Episode 197 – Gentrification and Culture with Davarian Baldwin

Macro  N Cheese – Episode 197
Gentrification and Culture with Davarian Baldwin
November 5, 2022

 

[00:00:03.340] – Davarian Baldwin [intro/music]

In a society organized around white supremacy, to say that you need help or you need federal support or aid, you can’t do it on your own because the very same institutions that were supposed to help you have actually hurt you. To admit that would mean that you’re like a black person.

[00:00:19.760] – Davarian Baldwin [intro/music]

None of us live or walk in just one identity. For example, I might be adversely affected by being black, but at the same time, I do have different sets of privileges because I’m a male and because I’m middle class. And we walk with those realities in the same person. I might be excluded from certain conversations because I’m black, but I might get in certain boardrooms because I’m a guy.

[00:01:35.140] – Geoff Ginter [intro/music]

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

[00:01:43.140] – Steve Grumbine

All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is Davarian L. Baldwin. He is the Paul E. Raether distinguished professor of American studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is author of Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life, as well as numerous essays and scholarly articles. He is also a coeditor with Minkah Makalani of the essay collection, Escape From New York! The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem.

Baldwin served as a consultant for the 2014/15 international art retrospective, Archibald Motley Jazz Age Modernist. He is currently working on two new book projects; Land of Darkness: Chicago and the Making of Race in Modern America and Universities: How Higher Education Is Transforming Urban America, and is also editing the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Harlem Renaissance. He is also the author of In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower. And with that, welcome to the show, sir. How are you today?

[00:02:49.890] – Davarian Baldwin

Hey, great to be here. Thanks so much, Steve. Wonderful to be in conversation with you always.

[00:02:53.800] – Grumbine

Absolutely. We’ve had Davarian on here because his work is so important, and I don’t think enough people are talking about it. The way universities have taken over entire cities and become the city. A nonelected government of sorts.

[00:03:09.040] – Baldwin

Yeah. A mini republic, yeah.

[00:03:10.780] – Grumbine

Absolutely. But we’re not talking about that.

[00:03:13.510] – Baldwin

Right.

[00:03:13.900] – Grumbine

We’re going to focus on a couple things. Given the pervasiveness of this rise of proto-fascism in the United States and the rise of right wing reactionary social norms, it’s kind of like watching polio resurface. I think it was always there, but I think we’ve just peeled it back. But now people aren’t even embarrassed about it anymore. They’re open to it. And this is evidenced in this anti-woke commentary. Let me be clear. I understand why some people say, forget that woke cultured stuff.

[00:03:49.890] – Baldwin

Right.

[00:03:50.160] – Grumbine

They don’t really understand the only version of what they think woke is is Nancy Pelosi with a Kente cloth. They don’t realize that that’s not what it started with. Before we jump into some of the other more heady topics, I want to start with that. I really think that that sets the stage for a lot of things that people hide their eyes from, and this is a way of bastardizing having open eyes to see what’s happening. Tell me, what does woke mean and where did it come from?

[00:04:19.840] – Baldwin

That’s a great question. Somebody should probably do a genealogy of the word ‘woke’ in the black community, but I can say that at least it goes as far back to 1952 with the publication of Ralph Ellison’s iconic novel Invisible Man. In that novel, Invisible Man talks about both black and white, all people walking around asleep, so basically like zombies, because they’re blinded by a series of caricatures and ideas about people through race and through racial stereotypes that keeps them what he calls sleepwalking.

He actually makes a call, death to all sleepwalkers i.e. people need to wake up. That people see with their eyes, but they don’t actually see the world. They’ve been taught how to see. That we think of the eyes being the natural kind of capacity for having sight. And he said, well, no, actually, we’ve been trained to see in particular ways because of the social norms around us, and so we need to wash those things away and wake up.

We find a similar conversation in the work of psychoanalyst and activist Franz Fanon. His book, “Black Skin, White Masks”, which is published the same year, he talks about the very same thing–about individuals needing to wake up, or how racism blinds us from seeing the world as it actually is. So, for me, it goes back at least to that.

We can also move up to someone as fun as Childish Gambino, the hip hop artist and filmmaker and creator who put out the interesting television series called Atlanta that’s wrapping up his final season this year. And he has a song where the chorus said, “Stay woke”. And because it pulls out this longer tradition in the African-American community about the belief or the reality that what we see in media, what we see in textbooks, what we see in advertising in a society that’s governed by white supremacy, does not reflect actually who we are.

And, therefore, we must look for sources and expressions of truth and black vitality and even of white reality in other venues. That we need to stay woke. That we need to wake up to the blindness that has been washed over ourselves based on the worldview being put forward that justifies, in this case, white mediocrity as a pathway to excellence and privilege, and looks at black excellence as a threat to societal norms.

So that the world has turned upside down today. And this is what has been perceived as in this historical trajectory of what we today might call wokeness. It’s been captured by the radical right, caricatured as racial hypersensitivity and symbolic gestures to racial justice or antiracism. But it’s been caricatured because it’s a threat. Antiracism has seen as a threat.

It’s seen as this idea that “I can’t say anything. If I say anything, I’m going to be canceled”. And I get that. I get the sensitivity around that. But what’s rarely looked at in these conversations is that for at least 300 plus years, those who have been in power or those who have been associated with those who’ve been in power have been able to say anything without any consequences.

So today, when now, those who have not had the power to speak back to the ways in which they were represented or the jokes that have been told about them can now speak back. Now it seems like everything is sensitive. There’s a great phrase that people use. It says that, from a position of privilege, equality looks like oppression. And so now, all of a sudden, people have the capacity to speak back. And so now it looks like you’re being oppressed.

