The Political Economy of Niggerdom: W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. on the Racial and Economic Discrimination of Black Males in America

Abstract

In The Color of Money, Baradaran argues that the defining feature of America’s racial divide is the wealth gap which is where the seeds of historic anti-Black injustice and the present economic sufferings of African Americans were sown. While exploring the philosophical thoughts of W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr., this essay grapples with such roots of anti-Black economic injustice by highlighting how the American capitalist economy was designed to, ultimately, destroy Black families through the exclusion of Black males from the system of wealth creation. I argue that insights from the structural, socio-political and economic critiques of W. E. B Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. reveal how America operated a “political economy of niggerdom”—a system that utilizes various modes of anti-Black misandry, and the stereotype of criminalization as the basis for racial and economic discrimination against Black males.

Keywords

Black males Martin Luther King Jr.W. E. B. Du Bois racial discrimination and economic injustice

The quest of the Black male for employment was always frustrating. If he lacked skill, he was only occasionally wanted because such employment as he could find had little regularity and even less remuneration. If he had skill, he also had his black skin, and discrimination locked doors against him.

—Martin Luther King Jr. (1967)

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

—W. E. B. Du Bois (1903)

Studies on the disorganization and dysfunction of the African American family primarily blame the Black male for this predicament—as an indication of his own socioeconomic and existential failures (Anderson, 1981; Rainwater, 1966; Rodman, 1968; Roger, 1964)—even though Black males are overrepresented in American prisons, are being disposed of and destroyed at the hands of the state through racially motivated police killings, and have a lower participation rate in the labor force when compared with all males (Townsey, 1981). Despite these negative manifestations that overdetermine the existence of Black males, social scientists and other intellectuals continue to perpetuate many myths, stereotypes, and distortions about Black males which masquerade their racial and economic victimization. For instance, Blake and Darling (1994) put forward the argument that “African American male joblessness is a major contributor to [Black] family instability and to economic insecurity of Black mothers and children” (p. 407). Although, this statement acknowledges the reality of the economic problem that confronts the Black family, it fails to underscore the historical and socio-causal factors responsible for such phenomena. It seems to suggest that Black males are irresponsible and ineffective family figureheads that endanger the lives of Black mothers and children.

What this implies is that “as a subject of research, the [B]lack male has been cast in a restricted role set that, to a large extent, has been pathological in nature” (Gary, 1981, p. 11). Such pathological categorization of Black males as being unable to function adequately in their social roles as fathers, husbands, and providers for their families makes it impossible for the society to grasp the victimization of Black males. It also conceals the depth of the economic discrimination that confronts Black males within an American economy that is purportedly open to all through the principles of a free-enterprise market economy. But when it comes to the plight of Black males within America’s political economy, this notion of economic access is more myth than reality. As Harold Cruse (1984) maintains, America is a nation that abounds in many myths and many realities. The greatest myth is that of democratic capitalism, which has never existed for all groups in America. Thus, the pathological treatment of Black males within America’s economy is encapsulated in such phantasmagoria of democratic capitalism (Baradaran, 2017).

In a bid to counter such pathological descriptions of Black males in contemporary imaginations, researchers on Black males (under the appelation, “Black Male Studies”) are beginning to provide deep counter-hegemonic narratives that depict Black males as victims rather than as perpetrators of their condition of social economic isolation and racialized discrimination in America. In The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, Curry (2017) argues that the modernization of America’s economy during the 1970s and 1980s had dire consequences for Black men because they are seen as racialized men. Black males suffer from deliberate and institutional programs designed to remove them from society. This is made obvious by the institutional decimation of Black men through police violence and incarceration emergent from a political economy that deliberately confined Black men to poverty; exploited Black male labor and rationalized their death as a consequence of their deviance and undesirability in American society. Although, African American labor was made increasingly redundant or superfluous in this period (with heightened competition with White labor too, thus stoking the coals of anti-Black racism and anti-Black misandry). This was in the context of the Volcker Shock/deindustrialization,¹ a period where fewer good jobs were available to African Americans and with that institutional discrimination was on the upswing.² In this period, it was simply well known that most good jobs were not available to Blacks. Not only employers but also labor unions, particularly craft unions, were explicit on maintaining the color bar (Arrow, 1998).

Recent research on this issue finds that employers not only are less likely to hire Black men after they are incarcerated but also discriminate against Black men more generally because the high rates of crime and incarceration among young Black men are likely to reduce the employment prospects of those with no criminal background themselves (Curry, 2017). This scourge of criminalization has grave consequences on both Black males and Black families. Mass incarceration destroys Black families; it removes fathers from homes and makes Black men, both literally and figuratively, disenfranchised and unemployed under America’s caste system (Curry, 2017). Similarly, in “The Economic Plight of Inner-City Black Males,” Wilson (2009) contends that African American men continue to confront racial barriers in the labor market; many inner-city Black males have also been victimized by the declining relative demand for low-skilled labor. Citing empirical research conducted on poverty and joblessness among Black males in inner-city Chicago neighborhoods, Wilson (2009) maintains that “the jobs filled by the low-status Black men were poorly paying, dirty, physically demanding, and uninteresting” (p. 59). This reveals a pattern of economic discrimination and victimization that specifically targets Black males. It is this pattern of economic discrimination on the basis of race and sex, that is, being Black and male, that I refer to as the political economy of niggerdom.

