This conversation will kick off a MarketWatch interview series with leaders in business, government and the academy about how to address the racial wealth and income gaps:
There’s a ride at Disney World called the Carousel of Progress in which a cast of animatronic Americans on a revolving stage tell of all the technological upgrades to our lives since 1900: indoor plumbing, flight, television. It’s one of Walt’s original attractions, dating back to the 1964 New York World’s Fair — and the name could not be more apt. Carousels, for all their dizzying motion and calliope music, mostly just spin in place. “Progress” is like that, too.
Glaude’s book shook me into seeing better, and reading better. I am embarrassed to confess I had not read Baldwin before, something I have since made a project of correcting. I have been spending the past month “thinking with Jimmy,” as Glaude calls it. In his novels and nonfiction Baldwin had a distinct ability to find words to make sense of the infernal and ineffable depths of America’s soul.
This makes me think about John Lewis’s passing. And about Fred Douglass, who lives to see Lincoln sign the Emancipation Proclamation and also lives to see the first Jim Crow law passed, and he dies the year before Plessy v. Ferguson. Glaude: The value gap is the through line in American history. It is the belief that white people matter more than others. That belief evidences itself in our habits, our practices and our dispositions. It shapes and informs our social, political and economic arrangements.
MarketWatch: You say the value gap is “The Lie.” But what is the role of money here? How much of the struggle of Black America in 2020 is due to economics? The nation was founded on the insidious equation that a Black person is worth three-fifths as much as a white person. In 2020, however, the median Black household worth is one-tenth that of the median white household — if we could get to three-fifths that would be an improvement.
Glaude: Any economic system that is predicated on the disposability of people, Baldwin is going to reject it. I am going to reject it. So the way in which we reconcile this is not by simply appealing to markets that can drive up the standard of living of Black folk and create some kind of equity as a result. No, we have to change the fundamental center of gravity of our moral concern and how it organizes our lives.
MarketWatch: It’s like the line in “Hamilton”: “Look at where you are. Look at where you started. The fact that you’re alive is a miracle …” That may be true, but it’s not enough.
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