Episode 82 – A Lesson in Systemic Racism with Camille Walsh

Macro N Cheese Episode 82
A Lesson in Systemic Racism with Camille Walsh

Camille Walsh [music/intro] (00:02):

In terms of communism that it is a quote, unquote slippery slope. And once you start funding schools equally, once you start saying that it shouldn’t be based on basically the local property tax wealth, which was really the question case, then you’re just a communist country.

Camille Walsh [music/intro] (00:19):

Want to have some hope that the people who might’ve otherwise bought into the taxpayer myth will have a different approach in the same way that during the great depression that was at rejuvenation of the left in part because there were clearly impacts that were hitting people so widely, that it was hard to blame individuals for their own economic predicament.

Geoff Ginter [music/intro] (01:28):

And now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse all together. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

Steve Grumbine (01:34):

All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today, I have Camille Walsh who is an associate professor of law, economics, and public policy and American and ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell. She holds a JD from Harvard Law School, as well as a PhD in 20th century U S History from University of Oregon. And her first book, Racial Taxation, Schools, Segregation, and Taxpayer Citizenship, 1869 to 1973 was published in 2018 by University of North Carolina press.

I have been trending down this trail for the last several months and our most recent conversations with Raul Carrillo. Also, Irami Frimpong. We’ve had Keeanga and we’ve had Darrick Hamilton. We’ve had Sandy Darity and now we’ve got Camille and I am so happy to have her because her book is so powerful from what I’ve heard from everybody. And yes, I do have this book. I am so excited to read it. So with that, thank you so much for joining me.

Walsh (02:42):

Thank you for having me. It’s great to talk to you.

Grumbine (02:45):

Well, I appreciate that. We’re in very scary times right now with this pandemic that we’re in the middle of. I don’t think any of us really ever thought we’d be here. Right smack dab in an election with all kinds of funny stuff going around about the election. It’s just an incredibly toxic time. And that’s just for rank and file Americans, even people that are doing pretty good. But the issue here is, is that there’s some people out there in this world that are not doing very good.

And we oftentimes overlook them because they’re not us, or maybe we are so caught up in our own problems, we don’t think about this. But at a time where you’ve got black lives matter taking to the streets and white allies joining them and people of all races coming to the forefront to fight for justice, the concept of racial taxation and the concept of what drove us to this point they’ve got to be brought out front and center. We cannot let this time go without bringing this to the forefront.

Opportunities like this just don’t come around very often to really slam dunk the point of the inequality and the evil, quite frankly, that has been perpetuated against people of color in this nation since its inception, quite frankly. And here we are in 2020, and it just doesn’t look like it’s a whole lot better. Yeah. Can you set the stage for what we’re experiencing and maybe where it came from?

Walsh (04:14):

I mean, I can certainly try, but I think any historian right now has got to be feeling the way I felt the last six months, which is we often feel like we’ve got a lot of examples to draw from in the past. And there are quite a few examples from the past that we can draw parts from, but we are definitely in a moment with so many intersecting and fairly to a degree, at least unprecedented things, coalescing that I think what matters is the values we take into that moment.

And we can look to a lot of past moments to draw some lessons, but none of them is going to be exactly on point. And a lot of them unfortunately are going to be lessons about how past people went down the wrong path, or, you know, sort of made the selfish choice. So I think part of what we’re experiencing right now in its connections to racial taxation is the way in which we’ve for centuries tied the pretense of spending and “deservingness” to certain identity groups’ sense of ownership, and particularly like white belief in ownership of resources and sort of white assumption of resources, right?

Like, I mean, staking claim to land that didn’t belong to you, but just sort of claiming it. Those kinds of things are so intimately connected to the way that we’re seeing spending talked about now, because we’re seeing things we’ve seen in the past where groups get divided against each other based on whether or not they’re going to get this tiny amount of resources or support in the midst of really an unprecedented crisis, which is the moment to spend.

And we’re still seeing this dialogue happen. So it’s not surprising historically, I guess, but as you said, this is a moment to take some dramatic action because if we don’t spend now then when on earth, is it the right time to spend?

Grumbine (06:08):

You almost feel embarrassed, laughing about it, but it’s so in your face that it’s like, how in the world could we screw this up? How could this even be a debate? And you brought up a great point, and that was the identity of the taxpayer. And our podcast largely focuses on modern monetary theory, but we’re very deeply interwoven into all the social aspects of this and legal aspects of it as well.

And the concept of the taxpayer is probably one of the most pernicious lies. I’m just going to call it out. It’s one of the most evil things that has ever been laid before us. And it speaks to who’s deserving and who’s not. And Raul Carrillo and Jesse Myerson wrote a great article in the Splinter Magazine that talked about The Dangerous Myth of the Taxpayer Dollar, the taxpayer myth, basically. And this comes back to the identity that you were talking about. Talk about the concept of the taxpayer dollar and where this all came from.

Walsh (07:09):

Yeah. In the U S and different countries have different sort of taxpayer myths, but there’s very few of them outside of France has a strong one for whatever reason, but there is a weird 20th century legacy of like taxpayer resistance movements in France. And they may be tied to, I’m not going to speculate about French history. They may be tied to other things, other political movements that are not so nice.

