White Empathy, for a Change: Comments from Jason Hackworth

Let me begin by thanking Andy Oler for his thoughtful review of my book Manufacturing Decline, and Cleveland Review of Books editor Jacob Bruggeman for his encouragement to write a response. Since the book release in October of last year, I have been asked to write a handful of such replies, but I have to admit finding this assignment particularly fitting and satisfying. I grew up about 150 miles south of Cleveland (in a rural area southeast of Columbus, Ohio), and in many ways, Cleveland was in the back of my mind when I wrote the book.

Though no person or politician from Cleveland ever had any jurisdictional authority or say in the laws or economy or everyday life of where I grew up, I remember a strange hatred that the most conservative members of my family and town had for it. As they told it, Cleveland was a dirty, corrupt place filled with crime and vice. To be honest, it sounded pretty scary to me. Manufacturing Decline is, in part, my attempt to understand why vitriol for places like Cleveland exists and how it leads to a politics of revenge and deprivation, particularly toward their non-white residents. Many years later, as a professor in a different country and lots of time to think and study this issue, two things have become abundantly clear to me. First, the hatred of such places is not unique to rural Ohio. The vitriol of outstaters to Detroit, and Milwaukee, and Chicago, is very similar. And second, no matter the intricate efforts to deny it, such constructions are centrally about race. Speaking of Cleveland in this way may have fooled my 8-year-old ears as a dispassionate, objective description of a scary place. But it is increasingly clear to me as an adult, that such tropes are a thinly veiled way to condemn blackness. The racist deployment of places like Cleveland is not just a pastime in redneck bars in southeast Ohio or small talk amongst my estranged family members. It is repeated up and down the Conservative Movement food chain—from social media memes to think-tank “thought pieces” to, most famously, the current U.S president’s Twitter account. Pathologizing the city in the Midwest is a way of pathologizing blackness. Conservatives have deployed these tropes since the Civil Rights Movement, and it is a key reason why they enjoy so much electoral success.

Andy Oler does a terrific job of relating Manufacturing Decline to the current context. He focuses on the final chapter that I have titled “urban decline was planned.” The title and the theoretical arc of the chapter are derived from Karl Polanyi’s famous expression, “laissez-faire was planned, planning was not.” Polanyi was a social theorist in the early twentieth century. In his opus, The Great Transformation, published in 1944, he sought to understand the power of what we would today call “conservative economics” or “neoliberalism,” simply called “liberalism” during the nineteenth century. Then, as today, conservatives insisted that the market is an efficient, just, natural, even god-ordained allocator of opportunity. Also, like today, conservatives railed against any form of regulation. They insisted that “planning,” “regulation,” and the like were unnatural deviations from the market. Things would always improve if we surrendered ourselves to the “natural” free market. Polanyi thought this framing was absurd. He rightly pointed out that the conditions of a “free market” are incredibly planned. Markets cannot exist without laws, police forces, and wage levels that require people to work under circumstances of someone else’s choosing. To Polanyi, the market was planned and organized; the various “interventions” like child labor laws were organic gasps from a desperate public that had become over-exposed to the brutality of these conditions. Polanyi’s point was to shine a light on the hypocrisy of the Right—how it was very willing, despite all of its protestations, to use statecraft to actuate a world that it wanted to see. My point in applying his phrase to struggling cities in the Midwest is likewise to suggest that their challenges are significantly caused by the actions of conservatives seeking to hurt them. Their challenges are as planned as any formal policy.

The other reason, maybe more important than the first, to emphasize “planning” is to denaturalize the challenge. It isn’t the natural or god-ordained market that is causing inequality or the destruction of Detroit. These things are the result of coordinated political actions. And if the challenge is political in origin so then might the solution to it be. In the most optimistic application of this idea, scholars have used his framework to understand the shift toward social democracy in the 1930s. To Polanyi and others, this shift was the product of a populace finally reasserting its right to make the market adhere to basic social standards. For such a swing toward progress to occur, a crisis of sufficiently severe magnitude must challenge the prevailing paradigm. The Great Depression was sufficient within this framework to test the erstwhile dominance of conservative economics that reigned before it (and in many ways caused it). Activists, scholars, and politicians were able to remake the state’s relationship with markets after the erstwhile paradigm had collapsed. Relief programs, labor regulations, corporate taxes, and anti-monopoly regulations were enacted to actuate a more humane market. In parallel to this, institutions were created to support the new paradigm. Union membership swelled, progressive think-tanks were created, and the Democratic Party embraced this new mode of thinking. Oler asks if the current crisis is sufficiently severe to provoke such a change today. And he’s right to do so. Well over 100,000 Americans have died of a disease that other countries were able to keep under control. More people are unemployed than at any other period in American history, including the Great Depression. The state has failed and the paradigm of neoliberalism has been exposed again.