When you have to hear someone responding to the jokes you tell, to the stories you put out there, to the images you produce. Having to hear somebody respond to that sounds like oppression. And so this is the way in which wokeness has been caricatured. The fact that people have to hear a response to the things they put out there about other people. That’s what is really going on, in my opinion, in society today.

[00:08:27.260] – Grumbine

That’s powerful. Because I remember when I was a young man, back in the early 70s, my grandmother lived in an Amish community. She was a crafts person. She handled boxers, and she did a lot of ceramics and Amish Dutch type artwork. And she had a stroke. And my father had to help move her out of there and move her back to my family’s home.

And I remember the guys talking, and I had never heard the N word. And I heard my father drop into a way that I’d never heard my father speak. I’d never heard him say these things before, and I didn’t know what to make of it. And they bought me a black G.I. Joe. I don’t know if you remember the kung fu grip and all that stuff. But I had the black G.I. Joe.

Nothing in my mind said anything weird or wrong. I had no concept of anything. And I remember playing out in the yard. We lived in an apartment complex, in what would be considered a black area, which we’re going to talk about shortly. And the people around me said, oh, you have an N. G.I. Joe. I had no idea that that was a bad word again. And I came home and I said, Mom, Dad, I had no idea. I had an N.G.I. Joe. I might have been four.

[00:09:45.510] – Baldwin

Right.

[00:09:47.210] – Grumbine

And my mom gave me a good slap. I had no idea what was happening. And then finally they told me, “don’t say that. It’s not polite to say in public”. In public. It was ok privately, but not publicly. And my parents were a product of their era, too, of course, but that’s what I grew up around.

[00:10:08.260] – Baldwin

Yeah. And I want to say to my white brothers and sisters, I get it, the perspective that might come across as if saying, okay, I’m white. I’m struggling, and people want to bring up something called white privilege. What do you mean, white privilege? I’m struggling. But the problem and this is a part of this whole woke conversation, is that people want to compare, say, white working class individuals in Appalachia with Kanye or Oprah or Tyler Perry and say, what do you mean, white privilege?

Look at how well you black people are doing. But in that conversation, we don’t compare white Appalachians– and here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about– with the conditions of black Appalachians. So we want to compare apples and oranges, white working class people with black elite. But when we compare equitably white Appalachians with black Appalachians, systemically black Appalachians are doing worse.

And so those white working class individuals, your frustrations are not with race. Your frustrations are with class. And so we would say, “wake up”. Instead of looking at black people as welfare recipients and pulling the country down, look at those amongst your own racial group who are telling you the problem is black people while they pick your pockets clean and sell you vaccines and drugs at market rate prices that are being developed with federal grants.

So you should be getting discounted prices for your drugs and for your housing. But they’ve told you to believe that federally funded support is welfare. That’s inward stuff. We stand on our own two feet. Don’t take those drugs. Don’t take that housing subsidy. Don’t take access to universal health care. That’s inward.

That’s dependency. But that’s the trick. So I would say wake up. That your allegiances should be with us against those in the elite, including white elite, who are telling you that black people are the problem while they pick your pockets clean. Wake up.

[00:12:18.720] – Grumbine

Yeah. This is the thing with class solidarity. You don’t want to be a class reductionist because in order to have a full understanding of the working class, you need to have intersectional relationships within class.

[00:12:34.410] – Baldwin

That’s right.

[00:12:34.950] – Grumbine

It can’t just be one size fits all because everybody doesn’t have the same experience, journey.

[00:12:40.410] – Baldwin

Conditions.

[00:12:41.250] – Grumbine

Exactly. Before we jump into gentrification, I really want to touch on CRT.

[00:12:47.160] – Baldwin

Okay

[00:12:49.840] – Grumbine

This is hilarious to me. My go to is talking about Bacon’s rebellion. Howard Zinn talked about it, Michelle Alexander, Sandy Darity. This is a great case in point where you see the base solidarity of class, maybe the first time, and they give the white guys a scrap more, just a tiny bit more, and it shatters solidarity.

[00:13:12.190] – Baldwin

Right.

[00:13:12.870] – Grumbine

And so history shows us that class solidarity is not easily achieved.

[00:13:18.660] – Baldwin

That’s right.

[00:13:19.480] – Grumbine

And it takes effort and it takes being woke to understand how to create that class solidarity. So, CRT as I understand it; it’s not a thing you teach elementary school kids, though I wish it were. [laughter] This is PhD level stuff.

[00:13:37.260] – Baldwin

It’s even more than that. Yeah. And so just to go to your original point about Bacon’s rebellion. It’s a tome of a book, but the listeners out there, if they want to understand how this works, read the amazing scholar W. E. B. DuBois’s book Black Reconstruction, because he talks about how whiteness works as a psychological wage.

And what he means by that is that you can have black, white and others all having the same shared relations to production if you want to bring Marx into it. They all are working for, say, the same financial wage to a certain degree. But there’s this additional wage that gives those who have been identified as white an additional wage.

So a different kind of housing, different access to transportation, different sense of self and pride or dignity when you walk down the street. So we can go to the US South during the Jim Crow era, for example–but even in the North–where you might have two working class people, one black and one white. But when you’re walking down the street, even if it’s a black adult, and a white child comes the other way, he has to refer to that child as Miss or Mr.

And then that child can talk to that black adult with their first name or even call them boy. So that’s the additional wage. Or from an economic standpoint, because white versus black in this landscape, coming in with a different rate of pay for the same work. And we know this even to this day, that systemically African American women make eighty cents, sometimes seventy five cents on the dollar for every white male.

That’s systemically across the board. Now, is that attacking all white men or saying white men are evil? No, it’s not saying that. But it’s saying that in a society organized around white supremacy, the distribution of resources and values takes place along racial lines. So that we have outcomes like this. For every dollar made by a white male, a black woman makes eighty cents.

