[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]For the last few weeks, every morning when I have awoken, the first words from my lips are, “Bill Moyers said.” My dear husband is surely tired of hearing me wake up starting with the phrase.
I used to read a lot of romance novels. I could wile away hours, and sometimes days, engrossed in made up worlds. When I tired of love stories, I would switch to so-called “women’s fiction,” books about women’s relationships with one another and their families.
In the last few months, though, my taste for such fare has waned. Whether it has to do with the quality of fiction produced today (More vampires! More werewolves!), less artful prose or my shifting tastes, I can’t say; but I’ve been spending my time reading a lot of non-fiction – depressing non-fiction at that. In between all that cheerful prose, I’ve listened to nearly one hundred fifty podcasts of Bill Moyers’s Journal.
During one episode, he interviewed Douglas Blackmon, author of “Slavery by Another Name.” Another time he spoke with television writer and producer David Simon (Homicide, The Corner, The Wire). The Blackmon interview and book (which I subsequently read) fundamentally changed how I see the confluence of race and capitalism in America, as it provided a broader narrative in which to place my own family history. The Simon interview, like his shows, was deeply moving and illuminating about many of the structural problems in our society today.
Each of these sources of information, along with a series of books I’ve read in the past year, starting with Devah Pager’s “Marked,” Jeremy Scahill’s “Blackwater,” and Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” have triggered a transformation in the way I understand my place in the world, the country in which I live and the valuation of labor.
My earliest attitudes about notions of work originate with stories I heard at my grandmother’s knee. I come from a family of sharecroppers on my mother’s side. My great-grandparents, Samuel and Luella Franklin, lived in Clark County, Mississippi, in a small town, Shubuta. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Clark County was a center of cotton farming in the black belt.
Of Mercy There Was None
Like most sharecroppers in the American South, the members of my family were essentially serfs. The Franklins were as tied to the land as their slave forbearers. Despite the emancipation of African Americans nearly seven decades earlier, white masters oversaw most aspects of their lives and prevented them from being free. Although they were technically “independent contractors,” my sharecropping progenitors were unable to determine who among them could work and when.
My grandmother remembers an overseer, a Mr. Davis (she does not recall a first name), who daily rode through the plantation on a large horse, making sure every last able-bodied member of the five or six families living on the land were working. And work they did. As children, my grandmother and her siblings were allowed to attend school only four months of the year. Maternity leave, as we now envision it, was non-existent. My great-grandmother, upon having her fifth or sixth child, tried to stay home to care for the family’s newest member – but the overseer dashed her hopes by ominously warning her husband that she had better be back farming cotton when he next rode by. A week, he had said, was enough time to recover from giving birth.
Although there was plenty of work, there wasn’t much “sharing involved in the farming enterprise. The Franklins and the other families had to purchase much of their food, their milling and all of their goods from the landowner’s “store.” The system was geared so that they were constantly in debt. Selling their cotton to the landowner — at the prices he fixed — was insufficient to pay off what they owed, year after year. They had little money to speak of. No matter how many hands they had picking (determined, by the number of children), there was little they could do to pull themselves up out of abject poverty. Indeed, despite the familiar aphorism, they had no bootstraps to pull upon.
Things Grew Better, but…
As Blackmon’s book vividly details, it was on the backs of my family and millions of others like them that many whites in America generated great wealth. Often absent from discussions about America’s supposed meritocracy from which the cream supposedly floats to the top, are the tales of the thousands of laboring workers — be they black or white, children or convicts (many guilty of no genuine crimes at all) — who were exploited to make rich just the few who exploited them.
Sure, things got better after a time. The Great Depression served to virtually end child labor. Passage of the National Labor Relations Act in the mid-1930s paved the way for collective bargaining. And World War II acted to extinguish peonage in the 1940s, allowing blacks to work for wages.
Today almost all labor experts and economists agree that the present climate is a very bad one for workers in the United States. For some time, I believed this condition was limited to lawyers or African Americans, perhaps because I belong to both groups, and I still think that they are both horribly maligned. Recently, and with some assistance from Bill Moyers and his guests, I’ve extended my outrage about the lack of opportunities to a much broader swath of the population.
To paraphrase David Simon, we Americans, all of us of able-bodied and of working age, are not necessary to the American economy. In Simon’s view, the inner city blacks are virtually unnecessary in today’s economy. Like Oprah, I had a “light bulb moment” when I heard him say this. But I think the numbers of those who are redundant extend beyond race and geography.
How else could we have nearly two million men and women in prison, mostly idle? How else could we have inner cities filled with black and brown people, many of whom have no opportunity? How else could we have “structural” unemployment of so many in our population? How else could we have tens of thousands of college graduates, of lawyers, of teachers, of newly minted Ph.Ds completing school every year without any realistic employment opportunities?
We like to pretend that there is opportunity. Our President touts college as the answer. Many others promise that all would be well if only our public school system provided an equally sound education for all. Economists assure us that it will all turn around soon and another boom in our boom/bust cycle will come again.
The truth, I fear, is that our “economy” needs fewer and fewer of us to thrive for an aristocratic few who will benefit. The causes have a different face depending on what you read. Some say it’s outsourcing. And that is true. Corporations will happily pay a few hundred dollars a month to a worker in China or India to avoid paying twelve hundred dollars to an American worker. Others fear the vast undocumented immigrant hoards. That fear has its basis in some rationality. Employers will happily pay a worker $3 an hour to avoid paying an American worker $7.25 to do the same menial work.
What many fail to see is that it long has been this way. Whether the exploited worker was an enslaved African, a European child or the wrongly convicted, small bands of people (often organized in corporations) have long searched for and found ways to have humans work for them for nothing or nearly nothing. The last seventy years or so have been the exception.
Yet the exploitation of the worker, the race to the bottom for the cheapest worker at the lowest wage, is not sustainable. Americans out of work and out of credit cannot buy the products made with exploited Asian labor or be the customers serviced by exploited Indian labor. Only so many Americans will continue to volunteer for the armed services, — lately tasked with making sure limited natural resources are available to corporations, whether it be fossil fuels or Coltan. An out-of-work populace can’t make the interest payments on their difficult-to-discharge debt, be it student loans, home mortgages or credit cards. These same unemployed folks can’t “invest” in lockbox tight retirement accounts, giving bankers unlimited access to our money for decades while we have virtually no rights to it ourselves.
The rich, the wealthy, the bankers all need us to feed their greed. Bill Moyers would say that the current tactics used by the corporate elite spell the end to our democratic republic. I think it’s bigger than that, though. I used to think it was just blacks whom capitalists wanted to work for free and wanted to use us to inspire fear among whites. But corporations and their beneficiaries are equal opportunity exploiters. Unfortunately, the tactics are the same, whether it’s H1Bs or Muslims. That fear will ultimately divide and conquer us all.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