And in the U S it dates back to the idea from the founding of the nation around who gets to be a citizen and who is qualified to vote and who is qualified and permitted and enabled and facilitated to own other human beings. You know, it’s all around this tax paying identity, property owning taxpaying white males. And after the civil war, what you see is you still have that identity in play. It’s it still holds all the power.

That group is still the group that’s making virtually all the laws, but now they’re sort of putting it in a different language when you start to see the founding of schools, which is what I focus on in my book, but it applies to a lot of other government services as well, particularly after the civil war, get this boom in common schools being founded. And they’re kind of founded on this tradition of local property tax funding.

And from that funding, you sort of decide whether that school gets one room and 20 books, or, you know, just a back shed and no books. And local school boards make those decisions. And those local school boards are populated by white people, white men in those towns. And so over and over again, when I looked back through the archives, one of the things that I found in these legal cases is that over and over again, whether or not a state had a quote, unquote “colorblind” taxation system, where they were like, oh, we don’t differentiate our taxes based on black taxpayers and white taxpayers.

That’s fine. They wouldn’t technically be doing that, but they would be gathering the tax funds. And then the school board would be distributing 10 times as much to the white school as to the black school in town, because they still had basically unequal schools or segregated schools.

And if they had actual literal, separate taxation, they would find other insidious ways to ensure that, okay, they’ve got their quote, unquote “white taxpayers” and their “black taxpayers,” and they’re supposedly separate pools of money, but they would somehow manage to tax the black taxpayers for property. They would draw the property lines for the taxation for the white school district so large as to encompass black property.

So the black taxpayers were paying for the white school and lo and behold, no white taxpayers were paying for the black school. These mechanisms and these like tiny little tools just got replicated over and over again. And then the really insidious thing is that when you create government services like that, and you build them on those local tax bases, and there’s been a lot of studies about people’s like emotional attachment to, or resentment of taxes, and people tend to be like the most emotionally attached to their local taxes because they feel like, oh, those are my local services, and I can really see that, see my money in action.

But part of what that means is that they also then feel like they’ve bought and paid for it. They feel an entitlement to a particular thing. Even if that school was built 60 years ago, they’re like, well, I moved to this wealthy white neighborhood, this school district, I moved to this neighborhood because it had a good school rating. That’s my school. I paid for that with my tax dollars. And that sense of entitlement, it permeates the way we talk about public education in the U S and it’s really devastating that it does unfortunately.

Grumbine (10:53):

It’s interesting you say that because I’ve come to find, and correct me on this if I’m wrong here, I’ve come to believe that the law is not on our side in this, when it comes to the concept of a right to an education to begin with, even that, that has been left to the States, and there is no federal right to an education. Is that correct? Or am I misstating that?

Walsh (11:17):

No, that is correct. And in fact, you just hit the nail on what motivated and drove me honestly, to go to graduate school. I think after law school was my second year of constitutional law class and the very end of the chapter on equal protection. I’ll never forget it. We’d read through all these cases on civil rights, on equal protection, on fundamental rights.

And there’s all these fundamental rights from early in the 20th century, like the right to procreate, the state can’t sterilize you. I mean, it was still doing it until the 1980s, but like technically the state couldn’t sterilize people for criminal offenses after, you know, a case in the 1940s, it took that long. So there were all these fundamental rights. They don’t have to be spelled out in the constitution. It’s just so obvious that they need to be protected as rights.

The right to interstate travel is kind of a fascinating one actually right now. Cause that was one of the earliest fundamental rights. And it came out of the court during the great depression when people from Oklahoma and Arkansas were moving during the dust bowl and going to California and California enacted these laws that were like, well, if you don’t have a job in the state of California, you can’t enter our state. If you’re a California, you can’t bring somebody in if they don’t have a job.

And so it went to the Supreme Court, okay. Obviously we’re a federal government. You can’t have States just set up their own borders with each other, but it’s not anywhere in the constitution. And so we’re going to have to draw it from all these places. So unfortunately in that one, they came up with six different rationales because it’s not in the constitution anyway.

So moving ahead, we’re into the chapter. There’s this case, San Antonio versus Rodriguez in 1973, after a long line, almost 20 years from Brown versus Board of Education on of school segregation, lawsuits of various kinds that had all been unanimous rulings and Milliken V Bradley was the following year, that was 1974. And that was the case where the court split five to four and basically said essentially split on busing in Detroit in that case, but actually San Antonio V Rodriguez the year before I think is really the moment where you see the split, because it wasn’t directly about a segregation remedy like busing, like a more obvious one, but it was about funding.

And it was about property tax funding to an overwhelmingly white school and an overwhelmingly Latinx school on the other side of town, which was incredibly poor, incredibly poorly funded in comparison to the white school. And it goes to the Supreme Court and they make all these claims in the case. They claim that this is a case of racial discrimination and violates the 14th amendment. And they claim that it’s a case of class discrimination based on wealth, which the court had considered for like the decade before that briefly, they kind of flirted with it.

 And then they claimed that education is a fundamental, right? And the court ignores the race claim, the class, the like poverty claim. This was the case where they said no, and shut the door on that. And this was also the case where after Brown, most commentators assumed that when Earl Warren said that education was perhaps the most important function of state and local governments in Brown vs Board, most people were like, well, obviously it’s a fundamental right then.