And that impacts life chances, that impacts generational wealth, it impacts the capacity to access housing, education, child care, all of these things. And so when we come to something like critical race theory– actually, my wife is a law professor– it’s a law course. It’s not something that’s even taught at the PhD level. It’s a law course.

It’s a way to make sense of in the 1960s and 70s, we have these different laws that do away with racial inequality in the books according to the law. So you have housing acts and civil rights acts that do away with unequal distributions of federal resources according to the law. The claim of equal protection under the law. Finally, after multiple centuries, late 1960s, equal protection under the law.

But yet after that, because of the legacy that had been set in all those years, we have black people in certain housing, white people of certain jobs, certain access to income and wealth and inheritance of wealth that was taken. So you do these laws in 1970s or late 60s, but people have already accumulated wealth. It doesn’t go away.

And so critical race theory is an attempt from a legal standpoint to make sense of how do you talk about race and racism, even though under law we’re all equal because of the inheritance of decades of racial inequality. That’s what critical race theory is. There is no critical race theory in kindergarten. There is no critical race theory in 12th grade.

There’s very little critical race theory in college unless you’re taking pre law courses. Some educational schools have taken aspects of critical race theory and taught it in education graduate programs, but there is none of that being taught to little kids to make them feel guilty about being white. That has become a political caricature that’s used by parents and what we call astroturf activists–not really grassroots.

With astroturf meaning these fake grassroots activists that are really being funded by the Koch brothers and other multimillion dollar think tanks and propagandists that put white parents and families as their fronts for pushing forward really an elite agenda that’s using critical race theory as a boogeyman to scare white families into being afraid of having honest conversations about the history of this country.

[00:18:08.740] – Grumbine

It’s just terrifying to me that we are this easily propagandized and for it to be in the political sphere and this is the problem. They are genuinely seeking class solidarity, but they have no analysis. They have no theoretical framework from which to understand the material conditions or any of the other aspects of what’s being said. They just hear a buzzword, they repeat it, and it becomes the word of the land.

And this mind meld that’s happening with propaganda and people that are genuinely seeking class solidarity but don’t understand what they’re actually up against, it’s terrifying. And yet, at the same time, we clearly see the weaponization of identity politics used not only as a means of dividing us, but crushing the real struggle that people are going through by elevating someone like Obama saying, “see?”

[00:19:03.510] – Baldwin

Right, “he made it”. And I’m glad you brought the term identity politics, because what’s happened now is that any discussion of race or racism, identity politics is seen as black and brown or women or queer or LGBTQ, as if straight or white or elite aren’t identities. As if those aren’t the identities that have guided and driven our society since its founding. So identity politics is not discriminatory.

Everyone has an identity politics. And I think it’s really important for us to understand that. You mentioned also intersectionality which tries to point that out, is that none of us live or walk in just one identity. For example, I might be adversely affected by being African American, by being black, but at the same time I do have different sets of privileges because I’m a male and because I’m middle class.

And we walk with those realities in the same person and that is what’s important. So I might be excluded from certain conversations because I’m black, but I might get in certain boys rooms or certain boardrooms because I’m a guy. And that’s the reality. And so that’s why we say “stay woke”. It’s really about just being honest about the conditions that surround you.

We see the world in our daily lives. I’m from Wisconsin. My family were all factory workers and domestics. We had relationships with working class white guys, drank Jack Daniels on the weekends with white folks. And when you have real honest conversations about this society, about how it is, about how we live our lives, we are in agreement.

But then when you listen to Fox News, when you watch certain propaganda and the propaganda washes over your eyes, in the words of Ralph Ellison, we go to sleep. And so this is what we mean by stay woke. Open your eyes to the conditions that’s actually around you. So we can have honest conversations about how we know the world actually is.

As compared to the fact that you see your patience getting smaller and you see the opportunity for your children to go to school shrinking. And so then we grab onto these extremely facile explanations for why that is. Oh, it’s the black folks. Oh, it’s the immigrants… Even though we know that the conditions are much more in reality in our faces and we can have these conversations in real ways.

[00:21:22.010] – Grumbine

I love the way you just said that. Before we started this interview, we had talked a little bit about Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s book “Race for Profit”, about David Freund’s book “Colored Property”.

[00:21:34.510] – Baldwin

Right.

[00:21:34.920] – Grumbine

And all this stuff plays into this larger balkanized world. There’s two worlds, even though they appear not to. There are those in the power class and those who have to deal with it.

[00:21:49.440] – Baldwin

Right.

[00:21:50.190] – Grumbine

Go back beyond chattel slavery going into Reconstruction, we have seen the perversion and the twists and turns the power elite have done to maintain the status quo while changing the language around status quo.

[00:22:05.470] – Baldwin

Right.

[00:22:05.760] – Grumbine

So that it appears that they have changed similar to what you said about the laws changing but in reality they didn’t change.

[00:22:12.720] – Baldwin

Right. People still live their lives a certain way, right?

[00:22:15.810] – Grumbine

Absolutely, yes. So we had redlining and the evils that occurred as a result of redlining created predominantly black and brown communities. And these communities took on an identity of their own and had their own way of living and they were relatively happy in their own space. But then suddenly white people and power people in general realized we can make some money there.

And gentrification, what an evil thing. And it’s such a pernicious, almost stealth move to destroy communities. And yet it’s not stealth at all. My grandparents living in northwest DC. My grandfather, being a milkman, salt of the earth blue collar guy, right? They couldn’t afford to stay in DC because they had intentionally raised the property taxes to force out the people that lived there so that they could gentrify the areas. And I didn’t know what that meant at the time. My grandparents moved out to the country with us in Southern Maryland.

[00:23:21.790] – Baldwin

Okay.

