Not long before I was born in 1969, this country was split between states that had legal segregation of the races and states that did not. The raging debate was whether it was legitimate or even constitutional for state and local governments to have laws and ordinances based on white supremacy. In other words, there was no consensus at all that racism was wrong.
By the time I was in elementary school, however, this was no longer an active debate. Particularly in my New Jersey Ivy League community, it was uncontroversial that racism is wrong or that Martin Luther King Jr. was a moral giant.
I am aware that other parts of the country came along slower and more begrudgingly, but they came along eventually, and you won’t find white supremacy being discussed as something legitimate in any elementary schools today.
That’s progress, right?
I mention this because it’s interesting to see unnamed Senate Republicans criticizing Speaker Paul Ryan for openly conceding that Donald Trump recently made textbook-definition racist comments concerning a judge who is overseeing a civil suit against Trump University in San Diego, California.
What’s their complaint?
Well, it seems that Ryan’s honesty contrasts poorly with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s obfuscation and causes them a nasty inconvenience.
Speaker Paul Ryan’s handling of Donald Trump is coming under criticism from Senate Republicans, many of whom prefer the way their leader, Mitch McConnell, deals with the unconventional candidate.
McConnell, the Senate majority leader from Kentucky, has steadfastly declined to call Trump’s criticism of a federal judge “racist,” a term that Ryan (R-Wis.) pointedly deployed.
“It sets up journalists to ask, ‘Do you agree with Paul Ryan that it was racist?” said an aide to a vulnerable GOP senator.
I mean, that’s a shame that people are getting asked whether something is racist, but the real problem is that they’re not willing to say, “what’s the problem with being racist?”
Insofar as Trump’s complaint makes any sense, it’s premised on the fact that he’s so anti-Latino and anti-Muslim that a Latino or Muslim judge could not help but be biased against him. He’s not getting a fair shake in court and he could never get a fair shake in court from hated-minority judges. As a white bigot, justice demands that he be judged by a white bigot. And that’s basically a clear defense of white (Christian) supremacy.
You can make that argument openly if you want to. You won’t convince a majority of the people to agree with you, but you’ll find sympathizers.
Fortunately, the Speaker of the House isn’t one of those sympathizers, and he’s in no mood to tread lightly around the issue.
Paul Ryan said he and Donald Trump spoke on the phone about his attacks on a federal judge, and the Speaker continued to condemn Trump’s criticism on Friday morning, calling the remarks “beyond the pale.”
In an interview on “Good Morning America” on ABC, Ryan — who had already labeled Trump’s comments “the textbook definition of a racist comment” — elaborated on his disagreement with Trump.
“I have [spoken to Trump] and explained exactly what I thought about that comment. I said it publicly and I said it privately,” Ryan told host George Stephanopoulos.“This is something that needs to be condemned. That comment is beyond the pale. That’s not political correctness — suggesting someone can’t do their job because of their race or ethnicity, that’s not a politically incorrect thing to do. That’s just a wrong thing to say, and I hope he gets that.”
Now, if you happen to be a white supremacist then you don’t think that what Trump said is wrong or that there is any problem with being racist. You obviously disagree with Paul Ryan.
But, if you aren’t a white supremacist then you shouldn’t have any difficulty saying that this kind of racism is unacceptable.
But how do we characterize the person who agrees that white supremacy is wrong but doesn’t want to have to answer questions about it? What do we say about a person who is angry with a political leader for admitting that white supremacy is wrong and praises a political leader of his party who refuses to make that admission?
Look at this:
One GOP senator said he and his colleagues are more upset with Trump’s lack of discipline, which has forced them to play defense instead of talking about the weak economy.
At the same time, the senator added, “nobody was happy with Paul.”
Another Republican senator was more diplomatic: “If he could have gotten his point across without being so definitive and giving Democrats fodder for people lower on the ticket, that would have been good.”
Senate Republicans won’t criticize Ryan publically because they don’t want to pick a fight with the top-ranking House Republican or be seen as defending Trump’s comment, which many thought was ill-advised.
But they have concerns about whether Ryan is thinking enough about how his actions affect the party’s chances of keeping control of the Senate.
Is that a profile in political courage?
Don’t be so “definitive” about calling white supremacy out for what it is!
