Labor Can’t Be Treated As A Mere Voting Bloc — It Has Power To Reshape Society
Costas Lapavitsas – Photo: SOAS University of London
06-25-2026 ~ It is necessary to put the capital-labor relation back at the center of left politics, says Costas Lapavitsas.
The left in western democracies has been pretty much in free fall since the onset of neoliberal globalization. This is quite ironic since resistance to capitalism from civil society has actually grown during the same period. This resistance is also reflected in the U.S. political landscape, where the Democratic Socialists of America are surging in support through grassroots efforts in major urban areas. Voters are clearly signaling that they are fed up with the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, whose leaders continue serving, above all else, corporate and financial interests and have displayed immense hypocrisy on foreign policy issues. The stunning results on June 23 in New York’s primaries — which came on the back of advances already made by Democratic Socialists in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and in Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District, to mention just a few — speak volumes of the ideological bankruptcy of the Democratic Party in the U.S.
But on the rare occasion that left parties have managed to score national electoral victories, as in the case of Greece in 2015, public disappointment and discontent have soon set in as leaders failed to mount a coordinated attack on neoliberal policies and structures, let alone turn class relations on their head.
In the interview that follows, world-renowned radical economist Costas Lapavitsas addresses the structural roots of the left’s political crisis and explains what needs to be done for the left to become again a viable and meaningful alternative to the capitalist dystopia that has engulfed western societies. He highlights, in particular, the case of the U.K., where Member of Parliament Andy Burnham’s “Manchesterism” aims to become the future of the Labour Party’s economic vision. Burnham just won a decisive victory for Labour in the Makerfield by-election, soundly defeating the far right, and setting up the stage for a Labour leadership showdown. Lapavitsas is a professor of economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and a former Syriza Member of Parliament. He is the author and co-author of scores of books, including The Left Case Against the EU, The State of Capitalism: Economy, Society, and Hegemony, and Reindustrialize Britain: A Strategy for Wealth Creation.
C.J. Polychroniou: We live in a world of profound social, political, economic, and ecological challenges. Capitalism is in disarray, the postwar international order is disintegrating, and authoritarian rule is expanding globally. Yet the left is weak and fragmented, experiencing dramatic electoral defeats almost everywhere. What are the structural roots of this crisis, and why has the left failed to build a mass movement in the 21st century?
Costas Lapavitsas: We need to be careful about generalizations here. The left is not the same across the world, and lumping together the Brazilian left, the Indian left, the European left, and the U.S. left produces confusion. Even within Europe there are significant differences. Let me focus on the European left, and within that primarily on Britain and Greece, which are the cases I know best and represent extreme versions of the problem.
It is true that this is a moment of historic weakness, perhaps the deepest since the left first began to emerge as a political force in the 18th century. The narrative about its decline usually focuses on leadership failures and ideological drift. There is something to this, but the deeper problem is structural and intellectual. And the rise of the far right across Europe and beyond feeds directly on the vacuum that a weakened and directionless left has left behind.
The organized working class that built the labor movement, created the welfare state, and gave the left its mass base in the 20th century was a product of industrial capitalism, with manufacturing at its heart. Neoliberalism, beginning in the 1980s, systematically undermined it. Employment was created in service sectors — retail, hospitality, logistics, care work — where bargaining power is weak, turnover is high, and collective organization is extremely difficult. Union density collapsed and collective bargaining coverage shrank. When a steelworks, shipyard or engineering plant closes, a community loses more than jobs. It loses apprenticeship routes, trade-union organization, technical skills, and often the institutions that gave working people collective confidence. The destruction of manufacturing was simultaneously the destruction of the organizational capacity of labor, and ultimately of the left.
The intellectual dimension is equally important. The European left gradually moved away from the political economy that had historically been its theoretical foundation — from the serious examination of capital-labor relations, investment, profit, and the structural sources of economic power. In a word, away from production. In its place came rights-based politics and anti-austerity politics. Both have genuine moral force, but neither constitutes an anti-capitalist program. What is necessary for that is analysis of the supply side of the economy, radical alternative strategies for investment and ownership, a solid framework for altering the capital-labor relation in favor of workers. Without these, the left can identify injustice with clarity and moral passion but cannot propose a concrete path beyond it.
