Ep 365 - Funding White Supremacy with Robert B. Williams

Steve Grumbine: 00:00:42

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro and Cheese. And folks, today's guest is going to take us down a path I think that is incredibly important.

You all have heard me talk about stratification, and we've talked about stratification to show the class differences with capital order. Folks like Clara Matei have written eloquently about and the working class.

Well, there's more stratification than just simply working class and capitalist class, and that includes racial wealth. That includes funding white supremacy, which is the topic of today's conversation.

The book that we'll be discussing is Funding White Supremacy, Federal Wealth Policies and the Modern Racial Wealth Gap by my guest today, Robert B. Williams, who will henceforth call Bob, who was introduced to us by a mutual friend of Sandy Darity and my guy, Tom Clark. He said, hey, you gotta talk to this guy. He's got a great book, man. I had lunch with him. He's really nice guy. You'll like him.

So, Robert B. Williams, Steadman professor of Economics at Guilford College. Bob has taught economics and political economy for over 40 years.

ap by Cambridge, published in: 2025

Bob Williams: 00:02:13

Thank you so much, Steve. I appreciate being here.

Steve Grumbine: 00:02:16

Absolutely. This book is fantastic. I want to get this out of the way so that we can just nail it.

Folks who follow this program are very well aware of my bleeding on about federal taxes don't fund spending and taxes don't fund spending. And this book uses the framework of tax expenditures.

But what we're really talking about, and I'll let you elaborate on this, is basically tax credits. We're talking about giving people tax breaks and, and the funding of white supremacy through allowing those tax breaks, amongst many other things.

So with that in mind, Bob, when you wrote this book, I mean, this book just came out here recently, what was the purpose? What drove you to write about this? Because it feels very timely.

Bob Williams: 00:03:02

Yeah, thanks, Steve. What really drove me about this book was to try to explain the racial wealth gap. Wealth has long been in this country pretty veiled and opaque.

And not until: 1962

nt people to remember that in: 1962

And so we're looking at what has happened to the racial wealth gap. This is why I call it the modern racial wealth gap over what we might call the civil rights, post civil rights era.

And so it has totally expanded, it has tripled. And so part of what this book is about is to try to explain why that happened. What are some of the underlying causes.

Steve Grumbine: 00:04:13

ory view of the world back in: 2007

I just completed a master of Business Administration, and all of a sudden, $125,000 worth of student loans later, I'm questioning, what did I get out of that?

I learned a bun things that justified capital accumulation and justified predation upon the public and justified a million forms of austerity and so forth. And I never really learned about stratification.

You would have thought a master of business administration might teach some of that, but no, it's teaching blind spots. It's teaching you to be a good capitalist. And one of the concerns I had was, why don't we learn more about stratification?

Why is stratification typically left out of the standard conversations that we have at the dinner table that we have in this country that the news talks about? I mean, even when they touch on it, there's always an easy excuse for any discrepancies, et cetera.

I was wondering if maybe you could describe stratification economics and understanding stratification on a broader scale.

Bob Williams: 00:05:29

Well, I mean, obviously orthodox economics does the same thing, which is ignore any kind of principles of stratification.

It assumes that, you know, sort of the free market, you know, and presumably it's a meritocracy and we have winners and losers, and it's all deserved.

What stratification economics looks at is a system that is deliberately set up to try to keep things stratified so that people who start on top, they're going to stay on top.

And not only that, but they're going to then be able to make sure that they're descendants stay on top, and the people on the bottom are going to stay on the bottom, and occasionally some very brilliant people from the bottom are going to be able to make it somewhere up. But for the most part, our situations are determined by basically birth. So stratification economics looks at, you know, how that works.

My research looks at wealth, which I would argue is the perfect vehicle to understand how the system is stratified. Wealth is a source of power. It is much more durable than income. We talk about income much more. We talk about socioeconomic status.

For me, wealth is really sort of at the crux of power. And one of the things about wealth is it transfers quite easily across generations, much more than social economic status, much more than income.

And so my work is to look at how wealth is used in that way and then also looking at how government policies are set up to sort of promote that and to make sure that that system persists and even thrives.

Steve Grumbine: 00:07:11

This is going to sound like a very, very junior question, and it probably is. But for clarification, I'd like to ask you, what does wealth mean?