Like I said, by the time I entered elementary school in 1974, this was no longer open for debate. We all learned that having the organs of state, including the judicial system, support laws that favor whites and disadvantage nonwhites is unconstitutional and morally outrageous.
But, you know, there was a time not long before that when the matter was unsettled. I just never thought we’d have a presidential candidate who would reopen the question.
hillary may as well start measuring those drapes. the gop can’t buy enough fire extinguishers to put out the daily trash fires trump’ll keep lighting all the way to november.
It saddens, disgusts, horrifies and frightens me that we are even have this blog post. Not a critique of the post, itself, of course, which is entirely relevent.
I’m old. I have relatives in Alabama. I remember all too well the segregated lunch counters, drinking fountains, rest rooms, buses, etc. My grandparents (bless ’em) refused to follow the rules in Alabama when they visited and drove the AA cleaning lady home. She got to sit in the front seat, although possibly it scared that poor lady to do so.
I remember Rosa Parks. I remember the Civil Rights era. I remember those students getting killed. I remember the Civil Rights Act of 1964 getting passed. I remember MLK getting assassinated. I remember the Dixiecrats leaving the Democratic Party in droves.
Yet and still, I remember a number of decades where one didn’t get chided and yelled at for being POLITE and gracious and having manners. Where being a rabid racist was not considered something to be proud of. And frankly, people did change as a consequence and mostly for the better.
Now I remember Richard Milhous Nixon and his evil band of brothers including Lee Atwater, and Atwater’s infamous Southern Strategy. And I fully remember decades of Hate Radio, Fox, “Christian” Broadcasting, the pernicious Family/Fellowship, rightwing think tanks. I have witness a severe and very serious decline in this nation brought about by funding by the 1% in aid of dividing our nation once again – bringing us back to the days of the Confederacy.
It’s beyond the pale that there’s even “discussions” about what constitutes racism, where we even have to “consider” the hurted fweelings of butthurt thin skinned Trump supporters who feel so oppressed by so-called “liberal” political correctness.
Am I with Alice through the Looking Glass? Every day I awaken to be assaulted once again by skeevy scummy lying liar disgusting broke crooked “businessman” Donald Trump bellowing out some fugly nasty rascist sexist homophobic bigoted diatribe, with all of his toadies and scummy “endorsers” running behind him declaiming loudly: the Emperor’s clothes are very fine indeed!
WTF is wrong with this country that we can come to this pass? WTF is WRONG with those dastardly shitheads in Wash DC who defend this execrable behavior. WTF is wrong with our media that play act around “discussing” Trump’s latest racist shout out as if it’s something to be taken seriously – but not seriously as in: this is VERY BAD, immoral and NOT who we are as nation. Nay verily, it’s to parse out his fugly racist diatribes as if they’re some kind of hieroglyphics that, if only they could translated just so, it would have some valuable meaning for us all.
Sorry for the rant, but I simply cannot take the la di dah-ness of “discussions” about white supremacy as if it has a leg to stand on or something of import to impart to us.
It does NOT. It is WRONG. It is immoral. It is disgusting. Citizens who vote for Trump should be ashamed of themselves. I don’t care what they’re stupid circumstances are. Enough tip toeing. It’s crap. The end.
From the heart. Excellent.
I saw recently that Trump has gotten an estimated $1.9 Billion of,free air time from the media. It appears he just calls in and everyone talks to him. WTF is that all about?
A fine rant has its place.
This is a fine rant.
This is its place.
In Ireland we have a phrase to describe people like this: they are called “sneaking regarders”, sometimes pronounced “snakeing regarders”. It is a term of contempt for people who privately support something awful but are not prepared to stand up and say so in pubic.
GOP politicians may or may not be white supremacists, but they sure as hell want to get the votes of white supremacists and are quite prepared to send mixed signals which white supremacists can interpret as support, or at last sympathy for their position. When challenged, they may of coarse still deny it, but give off some other mixed signals using various dog whistle terminology.
Ryan has just made that gambit that bit harder and risks driving a wedge between GOP candidates and an area of potential support. It also sets an agenda they would rather avoid. They will of course blame political correctness gone wild. It’s all the libruls fault…
right, they’re always saying liberals always play the victim card when their go to response is their failures are always someone else’s fault. not really the party of personal responsibility is it?
Remember:
US Conservatism is built on the twin pillars of cognitive dissonance and projection.
