In his recently released posthumous autobiography, I Came As a Shadow, longtime Georgetown University basketball coach John Thompson recalls one of the many times when he was accused of playing the “race card.” Thompson, the first Black coach to win an NCAA Division I Men’s Championship, and an outspoken critic of racism in American society, answered the charges against him in typical Thompson fashion:
“Fuck that,” he said, “Y’all stacked the deck. I played the cards you dealt me.”
People are sick of all of these racial inequities, and Biden has expressed his displeasure from time to time. But as my mother likes to say—if you toast your bread and keep burning it, you must really like burnt toast.
I grew up in the same Washington, D.C., as Coach Thompson and attended the same all-boys Catholic high school. By my time, the overt signs of our shared racially segregated capital were diminished, but the residual inequities remained.
By the time I was born, my neighborhood and most of the city was Black; whites had scattered to the suburbs, taking their wealth and tax revenue with them. The public schools in my city began to slowly descend into dysfunction due to lack of resources and entrenched racist policies.
Black families struggled to provide a safe and nurturing environment for their children amid growing poverty, drug addiction, and a constant lack of opportunity. Meanwhile, the “vanilla” suburbs, which whites had moved to in droves, flourished. Schools were plentiful and well funded. Civic resources were abundant, jobs and economic opportunities were everywhere.
Wealth, the silver bullet of upward mobility and equality in the United States, soared for whites in the mostly white affluent suburbs while many Black people in the city were left behind. While I did not grasp it at the time, I was living in the United States’ “stacked deck” of racial inequity. And my experience was similar to that of Black Americans all across the country.
Now that Joe Biden has taken office as the nation’s forty-sixth President, with Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black woman Vice President, at his side, it will be their turn to try redealing the cards. There is reason to hope—and reason to doubt—that they are up for the challenge.
“How do we break the cycle?” Biden asked during a speech announcing his racial-equity agenda this past July. “In good times, communities of color still lag. In bad times, they get hit first and the hardest, and in recovery, they take the longest to bounce back. This is about justice.”
“The Biden Plan to Build Back Better by Advancing Racial Equity Across the American Economy,” on the Biden-Harris campaign website, contains an extensive wish list of ideas and proposals. Everything from investing in small businesses, opportunity zones, addressing “inequities in agriculture,” fair compensation for workers of color, assistance with retirement savings for Black and brown Americans, promoting affordable housing, entrepreneurship, a tenant’s bill of rights, educational assistance and support are all there. It is hard to be against most of these proposals, though few break new ground and most are market-based ideas.
And many of these ideas do not take aim at the real target: racial oppression, manifested as systemic economic inequity.
In 2019, according to the Brookings Institution, the typical white family had 7.8 times the wealth of a typical Black family ($188,200 to $24,100). This disparity has persisted for generations. In fact, Black people, 13 percent of the nation’s population, have only 4 percent of the nation’s wealth.
This is not because Black people are lazy; this is by design, through government-backed policies and practices that have disenfranchised Black people and rendered Black Americans colonial subjects in their own country over the past 150 years.
Black people also suffer inequities in the labor market. For fifty years now, the unemployment rate of Black people has remained twice the rate of whites. In Washington, D.C., the city where John Thompson and I were born and raised, the jobless rate for Black people was more than six times the rate of whites in 2019. And Black households in 2019 earned just 61 cents on the dollar when compared to white households, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Racial disparities are also a central feature of the criminal justice system. Black folks make up 40 percent of all incarcerated people in federal prisons (three times their share of the population) and are five times more likely to be incarcerated in state prisons. Black men are also more likely to be shot and killed by the police, and much more likely to be stopped and frisked.
I could go on and on.
Sure, people are sick of all of these racial inequities, and Biden has expressed his displeasure with them from time to time. But as my mother likes to say—if you toast your bread and keep burning it, you must really like burnt toast.
Biden needs to dig much deeper. And he should start with criminal justice.
Poet and legal scholar Reginald Dwayne Betts, creator of the Million Book Project and a former member of President Barack Obama’s Coordinating Council of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, has some specific ideas on things that Biden should do.
Betts says the new President should adopt his campaign proposal to create a “$20 billion competitive grant program to spur states to shift from incarceration to prevention.” This would address some of the underlying factors, such as child abuse and illiteracy, that lead to incarceration.
Biden could also reduce the number of people incarcerated in state prisons by calling on states to bring back parole. Truth-in-sentencing laws that deny prisoners the ability to obtain early release are a main driver of mass incarceration.
And finally, Betts keeps it simple: “You just have to decide to not put people in prison. I’d like to hear him say something like that rhetorically.”
Law school professor and attorney Mark Osler, a longtime champion for criminal justice and sentencing reform, takes Betts’s ideas further.
“The single most important thing [the Biden Administration] could do is to appoint a Cabinet or sub-Cabinet-level adviser on criminal justice who would be independent of the Department of Justice,” Osler says, adding that this “would make so many other reforms possible.” He suggests that this be “a high-profile person such as Rachel Barkow or Bryan Stevenson,” both of whom could be “a strong voice for change to counteract the DOJ’s constant resistance to reforms.”
On economic issues, Dedrick Asante-Muhammad of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition believes the only solution for any President who wants to fix the wealth gap is to push for direct payments to Black Americans.
“The hard truth is that the United States—and its economy—is based on a white supremacist concentration of wealth and resources,” Asante-Muhammad has written. “To end this disparity, which rears its head in everything from the racial wealth divide to police brutality and mass incarceration, a massive redistribution of wealth and resources is required.”
As Michael Harriot, writer and activist, recently wrote: “Without restitution, there can be no justice.” Vanessa Williamson, senior tax fellow at the Brookings Institution, concurs, saying “racial justice requires heavy taxes on wealth.” She refers to reparations as “an urgent economic necessity,” and “a moral imperative.”
And why not reparations? Why shouldn’t Biden support the bill (H.R. 40) sponsored by the late John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, that establishes a commission to at least study reparations for Black Americans?
Biden’s agenda on race is not bold enough. No one is against more home ownership, full employment promotion by the Federal Reserve, small business development, or financial support for more educational opportunities. But Black people want something affirming and aimed directly at the problems that impact outcomes for them and their children.
The COVID-19 pandemic has added urgency to these issues. In an essay, “Stolen Breaths,” published in The New England Journal of Medicine, three researchers detail the path of destruction through Black America caused by the coronavirus, using it to demand a bigger agenda to address racism and racial inequity. Rachel R. Hardeman, Eduardo M. Medina, and Rhea W. Boyd argue that all of the country’s racial inequities should be treated as health issues.
Government policies that promote, encourage, or turn a blind eye toward police violence, segregation, white flight, gentrification, environmental racism, and public health emergencies, they say, all maintain racial inequity. Improving the health of the Black community and the nation requires that “we address the social, economic, political, legal, educational, and health-care systems that maintain structural racism.”
Ultimately, they demand that the country “divest from racial health inequities.” This approach could be applied to all institutions in the United States, from criminal justice and employment, to education and just about anything else.
The United States’ racial inequities have deep historical roots. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris acknowledge this fact but their plan does not address it. As Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity, and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, has written, “Racial justice demands action. Racial equity is the goal. Passivity is not an option.”