Look, we just made, you know, procreation a fundamental right. We talked about these other things. Clearly education must be, and in San Antonio versus Rodriguez, they very closely say, no, it’s not. And part of that was anti-communism. Part of that was just a very blunt anti-communism by Justice Powell who wrote the majority opinion.

And I’ve looked at a lot of his memos on this, and it’s pretty clear that the opponents, in that case, they had all of these documents and briefs where they were like, this is the past to Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China. Those are direct quotes. They put it in terms of communism, that it is a quote, unquote “slippery slope,” and once you start funding schools equally, once you start saying that it shouldn’t be based on basically the local property tax wealth, which was really the question of the case, then you’re just a communist country.

Grumbine (15:12):

It’s ridiculous.

Walsh (15:12):

So you’re right. There unfortunately isn’t and it’s left to the States. And that means that based on whatever one state constitution says, like Washington state has really strong language in our constitution around education. So that means that we have a more protected right to education for students here than in many other States where they sort of say, Oh, yeah, some schools.

Grumbine (15:33):

Can I ask a strange question and I am not a legal scholar, but I enjoy talking about it. The 14th amendment was used as a means of passing the ACA. It was also been used in many other ways to mitigate things with the fourth amendment that have been completely butchered as a means of redressing, if you will, racial discrimination such, has anyone ever fought this? And I’m sure there’s a million examples of this.

And I just feel like idiot saying it, but is there not a case to be made at an equal protection cause kind of case for education to meet the same level as Seattle or wherever you’re at? If you’ve got this great robust thing, could somebody not take that to the Supreme Court and say, why doesn’t our state have that? If they have it, why don’t we have that?

Walsh (16:24):

You know, what you’re getting at is really something that there’s so many things we would do differently, but if we could go back in time and just encourage them. You know, reconstruction Congress that did a lot of good things, did a lot of great things in many cases. But if we could say, I think the last sentence that you’re talking about is nor shall any state deprive any person of blah, blah, blah, equal protection of the laws and within its jurisdiction, it means that California cannot deprive any person within its jurisdiction, equal protection of the laws.

So that means California can’t deprive any person of the same rights that the federal government guarantees in the Bill of Rights. California could add extra rights. It could add extra privacy protections, right? It could go beyond what the fourth amendment implies according to the current Supreme Court’s interpretation of the fourth amendment. But somebody from Oregon couldn’t then go and say, but California does this. Why can’t we do it?

No it’s honestly where a lot of the inequality in schools happen now. It happens between the States like between a really poorly funded state, actually California would be a good example on that side and a state that just has like maybe a wealth of natural resources and like almost nobody in the state where they can spend a lot more money per person.

Grumbine (17:36):

We oftentimes talk about the race to the bottom. And we’re usually talking about companies leaving a state and leaving this island of people without means to take care of themselves anymore. There’s no work, there’s revenue for their local communities. Their schools go bankrupt, their counties and States their cities, et cetera, go bankrupt.

And you look at places like Flint, Michigan as a poster child for these kinds of examples. And then you think about the idea of schools being, you imagined it doesn’t take much imagination. That’s happening. You look at a place like Flint that has lost most of its tax base. How in the world did their schools even stay in existence? It’s just unbelievable.

Walsh (18:19):

Right? And those are the examples. I think they just don’t get reported on in the same way because the people on the ground there are just doing their best to make it through every day. And those are the kids who aren’t as likely to get out. One of the things that inspired me to research education to begin with, especially after I read the end of that chapter. And I was like, okay, wait, what? That’s equal protection for ending with that. It’s a terrible ending. We need to write a different ending.

But part of it is that right around that same time I was in law school and or maybe it was a few years before that it was in college. And I was first generation in my family to go to college from a very rural town. But my rural town had an, this is going to sound weird, but we had a nuclear power plant and the nuclear power plant was it got shut down for safety problems.

At the time I was in school, it was the big jobs maker. It was the tax base. That was why our schools were halfway decent in this little rural town. And after that power plant got shut down, which was a few years after I left. I remember they cut high school English to two years instead of four. And I remember realizing they were doing that cause I was friends with one of my old English teachers.

And when I realized they were doing that, I was like, I had gone through the college application process at that point. And I was very well aware that you had to have four years of high school English to go to a four year college. It’s like, Oh, Oh, you know, not that many people from my high school went to college necessarily just, it wasn’t the norm the way it is.

But that realization just made me so furious. It was like, okay, if that’s happening in a pretty white, rural country town, you know, tiny town, the things that are happening in schools that are much more highly populated, you know, my high school class was like 80 students, there are schools with classes of 800 students where they’re just shuffled from room to room with no real resources and no real support, let alone four years of high school English to make sure they go to college.

Grumbine (20:21):

Wow. So let’s just take a second to breathe and think about this for a minute. With all the different ways that they destroy racial communities, you brought up the power plant, the nuclear power plant, environmental racism. Yeah. I mean, that’s a tax, it’s a different form of tax, but it’s definitely a tax. You look at the policing. If you go down to Ferguson, you know, with the Michael Brown shooting and you find out after they do the full review of the police, that report is probably three quarters of your book. It’s amazing how much garbage came out of that. My eyes are gaping. How did this happen?

But then you think about, it’s like everywhere you go, it is the vulnerable that are carrying the weight because they got nothing to fight back with. Yup. Help me understand. I’ll be honest with you. I’ve been literally swimming in Michelle Alexander’s updated version of “The New Jim Crow,” and I’ve listened to the audio book at least four times now because it is so powerful to hear it in audio.