Although the political economy of niggerdom is rooted in the historical but pathological, prejudiced, and caricaturized portrayal of Black folks as niggers, the Black male is singled out for constituting a threat to the social, economic, and political power of the dominant White males. So he was labeled as an unwanted being, a social deviant and a brute in the imagination of White Americans. In this context, niggerdom typifies the domain of exclusion, outsideness, and social ostracizing particularly reserved for Black males. It is important to note that such brute depiction of Black men as incensed, animalistic, buckish, and prone to wanton violence was a vestige of the hetero-patriarchal norms prevalent in 19th-century American social and family structure where economic, social, and political power or dominance was restricted to the domain of White manhood. Within such patriarchal caste-economic structures, Black males were primarily targeted for constituting a threat to the socioeconomic arrangement. In Caste and Class in a Southern Town, Dollard (1937) observes that

In comparing the life history data of Black men and women, it was quite clear that much more antagonism is tolerated from women; they can do and say things which would bring a severe penalty had they been men. It may be that white caste members do not fear the aggression of women, so much, especially since it cannot take the form of sexual attack, or the chivalry expected of men in our society toward women in general may come into play. They are, of course, distinct limits to what a Black woman may do, but they are not so narrow as for men. (pp. 289-290)

This observation by Dollard reveals that under the South’s patriarchal order, Black men were punished more severely than their Black female counterpart for violating the societal norms used to enforce their racial inferiority. Black males were condemned to the bottom of the racial caste system such that any attempt by a Black man to improve himself economically was perceived by the White caste as an affront (Curry, 2018). As a consequence, the full weight of Jim Crow regulations was directed at destroying the Black male. The racial order of Jim Crow was designed to destroy the self-concept and will of Black males. Oppression of Black men was specifically contoured to deprive them of the will to pursue the means of acquiring any semblance of manhood (Curry, 2018). Dominant White males created Jim Crow economic policies that became inescapable economic trap for Black men and Black families attempting to transverse the capitalist caste-system or turf of colonial segregation. Thus, the political economy of niggerdom is essentially a system of economic discrimination that is informed by sexualized racism or anti-Black misandry—the targeting of Black males by powerful White males. Smith (2010) defined Black racial misandry as an exaggerated pathological aversion toward Black boys and men, created and strengthened in societal, structural, and institutional ideologies.

In Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression, Sidanius and Pratto (1999) using the in-group/out-group framework provide a theoretical lens for understanding how Black males were excluded from the social order under patriarchal social structures and gender systems. Such that subordinate males or “out-group males” are the primary targets of hegemonic and dominant males or “in-group” males. Especially when group conflicts are seen as contests over the symbolic maintenance of group boundaries and over concrete material interests. Sidanius and Pratto realized that these patriarchal societies that gained economic surplus exhibited a tendency to construct subordinate males as sexual threats to the endogamy of the dominant White race. In short, the organization of these particular societies saw subordinate males as threats to their kinship relationships with the dominant group. Looking at various capitalist societies throughout the world, Sidanius and Pratto found that in every society studied, the subordinate males within that society experienced the most severe forms of discrimination and seemed to be the consistent targets of the most egregious forms of violence and death (Curry, 2018).

It is also important to note that social dominance theory (SDT) was developed in an attempt to understand how group-based social hierarchy is formed and maintained. Unlike most other theories of prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination in social psychology (e.g., realistic group conflict theory, social identity theory, self-categorization theory, stereotype content model), SDT assumes that we must understand the processes producing and maintaining prejudice and discrimination at multiple levels of analysis, including cultural ideologies and policies, institutional practices, and relations of individuals to others inside and outside their groups (Pratto, Sidanius, & Levin, 2006). The theoretical assumptions of SDT underscore both the historical and contemporary economic discrimination of Black males within America’s patriarchal capitalism which is of particular interest in this essay.

Today, Black males are still experiencing such economic victimization and are excluded from gainfully participating in the American economy, so as to ensure they remain at the bottom of society’s well. This aspect of the political economy of niggerdom manifests through the rate of incarceration, underemployment, unemployment, and poverty among Black males that negatively impacts the Black family. In a recently published study by Chetty, Hendren, Jones, and Porter (2018) titled “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective,” it was revealed that race gaps in intergenerational mobility reflect poor outcomes for Black men, and by extension—the Black family. The study examines sources of racial and ethnic disparities in income using de-identified longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989 to 2015. It documents that Black Americans have substantially lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than Whites, leading to large income disparities that persist across generations. It also identifies the fact that Black men have substantially lower employment rates and wages rates than White men as a consequence of the large intergenerational wealth gaps and disparities in earnings for Blacks in comparison to White men.

