On Privilege, Racism and the Future of Our Democracy

“Oh my G*ddddd! Have you HEARD? Southwest Airlines just criticized Georgia!!!”

I swear, if I hear one more of my fellow citizens say that, I will explode. And the rest of you all will be stuck cleaning up the mess. I promise you, it will be goo-ey.

I have a news flash for you, folks: Corporate America, including all the Corporations coming out against the Georgia and Texas GOP, is still racist.

I know: hard to believe, right? With all those nicely-tailored suits, sensitivity trainings, inter-racial ads during the Superbowl?

So here’s a simple question: how is it that Black folk have disproportionate levels of unemployment, low household income, food insecurity, poor healthcare? Is it not because they are employed less, paid less, receive fewer employment benefits, that white folk?

I rest my case.

Yes, I do: because Corporate America is the biggest employer in this country and because their track record of employment discrimination, wage discrimination, job category discrimination, last-hired-first-fired discrimination, has been well-documented over and over and over again. Any bean counter knows that most corporate workforces do not reflect the racial composition of the communities they exist in, and that where workers of color, especially Black workers, are hired, they are concentrated in the dirtiest, most dangerous and least-desired positions within the company.

Folks, we’ve got to dig deeper in our analysis. Right, left, center, out in the bleachers, you got to admit this country is between a rock and a hard place and unless we think hard about what is going on around us, we are going down to a place none of us will want to be in.

So, first: not all Corporations are created equal. There are corporations that are tied to the financial markets — the banks, investment firms, etc. There are corporations tied to the productive sector — the Fords, the Dow Chemicals, the extraction and transformative industries. There are corporations — Amazon comes to mind — that are tied to the consumer economy. All these are reacting according to the needs of their sectors. So, yes, Gap and Coca-Cola, who are very exposed to consumer blowback, are taking strong positions against the Georgia and Texas GOPs for that reason. But more importantly, they are taking these positions because companies like Coca-Cola manufacture and distribute across the planet, and the ‘goods’ they commercialize are absolutely non-essential. They rely on world trade to survive on the scale they are at. A return of the Trump GOP to power means interrupted supply and distribution chains and a huge long-term threat to their existence.

And what, exactly, is the ‘Trump Plan’?

The Trump Plan is the disruption of world capitalist cooperation and a return to nation-state competition, including military competition. The reason for this plan is the fact that the rate of profit of US corporations has been steadily falling since the early 1950s, and touched an historic low just before the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic. Forty years of Reaganomics, from the raiding of the S&Ls, of union pension funds, of deregulation, corporate tax breaks, union busting and backsliding on the fight against racism, have not reversed that trend. Only the direct re-conquest of a colonial empire can, in their eyes, do so.

The GOP of today is not fighting for ‘Americans’: it is fighting for specific sectors of Corporate America. So, yes, they knew full well their Congressional opposition to the Biden-Harris Coronavirus relief package was going to be hugely unpopular — but they did it, because it was in the interests of core sectors of the US economy to do so. They know that what they are doing in state legislatures across the country is hugely unpopular. But they do it anyway, because it is more important, for them, that Corporate America gain full control in this country than that our democratic institutions survive.

So: does this mean that Coca-Cola, Amazon, etc., believe in democracy?

No, it does not.

Amazon just sank millions of dollars into defeating an attempt on the part of their Bessemer, Alabama, workforce to have a bit of jobsite democracy by voting in a union. Amazon drivers are on such a tight schedule they have to pee in a bottle when they’re out making deliveries. When Amazon was holding its ‘new corporate headquarters’ competition, it demanded billions of dollars in tax-breaks from cities like New York — cities that can’t afford cuts to their revenue. This is not just business: Amazon does not need to be viciously anti-union, or drive our cities even closer to the edge of disaster than they already are. This is an agenda.

So no, these companies are not ‘pro’ democracy. What they are is ‘anti’ the GOP plan because they have a plan which is ‘kinder and gentler’: the Clinton Plan that the Democrats have been enacting for the past thirty years (where and when they can). That plan, mind you, is not kinder to working people or to communities of color. It was Bill, you will remember, who passed ‘Three Strikes’ and who cut Welfare — the first Democrat in US history to do so. Clintonism is predicated on the idea that the GOP is right that the New Deal and the fight against racism are done.

Second: the fight against racism needs to go deeper.

The essence of the fight against racism in this country is not whether our ads include Black guys alongside white guys drinking beer, or a smiling Black woman bying a car. It is not whether some company has a few Black CEOs, or that there is an increase in inter-racial couples (even Bridgerton picked a lighter-complexioned Black actor to play the Duke). And while I certainly am not interested in downplaying the importance of inter-personal dynamics, the proof of the anti-racist pudding is in people’s ability to live like human beings: jobs, savings, housing, healthcare, participation in the broader social, scientific and cultural pursuits that fulfill us as humans. And where these metrics are concerned, Corporate America has, I repeat, a huge responsibility that a few press releases will not absolve. As a society, we must demand more.

