On Part 1 of Oprah Winfrey’s two-night (June 9 & 10) virtual roundtable discussion, “Where do we go from here?”, Rev. William Barber II and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones were, like all the other participants, passionate in decrying what Hannah-Jones called a “collective racialized terrorism against Black Americans” which has prompted a wave of demonstrations across the country and even abroad — yet these two luminaries also stood out in their emphasis that the fight for racial justice is inextricably bound to the fight for economic justice.
Rev. Barber was first to steer the conversation there:
"Before COVID came, we had 250,000 people dying every year from poverty according to Columbia University, and if black folk are 61% of all poor and low-wealth people, then a lot of us are dying from poverty.”
This screaming and this anguish, this pain, when I first heard of it, three things real quick happened to me. Number one, I saw the same thing Stacey [Abrams] saw — the pose of death. I had seen that 100 times in the South when people were hunting, I’d seen it, posing on an animal. It was — it was eerie. The other thing that happened was my son, just watching him cry, and holding him and cursing with him and joining him in that pain, because my scriptures tell me to mourn with those who mourn and cry with those who cry. The last thing I’d like to say: I think the whole country is mourning, because...think about, before COVID came, we had 250,000 people dying every year from poverty according to Columbia University, and if black folk are 61% of all poor and low-wealth people, then a lot of us are dying from poverty. We had thousands of people dying from the lack of health care. Then COVID hits. We have 100,000 people die. Then we find out most of them didn’t have to die. They died because the state didn’t protect the first thing it’s supposed to, and that is life. Life is the first thing the state is supposed to! And then we see this public lynching, this officer operating in the — our name, and in the state’s name, literally snuffed, you know, just posed and pushed down and take the life of George Floyd, and it’s almost like in that moment, we had so much death, that when George Floyd says, “I can’t breathe,” it’s like a collective gasp.
That’s why I think we can’t miss this moment of black and white and brown and Asian. I’ve been working the last three years in the Poor People’s Campaign, and we’ve been organizing folk in the mountains of Kentucky, and we’ve been organizing in the delta of Mississippi, and one thing, we start with racism — we say there are five interlocking justices. When Dr. King said, “Where do we go from here?” he mentioned three. We talk about five: systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, denial of health care, the war economy and militarization of our community and this false moral narrative of religious nationalism that tries to consecrate all this evil.
And we’re working with people of all different races, creeds and colors that have decided, to fix America you have to deal with race — I don’t care whether you’re black, white, brown, whatever — and it has to be a multicultural coalition that Dr. King envisioned at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march, and he said, every time black and white people have the possibility of coming together, the aristocracy and the Bourbon class deliberately sows division to keep that from happening, because they know that’s the hope to break this thing open.
Later in broadcast he says:
And I want to talk about black death for a moment. Yes, it’s the police, but thousands of people die every year in our community from the lack of health care — one lady called it public policy mass murder — [and] from the lack of living wages. And we have the money to do this. If we provided health care for everybody, thousands of people, black folk, would live every year if health care was connected to your body and your humanity, but not your job. Well, why is it not? Remember when — the 40 acres and a mule — remember the Freedmen’s Bureau Hospital? It was one of the first things that was cut after slavery toward the end of Reconstruction. Why? Because they did not want to fund something that would keep black people alive.
We have to look deep into this stuff. 54% of all African Americans make less than a living wage. We must make sure in this moment of all this upheaval that we don’t ask for too little, that we understand, we talk about, black death and what’s causing it, and the policy solutions to that death that can happen right now.
Hannah-Jones continues in this same vein:
“So much of the societal issues that we’re having to deal with are issues of poverty. The very reason we had racism and the international slave trade was economic exploitation.”
I think this point by Rev. Barber is really critical, and it’s a point I really want to get across, which is the thinking too small, because this is really a time where we can expand on black economic inequality, and that’s fundamentally what we need to be addressing.
There was some devastating data that came out earlier this week that said that black Americans’ wealth has been stagnant for 70 years, that it would take the combined wealth of 11.5 black families to equal the wealth of one white family, and that attending college does absolutely nothing to mitigate that wealth gap. …
So much of the societal issues that we’re having to deal with are issues of poverty. The very reason we had racism and the international slave trade was economic exploitation. The period of Jim Crow, the 100 years of racial terrorism, was a period of economic exploitation, and black people are dealing with a gap where Prof. Sandy Darity and Derrick Hamilton say there is nothing that black people can do on their own to mitigate the wealth gap, that we can do everything right, and it will not change the wealth gap one bit.
Some polling came out from Monmouth University that showed 76% of Americans believe that racism against black Americans is widespread and systemic. We have never in the history of polling seen numbers that high — that includes 71% of white Americans who actually believe that systemic racism is a major problem for black Americans. So we can’t just be talking about policing. If we’re going to be talking about that, we also need to be trying to put forth an economic agenda that would have to include reparations, because there is no way without actually paying reparations to the descendants of those enslaved that we can deal with the economic gap that black people perennially have, 70 years of unchanged wealth, even as black people have become more middle class, even as black people have become more educated, our wealth gap remains the same.
So I hope we can use this moment of kind of unprecedented reckoning of the ongoing legacy of slavery to demand not just police reforms, but to demand those economic reforms that are so critical for equality. Dr. King said that the ‘64 Civil Rights Act and the ‘65 Voting Rights Act was civil rights and equality on the cheap, that white people didn’t have to give up anything to allow us the right to sit in a cafe, that the hardest battle was going to be an economic redistribution that actually allows black Americans to have the power that comes with wealth. He said that it doesn’t do any good to have the right to go in restaurant or by a hamburger if you can’t afford to buy the hamburger, and that’s what we’re seeing in America right now. And I hope that we will fundamentally be able to address that in this time.
Hannah-Jones references economists Sandy Darity and Derrick Hamilton, intellectual fathers of a field called stratification economics, who have advocated for a federal “baby bonds” program and a federal jobs guarantee to help mitigate the wealth gap. The “baby bonds” idea became the economic centerpiece of Sen. Cory Booker’s presidential campaign platform. In a recent Washington Post article (“The black-white economic divide is as wide as it was in 1968,” June 4), Hamilton says he sees in younger people today the potential for a sea change:
“I’m hopeful of younger generations. To the extent white people, particularly white youth, are willing to sacrifice white privilege for justice, then we can have a different society that is more moral," said Hamilton, the head of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.
On Part 2 of Oprah’s roundtable, Rev. Barber offers the Democratic Party some advice on how to be a catalyst for that sea change, including investing more in campaigns in the South and focusing more on poverty:
“We can’t just say, wait till after the election, then we’ll tell you we’re gonna do these things, we need to be talking about them now.”
We have 140 million people in this country who are poor and low-wealth — 61% of black people are poor and low-wealth — and not one [presidential] debate on poverty. Not one! … At the very time that demographics tell us if you organize black and white people, particularly poor or low-wealth, you can win the South.
So there again, race factors in — we have to challenge, even the Black Caucus — even the Black Caucus, love ‘em, but if 61% of black people are poor and low-wealth, why isn’t poverty one of our major issues? … If we do that, if we focus on that, Oprah, we will have an expansion, an explosion — if people know if you vote, they get health care. If they vote, they get a living wage. If they vote, they get decent unemployment. If they vote, they get sick leave. And we can’t just say, wait till after the election, then we’ll tell you we’re gonna do these things, we need to be talking about them now.