[00:23:22.650] – Grumbine

The rest is history. But as we started learning more and more about how DC had been gentrified, this word gentrification started becoming more and more salient. And looking at Harlem, I know you’ve done some work, especially recently with a puzzle about Harlem. Gentrification happens everywhere. These communities crop up and they’re forced communities.

They didn’t really have an alternative. They were put there by the powers that be. And as a white guy having just a taste of it with my grandparents, I can only imagine the depths of this. Can you talk to me a little bit about the concept of gentrification?

[00:24:04.760] – Baldwin

Sure. So first I want to introduce two concepts to you and your listeners is first the term racial capitalism and then the term gentrification because they work together. Okay, so racial capitalism is this idea introduced by the amazing scholar Cedric Robinson in his book called Black Marxism. And Racial capitalism is pretty basic in the sense of that capitalism works based on accumulation.

Accumulation of power from workers and from markets. If you continue to accumulate and accumulate, there’s going to be collapse because there’s only so much you can accumulate. So then how does capitalism stabilize itself? It stabilizes itself by assigning different value to different humans based on racial difference.

Assigning different value to different markets, different properties, based on racial difference. And so in this context, the contradictions of capital and capital relations. So for example, if you exploit labor so much, that should actually lead to unrest. People get upset, there’s unrest. If you over speculate on markets, this should lead to financial collapse because you value them higher than what people can pay.

If you raise the values of commodities to the point where people can’t afford them, that should lead to price decline. But it doesn’t always happen. Why? Because we assign racial difference as a way to extract additional levels of exploitation from labor and markets, to stabilize those things that should collapse capitalism, or at least bring it down.

What do I mean by this? How do we stabilize this through racial difference? For example, black workers making less for the same labor as white workers, or they’re excluded from labor to keep white wages low as they serve as a reserve labor force. Land in black neighborhoods being valued for less or targeted for more negative things like environmental toxins.

Another thing, black consumers being charged more for the same services. There was just recently an exposé that showed that a number of internet companies charged more for inferior services in historically black communities. This just came out two days ago. Or also largely nonwhite undocumented workers being paid less because they are undocumented.

They have no legal protection. They can’t make an appeal to the state or to the Labor Relations Board because they’re undocumented. So all of these practices. By assigning different values to different neighborhoods, different markets, different laborers, based on racial difference. All these practices help stabilize the normal process of capitalism.

Like over-speculation. Over saturation of markets. That should lead to collapse. But they don’t because you always have this additional value that you can additionally exploit from these other groups and markets because they have been assigned racial difference. Now, how does this work with gentrification? Well, what is gentrification, first?

Gentrification in the simplest terms is where we have a process of neighborhood change. That can include economic change. So property values and income and demographic displacement, those of a different education and racial makeup. So a neighborhood, for example, let’s just say Harlem or Southside Chicago, these are historically black neighborhoods and they’ve been made that because black people have been confined to those areas.

And as you said, they make a life in the face of segregation, in the face of their property values not being worth the same for the very same housing. Worth less because it’s in a black neighborhood, because of red lining–and we’ll talk about that in a minute. So the neighborhoods are historically economically depressed because they are occupied by non-white people.

That’s what we mean by racial capitalism. So gentrification becomes powerful because all these other white neighborhoods are rising in value because cities become hot. So even, say, moderately income white people who live in these cities, they can’t even afford to live there because, say, dot commerce, internet moguls, real estate moguls, etc. are raising property values above the means of even moderately income white people.

So they want to stay in the city, but where can they go? Aha! These black and brown neighborhoods that have been historically suppressed by state law and by real estate agencies, by public and private practices, those neighborhoods are still relatively affordable, right? They’re growing expensive for the residents who are there because they make less for the same work.

They can’t get second mortgages because banks won’t lend to them because they’re black neighborhoods. But I’m a white person in these other neighborhoods where I can’t afford to live in my neighborhood. So the black neighborhood is kind of attractive. I wouldn’t normally live there, but inflated values is making it impossible for me to stay in my own neighborhood.

Let’s go to these neighborhoods, let’s go to the South Side, let’s go to Harlem, let’s go to Columbia Heights in Washington, DC. These neighborhoods now become attractive because… I wouldn’t go there before, because they seem dangerous and all black. But I can’t afford to live in my current neighborhood. Let’s go.

If I go there, it’s affordable for me, but my presence then carries with it a whole host of resources for me, not for the long standing residents. I can get second mortgages on my home. My property values get higher because high property values come with me because I am white. Investors want to come follow to build high end housing because I’m there.

And they hope that maybe with me being there, others will follow. So all of a sudden, if I’m the black residents who have lived there all this time, everything around me is changing. Property values are going up. The restaurants and the retailers that cater to me can no longer afford to pay the property taxes or the rents for their commercial properties. So they get pushed out.

And then in comes the chains like Lululemon, Abercrombie and Fitch, Trader Joe’s, all these chains that will cater to the new residents. And so then the long term residents, even if they’re homeowners, they can no longer afford the property taxes. If they’re renters, the owners of those properties will want to cater to these new residents.

So they might engage in practices of not maintaining or repairing the properties of long term residents to ‘encourage’ them- I put encourage in quotes–to ‘encourage’ them to move. Because they want to cater to the incoming residents that will pay higher rates. So you can’t afford to live there, or you’re struggling just to make ends meet to stay there.

And then on top of that, the services, the cultural practices, the retailers that cater to you, the dollar stores or the lower income retailers can no longer afford to pay their rent, so they have to leave. And then you mentioned DC. There was a whole story around this. There was a cell phone service company right near Howard University that used to blast go-go music, which is the heart and soul of DC.

Oh, yes, they used to blast that all the time for the people that live there who loved to hear the music as they went by, day to day. A couple of new developments came in nearby, filled with individuals from the broader DMV [DC-MD-VA] metropolitan area, mostly white, came into the area with high end housing that came in above the means of long-time residents.

