The History of Work In the Time of #BLM

Low Road Capitalism

The Lingering After-Effect of a Plantation Economy

Unsurprisingly, we’ve been thinking a lot about #BlackLivesMatter since the brutal death of George Floyd on May 25th. Like many businesses, large and small, these events have caused us to ramp up our commitment to social justice by adopting anti-racist policies.

Although we’ve only just begun on an anti-racist path, our amplification of Black women’s voices in our newsletter has already led to complaints by some white readers that “Black issues” are inapplicable to their lives. They write to tell us that they are unsubscribing because they are “tired” of listening.

These complaints moved me to return to the New York Times 1619 Project, particularly its examination of the modern workplace in the article American Capitalism is Brutal. You Can Trace That to the Plantation. Because we believe that the diminishment of Black Lives directly affects not just the spiritual but also the economic well-being of all Americans, we share the insights of the 1619 Project with our readers today.

Amazon Worker $14/hour

Value of Bezo’s Amazon Holdings: $133 Billion

The American Brand of Capitalism Directly Harms Everyone

It should go without saying that the statement "Black Lives Matter" needs no justification other than the simplicity of its message - Black lives are lives that matter as much as other lives. That they haven’t sufficiently mattered in American life is unquestionable. That we are morally obliged to honor these lives on the same footing as all others cannot be disputed.

What does not appear to be sufficiently understood is the harm that comes to all Americans when we decide that “their” tribe’s challenges are not pertinent to those experienced by “ours’”. We therefore believe we’d be remiss if we didn’t examine the moral and economic harm caused to all Americans when we divorce our own well-being from those we consider “others’.”

As the 1619 Project teaches,

During slavery, “Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon,” a “culture [that] would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since.

It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929 and the recession of 2008. It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions.

In 1984, the year Reagan was elected, the wealth gap between upper-income Americans and the “rest of us” began the march toward today’s startling income and wealth inequity. As the Pew Research Center recently noted

The wealth gap between upper-income and lower- and middle-income families has grown wider this century. Upper-income families were the only income tier able to build on their wealth from 2001 to 2016, adding 33% at the median. On the other hand, middle-income families saw their median net worth shrink by 20% and lower-income families experienced a loss of 45%. As of 2016, upper-income families had 7.4 times as much wealth as middle-income families and 75 times as much wealth as lower-income families.

In the wake of the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, one group of political actors devised a “Southern Strategy” designed to increase political support for some Republican candidates among white voters in the  South by appealing to racism against Black Americans.

Thus began the conflation of poverty with urban Blacks. What followed was the destruction of unions and worker rights, the shredding of support for public institutions, the damage to social safety nets and the transfer of wealth to the “owner” class.

Sadly, the “Southern Strategy” didn’t do its nefarious work only in the South. It worked wherever explicit or implicit racism existed, North and South. It has hurt us all.

The Remnants of the Slave Economy Hurts Us All

The plantation economy, the Jim Crow culture that followed its dismantling, the government’s red-lining of neighborhoods to exclude the movement of Black Americans into the suburbs, the police occupation of our inner cities, and the resegregation of our public schools, have kept this nation divided and fighting against itself since the abolition movement began in 1830.

These assaults on our Black brothers and sisters have not only scarred our shared culture, but undermined the nation’s willingness to maintain our public institutions and strengthen our social safety nets. For too many decades, the lure of “punching down” has caused too many Americans to vote against their own interest in thriving public schools, universal health care, and a living wage.

As the author of the slave economy article argues, plantation capitalism is a “union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; [as well as] a racist capitalism [that] originated the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider.”

And need we add, a capitalism that has resulted in shocking income inequity between the “haves” and the “have nots.”

In offering this view of racism’s toxic effect on all of our lives, we aim to draw all of our readers, clients and allies into the same family, to eventually obliterate the distinctions between “us” and “them,” and to firmly stand today in solidarity with our Black brothers and sisters. We will continue to amplify Black voices, further diversify our referral networks, and, in the annus horribilis of 2020, offer free #BLM consults in July and August to our Black sisters. Beginning in September, we will offer the same free consult to all BIPOC women.

We hope you will join us.

And for her guidance on these matters, we thank our anti-racist North Star Rachel Rogers for her awesome leadership.