Racial Moralism Over Redistribution

Precisely because Blow is not averse to context, his recent visceral reflections on President Trump’s reelection reminded me of his meditations, nearly a decade ago, on the context that gave us the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (VCCLEA).

During the 2016 Democratic primaries, Blow released an impassioned video intended to contextualize Hillary Clinton’s advocacy for the omnibus crime act. After acknowledging the bill’s disastrous impact on “the black community,” Blow noted, correctly, that support for the VCCLEA ran deep among Democrats and liberals. Sen. Joe Biden helped draft it. President and First Lady Bill and Hillary Clinton stumped publicly for it, while the president lobbied Democrats in Congress to vote for it.

Thanks in part to the Clintons’ efforts, the bill received more support from congressional Democrats than Republicans. Perhaps most striking, or maybe just telling, roughly two-thirds of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted for the Crime Act, which was also enthusiastically greeted by black mayors and ministers alike.

Blow insinuated the VCCLEA’s long-term consequences were not altogether clear in 1994; however, this wasn’t quite right. In fact, while Bernie Sanders voted for the bill because it included the Violence Against Women Act, he also warned, on the floor of the House of Representatives, that tough-on-crime policies absent programs designed to address poverty — a major contributor to violent and property crimes — would compound extant racial disparities in the US criminal justice system while swelling the nation’s already appallingly large inmate population.

One has only to reflect upon the racial connotations of “superpredators” — a construct that came into vogue in the early 1990s, in tandem with the mythical crack babies, that was used to describe young men whom criminologists claimed were prone to crime — to appreciate the fact that most understood that the omnibus Crime Act would put more blacks in prison. In real time, however, few cared that the VCCLEA would exacerbate disparities among “convicted criminals.” Indeed, in the early 1990s, a supermajority of black Americans (tracking closely with whites) supported tough-on-crime policies. Why? Well, one reason is that blacks were very much overrepresented among victims of violent crimes and property theft — crimes that were likewise disproportionately perpetrated by African Americans. Since New Democrats had little interest in redressing poverty (recall Sanders’s warnings), tough-on-crime policies offered many blacks, particularly low-income African Americans, the only available pathway to safe and stable communities.

The 1994 Crime Act’s predictably appalling impact on black incarceration rates was further displaced from the popular imagination by a sense of moral urgency. Indeed, New Democrats successfully papered over their disregard for class-oriented preventive crime measures like direct job creation. In place of these remedies, Democrats attacked the welfare state through a discourse on crime and punishment driven by a moralism — expressed often in both unambiguously racist but also race-reductionist-underclass-informed terms — that conflated any effort to contextualize crime as something caused by poverty or inequality with coddling criminals.

This disposition not only informed Sen. Joe Biden’s impassioned case for the VCCLEA on the Senate floor as well as First Lady Clinton’s infamous superpredators speech. It also informed the perspectives of black Americans, be they elected officials, civil rights leaders, essayists, and comedians, or friends, family, and neighbors.

The tragedy of Clinton-era policies and the related political and popular discourse on race, crime, and punishment has largely been swept from collective memory by a righteous liberalism that insists on mystifying race and racism. A popular and even academic discourse in which white racism is the source of eternal black suffering cannot accommodate the complexities that shape the world human beings actually occupy. This makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to imagine that most blacks had once embraced the “rightness” of tough-on-crime policies.

It is worth emphasizing that black Americans were, indeed, concerned about crime and disparities during the 1990s. However, it is necessary to reiterate that most were animated by the fact that blacks were disproportionately victims of violent crime and property theft. This reality is confirmed by the sociologists John Clegg and Adaner Usmani’s observation in a Catalyst article from 2019 that, between the late 1980s and early 1990s, lower-income blacks, who frequently lived in communities with high crime rates, were more likely to support tough-on-crime policies than upper-income blacks, who infrequently lived in high-crime communities.