I have the hard back, so I’m not totally not reading, but I admit I have gotten myself caught up in listening to these books because I feel I can clear a lot more land if you will listening to them then trying to let my eyes stay awake enough to read them. Yeah. And the impact of realizing every time they changed the language, Oh, it’s no longer in Vogue to call them slaves, so we’ll call them this. Oh, it’s no longer allowed to be slave. So we’ll find a way to get them in jail.

We’ll put them into work camps that are now slaves of the state. In each of these ways, they’ve done this going back to reconstruction before reconstruction, but definitely in the reconstruction era and the Freedmen’s Bureau and all the other things that gave lip service to trying to help these people. But in reality, we’re just there — I’ll go right through red lining. There’s so much to this. You’re a historian. Take us through the real history versus the winner of the war, so to speak history, the real history. Where does all this start? What was the motivation behind it?

Walsh (22:40):

To be blunt? I think the motivation was kind of what you said before. Like what tools do people have when these horrible things are visited upon them in their communities. And I think one of the few tools, and it’s a tool that you have to sometimes literally fight to have access to, but it’s education.

And so I think it’s one of the most contentious battle grounds for this provision of any form of even pretensive equity for resources in part, because they don’t actually want every child to have an equal opportunity because their child might not win. It doesn’t have to be that way. Right? Like we don’t have to live in that kind of world.

But I think we’ve created a system whereby even many well intentioned people or many people who are not, you know, super wealthy or they’re not the 1%, but they do believe that their child is like on the precipice. And in some ways, those people can be even more on that precipice. Right? Given the way I grew up, I knew many people who grew up in a similar way, who for whatever reason, for them, it flipped this sort of I will make sure that my children, you know, everything and go to the best schools and have all the resources and opportunities in life.

I think a big part of it comes in what Michael Thomas, is an education scholar calls, white racial hoarding. It’s hoarding. It’s saying there must be a scarcity of this resource. There’s not necessarily, but in their minds there must be. And so I’m going to claim it all for myself and reclaim it every time. And so I think that’s why it’s so appalling and astonishing every time, you know, I would look through the archives and find examples of actually certain black communities were paying many times over in taxes every year to support not only the black school that got burned down repeatedly and then had to be rebuilt, but also to pay for the white school in town.

And the whites’ view was that white people pay all the taxes and that white people are the reason that black people get to go to school. And those views prop up a system where people feel entitled to hoard the resources. They feel entitled to say, we’re the ones. And our children are the ones deserving of the nice school house, the school buses, the school books.

And therefore, because they had that great chance at an education, they’re the ones deserving of a job. Oh, it’s just, you know, just a meritocracy. They just did better. So they just deserve the job. But that’s not actually how that worked. So the education piece is a setup from the start. It’s the most obvious way we stack the deck, but there’s a million ways we stack the deck.

Grumbine (25:14):

It’s so gross because you know, as we’re heading out and I can’t even see heading out of with a straight face as we’re, nosediving into a pandemic, as we send our kids back to schools and baseball, football, the baseball teams are literally not even playing their games. They’re open technically, but their whole teams are falling down with this COVID-19.

Now it may not be killing millions of people like previously thought, but there’s enough people dying. There’s enough vulnerable people dying that this is no joke. Yeah. And we’re sending children into schools with teachers who are now right there in the line of fire. Yeah. But here’s the thing: once again, not equal because a lot of schools are allowing people to go remotely to school, to stay at home and go to school.

And this is a luxury that even with that available to everyone, everyone can do it. Of course you can. Everyone can’t do it. Not only is the internet not free, not only do many families still not have the internet, but they also don’t have the luxury of working from home. They don’t have the luxury of taking a year off for the kids to go to school so that they can stay home. Is this not another form of racial taxation? I don’t even know how to package this. It’s so here and now, and it’s tormenting me just to think about it. What are your thoughts on that?

Walsh (26:45):

Yeah. I mean, I agree. I don’t know if it’s taxation, because I think in some ways it’s just for some people who are maybe the ones driving the reopening, who are the most up in arms about how schools have to reopen it’s that they refuse to sort of recognize the massive subsidy that’s been provided by public school systems in terms of childcare.

And that that’s a correct form of subsidy that we should be providing as a society. And these are the same people who ironically have spent decades attacking public schools and saying that they shouldn’t exist, but the dual motivation there is sort of a fury at the idea that that subsidy would be taken away for them at the same time that they don’t actually want to expand subsidies to everyone. Right. Because it’s not enough.

Even if kids went back to school, right, as you said, there’s no way to have safety precautions that would fully protect them and their families, especially if they’re living in intergenerational homes or, you know, I mean, I see this, even my college students because we’re predominantly first-generation campus and most of my students don’t have any rooms from which to get on a zoom in private. They don’t have space to be in online learning in the way that maybe wealthier families do.

Intermission [music] (28:12):

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Grumbine (29:01):

I’ve gotta say, I heard, I heard someone saying this and it just struck me. And it goes to your zoom call, your non-private situation, zoom call. You know what happens when teachers are able to look into households that have entire families there, people are fighting, cause they’ve been cooped up in the house. And now all of a sudden teacher hears they’re fighting.

