Anti-Racism Built This City

The prosperity of the New South is a gift extended to mostly white people by the Civil Rights Movement

As you look at Atlanta's skyline (or just about any glimmering skyline throughout the Bible Belt) there are two things that should be immediately apparent.

First, it is incontrovertible that the skyline would be barely noticeable if the city's white establishment had been given the option to cling to its once revered traditions of segregation and outright, violence-pocked racism. If segregation persisted, Atlanta would not be the home of Coca-Cola, Delta would not be ready to fly there, and Georgia-Pacific would probably just be Pacific.

Second, for all the good that these changes have done that inure to the benefit of Black residents receiving the bare bones, threshold treatment as humans, those towering buildings represent the massive accumulation of white people wealth.

Anti-racism is not charity. It never was.

40% of growth in U.S. GDP for the fifty year period from 1960 to 2010 came from the diminished barriers to jobs and education for women and minorities. …Women and minorities themselves did not enjoy that growth in GDP.

Indeed, if you factor in the demonstrable profitability that anti-racism offers white people, their (okay, our) on-going resistance to DEI, affirmative action programs, ballot access, hate crime legislation, and (perhaps most telling of all) the social safety net (which benefits far more white people but gets derided and ridiculed for extending benefits to Black Americans), speaks volumes as to the magnitude of hate and bigotry driving the choices of so many people right now.

The proof that racism is a choice and not a collateral consequence of people looking out for their personal prosperity is laid bare by the fact that, time and again, well off and not-so-well off white people willingly deny themselves the monumental gains they’d secure for themselves for the sake of making it difficult for people of color to thrive and prosper alongside them.

The way that integration and more equitable access to education and jobs and political influence for minorities - and women - has boosted overall prosperity, for white people especially, is not just observable to the naked eye, it’s supported by data.

According to a 2019 paper published in Econometrica, a whopping 40% of per capita growth in U.S. GDP for the fifty year period from 1960 to 2010 came from the diminished barriers to jobs for women and minorities. Source: Hsieh, Chang-Tai, Erik Hurst, Charles I. Jones, and Peter J. Klenow, The Allocation of Talent and U.S. Economic Growth. Econometrica 87: 1439–74 (2019).

Again, although it should not need to be said, the juxtaposition of this next thought is important: women and minorities themselves did not enjoy that growth in GDP.

(Note: This short video providing a non-technical overview of the Econometrica article is available on YouTube here.)

This prosperity we see - particularly in the so-called New South - is the Civil Rights and the Women’s Rights movements hard at work for the benefit of white men like myself.

Over those fifty years, as far as per capita GDP growth is concerned, there was no industry sector on Wall Street that has performed as well as or given the U.S. economy as much of a boost as the these movements. Not telecom. Not oil and gas. Not FinTech. Not even the military-industrial complex.

Yet, for all the progress made - there’s still plenty of unrealized prosperity that remains waiting on the table. We have a long way to go before we exhaust the benefits from promoting equity. We can secure these easy gains by improving access to quality health care, ensuring more equity in early education, eliminating food deserts and improving maternal health and childhood nutrition. (Plus, as the Econometrica paper notes, there are still significant gains waiting to be made in terms of further eliminating persistent barriers to hiring attitudes and job opportunities.)

Paid leave is low-hanging fruit to added prosperity for all - yet it gets labeled as a “handout” and derided as “an entitlement program.” If you want to get a hint at what paid family leave can do to further reduce the barriers that continue to hold back women and minorities, consider the February 2024 newsletter by the National Partnership for Women and Children which reveals how, in my State of South Carolina, “81 percent of Black mothers, 42 percent of Latina mothers, 48 percent of white mothers and 47 percent of AAPI mothers are key family breadwinners.”

We can look at who shoulders student loan debt as yet another indicator of where barriers continue to exist that would inure to our collective benefit. In this April 2022 Brief by the Education Trust on Jim Crow Debt: How Black Borrowers Experience Student Loans, we see how Black women, those seeking graduate education in particular, end up with more debt than any other demographic group.

Undertaking this debt cannot be ascribed to poor choices - though that’s often the rebuttal raised among those who are quick to assume that there are better choices available to people who are denied opportunities and access routinely (often by the people who look at survival decisions and decipher them as poorly-made optional choices).

These choices are driven by pay inequity and bigotry - which are bad choices, to be sure, but not authored by the Black women who must find answers to those bad choices. The high level of debt is borne out of the pragmatic need for Black women to achieve so much more just to keep pace in terms of compensation. As the April 2022 Brief notes, “Black women are still pursuing a higher education, because they can’t afford not to: In order to achieve their academic and professional goals and improve the financial situation of their families, they need a degree (if not two or three).”

We are far from exhausting all the opportunities at hand to build more economic prosperity for everyone. We get in our own way every time we buy in to the myth that tackling these problems is an act of largesse on our part or that we’re giving handouts and helping others who we view as being unworthy of our efforts to be more inclusive.

Although the Supreme Court regards Affirmative Action as a failed endeavor that has run its course, in what amounts to “reverse racism” - at least when it comes to university admissions policies - the facts tell a different story. If you had to pick just one economic engine to grow the U.S. economy, recent history tells us that the good choice would be Affirmative Action, DEI, or whatever you want to call programs that embrace inclusion and the elimination of barriers to thrive and succeed.

The people making the bad choices, to be clear, are the ones who deny themselves the prosperity that comes from inclusive practices. They’re people who look and walk and talk much like myself. As long as the most powerful and wealthiest white men sustain the false narrative among all white people that they’re making sacrifices (or even that they’re “allies” - which implies an optional, non-stakeholder interest in increased equity) by entertaining DEI and inclusion, those powerful white people will sustain the enormous wealth gaps that their oligarchies depend on.

The proof that improved access for women and minorities has been a boon to white men as much as anyone has been staring back at us all this time and the proof that we, as white men, are hard-wired to default to and defend racist, misogynist and other oppressive systems that preserve any number of bigotries is bound up in our persistent bad choice to refuse to do what’s proved all along to inure to our immense benefit.