Bob Williams: 00:07:22

Yeah, you know, they're formal definitions. And what I use is basically all your assets. I look at households, so all of your assets. So privately held assets, minus any kind of debt.

And usually I'm looking at real and financial assets, generally not looking at cars and furniture and that sort of thing. But it's assets that are more durable, most of which have the potential to either generate income or appreciate over time, or both.

Steve Grumbine: 00:07:52

Very good. I appreciate that because, you know, we oftentimes get in these debates that people say printing money isn't printing wealth.

And you're like, no one said it is. But money into the economy is a mobilizer. It's like the thing that unclogs the drain.

You put money in, it gets spent and creates kind of the mechanism that the government can use to mobilize real resources. Unfortunately, it seems like those real resources are spent on something we're going to talk about today, this concept of white supremacy.

People will deny that.

I mean, we got Donald Trump literally saying right here, right now that the civil rights movement was really mean to white people, really made it really tough on white people, and found that to be fascinating that there's a lot of white tears out there about this. But there is something to that, because it's right here, right now, this concept of white supremacy is.

It's on full display with ICE walking down the streets, knocking doors down, yanking people that don't look like them off and out. It doesn't matter if they're even dressed with kids, whatever.

The discrepancy, the absolute filth that comes from white supremacy and this white fear of replacement theory and all these other cockamamie right wing ideas. You're like, where do they hear all this?

How the heck does everybody get unified in this insane kind of pseudo, this alternative reality they've created? But it's funded. It didn't happen by accident.

Can you talk to me a little bit about that element and we can start getting into the book, you know, as we approach the definition of what it means to fund white supremacy and what you define as white supremacy.

Bob Williams: 00:09:42

Well, I think that for me, white supremacy is. I use that term instead of using white privilege. So it's obviously a much more provocative term than white privilege.

And it's because I wanted to be honest with what I think is going on. And white supremacy really has to do with all of the privileges and benefits it means to be white, as you sort of just explained.

And what I would argue is that again, what buttresses that white supremacy is that we as whites hold the overwhelming amount of wealth in this country.

And that wealth is what allows us to sort of go through the world without having to deal with a lot of the difficulties and conflicts and problems that people who are not white people of color, blacks in particular, have to deal with on a daily basis. And so that's again, the focus of the book is to try to explain how that system works and how it sort of continues to perpetuate itself.

It is expanding. There's no question the economic divide and the racial wealth gap are expanding.

Steve Grumbine: 00:10:54

So because we talk frequently about economics and obviously we're also talking about struggle in general, you know, and this definitely falls within the case of struggle.

I mean, we watched a genocide in Gaza that some were able to, in their own twisted brain find a way to say maybe not a real genocide, maybe not so much, you know, and you look at people that are considered to be subhuman, less than human, like rats, like just trash. And that mindset is so pervasive as part of this white supremacy that we see. And we see it domestically, right? We see this in so many ways.

We see this with how black people are, and let's be fair, policed in general, the difference between how they are policed and not policed.

And now we're watching them turn the focus on not just blacks, but whites and others that are maybe not in elite circles that Maybe stand in the way or create a speed bump for these kind of arrangements. And they are starting to feel a little bit of what it might have been like, although they will never be able to honestly feel what it's like.

Help me understand the mechanism by which these things are funded, how the government facilitates this accumulation, this wealth gap.

Because I know in the book you talk about 12 what you call tax expenditures or tax credits or tax cuts or tax avoidance strategies or whatever that they deploy to enable these things. Take us through the mechanisms by which this phenomenon takes place.

Bob Williams: 00:12:42

Sure. The federal government has some over 170 tax breaks for individuals. What I do is I focus on 12.

These 12, they tend to be the largest of those tax breaks.

And they are all similar that they are designed to meet the needs and circumstances of people who are already affluent and they are then to help those folks build wealth.

So essentially what the government is doing is helping households build wealth, but they are doing it only to those households who have already demonstrated that they have wealth. So let me give you an example. Three of these 12 tax breaks focus on homeowners. None of them help would be homeowners or prospective homeowners.

So you have to already have acquired the home to then be able to get the tax break, like the home mortgage interest deduction. So there's that. Two of them help households who are saving for retirement.

