Often when Dedrick Asante-Muhammad gives a talk about race and economics, it’s to audiences who might not have a base level of understanding. That was not his audience at the region’s first St. Louis Racial Equity Summit, he said, so he decided to be more clear with his language.
“We say ‘racial inequality,’ but what we’re really trying to talk about is white supremacy and deconstructing white supremacy,” said Asante-Muhammad, of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and an expert in racial economic inequality analysis. “I want to name that.”
Keynote speaker Asante-Muhammad showed the summit’s sold-out audience of more than 500 people on October 11 how he had crossed out “racial inequality” on all his PowerPoint slides and replaced them “white supremacy.”
“That term is often used in a classist way,” he said, “like white supremacists are those poor working-class people in the South or in the Northwest who are Neo-Nazis. But I think it’s important to understand that many of the institutions we work at, the foundations that fund us, the governments we work with are the main purveyors of white supremacy. The foundation of white supremacy is racial economic inequality, and the foundation of racial economic inequality is the racial wealth divide.”
Asante-Muhammad was among 65 speakers across more than 20 breakout sessions, who spoke about the work of advancing racial equity across the region. Presenters highlighted local successes, bold ideas, learning experiences and best practices, organizers said.
“The movement is not on the way, it is here; it has been here,” said David Dwight IV, executive director and lead strategy catalyst at Forward Through Ferguson. “It’s time to move from a rag-tag team of isolated advocates to a coordinated field of leaders. Today was an opportunity to deepen our relationships, to deepen our camaraderie.”
Forward Through Ferguson worked with several organizations to plan the summit, including FOCUS St. Louis, United Way of Greater St. Louis, St. Louis Promise Zone, and Clark-Fox Policy Institute. A goal of the sessions was to build alignment and investment in Forward Through Ferguson’s framework for achieving racial equity by 2039.
In spring 2018, Forward Through Ferguson released the STL Action Plan 2039, imagining a St. Louis devoid of racial inequality by the year 2039. That year will mark 25 years since the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.
Much of the content covered in the sessions focused on how to implement the Ferguson Commission report’s Signature Priorities of Youth at the Center, Justice for All, and Opportunity to Thrive.
Asante-Muhammad applauded that the Ferguson Commission’s 2015 report did not stop at publishing the report, but that there is a foundation charged with pushing forward those goals. His one critique was that there needs to be stronger economic recommendations that include clear goals of achievement. For instance, he said the suggested employment programs should have an attached goal for bringing down the unemployment rate by a specific percentage.
Asante-Muhammad started off his remarks by recognizing those who rebelled five years ago against the issues of inequality and suffering and who likely weren’t in the room. The entire two-day summit revolved around the five-year anniversary of the Ferguson Uprising and how far the region and country have come since then.
Often times, people look at race relations as a personal thing, focusing on how people feel about a certain group or whether people have enough Latino friends or black friends. However the base of racial inequality is economics, as it has been since people were enslaved for economic gain.
“You can never have good personal relations with people who are using you as slaves or with the people who you are pushing off the land,” said Asante-Muhammad. “Economics is at the center.”
Oftentimes people wonder why white supremacy can be so pervasive in the United States in 2019.
“It’s because we haven’t dealt with the economics sufficiently,” he said. “Until we deal with the economics, we’ll be saying the same thing in 2039.”
The STL Action Plan 2039 cites a quote from the 1968 report by the Kerner Commission, which was convened in response to a wave of deadly race riots. Asante-Muhammad read the quote aloud to the audience: “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
When people look back at the Civil Rights Movement, he said, we often forget that deconstructing the economy was at the center of it.
“We’ve taken all the things that the Civil Rights Movement didn’t accomplish, and we made that disappear like they weren’t fighting for it,” said Asante-Muhammad. “And we only highlight that there are no more colored water fountains, like that’s what the Civil Rights Movement was all about, versus a much broader social-economic agenda.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in the midst of struggle, not after victory, he said. He was supporting the Poor People’s Campaign, and 140 rebellions dealing with economic disenfranchisement took place in 1967. Robert Kennedy, who was killed shortly after King, endorsed the campaign as well, Asante-Muhammad explained.
The Civil Rights Movement’s “freedom budget” looked at the abolition of poverty, health service for all and adequate minimum wage equating to about $14 an hour in today’s value, he said.
“There have been many battles won, but many wars never won,” he said. “Narratives shape our understanding of reality.”
Even with the nonprofits he works with, he said, people often still fall into regressive narratives. Even people doing good work perpetuate the idea that there is a system that works and communities of color are doing something wrong, he said.
“That is the myth,” he said. “The truth is our economy is designed to reward the wealthy and leave others behind. It has been quite clear for the last 30 to 40 years. We have an upside-down tax system, residential economic segregation, lack of investment and disenfranchised communities.”
The myth is that white people have worked hard, and now everybody else can do it too. However, he points out that more money was invested in the creation of the white American middle class than in rebuilding Europe, including subsidies for housing and higher education.
From 1947 to 1979, the country’s poorest 20 percent saw a 120 percent growth in income, while the country’s wealthiest 5 percent saw a 86 percent growth, he said. This is considered progressive. However, from 1979 to 2008, the poorest have seen their income decline by 7 percent and the richest 1 percent have seen a 224 percent growth. This is a regressive economy, he said.
However, the country continues to spout a “sophisticated justification” for this racial divide, that if the black people would just go to school then they too would experience steady growth, he said.
One member of the audience asked if he thought redistributing wealth was a radical idea. Asante-Muhammad responded that redistributing wealth is something our country does every year.
“We continue to reinvest $700 billion of tax money to support the wealth development of the wealthy,” he said, pointing to tax cuts and housing subsidies. “We redistribute wealth all the time, it’s just that people don’t mind when it goes to the wealthy.”