They started to complain about the go-go music being blasted in the neighborhood. They had the power to call the police. The police will come for them. To police noise ordinances. But then the long standing residents and black and brown politicians and white allies helped launch a campaign with local residents called Don’t Mute D.C.

Saying that this whole campaign to enforce noise ordinances is the front line aspects of gentrification. First you change our culture, then you push us out. And so just to give you a couple of examples. This is how it’s worked with the point that I want to make that you wonderfully touched on, is that the very reason why these neighborhoods become ripe for gentrification, this kind of turnover, it is not just a racial thing, it’s an economic thing.

Gentrification, actually, the term comes from England at a time when the issue was about class turnover in neighborhoods. But in the US. You can’t talk about class without talking about race because of the history of enslavement and Jim Crow, who both Jim Crow north and south. So there’s a way in which race and class work hand in hand in the US in ways more intimately than it does other places.

It happens in France. It happens in England, too. Go to Notting Hill and talk about how the carnival got pushed out a couple of decades ago. Same story with the longstanding West Indian community. So there’s a similar story, but here there’s a much longer history of the relationship between race and class. And so it’s because these black and brown folks have been constrained in a neighborhood because of a history of restrictive covenants created by the real estate industry or redlining practices created by the Federal Housing Administration.

Yes, the federal government helped to support this containment and constraint of black and brown folks into neighborhoods that have been devalued, divested, and depressed. So now that we come to the current moment when even white folks can’t afford to live in cities, these neighborhoods become attractive because of a whole history of racial discrimination. And that’s why they become attractive.

[00:33:53.310] – Intermission

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[00:34:19.310] – Grumbine

I witnessed it. It’s funny. You talk about go-go. I used to go to this thing called the Back to School Boogie.

[00:34:26.310] – Baldwin

Oh, yeah.

[00:34:26.950] – Grumbine

And every year you have EU Trouble Funk, Air Raid, lil Benny.

[00:34:32.680] – Baldwin

Right. Buck Brown. Rest in peace.

[00:34:36.340] – Grumbine

I remember when we would go downtown, going through Ninth and F out there, where a lot of the punk clubs are. But you would see these folks in the streets. They’d have plastic buckets, whole neighborhood hopping around. It was so much part of being a DC native. I was born in Kayford’s Hospital. This is where I was from.

It’s a neat thing and it’s a scary thing, but it’s a thing that just keeps happening. And people’s minds and eyes are closed to this. You don’t realize what’s happening.

[00:35:10.310] – Baldwin

It’s so great to mention because, as you know, I’m on Twitter quite a bit, and we’re having these battles because people are saying, just vote blue down the line. Vote blue. It’s either Blue or the Fascists. And you know what? I get that. But at the same time, you got your boy Obama in Michigan this past weekend, and it’s so condescending to young people, “put down TikTok, put down your phone, get up off your butts, off the couch, and go vote.”

And it’s just so condescending because it doesn’t put any kind of onus or responsibility on the Democratic machine party politics that really cater to the leadership and the elite of one faction of the elite that’s red or blue. They have more in common with each other than they do with us. And so this so called ‘vote blue down the line,’ it’s your responsibility, Democratic Party, to put together a set of agendas and programs that will encourage, that will lift those kids off their couches.

They’re not motivated because you haven’t given them an agenda to push forward. Or the Democratic Party in many parts of this country will actually work to vote against, to fight against the progressive candidates in their own party to make way for the machine centrist, moderate, borderline conservative members of their party. They will sabotage progressive campaigns.

[00:36:30.640] – Grumbine

Yep.

[00:36:30.960] – Baldwin

So these young generations, they see that. And so then for Obama to get up there with his salt and pepper hair, cool black guy in Michigan to say, get off your butts and go vote, it’s so condescending. It’s so apolitical and political at the same time because it lets the Democratic Party off the hook. It doesn’t require them to have actually, an agenda.

So what your position is vote for me or it’ll be the fascist? No. Give us a position on housing. Give us a position on health care. Give us a position on international affairs. Give us a position on affordable housing, an anti eviction policy, fair labor and quality of life practices. Give us an anti gentrification campaign. This is what you need to do.

Because the problems that those Democratic machine party politics leaders are in the pockets of the same donors and philanthropists that the right wingers are, and it’s just so off putting and condescending and disingenuous to say simply, get off your butts and get out of TikTok. The reason why they’re not off TikTok because they are disillusioned with the politics you’re selling. Do some work, Democratic Party. Do better.

[00:37:36.560] – Grumbine

Yeah. I am often flayed by the VBNWs. I’m a registered Democrat.

[00:37:43.470] – Baldwin

Me too.

[00:37:44.230] – Grumbine

And that and a bag of chips gives you a bag of chips. Because I have loyalty to a concept, to people, to policy, to truth.

[00:37:53.310] – Baldwin

Right.

[00:37:53.730] – Grumbine

And when I know how bad it hurts, when your financial situation is so bad you’re not sleeping, your whole world is turned upside down. And then you hear some rich, privileged SOB with the boutique lifestyle and living in the mansion and lecturing regular people on tone and falling in line, and “what do you want, Trump?” You’re the enemy.

[00:38:22.990] – Baldwin

Right.

[00:38:24.860] – Grumbine

How in the world do we get on the same team? Because I don’t see us fighting for the same things.

[00:38:30.060] – Baldwin

Exactly. Yep, that’s right. It’s a hard thing. I’m a registered Democrat as well. But the leadership of that party is strangling any other kinds of possibilities, any other ways of thinking? You mentioned Pelosi in kente cloth, give me a break. Give us a real agenda. I don’t want to overstate this point, but in certain ways, because the leadership of this party has been so obsessed with their own preservation, they opened the door for a Trump.

