America Sold its Soul to Slavery. It’s Still Paying the Price.
Jun 19, 2020
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It’s Juneteenth — the date celebrating the beginning of the end of American slavery. It’s good that there’s a widespread mass movement now to honor this date — at long, long last.
I think that if we really want to honor this date, it will mean changing how we understand America — its history, right up to now.
The story that we tell about America is wrong — yet American wealth came from ingenuity and innovation, not slavery and subjugation, and so slavery inflicted no long-lasting scars on America as a whole, just on black Americans, whom it mentally and physically wounded.That story is wrong, absolutely and flatly wrong, and being wrong, it has trapped America in a vicious cycle of ignorance. A truer reckoning goes like this.
Slavery made America rich. By about 1850 or so. And then it made it poor. By about 2010 or so.
That is because America became rich in all the wrong ways. Rich in money, to be sure — for a time — but also rich in inequality, greed, brutality, selfishness, and ignorance. And so, in the end — which is today —slavery made everyonepoorer.Ultimately, white Americans, whose living standards imploded, when the middle class began to become a minority about a decade ago, becameenraged, disappointed, embittered.Where were the better lives they had been promised?
That decliningwhite Americaturned for salvation to afreakish demagoguewho promised to “make them great again.”Did he?Of course not.He did the opposite. Today, 120,000 have died,with many more to come— and unemployment has hit 50 million. It’s not just the pandemic —America was on its way to becoming a poor country, for all, save the 1%. And today, it is.
I’ll explain all that in a moment — don’t worry. First.
America’s greatest economist and philosopher both predicted all this long ago: that hate would destroy prosperity for both victim and oppressor, making them both poor in the end, living in the ruins of a crumbled democracy.Who was he? I’ll come to that. The first thing to be said to anyone who really wants to understand American history is:he was empirically and factually provenright.
Slavery and hate made even whites poor, in the end.How did that come to be?
American economists — most of whom are white men — ignore it, but there’s one date that stands out in American history, like a blinking red alarm signal.1971. That is when incomes began to stagnate — even for middle class white Americans. They have not recoveredto this day.
Americans have faced over fifty years of economic stagnation. That’s more than the Soviet Union.It’s left them poor.Yes, really,poor.The average American now dies in debt. To an economist like me, there’s no more alarming figure. That means the average person will never effectively own, save, or earn anything. Not a penny. Americans are paupers now, even white ones. What happened? Why didn’t all those centuries of slavery and decades of segregation make themrich?
1971 is also the date of another titanic event in American history. The end of segregation.
Is it just one of the greatest coincidences in economist history that incomes began to flatline in America at theprecise momentsegregation ended? You’d have to be very, very naive to think so, or not want to think about racism at all, like American economists.
The reason that American incomes began to flatline as soon as segregation ended tells us something dramatic, dismal, and deep:America’s economy was based on bitter, brutal exploitation.Without a ready pool of cheap labour — segregated black people — to exploit, what did the American economy do? It began to exploiteveryone. That is why incomes flatlined.
Corporations and banks and stock markets could no longer just depend on easy, perpetually rising profits on the backs of black and minority workers.What were they to do? Simple. They decided that everyone was now to be exploited, much the same way that black people and minorities were — only more politely, perhaps, with slightly lessovert brutality.
So over the next three decades, evenwhite middle class Americanslost all the following.Pensions. Retirement. Stable incomes. Good benefits. Vacations and leisure time. By about 2000, all those things were becoming a distant memory.
White America was baffled by this.Who was to blame? Fast forward to 2015, and a demagogue emerged — Trump — preachingthe same old hate demagogues always do. Who was responsible for the economic woes of the “real” America, the middle class white?It was Mexicans, Muslims, Jews, and of course, black people.Everyone else. Everyone non-white, not “real”, not pure-blooded.
