#racism and the economy
“A true and appropriate answer to our race problem, as to many others, would be restoration of our communities—it being understood that a community, properly speaking, cannot exclude or mistreat any of its members. This is what we forgot during slavery and the industrialization that followed, and have never remembered. A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, and an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members—among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.
“Is this something that the government could help with? Of course it is. Community cannot be made by government prescription and mandate, but the government, in its proper role as promoter of the general welfare, preserver of the public peace, and forbidder of injustice, could do much to promote the improvement of communities. If it wanted to, it could end its collusion with the wealthy and the corporations and the ‘special interests.’ It could stand, as it is supposed to, between wealth and power. It could assure the possibility that a poor person might hold office. It could protect, by strict forbiddings, the disruption of the integrity of a community or a local economy or an ecosystem by any sort of commercial or industrial enterprise, that is, it could enforce proprieties of scale. It could understand that economic justice does not consist in giving the power to the most money.
“The government could do such things. But we know well it is not going to do them; it is not even going to consider doing them, because community integrity, and the decentralization of power and economy that it implies, is antithetical to the ambitions of the corporations. The government’s aim, therefore, is racial indifference, not integrated communities. Does this mean that our predicament is hopeless? No. It only means that our predicament is extremely unfavorable, as the human predicament has often been.
“What the government will or will not do is finally beside the point. If people do not have the government they want, then they will have a government they must either change or endure. Finally, all the issues that I have discussed here are neither political nor economic, but moral and spiritual. What is at issue here is our character as a people. It is necessary to look beyond the government to the possibility—one that seems to be growing—that people will reject what have been the prevailing assumptions, and begin to strengthen and defend their communities on their own.”
–Wendell Berry, “Racism and the Economy” (1988) in The Art of the Commonplace, (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002), 63-64.
“The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth—that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community—and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and the practical means. This happens—it is happening—because the alignment of wealth and power permits economic value to overturn value of any other kind. The value of everything is reduced to its market price. A thing not marketable has no value. It is increasingly apparent that we cannot value things except by selling them, and that we think it acceptable, and indeed respectable, to sell anything.”
–Wendell Berry, “Racism and the Economy” (1988) in The Art of the Commonplace, (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002), 58.