None of them help households who are trying to save just for a rainy day, who have much more liquid needs for saving. Three of them require you to itemize your tax deductions. And of course, the very few households do that other than people in the highest tax bracket.

It just doesn't make sense.

Three of them only help people who are willing to take higher risk investments, like the capital gains exclusion, people who are putting their money into the bank in terms of just earning interest. They don't get any kind of help. And then the last piece of it is that the majority of these 12 have no limit. They are entitlements.

If you own a home and you pay mortgage interest, you are entitled to the tax deduction. So they operate just like entitlements, like Social Security. But nobody talks about these when they talk about entitlement reform.

hat we're talking about is in: 2025

We're talking about huge amounts of money. And it's an annual benefit.

Steve Grumbine: 00:15:13

Wow.

I mean, it is ironic that, you know, when I think about what I call PIAN taxes or SYN taxes or behavior modification taxes, it's like they incentivize certain behaviors but to get those certain incentives you've got to have some pre existing conditions, right? Like a good paying job, money saved today, kids.

And unfortunately as a father of nine, there are going to be children in my family that will struggle to get a home and things that I think a lot of people at one point in time, I don't want to say took it for granted, but it was much more open to people in general.

Now you got groups like BlackRock buying up properties like crazy, inflating the costs of these houses and then turning the country into a nation of renters, if you will. Home ownership is at an all time low in terms of, you know, accessibility. And that's for everybody.

That's not just black and brown people or people on the lower stratum. I mean that's people walking out of four year degrees, struggling to get a job. Even the world has changed dramatically.

How does that look in practice now?

Bob Williams: 00:16:33

Well, I think that housing is its own issue in terms of what's happening there.

I mean, it's just, you know, we're not building enough homes, we're not building enough and it's, it's subject to limits that, that are meaning that it's going to just be harder, harder for young people to be able to become homeowners. I mean it's a circle that's only going to get worse.

So I think that what, you know, again the solution is to think about how we as a society can deploy the resources of the federal government to help individuals and households that need the sort of leg up to build wealth to then be able to participate in a, in the economy in a way that they're not able to right now. It's, we really have a system that, that if you have wealth, you have wins at your back. It's easier to be able to build more wealth.

It actually sort of can increase exponentially. But if you don't have wealth, it's the opposite. It's not just that you don't have winds at your back, the winds are blowing in your face.

And I'll give you an example. Think about how banks treat people who have wealth versus people who don't have wealth.

The bank sees me as a source of deposits and so they're encouraging me to save and they're doing everything they can to help me with that for people who don't have any, will the banks see those customers as an irritant because they impose costs, because they require, you know, transactions, but they don't have any money in their accounts that generate the kind of profits that the banks can then earn. So they set up high fees, they set up credit card rates, et cetera, that make it so much harder for people who don't have wealth. It's.

The whole system is like the Red Sea party. If you're on one side, you are benefiting from the system. If you're on the other side, you're getting drowned.

Steve Grumbine: 00:18:41

You know, one of the things that you talk about in this book, which ties into this nicely, I believe, is just kind of how these things came to be. Right. I like to marry everything that I talk about with things that I've talked about previously.

And I think Sandy Darity's work is very instrumental in understanding how we got here in some way.

I think that, you know, going back to chattel slavery and even the founding of this nation, you can see how every step along the way, the elite, the wealthy have always been the ones that these laws and stuff were there to protect. They weren't there to protect the people, quote, unquote, out of doors. And, you know, you saw this through chattel slavery.

And then when slavery supposedly ended, you saw this in the way that they rewrote the laws for vagrancy. You saw this in every step along the way. A means of extracting, a means of keeping folks down, a means of criminalizing existence, et cetera.

But the 12 that you specifically target in on, can you take us through the genesis of how each of those things came to be and the intent, really, of how white supremacy was basically empowered through this?

Bob Williams: 00:19:58

Sure. This was a fascinating part for me of the book in terms of learning about this.

modern federal income tax in: 1913

And this was an era in which, you know, child safety laws were created, occupational labor safety, food and drug trust busting, breaking up the monopolies. This was this celebrated period that was a point push back on the sort of unbridled industrial capitalism of the robber barons.