And that has got to be said. If you actually tried to put together an agenda that addressed the needs of working families in this country, it would make it more difficult for Trump to come to power.

[00:39:10.690] – Grumbine

I come from recovery, and so I know people that are rich, that are sitting in there, that treat you like a human being because you are there to solve the same problem they are. And you’re there with white, black, gay, straight people, women, men, old, young, everybody’s together. That’s solidarity for a cause, right?

You’re there to solve the problem of this obsession with a chemical or alcohol or a behavior, whatever shared sense of purpose. And this is the beauty in my mind of class solidarity, of giving us some common theoretical framework from which to assess the world around us. And I know people say they want that, but when you tell them it requires more than just you demanding it, it requires an understanding.

People didn’t understand why Bernie Sanders wasn’t able to capture the African American vote, right? A gentleman named Glen Ford a few years ago, bless his soul, he spoke of this leadership class within the black community. You see the Clyburns of the world that are using their access in the churches to create this power dynamic that seems insurmountable, but it’s always used for conservative politics.

It’s always used for the wrong things.How do we get past this Davarian? I know that you’re an academic, but you’re also an activist. I want change, and I’m tired of the pinky out folks trying to make me stay quiet.

[00:40:44.740] – Baldwin

I think a lot–and I’m going to bring it back to racial capitalism here–I think a lot of us are struggling. But in a society organized around white supremacy, that kind of struggle, or to say that you need help or you need federal support or aid, you can’t do it on your own because the very same institutions that were supposed to help you have actually hurt you.

To admit that would mean that you’re like a black person. And people don’t want to have that openness, that vulnerability to say they were all in us together. You want to say, no, you have had a moral failure over there because you don’t live the right way. And I am a victim of you, of all the benefits that you get. That’s what’s hurting me.

But if we cut through that and see our shared conditions, that is the groundwork for solidarity. Like I said to you before, I grew up in a working class factory town. We talk about America’s heartland. I’m from that. That’s my life. Beloit, Wisconsin, on the border of Wisconsin-Illinois factory belt. My uncle’s parents worked at General Motors, Chrysler, Taylor Freezer, the company that makes the ice cream machines, the shake machines for McDonald’s and Burger King.

That was the life that I grew up in. And I remember my uncles–talk about intersectionality again, there were times when they were mistreated because they were black people on the line. Mistreated by the bosses at Chrysler and GM and treated differently by UAW, United Auto Workers, your union brothers and sisters, treated differently.

But at the same time, when you talk to them around a beer, them, my uncles and their white coworkers, and you hear the things that they would advocate for, like health care, like free education, they would be considered democratic socialists today. And they believe that because they felt like it was right, it was good. They understood that in contradiction to what we hear today about student debt.

People saying, well, I paid my debt or I didn’t go to college, why should I be paying someone else’s debt? My uncles understood, listen, there are things that I benefit from that I don’t pay for all the time. It is hypocritical to come in and cherry pick one thing to say, I didn’t go to college, so I don’t want to pay for that. If we pay into the public good, there are sometimes when I benefit, sometimes when I don’t.

But it’s the collective good. We all rise together. They believe that. And I just say it again. The things that they believe in when I talked to them–many have passed away now. Some of them have passed away early because of toxins that they were exposed to on the shop floor line. Early kinds of exposures, different kind of cancers, without the appropriate health care.

They would be considered democratic socialists because of the things that they believe. And it’s in those rooted, shared principles of being able to wake up and see our conditions as they actually are and take away these racial caricatures. It is a failure to be in pain, that we are all, in some ways, in debt, that we all need quality housing, that we all need quality health care, that we all pay into the public till, and it’s not benefiting us in the ways that it should.

We all share those conditions, and that’s the ground upon which we could build a blueprint for a new America. And we can’t be afraid of that. And it starts with empathy. We have to be able to see ourselves in each other. Let’s talk about police brutality for a minute. We see a Trayvon Martin or a Freddie Gray in Baltimore, or Brown in St Louis, in Ferguson, and we say, oh, they’re a thug.

They should have been killed. They didn’t listen. They should have complied. But then when we think about some of the things that we’ve done in our lives. Whether it be taking down a goalpost at a football game. Drinking underage. I’m talking to my white brothers and sisters out there. Right? Who live in certain neighborhoods that are primarily white or majority white or in suburbs.

The things we’ve done that were illegal. Maybe even taking a lot of coke in college. Whatever it is that have been illegal. And our communities did everything they could to not subject us to the criminal justice system, whether it be go work over at Mr. So-and-so’s house, work it off, go through a drug rehabilitation program, go play basketball, join a track program, mentor some youth, do something to repair yourself.

But we did everything we could not to put you in jail, not to give you a criminal record, because we see ourselves in those young white children. But we don’t see ourselves in the so-called thugs, the Trayvon Martins, the Freddie Grays. So it starts with empathy. Children make mistakes. So let’s say that a young black child did steal something.

They did break the law, but according to our laws, there is no automatic death sentence for theft. But we justify that with black and brown youth. They should have listened. They shouldn’t have did it, or they would be alive today. Just think about how callous that is. Replace that black child with your own child and say the same thing.

They should have listened, or they would be here today. You wouldn’t say that. And so this is the kind of empathy across the color line, across the political aisle that we need today. The same outlook you would have for your child or your sister or your brother, have for us. Have for everyone. And let that be the ground upon which we build a politics based on our actual conditions and not based on our fears.

[00:46:17.210] – Grumbine

That is very well said. It brings me to a point that I want to close out on, because I think that this is looking forward. You’ve got a lot of things that are brewing beneath the surface, some making it into the mainstream, but definitely in black Twitter, it should be on all of our minds. I try and bring it up as often as I can, but I am perplexed about a few things, and that comes down to reparations.