The historic task of the left today is not simply to redistribute existing wealth more fairly but to rebuild the conditions under which wealth can be created democratically, through productive investment, skilled labor, and institutions capable of directing economic development in the interests of the majority. That requires organized labor rooted in production and armed with serious political economy. Rebuilding the power of the left is impossible otherwise. Read more
Ritual, Power, And The Weekend Arena
Gary M. Feinman
06-22-2026 ~ In a March 2026 paper published in the journal Science Advances, which focused on variability in governance along the autocratic-democratic axis, my coauthors and I found that one of the strongest associations for the 40 case observations, which were part of our study, was between the nature of rituals and the concentration of power.
For this global sample, autocratically organized societies were characterized by spectacles that foment fear and awe, while participatory rituals predominated in more democratically organized contexts. For example, in the region where I study (Oaxaca, Mexico), when governance was typified by distributed power relations, the pre-Hispanic rubber ball game was played in a large court adjacent to a broad, flat open plaza, the Main Plaza at Monte Albán, a space that could accommodate many of the settlement’s inhabitants. Later, however, as political power became more concentrated, the size of ball courts was reduced, access to them became more restricted, and some were even built immediately adjacent to the houses or palaces of ruling families.
Social scientists have long recognized that communal rituals are a universal human experience that binds people together in various ways. Spectacles, often rich in disorienting noise, shock, and awe, tend to captivate observers through the powerful figures at the center of the spectacle, who inspire fear and wonderment, reinforcing authoritarian cults of personality. In contrast, participatory rituals like communal dancing, singing, or chanting tend to instill camaraderie among participants, solidarity, and trust among those involved. As a student of history and a sports fan, the mirrored reflections of the past provide an analytical perspective about the final Knicks game on June 13, a sports agenda that cannot be ignored.
During the 2026 National Basketball Association playoff between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, Madison Square Garden, the storied home of the Knicks, once again became like a civic commons after a 53-year championship drought. The competitiveness of the Knicks during the playoffs elevated the space from merely being a site of entertainment to a participatory ritual arena. The crowd did not passively observe; it chanted, rose, groaned, anticipated, and collectively willed momentum into existence. One needed to only look at the faces in the stands—season ticket holders and first-timers, celebrities and subway riders alike—to notice that the sight was closer to what might be considered an integrative ritual: one in which meaning is not imposed from above but generated, often with spontaneity, among participants.
Basketball, by definition, is a team sport, but this is typified by the game that the Knicks currently play. It is not about consistent domination by a central figure. Even the most celebrated player, Jalen Brunson, depends on coordination, timing, and trust in his teammates. The drama unfolds collectively, and its outcome remains contingent on who makes a foul shot and who grabs a rebound. Participation matters—not just symbolically but materially. The arena amplifies the idea, however imperfectly enacted, that communal engagement shapes outcomes. And these outcomes transcended the arenas where the Knicks games were played, stimulating joy and collective actions, and bringing people together in the desire for a common outcome.
By contrast, the spectacle of an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, staged in a garish steel cage, on the grounds of the White House on June 14 operated on a fundamentally different ritual logic. It was not designed for mutual participation but for spectacle: with the concentration of attention onto a staged center, where one-on-one conflict and mayhem are distilled into physical dominance and symbolic submission. The audience’s role is not to join but to witness—to be awed, to see blood and hear pain, be unsettled, and ultimately to orient themselves toward the figures who command the stage and oversee the event.
The choice of venue was not incidental. The White House has long functioned as a site of state ritual. But traditionally, those rituals—press briefings, public ceremonies, even contentious protests beyond its gates—are tethered, at least aspirationally, to norms of decorum, accountability, and public engagement. Introducing a choreographed combat spectacle into that space shifts its symbolic significance. It recasts a locus of governance into an arena of performance, where the aesthetic of dominance and self-promotion, by a small network of cronies, overshadows any ethical prospect of leading to wider participation.