In a study conducted for the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), Kroeger (2013) discusses this group’s high unemployment rates, which she attributes to high incarceration rates, low graduation rates, and a lack of support systems to help Black men out of the low-income trap. The report notes that young Black men often lack support systems and early opportunities to properly prepare them for the job market. They enter the workforce at a disadvantage that can continue throughout their lives. Their lack of skills and experience leads to higher unemployment rates, lower wages, and fewer advancement opportunities than their White peers. Data compiled from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that a larger percentage of Black males aged 16 to 64 years were unemployed than for “all men” (11.2% compared with 7.3%) and were living below the poverty level (26%) than “all men” (15%). It is also noted that in 2014, 27% of all African American men, women, and children live below the poverty level compared with just 11% of all Americans (Black Demographics, 2018). Even highly qualified Black men with professional skills, higher education, and work experience are not exempted from such niggerdomized discrimination. Smith, Hung, and Franklin (2011) observes that even though African American men attain higher levels of education and break through traditionally White occupations and spaces, they are still challenging and encountering stereotypes regarding Black male inferiority and stereotypes about whether they are qualified for such positions. Many of these stereotypes are regarding whether they possess a thug or “ghetto-centered” mentality or not, whether they violent, and whether they truly merit a position that is the result of hard work.

Another aspect of the lived experience of Black males where the political economy manifests within the social fabric of America is through the pernicious stigma of criminalization. The media, in the United States, is adept at projecting negative images about Black males in order to sustain the myths that legitimize White supremacy and the racialization of the “other” in the White racial imaginary. Overwhelming evidence exists of exaggerated associations of African American men with drug-related crime, unemployment, and poverty. Such niggerization and criminalization of Black males becomes concretized when the image of the idle Black male on the street corner becomes the dominant one in the world as depicted by the media (Donaldson, 2015). However, the racial implication of such niggerization—the mapping of hatred, delinquency, and derogatory portrayals to Black male bodies—is aimed at justifying their decimation within the state. Such hatred of Black males manifests today in various forms of state-sanctioned violence like mass incarceration and police racialized killings. About 6% of working age (18-64 years old) Black men are currently in state or federal prison, or a municipal jail. This is 3 times higher than 2% of “all men” in the same age group (Black Demographics, 2018). This data coincide with the increased absence of Black men in the labor force because offenders are prevented from obtaining a large percentage of occupations either by law and are often legally discriminated against by private employers.

In White Privilege and Black Rights: The Injustice of U.S. Police Racial Profiling and Homicide, Zack (2015) argues that the culture and attitude of American police officers inevitably reflects who they think criminals are. And they seem to strongly associate non-Whiteness, especially Blackness [Black maleness] with criminality. Many unarmed Black men and boys have been killed since Trayvon Martin’s tragic death over 6 years ago. Many of the killings occurred after police officers arguably engaged in racial profiling—stopping and harassing these men for no explainable reason other than the color of their skin. In all of the cases where Black men were shot and killed, the officers claimed they felt threatened, even though the men were unarmed and often running away or retreating. In almost all of the cases, the police officers were never arrested or charged with a crime (Davis, 2017). What this suggests is that the stigma of criminalization which is used to justify the disposability of Black males is a way of ensuring their lack of participation in the American economy. That is, just as dead men do not tell tales, they do not join the workforce to compete for economic resources either.

This social stigmatization and exclusion of Black males from participating in America’s capitalist political economy through what I refer to as the political economy of niggerdom is a thread that reverberates through the political philosophies of W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. In this instance, I am referring to the socioeconomic critiques of King and Du Bois against America’s system of wealth creation, which reveals the enduring legacy of sociostructural racism in America and how this type of racial discrimination specifically targets Black males. In what follows, I argue that a critical survey of the politico-philosophical thoughts of Du Bois and King provide a profound historical grounding to analyze how the political economy of niggerdom functions to perpetuate economic violence against Black males. Ultimately, the arguments of Du Bois and King vividly capture the economic victimization of Black males which, in turn, creates the problem of the dysfunctional Black family. Put differently, the thoughts of Du Bois and King show that the dysfunction of the Black family is not caused by the Black male. Instead, the Black male should be seen as a victim of the economics of structural racism that primarily seeks to destroy the Black family via his own destruction.

W. E. B. Du Bois on Genocidal Logics and the Economic Plight of Black Males in America

“Who are men? Is every featherless biped to be counted a man and brother?”