I know the ADOS perspective based on Sandy Darity’s work is laying out a specific claim for specific aggrieved individuals for a specific purpose. Then I know the diaspora has its own view of what reparations should mean to whom, right? And then we’ve got another group with folks like Fadhel Kaboub and Jason Hickel, who are talking about reparations for the Global South. In the United States, what happens if you give people monetary reparations without structural change?

[00:47:20.230] – Baldwin

I agree.

[00:47:20.680] – Grumbine

One of the biggest challenges here is… I’m fortunate; I’m not the aggrieved. So I’m not here to tell you how it should be.

[00:47:26.050] – Baldwin

No, I hear you.

[00:47:27.060] – Grumbine

I’m talking proverbially. You fight for what you need to be whole. To some degree, the reparations reminds me, the way it’s frequently laid out, as we want to be able to play in this libertarian free market world. Here’s some money. We’re going to become the new capitalist class.

[00:47:47.220] – Baldwin

Right.

[00:47:47.710] – Grumbine

And I’m a socialist. As a good socialist, a person who is very aware of these things and desperately wants to see folks that have not had an inheritance passed down to them after all that has been taken, and the way this country was built on their backs. I don’t know how to quite reconcile that within a capitalist framework as a socialist.

And I want to be a good ally, and I’ve always advocated for reparations, so I’ve never taken a stance otherwise. Right, but that’s a contradiction of sorts that I feel creates new alienation of a different flavor.

[00:48:21.760] – Baldwin

I think you’re right.

[00:48:22.810] – Grumbine

What are your thoughts? Because I don’t want to be insensitive.

[00:48:26.100] – Baldwin

No, not at all.

[00:48:27.310] – Grumbine

Good. I appreciate it.

[00:48:28.560] – Baldwin

No, it’s a real conversation that we’re having internally within black communities and having crossed the color line as well. I love the work of Sandy Darity and other people, but we do have some disagreements. The foundation is the same, but disagreements around, for example, from what I understand, he believes that reparations should only be applied to those who can be identified genetically or biologically identified or genealogically identified with those who have been direct descendants of US slavery.

For me, I’m a historian and I understand that the structure that you mentioned, the structure of race and racism, has extended beyond just simply those who were descended from a US slave. And we look at the history of redlining and the ship of covenants and Jim Crow. When black immigrants from the Caribbean and from Africa came here, they were subject to those same realities.

And so my vision of reparations is a little bit broader. I definitely agree. I don’t necessarily think it should be an individual paycheck. The racist character is that black people going to buy a bunch of chicken and Cadillacs. That’s what people say. Let’s be real. That’s what people say. Right?

[00:49:28.560] – Grumbine

Yeah.

[00:49:29.460] – Baldwin

We’ve had reparations in this country before. It was repair for Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. And the original reparations came to white planters after emancipation. They argued reparations for the money they lost when black people freed themselves after the Civil War. They got reparations.

So for people to walk around saying, this is impossible, this is unthinkable. The first benefits of reparations in the US were slaveholders. So we have a legal and historic precedent for this reality. And living in a capitalist society, if you have engaged in labor and your value and your compensation has been stolen, the law of capitalism and the law of the land says you can receive repair.

That’s the history of white supremacy and racial discrimination in society. That there have been people of African descent whose labor has been stolen, whose land value has been stolen. And that is the reality. That is what we’re talking about here is repair–the root word of reparations. Repair for these horrific crimes that have generated prosperity in this country for everyone but those people.

We got to be clear about this. The extraction of wealth and labor power from black people historically has benefited other people. It created the prosperity that made this a land of target and of attractiveness for whole waves of immigrants to come here. The prosperity that was attractive here was because of the uncompensated labor of black people.

That’s the foundation of the prosperity of America. So that’s got to be said first of all to your main point is that I believe that it should not be individual paychecks. I’m an urbanist, so my approach would be to repair historic communities, whether that be by zip code or historic demarcations. Those communities should be repaired with an infusion of wealth that will build out institutions, access to financial credit and programs.

Because we got to be clear about this. People say, let’s go back to the New Deal. The New Deal was the answer for everything. But we got to remember, redlining was created during the New Deal.

[00:51:51.640] – Grumbine

Yes, indeed.

[00:51:52.720] – Baldwin

Racially uneven wages were upheld during the New Deal. So we need a new New Deal. A New Deal that takes into account the racial discrimination that took place even with this wonderfully wide sweeping approach to a strong government set of programs that offered the protection to engage in organized labor, that offered jobs to work on public works projects for bridges, roads, tunnels, all those things, support for anti eviction protections.

All the things we’re struggling with today could have been prevented if the New Deal had been maintained and was racially equitable. So this is what we’re saying. So the New Deal, it serves as a blueprint in certain ways. We need a new New Deal to be infused with black and brown communities. But it cannot be racially exclusionary.

Because right now we have what’s being called a reparations project in Evanston, Illinois, which is basically a house-buying program. So they give you a couple of extra dollars to buy a home, but who’s that going to really benefit? The land development class.

[00:52:59.430] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:53:00.340] – Baldwin

That’s not it. We need community land trust. In each community.

[00:53:05.810] – Grumbine

Yeah.

[00:53:06.810] – Baldwin

We need labor-controlled companies like the Mondragon Group in Spain, worker control factories. We need education programs to get black and brown kids and adults up to speed, to work in the knowledge and service economy. We need fair wages. We need to extract environmental toxins that target our communities. We need to extract it.

We need people to equitably share their garbage, which is disproportionately located in black and brown communities. These would be the foundations. I’m just talking about a couple of things–the foundations for reparations on a structural level in ways that would not just simply pay the financial class for offering loans or new grants in this community that will go back to them through financial services.

No, we don’t want that. We want the money to invigorate and remain in these communities so we can build up these communities in an autonomous or semiautonomous way so that they can be sustainable.