Thiswaspredictabletopeoplelikeme, who understand how poverty made Weimar Germany become Nazi Germany.Poverty creates desperation, which inflames old racial and ethnic tensions. The weakest minority is scapegoated for the economic travails, the sudden poverty, of the majority. In Germany, it was Jews and Poles and others, in America…well, you know the score.
But why did even white Americans become poor?Because they were being exploited, brutally, by their systems — just like once only minorities had been.White Americans were learning what it meant to have to live like their hated minorities.No savings, no stable incomes, everything had on debt, at crippling interest rates.
To be sure, they didn’t suffer police brutality and violence.They didn’t shun each other. But growing poverty among even white Americans is very much the point.
Slavery and segregationhadn’t worked.
You see, the grand idea America had once had — once you go beyond the comfortable sentiments of the “land of the free” — went like this.They’ll do all the work, and we’ll take all the gains. The labour was to be done by black people, especially the hardest and most risky, and the winnings were to be taken by whites, whether in the North or South. That was America’s social contract, for generation upon generation. The central idea was: we will exploit each other, to get rich.
So what was to happen once segregation finally ended — but the central idea of exploitation leading to richeshadn’t changed?Then white America was about to learn the hard way, too, what it meant to be exploited. And it did — as all those things white America’s grandparents took for granted, like pensions, incomes, rising incomes, careers, simplydisappeared for most of the middle class.
By 2020, the bitter conclusion is self-evident: slavery and segregation didn’t make Americans rich.It made thempoor.
That is the story we have yet to tell as Americans.That is because our economists don’t tell it, because they’re mostly white men, and when you do hear it, it’s from minorities like me, or the greatCedric Robinson—and we are ignored, when we’re not being attacked, mocked, and hated. Don’t think that racism doesn’t exist within economics, too — and that it hasn’t blinded economics to how racism poisoned America, in a double irony.
Let me continue the story, though.
Through the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Europe was busy building the social contracts it’s now famous for — expansive healthcare, retirement, pensions, income, housing, and so on — public goods for all.All.And yes, despite Europe’s own problems with racism, even black people have all that in Europe.
But America built none of these things. It couldn’t.These things are public goods — which means they are for all. America was busy trying to preserve the legacy of slavery, and build a segregated society.But a segregated societycannot ever develop public goods.
So while Europe was investing and reinvesting every year in public goods, America wasn’t — it was malinvesting in things like police forces and armies and national guards. Do you see the stark difference?
That was an additional factor in how slavery destroyed America, in the end.It deprived even white people of having the kinds of public goods that modern-day Europeans take for granted. Why do even white Americans suffer “medical bankruptcy,” or work at Walmart into their 90s, or face hospital or college bills that cost more than a home?
They don’t have public goods. But they don’t have public goods because of racism, which is the legacy of slavery.
Now, the strangest wrinkle of all is this.White Americans chose not to have public goods. They chose to be exploited. Who voted against public healthcare time and again —right down to about three months ago, even on the left? White Americans!
White America chose it’s own ruin.It began with Reaganism, which was the counter-counter-revolution against segregation, and culminated in Trumpism. It chose over and over and over again to deny itself and its own families, kids, parents, things like retirement, healthcare, education, income, stability, and so forth.
Think about the bizarre, twisted irony of it, for a moment.Once they couldn’t exploit black people as slaves anymore, who did white Americans exploit? Themselves! Each other. LOL. They couldn’t imagine a society without exploitation, because that was all they’d had for centuries. And so they just turned oneach other.
That is the legacy of slavery and segregation, too: it corrodes the mind.It producedthe American Idiot— the kind of person who denies themselves and their own kids healthcare and education,right to this day. The world wonders: what the? What kinds of fools wantworse livesfor themselves and their own?What on earth is wrong with Americans?
The answer is this. White Americans made achoice.An especially foolish and stupid and childish one. They decided it would be better to still beon topof a ruined society, thanequalsin a free, just, and prospering one. Hence, “I won’t pay for those dirty, filthy people’s healthcare —even if it means denying my kids their own!!”
