Racism and Selfishness
By: Thomas St Thomas
Tags: Economics, Culture, Racism

Ibram Kendi explains that the common belief about the root of racist ideas is “ignorance and hate.” And if this is the root of those ideas, the cure is to fight ignorance and the hate that produces it with their opposites: education and love. The problem with this idea, he contends, is that this is not the root, therefore the cure will not suffice. The root is in individual self-interest, particularly “economic, political, and cultural.” This self interest is what creates policies that guard individuals against economic and cultural encroachment, and the defense to challenges against these policies are framed in racist contexts, which create actual racism.

“We can understand this very simply with slavery. I’m enslaving people because I want to make money. Abolitionists are resisting me, so I’m going to convince Americans that these people should be enslaved because they’re black, and then people will start believing those ideas: that these people are so barbaric, that they need to be enslaved, or that they are so childlike that they need to be enslaved.” — Ibram Kendi

The self-interest: The Portuguese had to justify their pioneering slave trade of African people before the pope.

The racist idea: Africans are barbarians. If we remove them from Africa and enslave them, they could be civilized.

These examples are easy to understand, and no doubt often the case. But self interest spans more than simply along lines of race. And there are effects of self-interest that supersede biases towards race that any one of us may carry.

Segregated Seats

The name Rosa Parks is one that is, and should be, familiar to anyone who knows anything about the history of the civil rights movement. Often called the “first lady of civil rights,” her famous refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery Alabama, led to a subsequent arrest for a violation of city code. Her brave refusal to comply sparked the Montgomery Bus Protest, lasting 381 days, which led to a Supreme Court ruling declaring segregation of public transportation to be unconstitutional.

There is no doubt that there was racism deeply embedded in the ordinances that created this situation. But when you look at the development of the process of enforcement by government agencies, the details tell a slightly different story. A story of self-interest, and constraints, that are both political and economic.

Immediately after the Civil War, the U.S. had troops stationed in the Southern states to assure the rights of Black citizens were protected. This is referred to as the Reconstruction era. As Reconstruction ended, and the troops left, local governments were able to take back the reigns and implement ordinances as they saw fit. Now referred to as the Jim Crow era, efforts to oppress the black community ranged from the suppression of voting to outright terrorism. Segregating seating on public transit vehicles was just one of the consequences of these actions, which began close to three decades beyond the end of slavery. Up until then, people of all races simply sat where they pleased. Segregation on busses was a new development towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Most of the companies that provided public transportation at the time were privately owned, and motivated by profit. The cost, and therefore profit, for transporting human beings was equal regardless of their ethnicity. What bus owners wanted more than anything, was to sell tickets, and the only color they saw was green. Splitting up seats by color, with no means to adjust their purpose as the distribution of ethnicities on vehicles constantly varies, can keep people of either color uncomfortably sitting or standing based on the availability of black or white seats. It is no surprise that several privately owned transit companies fought against segregation laws in the legislature and then in the courts. Unfortunately, they lost those battles, and the laws went into effect. Still, there was an alternative: don’t enforce the law. And that is what many companies did. Years beyond the passage of the laws that segregated passengers by color, many continued to ignore them and allowed people to sit where they pleased.

Not until years later, as the government started to fine companies that did not enforce the laws, and actually threatened prosecution of the owners of the transit companies, were the laws heavily enforced. Self-interest of racists in government may have created the motivation to segregate people on busses, but economic self-interest of the transit company owners trumped whatever racist biases they may have held, and dictated what was important: their behavior.

Apartheid Rentals

In an effort to reduce any ambiguity of the racial motivations and actions of society, one can look at South African Apartheid as an example of blatant, purposeful and explicit racism. During Apartheid, the white minority government was elected while denying the black majority any vote and specifically promoted the ideas of white supremacy. There is no confusion as to the magnitude much less the existence of blatant racism.

Outside of simply denying blacks the right to vote, Apartheid laws limited the numbers of people, based on their color, in certain industries, above certain pay grades, and specifically outlining what neighborhoods they were allowed to reside in. But here again, individual economic interests trumped whatever biases each individual held, if they also had an economic interest.

In employment, many South African employers hired black employees at rates higher than the laws allowed, and even promoted them to positions they were not supposed to qualify for. It was not until the 1970s, during a government crackdown on these companies, that these companies started to follow the government mandate. In some occupations, Dr. Walter Williams notes in his study of South Africa, blacks outnumbered whites in jobs that blacks were not allowed to have at all.

Similarly, in neighborhoods where only whites were allowed to live, often home owners still rented to black tenants. In at least one neighborhood, designated white only, the demographics reported that whites were actually a minority. Apparently, when faced with economic constraints, collecting rent trumps not collecting rent, regardless of whatever racial biases the rent collector may have.

While collecting the research on some of these disparities, Dr. Walter Williams lived in South Africa, in a white only neighborhood. Dr. Williams is a Black American.