The moralism that helped numb most Americans, blacks among them, to the antidemocratic implications of tough-on-crime policies absent efforts to redress precarity has been in liberals’ and Democrats’ rearview mirror for about a decade. However, the antiracist moralism that took hold during President Trump’s first term is performing similar work.

I spent the better part of the first fifteen years of my career as a professor teaching against the very race-reductionist sensibilities that animated support, even among blacks, for the 1994 Crime Act as well as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, welfare reform legislation introduced in 1996. Prior to Trump’s first term, most of the discussions I had about racial inequality with black students, American and foreign-born alike, and nonacademic peers pivoted from my interlocutors’ insistence that “we need to stop talking about the white man” or even the disparate impact of the Crime Act and welfare reform on blacks. Instead, I was frequently informed, “What black people really need(ed) to do is focus on what we can do for ourselves.”

Then as now, I stressed the New Deal and postwar welfare states’ indispensable contributions to the growth of the white middle class of lore. In other words, contemporary disparities had less to do with blacks’ failure to take personal responsibility for their “own communities” (whatever that would mean in an industrial or postindustrial society) than the racial and economic politics undergirding a truncated welfare state that afforded African Americans, in the aggregate, fewer benefits than whites.

Several years ago, however, the wheel turned. And now the popular discourse on inequality — as illustrated by Blow’s, Glaude’s, and countless others’ reflections on the roots of Vice President Harris’s presidential loss — insists that white racism is the defining and foundational threat to black Americans, democracy, and perhaps even humanity.

Today racism is, of course, one of many contributors to blacks’ overrepresentation in the categories in which no one wants to be overrepresented. But while racism is a part of the problem, that does not mean it accounts for the whole. Moreover, precisely because racism is not a mystical force that can never be exorcised, it is counterproductive to remove disparities or even just the 2024 presidential election from their proximate contexts.

Indeed, as 1990s-era discourse on race, crime, and punishment should remind us, displacing context from our interrogations of inequality does not usually serve black Americans well. Just recall the options Clinton-era righteous moralism kept on and took off the conceptual and political table.

Bringing this back to where I started, the 2024 presidential election was a disaster. The procedural aspects of the election alone would likely have been too much to swallow as a storyline on House of Cards. More than a hundred days into President Trump’s second term, his administration has proved just as destructive as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 said it was going to be.

There is no doubt that racial resentments are an important part of Trumpism. Of course, racial animus also drove President Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, which helped widen fissures that had threatened to fracture the old New Deal coalition since the Dixiecrat insurgency in 1948. Tales of black savagery, incompetence, promiscuity, and profligacy animated President Ronald Reagan’s crime rhetoric as well as his efforts to dismantle affirmative action and welfare in the form of cuts to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. And George Bush I and II each channeled racial resentments for political advantage. Bush the elder evoked the specter of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who gained notoriety during the 1988 presidential campaign, to play on voter’s fears. And a decade later, his son took a stand against the University of Michigan’s affirmative action initiatives.

This is all to say, the GOP has long understood the utility of race-baiting, even as Trump has unquestionably turned the race-baiting up many notches.

But while racist rhetoric and theatrics unquestionably animate Trumpism and inform the sometimes devastating human toll of many of his policies, the notion that antiblack racism or, more narrowly, misogynoir, is the sole or even the principal reason Vice President Kamala Harris lost is difficult to defend — at least if we have the strength of conviction to remove the moralistic blinders from our eyes and look at the evidence available to us.

Just compare the share of the so-called white vote captured by VP Harris with white turnout for the three most recent Democratic presidents. When compared with Joe Biden, Harris underperformed with white voters — 44 percent of whom turned out for Biden while just 42 percent cast ballots for Harris. White male Joe Biden performed as well with white voters as white male Bill Clinton in 1996 (44 percent) while performing slightly better with whites than black male Barack Obama in 2008 (43 percent). The matter that has garnered little attention, however, is that Harris seems to have performed better with white voters than Clinton and Obama had in 1992 and 2012, respectively — when each captured less than 40 percent of the “white vote.”

