A DEEPER DIVE INTO THE N-WORD: DISTURBING HISTORY/TROUBLING PRESENT

In our last post we expressed the idea that perhaps today’s racists should abandon their fake civility and speak like they think and act. We noted thatcurrent day racists don’t regularly use the n-word in public, unlike their more obviously racist predecessors, who often did. The thought occurred to us that we should take a deeper dive into the history of this racial slur. Maybe we could explain there isn’t any difference between the fake civility of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson and 1960s era segregationists like Mississippi Senator Jim Eastland, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, and Alabama Governor George Wallace. The words differ, but the policies are the same – voter suppression, gerrymandering, and fearmongering that prevent the accumulation of black (and brown) political power and quash challenges to white supremacy.

 

‘The Atom Bomb of Racial Slurs’

In the O.J. Simpson trial, prosecutor Christopher Darden called the n-word “the filthiest, nastiest word in the English Language.” One British Member of Parliament (MP) termed it “the most offensive word in English.”  Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy dubbed it the “atomic bomb of racial slurs” because “if you want to put somebody down, analogize them to the [n-word].”  These characterizations of the n-word haven’t stopped its use in contemporary society, on either side of the Atlantic.

Just in 2017, Diane Abbott, a Labor Party MP of African descent, described being repeatedly referred to by the n-word on social media and in e-mails from members of the public.  In the United States in 2016 a Charlotte, North Carolina television journalist was reporting on a hurricane when a man walked by and dropped the n-word on him. Donald Trump’s election as president spurred numerous accounts of racial slurs, including the n-word, being hurled at public school students.

 

History

Where did the n-word come from and how did it become the slur it’s now recognized as?  Scholars seemingly agree that the word originated around 1619 with the arrival of the first African slaves in what’s now the United States. The slaves were referred to by the Spanish and Portuguese term for “black.” The word—N-I-G-G-U-H-S—for a time was seen as merely descriptive, but before long it became derogatory. By the 1820s and 1830s, white people had begun using it as a way of admonishing children not to engage in certain behavior. It became a widely recognized epithet aimed at making black people feel inferior and unworthy. As one British professor observed, “It’s really tied into the idea that African people aren’t really human beings.”

 

Substitutes

It’s clear that much of the public now won’t stand

for use  of the n-word. The BBC, for example, received over 18,600 complaints about a July 2020 story that included the word in an account of a racially aggravated attack. Scrubbing the word from accepted public discourse, however, hasn’t prevented racists from getting their racial message across. Consider:

•       In 2014 then-National Football League star Richard Sherman noted that he’d been called a “thug” and “ghetto” for a rant he went on about events in an NFL game.  Sherman said such terms had become “the accepted way of calling somebody the n-word.”

•       Beginning in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan, code words like “welfare queen” in essence became a surrogate for the n-word as conservative political figures put a black face on abuse of public assistance programs.

•       “States’ rights” was a favorite term of southern politicians in the ‘60s in opposing civil rights measures. Reagan gave that term new life by opening his 1980 general election campaign in Mississippi in the same county where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. The n-word wasn’t used in his speech, but it was an undercurrent of his message.

•       Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, saved his 1988 presidential campaign with the infamous Willie Horton ad that put a black face on crime. The ad didn’t use the n-word, but it wasn’t needed. His base got the message.     

Former NBA star Charles Barkley was once quoted as saying many people “don’t have enough courage to say the n-word, so they say things like ‘thug’ or ‘street cred.’” Even if Barkley is controversial as a social commentator, he’s not wrong about this.  Many people won’t say the n-word in public, but their policy preferences get the message across.

We’d prefer a world in which people didn’t use the n-word. What we really prefer is a world in which

people  didn’t think the thoughts that lead to the n-word.  In advocating an end to false civility and for honesty about the n-word, we’re really suggesting that what we’d like to know is where people stand. If they won’t stand with us in opposition to racial oppression, we prefer seeing who they are and understanding how they think.  As we said before, talk like you think and act. It was clear to everyone what racists believed and meant when they used the n-word.  That had the benefit of letting the rest of us identify them.