And so it's this sort of, you know, this brief moment of sort of progressive resistance, which I think in Part it was.

What I didn't realize is this is also the period where lynchings are at their peak, where the erection of Confederate monuments is going to full scale. And, you know, to show that that intersection is not just coincidental.

What I realized was that the two people in Congress that really pushed the in, particularly the estate tax, which was again, a really a pushback on the wealth class at that time.

So the creation of the income tax and the estate tax really were populous measures to try to push more of the tax burden onto wealthy folks rather than everyday folks. So the two people are furnifold. Simmons and Claude Kitchen, both from North Carolina. They pushed both of these taxes 20 years before that.

he election in North Carolina: 1898

1898 election in North Carolina is considered the most infamous election.

It is where white supremacy was overtly campaigned on, where white vigilante groups were going through black neighborhoods with guns, daring anybody to vote. And what happened was a day later, there was a landslide for the white Democratic candidates.

A day later, you have the coup and riot in Wilmington in which white people rose up and eliminated the black biracial city council, went into the black neighborhoods with cannons and killed up to 300 people. It was just an incredibly violent and horrible scene.

And then two years later, there is the disenfranchisement law, in which then blacks are completely eliminated from their political rights for the next 60 years. So this is the two people that are involved in this white supremacy campaign, then 18 years later, are populous. So it's just a fascinating example.

And one of the insights of stratification economics is to recognize that when we look at how we are doing, the tendency of whites is to both look within our group, but also across groups.

And so that it is quite possible for whites who have low wealth to actually be willing to accept policies that are against their economic interest if they see it as suppressing blacks even more. So there's this interesting piece where class and race are at tension with each other.

And it's a complicated issue, but it plays out in just, I think, in important and varied ways.

Steve Grumbine: 00:24:08

You know, go back to Bacon's rebellion.

I mean, there's examples, like, littered throughout history where you have a moment of solidarity and all it takes is just a sprinkling of inequality, a sprinkling of advantage, a sprinkling of privilege to get folks to sell each other out. And Bacon's Rebellion just. It is a really. I believe Michelle Alexander, in her book the New Jim Crow, spoke extensively about that.

I believe Sandy touches on it as well.

I'm curious, do you see the relationship between Bacon's Rebellion and these modern, you know, the poor whites kind of abandoning their own class interest in pursuit of this perceived racial interest? It feels very, very similar.

Bob Williams: 00:24:59

Yeah.

North Carolina Prior to this: 1898

And also during this period, the 2nd congressional district was mostly black majority district, and it sent four different black congressmen to Washington during this time period. It was called the Black Second because it sent so many black representatives.

But both Simmons and Kitchen were at one time representatives of this particular district. So they learned the power of a biracial coalition. In fact, Simmons lost twice running for office.

And he then recognized the need to just have these overt appeals to white and white bloodlines. I mean, the kinds of things that we are hearing again today, the echoes are just potent.

Steve Grumbine: 00:26:11

I guess we'll talk more about this here, but it feels like, you know, we thought we won a war. We thought the north beat the South. And in reality, it wasn't a geographical war. It was an ideological war.

And it seems like even during Reconstruction, when powers that be sold out and gave those slavers back their power, that that just continued forward. I mean, I wasn't around then. I can only read books and different things that are out there for study, but I just don't see a difference.

I know that there's a difference. Structurally, I mean, you could see. But at some level, it feels like that ideology won it, like. Or it's winning, I should say.

Do you see that kind of an extension of. Of the Civil War, like that it never really ended.

Bob Williams: 00:27:03

This stuff is deep indeed. So, yes, I think this notion that white tribalism is incredibly deep.

I think it's very difficult for us whites to really be able to work effectively and collaboratively with our brothers and sisters across racial lines. So, yeah, I think we are dealing with the same issues that people were dealing with 150 years ago.

You've mentioned Sandy's book, and again, it's a wonderful book in terms of the moments in which white America could have said, we're ready to deal with this issue, we have continued to back away from. So I do think we're dealing with the same issue. And, you know, it's like family abuse that just goes from generation to generation within families.

Right. I think we're dealing with this on a cultural, sociological level.

Steve Grumbine: 00:28:04

Absolutely. And we're seeing it play out in every strata and every functional area of society.