—W. E. B. Du Bois (1899/2007)

In his diagnosis of the Black problem in The Philadelphia Negro, W. E. B. Du Bois was very convinced that the economic exclusion of Black males from the system of industrial wealth creation and distribution within America’s capitalist economy was slowly aimed at murdering Black males by ensuring their eternal economic and social exclusion to the point where they disappear from the face of the earth (Du Bois, 1899/2007). This genocidal logic was propagated on the basis of the socially accepted worldview in the 19th century that signified manhood rights as the hallmark of economic prosperity, and the exclusive preserve of hegemonic White males. Which means that underneath the question of economic prosperity rests the consciousness of manhood. This is why Du Bois, while describing the aspiration of Black spiritual strivings, affirms that “the history of the American [Black] is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood” (Du Bois, 1903/1994, p. 2). This was during the late 19th century, a period when White men, in particular, felt their manhood being undermined by the corporatization of the economy and the decline of proprietary and patriarchal capitalism, the “closing” of the frontier, and the incursion of Black men and women into the political realm through reform and suffrage movements (Summers, 2013).

So one rationale for ensuring the exclusion of Black males from the economic resources of the state within this epoch is the mission to nullify all threats that they may pose to the wealth of White folks, especially patriarchal White males who control the means and factors of production. So Black males, especially during reconstruction, were restricted to the class of manual laborers within this capitalist arrangement to produce wealth that they can never have and serve as programmatic machines in the structure of America’s industrial revolution. Although, the Gilded Age, the era which began with Reconstruction, commenced with the promise that Blacks would not only rise from the status of slave/wage laborers but be included in the nation’s economic and civic life. The period, conversely, generated increasing inequality generally, economic turbulence with unregulated financial systems, corrupt and issueless politics, corporate domination, and oppressive treatment of African Americans (Bacon, 2007).

In an essay on the African American experience in the Gilded Age, Fishel (2006) argues that in the South, African Americans saw the political and economic gains of reconstruction slip away. White southerners imposed a system of institutionalized racial segregation and disfranchised African Americans through literacy tests, poll taxes, and other means. Lynching and political violence provided more direct means of coercing and subjugating Blacks. Thus, reconstruction became in history a great movement for the self-assertion of the White race against the impudent ambition of degraded Blacks, instead of, in truth, the rise of a mass of Black and White laborers. The result was the disenfranchisement of the Blacks of the south and a worldwide attempt to restrict democratic development to White races and to distract them with race hatred against darker races. This became the root of modern industrial capitalism as this program undoubtedly helped raise the scale of White labor and in much greater proportion put wealth and power in the hands of the great European captains of industry and made modern industrial imperialism possible (Du Bois, 1969).

Hence, Du Bois writes in “The Future of the [Black] Race in America,” lamenting the economic plight of Black males in America:

The black man is in continual danger . . . his economic condition is especially unfortunate; he was emancipated suddenly, without land, capital, or tools, or skill, and generously bidden to work, be somber, and save money. And yet his most frantic efforts, under the circumstances, could not save him from sinking into an economic serfdom which, at its best, is organized and systematic pauperism. To turn astray in modern competitive industry a mass of ignorant, unguided working-men, whose employers despise them, and for whom the rest of the nation evinces only spasmodic concern, is to invite oppression. The result is oppression. (Du Bois, 1904/1996, p. 362)

A crucial point that Du Bois emphasizes here is the aspect of genocidal logics that thrives on the weaponization of poverty. That is, the Black male was kept poor in order to perfect his oppression and to guarantee him a life of economic hardships. This is why Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk maintains that “to be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships” (Du Bois, 1903/1994, p. 5). Thus, for Du Bois, the White upper class have perfected the art of oppressing Black males and the Black race generally, through the perfection of a system that will keep them perpetually in poverty. He, therefore, referred to this scheme as an “organized and systematic pauperism”—this is what I characterize in this essay as the political economy of niggerdom. Du Bois (1919) would later poignantly articulate this perpetuation of the logic of genocide through the weaponization of poverty in “An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War,” published in The Crisis, June 1919, with the following quip: “America knows the value of [Black] labor but not [Black] life” (p. 67).

Several decades later, E. Franklin Frazier writing about the efforts of Black males to acquire wealth or break through the economic caste system would echo Du Bois’s arguments about how Black males are denied employment in order to keep them poor. In the various studies conducted by Frazier at the turn of the century within various Black communities in the Southern and Northern territories, it was observed that most jobs that were available to Black males were low-skilled and low-paying, like bricklayers, shoemakers, butchers, which are highly competed for by other working-class groups like the keen competition of immigrant European labor (Frazier, 1939). This is akin to Du Bois’s characterization of the economic reality in which Black men find themselves, not entirely different from the economic reality during the time of slavery. Du Bois (1904/1996) observes that

on the plantation of the southern backwoods the Black is a peon bound to the soil without wages or rights; throughout the rural south cunningly devised labor laws—laws as to contract and lien, vagrancy, and employer and servant—are so applied to Black men as to reduce them to the level of fourteenth-century serfs. In the cities of the South and in the North the color line is so drawn as to increase competition against the Black, restrict his chances of employment, and lower his labor price, and while agencies for his degradation welcome and invite him, those for his uplifting are closed or coldly tolerant. (p. 363)

Due to such economic hardship and condition of penury, a relatively large proportion of the free Blackes, especially in the Northern areas, had to depend upon domestic and personal service for a living. Thus, discrimination mainly took the form of limiting the range of jobs in which Black males were hired at all (Arrow, 1998).

