The Tables of Moneychangers: How Our White, Capitalist Class Dodges the Language of Anti-Blackness
By: Hal H. Harris
Tags: Equality, Race, BlackLivesMatter, Justice, George Floyd

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,

And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple; and he healed them.

— Matthew 21:12–17 King James Version

Over the last few days, some of the most monied white men in America have offered their prayers to George Floyd.

The New York Stock Exchange

Their shrine, the New York Stock Exchange, observed almost nine minutes of silence on June 9th for the 540 seconds in which police suffocated Floyd and, in his last mortal, Black breaths, cried out to his dead mother.

Fortune 500 companies furnished penances. The top-ranked company, Wal-Mart, claimed that Floyd’s lynching was “senseless,” and that the organization “has a role to play in helping create a more just and fair country.” Jeff Bezos, owner of the second-ranked business, was happy to lose a racist customer. ExxonMobil, whose financial earnings gave it the third spot on the list, offered nothing on Floyd’s death. Fourth-ranked Apple, however, posted a statement, bringing attention to the inequalities “in our criminal justice system, in the disproportionate toll of disease on Black and Brown communities, in the inequalities in neighborhood services and the educations our children receive.” Larry Merlo, CEO of the fifth-ranked CVS Health, evoked the “greater good” and called for the nation to practice “respecting one another no matter what our race or ethnicity.”

Language is about who chooses to listen and the behavior that follows. I do not feel my observation arises to any sort of profundity. It does, however, alert those truly interested in #blacklivesmatter and the ongoing moral regeneration of the United States to pay attention to the patterns of what people of consequence are saying and how they proceed to act. With this analysis, we see an ongoing avoidance of engaging in the anti-blackness within their organizations and, instead, an offering of milquetoast, vague “justice” that only serves to exonerate themselves from systemic change.

T’Challa, using his “King of the Dead” power to summon the wisdom from centuries of unbroken kings.

Anti-Blackness lynched George Floyd. By using the language of anti-Blackness, we center the Black experience and, like T’Challa, gain access to centuries of folklore, history, social science, politics, and economics to contextualize his killing. There are so many tales of mothers and aunties telling Black men to walk timidly and respectful to avoid the eyes of the state; this advice failed Floyd. America has both a deep and immediate history — stretching back to slavery times, and the recent past of Abner Louima and Rodney King — of police brutality. Social scientific research has traced the implementation of all the conditions of such state-sanctioned viciousness. Redlining, which creates a playpen for the state to exploit and brutalize Black folk, is now canon in any serious student of American cities. The decrees from the Department of Justice regarding Ferguson and Baltimore were fueled, in part, by sociological research. Politicians have built careers on crime bills and demonizing Black people for the conditions they were forced to live within. And at the base of it all is the economic exploitation — the expensive price we pay to be poor, the wealth chasm between whites and Blacks that seems unclimbable despite living in the richest nation in recorded history.

The language of my people — of describing anti-Blackness in its entirety — is the preferred language of those serious about enacting reparation for Black folk. Instead, we see many of these Fortune 500 companies adopt the vague language of “racial justice.” The language of racial justice falls into the intellectual tricks — ontological centering, solipsism of language, and erasure of nuance — that white language consistently falls back on to hide what true action to anti-Blackness would look like.

Apple’s Executive Leadership Team. Source: Apple Leadership.

Consequently, we get solutions from many white people concerning racial justice that does not respect the defenses against anti-Blackness that Black personhood has developed during the two American epochs that only matter — slavery, and the chains that came afterward. Thus, in the same meeting that Wal-Mart decries Floyd’s death, it also announces its intent to add 300,000 “temporary or part time roles,” a strategy intended for the world’s richest company to pay benefits to its mostly working poor employment base; in the city I live in, that also equates to Black. Amazon denigrates the Black worker in Staten Island who tried to organize a strike and uses the expected historical language — the worker was “not smart or articulate” — to disparage his personhood. ExxonMobil, as previously mentioned, did not put out a statement on Floyd or racial justice. Perhaps the company’s leaders are self-aware enough to know that they cannot claim to value Black lives while also polluting Black communities with carcinogens. Apple touts its success in its diversity hires, yet has an executive leadership team with no Black faces. CVS Health, in its immediate history, was sued for allegedly directing workers to racially profile Black customers. If these companies adopted the language of anti-Blackness, we would see more accurate wording in their statements and a reverse march from their historic behavior.

There is no duel between what these companies say and what they do. American capitalism has always embraced its beliefs walking in opposite directions, with Black bodies caught in the middle. Scions of business will always seek on the moral clarity that only the Black experience can give while also supporting conditions that make George Floyd’s inevitable. They want social change without the structural transformation of reparations, affirmative action, and fair tax policy. They want to change the nation without changing their core behaviors. White America has always wanted the mirror without the reflection. Hope, in this age of protest and pestilence, is actually going to cost them something.

The market is their only shrine of consequence. Their place of worship cannot decide if over 100,000 Covid-19 deaths are good for bonds, securities, and stocks. What hope do Black lives stand in such an environment unless we flip the tables over?