Their market fundamentalism and neutral fairness masks racial hierarchies of the economic systems – political energies must be focused toward the liberation of black and brown people

Black Americans are dying from COVID-19 at almost three times the rate of white Americans. As has been widely noted, black people in this country face a variety of systemic public health risks—including higher pollution in neighborhoods and greater rates of asthma and heart disease—that contribute to this high fatality rate. Black and brown people are also more likely to work in industries like food service, care work, shipping, meatpacking, and farm work, where workers are being forced to choose between their lives or their livelihoods, while wealthier white-collar workers are better able to shelter and work remotely. The failures of the federal economic response accentuated these disparities. Wealthier and whiter communities gained quick access to Fed funds in money markets, while black and brown businesses were largely left out of the small business Paycheck Protection Program. Though most people received a one-time $1,200 cash support, debt payments and rent are still due. Working-class families must scratch together money to make these payments, while financiers and landlords retain their revenue streams. The COVID-19 crisis has cast into stark relief what has always been true: the wealth and prosperity of the U.S. economy rests on the labor, and the lives, of black and brown communities. Systemic racial disparities of wealth and health are woven deeply into the fabric of American capitalism. This system of racial capitalism is a result of policy choices that structure our political economy. Modern systems of precarious work are rooted in histories of extractive labor models, from Jim Crow to undocumented immigrant labor. Many black and brown workers were cut out of the twentieth-century New Deal social contract. Zoning policies have deliberately concentrated poverty and pollution—and therefore poor health—in black and brown neighborhoods while securing economic gains and class advantage for wealthier and whiter communities. The rise of predatory systems of student and consumer debt paper over the erosion of the safety net and fuel returns for financial interests. The racialization of 108 D issen t · SUMMER 2020 A protester in front of the 3rd Precinct police building while it burns on May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) 109 THE PANDEMIC public goods, from healthcare to welfare to food stamps, has helped drive austerity and the dismantling of the safety net. These policies are sustained by a set of interests and ideologies. Businesses directly benefit from these extractive economic models. But so too do middle- and upper-class constituencies. An alliance between big business, those hostile to racial integration and the civil rights movement, and anxious and self-interested affluent elites is at the heart of the modern conservative coalition. These political arrangements are legitimated by market fundamentalism and color-blind notions of fairness and neutrality that obfuscate the deep unfreedom and racial hierarchy of our economic system. The COVID-19 crisis exposes the harsh reality of this system. It might also animate a more equitable and inclusive reimagining of our political economy. We need to direct our political energies toward the liberation of black and brown people—and in so doing, secure the liberation for all of us from the inequities of modern capitalism.