Thus, it is on the basis of such organization of the political economy of niggerdom that constricts Black males to a life of penury that Frazer would later offer his skepticism about the move to assimilate the Black into the middle-class status. As Frazier (1962) opines,

it is relevant at this point to say something concerning integration and the Black community. In the generally accepted meaning of the term, integration involves the acceptance of Blacks as individuals into the economic and social organization of American life. This would imply the gradual dissolution of the Black community, that is, the decline and eventual disappearance of the associations, institutions and other forms of associated life in what constitutes the Black community. (p. 27)

In Frazier’s view, what Black intellectuals who advocated such moves have had to say concerning integration has been concerned with the superficial aspects of the increasing participation of Blacks in the economic and social and political organization of American society. But in doing this, he inveighs that no practical attention has been directed to the rather obvious fact that integration involves the interaction of the organized social life of the Black community with the wider American community (Frazier, 1962). Here, Frazier is calling attention to how the thrust toward economic integration would adversely affect the sociopolitical organization of Blacks, especially an imagination of integration that does not take into cognizance the fact that the structures of economic and racial discrimination has been the greatest obstacle to Black economic progress in America.

It is on the basis of such practices of economic discrimination against Black males that Du Bois indicts America for its moral bankruptcy in utilizing genocidal logics as a strategy of discrimination through the weaponization of poverty and for refusing to grant Black males access to education in order to improve their chances of economic emancipation. Thus, Du Bois utilized his research about the condition of Black families in Philadelphia to call out the immorality of the economic discrimination against the Black family by White folks:

there is no doubt that . . . [the] kernel of the Black problem so far as the white people are concerned is the narrow opportunities afforded Blacks for earning a decent living. Such discrimination is morally wrong, politically dangerous, industrially wasteful, and socially silly. It is the duty of the whites to stop it, and to do so primarily for their own sakes. Industrial freedom of opportunity has by long experience been proven to be generally best for all. Moreover, the cost of crime and pauperism, the growth of slums, and the pernicious influences of idleness and lewdness, cost the public far more. (Du Bois, 1899/2007, p. 273)

In this instance, Du Bois asserts in The Souls of Black Folk that if America refuses to use and develop these men [Black men], America risk poverty and loss. He probes further by asking the following penetrating question: If, on the other hand, seized by brutal afterthought, America debauch the race thus caught in our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the future as in the past, what shall save it from national decadence? Only that saner selfishness, which education teaches men, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work (Du Bois, 1903/1994). The denial of access to education to Black males was designed to keep them as poor laborers who produce the “common” wealth of the nation that will remain uncommon to them. Harold M. Baron in “The Demand for Black Labor” poignantly describes this exploitative tendency as a trait of all capitalist systems. In most Western capitalist states, there exists a group of workers to fill the jobs that the more politically established sectors of the working class shun. These marginal workers generally are set apart in some way so that they lack the social or the political means of defending their interests (Baron, 1971).

On this note, Du Bois indicts America’s capitalist system of wealth creation as a criminal system because it thrives on slave labor—the exploitation of Black labor.

Organized labor is giving Black less recognition today than ever. It has practically excluded them from all the higher lines of skilled work, on railroads, in machine-shops, in manufacture and in basic industries. In agriculture, where the Black has theoretically the largest opportunity, he is excluded from successful participation, not only by farmers, but by special conditions due to lynching, lawlessness, disenfranchisement and social degradation. (Du Bois, 1933, 200)

Due to such parasitic capitalist exploitation that feeds on Black male labor, Du Bois raises serious questions about America brandishing itself as the greatest civilization in the world. He could not imagine a supposed great civilization with the stains of racism, imperialism, and economic discrimination embedded into its moral fabric. As Du Bois reasons, in his groundbreaking sociological studies of Black folks published under the title, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, if in the hey-dey of the greatest of the world’s civilizations, it is possible for one people ruthlessly to steal another, drag them helpless across the water, enslave them, debauch them, and then slowly murder them by economic and social exclusion until they disappear from the face of the earth—if the consummation of such a crime be possible in the 20th century, then our civilization is vain and the republic is a mockery and a farce (Du Bois, 1899a). Shannon Sullivan claims that Du Bois here is revealing that White racist capitalism depends upon the treatment of Black people as “property” to produce economic wealth (Sullivan, 2003). But when we put this in context of what Du Bois says about “sucking the blood and brains” of Black folks, we see that he is calling out a deeper problem of genocidal logics used by White Americans to ensure the annihilation of the Black race—especially by targeting Black males. This genocidal logic, according to Du Bois, thrives on the hatred of Black men mostly regarded as niggers.