TRUMP AND A CRAZY LITTLE THING CALLED “SIGNING STATEMENTS”: ANOTHER REASON FOR VOTING

In the American system, Congress passes laws,  the president signs and carries them out, and the courts interpret them or

determine if they’re constitutional, right?  It turns out it’s not quite that simple. Thanks to signing statements, presidents may put their thumbs on the scale and say more about what a law means, in practice, than does Congress.

 

President Trump exerted that kind of presidential primacy in connection with a key portion of the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus package aimed at helping the nation through the current coronavirus pandemic. Congress

passed that legislation March 27 and Trump signed it the same day. Hours later he released a signing statement indicating he doesn’t intend on complying with all the provisions of the law that would assure transparency in the $500 billion part of the legislation aimed at helping corporations. So, what’s a signing statement and can Trump do what he said he’d do?

A Tradition from Nowhere

Signing statements express a president’s view of the constitutionality of specific legislation or how his interpretation of the legislation will guide enforcement of it or its

anticipated impact. They date back to James Monroe’s presidency. Ronald Reagan rapidly expanded its use in the 1980s. The Gipper issued 250 of them. In only one term, his successor, George H.W. Bush, issued 228. Bill Clinton

issued 381 during his eight years in the White House, Barack Obama 37. Historians now regard George W. Bush as the king of signing statements. Though he issued only 161 separate signing statements, he used them in challenging over 1000 provisions of various laws. The great classicist and historian Garry Wills once told an audience the younger Bush challenged more provisions of laws through signing statements than all his predecessors combined.

 

Despite this history, the federal constitution does not include a signing statement provision. They’ve just sort of become part of the legislative process. Members of Congress and others have challenged the actions presidents have taken through signing statements. Such challenges assert the president acted in a way at odds with the intent of Congress in passing the law at issue. The challenges have a mixed record, with the outcome of the cases turning on whether the court concluded the president did or did not enforce the law as Congress intended. Courts have not, however, declared the practice of issuing and using signing statements unconstitutional. 

  

Trump and the Stimulus Legislation

Trump said his administration wouldn’t treat the stimulus legislation as permitting the inspector general provided for in the bill (also known as  the SIGPR) to issue reports to Congress without his approval. In other words, the special inspector general couldn’t give Congress potentially damaging information about how the $500 billion corporate relief part of the package is being

spent unless Trump personally approved. Congressional Democrats and watchdog groups fear much of the $500 billion will get used by corporations for things like stock buybacks and executive bonus payments, not worker salaries as Congress intended.

Trump’s signing statement flies in the face of

the transparency congressional Democrats, in particular, fought for in passing the bill. Many in Congress don’t trust that Trump and his Treasury

Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, will make sure the money benefits workers, not corporate executives as occurred with TARP money during the Great Recession of 2008.

               

Certainly, presidents have used signing statements for reasons that don’t suggest evil. These include telling the public what the president expects as a likely effect of the legislation or guiding subordinates in carrying out the legislative purpose. Presidents have also used signing statements in advising the public he views some part of the bill as unconstitutional and expects a court challenge. Trump, however, suggested none of these things in his statement. He just made clear the public will find out only what he wants it to find out about the $500 billion. 

     

What to Do

When someone with dishonest motives occupies the White House, the temptation

arises to say that the courts or Congress or someone should get rid of signing statements. After all, they have no textual foundation in the constitution and Congress has never enacted a statue providing for them. 

History, though, shows that presidents in both parties use them, perhaps for good reason.

Signing statements may, under certain circumstances, function as part of our system of checks and balances. Congress, for example, could go off the deep end with ill-advised legislation a president prefers not vetoing because it contains provisions

addressing a serious national need. A signing statement, and subsequent presidential action, limiting the negative impact of the bad parts of the legislation may represent the best course for the country. Perhaps signing statements aren’t all bad.  We believe the country can take some

comfort in knowing that the courts remain the final arbiter of any action the president takes pursuant to the execution of any signing statement.

The presence of signing statements in our system illustrates the power of the presidency

and emphasizes the importance of getting right who occupies that office. In November the voters weigh in on who can issue signing statements the next four years. As we’ve said before, we can’t mess this up.  

