If the “Rona” Don’t Kill Us, Racial Capitalism Will.
My hope is that “middle class” Americans learn from this coronavirus episode that they have far more in common with poor Americans than they do the wealthy elite. My fear is that racial capitalism might foreclose that possibility.
With “the economy” — and much of the “Western” world — in free-fall, Congress passed, and President Tr*mp signed into law on Friday the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, a $2 trillion response bill that lawmakers hope will save “the economy” from utter destruction. “I think we are going to have a tremendous rebound,” the President goofily remarked as he made official the single-largest spending measure in American history. But while “the economy” might, in fact, rebound, it remains to be seen whether most Americans — particularly those who are not a part of the social elite — will. If history tells us anything, the answer will likely end up being a resounding “no.” And the folks most likely to bear the burden of an unflinching ideology that places the needs of “the economy” — a reified creation that finds itself in need of “saving” more than a church mother on Easter Sunday (fitting, given that this is the date that Tr*mp has arbitrarily set as the one in which he wants to see “the economy” up and running again) — are those individuals who have been raced as “black.”
Now I know what you might be thinking — why not be sanguine in the face of a $2 TRILLION (with a ‘T’!) bill that even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has proudly proclaimed “puts families first and workers first”? Because it doesn’t. Not in the slightest.
To be fair, the CARES Act (an acronym likely conceived without the slightest ounce of irony) does do some “good” things. It offers immediate relief to small businesses that are reeling due to the aggressive “social distancing” measures required to combat the spread of the virus. It will make all COVID-19-related treatments and vaccines free to all Americans once such items become widely disseminated — an important clause given that many Americans remain uninsured. It expands unemployment benefits in ways inconceivable for a nation that has made disciplining its poor a priority — under the (routinely debunked) guise that most folks who are unemployed suffer because of their own negligence and poor decision-making, rather than at the hands of an economic system that has commodified human life and, thus, means that there will always be a steady flow of individuals deemed “expendable.” In other words, “the economy” seldom “needs” all 330 million American bodies in order to operate “efficiently” at any given time, meaning that there will always be some unemployment (despite varying degrees across time and space). And since many of these unemployed bodies are raced as “black” (and, increasingly, “brown”) even in good times, one should reasonably expect the same to hold true during bad times. Viewed through this lens, expanding unemployment benefits will, in fact, help a lot of people, many of whom are disproportionately raced as “black.”
Naturally, this last provision did not make it into the final bill without some (predictably) performative handwringing, with some GOP members of Congress declaring that making unemployment benefits too generous might compel some Americans to cash their TRUMP CHECKS and make it rain in their living rooms, rather than seek employment. These folks eventually had their mics turned off, but the message was loud and clear: We do not care about you.
Most members of Congress (dare I say a vast majority?) do not care about the large swaths of Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, among whom one unforeseen circumstance is the difference between a decent life and economic ruin. The prioritization of corporate interests should make this fact abundantly clear. Nevertheless, I fear that many Americans will not interpret this moment as what it actually is: Political elites circling the wagon around “the economy” at the expense of the most vulnerable.
There are a few reasons why this might be so. First, the bill was passed with such haste that I doubt many Americans even know a bill was passed, let alone what’s in it. Hell, most members of Congress who voted for the bill likely didn’t know what was in it (and, indeed, there’s political science research that suggests that many lawmakers don’t, in fact, read many bills that are brought to a vote). Second, given that many (non-wealthy) Americans have been successfully inculcated with the myth of meritocracy, they might view these TRUMP CHECKS as an act of generosity, rather than what they actually are: Crumbs meant to divert attention from the fact that they have, once again, gotten the short end of the stick. To that end, the primary reason I fear that most folks will never bring themselves to acknowledge that “the economy” is the emperor that has no clothes rests on the fact that admitting as much would require exposing capitalism and racism as forming two sides of the same coin — a confession that would upend the entire idea of “America” as most of us know it.
“America” works precisely because most Americans are able to detach the idea of “the economy” from its racialized origins. Though tomes have been written about the concept of “race” as a necessary condition for a capitalist regime, many Americans remain unaware of the linkage between capitalism and racism. But this ignorance is what allows capitalism — and, thus, the ability of the wealthy to prioritize business interests over the needs of the working class — to operate. So long as “the economy” remains an abstract idea, agnostic to its constituent, racialized parts, we will continue to make the same mistakes: Suffering at the hands of the elite class, while the rest of us battle over crumbs like fowl in a birdfeeder. And because capitalism is racialized, those left with the fewest crumbs will be “black” and, to a somewhat lesser extent, “brown.”
Of course, things don’t have to be this way. This isn’t a fate that we have to willingly accept. But while the task of upending racial capitalism won’t be easy nor guaranteed, we can start by exposing “the economy” for what it is (hence my repeated use of scare quotes in this piece): A political and social hoax parading as an inevitable state of affairs. As Barbara Fields, co-author of the sublime Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, states:
“There is no such thing as the economy. It is the result of many millions of individual decisions that people make. We speak of it as the economy personified or reified precisely because we cannot get hold of all those individual actions, so we turn it into “the economy.”
We can all collectively decide that we will no longer stand for a government that privileges few at the expense of many. To do so, however, would require us to look into the mirror as a nation and acknowledge that this thing we have blithely called “the economy” has only operated as it has because we were far too willing to sacrifice black and brown bodies to make it work. It will also require us to recognize that our trajectory is far more likely to be downward at this point, unlike the economic elites in which many of us place our trust. “Middle class” folks must also be willing to embrace the fact that they have far more in common with the poor, irrespective of the way one has been “raced,” than with those in the wealthy elite class. Are we — especially white people — willing to confront these realities?
The future of the nation will depend on it.