In the words of Du Bois, “the flat, frank realization that however high the ideals of America or however noble her tasks, her great duty as conceived by an astonishing number of able men, brave and good, as well as of other sorts of men, is to hate niggers” (Du Bois, 1919, Quoted in Du Bois, 1986, p. 880). This hatred for Black males/niggers is what would lead to the creation of the mythic image of Black males as criminals, in the minds of the White majority at the turn of the century. The predominant suggestion during this period was that criminality is a specific social ill that is peculiar to Black males and not that of the entire society. In an anthology on Black Crime (and in other writings on this issue) particularly in Georgia, published in 1904, Du Bois would make the observation, based on sociological/empirical findings, that the problem of crime is the direct and indirect result of systematized poverty within urbanized communities and its attendant evils and not as a result of an assumed moral deficiency of Black males (Du Bois, 1899b, 1904).

The economic implications of America’s targeting of Black males in this fashion help to concretize his exclusion from participating in the American economy thereby ensuring his inability to thrive, which eventually will lead to the destruction of Black families. In Men at Risk, Errol Miller (1991) points to this form of discrimination against the Black males as being responsible for the Black family to virtually collapse. When Black males are denied employment, access to education, and are overrepresented in prisons, it creates a lacuna in the financial destiny and prosperity of Black families. This is why Du Bois asserts that America’s system of labor “tends to break up [Black] family groups” (Du Bois, 1903/1994, p. 87). This social problem is what leads to the manifestation of the absence of Black males in the family, and the lack of strong frontiers of Black male–female racial solidarity posed toward confronting anti-Black racism. It also makes it difficult for Black families to break away from the cycle of poverty festered upon them by America’s racist economic structures of oppression. Especially within the American patriarchal culture where the ability of a man to protect his family is probably understood as the basic element in our concept of manhood (Wendt, 2007). In The Black Family in the United States, Franklin Frazier provided an account of Black families surveyed between 1860 and 1900 which showed that most of these families had female heads and Black women had higher rates of employment when compared with Black males (Frazier, 1939). This was also corroborated by Marable (1983) in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. Thus, Du Bois’s structural critiques against America’s capitalist exploitation reveals a system of political economy of niggerdom that thrives on the persistence of the economics of structural racism and social inequality that negatively impacts the social outcomes for Black males within the Black family structure and renders the Black family dysfunctional.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Diagnosis of America’s Political Economy of Niggerdom

“The racial twin of racial injustice is economic injustice.”

—Martin Luther King Jr. (1958)

Even though Martin Luther King Jr. was just beginning his political activism/civil rights career at the twilight of Du Bois in the 20th century, they made similar critiques³ exposing the enduring structures of the political economy of niggerdom that would manifest strongly in the 60s and beyond. During this period, King was able to show that there was an enduring legacy of economic discrimination from Emancipation to the Civil Rights Era. In Why We Can’t Wait, King avows that the Black has had to recognize that one hundred years after emancipation he lived on a lonely island of economic insecurity in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. Blacks are still at the bottom of the economic ladder. They live within two concentric circles of segregation. One imprisons them on the basis of color, while the other confines them within a separate culture of poverty. The average Black is born into want and deprivation. His struggle to escape his circumstances is hindered by color discrimination (King, 2011). This assertion echoes Du Bois’s arguments about how poverty is weaponized to restrict the economic destiny of Black folks to the level of serfdom. Especially when Du Bois talks about the Black family as not being socially recognized as a viable economic class often presented as the justification for economic exclusion and discrimination in America (Du Bois, 1933). This is why King (2011) points out that

to the Black, as 1963 approached, the economic structure of society appeared to be so ordered that a precise sifting of jobs took place. The lowest-paid employment and the most tentative jobs were reserved for him. If he sought to change his position, he was walled in by the tall barrier of discrimination. (p. 30)

In the mid 60s, the White racial victimization of Black males would reemerge as a canonized government policy position in the form of the 1965 Moynihan report, tagged as “The [Black] Family: The Case for National Action.” This document prepared by the U.S. government concretized and perpetuated a virulent form of anti-Black misandry that depicts the enduring legacies of economic apartheid against Black males in America. This report essentially blames Black males for the dysfunction of the Black family by describing Black men as being incapable of becoming strong fathers and husbands because they do not participate in the economic system. The report further claims that such incapability on the part of Black males is what leads to Black families breaking up because women must assume the task of bringing in and rearing the children without male assistance. This then negatively impacts Black children since they do not grow in a stable home, they cannot learn and cannot have a stable life. This report also used the notion of “the tangle of pathology” (a phrase borrowed from social-psychologist Kenneth Clark’s description of Harlem ghetto life), to describe Black males as socially deviant and economically less viable than Black females. This narrative also goes as far as claiming that it was due to the presumed social slacking of Black males that a culture of matriarchy evolved within the Black family. Invariably, the report concluded by describing Black females as faring better interpersonally and economically than Black males as a rationale for why they dominate Black family life (Moynihan, 1965).