And now all of a sudden they’re duty bound to report these families. And now all of a sudden, just like, well, I’m going to use the Karen term, the Karen’s of the world, who just they’re constantly throwing people, you know, to the wolves and calling the police. So this has gotta be a real fear for people in this situation.

Walsh (29:40):

Definitely. I think it’s why the idea of, I talked to my colleagues about this sometimes. I am not comfortable with ever mandating or frankly, even requesting that my students turn their video on, in this climate. I feel like this is a moment where we’re all always having to remind each other, like this is not normal. We’re not in normal time. We’re in a pandemic. Let’s all be as kind as possible.

Like we don’t have to have these expectations that everybody turns their video on and shows up to class, that’s [inaudible]. You know, and I think I say that in part, because the college students are old enough that, you know, we can communicate with them via email. We can do lots of other things with them. I know for public school teachers of younger ages, it’s much, much harder and much trickier and more challenging to figure out.

And it would be one thing again, if everybody had the same resources so that nobody fell behind, but we know that’s not happening and that’s not, what’s going to happen. Huge groups of kids are going to fall behind and that’s horrifying. I mean, it’s something that happened. I talk about it a little bit in my book in Prince Edward County, Virginia, when they chose to close down and they did this in a couple of other counties as well in the south, post Brown. They chose to just close their public schools for several years and they just provided private school vouchers.

But the only private schools that the local school board read the vouchers for, and the only private schools were white segregation academies. So de facto, there’s a generation of kids, students of color in those poor Virginia towns that just didn’t go to school. They just didn’t get an education. Or they just, that was the end of it. Or if they did get one, they had to delay it by three years and go back later. That interrupts your education at that age in such a unmanageable way, you can’t come back from that easily. So I worry about that. I worry about that now.

Grumbine (31:29):

Okay. So with us coming full circle, going back to the research you did on your book, what insights do you feel that you gained from that research that might shed some light on our present circumstances? Where do you think you gain the most insight into modern day racial taxation?

Walsh (31:51):

Well, I think my biggest perhaps contribution to the literature is around this idea of tax: there is a deeply racialized and problematic category historically, but I would say, I’m not sure I totally went into the research thinking taxpayer was a great category, so I’m not sure. I went into it not expecting to research about taxing. I didn’t actually expect that to be the focal point of my research. Right.

But I was just sort of astonished at how many times defenders of segregation would write these diatribes as “taxpayers,” quote, unquote. And it sort of bemused me, I think because I had been to law school at that point. Um, just maybe because of kind of where I came from, I didn’t really view myself in that. I just viewed it as a weird category that people like pronounced rhetorically, but had no real meaning and in the law, it has no real meaning.

And I think once I got to the archives, I was also looking at them, not just as a historian, but as a lawyer. And it was like, well, if you’re not making a claim in tax court about your taxes, it doesn’t matter that you’re a taxpayer, but to them, it really mattered a lot. It meant that they should get all the rights to education and black students should be kept out. So the emphasis on it was one of the biggest things I learned through looking through all those archives and doing the research.

But the other thing that I found that I think is my big takeaway that relates to right now is that there are many times where something can appear to be a really helpful or noble or, I mean, I don’t want to say progressive, but like a good and just, and wholesome claim. Right? And my example of this from the book is several incidents where black families were writing in as taxpayers cause it’s certainly happened.

And they were writing letters to the NAACP typically, cause that was like maybe their only outlet. You know, they get the same protections from courts unless they went through an organization with the NAACP, but they would write these letters in saying like we’re taxpaying citizens and they’re burning down schools, or they won’t let my child into school. And there’s one quote from a man who was a veteran who didn’t have kids of his own, but he said he wanted to pay taxes so all the kids black and white could ride the buses and get an education.

And I mean, it’s just beautiful. The communitarian notion of tax paying still moves me when I think about it. Right? The idea that essentially sometimes you can say to yourself, like I’m paying these taxes for these people I don’t know, for these people on the other side of the country or people in circumstances, I may never be in, but I could be in, you know, there, but for some luck could be me.

All of those things are really beautiful and this identity in aggregate and the way it’s actually mostly used in politics is really awful. So I think that was maybe my biggest takeaway that this happens over and over again, right? This is not an isolated incident with taxpayer identity, but this idea that something can be a wonderful thing on the surface and we can argue for it or defend it.

The other example, that’s not something I write about in the book at all, but I like to sometimes bring it up to my policy graduate students, just to like mess with them a little bit, I guess. I like to bring up the example of the GI Bill because we have many veterans in my school and they, thankfully for them, I’m very happy for them. They benefit from the GI Bill. It’s great. Right? And we talk about it and they’re like, what could possibly be a critique of the GI Bill, such a great thing.

But of course the GI Bill is only the GI Bill because FDR didn’t get an actual nationwide, essentially social welfare safety net program passed. He couldn’t get it passed through Congress at that time. And that was partly due to the really aggressive lobbying of some of the veterans organizations from World War I veterans.

But part of Roosevelt’s argument, and certainly some of the advocates in his administration who were probably pushing more for this than he was, was that on the home front, during World War II, right, it’s probably the closest parallel in maybe some people’s living memory to now you had everybody doing what they could like everybody coming together on the home front.

