Dixie Ain’t Just in the South
Dixie Ain’t Just in the South
A few thoughts on America’s original sin
Because of the South’s history of enslavement and Jim Crow segregation, there is a general perception that the country’s racial problems only exist in the land of Dixie. But as Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. learned during the Civil Rights Movement, reality tells a different story.
Not long ago, I watched King in the Wilderness, an Emmy Award-winning 2018 HBO documentary chronicling the last eighteen months leading up to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Through a series of interviews with civil rights icons, including the late Representative John Lewis, the late Harry Belafonte, Andrew Young, the late C.T. Vivian, Diane Nash, and Cleveland Sellers (the father of political commentator Bakari Sellers), the film tells the story of King’s struggles and triumphs in his final days.
The film focuses on the Chicago Freedom Movement. King’s most ambitious campaign in the North, this phase of the broader Civil Rights Movement, is generally considered the inspiration for the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Belafonte and Sellers describe King’s surprise at the level of racist hatred he encountered in the Second City, especially considering its location in the northernmost United States:
HARRY BELAFONTE: Chicago was a huge awakening for him. He saw that the movement now as reflecting more of the truth of what America was about than just what we had experienced in the South.
CLARENCE SELLERS: Martin [Luther King] said to me, “Clarence, I've seen some hate-filled eyes and mobs in Mississippi and Alabama,” he said, but the hate I saw in Illinois was equal in greatness to hate I see in Mississippi. He was really shaken when we left Chicago, I remember.
Drawn in 1767 by English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the Mason and Dixon line was crafted initially to settle a border dispute between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. It later became considered the separation point between the northern free states and the slave states to the south. While its true etymology is unclear, some historians suggest the terms “Dixie” and “Dixieland” originated as slang referring to the area south of Dixon’s boundary line.
More recently, Republican senator and presidential candidate Tim Scott made news with his appearance on The View, a daytime talk show. Scott requested the appearance to defend his position on systemic racism, which he says does not exist.
In support of his claim, Scott pointed to the fact that the country has had a president, vice president, and two secretaries of state who were persons of color.
Indeed, a lot has changed for the better since the turbulent sixties. But while Scott’s examples do indicate progress, they fail to address the country's persistent problems surrounding the issue of race. Ironically, his status as the South’s first Black Republican senator since Reconstruction only serves to underscore the fact that he is as much of an exception to the rule as his anecdotes.
The cost of systemic racism
Citi, the global financial giant, has a history of producing research reports that manage to fly under the radar. I’ve written a few times about the bank’s notorious “Plutonomy Memos” from the early aughts, in which their analysts presented strategies for ultra-wealthy clients to exploit income inequality in their stock portfolios.
Another one of the bank’s reports went largely unnoticed due to the upheaval surrounding George Floyd’s murder. Entitled Closing the Racial Inequality Gaps: The Economic Cost of Black Inequality in the U.S., the report attempts to quantify the far-reaching financial impact of anti-Black racism. The 2020 study estimates that in the preceding twenty years, racism against Black Americans cost the U.S. economy $16 trillion.
Citi’s analysts arrive at their stunning conclusion through an analysis of wages, education, housing, and lending, all areas where anti-black racism persists. A 2020 CNBC article summarized the report’s findings:
The bulk of the lost $16 trillion is based on a lack of lending to Black entrepreneurs, which Citi estimates has cost the U.S. $13 trillion in business revenue and 6.1 million new jobs per year. Another $2.7 trillion in income has been lost due to the racial wage gap for Black Americans, while the lack of access to higher education for Black students could have added $90 billion to $113 billion in lifetime income. Finally, a lack of equality in access to housing credit, which could have led to an additional 770,000 Black homeowners, has cost $218 billion.
In the report’s introduction, Raymond McGuire, one of its authors and a Citi vice chairman, begins by quoting Reverend King’s famous Letter from Birmingham Jail to underscore the report’s thesis that racism not only effects those to whom it is directed but society as a whole. He ends by stating that not even his status as one of the most influential figures on Wall Street exempts him from the effects of racism:
In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
…[E]ven today, with all those credentials and as one of the leading executives on Wall Street, I am still seen first as a six-foot-four, two-hundred-pound Black man wherever I go - even in my own neighborhood. I could have been George Floyd. And my wife and I are constantly aware that our children could have their innocence snatched away from them at any given moment, simply for the perceived threat of their skin color…
On the positive side, the study found that addressing the gaps in racial inequality could add as much as $5 trillion to the economy over five years.
An afternoon at the Harvard Club
Because my thirty-odd years in finance were split between Arkansas and New York, I learned firsthand that discrimination doesn’t only occur below the Mason-Dixon Line.
It’s been over a decade since I left Wall Street, but I’m still in touch with many of my former colleagues. I speak to a few of them several times a week. Some have moved on to other careers, but as former traders, we share a unique bond. As recently as the 2000s, Black traders on Wall Street were as rare as unicorns. I was even more unusual in that I ran a trading desk.
Not long ago, I was speaking with one of my former colleagues. When I started an algorithmic trading desk for what was then a minority-owned startup, he was my first hire. After opining on the state of the world, my friend reminded me of something that happened to us back in the day.
The two of us, along with another of the firm’s Black traders, attended an event for minority-owned investment banks at New York’s Harvard Club. The event’s sponsor was Goldman Sachs, the global investment bank.
Things may be different today, but a dozen years ago, the Harvard Club was as homogeneous as any place in Manhattan. The elite midtown club was the last place you’d expect to find an event touting minority inclusion. Nevertheless, the bulge-bracket bank was making a big push for diversity and inclusion, plus the drinks were free, so every minority-owned investment firm in town was present.
When the function ended, the three of us boarded an elevator to make our exit. The doors opened on the next floor, revealing an older gentleman and a fur coat-clad woman, both white, standing arm in arm. Based on their attire, they were leaving a formal event.
Both appeared stunned by our presence. The man’s mouth flew open in shock. The woman tightened her grip on her date’s arm, simultaneously reaching for the string of pearls around her neck. To reiterate: the lady literally clutched her pearls. It was as though they’d ventured into a dark alley by mistake.
The three of us recognized the racism behind their reaction, despite its subtlety. Unlike the brutal abuse of King’s Chicago experience, their racism was silent, nonviolent, and came without so much as an epitaph. For all our thousand-dollar suits and French-cuffed shirts, the couple at the Harvard Club feared being on an elevator with us.
After a moment, the two partygoers recovered from their momentary astonishment and boarded the elevator. No one said a word as we descended to the lobby.
A decade later, former colleagues and I share these stories with laughter instead of anger, mainly because we have no other choice.
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As a retired Teacher am brutally aware that the education system is a multi-layered system designed to give to the rich and give as little as possible to the poor. The Illinois Supreme Court once dismissed a suit for equal funding, saying that money had nothing to do with the quality of education.
The whole system of funding nationwide is set to favor the wealthy. School choice is another mechanism that sounds great but is supported by the conservatives because it helps their downer constituency.
Teachers stare this reality in the face every day.