This is precisely the distinction our comparative work on governance and ritual helps illuminate. When power is broadly distributed, rituals tend to be inclusive, iterative, and co-constructed. They require participants to see one another as collaborators in a shared process, even when competition is involved. In contrast, when power is tightly concentrated, rituals often become spectacles—staged experiences that reinforce hierarchy, channel emotions toward a focal point, and reduce the audience to spectators instead of actors. The Knicks, for all the commercialism of modern sports, still lean toward the former model. Their playoff games invited identification not with an owner but with a collective—however abstract—called a team, a city, a fan base. Victory was widely shared across an entire metropolitan area, communally. The ritual binds laterally, person-to-person.
A UFC spectacle staged in the orbit of political power points in the other direction. It binds vertically. The emotional energy of the crowd is drawn upward and inward, toward a center that is insulated from participation. The unpredictability of sport is replaced by an orchestrated spectacle; even the violence, ostensibly raw, is framed and contained to produce maximum symbolic effect. None of this is to suggest that one form of ritual is wholly virtuous and the other entirely malign. Spectacle has always been part of human societies, and participatory rituals can exclude to the same extent as they can include. Madison Square Garden is not immune to hierarchy, nor is fandom evenly accessible. But the contrast remains as glaring as instructive because it reveals not just different entertainments, but different models of how people relate to power—and to one another.
At stake is more than this season’s recreational programming. Rituals, whether ancient ball games in Mesoamerica or modern sporting events in New York, are not peripheral to political life; they are constitutive of it. They shape how individuals experience belonging, authority, and agency. They encode assumptions about who acts and who is meant to watch. The event at the White House reinforces values such as “might makes right” and life is a “zero-sum game.”
Alternatively, in an era when democratic practices often feel attenuated, the spaces where participation is still enacted—even imperfectly—carry heightened significance, thereby fostering shared aims and emphasizing the potential win-win-win outcomes that interdependence and collaborative action can generate. The roar of a crowd that believes its collective voice matters stands in quiet contrast to spectacles that ask only for attention, passivity, and allegiance.
We would do well to recognize the difference.
By Gary M. Feinman
Author Bio: Gary M. Feinman is an archaeologist and the MacArthur curator of anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Human Origins Destroys Core Fascist Mythology
19-06-2026 ~ How deep history challenges fascist myths of purity, hierarchy, and identity.
The deeper we explore humanity’s past, the harder it becomes to sustain some of the most powerful political myths of the modern world.
For more than a century, authoritarian ideologies have sought legitimacy in origin stories: pure people, ancestral homelands, primordial hierarchies, and civilizational destinies. Fascism, in particular, has always been obsessed with beginnings. Whether in Nazi fantasies of Aryan ancestry, myths of ethnic continuity, or contemporary narratives of demographic replacement and civilizational decline, the past is transformed into a source of authority. History becomes destiny. Origins become a source of legitimacy.
Yet archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and evolutionary science increasingly tell a different story. Research across these fields has challenged older assumptions about purity, hierarchy, and human nature. Deep history reveals migration rather than isolation, cooperation rather than perpetual conflict, and experimentation rather than inevitability.
Few 20th-century thinkers saw this more clearly than Georges Bataille, who observed that competing visions of the past often conceal varying perspectives of humanity.
Better known today for his writings on eroticism, sacrifice, and transgression, French philosopher Bataille was also one of the first major European intellectuals to recognize that prehistory could serve as an antidote to fascist mythology. During the 1930s and 1940s, when fascist movements were mobilizing myths of origin on an unprecedented scale, he turned to cave art, ritual, and the earliest traces of human life, immersing himself in the latest archaeological, anthropological, paleontological, and sociological research.