People going without things, people working in war industries and in those war industries on the homefront, which, guess who was in those industries? It was a lot of people of color and a lot of women. People lost limbs, people lost fingers, people, and all of these industrial accidents, people lost their lives. There were thousands and tens of thousands of those kinds of accidents. Does somebody who was wounded in military service with the same kind of injury, somebody who who’s wounded on the home front have a greater claim on public resources.

Or, and this was sort of the argument quote, unquote “against” the GI Bill, it was an argument for everybody to get it, right. And the argument was, it would be less special if everyone got it, essentially right. That we have to do this special thing for just the special group that just so happens to exclude a lot of the more disenfranchised populations, particularly people of color and women.

We have to do it for this special group because they deserve it. And what kind of monster would you be to say they don’t deserve it? And it’s an amazing bait and switch, right? Actually, maybe everybody deserves it. And we feel like we’re having just the same conversations right now, over and over again about different things.

Grumbine (37:04):

You can almost hear them say, what are you going to do? Print more GI Bills? You’re going to devalue them. You’re going to debase our GI Bills. So it comes full circle. I guess you got Lee Atwater in the Southern strategy that really played on this taxpayer myth and all the other tropes of the time that they kind of word switched and code switched in the most racist of ways.

And then you’ve got Reagan and Thatcher, of course, who really pounded on the idea of there is no such thing as public money. There is only taxpayer dollars. And so they really threw steroids on those people that found it to be a noble calling, to be a taxpayer. Right. And I believe that that has been so destructive because even Bernie Sanders used these terms and he had Kelton in his ear. You kind of scratch your heads. Like what are you doing, man, what’s going on?

But these are the very things that – that very concept is what holds us back from things like a green new deal or Medicare for all, or free college for all, or student debt cancellation. All these things are held back by this destructive framing. In talking with friends, people of color that are really in tuned with this, they’ll tell you flat out that these are sideways shots at depriving the African American community and others of any good thing.

It may hurt some white people as collateral damage — the way they did it in a harken back many, many moons. Every time you had whites and blacks uniting in class struggle, they would throw a few privileges at the poor white SAPs, just enough to dislodge the wedge issue. And those wedge issues have been used nonstop to prevent us from ever having any kind of realized class struggle in this country. So this concept of race is extremely important to solve because without which we can’t get to a class struggle.

Walsh (39:10):

No, even the stimulus checks right now where they’re like, oh, but we’re not going to send them to people if you are undocumented or married to an undocumented person, or they cannot do a thing and just give it to everyone because it ideologically undermines every other argument they make. So they can’t do it.

Grumbine (39:28):

It brings me to another point that I hope we can spend a little bit of time on, right? The concept of the prison system and people coming out of prison and they are largely cut out of society now. They’re in an invisible prison for life. They’ve got the Scarlet Letter painted on them. They have to check the box.

I think there’s been some movement on that. But the fact of the matter is – is that these people are paying outrageously expensive to be poor. And there’s all kinds of taxes paying for state agencies and state mandated treatments, you name it, that these people that have no job and part of their release is contingent on them having a job. And there is no job, right?

And the circular nature of this, but you take it down another step and these people get divorces. You go away for 10 years. People move on with their lives. Everybody can’t wait around forever. And as you watch families split up and so forth. And now all of a sudden you’ve got child support mounting up on you while you’re in jail. And maybe you were only in there for a debt.

Not all criminals are good people. Not all of them have been wronged here, but so many of them have been caught up in a system and have been forced to make bad decisions based on impossible situations. And one of the things to your point about the stimulus checks. If you were in a rears on your child support, you did not get a stimulus check.

And so all those people that were cut out of the system that are in jail, or just got recent release from jail, none of them got a stimulus check. In fact, people that were caught up in the last financial crisis and swept up in this one, if they were behind on a rears, did not get a stimulus check. And who do you think is probably more likely to be behind? Someone who has been oppressed ruthlessly? It’s just, again, another case in point of this incredibly in equal situation. Can you talk about that for a little bit?

Walsh (41:27):

Yeah. The specific example, I think is a good one because it’s just another way we don’t have to rely on people privately sending each other child support payments in order to provide resources for children. But we’ve chosen to structure the system that way in order to really create greater burdens. I think for low income people, whoever the parent is, right?

Like the parent receiving the child support check or not receiving it and depending on it and the parent who can’t send it and feels shame and feels guilt. And like it’s such a insidious structure to say, Oh, rely on this private transaction or this private exchange to solve your necessities of life, to get food for your child, clothing for your child, school supplies, because there’s no way the government could do that. That’s not possible. Right. And we just know that’s not true.

It’s just a choice we’ve made. And I mean, again, coming back to the current moment, if it’s shown us anything, it’s shown us that, Oh no, that’s definitely not true. Right? You could get a check tomorrow. You could get a check every month, you could get more than a check. You could get health coverage, you could get your student loans could just be canceled and they could happen really fast. Like could happen real quick.

I hope that for many people that’s been kind of eye opening to see, but it’s hard to know because I think this system that depicts people as undeserving in the media and that kind of relishes telling stories of undeservedness.

Grumbine (42:54):

Yes.

Walsh (42:54):

It’s just never ending.

Grumbine (42:57):

It’s a real pandemic. You talk about the other side of that. I mean, it just keep thinking about how unbelievably it’s like screaming into a pillow. Yeah. The layers upon layers of suffocation from mass media, the mainstream media and their narratives owned by the corporations that are owning the politicians that are getting all the breaks from the federal reserves’ programs and the regular people that keep getting buried more and more and more and more and more just to put it in perspective.

