Capitalism and Race

Capitalism creates a necessity for exploitable resources, whether that be labor (people, or enslaved persons), land, or minerals. Thus, America as a nation was constructed on the backs of enslaved blacks, and much of the policies and ideologies since emancipation have merely worked to perpetuate black exploitation and marginality. A parallel and very similar process occurred through America's empire building efforts, where actions and rhetoric toward the colonized groups closely mirrored the "domestic" rhetoric around blacks and immigrant groups. For the purposes of this post, I will be focusing on how the "culture of poverty" was created as another tool to control blacks as a part of capitalistic resources and how the experiences of black's in America mirrors the colonial and empire building ideologies of the United States.

The paternalistic language of slavery as being beneficail to blacks, and the need to Christianize slaves to remove their "pagan savagery" once they were here is similar in many ways to the lnaguage evoked during American imperial campaigns and memorilized in Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden." For instance, rhetoric around blackness during slavery (and post-emancipation as well) mirrors Kipling's "Half devil and half child" (Line 8). The rhetoric of racialization during slavery and empire building hinged in many ways on masking the capitalistic gains of white upper-class men with the paternalistic language of aiding blacks and other colonized groups to a degree of assimilation into white culture, but never fully, and they would only ever be seen as tools for greater white prosperity. The eugenic language and policies of the early 1900s tracks well with the slavery and empire building ideology. Much of the white man's burden and empire building supposedly places the colonized as benefiting from the relationship, as did many of the eugenic policies of forced sterilization. As was argued in Paul A. Lombardo's Three Generations, No Imbeciles a work studying Buck v Bell forced sterilizations were seen as to free particularity "promiscuous" or "feebleminded" women, so that instead of being forced to live in a colony all their lives could be released and live productive lives as soon as the threat of sex and reproduction was removed form them and by extension society.

As Michelle Alexander tracks in her work The New Jim Crow each change in American economic landscape lead to or worked along side the change in bondage of blacks. In order to ensure the continued exploitation of black labor post-emancipation, sharecropping and peonage were established as continued ways for wealthy whites to profit off practically free or completely free labor of blacks. With the Great Migration from the South and with fewer agricultural positions, sharecropping decreased and was replaced in more industrial arenas by blacks being barred from labor unions, being paid substantially less, being used as strike breakers, etc. Blacks were intentionally economically disadvantaged and pitted against whites of the same class status to prevent an interracial economic and class solidarity. As industrial centers began to move abroad and unemployment in these areas rose, a move towards preventing blacks from entering different job markets or retaining employment in those arenas manifested particualrly in the 1980s as the War on Drugs. By increasingly incarcerating young black men they became illegible for the workforce. This was further legitimized by the common economic priniciple that we have a fairly unchangable structural unemployment of around 5% that means anyone arguing that the areas we considered to be "blighted" by poverty, mostly black, inner cities don't have jobs could be countered with the idea that there will always be this unemployment and that those people affected must alter their skills, education level, location, etc. to adjust.

All of these historical institutions and events culminate into the "Culture of Poverty." The "Culture of Poverty" like the paternalism of imperialism argues that there is not only something different about this culture of groups of people, but also something wrong. Racial and Eugenic sciences that argued that intelligence, promiscuity, feeblemindedness, etc. were genetic also argued class was as well, which provides the foundation for familial and cultural sharing of ideas that lead to poverty. In the United States our "domestic" and "foreign" racism have functioned in very similar ways, and many times are difficult to distinguish since they can effect the same groups or different groups in the same way. Beyond the shared rhetoric, the "culture of poverty" emerges from another consistent American trope, the economic control and exploitation of blacks. By perpetuating the idea that particularly post-Civil Rights Movement we live in a meritocracy where anyone can "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" intentionally as was remarked in "Re-evaluating the 'Culture of Poverty'" as an easy way to create a victim blaming dialogue around culture as something wrong with blackness (as there was something wrong with the colonized) and that assimilation into whiteness is the only way to be successful. This also prevents active mobilization to improve the conditions of the poor, particularly black and other people of color, in this country since the view of self or culturally imposed poverty is so strong. This means we are less likely to want to promote large scale welfare and social services that many other countries have, such as universal health care, free higher education, etc. Instead we create a culture of "deserving," you deserve to be poor, or you deserve assistance, and this rhetoric dehumanizes the poor and legitimizes their mistreatment, which benefits the wealthy as they can maintain low minimum wages and large numbers of employed persons means it is easier to fire and rehire. We feel little need to address these economic extortion and their subsequent economic disparities because they are "deserved" or from a failing in that particularly community's culture.