                                      

 

    

INCOME INEQUALITY: SOME BASICS

We recently began discussing income inequality in America. We focused our first post on poverty

and who bears the most significant responsibility for attacking the problem of people in our society who don’t have enough for a respectable existence free of want. More recently, we identified and fleshed out barriers to freedom from poverty and income inequality. 

We look now at some of the policy reasons for the divide between those at the top and the rest of the population. A real gap exists between the wealthiest Americans and even the middle class, a circumstance producing anxiety and political instability that feeds our destructive partisan divide. In time, we’ll consider solutions and evaluate proposals offered by the 2020 presidential candidates and others. We think it important we help voters separate real, viable solutions from noise and platitudes.

The Depth of the Problem

We hear much about the “one percent” and how they’ve done better than everyone else.  The numbers tell a disturbing

story of a growing wealth gap in the United States. According to a report by scholars associated with the Roosevelt Institute, since 1980, the share of national income earned by the top 1% doubled, to 20% in 2014, up from 10%. That hasn’t happened in all western democracies. In Denmark, for example, the 1%’s share went up only from 5% to 6%. 

Governmental policies and actions affecting both the top and bottom parts of the economy contribute. At the top, reductions in tax rates gave the wealthy a windfall.  At the bottom, policies negatively affecting wages and job growth suppressed lower income individuals.

Most “tax reform” has benefited upper income tax payers, including the 2017 tax bill the Trump administration touts as its major achievemet. In the

1980s, the top marginal tax rate dropped from 70% to 28% and has remained below 40% since. Capital gains tax changes also heavily favored the wealthy, with 65% of the benefits going to the top 20% of tax payers. More than lower tax rates help the wealthy. Half of tax expenditures – deductions for 401K retirement accounts, mortgages, and the like – go for things from which only the top 20% of tax payers benefit.

Meantime, 80% of job growth has come in low wage service and retail jobs. Worker power through collective bargaining decreased as union membership declined. In 1960, 30% of U.S. workers participated in unions. That dropped to 20% in 1984 and to just over 11 % in 2014. Wages and other compensation stagnated with this development, rising only 19 % between 1973 and 2013, despite a 161% increase in worker productivity. 

 

Government Complicity

Politicians of all ideological stripes like saying government shouldn’t “pick winners and losers” in the economy. Fair enough as a theory, but the idea does not comport with reality or history. In addition to tax policy, government has long been in the business of picking economic winners and losers. Start, for example, with the racially discriminatory housing policies so devastatingly described by Richard Rothstein in his path breaking book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. We exhaustively detailed Professor Rothstein’s findings in a series of posts in 2018 and need not repeat them here in making the point that many governmental agencies frequently pick economic winners and losers. 

The Federal Reserve’s hyper focus on fighting inflation has had the same kind of effect. By tightening the money supply through higher interest rates at the first sign of upward price pressure, the Fed has stopped or reduced the job creating opportunities of large and small businesses and stymied start-up activity by making credit less available. Most progressive economists agree this made returning to full employment slower and more difficult, particularly impacting lower wage earners who have more difficulty insulating themselves from the whims of the business cycle. 

Then there’s the matter of the federal minimum wage. It stands now at $7.25 per hour and hasn’t gone up since July 2009. Opponents of a

higher federal minimum wage, mostly  Republicans, argue raising it kills jobs, despite evidence to the contrary developed by economists like Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz, a leading income inequality scholar. Whatever the reality on that issue, keeping the minimum wage low disadvantages a large segment of the American economy, giving employers a victory and wage earners a loss. No basis exists for arguing the government hasn’t had a major role in creating our current measure of income inequality.  

Why?

Income inequality exists for many reasons. Some are purely political, like the election of Ronald Reagan and implementation of his tax cuts in the 1980s. Some emanated from fears based on historical events. The inflation of the 1970s, partly sparked by upheavals in international energy markets, helped start the Federal Reserve on its anti-inflation crusade. Some have roots in personal greed, “rent seeking” as economists call the efforts of manipulative players in the economy who extract financial advantage through exploitation.

The reasons for income inequality bring into play a variety of individual and societal factors. The good news is that more people, including some running for president, now think we should do something about the problem. We see paying attention to them in the coming months as a good idea.