We did a premiere with The Con, which is one of the things Bill Black was deeply part of. Bill Black, being a hero of most of the modern monetary theory people and really should be a hero to everyone. He, Patrick Lovell, Eric Vaughan, they did this phenomenal five part series depicting what happened during the great recession and the housing collapse.

And instead of taking it at the top, kind of like they did with The Big Short, they instead found this lady named Addie Polk and her story became thematic. And she was an 80 year old black woman who had bought her house with her husband many, many years ago. And all of a sudden she got lied to and she got a Liar’s Loan. She didn’t even know that this was going on. She had no idea. And her house was taken from her and she ends up committing suicide.

And you think about what the price of austerity is a suicide, social murder. And the fact that these people are made feel less than human and criminals that are petty crimes that regular people do, but are disproportionately meeted out against black and brown people. And you think about them coming out in the recidivism based on the way that they do these things and it just self perpetuates all of this.

Do we have any prayer at all to get through this? I feel like I wanna scream, it bothers me so bad.

Walsh (44:57):

Yeah. It’s funny when I’m teaching right now, because I think I’ve spent my teaching career — it’s only been maybe 10 years total now — but in history classes and in law classes, like telling students over and over again, that we are not in a progress narrative. There is no guarantee the future will look like the present. And I’m always the sort of chicken little look.

All we know from history, like this is the one thing I can tell you from my entire history PhD, the one conclusion we can draw about history is that the future will be different than the present. It will not look like the present. So we know that, right. That’s just kind of all we know. Some things might look like the present, right?

The property tax financing system for schools has proved incredibly durable even while a lot of technical segregation laws on the books have fallen away over the last century and a half. So some things will remain the same, but you can’t predict what those things are that will be different, but you know, they will be different. And I’ve had student resistance on that for years and years. Right.

I would teach about the constitution and be like, well, we don’t know that we’ll have this constitution in 20 years or 50 years. There’s no guarantee of that. And they are like, you are high. I mean, they just like uniform. Typically they are just like, you are so crazy. Okay. Professor Walsh, you’re wacky or on any other issue, right? I’m like we don’t, we don’t have a guarantee that a lot of things might not happen tomorrow.

And so the pandemic hit and now in my classes, I’m just like, look, we can get through this because I can’t, they don’t need me to teach that lesson right now. They’re super aware now. And it’s a, what a horrible time to be a young person or somebody like starting in the world or just somebody like hanging on by a thread like paycheck to paycheck. What a awful, awful moment.

When you have to be looking to your fellow citizens and saying like, come on the fact that they’re right now, negotiating over how much misery they can technically meet out to people and still maybe win reelection, which is really what they’re doing — negotiation of misery and suffering. It’s painful to watch. I agree.

Grumbine (46:59):

I’m going to steal that if you don’t mind — this negotiation of misery, this is exactly. Cause I’m just going to pull no punches. I see two racist, conservative, crazy people that we have a choice to choose from. Neither one of them is addressing racial justice. Neither one of them is addressing economic justice.

Neither one of them can I feel remotely confident in solving anything to do with the environment, which is a near and present danger. Neither one of them are willing to tackle anything meaningful about healthcare. Neither one of them are willing to address income inequality or anything. Joe Biden even said, nothing will fundamentally change. Yeah. And it’s like, what the hell happened?

Walsh (47:42):

Yeah. This goes back to my big lesson for my history students, which is that we can’t assume it’ll look the same tomorrow. So when I think about next year, I have no expectation that everything will just be normal. Like we’ll be in a normal situation. And even Biden being like, Oh, where does this go back to 2008 or something? I mean, it just, it won’t happen. We’re not in that time anymore.

There are at least some people I think who could do some work to pull something different. Like I think there are a handful of people around that could do that, but I don’t necessarily have faith that we’ll have the same kind of presidency or constitution or government in 10 years. Because also like you said, I mean up until this pandemic hit, I was starting to pivot some of my teaching in classes where I could, I mean, obviously I teach history and I teach law [inaudible] conducive to this, that much, but to climate change because I was realizing this is the existential threat where when I tell students like, we’ll see what the constitution looks like in 50 years,

Grumbine (48:39):

There may not be a constitution

Walsh (48:41):

Or they’re just maybe a very different one. I mean, it’s just, it’s always amazed me how, and it’s kind of the fun part of teaching history where students are always like, and it’s understandable, right? They’ve like I’ve grown up in this system that’s been exactly the same, and it’s been the same since my grandparents, time and time before that. And how could it ever change? I’m sure people felt that way in the 1830s and the 1930s, 1960s.

Grumbine (49:07):

Here’s what I hang my hat on right now. I’m watching the intersectional movement of Bernie Sanders and others out in the streets in Portland. I’m watching the intersectional movement of Bernie Sanders and other progressives that are working in joint coalitions with all sorts of different people, still out there fighting for justice, right, wrong or indifferent even without Bernie leading that charge, so to speak.

And I see so many positive things in terms of an awareness based on people like Stephanie Kelton’s new book, “The Deficit Myth, and Pavlina Tcherneva has put out some really important stuff about the job guarantee. I see people’s eyes opening, people that previously were not open to these things, but this concept of the taxpayer myth, I feel like this is a hill to die on.

