Push for Racial Justice
Beyond Race Alone
What ought a racial justice agenda look like as we anticipate the possibility of
defeating Donald Trump in 2020, strengthening progressive forces in Congress,
and generating the sort of broad movement needed to support egalitarian social
transformation beyond the election?
Answering that question, and rising to meet this
challenge, requires examining what we mean by “racial
justice.” Most people who consider themselves pro-
gressives no doubt have general ideas of what would
constitute a racially just society. Yet two basic norms of
racial justice have coexisted—sometimes converging,
sometimes contending—since at least the 1930s.
Political scientist Preston H. Smith II described
these twenty years ago as the ideals of racial democ-
racy, “the view that all racial groups should have pro-
portionate access to and enjoyment of all social goods,”
and social democracy, the principle that “all individuals
regardless of class should have equal enjoyment of all
essential social goods.”
Each is legitimate as an ideal of a just society, and,
as Smith shows, for the middle third of the twentieth
century, they were compatible and often mutually re-
inforcing. When movements against racial exclusion
and discrimination and movements for egalitarian
Adolph Reed Jr. is
professor emeritus
redistribution overlapped, when the same individuals
of political science and organizations were involved in each, there was no
at the University of pressing need to parse potential divergences and areas
Pennsylvania. of conflict between them.
48 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2020
BY ADOLPH REED JR.
The 1944 volume, What the Negro Wants, edited
by Howard University historian Rayford Logan, is a
good illustration of the broadly shared commonsense
view that the two ideals of social justice were naturally
compatible, if not symbiotic. Logan’s volume collected
perspectives from black civic elites across the ideo-
logical spectrum, from radical to conservative, who
opined on what they considered the most pressing
issues and opportunities, problems and prospects for
black Americans in the rapidly approaching postwar
years.
Even the most conservative bootstrappers agreed
in a matter-of-fact way that continued expansion of
federal social wage policy and CIO-style industrial
unionism were necessary conditions for the continued
advance of black Americans’ pursuit of justice and
equality, as well as progress in the struggle against
discrimination and racial exclusion.
As Smith later showed in his 2012 book, Racial
Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy
in Postwar Chicago, tensions between those two ideals
could and did erupt into conflict in concrete instanc-
es throughout the postwar period. However, those
 eruptions were usually episodic and isolated, and as a
result didn’t disrupt the prevailing understanding that
these tensions were ephemeral moments in a singular
progressive movement.
By the end of the 1960s, as a result of a combina-
tion of Cold War anti-leftism and the consolidation
of victories won on racial-democratic terms, the so-
cial-democratic tendency in black politics became
increasingly attenuated. As a new black political
class became hegemonic over the 1970s and affected
a modus vivendi within neoliberalizing Democratic
liberalism, what once had seemed like an organic as-
sociation of racial-democratic and social-democratic
norms in black politics persisted only as an empty
rhetorical gesture.
By the time of the Obama presidency, the ra-
cial-democratic ideal, typically expressed through
objection to racial disparities, had effectively monop-
olized public discourse on the telos of black politics.
Today,
liberals and
many on the
T oday, liberals and many on the left reflexively cast
“African American” and “working class” as antag-
onistic rather than overlapping categories. “Working
left reflexively class” has thus come to imply “white,” if not white
racist.
cast “African From that perspective, the racial-democratic agen-
American” da of reducing, if not eliminating, racial disparities of
and “working all sorts, is the totality of the racial justice agenda. It is
class” as in this context that addressing the “racial wealth gap”
antagonistic has become a major item in the racial-democratic
agenda.
rather than The racial wealth gap refers to the median—the
overlapping number at which as many individuals or households
categories. lie above as below—difference in net worth among dif-
ferent racial groups. Since the mid-1990s, researchers
have examined both snapshots of median differences
in group-level net wealth and trends over time. Much
of this research compares differences in wealth in dif-
ferent parts of the country and at different income
and education levels. Studies have generally found
that at all levels of income and education, and in all
regions of the United States, African Americans pos-
sess considerably less individual or household wealth
than whites.
This relatively new focus on a racial wealth gap
treats racial inequality exclusively in a framework of
wealth management. That is, it separates economic
inequality from jobs, wages, income, and overall per-
formance of the economy, and accepts the neoliberal
premise that personal wealth is the most important
cushion against insecurity and the basis for oppor-
tunity.
That is a major shift from nearly a century of advo-
cacy for racial justice that focused both on challenging
discrimination and providing economic security for
all Americans by means of a full-employment econo-
my and the expanded provision of public goods.
As black legal scholar and civil rights activist Pauli
Murray indicated in 1945: “[J]ob discrimination based
upon racial or religious prejudice is subsidiary to the
more pressing issue of full employment. When jobs
are plentiful, all kinds of economic discrimination are
minimized. When jobs are scarce, and the competition
among workers for available openings is sharpened, it
is relatively easy to divide employees into convenient
groupings provided by the incident of race, color, or
religion, and to aggravate the prejudice which leads
to an exclusion of minority groups from job oppor-
tunities. The basic problem to be solved, therefore, is
the problem of full employment.”
That is why Murray joined the vast majority of Af-
rican American and other advocates of racial equality
in supporting the Full Employment Bill of 1945, which
would have established the right to employment as
federal law and required government action to ensure
full employment. The bill would also have established
a national health care system, expanded Social Securi-
ty, and nationalized unemployment insurance.
