How can we center the role of race in our economic policy and in our politics in a way that will drive real change? Kyle Strickland, the deputy director of race and democracy at the Roosevelt Institute, explains how our leaders have fallen under the sway of racial liberalism, which focuses solely on disavowing personal bigotry and overt discrimination. In order to realize true racial and economic justice, he argues we should move beyond racial liberalism and toward a greater understanding of the systemic injustices built into our political and economic systems.
Kyle Strickland is the Deputy Director of Race and Democracy at the Roosevelt Institute. He is also the Senior Legal Analyst at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity and the Director of My Brother’s Keeper Ohio.
Twitter: @kstrickland_
A New Paradigm for Justice and Democracy: https://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/RI_A-New-Paradigm-for-Justice-and-Democracy_Report_202111-1.pdf
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David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures. If you are a regular listener of Pitchfork Economics, you know that we spend an awful lot of time tearing down the dominant neoliberal paradigm while constructing a new narrative that we think better describes how the economy really works, but a new paper by Kyle Strickland and Felicia Wong of the Roosevelt Institute argues that critiquing neoliberalism isn’t enough. According to Strickland and Wong, if we want to take racial justice seriously, we need to acknowledge that race and the economy are inextricably linked. And that means ending the era of racial liberalism that has worked hand in hand with neoliberalism to sustain our nation’s indefensible levels of income and wealth inequality between the races and particularly between white and black households. I talked with Strickland about what racial liberalism is, and how by pretending that the market is color blind, it plays a central role in perpetuating racial inequality. I hope you find the conversation as informative and instructive as I did.
Kyle Strickland:
My name is Kyle Strickland. I’m the deputy director of race democracy at the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank dedicated to advancing economic democracy for the many, not the few, and want to highlight our new report, which is a new paradigm for justice and democracy moving beyond the twin failures of neoliberalism and racial liberalism, and how we can create a more just equitable society, a more multiracial, inclusive democracy.
David Goldstein:
For our audience, if you could just lay out the main thesis to start, that would be useful.
Kyle Strickland:
Of course. So what we talk about in this report is really about how for the past 50 years, the fight for racial justice in our country has really been weakened by an individualistic race neutral color blind conception of access and opportunity within a society that has been largely dominated by neoliberal economics. So this idea that we are going to have the market as the solution to all of our problems and the rest is going to trickle down to the rest of us, when we know that, that actually has not created the shared prosperity. And as a result, what has happened has been a society that has failed to reckon with the legacy of racism in this country. And we silo the issue of racial justice from economic justice. And we have to talk about the two because they are connected, race and the economy are connected, and these are stories that we have to tell together.
And we’re ultimately arguing that right now, we are living in an era of the failure of those two paradigms, one paradigm of neoliberalism, but also this paradigm around racial liberalism, that’s simply talking about access and opportunity without systems of racial inequality, racial injustice, is not going to get us to where we need to be. And in order to build a more powerful, equitable, inclusive democracy, we have to take this head on, and especially with growing authoritarianism that we’re seeing right now, and especially with white supremacist threats and backlash. And so it requires us to take bold action, which we’re seeing within the racial justice movement today, but now we have to see within our mainstream politics.
David Goldstein:
I think we need to start with some definitions here. You talk about neoliberalism, which we talk about a lot on the podcast. We spend a lot of time critiquing it and building up an alternative narrative, but you also talk about racial liberalism. So, I want to start at the root, what do you mean liberalism? And is the liberalism in these two terms the same thing?
Kyle Strickland:
So, we tell the story of racial liberalism and neoliberalism together, but yes, they come out of the same branch around the sense of liberalism and how we tell the stories. And we especially tell this within the stories of the thirties and forties, this new deal era sense of American governance about how which society would provision public goods for individuals, and especially within the context around communities of color and racial justice. And so it’s really a matter of the impacts of government versus impacts of markets. And instead of just focusing on the economic side of things, we also focus on through a lens of race. And so it is this general same concept around liberalism, but we actually, we tend to have the argument and conversation about neoliberalism that usually silos the conversation around race and racial injustice.
David Goldstein:
Right, because the notion with neoliberalism is that the market is color blind.
Kyle Strickland:
Yes.
David Goldstein:
If we just have economic freedom, that’ll solve the problem all by itself. So, we don’t need to have any interventionist policies in terms of race, just let them market handle it.
Kyle Strickland:
Yes, exactly. So basically we’ve defined racial liberalism as really developing within this market based framework, especially within the late fifties and sixties, where effectively the idea was that, well, if the market’s going to solve our problems, then it will compete away discrimination. And so as a result, then that’s not a problem that we have to worry about. And so what ended up happening is really in the mainstream conception of just thinking about racism in this country, or racial inequality in this country, for the past 50, 60 years, it has really been about, well, we are going to disavow personal bigotry. So individual overt acts of discrimination, those are things that have no being in regard within our body politic, but this approach, this color blind approach, actually ignores the role of racialized systems, unequal structures that actually perpetuate domination and justice. And so they actually work in tandem with the project around neoliberalism.
