“What of This Racial Justice?” June 8, 2020

We are now going into a third week of following the killing of in on . Over the weeks, these protests have spread across , including to small town America. United under the banner of – often literally – protestors have consistently demanded two things: police reform and racial justice. One has proven easier to embrace than the other.

Calls for police reform is an obvious response to the casual killing of Floyd by police officer , who kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, ignoring the 46-year-old African American man’s pleas for breath and bystanders call to “let him up.” And reform cannot come fast enough given what Keeagna-Yamahtta Taylor has identified as “’ simple inability to stop killing Black people.” The numbers confirm, as do a seemingly endless supply of smartphone videos, that brutality toward and killing of black and brown people, particularly men, is systemic to policing in the United States. Of the more than more than 1000 people killed by police each year, roughly one quarter are black despite being only 13% of the population. Saturday, not twenty days after Floyd’s death and on the same day that the voted unanimously to replace the city’s police force with a community safety department, police in fatally shot 27-year-old Rashard Brooks as he was attempting to run away after a confrontation in a Wendy’s parking lot. Reform cannot come fast enough.

But, what about protestors’ second demand? Racial justice.

In his taped eulogy for George Floyd’s funeral on June 9, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee declared, “Now is the time for racial justice. That’s the answer we must give to our children when they ask why. Because when there is justice for George Floyd, we will truly be on our way to racial justice in America.” While appropriate to the occasion, these are the words of a politician: sweeping, inspiring, and intentionally vague. More to the point, Biden’s comments reflect a general failure to define “racial justice.” This is a problem.

Banning police from using chokeholds and no-knock warrants is low-hanging fruit, which is not to say it has been easily harvested fruit. In Making All Black Lives Matter, historian Barbara Ransby details the wide network of local organizers that have fought tirelessly against police violence toward African Americans and other forms of in the justice system since George Zimmerman’s 2013 acquittal for killing 17-year-old . Still, racial justice means change on a whole other level. That politicians and allies of Black Lives Matter cannot – or will not – define it is because racial justice is at odds with structures fundamental to the “American way of life,” namely capitalism, individualism, and racial inequality.

A growing number of U.S. historians have pointed to the relationship between racism and capitalism: it is an intimate, co-dependent relationship forged through the institution of slavery. As historian Walter Johnson explains, from slavery emerged “a sort of capitalism that relies upon the elaboration, reproduction, and exploitation of notions of racial difference.” Racism is the lubricant that keeps the wheels of U.S. capitalism turning. Many will reject this formulation, which Johnson terms “racial capitalism.” However, even the most nascent student of economics understands that capitalism is organized around making, indeed maximizing, profits, and the most easily manipulated expense of any enterprise is the cost of labor. It stands to reason that African Americans, who number among the poorest and most disenfranchised, are the most vulnerable to the exploitation this economic system encourages.

The current coronavirus pandemic has made African Americans’ adverse relationship to the U.S. economy abundantly clear. With a tenth of the wealth the average white family has, most African Americans cannot afford to quarantine. They also live in poor neighborhoods and housing at disproportionately higher rates, areas in which the virus spreads faster. These factors help explain why African Americans are dying of COVID-19 at rates much higher than whites. In Wisconsin, for example, blacks account for over 25% of Covid-related deaths, despite being only 6% of the state’s population. Blacks are also suffering a much higher unemployment rate in this stalled economy, standing at 16.8% in May, compared to 12.4% for whites. These numbers reflect the fact that African Americans are overrepresented in the service sector; therefore, they are paradoxically more essential – and thus at greater risk for exposure – and more dispensable, because much of their employment is tied to industries hardest hit by quarantine measures, including the food service and hospitality industries, as well as manufacturing and construction.

Sick of quarantining and , most Americans are anxious for things to “get back to normal.” The Covid-19 crisis, however, has laid bare the sweeping inequities across race and class lines inherent to “normal” life in the United States, which are keeping African Americans poor at best, and killing them at worst. This has undoubtedly fueled the size and longevity of the George Floyd protests.

These protests are unique for how many whites have joined the ranks. There is no doubt that their numbers increased the protests’ legitimacy and leverage, which explains the fast and favorable response to demands for police reform – after years of next to no response following numerous police killings of unarmed African American men and women. Last Monday, congressional Democrats announced an expansive reform bill that would prohibit excessive force, , and immunity for police officers. Cities like Louisville have banned no-knock warrants following the death of 26-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor who was shot eight times by police during an ungrounded raid on her home. And, while largely understood, the “” movement has gone mainstream. Even President Trump blinked under the pressure, going so far as to say, to say, “I don’t like chokeholds.”

Whites’ overrepresentation in the protests also helps explain why corporations like McDonalds and have come out in support of Black Lives Matter. Even the finally got on board, with the contrite commissioner Roger Goodell saying, “We…believe black lives matter.” In response, NFL defensive end Michael Bennett voiced the cynicism of many: “He [Goodell] knows Black Lives Matter, because without black players, the NFL wouldn't be as lucrative as it is.” Bennett’s statement highlights the fact that anti-racism is currently good business because it is trending. To claim that black lives matter is on brand with not being racist.

African Americans, however, are tired and understandably suspect of the performative actions of institutions and individuals desperate to appear “.” Congressional Democrats taking a knee while wearing Kente-cloth stoles was a particularly cringe worthy example. In Minneapolis last week, white police officers and community members washed the feet of two black pastors following a walk led by those pastors to honor George Floyd. The symbolism of this ritual must have been incredibly healing, which cannot be discounted. In the end, however, there are two black men with clean feet. African Americans are waiting to see what form allyship takes once life does get back to normal and Americans are no longer working from home or unemployed, and people are once again free to dine out, shop, go to the movies and concerts, and travel – all those things we do that mercifully distract us from the world’s injustices.

Racial justice requires that whites reconcile themselves to a fundamentally different experience of whiteness. In her seminal article “Whiteness as Property,” law professor Cheryl Harris outlines how, precisely because this nation’s history is bound up in slavery, whiteness is a racial identity with actual value that is privileged and protected by law. And this “status property” depends on, as much as it promotes, racial inequality. Racial justice, then, requires more than white Americans believing, even declaring, that racism is bad and people of color are equal. Anti-black racism is structural, therefore eradicating it requires that white Americans be more than not racist; they must be, as Ibram X. Kendi argues, antiracist. Antiracists “locate roots of problems in power and policies…and confronts racial inequities.”

Currently, “racial justice” parallels “diversity” as empty jargon used to “not racist” to a target audience of “friends,” clients, consumers, prospective college students, or constituents. For it to have real meaning, white Americans must go beyond claiming and apologizing for their white privilege. They must go beyond symbolic gestures such as turning their profile picture to black and deriding the Beckys and Karens. Race justice in the United States requires nothing less than white Americans looking at the many ways they choose the value of their whiteness over racial equality and making a different choice. They must examine how they approach their children’s education – are they leaving their progressive politics at the schoolhouse door? Where do they choose to live? Are they among those driving gentrification or drawing tax bases away from places where people of color live? What taxes are they willing to pay to help make people of color whole? When and why do they call the police? Who do they elect? This last one is especially important, because history tells us that this period of will be followed by a backlash in which conservatives attempt to rollback measures important to both police reform and racial justice.