When a conservative is screaming that a liberal is playing the victim card, they are both cognitively dissonant that they themselves play the victim card, constantly. I mean, what else is the whole “political correctness” thing about, other than conservatives being victims of the big bad liberal PC movement?
US Conservatives are the biggest victims on the entire planet. Hell, if their candidate loses an election, it means that their country was “taken” from them, as if they aren’t still living and working and watching TV in their country.
“If you happen to be a white supremacist then you don’t think that what Trump said is wrong or that there is any problem with being racist.”
BooMan, this is manifestly untrue and (as came up in the “Trump voter” thread, contentiously) is the biggest problem facing liberals who try to combat racism and the linguistics and semantics of racism.
They don’t think of themselves as racists. They think of themselves as reasonable, fair, open-minded people whose “common sense” (Trump’s words) tells them that there are certain problems endemic to Muslims, blacks, Mexicans etc…and that those of us who a) muzzle this idea; b) pretend we can’t see the underlying truth or c) promote compensatory policies based on race are the “real” racists; the people bringing race into the equation when they were just talking about endemic laziness or a “dependency culture” or terrorism.
Until we face this, we lose the argument.
Not an attack on you, personally, but oh please: gag me with a spoon.
That kind of skeevy, twisted, distorted, perverted language to justify their incendiary racism is just a ruse. Yeah yeah some Trump voters are all butt-hurt to be called a racist because it’s so “unfair,” and all the mean bully liberals are oppressing them so.
Gimme a break.
If you want to discuss some issues about minorities that you truly, honestly, genuinely believe are problematic: FINE. Go ahead.
But do so in a way that is NOT clearly racist.
These people don’t have a leg to stand on by virtue how these issues cropped up, and by virtue of how they CONTINUE to talk about them in the most viscious, attacking and racist way possible.
Yes, there are issues to be considered about illegal immigrants. That is true, but the FACTS don’t bear out most of the fugly nasty diatribes that I read DAILY since Trump descended his frickin escalator. FACT: Obama has deported more Central and South Americas and Mexicans than any of his predecessors, yet we NEVER EVER hear about that.
FACT: more Mexicans are leaving the USA and returning to Mexico than ever before. But we NEVER EVER hear about that.
FACT: many of the undocumented workers are recruited, hired and brought to the USA by businesses seeking low wage workers to work in unhealthy unsafe conditions. When ICE comes a-knocking, the undocumented workers get deported but the business person? NOT even a wrist tap. But we NEVER EVER hear about that.
WTF is “wrong” with Muslims?? Please enlighten me?
So there’s been one attack by a Muslim couple that regrettably killed a number of US citizens.
HOW many US citizens have been killed by WHITE men, many of whom probably identify as Christians?? HOW Many?? How many little kids?
OH, but that’s fine and jim-dandy, but let’s get totally riled up about Muslims and threaten to kill their entire families.
Right.
Gun control? Don’t get me started. That Muslim couple may never had gotten those weapons if we had adequate gun control. But we simply cannot discuss that rationally either.
Seriously? I’m sick to death of the whinings of rightwingers who have been brainwashed into victimizing themselves over every little thing, and if their bad behaviour is pointed out to them in a reasonable way, they commence to more whining about how even more victimized they are because horrible Liberals didn’t approach them in some “gentle” way or something.
Grow UP.
Face the music.
These people are RACISTS. IF they can’t see it, then they need to figure it out.
“These people are RACISTS. IF they can’t see it, then they need to figure it out.”
Of course they’re racists, through and through. But there’s no “if” about it: they can’t see it.
We on the left need to learn this; we have a stunning mental block when it comes to this idea. Look at the Trump voter BooMan quoted the other day: “Keep saying ‘racist, racist’ and you’ll drive more voters towards Trump.”
All those people who said that those attacking Trump for his comments about the Judge were “the real racists.” I remember people I knew in 1989 saying Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing was “racist.” Right wingers say Obama is “racist” because he’s practicing “the politics of racial division.” Affirmative Action is called a “racist policy.”
You can gag yourself with as many spoons as you want but this is the way they actually think. They do not conceptualize themselves as racists — even the overt white supremacists insist they’re “protecting” the “endangered” white people against “racist” policies.
Calling racists “racists” doesn’t work. They will never accept that they are racists; they think we are the racists. I’m sorry, but that’s how the right-wing mind works, and we won’t make any progress until we accept it and deal with it.
