If the White people in my life could hit a button and instantly remove the privileges afforded to them along racial lines, would they hit that button?
Now here is a powerful question, and one that gets right to the heart of the true extent of inequality in the United States. Reparations are relatively easy for us to support, since any reparations will necessarily be paid for through tax revenue and, I think, is likely to be relatively insubstantial on a family's bottom line. Smoot's question, however, dispenses with any theoretical considerations of reparations and straightforwardly demands that Whites should return to Blacks the value they inherited through centuries of slavery and generations of systematic exclusion of Blacks from the opportunities that the parents, grandparents, great grandparents and great great grandparents of Whites benefited from.
What's more, Smoot argues that the donations, the expressions of support, the flag waving and social solidarity afforded the BLM movement by Whites is a way of buying forgiveness of the sin of racism, an exculpatory expression simultaneously of guilt and superiority, an indulgence of the secular church of progressivism. She writes:
In my direct circle, it has become obvious to me that many of my White peers are at a loss for what to do in this critical moment to prove themselves different from the ones they have come to view as the true agents of White supremacy. I imagine them, phone in hand, scrolling on social media and seeing messages of disdain and moral indictment pointed at them directly. They think to themselves: “I am not the type of White person who would murder someone in the street. I don’t use racial slurs. I voted for Obama. I have Black friends.” Unable to reconcile the dissonance of their allyship being broadly called into question in the digital sphere, these White individuals turn to me, to us, the proverbial “Black friend”, as a cathartic release of such inner turmoil. They want us to vindicate their longstanding inaction – their culpability in White supremacy – by accepting their monetary donations, their well-wishes and genuine feelings of sympathy at what is only now crystalizing in their minds as another sort of pandemic; one which has only ever kept racially marginalized individuals quarantined away from enjoying the liberties promised to all Americans in the governing documents of the nation.
The word "afforded" in this context should ring with dissonance. It suggests that support for BLM by Whites is as much a form of privilege as any other. It is a way of Whites saying "my conscience is worth this much, and this much only," to which Smoot rightly responds by questioning how much they've gained through generations of tacit ( at best ) support of White superiority. She goes on to say:
The truth is, genuine allyship is not kindness, it is not a charitable act, nor is it even a personal commitment to hold anti-racist ideals – it is a fall from grace. Real allyship enacted by White Americans, with a clear objective to make equitable the lived experiences of individuals across racial lines, means a willingness to lose things. Not just the extra $50 in one’s monthly budget by way of donating to an organization working towards racial justice. I mean palpable, incalculable loss. The loss of the charmed life associated with being a White person in America. Refusing a pay raise at one’s job and insisting that it be reallocated to co-workers of color who are undoubtedly being underpaid. The loss of potentially every close relationship with other White friends and family members who refuse to acknowledge or amend their behaviors that reinforce systemic oppression. The loss of bodily safety, by way of physically intervening when violence is being inflicted on to Black bodies.
A "fall from grace," now that is a powerful description. It denotes a state of being in which one has been gifted a reprieve from the consequences of one's own sins, a reprieve which is moreover unmerited. For Whites, being a true ally to Blacks means sacrificing all the entitlements and privileges they have - often without thinking of it. That pay rise which is not shared with people of color, regardless of performance. ( One might also say so of gender. ) Access to loans, housing, education. The "charmed" life did not come to be by accident, nor even by one's own hard work. It came as a result of violence, violence which is still being inflicted on black bodies and brown.
If the benefits of a culture which prizes whiteness often go unnoticed by them, while at the same time prises those benefits from people of color, then the beneficiaries share responsibility for that violence. As difficult as it is to wake from this ignorance into the uncomfortable knowledge of one's own complicity in these crimes, it is more difficult still to appreciate the vastness of them, and of the true scale the benefits of these crimes has afforded the United States.
One of the key works attempting to understand the value of slavery and its contribution the US economy is The Economics of the Civil War by Roger Ransom. One way of looking at the problem is to evaluate the value of all slaves in the US at the height of slavery, in 1860. Ransom presents data suggesting a valuation of nearly $3.5 billion in 1860 dollars.
Normalizing values across this distance of time is difficult, and there are a variety of ways of doing so. Samuel Williamson and Louis Cain take Ransom and Sutch's data to estimate that the 1860 value of slaves in 2015 dollars comes to between six and thirteen trillion US$.
 |
| Wealth in Slaves in Trillions of 2016 dollars As Measured by the Share of the GDP |
Ian Webster at Officialdata.org uses BLS statistics to derive the aggregate increase in inflation from 1860 to 2020, which he puts at 2,989 percent. Measured this way, the 1860 value of slaves in the US comes to roughly ten and a half trillion, about half of US GDP in 2019. But this is just a representation of the purchase price for all slaves in 1860. The real value of slaves was the labor they produced over their working lives. Williamson and Cain offer a sense of what that value actually was:
While some slaves were rented out for farm and other types of work, most slaves worked on the farms and plantations of their owners. In both cases, the work they did was mostly unskilled, so a comparable measure of the value of these services is reflected in the unskilled wage. In other words, we can assume that to hire a free employee to do the work of a slave would cost the unskilled wage of that day. Thus, a measure of the average value of a slave would be the present value of the net rental cost over the life expectancy of the average slave...Unlike hired hands, slaves were responsible in large part for producing their own room, board, and clothing. Given that the work week today is significantly shorter than in 1850 and that slaves were made to work harder during the same amount of time as free workers, it would take more than one hired hand today to replace the labor supplied by a slave then.
According to Salary.com, the average wage for a general laborer today comes to $16 an hour. Non-slave industrial work ran between 60 and 70 hours per week by 1860, and had been steadily decreasing since 1840. In 1860 slaves certainly worked more hours per day than non-slaves, and agricultural work generally demanded more hours than industrial work. An 80 hour work week is probably a very conservative estimate, then - and that's not counting the work slaves were required to do to maintain their own living standards. Today that brings the cost of such labor to roughly $66,500 per year. Williamson and Cain suggest the average working lives of slaves ran to 20 years. There were one million slaves in the US by 1860, bringing the value of their productive work in 2020 to 66,500,000,000, a value which slaveholders could expect to get twenty times over. Thus the purchase price of all 1860 slaves today comes to ten and a half trillion $US, and the value over their working lives to roughly twelve trillion.
Now the net value slaveholders actually saw from slavery is hard to evaluate, and the headline numbers here are not representative of that. Those numbers do represent the gross value generated by those slaves, however, and therefore the value lost to them. If we consider the potential of interest gained in the intervening 180 years, the total lost revenue to slaves and their families could well be much higher. There is nevertheless value in simply using these numbers to provide a first approximation of the total value of the labor stolen from Blacks in 2020. There are 40 million or so blacks, and we estimate some $23 trillion worth of stolen labor, which comes to roughly half a million dollars for every Black person in the US today.
So yeah, giving up that raise doesn't begin to address the problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment