Introduction

Strategic Racism

I can only hope that other people are not as resistant to the conclusions reached in this book as I would have been if I had read them ten years ago.

Back then, I wouldn’t have wanted to believe them. The implications would have been too much for me to handle. While I certainly wish I could say that, as a longtime civil rights lawyer, I have always had a clear understanding of the causes of racial inequality, that would be a lie. I now know that, for much of my career, I didn’t fully appreciate what people of color were up against. I was working alongside predominantly black and brown communities all across the United States, helping to fight the injustices they faced as best I could, but in truth I didn’t really have a clear grasp of who and what we were fighting.¹ At the time, I thought that the biggest obstacle to justice was ignorance. That is what I believed to be our greatest enemy. It was only much later in my career that I realized that what we were really fighting against was much, much worse than that.

How do we explain our racial divide in the United States? Where does it come from? Why does it persist? For me, the answers to those questions used to be found in grainy news footage of Bull Connor turning his fire hoses and attack dogs against children in Birmingham, or of state troopers and civilians brutally beating marchers on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma. I could find more than enough explanation in the videos of the Arkansas National Guard being used to prevent the integration of Little Rock schools, and of Governor George Wallace of Alabama proudly proclaiming his support for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”² I thought that our lingering racial inequities could all be traced back to the most unenlightened aspects, and individuals, of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, and that the ideology upholding these injustices would inevitably be phased into obsolescence by my more progressive-minded generation. In other words, our current inequities were, in my estimation, merely the toxic residue of a tragic yet distant era that would soon be swept into the dustbin of history. And I, for one, was eager to work that particular broom. In my mind, all that we had to do was point out the lingering injustice in our society, and surely the American public and policy makers would spring into action to achieve true racial equality. Surely the moral arc of the universe would, as Dr. King said, bend toward justice.³

Over time, though, I came to realize that justice wasn’t quite so forthcoming, and that the moral arc wasn’t bending in the ways I anticipated. However, this realization didn’t come from losing the struggle for equality. It came from winning, or at least from what we typically think of as winning.

For many years, my work has been devoted to supporting grassroots movements to eliminate systemic racism and create positive social change. At the center of those efforts have been advocacy campaigns to advance the most critical priorities of communities of color, such as achieving education equity, ending mass incarceration, protecting immigrants’ rights, dismantling the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and creating a more inclusive and participatory democracy. The leaders of these campaigns have been youth and adults from some of the most politically and economically marginalized communities in the country. These are the neighborhoods that American society typically does its very best to ignore, such as the predominantly black and brown sections of Chicago, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Denver, Philadelphia, Oakland, Jackson, New Orleans, Phoenix, Newark, and Baltimore, among many other places. Yet because of these community leaders’ remarkable perseverance and fierce devotion to their people, they have won many, many significant and even groundbreaking victories. They have notched so many wins that one would naturally assume that the racial inequities they face would have substantially diminished or even disappeared by now. However, even after all these years, and staggering sacrifices by the individuals who led those efforts, it is difficult to make the case that those communities are better off than when we started.

That is not to say that those victories didn’t represent significant steps forward, or that they haven’t produced many undeniably positive effects. They did, and they have. It’s just that for every two steps forward these communities have been able to make, there are other forces at work that are quick to push them two steps back, if not more.

At first you don’t see it. All your attention is focused on winning the campaign in front of you. Initially you also think that doing so should be quite straightforward, as these efforts were all intended to address what should have been seen as clear-cut, no-brainer issues. All we were doing was pointing out obvious injustices that were deeply harmful to large segments of the population: the rampant overuse of out-of-school suspensions and expulsions in K–12 schools, far too many people being pushed into the criminal justice system, the inhumane treatment of immigrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), transparent attempts to limit people’s voting rights, the decimation of the public school system, etc. In every instance, there were easy, vastly superior alternatives available to the government agency that was responsible for the injustice. Yet every fight was a slog. We met extreme resistance at every turn. And even when we won, the opposition never stopped fighting against racial equality.