Intermission: 00:28:13

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Steve Grumbine: 00:28:34

There is no haven for the raven, so to speak. I mean, when you look at policing, I've told this story many times and I'm loath to tell it again, but I'm going to because it fits.

Many years ago,: 2002

Obviously that's a really big deal, especially for a guy like me who at the time had a fairly successful career as a senior sales engineer at a Fortune 5 company in Verizon at the time. And huge, huge stakes. And when they put me in jail, I was jailed with five young, very young black kids.

You know, we got to talking as people, I guess, do in a jail cell. And it was freezing. We had these burlap kind of blankets. It was cold, it was December and, you know, there's no comfort, there's no warmth.

It's just concrete floors and very, very cold. They went ahead and let me go on my own recognizance and basically said, don't make a fool out of me. Come back.

You know, when your trial is, you have a good job and you're an upstanding member of the community and probably just a one off, we'll let you go. And you white and I'm white, well, that was ironic. And it was a black commissioner that said this stuff to me.

There's a saying by Rosa Luxembourg that a socialist elected into a capitalist government doesn't suddenly turn the government socialist. They become a minister for capital.

And I imagine the same is true when an African American is brought into the thing, you know, they by themselves can't change the system. They are slave to the, no pun intended, slave to the code. And he went ahead and released me and.

But when I went back into the jail cell, waiting for my papers to be processed or whatever, these kids told me, you know, what they had done, and I'm not a cop. I don't think they were trying to embellish because I told them my story, and they told me theirs. They had done like a fraction of what I had done.

I think they had been found with a couple joints or something like that, and they were going to be kept for two weeks until their trial. I was, however, getting released that night.

And the legal gap, I mean, the cost of trying to survive the criminal system once you're in it, is extensive.

You're already broke and then now you got to pay legal fees, you got to pay the breathalyzer in the car, all these things that hurt for somebody who has a little bit of money. But for people who don't have money, chances are they don't drive anymore.

Chances are they're stuck getting somebody to drive them, if they can at all take public transportation, if it's even available. And their lives and their housing and everything is suddenly put into absolute jeopardy through cuts and spending, etc.

But more importantly now, the penalties that come with not being wealthy and white, the penalty of being born differently and now having to survive. The system meant to keep you in a subsisting position through stratification here.

You know, I guess my next question to you, based on my silly story, it's not silly at all. It's really sad, actually. How does that play out in stratification economics, though?

Aside from you got the 12 tax cuts, 12 tax breaks, 12 tax strategies, whatever, how does that play out in real terms today? How might somebody that's just opening their eyes and ears and mind to this phenomena, how might they see it today? What would they need to look for?

Bob Williams: 00:32:12

It's a great question. Part of it is the system is set up to be opaque, right? So again, these 12 tax deductions are all things that sort of don't feel like handouts, right?

They're entitlements.

So, for example, for any of your listeners who are homeowners and have mortgages, we take the sort of mortgage deduction and it feels like this is appropriate. And this is not a handout. So the whole system that I'm talking about is set up to be what I call stealth.

So it's stealth tax deductions because again, the notion is that none of this is favoritism, none of this is preferential. All of these tax deductions are available to anybody, right? But you have to have the wealth to be able to get them. There's no race barrier.

So what I'm arguing is that they essentially are recreating for whites only, sort of Jim Crow, but now it's for wealthy people only.

And so I think it's much easier for the people who don't have wealth to see how this system works than for those of us who have some wealth and then benefit from it. The idea of the system is to keep the narrative that we are the land of opportunity, we are a meritocracy.

And if I'm doing better than you, it's because I earned it. So it's very difficult for people to really sort of begin to penetrate how it works.

Steve Grumbine: 00:33:54

The I earned it part that is so spectacular. I mean, one of the things that we talk about here a lot, actually, is the bond market and the interest income channel and the government.

I mean, these are not bonds that are necessary. I mean, they create money out of thin air.

That's kind of part of the Article 1, Section 8 component of Congress has the ability to spend and basically levy taxes.

And when you think about the bond market, I mean, the bond market is, you know, the normal thinking is that we tax and then we collect taxes and then we spend. But that fundamentally misses the point that the government spends first and then taxes later.

And so when you think about the bond market, it's a safe bet the government checks don't bounce. Okay?

