STREET SMART ECONOMICS | Shifts in policy appear more possible now than they have in decades
Millions of people in the streets calling for an end to police violence against Black people have given a push to policy changes that have been stalled for decades. Legislators are at last prioritizing bans on choke holds, accountability for law enforcement officers using excessive force, and a shift of resources away from punitive responses to mental health issues and houselessness.
At the same time, police in riot gear have responded to the mostly peaceful protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement with beatings, tear gas and “less lethal munitions.” A forceful police response has had the active support of the White House and of armed, right-wing militias targeting protesters.
Economists generally overlook violence when analyzing racial inequality or other economic questions. It’s obvious, though, that racial violence serves to “keep people in their place” economically as well as politically, has clear economic consequences and is often economically motivated.
It’s also clear that protests, civil disobedience and riots can effectively challenge racial inequality, including housing and employment discrimination, as well as racial inequities in the criminal justice system.
It’s not uniquely anti-Black racism that’s enforced by violence, of course. Violence against women, Native Americans, Asians, Latinos and union organizing also scars our history, continues into the present and serves to keep people in their economic place.
However, the ongoing, lethal police response to African Americans, excessive use of force without consequences, mass incarceration and the beginnings of some policy response by local, state and federal governments demand a focus on anti-Black violence in this moment.
The role of government in racial violence
Ultimately the power of the state rests on violence, and our government has played four important roles in racial violence:
1. Enforcing racially unjust laws, supporting slavery and the denial of Black civil rights during the Jim Crow era.
2. Targeting Black and other communities of color for disproportionate policing and incarceration.
3. Failing to stop illegal violence on the part of state officials, including brutality by police and prison guards.
4. Tolerating threats and violence from vigilante white supremacists, creating impunity for acts of terror and violence on the part of civilian groups, which sometimes include the unofficial participation of public officials.
Economically motivated racial violence in U.S. history
Racial violence reinforces economic inequality by race. Mobs resisting racial integration of schools reserved educational resources and opportunities for whites, leaving Blacks and other communities of color in under-funded schools. Disproportionate policing and the world’s highest rates of incarceration badly damage the earnings capacity of prisoners for life.
Vigilante violence has been even more directly economically focused. “Lynching was merely an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized” was the observation of pioneering Black journalist and publisher Ida B. Wells in an editorial on the 1892 lynching of the three Black proprietors of a Memphis grocery. In response to her editorial, a local mob burned her press and drove her out of Memphis.
Armed whites killed up to 300 people and burned 1,265 homes to the ground as well as torching two newspapers, a school, a library, a hospital, churches, hotels, stores and many other Black-owned businesses in an assault on Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street” in 1921.
Sharecropper, labor and civil rights organizing in the South were consistently met with violence, often by legal authorities. Economists Lee Allston and Joseph Ferrie observed that Southern landowners benefited from an environment of racial violence, as sharecroppers were then tied to landowners who could provide some measure of protection and intercede with authorities.
New opportunities resulting from ‘race riots’
If economists haven’t much noted the connection between civil uprisings and economic progress, others have, including Grace Edwards-Yearwood, in her 1988 novel, “In the Shadow of the Peacock.”
“It was the cry of alarm being heard in the streets, and on television at dinnertime, that had got Celia hired. It was the clenched fist raised high that no one wanted to see. It was the threat of violence, real and imagined, that propelled company recruiters to black campuses with orders to bring back ten tokens, dead or alive, one for every other department. No one wanted to step off the 8:20 from Larchmont to find Grand Central in flames.”
The late 1960s were marked by significant racial unrest, fueled in part by the stark contrast between the lack of freedom, representation and opportunity accorded African Americans in the U.S. and the sacrifices made by Black troops in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The hard-fought civil rights movement had yielded limited gains, despite a tremendous effort in the face of official and civilian violence. The emergence of the Black Panthers and other activists met with increased state violence.
The years 1966, 1967 and 1968 saw the most intense racial conflicts of the era spanning 1954 to 1992, accounting for two-thirds of the events sociologists Susan Olzak and Elizabeth Olzak defined as race riots, because they involved a large number of people, some of whom carried lethal weapons, and lasted anywhere from to two hours to several days.
A simple analysis shows that these same years were ones in which Black men’s incomes jumped from a 28-year plateau of just over half of white men’s incomes, to about 60%. They again plateaued for another two decades, until a jump to 66% in the aftermath of 1992 riots sparked by the acquittal of police officers who were filmed savagely beating Rodney King.
Black women made significant gains compared to white women through the 1950s and early 1960s, but their relative incomes grew fastest during the late 1960s. They made no progress — even experienced reversals — until the early to mid-'90s.
Present day
Police brutality, hate crimes and harassment of African Americans in occupations such as firefighting continue to be routinely reported in the news. Racial discrepancies in policing and sentencing related to America’s War on Drugs, mass incarceration and the months-long detention of people who cannot pay bail, all implicate the state in the violent control of Black communities and the destruction of the economic potential of thousands of young people.
Armed white supremacists gather regularly in downtown Portland and are not arrested, even when they brandish weapons or assault people from their vehicles. The Portland metro area recently learned in detail about the false arrest of an African American man by the West Linn police, cooked up to discredit him before he might bring a lawsuit for race discrimination against his employer, A & B Towing.
The Black Lives Matter movement caught fire this spring, bringing millions of peaceful people into the streets all over the country, and nightly for months in Portland. After decades of work by local elected officials, shifts in policy appear more possible than in decades. The Reimagine Oregon project demonstrates the number and breadth of efforts being considered and actively pursued by the city of Portland, Multnomah County, Metro and the state of Oregon. Please lend your support. It’s time for a change!
Street Smart Economics is a periodic series written for Street Roots by professors emeriti in economics. Mary C. King is a professor emerita of economics, Portland State University.
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