His writings on prehistory drew extensively on the discoveries and debates of his time, delving into philosophical, anthropological, and political interests at once. What distinguishes humans from other animals? How did symbolic thought emerge? What forms of community existed before states, nations, and organized religions? These questions acquired a particular urgency during the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany, when competing visions of humanity became a matter of life and death.
Studying cave art and the discoveries emerging from sites such as the Lascaux Cave in France, Bataille became fascinated by a simple fact. The artists who painted the walls left no names. They founded no dynasties. They erected no monuments to rulers or conquerors. But they created some of the most extraordinary images in human history.
For Bataille, the lack of names was not a footnote; it was the point.
The caves revealed forms of collective creation that preceded authorship, ownership, and sovereignty. Art appeared not as an expression of individual genius or political authority but as a shared symbolic activity through which a community understood itself and its place in the world.
Instead of fascism’s cult of leadership, Bataille discovered a humanity whose earliest masterpieces emerged from participation rather than domination, anonymity rather than glory, and collective creation rather than the cult of personality.
The political implications of these observations became increasingly difficult to ignore during the rise of the totalitarian regimes that would engulf much of Europe and Asia. In his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” Bataille analyzed the attraction to sovereignty, authority, and charismatic leadership. In 1936, he founded Acéphale, an anti-fascist intellectual group whose symbol was a headless human figure.
The image was deliberately provocative. Against the Führer, Il Duce, Stalin, and every cult of leadership, Bataille proposed a humanity without a head. The figure was less of a political statement than a symbolic reversal of the principles celebrated by totalitarian movements. Against sovereignty, he imagined forms of collective existence that could not be reduced to a single authority. Against hierarchy, he emphasized participation, reciprocity, and shared experiences.
Prehistory became important not because it provided an alternative mythology, but because it revealed a past that resisted mythological simplification. Bataille turned to caves such as Lascaux as they seemed to preserve traces of human existence before nations, before states, and before centralized authority. What he found there was not an original people or an ancestral race, but forms of collective life that escaped the categories through which modern politics often tends to understand itself. Read more
How Agave Agroforestry Can Restore Drylands And Strengthen Climate Resilience
06-17-2026 ~ The agave-powered agroforestry and livestock management system is an example of how native desert plants, cultivated as part of an agroforestry system, can regenerate drylands and provide inexpensive animal feed, taking pressure off overgrazed rangelands.
Sixty to seventy percent of Mexico’s terrain is classified as arid or semiarid desert, typically with no rain for eight to nine months a year. La pipa, the water truck, brings enough water to supply farms for a day or two at most. Meanwhile, 86 percent of Mexican farmers lack a well and are unlikely to have one. In arid and semiarid drylands, deep irrigation wells are very expensive, water rights are hard to obtain, and many, if not most, underground aquifers are overexploited. This makes it very difficult to provide livestock with forage during the dry season.
Purchasing hay and alfalfa is expensive, especially given the low-to-nonexistent market for livestock products produced by subsistence farmers. Many traditional dryland farmers are still planting corn at the beginning of the rainy season—in June or July—but the lack of a dependable irrigation system, droughts, and unpredictable rainfall mean that the country doesn’t even get mature mazorcas or corncobs most years. The harvest, usually limited to corn stalks or rastrojo, can be fed to animals during the dry season, but it requires considerable work and expense for what is ultimately a low-quality feed supplement.
Typically, only large landowners or agro-export farms have irrigation wells, while smaller farms must rely mostly on rainfall. In addition to the high costs of buying water rights and drilling down 650 feet or more to hit water, most aquifers in the regional La Independencia watershed are depleted and/or contaminated with heavy metals.
In the mid-2010s, the 75-acre Vía Orgánica Agroecology Center and research farm prided itself on maintaining its greenhouses and gardens, pastures, and wooded nature refuge area without a well. However, after expanding the market gardens and milpa (corn, beans, and squash) and starting to reforest the land, the organization began spending several thousand dollars a week during the dry season on water truck deliveries just to stay afloat. Geographers and climate scientists have described the prolonged drying of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico as a climate-driven “megadrought,” with some studies concluding the region is experiencing its driest conditions in at least 1,200 years.