So interest rate hikes hurt the poor, hurt the working class, and I would imagine have an incredibly disparate outcome for black and brown people as well.

But when you think about the interest income channel, it's free money to people who have money, kind of like the same entitlement as when you think about the housing market and housing deductions and all these other hidden deductions, these occluded benefits that we try to pretend aren't there. But when you think about the bond market as a whole, people that already have money are making money hand over fist, free.

Just here I put my money in this account and I'm making insane amounts on, you know, interest income channel. This whole game is rigged in a way that is just absurd. And for me, I have a hard time taking it seriously anyway. It's very serious, by the way.

I don't want to come off flippant here. That's not what I mean.

But I understand that, you know, as a child, even as a kid going through grad school, okay, that these things that I teach you as if they're apolitical, that they're just ledgers, that they're just natural occurrences. The cultural hegemon, the mindset, the common sense, of course, that's just the way we do it here.

The fact of the matter is, is that money that these people are earning from interest income, they didn't do a damn thing to earn it. Nothing. But because they had money.

Now, they may have worked to get the money they originally had, but that's the payola to get in the door to play this game of free money through the bond market.

That right there is like, you see people that are taking 10, 12 vacations a year, live in expensive houses and never think twice about how they're going to pay their electric bill. And they just assume. They have to assume that. They just assume that they don't know better because.

Because, God, if they knew better, wouldn't that make them complicit? And maybe they are.

But the idea that they could look down their nose at someone and treat them as other, it's more than just an individual's imperfection. It's more than just an individual's bad character. It's systemic.

And I think what you're pointing out through your work here is that we have more than just a rich person, poor person problem. We have more than just stratification.

We have an intentional system and a system that intentionally rewards whiteness, rewards money, rewards elitism, rewards anything but hard work. Your thoughts?

Bob Williams: 00:37:36

Yeah. So the focus of my work is to really look at how the system benefits whites.

And you mentioned that people may have worked hard to get the money, and you know that they then were able to invest in the bond market. So, you know, how did people get to the point where they were able to work hard?

Steve Grumbine: 00:37:58

Yep.

Bob Williams: 00:37:59

So, I mean, again, what I look at is how wealth progressed through generations in terms of American households. And many people will say, well, I didn't get an inheritance. And that's true.

Only about somewhere around a third of the households are likely to get any kind of real inheritance. But that's just the tip of the iceberg of what generational wealth can provide.

I think far more important what parents do for their kids is to be able to, as best they can, put them in a position where they're able to go to college. And in some cases, they're able to help pay for college. So by the time they graduate, they have a diploma without really huge student loan debt.

And right there, you're now talking about a college wage premium of 20 to $30,000 a year that kids are able to then take for the next 40 years.

So people may not have gotten an inheritance from their parents or their grandparents, but by being able to get through college with either modest or no debt, that is an amazing benefit. Yes, that is something, again, that white parents have Been able to do far more than Latinx parents.

So it's this benefits and this privilege just across multiple levels.

Steve Grumbine: 00:39:29

You know, when I think about stratification in macros. Right.

Macroeconomics in and of itself can hide a lot of travesties, can hide a lot of, or as you say, obscure, you know, some of the truth of the story here.

And before we got on this call, I talked to you a little bit about how, you know, within macroeconomics, the idea that somehow or another based on sectoral balances and such, that I can be grouped together with the non governmental sector of Boeing, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and the Washington Wizards or something like that.

Somehow or another I can be lumped into that as the non government sector also hides kind of the stratification that you're speaking of at a racial level.

Like, sure, there are some African Americans that have really made out well, some non African Americans, some blacks from varying places that are immigrants, that are playing sports and stuff, that are making millions and millions of dollars. Oh my goodness, look, we're a post racial society. Look, Barack Obama was elected president.

And so they've got all these anecdotal kind of rebuttals that are just ridiculous on their face. But because of stratification, you can look at the aggregate of all and it is very, very imbalanced.

You get into it with a lot of graphs and deep thought here in your book. But what does it look like in numbers right now? Like what does the average black family have wealth wise? And what is the average white family?

Bob Williams: 00:41:04

Because wealth is so skewed, talking about the median is probably more realistic than average. So in terms of then answer your question, you know, the median black household has about 30 to 40 thousand dollars in net worth.

