are more optimistic about their prospects than poor Whites are.

For ages, racist poor Whites have enriched their sense of self on the stepladder of racist ideas, what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the “
wage” of Whiteness. I may not be rich, but at least I am not a nigger. Racist Black elites, meanwhile, heightened their sense of self on the stepladder of racist ideas, on what we can call the wage of Black elitism. I may not be White, but at least I am not them niggers.

Racist Black elites thought about low-income Blacks the way racist non-Black people thought about Black people. We thought we had more than higher incomes. We thought we were higher people. We saw ourselves
as the “Talented Tenth,” as Du Bois named Black elites from the penthouse of his class racism in 1903. “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men,” Du Bois projected. “Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was, and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters.”

I had come a long way by 2005. So had the Talented Tenth and the term “ghetto” in America’s racial vocabulary. In the forty years since Clark’s
Dark Ghetto,
dark had married ghetto in the chapel of inferiority and took her name as his own—the ghetto was now so definitively dark, to call it a dark ghetto would be redundant. Ghetto also became as much an adjective—ghetto culture, ghetto people—as a noun, loaded with racist ideas, unleashing all sorts of Black on Black crimes on poor Black communities.

I
N MY NEW
Philly home, I did not care what people thought about the poor Blacks in my neighborhood. Call them ghetto if you want. Run away if you want. I wanted to be there. To live the effects of racism firsthand!

I saw poor Blacks as the product of racism and not capitalism, largely because I thought I knew racism but knew I did not know capitalism. But it is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism.
As Martin Luther King said in his critique of capitalism in 1967, “It means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.”

Capitalism emerged during
what world-systems theorists term the “long sixteenth century,” a cradling period that begins around 1450 with Portugal (and Spain) sailing into the unknown Atlantic.
Prince Henry’s Portugal birthed conjoined twins—capitalism and racism—when it initiated the transatlantic slave trade of African people. These newborns looked up with tender eyes to their ancient siblings of sexism, imperialism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia. The conjoined twins developed different personalities through the new class and racial formations of the modern world. As the principal customers of Portuguese slave traders, first in their home country and then in their American colonies, Spain adopted and raised the toddlers among the genocides of Native Americans that laid the foundational seminaries and cemeteries on which Western Europe’s Atlantic empire grew in the sixteenth century. Holland and France and England overtook each other as hegemons of the slave trade, raising the conjoined twins into their vigorous adolescence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conjoined twins entered adulthood through Native and Black and Asian and White slavery and forced labor in the Americas, which powered industrial revolutions from Boston to London that financed still-greater empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The hot and cold wars in the twentieth century over resources and markets, rights and powers, weakened the conjoined twins—but eventually they would grow stronger under the guidance of the United States, the European Union, China, and the satellite nations beholden to them, colonies in everything but name. The conjoined twins are again struggling to stay alive and thrive as their own offspring—inequality, war, and climate change—threaten to kill them, and all of us, off.