I respect your opinion, but we’ll have to agree to disagree.
It’s my opinion – based on decades of observation – that the brainwashing inflicted by the righwing propaganda machine has gotten us to this point. Attempting to “reason” with these people using different words or whatever gets us nowhwere.
There’s no reasoning with racists because they’ve been carefully taught by Rush/Fox, etc, to toss it back in “Liberal” faces. If we DARE to question one vaunted word eminating from the right, it’s because WE are WRONG, and they have the correct viewpoint. If we bring up verifiable facts, they just get tossed back as wrong or delusional or whatever.
Don’t get me wrong: everyone should do what they think is the best course of action.
I’m old. I’ve seen efforts made before to reason with these types of rightwingers. They’ve been so inculcated with their poisonous beliefs that I don’t think much works other than saying the truth as it stands.
What they are doing and saying is racist. It just IS. Parse it anyway you want. That’s who and what they are. Yeah, they’ll kick and scream and fight it all they want.
Speaking only for myself, I’m done pussy-footing around and trying to make nice around it.
These people simply aren’t nice. I totally disagree with them, their fugly viewpoints, and the way they behave. I’m done pretending otherwise.
Nobody’s “pussy footing around.” Respectfully, I think you misunderstand my initial comment.
I was saying, BooMan was wrong to paint today’s Trump defenders, or even the 1960s anti-civil-rights advocates — as self-styled “racists” who accepted the label.
You have to look far and wide through history to find anyone who says, “Yes, I’m a racist.” They all look at it differently — in the way I’m describing — and indignantly push the label back on the accuser. This isn’t some trivial “Fox news” propaganda effect; it’s a deep, irreversible truth about how racial biases work.
I’m not saying anyone shouldn’t be called a racist. I’m not excusing or forgiving anyone. I’m simply saying, the idea that racists accept that they’re racists — and will, when told that they’re racists, therefore admit, “Okay, you got me — I am a racist, and it’s bad so I’ll stop” is a dangerous liberal fantasy. We should know better, but we still go around labeling racists as “racists” and expecting this to have some effect on racism, but it never will.
The point I believe Jordan is trying to make is that by calling them out on their racism accomplishes nothing. Everyone who isn’t an overt racist knows that the statement was racist.
In other words, if I want to have an actual conversation with someone about welfare, if the person I’m speaking with says something racist, just shouting at them that they’re a racist isn’t going to allow me, or them, to get to the merits of the subject, so that I can even point out, for example, that it’s white people who receive most of the welfare spending in each and every state, and the entire country. Or that corporate welfare pretty much dwarfs social welfare to individual people and families.
In other words, rather than just lying in wait for the racist to say something racist and then ending the conversation by shouting “racist!”, keep the conversation moving.
I mean, there are two options. Don’t have the conversation to begin with, or win the conversation (regardless of whether the other person admits you’ve won). If you’re unable to get to the merits and drop facts on the person, regardless of whether or not they care, then you haven’t won the conversation. You’ve simply called the other person a name. You’ve accomplished nothing, because they’ll just roll their eyes, and the facts go unstated, allowing the racist the privilege of not even having to ignore the facts and reality. Or, to put it another way, you just lost.
My view: the people who have absorbed racist right-wing talking points in these ways cannot be convinced. It is genuinely a waste of time to try, and infuriating to boot. It’s not a fair test of our rhetoric.
Good news: the voting population in the U.S. in 2016 does not have enough people who have absorbed racist right-wing talking points to elect one of their own as President. We don’t have to spend our time unproductively; we can organize around them and turn out voters to swamp them.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of many Congressional and Legislative Districts which, in the particularly viciously gerrymandered States under Republican control, are controlled by majorities of reliable voters who have absorbed racist right-wing talking points.
It’s a major ingredient in the poisoned chalice the GOP has mixed and drank deeply from this decade.
re:
Because I presume they’re all in his corner already. Who’s left to drive there by accurately (whether they accept/recognize that or not) labeling their racism.
That wingnut was almost certainly correct that accurately naming racists ‘racist’ is extremely unlikely to win them over to your side. But drive more of them towards Trump? Don’t think so. They’re already there.