We would strike down a discriminatory policy, but then another one that may have looked a little different but had the exact same effects would soon follow. We would successfully pass a policy that we had written ourselves—one that was designed to address an obvious injustice and institute a superior and more equitable set of practices—but it would never be fully implemented. Plus, while we were fighting on one set of issues, several other horrific policies would be passed around other sets of issues. It was as if we were in a big game of Racism Whack-a-Mole. For every injustice we thought we were solving, an equally nasty one would pop up to replace it. No matter how hard we fought, and how many victories we accumulated, we rarely felt like we were really moving the needle.

It was then that I began to detect some patterns to what I was seeing. While of course each individual campaign and community has had its own unique set of stakeholders and decision makers, I started to notice that the opposition we faced in each site was rather consistent. Regardless of which state or region of the country I was working in, the bad policies we were up against were usually being supported by the same set of advocacy organizations, think tanks, and media outlets. All across the country, when communities of color would attempt to address the most significant barriers they faced in their day-to-day lives, they would often run squarely into the same people, from the same organizations, pushing the same set of opposing policy ideas. Even if the opposition didn’t have a physical presence in each location, they were quite effective in ensuring that their preferred policies got into the right hands to advance their agenda. Thus, over and over, I would encounter policy makers in various states who would all seem to have the exact same ideas for new policy initiatives at almost the exact same time. It was eerie. Legislators in Tallahassee, Florida, would suddenly come up with the same “innovative” reform proposal as the legislators in Denver, Colorado, and Springfield, Illinois. Local school districts and police departments in Maryland, Arizona, Mississippi, California, and New York would somehow all implement virtually identical policies at the same time. While these policy initiatives cut across a variety of issue areas, they would all have one thing in common, which is that they would all have a crushing effect on communities of color.

That’s when I got curious. I started to research these policies and where they came from. I looked more deeply into the organizations that were supporting them. Then I began to research who was providing the funding for this network of organizations. I was shocked to discover that my research kept leading to the same small group of names. Most of the policies that were causing massive human suffering on a daily basis could all be traced back to a relatively small group of billionaires and multimillionaires.* In other words, every day the communities I was working with were fighting back against racial inequities—in many cases, they were fighting for their very lives—and at the same time a group of ultra-wealthy Corporate America and Wall Street executives was investing in organizations that were actively opposing those communities’ efforts.^† They were, in effect, promoting the perpetuation of racial injustice.

Not only were these organizations standing in the way of racial progress, they were typically doing so with exponentially more resources at their disposal than the communities of color they were opposing. That, I was startled to learn, was because of how heavily invested the ultra-wealthy were in these efforts. These weren’t rich people donating their version of spare change to organizations they found appealing for one reason or another so that they could get a tax deduction. This was billions of dollars being pooled together and invested strategically around a particular agenda that was ravaging low-income communities of color. This was a massive investment that was propping up an entire industry of organizations peddling racial inequality at the national and even international levels. Yet because of how effectively these efforts had been hidden or at least disguised, virtually no one seemed to know what they were up to.

The Intention behind the Devastation

At the time I stumbled upon these findings, it wasn’t as if I was some wide-eyed novice. My entire career has been devoted to addressing systemic racism. I had learned long ago that while many of us think of racism primarily, or even exclusively, in terms of biased person-to-person encounters, the reality is that the overwhelming majority of harm from modern-day racism comes not from individual bigots, but from the policies and systems that shape our lives. This form of racism isn’t as obviously repugnant as calling someone the n-word, but it can be just as damaging, if not more so, while affecting far more people—tens of millions of people, in fact, just in the United States.

For example, youth of color are routinely undereducated in the United States compared to their white peers. Every year, the racial inequities reflected in the “achievement gap,” high school graduation rates, college attendance rates, and countless other indicators make that apparent, and every year the grim consequences they produce are felt deeply and painfully in countless families across the country. Yet no more than a tiny fraction of those inequities can be attributed to any explicit racial biases held by individual adults within the education system. The much larger problem is how, collectively, we have simply failed to create a level playing field for youth of color.

Similarly, the enormous racial disparities within our criminal justice system are far more attributable to a series of major policy decisions than they are to the actions of any prejudiced police officers, prosecutors, or judges. Thus, even if we could somehow purge the criminal justice system of whatever “bad apples” there might be, our existing mass incarceration system would still reliably produce profoundly harmful and racially inequitable outcomes.