For whites it would be closer to 300,000. So it's about 10 to 1. And depending on how you define wealth and net worth, it can actually be a little bit higher.

So I think that statistic right there is so totally in contrast to what most people think. There was this poll that was done and people were asked how large of the racial wealth gap do they think that exists?

And people said they thought that for every hundred dollars in a white household had, Black households had $90. So a very modest gap. Obviously that is totally at odds with what the reality is.

And so I think that again there is this narrative that things were bad way back when, but that over the last 60 years we have become a much more even handed racially tolerant society which is at total odds with what.

Steve Grumbine: 00:42:23

The reality is, yes, you know, Derek Hamilton, who came up with, at least he made popular the concept of baby bonds. And then, of course, over there with our friend Sandy Darity, once again, the concept of reparations for descendants of slaves.

I mean, what is this concept, if you will, of, I think you call it malign neglect and then benign neglect. Talk about that, and then let's talk about the solutions that benign neglect goes back to.

Bob Williams: 00:42:57

mes. This is now right around: 1970

So after the civil rights legislation, obviously, a lot of anger that's going on as black Americans are sort of wondering when any benefits are going to come down to them again. There was a number of cities were going through civil unrest at that time period, et cetera.

So Moynihan says what we need is a period of benign neglect to let the modest affirmative action work its way. The idea was that by eliminating Jim Crow, that the disparities would, over time, slowly erode and go away. And of course, that's not happening.

You look at any metric, the disparities, you know, college attainment levels, et cetera.

Yes, black Americans have higher college attainment levels than they did in the past, but the gap between black and white college attainment is actually increased. So all of these things that they thought were going to happen didn't.

Well, now, fast forward 50 years, we now know that Moynihan's point that things would sort of work out on its own haven't and won't. I argue that our policy has not been benign neglect. It's been maligned neglect.

We are perfectly happy letting the status quo operate and letting the divide get wider. And that's the argument that I'm making, that we're all culpable. You know, we're acting like things are somehow going to get better on their own.

When all of the evidence suggests that.

Steve Grumbine: 00:44:47

Ain'T happening, that is absolutely spot on. I mean, there's so much stuff that we believe that just ain't so.

Pulling all that garbage away from our eyes and that surround our brain, that we have just folksy wisdom, you know, the kind of things that we just talk about at the water cooler, that just ain't so. It makes up so much of the belief system of the average person, and it's kind of hard to blame them. They're inundated with propaganda.

They're inundated with class based Programming on the television. They're completely inundated with insane nonsense from the White House even.

I mean the idea that somehow or another the young lady that was out there protesting ICE suddenly tried to hit the officer when he shot her three times in the face. I mean this is a white woman that's.

We are witnessing what it takes unfortunately to get people to pay attention to the struggle that black and brown people have known every day of their existence. Now suddenly it's creeping into white society and it's maybe now getting a little bit of attention.

I guess my question to you as we go to get out of this here is what's the answer man? I mean like we see the problems. I personally don't believe we can vote our way out of this unfortunately.

I think we're at a point in time where its full mask off. And I think that basically the Uni party of capital is large and in charge and making choices.

I mean obviously faction A with the white supremacy agenda, it's kind of shared by both parties. I mean there's a elite that run this country and make no bones about it.

I just don't see the kind of democratic opportunities to make the changes that I believe are probably prescriptive for this kind of arrangement here. Obviously even reparations, which the government as the currency issue could do yesterday could do it instantly.

I fundamentally don't know what mechanism would allow that to happen.

Just don't see a government, regardless of which party's in power that actually displays any kind of meaningful non veneer level solutions to anything at this point. Biden got tripped up by the parliamentarian trying to pass proact. I mean there's so many things that just fly.

You've got one that is nakedly just brutish and grotesque and the other side that pays lip service but ends up still deporting people and doing the same things and still oppressing people. So what do you think is the solution the path forward to fixing this or is it just your intent to bring awareness? I mean, what are your thoughts?

Bob Williams: 00:47:35

Well, my intent is to bring awareness. Now I agree with what all that you just said. Right. Don't you hate agreeing with me on that? And I can get depressed as easily as anybody else. Right.