Although, the Moynihan report identified Black males as the reason of the poverty and economic stress within the Black family, King makes nonsense of this argument and exposes how the calculated attempt to emasculate Black males was used to ensure his economic discrimination. That is, for King, the political economy of niggerdom thrives on the emasculation of Black males which shows that the problem of the Black family is not that of matriarchy within the Black family but that of the patriarchal orientation of America’s political economy which thrives on the emasculation of Black males. A few months after the Moynihan report was published, King gave an address delivered at Abbott House, Westchester, New York, in 1965 on the dignity of Black family life where he criticizes the Moynihan report saying that it obscured the Black family as an institution and little comprehended its special problems. He censures this report for not diagnosing that the system of matriarchy that evolved was a bad omen for the Black family which was a holdover from America’s long investment in the economic enterprise of slavery. King observes that because the institution of marriage was not legal under slavery, and with indiscriminate sex relations often with White masters, Black mothers could identify their children but frequently not their fathers; hence a matriarchy developed. After slavery it did not die out because in the cities there was more employment for women than for men. Though both were unskilled, the women could be used in domestic service at low wages. The woman became the support of the household, and the matriarchy was reinforced. While the Black male existed in a larger society which was patriarchal while he was subordinated in a matriarchy (King, 1965/1967).

What King seems to be pointing to here is the central problem in America’s system of patriarchy. He understood racism and economic injustice as twin systems of anti-Black economic discrimination and misandry that primarily target Black males because “he gained manhood in the nation that had always called him boy” (King, 2010, p. 17). As the modern civil rights movement began, both White and Black Americans shared basic definitions of manhood. Manhood entailed an economic, social, and political status ideally achievable by all men. A man was regarded as the head of his household, which means, he had to make enough money to support his family as the primary, if not the only breadwinner. He also had a political voice in deciding how his community, his state, and his country were run. Racism kept many men, especially working-class Black men, from achieving these attributes of manhood. This explains why the Memphis sanitation strike was framed with the “I Am A Man!” slogan to illustrate the salience of questioned manhood as an issue also for the Black working class (Estes, 2005). For the men who were involved in this struggle, it was an important way to reclaim their manhood by protecting their families.

In his first speech to the sanitation strikers in Memphis, King had equated low pay and racist treatment with the tradition of White emasculation of Black workers that stretched back to the time of slavery. King’s primary motive for addressing the emasculation of Black men was to attack the dehumanizing effects of paternalistic racism and low pay. For instance, areas in which Black men had been highly concentrated in, during this period, include low-paying jobs like file clerks, mail handlers, messengers and office boys, and postal clerks, and sanitation labor. Thus, King was, in part, responding to discussions of Black male joblessness, poverty, and family stability raised by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the mid-1960s (Estes, 2005). King’s involvement in the Memphis strike reflected a commitment to economic justice that he recognized was integral to the fight against racial discrimination, but also understood on a personal level the demand for recognition of Black manhood that had become the rallying cry for the sanitation workers (Scott-King, 1986).

King would also revisit the diagnosis of Du Bois on how the logics of genocide is used to perpetuate economic discrimination in the civil rights era by proclaiming that when

a man asserts that another man, because of his race, is not good enough to have a job equal to his, or live next door to him, he is by implication affirming that that man does not deserve to exist. He does not deserve to exist because his existence is corrupt and defective. (King, 2010, p. 74)

So, what King highlights here is how White patriarchy functions to emasculate Black males through economic isolation under the disguise of social deviance. Simply put, to argue that Black males do not deserve to participate equitably in the economy is the same as saying that a Black man does not deserve to live. King also highlights how the emasculation of Black males was being perfected by hegemonic White males which then puts the Black family at a position of economic disadvantage. He avows that the emasculation of Black men forced “our wives and daughters to go out and work in the white lady’s kitchen, leaving us unable to be with our children” (Estes, 2005, p. 139). This observation shows King’s understanding of how the denial of Black manhood affected the ability of Black parents to care for their children. King further expands on how Black children are neglected and deprived of parental care due to the poverty that results from the economic discrimination of Black males:

This (America) is truly an island of poverty in the midst of an ocean of plenty . . . [Black children] . . . live in a world where even their parents are often forced to ignore them. In the tight squeeze of economic pressure, their mothers and fathers both must work; indeed, more often than not, the father will hold two jobs, one in the day and another at night. With the long distances ghetto parents must travel to work and emotional exhaustion that comes from the daily struggle to survive in a hostile world, they are left with too little time or energy to attend to the emotional needs of their growing children. (King, 2010, p. 121)

What this shows is how the emasculation of Black males and economic discrimination against Black males in effect was aimed at destroying the Black family. This was why it was crucial for the striking working men to fight for higher wages so that they could support their families and fulfill the traditional breadwinner role of men in a capitalist society (Estes, 2005).