In other words, we know for a fact that entire communities of people will be severely harmed by these and other systems every year—that these inequitable outcomes will inevitably occur based on how these systems have been set up—and yet we demonstrate no collective urgency to fix them. That, in a nutshell, is the most pervasive form of modern-day racism. We have simply become far too willing to implement public policies that inflict needless harm on large groups of people of color, and far too unwilling to address that harm appropriately when it becomes apparent.

After dedicating twenty years of my life to these dynamics, I thought I was fairly well-versed in how they worked. I thought I knew how cruel the United States could be at times to its people, and particularly to people of color. What I didn’t know was that there were higher forms of cruelty than the ones I assumed I had been fighting.

Because I had been under the impression that the driving force of systemic racism was ignorance, I believed that all but the most hateful of individuals could be persuaded to address deeply rooted racial inequities. I was clinging to the idea that my opponents were people who, because of a lack of knowledge about the conditions within communities of color, simply had a different viewpoint about how to address equity concerns. However, as I researched how the ultra-wealthy were using their resources to defend and advance racial injustice, I realized that the problem wasn’t that they were unaware of the devastating harm being caused by systemic racism. The problem was that, for the ultra-wealthy, the harm being caused by systemic racism wasn’t a bug; it was a feature.

As will be described in chapter 1 and throughout this book, I began to learn how powerful a tool racial injustice has been for the ultra-wealthy in advancing their economic and political interests. I discovered that while such sordid realities are rarely mentioned in our public discourse, it was nevertheless true that there was a lot of money being made off of this type of large-scale cruelty. Indeed, for anyone who has ever wondered why deep racial inequities persist more than fifty years after the civil rights movement, the biggest reason is as simple as it disturbing: systemic racism is, for a small number of people, enormously profitable.

I also realized that this horrific form of modern-day racism wasn’t adequately captured by the term “systemic racism.” That descriptor is too impersonal and abstract to fully convey what the ultra-wealthy were up to. It suggests that persistent racial inequities are merely the accidental byproducts of our economic and political systems. In reality, what the ultra-wealthy have been doing was worse than that, because behind all of the billions of dollars in investments they were making in opposition to communities of color, there was intentionality. There was strategy.

My eyes were opened to the fact that many of the policies that plague communities of color aren’t doing so incidentally; they are doing so purposefully. And the devastation I was witnessing being caused to families across the country wasn’t the side effect or unintended consequence of some well-meaning set of policies; it was the direct result of their communities being sabotaged. Once I recognized that, it became clear that this particular brand of injustice—what the ultra-wealthy had been doing for decades, and were still doing today—went far beyond what I had understood to be systemic racism. This was different. This was strategic racism.

Thus, I finally realized the truth—one that is intuitively obvious to most people of color but took me an embarrassingly long time to recognize. My generation hadn’t merely inherited a race relations mess that we were responsible for cleaning up. We had inherited a living, breathing monster that had never stopped promoting racial injustice; it had simply changed its tactics. In short, my long-held beliefs about racism were dead wrong. Our current racial divide wasn’t the residual effect of a backward era in American history; it was part of an unending tradition as American as apple pie.

In other words, I finally came to see that the moral arc of our universe wouldn’t naturally be bending toward anything resembling justice. On the contrary, it was being forcibly bent toward injustice.

I must admit that I initially didn’t want to believe any of this. It was so deeply unsettling that I found a dozen different ways to rationalize what I was seeing, to explain why it was that these individuals were using their extraordinary wealth this way. I think I just wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I tried to convince myself that they, like many of us, were simply misguided on these matters, only their errors were magnified because of the number of zeroes that they could comfortably write on a donation check.

Additionally, while it is easy for most of us to condemn people who say or do blatantly racist things, it is much harder to get one’s mind around the dynamics of strategic racism and the notion that some people have powerful economic incentives to support those dynamics. I know it was for me. But as will be shown in the following chapters, the impact of those incentives, and the damage that has resulted from them, are undeniable. (Note that saying that these individuals contribute to, and profit from, racism isn’t to say that they are, as individuals, racists. They very well may be, as former President Trump has said of himself, the “least racist” people in America.⁴ Or they may not be. What is clear is that they have chosen to capitalize upon the dynamics of systemic racism in ways that have been profoundly beneficial for themselves.)