And I think that the way forward isn't yet clear as I think you've just articulated.

And I think that unfortunately we will get to a crisis where there will be a political realignment and so that there will really will become a biracial multiracial progressive movement that will push Forward. I do have one personal example of optimism.

Steve Grumbine: 00:48:15

Give it to me.

Bob Williams: 00:48:17

On Monday, through my community, we had about two dozen Buddhist monks who are on a 2,300mile battle pilgrimage starting somewhere in Louisiana or Texas. They came through. They're on their way to D.C. they're promoting peace, kindness and compassion, and they're walking from city to city.

So I was stunned by how many people came out to watch them.

Steve Grumbine: 00:48:51

Wow.

Bob Williams: 00:48:52

It was tens of thousands. There were traffic jams as people were trying to find a spot along the route.

People stopped their cars in the middle of roads because all the parking along the side of the roads had been taken. And when they came down the street, everybody was quiet.

And while we were waiting, people were talking to each other and we were building community, learning about each other, sharing names, but there was such a visual hunger. It was incredibly moving.

Steve Grumbine: 00:49:26

That is a little bit of optimism right there.

Bob Williams: 00:49:28

Yeah, I mean, it's just. It's there. It just needs to be. How do we sort of put it to work?

Steve Grumbine: 00:49:36

That's. I appreciate that very much. I really do. Bob, we're coming to a close here. I'd like to.

I probably missed more than I got, and that's the nature of this beast here. I do the best I can with the tools I have, but take us out.

Do you have anything that we missed that you think we should bring up to close our conversation out?

Bob Williams: 00:49:58

Well, I think that what we could do, and you've mentioned some of it, baby bonds, expanding Pell grants, doubling Pell grants.

I mean, there are clear things that we could do that would turn the efforts of the federal government, which from day one, they did things to help households build wealth, but it always was the elites. So there are mechanisms by which we could actually make it so that the economy could become much more inclusive.

And I think we would all be better off. So those programs and policies are, you know, out there. We just need to sort of develop the political will to use them.

Steve Grumbine: 00:50:44

Very, very good, Bob. Thank you so much for your time.

Obviously, we were discussing your book funding white supremacy, federal wealth policies, and the modern racial wealth gap that will be in our Real Progressives bookstore. So if you go to our website, you'll be able to find it there. But also you've written other things. Where can we find more of your work?

I know you're not on social media.

Bob Williams: 00:51:08

If you can email me, I'd be happy to respond. That might be the easiest way.

I'm not so busy that I can't deal with requests for work and things like that presumably you'll have my email address so people can feel free to contact me.

Steve Grumbine: 00:51:21

Fantastic. We will include that.

Bob Williams: 00:51:23

And I'd love to hear sort of viewer criticism of the book.

Steve Grumbine: 00:51:27

Absolutely. And now, to be fair, we are going to be an audio podcast.

Bob Williams: 00:51:32

That's right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:51:33

But I do want to say one thing, though. We do a thing on Tuesday evenings called Macro and Chill. It's a webinar where we invite people that listen to the podcast to come.

We break it down into 15 minute segments and we discuss each segment. You're more than welcome to join us. We are eastern time zone. It is 8pm on Tuesday evenings.

If that's within your awake time, we can send you an invite. If you can come, it would be great. We'd love to have you.

Bob Williams: 00:52:01

Great.

Steve Grumbine: 00:52:02

All right. Well, with that, folks, my name's Steve Grumbine. On behalf of my guest, Robert B. Williams, we'll call him Bob.

For now, I want to thank you all for joining us. Real Progressives is a nonprofit, 501C3, operating in the United States. That means that your donations are tax deductible.

Consider becoming a monthly donor to help us get more of this content out there and to do more webinars and to do more book club clubs and to really try to help educate a population that is just inundated with propaganda. Please help us. Please consider becoming a monthly donor by going to patreon.com forward/real progressives.

You can go to our website, realprogressives.org and go to donate. You can also go to our substack, which is substack.com real progressives. We are definitely looking for donations. If you can do it, we can accept it.

So without further ado, on behalf of my guest Robert B. Williams, Bob, and myself, Steve Grumbine, for the podcast Macro and Cheese, we are out of here.

End Credits: 00:53:17

with the working class since: 2015