If Harris connected better with white voters than two other successful Democratic presidential candidates, then that means she didn’t lose because she underperformed with whites. The real problem is that Harris underperformed with voters of color. Indeed, Harris not only lost substantial ground with Hispanic and black men (-12 and -7 percent, respectively), but she failed to generate enthusiasm among women — underperforming with Latinas and Asian Pacific Islanders while performing no better with black women than Biden did.

Once more, if one places Harris’s performance with whites and nonwhites in the context of previous Democratic campaigns, it is difficult to imagine how either antiblack racism or misogynoir are the key to understanding her loss.

Given that VP Harris had just three months to campaign, she delivered a strong showing — some significant missteps notwithstanding. Harris’s performance was all the more impressive if one considers not only (white) Joe Biden’s abysmal approval ratings, but also the questionable nature of the process by which she was selected as the 2024 Democratic nominee. Indeed, (through no fault of hers) Harris’s candidacy marked the third successive presidential election in which the process for choosing a Democratic candidate strained the meaning of democratic participation (albeit to varying degrees). This, in combination with Gaza and inflation, likely contributed to depressed turnout and even myopic defections.

None of this is to deny that racism and sexism contributed to Harris’s loss. Still, didn’t we all presume that some share of the electorate would not vote for Harris because she is a black woman, just as some would not vote for President Obama because he was a black man (irrespective of whether his middle name was Hussein or his last name rhymed with Osama)?

But if it is true that white voters (all but those who voted for Harris?) would rather burn down the building with themselves inside than see a black woman as the site manager — and, again, surely some would —  then why was it so goddamned important that seventy-eight-year-old (!) Joe Biden pick a black woman as his running mate?

The irony of all ironies is that for those who insist America hates black women too much to elect one POTUS, the short-term symbolic win of a black female vice president and black female presidential candidate were more important than protecting affirmative action or even birthright citizenship.

It should have been evident in 2020 that if Biden had been lucky enough to win, then his short con — intended, as it was, to stake the heart of the Sanders campaign — of promising that his then-to-be-determined running mate would be a woman might ultimately give away the 2024 race. Why? Because he was old! Biden needed to pick a running mate to whom he could pass the presidential baton. And yet he undermined Harris’s prospects as head of the ticket by legitimating the view that she was, in fact, his “affirmative action [aka DEI] hire.”

Adding insult to injury, President Biden would do the same to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson when he pledged to appoint a black woman to the high court. For comparison, if an employer were to announce that it would only hire members of a specific race or sex for its management or even janitorial positions, that employer would be violating antidiscrimination law. It does not matter whether the employer states that the only acceptable candidates will be black females rather than white males.

Yes, political appointments are their own category of “job.” Candidates choose running mates for any number of transparently symbolic reasons, usually motivated by a desire to pick up votes from a real or imagined voting bloc. But here too, context matters. To my knowledge, Rust Belt residents have not been the targets of a well-financed, decades-long, right-wing political movement challenging policies designed to counter extant discrimination by characterizing Michiganders, for example, as undeserving, entitled, incompetent beneficiaries of reverse discrimination.

To be clear, this is not a case against affirmative action. My point is that Biden and the Democrats’ commitment to shoehorning efforts that might be branded as reparations into extant, “safe” policies ironically undermined Kamala Harris and even Justice Brown Jackson by transforming affirmative action into what had long been the Right’s caricature of antidiscrimination policy — quotas in which race and/or sex were the qualifications for a position.

It is worth stressing that affirmative action was only “safe” within the Democratic coalition, and even then it remained controversial. Still, the insistence on the part of pundits, scholars, activists, and even some within the Democratic Party itself that we might only placate black Americans with policies branded as black-specific — a perspective buoyed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC)’s decision to use identity politics against Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns — informed Biden’s myopia here, perhaps with the aid of a little cognitive decline.