David Goldstein:
So, it’s not just that this approach on individual racism doesn’t address the problem, it helps perpetuate it, you argue.
Kyle Strickland:
Exactly. And when you continue to look at these issues solely through the lens of individual forms of personal bias, or personal bigotry, it actually perpetuates discrimination because it ignores the larger systemic forces at play that perpetuate inequality over time.
David Goldstein:
I’m curious, when you set out at the start of this project, how much of this paradigm shift did you already have in mind and what was the methodology in terms of deconstructing the issue and coming up with the report that you developed?
Kyle Strickland:
Yeah. So this project really builds on Roosevelt’s work over the past five years or so on, really thinking about how we rewrite the rules of our economy for the 21st century. A lot of the work we’ve been doing around post neoliberalism, and really this started with our project that Felicia Wong, my co-author, really helped spearhead and lead with a table of different partners that are really thinking about, what does the world look like in an after neoliberalism space? What does that post neoliberalism world look like? And what we did was really started out with a landscape of what various thinkers, organizers, public intellectuals, academics, worth really thinking about racial inequality and what the solutions are to address some of these massive disparities.
So we start with the premise that neoliberalism has failed, that this paradigm has not resulted in the shared prosperity that its adherence set it out to do. And so as a result, what is in its place? And as we’ve been developing this work, as it relates to neoliberalism and the different approaches, not only to analyze how we got here, but what do those solutions look like moving forward? One of the analysis that we see often missing in the conversation around economics is really this concept around racial stratification, really looking at these issues through a racial equity lens, looking at structural racism and its impacts on where we are today.
And so we wanted to actually do a landscape that more forcefully centered the role of racial equity. And that’s where we took over about a year, really spending research over 200 thinkers and organizers to really think about how they view the economy, how they view our democracy, and what the path forward looks like to building more racially equitable society. So it was a lot of reading, a lot of writing, but we helped to think through different ways to categorize how people think about these issues. So one, are they more incremental focused, are they more transformative in their focuses? What are their theories of change and theories of power look like? And then that’s ultimately how we settled on our focus of this project, which is about both tying in our economy, but also our democracy.
David Goldstein:
I’m curious whether my recent reading list cast The Sum of Us, The Whiteness of Wealth, The 9.9 Percent, is that just coincidentally that I’ve been reading a lot of these ideas from a lot of different authors, or is there a new consensus emerging?
Kyle Strickland:
What we’re seeing is a new consensus. We are actually seeing a really nice symbiotic combination of different thinkers, scholars, organizers, activists, who are really thinking about these problems in a way that is cohering around a new vision. One that says that the colorblind approach to our politics and our policymaking not only does not work, but it actually continues to perpetuate the injustices that we see, and we need transformative solutions. It’s an approach that says we have to tackle and dismantle structural racism by taking white supremacy, the patriarchy head on with the types of not only policy solutions, but policy approaches to our challenges. And so this thinking is really coming together and is starting to go cohere around a worldview that is about a multiracial, multiethnic inclusive democracy, which is directly counter to this white supremacist racist backlash that we’re seeing today. And especially over the last five to seven years with the movement for Black lives has really pushed a lot of these ideas that were once deemed radical into the mainstream so that everybody are talking about these issues on various scales, regardless of background.
David Goldstein:
So, I think you just answered my next question, which was going to be why now?
Kyle Strickland:
Exactly, exactly. Well, and not only is it coming together because of a movement on the ground, but it’s also coming together because we are in this era where the old paradigms no longer work to explain the problems and the challenges that we’re facing. And we have also seen an increasingly diverse coalition of Americans coming together to push against these old systems and saying that this is not working and we have to do something about it. And so these are all issues that are coming together. The question though is that, will we take the threats that we are facing seriously enough? And I worry that not everybody sees the threats to our democracy as threatening as they actually are, which will be the demise and peril of our democracy if we don’t take these threats seriously.
David Goldstein:
I wonder, and I don’t want to be too disheartening, but are our democratic institutions strong enough to overcome this period? With the profound anti-democratic structure of the US Senate and the electoral college and the Republican grip on state legislatures and their ability to gerrymander and suppress the vote? Is it too late?
Kyle Strickland:
I don’t think it’s too late. And I think there are still some very real fights that we need to have, but it may be too late, it could very well be too late. I think 2020 was a flash point to see what the road ahead looks like in 22 and 24, that if we do not act with urgency, then we could lose our democracy. We’re already seeing the unraveling of our democracy. We’ve seen our institutions that were set up in ways that have enabled these anti-democratic attacks that really, the security and stability of these institutions, a lot of them were based on the norms we have in our society and the norms to hold these institutions together. But when you see ideologues and demagogues coming together to just erode norm after norm, and when there’s no accountability for eroding these norms, then there will be no line that they will stop at.