Color me relieved there are still a few no-mans-lands Republicans are not willing to cross. That may be shortsighted. This is not an ethics question. The only reason they won’t go there is they know it would cost them votes and they’d lose elections. I’m glad no one believes the American people can be snookered into going along with outright racism because it’s not far from that point to complete lawlessness.
Well perhaps it was no longer open for open debate:
Lee Atwater, 1981:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”–that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites…. “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
Words left whole because that’s what he said.
The entire history of the Post-Southern Strategy GOP has been to cloak their white supremacist views under a respectable mantle of abstraction. Trump is nothing new. He’s merely saying in his outside voice what the GOP elites have been saying in their inside ones for decades.
The GOP has assiduously courted the rump Confederacy and it has consumed them whole.
It was 1980. I was in grad school sharing a house with people I will call Mike and Abigail. Abigail was a Southerner. Duke graduate. Worked in DC before starting law school in 1979. Anyway, one day Abigail called some city office to find out their hours. Evidently she wasn’t hearing what she wanted to hear, as her voice kept becoming shriller and louder. She finally slammed the phone down and shouted something about “that stupid nigger”. Mike and I were flabbergasted and told her that was not acceptable. Abigail defended herself by saying something along the lines of, hey, I’ve lived around those people, I know what they’re like, blah blah blah.
It turns out that a few months before moving from DC to start law school, she had been mugged. And the mugger was African American.
And Abigail would also have denied she was a racist. It was “common sense” that was behind her shout that day.
I can’t tease apart cause and effect here.
Right; this is what I was saying directly above.
No racist has ever said, in response to being called a racist, “Yes, I am — what of it?” (Or, “Yes I am…it’s shameful, but it was how I was raised” or anything that begins with them admitting it.)
So, calling them “racists” accomplishes nothing.
I once confronted a co-worker about using the phrase “jewed him down”. He looked stunned and told me he had no ill intention, that he had heard that sort of thing growing up and had just sort of absorbed it. This turned out to be an actual teachable moment. Occasionally, these teachable moments come along. If I had shouted at my co-worker and called him a bigot, however, probably not. What I actually did was remind him that I was Jewish and remind him what he had said. Now, some people are not as open to introspection and change as my co-worker. I’m not naive. My point is simply that there’s no one size fits all solution.
If Abigail had been mugged by a white man, I wonder what she would’ve called a different white man with whom she was frustrated or had a disagreement.
Yep, see how the frame of reference of being the “default” and the “other” works on perception of individuals and groups.
It works for hair color–quick, who’s the “default”?
For some reason, eye-color has not been so stereotyped.
It is just a huger set of stereotypes for skin color typing of ethnic groups and for the original stereotype frame of Indian, Negro, white, and immigrant.
I guess I now have a reason to respect Paul Ryan. My field of respect is pretty limited, but unlike a week ago, it’s not zero.
Agreed, my respect for Ryan is above zero. But my miniscule respect for the zombie-eyed granny starver was reduced again to sub-miniscule when Ryan immediately reiterated that he still supported Trump’s Presidential campaign, would still vote for him, and that Clinton was worse to his zombie eyes.
If you support a racist even after he says racist things, what does that make you, ultimately?
Racist institutions create racist language. The original racist institutions in South Carolina and Virginia created the legal definitions of “Indian”, “Negro”, and “white” (note the lower-case letter symbolizing “default class”).
Prettied up non-offensive liberal white supremacy carries an unconscious discrimination that perpetuates discrimination in hiring, promotions, layoffs, housing availability, mortgages, school assignments (and which schools are public or private or religious), among other institutional discrimination that persists despite 50 years of work.
Conservatives intuitive sense that white liberals are not always sensitive to affirmative action or justice or opportunities when those liberals’ own economic interests or social status are at stake. They also intuit that one of the most blatant institutions in question are liberal academic institutions. But the best they can muster as an attack is one on speech; people should have the free speech to call out racial slurs with the intent of being racial slurs. Yes, the “I was only joking” excuse is getting pretty thin for the recipients and the third-party observers of such “challenges to political correctness”.
Donald Trump is not a white supremacist because of what he says but how he treats the people he deals with interpersonally and how he structures his business enterprises. Discrimination in housing is structured by having separate, mostly disjoint, markets that operate with different rent structures or price points. Guess who consistently gets the higher prices assigned to them. Realtors collaborate in keeping the markets as disjoint as the enforcement of housing discrimination laws will allow. Block busting, scaring whites, is just another way of keeping the markets disjoint. If you have had a course in market imperfections like monopolies and price discrimination, you know exactly why this system persists. The same system persists in employment, but in this case it’s a matter of lowering costs.