Though passed by the Senate, the bill was defeated
in the House of Representatives, in the first clear signal
of the concerted rightwing attack gearing up against
the expansion of social-democratic policy. A much
watered-down alternative, the Employment Act, was
passed the following year.
Throughout the 1960s, the perspective that African
Americans’ lives would be most effectively improved
by civil rights enforcement in conjunction with so-
cial wage policies that benefited all working people
was dominant among racial justice advocates. That’s
why Murray joined Martin Luther King Jr. and all the
major civil rights activists in endorsing the 1966 Free-
dom Budget for All Americans. Advanced by black
labor leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin,
it reasserted the social vision and political priorities
expressed in the Full Employment Bill of 1945.
The Freedom Budget provided the explicit goal of
reducing unemployment to no more than 3 per cent
by 1968, with an ideal goal of no more than 2 percent.
It also called for increasing the federal minimum wage
to a level that would lift the working poor out of pov-
erty; providing guaranteed income above the poverty
level for those unable to work; guaranteed access to
affordable, good-quality housing for all; and access to
proper medical care for all. Finally, it called for edu-
cational opportunity for all “up to the limits of their
abilities and ambitions, at costs within their means,”
as well as the expansion of public sector funding to
repair and improve physical infrastructure, maintain
THE PROGRESSIVE | 49
 adequate environmental standards, and expand public
transportation.
A social-democratic agenda of that sort would still
be the one that would have the most significant pos-
itive impact for most black Americans.
B etween 1968 and 2016, African Americans, largely
as a result of the victories of the civil rights move-
ment and anti-discrimination enforcement, made sig-
nificant advances into occupations and job categories
to which they had previously had very limited access.
And yet African Americans’ income remains virtually
unchanged as a percentage of whites’ income since
1968—57 percent in 1968, 56 percent in 2016. This is
because the gains of African Americans in employ-
ment and wages have been offset by intensifying in-
come inequality in the country as a whole.
One 2018 study found that the primary reason for
the persistence of the overall racial income gap is the
extreme concentration of income at the top during the
past half-century. Lower-income and middle-income
families, both black and white, lost income in relation
to the richest Americans. And upper-strata black fam-
ilies have shown the greatest progress. Between 1967
and 2016, the greatest income increase among black
families was for those earning between $100,000 and
$200,000.
The number of households with incomes between
$100,000 and $200,000 quadrupled between 1967 and
2016, from only 3 percent to 12 percent of all African
American families. And it is this segment of the black
population that has been least affected by income con-
centration at the top.
As Murray, Rustin, Randolph, and others under-
stood, because blacks are disproportionately repre-
sented among the ranks of the poor, working class,
and economically precarious, policies directed to-
ward buttressing the security and stability of poor
and working-class people disproportionately benefit
black Americans. What all this adds up to is that a
broad social-democratic agenda would have greater
effect on the quality of life of more black Americans
than a race-specific one.
An agenda grounded on the racial-democrat-
ic ideal, by contrast, would not address the deeper
dynamics that produce and intensify economic in-
equality in American capitalism. Realizing an ideal
of racial democracy, especially under the conditions
of intensifying overall economic inequality that have
prevailed in this country for more than forty years,
would likely leave more African Americans vulnerable
to greater economic insecurity.
Therefore, the policy agenda of presidential can-
didate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is, in my
50 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 2020
view, the best racial justice agenda for 2020. Beyond
his banner policy of Medicare for All, Sanders’s Work-
place Democracy Plan also achieves this end, making
it easier to join a union, win union recognition, and
pursue grievances and rights as workers.
Sanders’s plan would also foster a full employment
economy with a $15 minimum hourly wage, as well
as the elimination of student loan debt, free tuition
at public institutions of postsecondary education,
significant reduction in economic inequality, and an
expanded Social Security program.
All of this is likely to benefit more African Amer-
icans directly than even the race-specific policies the
Sanders campaign also supports. Moreover, because
these policies will benefit African Americans as well
as other working people, they give us the greatest
possibility for winning the presidency and actually
implementing these initiatives. ◆
The Planks: Racial Justice
Establish Medicare for All: Create a single-pay-
er, national health insurance program to provide
everyone in America with comprehensive health
care coverage, free at the point of service.
No networks, no premiums, no deductibles,
no copays, no surprise bills. Expand Medicare
coverage to include: dental, hearing, vision, and
home- and community-based long-term care,
mental health and substance abuse treatment,
reproductive and maternity care, prescription
drugs, and more.
Implement Workplace Democracy: Establish fed-
eral protections against the firing of workers for
any reason other than “just cause.” Let unions
organize through a majority sign-up process and
enact “first contract” provisions to ensure com-
panies cannot prevent them from forming by
denying a first contract. Deny federal contracts
to companies that pay poverty wages, out-
source jobs overseas, engage in union busting,
deny good benefits, and pay CEOs outrageous
compensation packages. Eliminate “Right to
Work for Less” laws and guarantee the right to
unionize for workers historically excluded from
labor protections, like farm workers and domes-
tic workers. Raise the federal minimum wage to
$15 per hour indexed to inflation.
Make higher education free and cancel student
loan debt: Access to postsecondary education
should be available to all without regard to
ability to pay. Cancel all student loan debt for
the approximately forty-two million Americans
who owe about $1.6 trillion in debt for their col-
lege education, and place a cap at 1.88 percent
on student loan interest rates going forward.