In an address to the AFL-CIO constitutional convention in 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the delegates a prescient and dire warning of trouble ahead — and its antidote. “In the next ten to twenty years, automation will grind jobs into dust as it grinds out unbelievable volumes of production,” he said. “The political strength you are going to need to prevent automation from becoming a Moloch, consuming jobs and contract gains, can be multiplied if you tap in to the vast reservoir of Negro political power.”
But as Eduardo Porter notes in American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise, no such alliance would be formed and Moloch proceeded to impoverish the ranks of white workers. Porter asserts, “The America that built the most prosperous working class the world had ever seen collapsed into a heap of pathologies simply due to a lack of empathy. The greatest irony is that while the black and brown suffered most intensely from the fallout, the collapse in social trust wiped away the American dream of working-class whites, too.”
Of course, unions had long impeded the entry of blacks into the trades. After a stirring, fact-based introduction, Porter’s chapter “Welfare for Whites” notes that in 1869, a skilled ship’s caulker, a black man named Isaac Myers, addressed the National Labor Union, one of the first national federations of workers, and said, “The white laboring men of the country have nothing to fear from the colored laboring men.” But the convention voted no, suggesting that blacks form their own union. Reflecting on this event, W.E.B. Du Bois said Myers’ plea for the black worker was dismissed not through strategic calculations but because union members “did not believe in him as a man.” Organized labor became the institutional expression of white working-class racism. In 1902, Du Bois noted that 43 national unions had no black members at all.
Born in Phoenix to an American father and Mexican mother, Porter is a veteran economics reporter who started as a financial beat writer in Mexico, then moved to the Los Angeles bureau of Wall Street Journal in 2000 and the New York Times in 2007 where he now works. So yes, his historical mind is oriented to the churn of business, the significance of adequate take-home pay, and the evolution of our demographics. But his fast-moving chapters represent the best aspects of feature writing, driven by a clarity of purpose. When he details the scope of “America’s entrenched poverty,” he evaluates it in terms of the damage done to the entire nation. “The great paradox of the American experience,” he writes in one of several assessments in medias res, “is how its exceptional diversity – ethnic and racial, religious and linguistic – a well of inexhaustible vim and unparalleled creativity, has also stunted its development as a nation. It has shaped the most meager social safety net in the club of advanced nations. And it has paralyzed its politics, bringing national policy making to a standstill.” Thus, when he discusses the mass incarceration of blacks, he frames it in terms of Republican retention of votes in order to maintain earnings per share for the few – even while a deep pool of human potential for all of us is wasted.
Porter wants us to understand why the majority of whites of Macomb County, which stretches north from Detroit, voted twice for Barack Obama — yet flipped in 2016 for Donald Trump. Michigan, too, went for Trump where his state-wide margin of victory was just 13,107 votes. But in Macomb county he won by 48,348 votes. So you could say that places like Macomb delivered the state to him. Since 2000, Macomb has lost a third of its industrial jobs. Automotive manufacturing is still the biggest employer, but 75% of its job postings now require a B.A. degree. Research data shows that though 81% of its population is white, exploited sentiments about race, foreignness, immigration and Islam resulted in a Trump victory.
If you type “Eduardo Porter Economic Scene” in your browser, you’ll find a listing of Porter’s weekly “Economic Scene” columns published in the New York Times from 2012 to 2018. His August 15, 2017 headline reads “It’s the Economy, Democrats, but Inequality Is Not the Issue,” a piece in which he reported on a meeting of Democratic party strategists, politicians and fund-raisers who presented and debated ideas on how to regain the White House in 2020. At that moment, the inter-party debate centered on Bernie Sanders’ emphasis on income inequality and its potential viability as the campaign focus. While acknowledging the severity of the income gap, party centrists argued for a political strategy based on increasing employment opportunities, especially in locations where automation, globalization and Chinese imports had wiped out American jobs. Porter’s headline seems to concur with them.
But even in this brief column, Porter steers our attention to the underlying, insidious force that turned those largely white, disenfranchised, once-Democratic voters into Republicans: Donald Trump had put a spell on voters through “an apocalyptic vision of American under siege” and “voters blamed minorities and foreigners for their plight,” not the avaricious oligarchs and right-wing pols who abandoned and now cozen them. In American Poison, Porter ‘s heightened sense of urgency leads to a foundational premise: “American politics have become, first and foremost about race. The Republican Party is today a vehicle for the political expression of white anxiety over demographic change.” Then comes an echo of his embrace of policy that emphasizes opportunity: “The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has all but given up on its traditional alliance with working-class white men.”
Porter arrived in LA in 2000 some six years after Rodney King had been murdered by officers of the LAPD (who were then acquitted). “Racial tensions … were entrenched across town,” he recalls. “The arrival of Mexicans and Central Americans in large numbers over the preceding thirty years had further complicated the alliances and animosities that shaped local neighborhoods.” His chapter “The Black and the Brown” considers this situation — and the state’s history of antagonistic social policies towards all of its minorities. In 2001, Latinos surpassed blacks as the country’s largest ethnic group. He takes a look at Compton, ten miles south of downtown LA. Blacks weren’t even allowed to live in the precinct until after 1950. By 1970, 71% of the population was black. By 2000, 60% were Latino. In his LA, blacks and Latinos vie for a share of limited resources — which causes sparks. He writes, “To A Mexican American who had lived most of his life outside the U.S. borders, what perplexed me above all when I returned was how often race comes up in everyday life … Hispanics are somewhat of a fiction. You can’t find them outside of the United States. Outside the United States there are Mexicans and Ecuadorans and Salvadorans.” While stating that “hard racial borders are particularly challenging for Latinos,” he acknowledges his status:
“I have not been a victim of America’s racial violence. I’ve never been frisked by a cop or lost a job because of my skin tone. My Latino identity might even have helped me get jobs at the Journal and the Times, which likely saw me as a desirable minority to count toward their diversity goals and dilute their image as bastions of whiteness. I nonetheless allow myself to ask whether there night not be a better way to engage with America’s multi-racial, multicultural reality.”
In the end, Porter sees racism as the main factor in who decides how our nation’s resources, opportunities and wealth are deployed — and who gets what. His perspective on American history suggests that the Democratic Party must persuade whites that they have acted against their own best interests for the sake of a noxious delusion. But it’s a tough sell. Even his own data shows that “Democrats have lost the white vote nationwide in presidential elections since the mid-1970s.” The non-Hispanic white American cohort is getting older and now accounts for about 60.4% of the population. In 25 years, that percentage will have fallen below 50%. But even if people of color come to dominate the ballot box, Porter warns that if we don’t change our ways, “by 2050, seven in ten of America’s poor will belong to an ethnic minority.” These are the citizens whom we should be educating, empowering, and investing in. Now.
In the United States, policies regarding the scope of our social safety net are based on a specious question: Do poor people deserve to receive public assistance? “Can Americans overcome their racial mistrust to build a semblance of a cohesive society?” Porter asks. “To do so will require restoring empathy to that place in the American heart that has been colonized by loathing and fear.” The benefits of helping each other exceed their costs. Such are economics. Such is the power of empathy.
[Published by A.A. Knopf on March 17, 2020, 260 pages, $26.95 hardcover]