theatlantic | The politics of racial evasion are seductive. But the record is mixed.
Aid to Families With Dependent Children was originally written largely
to exclude blacks—yet by the 1990s it was perceived as a giveaway to
blacks. The Affordable Care Act makes no mention of race, but this did
not keep Rush Limbaugh from denouncing it as reparations. Moreover, the
act’s expansion of Medicaid was effectively made optional, meaning that
many poor blacks in the former Confederate states do not benefit from
it. The Affordable Care Act, like Social Security, will eventually
expand its reach to those left out; in the meantime, black people will
be injured.
“All that it would take to sink a new WPA program would be some
skillfully packaged footage of black men leaning on shovels smoking
cigarettes,” the sociologist Douglas S. Massey writes. “Papering over
the issue of race makes for bad social theory, bad research, and bad
public policy.” To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in
the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend
that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of
unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the
sin of national lying. The lie ignores the fact that reducing American
poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same. The lie ignores the
fact that closing the “achievement gap” will do nothing to close the
“injury gap,” in which black college graduates still suffer higher
unemployment rates than white college graduates, and black job
applicants without criminal records enjoy roughly the same chance of
getting hired as white applicants with criminal records.