The costs of organic grain (for the poultry and pigs) and alfalfa and hay (for the other animals) during the long dry season are unsustainable. It has led many farmers in our area to largely abandon their corn fields or milpas. Their main agricultural pursuit is to put their routinely malnourished animals out to fend for themselves on the sparse vegetation of their shared (eroded and badly overgrazed) communal rangelands (ejidos).
More than half of Mexico’s 450-million-acre land base is composed of communally owned ejidos, a transformation that occurred after the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, when most of the large colonial plantations or estates were broken up and distributed among the nation’s small farmer communities. Most of Mexico’s 28,000 ejidos, however, are situated on semiarid and arid lands—deforested, eroded, and overgrazed, usually with no year-round water sources or irrigation. Overgrazing on the brittle lands has created a vicious cycle of degradation—fewer plants, less forage, high runoff and low water retention, soil erosion, and fewer vital minerals —amplified by climate change. Read more
Why Wild Bats Matter To Agave, Tequila, And Desert Ecosystems
Reynard Loki – Independent Media Institute
06-16-2026 ~ Bats pollinate wild agave plants, sustaining desert ecosystems and preserving the genetic diversity that supports tequila and mezcal production.
Bats move through desert night skies with a purpose that is easy to overlook and difficult to replace. As they travel from plant to plant, feeding on nectar, they are also performing one of the most important ecological services in arid landscapes: pollination. For agave plants—long-lived, slow-growing succulents that define much of Mexico’s desert ecology—bats are not just occasional visitors. They are essential partners in reproduction.
This relationship is a classic example of mutualism, in which two species depend on each other for survival. Nectar-feeding bats gain a high-energy food source in agave that sustains their long-distance movements. In contrast, agaves rely on those bats to transfer pollen between flowers, ensuring fertilization and genetic diversity. The consequences of this exchange extend well beyond the desert; it helps shape ecosystem resilience, influences the future of agriculture, and even affects the production of tequila and mezcal.
The Interdependent Relationship Between Bats and Agave Plants
Agave plants are adapted to environments where water is scarce, and weather conditions can be extreme. Many species store energy in their thick, spiny leaves for years, sometimes decades. When the agave plants are ready to reproduce, they send up a single flowering stalk that can tower above the surrounding landscape. This bloom is both spectacular and final. After flowering and setting seed, the plant dies in most agave species.
Because each agave has only one opportunity to reproduce, successful pollination is critical. The flowers open at night, when temperatures are cooler, and there is less evaporation. They are large, pale, and highly visible in low light, and they release a strong, musky scent that can travel long distances. These traits are not random. They are signals evolved specifically to attract nocturnal pollinators—most importantly, bats. “Bats are one of the only ways wild agaves can reproduce—plants exposed to bats produce nearly 3,000 viable seeds for every seed made by a plant that wasn’t,” states a blog by FoodPrint.
Among the key species involved are the lesser long-nosed bat and the Mexican long-nosed bat, both of which migrate seasonally across Mexico and the southwestern United States. A bat approaches a flowering agave, guided by scent and visual cues. These bats have evolved physical traits that align closely with the structure of agave flowers. Their elongated snouts and tongues allow them to reach deep into the blooms, accessing nectar that other animals cannot easily reach. As they feed, their bodies come into contact with the flower’s reproductive structures, picking up pollen that will be carried to the next plant.
The mechanics of this process are straightforward but highly effective. When the bat brushes against the anthers where pollen is produced, it sticks to its fur, especially around the face and chest. When the bat moves on to another agave, some of that pollen is deposited onto the stigma of the next flower, completing the process of fertilization.
This repeated movement between plants enables cross-pollination, which is essential for maintaining genetic diversity. Genetic variation allows agave populations to adapt to changing environmental conditions, including drought, disease, and climate shifts. Without it, agave plants become more uniform and more vulnerable to stress.