And so I think for Democrats, for progressives, for those who believe in democracy, they actually have to do more than just saying rhetoric, that’s not enough. You have to make transformative structural changes. One of which obviously, if you’re talking about the anti-majoritarian features of the US Senate would be the filibuster we have to end, or certainly reform the filibuster, because what we’re seeing now are state legislatures across the country that are rolling back rights that should be federally protected with simple majorities. And yet it takes a super majority to secure and codify those rights. When you have that system set up, and then you have a system of governance, which the president doesn’t get elected, even if you’re getting the popular vote, that is a system for permanent minority rule and ultimate disaster for our democracy and for our country, but we can still stop it, but we are running out of time.
David Goldstein:
So, that’s a good first step into the specifics of the type of policies we need to pursue. In addition to the democracy side of it, more democracy.
Kyle Strickland:
Yes.
David Goldstein:
What else do we need to focus on?
Kyle Strickland:
So we need to look at material equity, and we talk about this a lot in our report, which is really, it goes at the heart of this neoliberal notion of just increased access and opportunity was going to be enough to bring about economic equality when we know that access and opportunity alone is not sufficient. We are seeing a vast inequality, vast economic insecurity, especially that has been exacerbated by this pandemic, both the health and economic tolls of this pandemic. And that’s why we’re seeing more and more scholars talk about wealth, and especially racialized wealth and the ability to build wealth over time.
And so our focus is really on how do we actually build more equitable material outcomes? So that true equity isn’t just about accepting that there’s a promise of opportunity within a system that continues to exclude. It actually means a more equitable distribution of resources, especially when wealth continues to be extracted from some. And so you see scholars like Derek Hamilton and others who talk of about baby bonds and federal job guarantees, guaranteed incomes. These are the types of transformative proposals that will help not only cut into the racial wealth gap, but will also even the playing field when it comes to wealth inequality in this country.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. Your report mentions one of my pet peeves, you quote, “President Obama is lying about ladders of opportunity.” I hate that line. I’ve always hated that line. This idea that equality of opportunity is what we should be focusing on. Sure, if you believe the neoliberal economic narrative that’s enough because the market will pay you exactly what you’re worth, but this shift of focusing, shifting from opportunity to outcomes, of course, we should be focusing on outcomes. That’s the whole goal of policy, better outcomes.
Kyle Strickland:
It’s exactly right.
David Goldstein:
So I loved that part of the report. Okay, so democracy and outcomes. What else?
Kyle Strickland:
Well with this country, whenever you’re talking about race, we have to reckon with our country’s legacy of white supremacy and violence and racism, and we bring this up through a concept around repair and redress, and a lot of the, there’s a lot of organizations that are doing this, a lot of organizers that are doing this, which is we have to take concrete reparative action to redress the legacy of harm that because it continues to shape our communities today, when what we are seeing right now, all across the country is efforts to ban any sort of teaching about this history, because you learn about this history and realize that the inequality we see today is the result in many ways of a failure to repair these past wrongs and past harms. And so that can be through policies such as reparations, or through other reparative policies that get at dealing with this legacy of repair.
And it also means as a society, as a society, as we move forward, we’ve got to heal from some of these wounds and you don’t do it by ignoring the challenges that we face. And I think there’s people who see this as a threat. They believe any discussion about our country’s history is somehow unpatriotic, and as a result is not worth the dialogue we need to have when in reality, it is just being honest and truthful. And I know some people are allergic to the truth and allergic to some honesty, but we have to repair that history if we are to move forward in a more equitable healing society moving forward.
David Goldstein:
So, I wonder this, the whole right winged attack on so-called critical race theory, was this a clever political strategy that they saw these issues being raised and they’re just trying to head it off?
Kyle Strickland:
So, the right wing has been trying to take any policy that could represent a movement towards progress and weaponize it against racial justice and weaponize it for racial backlash. This has been something that they have always done and will continue to do. I actually think that there are attacks on critical race theory, there are attacks on racial justice. I actually think it will backfire. I think it has backfired in many ways. And you look at some of these board races across the country where they tried to fund, it actually backlashed in a lot of these communities. And I know we see the results in Virginia and people think, oh, no. Now they’re talking about critical race theory, and as a result, they’re going to win. It’s inevitable. Well, they only win if you leave them unchallenged and unchecked.
They’re usher in a politics of racial grievance, white grievance to push back on anything doing with racial justice. This has been a tried and true method that they continue to do, but we will only fail if we refuse to address it. I think you can’t get caught up in every single attack that they make, because you’ll be debating forever if you do that, but you do have to address it and pivot and talk about the issues that matter to people’s everyday lives. And these so-called culture wars are nothing but just grievance politics.