Just trace the business practices of Trump pere and Trump fils and you understand that Trump in the Presidency would seek to create the same disjoint institutions in anything he touched so as to diminish minorities politically. Even if he were all sweetness and light and never said one racist phrase.
Like most Republican politicians after 1968 and most Democratic politicians before 1964, they know that their white (cough, default) constituents don’t know that unless they either dogwhistle it or brazenly flaunt it.
As long as white liberals went so gradually slow at dismantling racist institutions — of late, the police forces have been the poster children — nothing was ever settled. It was just forced back into the closets and woodwork to re-emerge as the house rotted. Ryan has just realized that the worms came out of the woodwork and the skeletons out of the closet on his watch as Speaker of the House. McConnell, is one of the worms.
All the convoluted excuses of the Trump voters because a substantial number of them are working class are a blindness to just how the class structure in the US used indentity markers from the beginning to structure an exploitative class structure much more complicated than the industrial capitalist Marxian class structure that was superimposed on it during the Industrial Revolution and the Rise of the New South.
The sooner we recognize liberals’ complicity in keeping the issue open through gradualism, the sooner we can begin to close the issue. Four hundred years of history is difficult to grasped, but once grasped in an non-personalized way, it is easier to release the inevitable guilt for or anger at the society you were born into and the defensiveness that goes with it. You will never punish the heirs of the Confederacy for what they inherited; that ability to suffer accountability goes to the grave. But you can help those heirs dismantle that destructive social structure the undergirded the settler colonialist frontier and plantation export agriculture. But it will take the heirs of the Industrial Revolution also dismantling to source of their wealth and privilege.
And you must allow for the heirs of the overseers, blacksmiths, waggoners, and other trades that serviced the domestic and overseas slave trade to come to see where their privilege came from. Also the Atlantic trade slave merchants and ships crews.
And how each wave of immigrant was set against the previous and the no-wage labor of slaves and the price-discriminated wage of the “liberated Negroes” even in the prosperous days of the Great Migration. The use of racist language was encouraged in order to keep communities for comparing their terms of labor. Or they were assigned as castes into certain jobs to allow for a monopsonistic labor market.
A lot of these institutions still exist and still function, but language is the shiny object that diverts public attention from the real hard work at settling this issue.
That’s why the words “multicultural” and “vegetable stew” and Obama’s self-description as “mongrel” scare a lot of people. It means that those disjoint markets become a union market (in the set theory sense, and possibly in the organized labor sense as well). Employers will no longer be able to use the most recent immigrants as scabs or to bust prevailing wages.
As important as it is for interpersonal psychology and calming emotions, speech is a diversionary shiny object. Just so that voters don’t see the killings of unarmed black men and women, the peonage of immigrants, and the literal physical assaults on women and people with perceived non-stereotypical gender identity.
Trump is trying to win on the retrograde institutions and attitudes of society.
And why were those distinctions made in the first place? To prevent class struggle. I linked a historical papers on it here before. Still working.
To the extent that the settler colonial agricultural plantation slavery can be considered the first stirrings of industrial capitalism, pioneered in Azores and Canaries plantation from the assumptions of feudalism and the managerial necessity of overseeing the work of large numbers of slaves, you can argue class struggle. Those slaves incidentally were first the indigenous (Canaries) and then imported slaves from the African coast. It is the managerial “visible hand” in slavery that becomes the less visible hand in capitalism and the way that capital and labor are managed.
My understanding is that the Indians held the land, the slaves controlled the labor, and the whites were the only guarantee of security against those groups, and the settler elites controlled the power and the capital. Formerly indentured and immigrant whites traded or conquered the land from the Indians and were the overseers that liberated African slaves from the fruits of their labor. The intent and the result is that the frontier rolled westward as rapidly as the land was liberated from the Indians.
Krugman had a column today on Dem’s dependence on it…
“What? Horizontal inequality is the term of art for inequality measured, not between individuals, but between racially or culturally defined groups. … And like it or not, horizontal inequality, racial inequality above all, will define the general election. …”
America has always been like this… Social media and the Internet gave it visibility and, I think, made it much worse. It’s going to get uglier as time goes on.