I suppose, in a sense, sure, the current crisis is severe enough to be the predicate for change, but I have to be honest. Right now, I do not see the institutional scaffolding of a progressive response. Polanyi and others always saw crisis as the necessary but not sufficient condition for change. For the crisis to generate widespread change, there must be widespread collective experience, institutions that are willing and able to fill the void, and a political vehicle for that to happen. When I reflect upon the modern urban landscape in America, I see a crisis that is felt unevenly, and institutions that could be part of the solution being suppressed and backgrounded by the center-left. The modern Democratic Party has spent the last 50 years suppressing its left flank in a quixotic attempt to get white suburban soccer moms to leave their relationship with the Republican Party. Minneapolis is literally smoldering as I write this. The streets erupted when footage of George Floyd being murdered by a Minneapolis police officer went public. True to form, the president of the United States responded with his racist Twitter thumbs threatening to kill looters on the spot. Protesters are “thugs,” and their actions lawless. Also true to form, centrist Democrats are rushing to cameras to make sure everyone understands that the officers in question will get due process, that there will be no rush to judgment, and that the most important thing right now is to be calm. Whatever tonal differences exist between the president and his “opposition party,” they are unified in substance—the “looters” and “rioters” are in the wrong. They must be punished, no questions asked. It feels as much like 1968 as 2020. The only thing that makes this different than 1968 is that national political figures like Trump do not mask their animus. The long-held assumption (by Republican political consultants) that direct racist language would scare off white suburban moderates is clearly incorrect. White suburbia largely agrees with Mr. Trump, even if they wish he would tone it down sometimes. And therein lies the politics of all of this. As long as the majority of white people continue to think of black protestors in Minneapolis and elsewhere as “lawless thugs,” the capacity to build institutions that might lead to change is elusive.

Maybe this shows the limits of Polanyi’s perspective. Sure, laissez-faire was and is planned, but unplanning it was never complete. The market didn’t die when the New Deal hit it. To the extent that it became marginally more humane, it always excluded a substantial portion of the electorate. Black people were the last served by Depression-era relief programs and were explicitly excluded from home ownership programs through deliberate, organized federal interventions. This racism was not a bug—it was a feature. To placate southern Democrats (without whom the New Deal would not have been), such limitations were requirements. There was no organic, comprehensive swing toward progress in the 1930s. There was one for white workers—the benefits to black people were secondary, residual, and resented by many white Americans as “undeserved.” To the extent that these matters were rectified in the 1960s with the three major civil rights acts, conservatives—mostly Republicans, but many Democrats too—revolted against these measures for 50 years. Isolating, pathologizing, and punishing black people, neighborhoods, and cities has become an electoral bonanza for politicians throughout the Midwest.

If I were to supplement Polanyi’s recipe for change, I would add something far more elusive to the mix: white empathy. Empathy for what it must be like to watch your brother or son be strangled to death on national television. Empathy for what it must be like for the majority of your country to be more patient with his murderer than they are with your kin. Empathy for what it must be like to parent a black boy in this society. I don’t mean performative understanding. I mean empathy that translates into jury box and voting booth behavior. Empathy that guides where you live, and who you allow your children to be schooled with. Empathy doesn’t seem like too much to ask, but white America has been and continues to be stingy about offering it. Until that kind of empathy exists, the kind of widespread institution and movement building that translates into general change will be elusive. I wish I had something more sanguine to write, but I have to admit being filled with anxiety about the reaction this crisis might provoke. American urban history is littered with the residue of white rageful reaction. Maybe the most optimistic thing I can muster at this moment is to end with the words of James Baldwin. “Not everything,” he wrote, “that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”