David Goldstein:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, I agree with the conclusions of the report. I think that if we pursued these policies and these narratives we’d all be better off, but does this require short term sacrifices from, well, white people like me who have benefited from the current system?
Kyle Strickland:
So, I certainly think that we have to change our perspective on what it means about short term sacrifices and short term expenses. I think we all need to recognize our privileges and that we have benefited from a system that continues to exclude far too many people. And in order to make sure that more people are included, more people have prosperity, more people have agency and control over the shape and structure of their lives, it requires all of us chipping in. And so for us, that might seem like a sacrifice for some, if we view this solely in a zero sum vision of this, but if we view this in something that is more equitable, more abundant for all of us, I think it helps all of us. And those who are going to have to sacrifice are those at the very top who continue to hoard onto power and wealth at the exclusion of the rest of us. So I don’t think it’s going to be much of a sacrifice. I think we have a long way to go, but we have to do it together.
David Goldstein:
It’s a difficult narrative to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it’s difficult to get people to understand something when it’s in their interest not to understand it. And I’ve had these conversations recently with friends, family, neighbors. I’ve been focusing a lot on housing, and housing policy and the tax code, the laws that’s clearly written to advantage white, particularly people earning over a hundred thousand dollars, Seattle with our million dollar homes. And well, a lot of people I talk to understand all this theoretically, they’re not really willing to give up their capital gains exclusion and their home mortgage interest deduction and everything else that has gone into creating this outsized different between white wealth and black wealth.
Kyle Strickland:
That’s exactly right. And I think that’s where we have to understand that when we take these ideas from the abstract into reality, do you mean it? And that means you have to understand the lived experiences of so many people who have been left behind, even from those we profess to care about and be in community with, and being in community requires some sacrifice, but we do it together.
David Goldstein:
Do you think these changes are possible without a new paradigm and a new narrative that goes along with it?
Kyle Strickland:
No, I don’t think these changes are possible without a new paradigm or new narrative. I think you can have some changes along the way that are inevitable in terms of just some of the, as society grows and as we deal with some of the challenges that we face, but without a newer paradigm, the types of structural changes that we need to make will not be possible. The facts are that there are some people who are just not committed to democracy, and try to frame it in a way as if a permanent minority rule is the only legitimate democracy.
And when you have that paradigm that is now really radicalizing one major political party here, the Republican party, that is not sustainable. So you need a new paradigm to break that up because some people who might not be on board with this racist rhetoric, this horrible rhetoric, still don’t see it as a deal breaker, and will vote for candidates who maybe just don’t express those views publicly, and that’s a problem. So we need a new narrative and a new paradigm to get us there.
David Goldstein:
And key, I think you make this point and that it’s not enough just not individually to be racist if we [crosstalk 00:25:15].
Kyle Strickland:
Yes.
David Goldstein:
But we understand that we’re benefiting from structural racism, from racist policies, we need to be committed to changing those. It’s difficult the last few years, the last six years or so have made me really question whether we’re going to survive this.
Kyle Strickland:
And it’s a balance, and I think, but you’re exactly right. And I think if you look through the lens of history I think there’s people sometimes like to see this inevitable path of progress and things are going to be okay, but the reality is that you have to work for it. And there are far too many people who have normalized what we see. And so it’s understandable to be disillusion, because we have not done what it needs to take to move us forward.
David Goldstein:
I want to ask you our final question. Why do you do this work?
Kyle Strickland:
It’s a great question. I think mostly, when I think about this work, I mostly think about my family, my community, I’ve got two young nieces who are five and three, and then a newest niece who is about eight months now. And I think about the type of future that we want to have for them and for our society. And I think that that future and based on my own experiences, identity as as a black American in this country, is one in which those who are continuing to be constantly othered and seen as not belonging in the fabric of this society are the types of experiences that so many people feel regardless of their background, regardless of their identity. And at the heart of this work is really, can we build a community where all of us, regardless of our background, can come together for people’s future, their prosperity.
And what is at the heart of this work for me is my family and the type of future we want to build for them. And so, regardless of, there are times where I don’t have hope and it’s sad, and it can be disillusioning, but I also know that, that is part of this project, that is part of this fight and this struggle, you can’t just wipe your hands off and say that we’ve achieved what we’ve needed to achieve. This is a constant struggle for justice and for rights for all people. And I’m in this fight. So that’s why I continue to do this work right.
David Goldstein:
Well, thanks for the work you do. We’ll have a link to the report in the show notes. I encourage everybody to go read it. I think it really does tap into, I don’t know the zeitgeist of the moment. I’m trying to think of a better term for it.
Kyle Strickland:
We appreciate that. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:
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