We don’t quite have the opposite of this, but we are also far from meaningful integration. The civil rights movement envisioned a fully integrated world of neighborhoods, homes, churches and schools where people could, in Rana’s words, “encounter one another, recognize common grievances and develop ties of solidarity.” Without that infrastructure, it is incredibly hard to shift people’s political views.”
They require a cultural infrastructure, in which left values are present in the everyday institutions that organize people’s experiences. Left-wing projects, argues Rana, “require more than simply making arguments about economic interest. It was exactly this entanglement that Donald Trump exploited to such powerful effect in his 2016 presidential election campaign, and which continues to fuel the rhetoric of conservative “populists” like Tucker Carlson of Fox News. Whiteness is then entangled in the idea of security, economic or otherwise. “For white residents in these areas,” writes Rana, “daily activities - in local schools, churches, playgrounds and businesses - reinforce a deep sense of shared cultural connection.” It creates the sense as well that the social integrity and even prosperity of those areas depends on their racial exclusivity. The legacy of our “long history of discriminatory practices by both the government and private sector, along with cycles of white self-isolation” means that even poor white families tend to live in segregated neighborhoods that are more prosperous than those inhabited by middle-class Black and Latino families. Rana’s argument, in short, is that this process is still in effect.
The effect of this was to cultivate a kind of chauvinism, as well as the sense of a cross-class solidarity among whites, which worked to undermine any feelings of solidarity or understanding between workers of different racial backgrounds. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks and the best schools.” “They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. Du Bois described in “Black Reconstruction in America.” “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage,” Du Bois wrote. This, in fact, was the whole point, as W.E.B. The other thing racial segregation does is inculcate racist ideologies as a kind of social learning. But because American-style segregation typically rests on the destruction of public goods, this shield is brittle and unreliable, as many white workers and their children discovered with the collapse of the New Deal economy and the rise of the neoliberal order in the last decades of the 20th century. The other group is shielded, to an extent, from the brunt of the system’s ills. One group is often subjected to the worst of capitalist exploitation and state repression, from wealth extraction and expropriation to being relegated to the most precarious forms of low-wage labor, if jobs are even available. The first is that it facilitates the exploitation of workers on both sides of the racial divide. Racial segregation does two things, essentially. “Throughout the country,” Rana writes, “in cities and rural areas, blue states and red ones, racial separation remains a common feature of collective life.” And while Americans have made meaningful progress toward integration in the decades since the civil rights movement, it is also true, as Rana notes, that “recent decades have brought profound backsliding, and many communities and institutions are more segregated now than they were 30 years ago.” Without question, the best thing I read this week was an essay for Dissent magazine by the legal scholar Aziz Rana on the challenge that racial segregation poses to the creation of a broad-based and emancipatory politics of class.Īlthough it is no longer enforced by law, racial segregation remains a fundamental part of the social order and political economy of the United States.
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