I feel like there’s so many tentacles from this evil squid here that are destroying and strangling us out of any good thing that until we wipe out that lack of understanding of what it really is even. Yeah. I think that we can pretty much count on a less than desirable outcome.

Walsh (50:20):

I agree. I do think that there’s a chance that with unemployment payments, I mean, I want to have some hope that the, who might have otherwise bought into the taxpayer myth will have a different approach in the same way that during the great depression, there was a kind of a rejuvenation of the left in part, because there were clearly impacts that were hitting people so widely and at such a high percentage of the population, that it was hard to sort of blame individuals for their own economic predicament in the way that we taught to do for decades. And people made that switch pretty quickly from blaming individuals to being like, no, it seems like a bigger issue.

Grumbine (50:57):

Right on I do too. So I want to take us out on this note here. With so much potential for change, we are literally in chaos right now. So wherever chaos is, opportunity is not far away. If we choose to accept that. And with that in mind, I understand that nothing is really won until it’s a right, until it can be protected by law, until it can be exacted in courts, until it can be protected and so forth.

So let me ask you, as we’re coming out of this and we’re looking at a path forward, what rights would you seek to strive to codified into law? What do you think are the necessities to lock down and solidify, to make us a just an equal society, to shed this concept that we’ve talked about for the last hour?

Walsh (51:49):

Well, only focusing on taxation. It would be narrower list, but I would say we would have to have a constitutional amendment around the right to education to address those public school inequalities, but to address the broader inequalities. I think we need, if we’re going to stick with our constitution that we’ve got, then we need somehow to pass constitutional amendments around the right to healthcare, around climate change.

And I always end my constitutional law classes having students do a mini-constitutional convention where they kind of propose their own ideas. And it’s been heartening to see over the last few years, how many students are trying to think through the wording of how they wouldn’t try and ensure something that would actually move us toward truly addressing climate change in a document as poorly designed for that as the constitution, right. They’re trying.

And I think the more we can actually provide a real social safety net, I actually think the more this myth might die away because some of it is rooted in just truly insidious and hateful racism. And some of it is rooted in being told over and over again, that there’s not enough. And you got to fight to keep your little bit and you know, everybody else is undeserving. And I think when people have their needs met, they might be less amenable to those lies.

Grumbine (53:04):

That’s a great way to end. I want to ask you a bonus question. I wasn’t going to do this, but I figured I’ll ask you this question anyway, cause you raised it. I have long been a proponent of not having a con con simply because I think the right wing is outrageously prepared for this — the state houses, the Koch Brothers have heavily financed.

They’re waiting. I think they’ve got the bibs on and the knives out and the forks ready to eat that baby up. So many people on the left think they can just barge right in and have a constitutional convention and they haven’t done any of the research. It is scary how ready the right wing is for this.

Walsh (53:42):

They are super ready. I will say I’m also sympathetic to the left perspective because there are people on the right who have done enough research to be scared too. And they should also be scared. And it’s the reason why they continually say, Oh, we want to have a constitutional convention, but only for a balanced budget amendment.

We want to have a constitutional convention, but it will only consider fetal personhood. But every constitutional scholar will tell you that once you call one, there is no format in which you can just dictate what happens. Like the point of the Articles of Confederation was the point of the original one was we were just going to revise the Articles of Confederation. That’s not what happened. So I’m not optimistic about it. I’m just saying, I think that their belief in control is probably also a little bit misguided.

Grumbine (54:27):

I don’t doubt that. I will say though, the left is like a patchwork quilt. It’s not a homogenous entity in any way. Right? And that there’s far more spectrum on the left than there is on the right. I believe, I think the right is way more narrow and it’s . .

Walsh (54:42):

By definition . . .

Grumbine (54:42):

Exactly. And so you look at that and you think about how easy it is for them to control the narrative because they literally have this very narrow space that they’ve got to control. The left, however, is all over the map. So going into a con con, you’ve got parliament on the left and you’ve got this unified . . .

Walsh (55:01):

No, it’s terrifying. I mean, I actually think before I would rather we deal with the electoral college and the Senate and D.C. statehood and deal with those things. And then maybe we can have a truly democratic conversation about the rest of the constitution. Unfortunately, those things are in the constitution. So we’re really in a catch-22 here.

Grumbine (55:17):

It is a catch-22, for sure. So on that happy note, let us know how can our listeners find you? Where can they find your work and so forth?

Walsh (55:26):

Yeah, my book, Racial Taxation, it’s available on ebook. I do not have an audio book sadly, but it would be a real depressing audio book just to get a lot of like legal citations, depressing court cases, but you should definitely buy it. It’s called Racial Taxation, School Segregation and Taxpayer Citizenship. And I teach at UWA Bothell. You can always track me down on email there. I don’t tend to go on social media that much.

Grumbine (55:49):

Smart.

Walsh (55:50):

I know. Well, I think it’s sanity protecting.

Grumbine (55:54):

Yes. Well look, I’ve really appreciated your time. This was really fantastic. Hopefully I can talk to you again soon.

Walsh (56:01):

Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much.

Grumbine (56:02):

Absolutely. Well, look, this is Steve Grumbine and Camille Walsh with Macro N Cheese. Have a great day, everybody. We’re out.

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