Of course, tribalist resentments have unquestionably and predictably contributed to the rise and return of Trumpism. But if we assume, as Afro-pessimists do, that whites’ primordial desire to dominate “black bodies” is the core principle animating politics, then black Americans are doomed for a simple demographic reason: whites outnumber blacks more than five to one.

The belief in pervasive and ineradicable racism, thus, offers little in terms of electoral or political strategy. However, the righteous antiracist discourse that has gripped the liberal imagination since the summer of George Floyd has encouraged us to settle on a narrow vision of social justice focused on racial parity at the expense of redistributive programs that might provide economic justice for all. Perhaps this is why the New York Times, the Atlantic, and a smattering of elite universities have afforded big platforms to Charles Blow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Eddie Glaude, and many other race-first liberals. Last I checked, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Boston College, Princeton, and so on were not owned and operated by blacks —  from America or from anyplace else.

Racism as Alibi

During the brief moment in which Trump and Sanders both put to the fore different visions of populism, left and right, each of the above writers and outlets retailed accounts of primordial white racism. These had the effect of harmonizing with the DNC’s desire to attribute the rise of Trump to the inherent awfulness of a large share of allegedly irredeemable (white) voters — complementing the Democrats’ pathological commitment to the refrain “It’s not us, it’s them.”

Such accounts also complemented the DNC’s efforts to rein in a substantial portion of the electorate’s growing enthusiasm about class-oriented politics — galvanized by and condensed in Bernie Sanders’s two campaigns. This second issue is important because young people and workers’ increasing expectations that the government materially improve their lives were compounded by its apparent ability to find money not just for foreign wars and corporate bailouts but for renters and homeowners (the Emergency Rental Assistance Program and HOME Investment Partnerships Program), workers and the self-employed (via Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance), and those without employer-sponsored health insurance (via expansion of the Affordable Care Act and subsidies for COVID-19 vaccinations).

Such sentiments could not go unchecked by either the Right or the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Liberals’ and Democrats’ insistence that the defining crime of the age is America’s failure to reckon with its “original sin,” race/racism, offered a superficially “progressive” means of doing so — wrapped in the language of moral righteousness.

Neither race nor racism are metaphysical forces. Race is an ideological construct; in its modern form, it dates back only to the late-eighteenth century. With the aid of corporate and state power, racial ideology encourages us to view inequalities that are the product of social relations (dare I say, capitalism) as if they were ordained by God or natural processes.

Racism — the belief in biological or quasi-biological race — has not taken on a life of its own, because ideological commitments are not living beings. Rather, business, government, political parties, intellectuals, and ethno-political entrepreneurs are regularly forced by political and economic disruptions on the ground to tweak the meaning and parameters of race in order to harmonize what we purport to believe (“All men are created equal,” and capitalism promotes social mobility) with how powerful people make their money (slavery, Jim Crow/the crop-lien system, racially tiered labor and housing markets, and so on).

Industrialization, the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, and deindustrialization engendered social, economic, and political disruptions that inspired the powerful and the aspirant to tweak the parameters and meaning of race. Some of these efforts translated into positive changes (like emancipation, Reconstruction, the New Deal, and black civil rights) while others would give rise to reactionary political movements (like Jim Crow, eugenics, McCarthyism, and Reaganism).

The Trump administration is unquestionably looking to roll back advances that African Americans made during the civil rights movement, if not Reconstruction. But the identity-politics-informed commitment to viewing Trumpism through a lens of decontextualized white resentments is not only an expression of the counterproductive moralism that has displaced sober analysis since Hillary Clinton’s not-so-surprising 2016 loss. It constitutes a rarely recognized expression of the reimagining of the meaning and parameters of “race” that, once again, smooths the contradictions between what we want to believe with the realities on the ground.

Just as nineteenth- and twentieth-century biologically grounded race theory functioned to harmonize slavery and Jim Crow with liberal capitalism, the insistence that Trump’s victory over Harris, like Trumpism itself, is an expression of eternal white racism provides cover for the failings of both late capitalism and the Democratic Party.