In desert ecosystems, where resources are limited and environmental pressures are high, such resilience becomes especially important. The bats that pollinate agave are often described as keystone mutualists—species whose ecological roles disproportionately affect their environment. By supporting agave reproduction, bats help sustain a wide range of other organisms that depend on these plants for food and habitat. Read more
Over 160 Years After Abolition, Anti-Black Racism Still Structures US Economy
06-15-2026 ~ Scholars Michele Holder and Jeannette Wicks-Lim share their analysis of the formation of US anti-Black racism.
More than 400 years have passed since the first white colonists arrived in North America to establish a settlement, and more than 160 years since slavery was abolished, yet structural racism is still alive and kicking in the U.S. In the interview that follows, two economists, Michele Holder and Jeannette Wicks-Lim, co-authors of a new book titled The Political Economy of Racism: The Persistence of Anti-Blackness in the United States, discuss how anti-Black racism developed and the role that it continues to play in the contemporary United States. Michelle Holder is professor of economics at the City University of New York’s John Jay College, and Jeannette Wicks-Lim is research professor at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
C. J. Polychroniou: Systemic racism has shaped the history of the United States. That’s a well-documented fact despite current attempts by President Donald Trump and his political acolytes to whitewash U.S. history. In that context, the publication of your new co-authored book The Political Economy of Racism: The Persistence of Anti-Blackness in the United States could not have come at a better time. It examines how anti-Black racism in particular developed and sheds light on how it works to promote the interests of a politically dominant social group. May I start by asking one of you to discuss the construction of race in the United States? Also, does it differ from other case studies of racism?
Jeannette Wicks-Lim: I really appreciate this question because it gets at a key takeaway of our book: that race is a social construction. What we mean by this is that race is only loosely — and inconsistently — related to superficial biological markers such as skin tone and hair color, and that its real meaning comes from how society uses it to put people into different social groups. Really, the entirety of the book is our effort to explain the political and economic rationale for why the nation we live in — the U.S. — chose, and continues to choose, to organize itself around this social concept, “race,” and anti-Black racism, in particular.
That’s why we dive right away, in Chapter 2, into tracing how the concept of race developed out of political and economic choices made by English colonists of the “New World,” starting in the 17th century. In particular, they made the choice to enslave people from Africa. We document how these colonists turned to enslaving people because they couldn’t get free workers or indentured servants to do the type of grueling labor that the colonists wanted for their commercial enterprises. And, to maintain their practice of enslaving people, the colonists withheld virtually any legal rights from the primary supply of people colonists had access to enslave: people from Africa. Colonists also supported this practice by imbuing profound meaning to superficial physical differences between African and English people, and attached this meaning to the concept, “race.” In other words, race developed into a crucial social marker for the legal status of slave — a legal status that this society maintained for more than 200 years.
In terms of your second question — I want to steer it in a somewhat different direction because my knowledge of how racism operates outside the U.S. is thin. Instead, I want to talk about different types of racism within the U.S. Take, for example, racism and Asian Americans — a topic I’m exploring in current research. The premise of my research is that while racism may operate for, or against, different groups in different ways, it serves the same purpose: it’s a political device that socially defined groups use to influence how economic, political, and social advantages and disadvantages in a society are created and doled out. I would expect this basic feature of racism to be the same in case studies of other countries. How racial groups are defined, characterized, and positioned in a country’s social hierarchy, on the other hand, are ways I would expect racism to differ across countries.
My thinking reflects the basic tenets of stratification economics — a relatively new approach in economics. In a nutshell, stratification economics examines how social groups compete with each other in order to gain greater access to social, political, and especially, economic resources — that is, to achieve favored positions in a social hierarchy.
Do you understand the particular brand of racism explored in your book as a consequence of the role of slavery in the U.S. economy, or is anti-Blackness simply ingrained within white supremacist thought?