It’s crucial to understand that White Americagot somethingout of this fools’ bargain, never to develop public goods: supremacy, superiority, primacy.It stayed on top of all the hierarchies of power, whether corporate, cultural, or political ones.
Yet it was exploited, too, now — denying itself healthcare, retirement, education, dignity, purpose, worth, value — and oddly, it was still the one doing the exploiting, too. That is why this mess is so hard to make sense of, by the way.
But choosing to stay on top of a collapsing mountain is just what it appears to be: foolish. Where will you end up? In the abyss that its slid into. White Americans chose to stay on top of a ruined society. And theydid.
But that didn’t mean they ended up rich. They ended richer,sure.Black wealth is the same as it was during civil rights. But white incomes have barely risen, either. White people ended up slightly richer than black people — but they ended up poor in absolute terms.Living paycheck to paycheck, unable to pay the bills, dying in debt.It was a fools’ bargain for just this reason. Me choosing to spite you, denying you something webothneed — just so that I end up richer than you? It’s foolish. BecauseIwill end up poor, too. That’s what happened in America.
White Americansto this dayhave never chosen to have a society of true equality.They’ve chosen, over and over again, instead a society based on exploitation — that was the only way they could stay on top, even if, by the 1980s, it simply meant they had to exploit each other, too, not just black people anymore. But the price was that even they ended up poor, desperate, and destitute, also.
See how twisted all this is? How mind-bendingly foolish it is?Nobody should make such choices. Nobody won this fool’s game. Nobody could have. Where can a society based on exploitation ever go? Even if I’m on top today — who will ever rise higher? Nobody.The only way left is down.
To me, the true legacy of Juneteenth is all this.Of course, there is much more to it than that. Centuries of untold suffering. I think today we can scarcely imagine the horror of living in a slave state, where human beings are not treated as human at all, but violated as a way of life.
But I am an economist. And to me, the story is very much this.
The promise of slavery and segregation, brutal as it was, was this: it would make whites rich.But even that didn’t work out, we can see today.The final evidence of this part of the American experiment is before us now.It culminated in Trumpism, which was a reaction of hate and rage from a white middle and working class in free-fall.
And they destroyed American democracy in the process, too.First, in a stillbirth, where black people were “3/5ths human” — right down to today’s Trumpism,whose fascism echoes just that mindset. Slavery and segregation, too, destroyed American prosperity by making whites react and choose their own exploitation, once they no longer had black people to exploit — instead of, like Europe, ever building modern, civilized societies, by investing in public goods and systems for all.
Former slaves may have gained their emancipation when slavery ended, but America isn’t yet free from the poisonous aftermath of slavery. That freedom will take a reckoning which has yet to happen.
I told you that America’s greatest economist predicted all that.
He said it long ago. Who was he?
Go ahead and guess. Really. Close your eyes. Take three guesses.
It was MLK. How deep does racism go in America?Even today, he’s not recognized as the one man who understood, so long ago, the true economic, social, and political consequences of a society premised on the brutality of slavery. How it was destined to poison its prosperity, democracy, and equality, in lasting, terrible ways.
So you tell me.Have we learned as much as we must?Not to repeat history yet? I think the legacy of Juneteenth is so great that it means we must examine American history anew, and write a different story about it. No, slavery and segregation didn’t work. Not for anyone. Neither victim nor oppressor. All that brutality, violence, subjugation — it was fornothing. Today, even white Americans are free-falling into poverty.
Maybe, having read this, you are beginning to understand why my broken heart says that.America should teach history and futurity a lesson. Slavery is a road to nowhere. 1776 led to 2020. 1971 led to 2015. Slavery is America’s original sin, but not just a moral one. America ended up falling into poverty, ruin, disgrace, and authoritarianism precisely because a society built on exploitation then might just be doomednever to be able to find another way.
UmairJune 2020
