Dear Editor,
It seems one of the riskiest things a Caucasian can do today is express an opinion about racial justice. However, I believe in the cultural virtue of open dialogue on issues of importance, and thus will forge ahead. Mindful of current norms, however, Ill preface my remarks by acknowledging my deficit of lived experience. In todays lexicon my background is one of economic and racial privilege.
I dont recall ever doing or saying things intended to demean others based on their race, but that observation is incomplete as it speaks only to my intentions. Research on the neuroscience of unconscious bias suggests we are often unaware of the latent shortcuts and subtle taxonomies our brains default to when appraising other people. This gap between associative perception and conscious thought suggests that the way our words and actions are received is a better measure of racial tone than how they were intended.
In the past decade Critical Race Theory (CRT) has supplanted traditional liberalism and civil rights thinking regarding racial justice, at least for the progressive left. Conceived as a framework for legal reform in the 1970s, CRT transmuted into a political agenda by the 1990s. CRT is organized around two core beliefs. First, that white privilege is a persistent feature of American society, propagated through legal and judicial mechanisms. White privilege is of course the notion that a myriad of advantages and benefits accrue to members of the dominant race. Second, CRT asserts that it is possible to transform the relationship between the law and racial power, and through that process to achieve broad-based equality.
The schism between CRT and traditional civil rights philosophy is profound. CRT questions concepts, such as legal equality, and Constitutional neutrality, that are foundational to liberal democracy. For example, CRT asserts that reason and empathy are insufficient to provide privileged people with a proper understanding of the lived experiences of marginalized people. CRT also argues that bias frequently undermines supposedly race-neutral processes in our legal system, and excuses violations of the constitutional rights of non-white people. It also asserts that hate speech does not deserve the protections of the First Amendment because it is actually a form of violence. Rejecting traditional liberalisms emphasis on color blindness and meritocracy, CRT favors an inherently race-conscious approach to social transformation. Where liberalism favors a commitment to equality of opportunity, CRT advocates for equity in outcomes.
Though deeply concerned about police brutality, until recently I was skeptical about CRTs argument that our legal institutions are structurally biased against people of color. Statistics compiled by Heather Mac Donald and other scholars demonstrate that the incidence of police shootings per arrest does not vary meaningfully by race. Over time, the mistreatment of martyrs like Trayvon Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have convinced me otherwise. Ms. Mac Donald and the defenders of broken windows policing tactics do not properly account for the massive differential in police presence within minority communities. I believe this differential in crime-seeking attention by itself constitutes a structural bias on the part of law enforcement.
Ironically, the practice of over-policing communities of color was facilitated by another structural form of bias. Redlining is the systematic denial of services by the government or the private sector based on race, ethnicity, religion or gender. Prior to the Fair Housing Act of 1968 American communities were blatantly segregated by racially prohibitive zoning regulations. The Federal government also deemed predominantly black neighborhoods high risk and discouraged banks from underwriting mortgages for them. Even after passage of the FHA, mortgage companies and landlords often used covert redlining (e.g. offering disparate interest rates based on the borrowers race) to suppress minority homeownership.
Segregated communities and low rates of home and land ownership have reduced wealth-building opportunities for minorities throughout the post-slavery era. At the end of the Civil War, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman promised four million freed slaves land that they would own, a policy known as 40 acres and a mule. Instead, after Lincolns assassination, his successor Andrew Johnson reneged on the deal. Black Americans started their freed lives empty handed. By some estimates that land would have been worth as much as $3.1 trillion today.
At the same time former slaves were being denied the land promised to them, the U.S. government was providing wealth-building stimulus to mostly White Americans. In 1862, the government enacted the Homestead Acts, a series of laws meant to help settle the west. The federal government distributed 270 million acres of land, most of it stolen from Native Americans, to settlers. Today 48 million Americans are descendants of the homesteaders who benefitted from this largesse.
This relates back to the debate about police brutality because wealthy communities have lower rates of crime, and black households currently hold just 3.8% ($4 trillion) of U.S. household wealth ($116 trillion). Differential crime rates and the racially motivated war on drugs have historically been the most pervasive rationale used to justify calls for a stronger, more persistent police presence in minority communities. Thus, a history of structural bias in economic opportunities indirectly fueled the over-policing of minority neighborhoods.
Redlining has gradually declined in the face of more active fair housing enforcement, but structural bias by the federal government has not disappeared. A disturbing example was revealed by a class action lawsuit filed against the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1999. In Pigford v. Glickman the USDA was accused of systemic racial discrimination in the allocation of farm loans and assistance between 1981-1996. The Pigford case is a fascinating example of how overlapping economic and political barriers can inhibit access to ostensibly race-neutral government programs.
In the Jim Crow era, African-Americans in southern states were systematically disenfranchised from political participation and chased off their farms by lynching and KKK terrorism. By the early 20th century, southern states had effectively established a one-party system of apartheid, ruled by white Democrats. Blocked from political power, most African-Americans were also unable to access credit, causing even more farmers to lose their land. In Mississippi, where 2/3 of all farmers in the late 19th century were black, most African-Americans were forced into sharecropping or tenant farming. By 1992 the number of black-owned farms had declined by 98%.
When a global crash in commodity prices spurred a farm recession in the 1980s, several relief bills were passed to address the crisis. However, USDA programs were mostly administered at the county level. Decisions to approve farm loans were made by 3-5 committee members in each county. Even after African-Americans regained the ability to vote in the late 1960s, those USDA committees remained overwhelmingly white. The historical pattern of discrimination against minority farmers thus continued unabated.
As a result of the Pigford suit, the USDA officially admitted to having discriminated against black farmers. In 1999 a U.S. District Court found in favor of the more than 13,000 plaintiffs and established a settlement pool of over $1 billion, the largest civil rights settlement in U.S. history. Another 70,000 farmers had filed late or been exempted from the class, so a 2008 farm bill created a process for additional claims. In 2010 Congress appropriated $1.2 billion to settle with those additional plaintiffs. Most recently, the American Rescue Plan President Biden signed provided $4 billion for debt forgiveness and $1 billion in other support for socially disadvantaged farmers, benefiting many who were not compensated by the Pigford settlements. Advocates identified this part of the relief bill as the most important legislation for African-American farmers since the Civil Rights Act.
Critical Race Theory is nuanced and controversial. I find some of its tenets to be illogical, but it does correctly argue that structural racial bias continues to exist in our institutions. In the spirit of our liberal democratic traditions, I think empathy and intent still matter and equating speech with violence is counterproductive.
Channeling MLK, Id argue that our compass should be aimed at becoming post-racial as opposed to becoming persistently race-conscious. However, CRT and recurring examples of police brutality compellingly suggest that we will never reach MLKs dream until we fully acknowledge and address the prevalence of structural bias in our society.
Derek RidgleyNederland
(Originally published in the April 15, 2021, edition of The Mountain-Ear.)
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