[00:54:04.240] – Grumbine

This brings me to the final point that I want to make and I think this will tie up everything really nicely. You’ve mentioned about work and we talk frequently about Modern Monetary Theory, and the primary–it’s not really a program, it’s kind of baked into the sauce–is the Federal Job guarantee. And I know that Martin Luther King was a fan of this and we’re big fans of this. But one of the things that I raised to my ADOS friends, immigrants have been used as a weapon against the black and brown community in the United States–in particular black.

[00:54:37.380] – Baldwin

Right. Yep.

[00:54:38.590] – Grumbine

It has been used as a way of keeping the black and brown community down. And what we have frequently said is by adding a federal job guarantee, it prevents there from being that scarcity of living wage payable work and it provides it out for all generational poverty. Which by extension would drastically improve these communities that we talked about at the beginning of this interview.

Without gentrification to allow those communities to suddenly have an infusion of cash and a sense of pride and a sense of community building. Because the federal job guarantee is federally funded but locally administered, that means that local communities choose the type of work they were giving and they could structure it in a way that built up their community and in such a way that they were in control of what’s done.

They’re in control of who gets the types of jobs they want, not some bureaucrat in DC and not some white person trying to do a favor for a friend or a family member. And by doing this, it takes the edge off punching down at immigrants who are seen as an existential threat because of the way they’re used by the powers that be. They keep us in precarity. Your thoughts?

[00:55:57.870] – Baldwin

Yeah, for sure. On one side, by excluding black people equitably from the workforce that you’re talking about when white ethnic immigrants came in, number one, obviously it decimated black communities. But also these black folks became a reserve labor force that also reduced the wages of those white workers because whenever they threatened to go on strike or demand better conditions, there was a threat that black people could come in and strike break.

[00:56:25.330] – Grumbine

Wow.

[00:56:26.070] – Baldwin

So these racially organized labor markets, they don’t just hurt black people, they also hurt white folks. And I think we need to be real about that. So if we have this job guarantee, the federal job guarantee–it would help if it’s administered equitably, which a lot of times these programs are not, especially at the local level–then it would benefit everybody.

I don’t know all the details about it, but to have the listeners look it up. In Richmond, California, they had this pilot program for I think it was a guaranteed wage. Okay. And it was extremely transformative. Richmond is a majority minority community, and there was a guaranteed wage program with a pilot program.

And from my understanding, it was transformative for these communities. And what it would mean to reproduce this in other communities across the country, I think would be transformative. And I think that we need to start thinking about that. We need to have a stronger base.

[00:57:17.200] – Grumbine

Yes.

[00:57:17.770] – Baldwin

In this country, we start at the top and we identify so called exceptional individuals as proof what we can all do. But we know that the quality of the community is the condition of the least of us. And it’s from that standpoint that we need to build out political policies and programs, economic solidarity projects.

It’s from that perspective that we must move forward. That it’s the office cleaners and the domestics and the grounds keepers and the food service workers, basically essential workers of Covid-19 who were thrust into precarity and danger during the pandemic. It’s their conditions, their lives. When they are met equitably, we all rise.

[00:57:58.310] – Grumbine

Great way to close this out. Davarian, I really appreciate the time you spent with me today. Of course, you just have to know I’m going to be calling you again soon. I love talking with you. Tell everybody what you’re working on, where we can find more of your work.

[00:58:13.110] – Baldwin

Yeah, as you mentioned before, and I thank you for this opportunity and the platform to have a conversation with you. My work has been both historical, trying to recover these communities that have been decimated, and also contemporary, trying to fight for the descendants of these black and brown communities and for white communities as well.

So on the historical piece, I just put together a puzzle called Harlem Renaissance Jigsaw Puzzle, which is really fun. And we know about the Harlem Renaissance for pieces and bits in terms of writers like Zora Neale Hurston, like Langston Hughes. We don’t know about the struggles for housing. And the activists on the left, like the black socialists, like A. Philip Randolph and his magazine The Messenger, or the black queer folk that started drag ballroom culture at the Hamilton Lodge on 155th.

So this puzzle tries to offer a more comprehensive vision of the Harlem Renaissance, both political and cultural. So that’s great for young people to get a deeper history of that world. Then, on the contemporary side, you mentioned my book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities.

And this has been powerful for me because, as you mentioned, where we start to reconstruct a better America, better communities. And for me, being an academic, I start where I work, I start where I live. And universities have a devastating impact on communities in terms of their control over housing, over health care, over property, over labor.

Not just for the schools, but for whole cities. And so through my Smart Cities Lab, we’ve been working with and advocating with communities who live in the shadows and fighting for equitable property taxation of these universities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. I’m developing a reparations campaign in Philadelphia for those communities that were decimated at the hands of UPenn and Drexel.

I recently was elected to the National Council of the American Association of University Professors. And we’re fighting for equitable campus labor conditions–wall to wall organizing from the low wage cafeteria workers up to the faculty and also into the community and working with medical professionals to ensure that university hospitals honor their social accountability.

That’s the condition for their tax exemptions. So we’re trying to tie that to their accreditation. And so these are just a couple of things that my lab was working on from the standpoint of where I work and live at the university and the impact the university is having on our communities way beyond the campus.

Trying to use that as a standpoint from which to argue for more equitable life conditions in the realms of housing, healthcare, policing, land, all these things. Trying to move forward in an equitable way. And that’s the ground upon which I’m working–from the past to the present to the future.

[01:00:41.210] – Grumbine

Very good. So, you know, I’ve already got my next podcast with you in my mind. This is Steve Grumbine with my wonderful guest, Davarian Baldwin. Please listen to this, share it around and by all means, keep coming back again. This is Macro and Cheese and we are out of here.

[01:00:58.170] – Baldwin

Thank you.

[01:01:24.250] – End credits

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.