Michelle Holder: As Jeannette’s response suggests, throughout the book we draw lines directly linking anti-Black racism to the institution of slavery. We believe that contemporary anti-Black racism in the U.S. evolved out of negative ideas about Africans promoted by American colonists to justify Black enslavement, as well as to ameliorate guilt whites may have felt at benefiting from the peculiar institution of slavery or tolerating it. In response to a part of the question as it is posed, we believe that white supremacist thought implies anti-Blackness. However, from our perspective, one need not be a white supremacist to engage in anti-Black behaviors. Indeed, Justice Clarence Thomas is a prime example of a Black person whose work on the Supreme Court repeatedly involved rulings which are contrary to the interests and needs of the Black American community.
While we do not dispute the notion that discrimination against and stereotypes about Black people existed prior to founding of the U.S., the present-day brand of anti-Black racism in the country has traceable roots that lie primarily in the implementation of slavery, and, with the abolishment of slavery, the desire of white Americans to preserve privileges that were exclusive to their racial group in antebellum America, in line with the tenets of stratification economic theory. In addition, discrimination against and stereotypes about many racial and/or ethnic groups exist throughout world history, so such experiences are not exclusive to Black Americans.
How does anti-Blackness stratify the U.S. economy?
Holder: Anti-Blackness stratifies the U.S. economy by the assignation of a positive value to a white identity alongside the assignation of a negative value to Black identity. These value assignations have been crafted and culturally cultivated over centuries, initially to justify the enslavement of Africans in America while imbuing whites with the notion that they were divinely chosen by a creator to control other groups.
After emancipation, the value assignations continued to be propagated by whites to preserve their primacy in an American racial pecking order. Contemporary audit studies conducted to assess the existence and extent of anti-Black racism in the U.S. labor market have repeatedly shown that white job applicants are preferred more than Black job applicants, all else being equal. As such, a Black identity appears to place a job applicant at a disadvantage with regard to income-generating employment.
In addition, policies implemented upon the end of slavery further limited the ability of Black individuals and families to accumulate wealth, as the enslaved could not accumulate wealth. Contemporary income and wealth inequality in the U.S. tracks very closely with race, with Black Americans in the least favorable economic position compared to whites. This places the Black community at a disadvantage regarding equitable access to educational attainment, good health care, home ownership, safe and environmentally sustainable communities, as well as the ability to influence policy change given the power of money in elections. These constraints on the Black community make it harder for Black families and individuals to attain economic mobility to the degree that white families and individuals have for generations, thus resulting in continuing economic stratification along racial lines in the U.S.
Can you elaborate a bit on how anti-Blackness applies in particular to the education and employment arenas?
Wicks-Lim: Let me start with education since Michelle has already talked a bit about employment and because I want to highlight how stratification economics is particularly useful in understanding how anti-Blackness operates in education.
As I said earlier, the main focus of stratification economics is how social groups compete with one another to gain access to resources, especially economic resources, in a hierarchical society. Education is arguably one of the most coveted resources in U.S. society — not only because of the social status which educational credentials impart, but also the economic opportunities that educational credentials help to unlock.
U.S. history and its current education system is full of examples of how white Americans actively sought ways to bar Black Americans access to educational resources. Most people with any familiarity with U.S. history are well aware of the racial animus that animated these efforts. What might be less well-known are the efforts of Black people to access educational resources — even those who were enslaved during the antebellum period. We document these efforts, including how newly freed Black Americans basically organized the Southern public school system into existence after the Civil War. Stratification economics shines a light on these processes: how social groups in the U.S. have competed with one another to control — or gain access to — educational credentials and to use these credentials to obtain economic resources for in-group members.
Turning now to the role of anti-Blackness in the labor market — this is hard to miss when you see the connection between the widely recognized racist hoarding practices among white Americans of educational resources and the racial disparity in access to good jobs. Conventional economists still tend to view the well-documented racial disparities in the labor market as being due to something other than racism. The late, great, economist Bill Spriggs poked fun at this theoretical position by calling it the “the two-bus theory” because it effectively requires busing out the people making obviously racist decisions about education (and housing!) and busing in new actors to make all other economic decisions, such as on jobs. Read more