Which brings me to the concept of ‘privilege’.

There is a sense in which I support the use of this term: the acknowledgement that there is not a single white person in this country who is oppressed by the ‘powers that be’ for the color of our skin. When my teenage son leaves the house, I do not have to worry that he won’t come home because some cop might decide to shoot him because his skin is dark. I don’t have to worry that I will not get a job because my skin color is a red-flag to a (liberal) homeowner who wants their bathroom re-done — and yes, this is something I have seen with my own eyes.

In theory, of course, this argument applies to all white people. But the very fact that the country is, at the moment, falling over itself in its praise of ‘anti-racist’ Corporations is proof that, in practice, the concept only applies to some white people and that the whitest institutions in the country — Big Business — are largely given a pass where ‘privilege’ is concerned.

Which means, dear reader, that in point of fact, ‘privilege’ is applied only to workingclass whites -

which, again, would not be off-base, except that at the same time, there is no recognition in the ‘privilege’ camp that workingclass whites are also an oppressed group in our society.

See that knee-jerk reaction you just had? That burst of outrage? Proof positive that I am right about this. How is it that you have to make yourself take a deep breath and take a turn or two or three around the room before you can agree that people who subsist below or near the poverty line, who live paycheck to paycheck, who often have to decide between paying their heating bill and paying their rent, are oppressed?

For decades now, we have been taught to believe that change comes from a book, that the college-educated, who have shed the infinite bigotries of the workingclass, will lead this country forward to a brighter day. To that culture, we workingclass whites are not people: we are animals. We are something to be abhored, to banish from one’s past, something dirty that risks clinging to one’s shoes as one walks away. To acknowledge that we, too, are oppressed, that we have something in common with our Black brothers and sisters, is an earthshaking idea indeed.

W.E.B. DuBois declared that the heart of any movement of change in our country is the alliance of Black folk and workingclass whites. Not ‘liberal’ whites, or ‘educated’ whites, or ‘middle-class whites’: workingclass whites. And lest any of you get the idea that what DuBois had in mind was some ‘cleansed’, ‘purified’ form of white workingclass humanity, I remind you that he reaches this conclusion in the context of a discussion of all the failings of white people, including workingclass white people, in the struggle against slavery and racism in the Civil War and its aftermath (although even here, DuBois acknowledges the leading role played by unionized white proletarians, who were the first to volunteer and constituted the first wave of recruits to the Union army).

DuBois only came to the idea of the ‘Labor/Black’ Alliance after abandoning his previous theory of the ‘talented tenth’ — which was based on exactly that same ‘education’ theory applied to his own, African-American, people. DuBois came to realize, post-’Souls of Black Folk’, that no amount of ‘education’ would ever end racism in this country, because racism is engrained in the very mechanisms by which the system works: from its reliance on colonialism, to its permanently-divided, Black/white workingclass, to its rise on the back of the Slaveocracy. And not unlike MLK, Jr., with his Poor Peoples’ Campaign, DuBois came to see that only the concerted action of those with the most to lose under the present system — Black folk and workingclass whites — could bring the system itself down. And that the system needed to fall was clear to both men — just as, I believe, it is clear to so many of us today.

This brings me to my last point. Earlier I noted that different sectors of Corporate America pursue different agendas, based on what sector of the economy they operate in. At the same time, and the consonance between Reaganism and Clintonism proves it, there is one thing all sectors of Corporate America agree on: the need to preserve the system, particularly where the demands of the workingclass and the racially-oppressed are concerned.

The present, New-Dealesque course being pursued by the Biden-Harris Administration is a response to two pressures: the virulently antidemocratic push coming from the Corporate Right, and the increasingly destabilizing push coming from below, from the white workingclass, the youth and Black folk, which are supplying the ground troops for, on the one end, Trumpism, and on the other, the new Social-Democratic and Black Lives Matter movements.

The real question is whether it is possible to return to a ‘new’ New Deal, given the basic reality of a structurally-determined, constantly-falling Corporate rate of profit. Because a new New Deal will have to square a circle: on the one hand, it will have to appease enough of the population to shut down the groundswells of political opposition coming from below; while on the other hand, it will have to gain the support of wide sectors of Corporate America, which will be called upon to foot the huge bill for all the new social programs.

My personal analysis is that the choice we face is this: either capitalism and dictatorship, or socialism and democracy.