Dear White People

The purpose of this book is to shed some light on strategic racism and identify who is doing it, and why. These are essential questions for everyone who is committed to eliminating America’s racial divide because it is impossible to win a fight when you don’t know who and what it is that you are fighting.

This book is particularly directed at my fellow white Americans.⁵ As a whole, what I have observed over the years is that we have developed an elaborate system of defense mechanisms and avoidance strategies around issues of race. We have become remarkably skilled at being able to avoid confronting the stark inequities that surround us. As a result, we, as a whole, continue to demonstrate a shocking lack of awareness about the realities of racial inequality in this country. In the chapters ahead, I attempt to unpack why and how so many white Americans—myself included—accumulate such deep wells of ignorance on these issues. In other words, why do we have such a hard time diagnosing and fixing these glaring problems? And within those racial blind spots, how have the ultra-wealthy been able to successfully convince so many of us that to fix our education system we have to destroy it (chapter 2), to maintain our freedom we must incarcerate more people than any other country in the world (chapter 3), and to remain the “land of opportunity” we need to oppress the immigrants that come to it (chapter 4)? (Spoiler alert: the same people who invest so heavily in racial injustice are also committed to our being uninformed and/or misinformed on these issues.)

Additionally, this book is intended to demonstrate that while the problems we face are severe, they are also eminently fixable, particularly if more people recognize that the injustice being engineered by this group of billionaires and multimillionaires hasn’t been limited to people of color. Their portfolio is far more diversified than that. Never was this more apparent to me than when I was investigating how they were contributing to the preservation of racial injustice. As I learned more about where they direct their money and the ideology that guides those decisions, I realized how heavily invested the ultra-wealthy are in pushing a political agenda that has been deeply harmful to most white Americans as well.

Thus, the living, breathing monster responsible for racial injustice actually has two heads: one focused on people of color, the other with its gaze fixed on the vast majority of white people. In other words, if white people examine the reasons their lives are far more difficult than they need to be, they will likely eventually run into the same set of organizations and individuals who are leading the opposition against racial equality. I, for one, was astonished to discover just how enormous an influence the ultra-wealthy have on my life and that of every white person I know. This book is intended to demonstrate why that is so, and how broader recognition of the fact that the struggles of people of color are deeply interconnected with those of white people would open up entirely new possibilities for creating an America that works for all its residents.

That is ultimately what we all want, isn’t it? Regardless of our race or ethnicity, we all just want to live in a country that supports us in living good, happy, fulfilling lives. Yet while there may not be much that unites Americans of diverse backgrounds and political ideologies, we can all see quite clearly that America falls short in this regard. We all recognize that our country could simply be better than it is. It could be stronger. It could be more. And as will be shown in the pages to come, the key to unlocking America’s full potential is for more people of all races and ethnicities to stand up for racial justice. That is how we build a stronger democracy. That is how we build a brighter future and make America a more truly free country. And that is how we move beyond our ugly legacy of racial injustice and find reconciliation and redemption.

This path is available to us. While actually walking it may not be easy, it almost certainly won’t be as difficult as continuing to walk the path we are on now. And though there are many steps that we will need to take together to find our way along this unfamiliar route, none may be more important than this: we need many more people to listen far more closely to what people of color are telling us about the America that they have come to know.

*Obviously not all wealthy individuals are using their money and influence in this way, and there are many who are responsible corporate citizens and humanitarians. However, as will be shown in the chapters that follow, there are many more billionaires and multimillionaires who are aggressively advancing this agenda than you might think. In fairness, it is also true that most of these individuals also allocate some of their wealth toward other, more noble, purposes, such as supporting the arts, museums, public health initiatives, etc. Unlike most of the investments described in this book, those donations typically receive a lot of publicity (much of which is sought out by the ultra-wealthy donors). I leave it to the reader to judge how best to weigh the benefits of such initiatives against the harms created by the largely under-the-radar efforts discussed in this book.

^†Throughout this book, I use the term “ultra-wealthy” to refer to this group of billionaires and multimillionaires who have put their wealth and power to use in ways that are highly advantageous to their interests and deeply harmful to low-income, working-class, and middle-class people of all races and ethnicities, and particularly people of color.