King (2010) also expanded on his argument that the emasculation and economic discrimination of Black males can be traced to the political economy of slavery through the designation of Black males as propertyless property within America’s capitalist economy:

Since the institution of slavery was so important to the economic development of America, it had a profound impact in shaping the social-political-legal structure of the nation. Land and slaves were the chief forms of private property, property was wealth and the voice of wealth made the law and determined politics. In the service of this system, human beings were reduced to propertyless property. Black men, the creators of the wealth of the New World, were stripped of all human and civil rights. And this degradation was sanctioned and protected by institutions of government, all for one purpose: to produce commodities for sale at a profit, which in turn would be privately appropriated. (p. 76)

King’s analysis here about Black males being reduced to propertyless property is very profound. It captures the evils of capitalist-patriarchal exploitation of Black males in America which is informed by the politics of genocide and an ideology of male conquest or domination. Such that the Black male, though a human being, is commodified as a laborer or machinery in the scheme of wealth production under America’s capitalist system. This is akin to the commodification and wanton exploitation of Black labor under long centuries of slavery within America. As King observes (2010),

the Black whose slave labor helped to build a nation was being told by employers on the one hand and unions on the other that there was no place for him in this industry. Billions were being spent on city, state and national building for which the Black paid taxes but could draw no paycheck. (p. 29)

So this implies that while Black male labor is somewhat responsible for the creation of America’s wealth, Black males do not have any access to possessing such wealth—a prototypical representation of the political economy of niggerdom. King further observes that the structures of economic oppression is so stacked up against the Black males such that even when a [Black] man is able to make his way through the maze of handicaps and get just one foot out of the jungle of poverty and exploitation, he is subject to the whims of the political and economic giants of the city, which move in impersonally to crush the little flower of success that has just begun to bloom (King, 2010). This analysis reinforces the permanence of anti-Black misandry which is deeply sustained by discriminatory economic practices.

Conclusion

Thus, what the thoughts of King/Du Bois orient toward in this essay is that when the politics of America’s exploitative capitalist economy is viewed through the lens of what I refer to as the political economy of niggerdom, it reveals the victimization of Black males by the two critical tools of patriarchal economics: (a) genocidal logics and (b) emasculation as grounds for social exclusion; which then rejects the negative portrayal of Black males as being responsible for the dysfunctionality of Black families, which overlooks the economic discrimination and racial victimization of Black males under America’s patriarchal capitalist economy. The political economy of niggerdom, as a theoretical lens, exposes the intersection between racism, economic injustice, and sex-based discrimination—particularly anti-Black misandry. That is, the thoughts of Du Bois/King in this respect provides a robust framework that shows the persistence of the structures of economic oppression against Black males in America from emancipation to the civil rights era and beyond. As Travis and Western (2017) alludes to, “in the hundred and fifty years since emancipation, the two great markers of racial injustice have been violence and poverty” (p. 294). These markers have largely constituted a clog in the quest for Black racial and economic progress in America.

Both issues of racism and the poverty imposed on Black folks by America’s capitalist-structured economy were at the center of the lives and work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr., who both as they matured into their careers developed an increasingly radical critique of United States’s capitalism and imperialism. They also both called for radical measures to combat such twin evils. In a speech delivered before the Fourth Constitutional Convention of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), cogently titled, “If the [Black] Wins, Labor Wins,” King speaks against America’s capitalism for organizing “misery into sweatshops and proclaimed the right of capital to act without restraints and without conscience” (Washington, 1986, p. 201). He therefore made a clarion call to Black folks by urging them to have faith in their future as they struggle against racial and economic injustice.

Du Bois on his own part, after observing that the Black is still a group apart, with almost no social recognition, subject to insult and discrimination, with income and wage far below the average of the nation and the most deliberately exploited industrial class in America, advocated a new organized group action along economic lines which involves the organization of intelligent and earnest people of Black descent for their preservation and advancement in America, in the West Indies, and in Africa; and no sentimental distaste for racial or national unity can be allowed to hold them back from a step which sheer necessity demands (Du Bois, 1933). What Du Bois advocating here is a kind of Black economic nationalism that he hopes will help to liberate the Black family from the shackles of White racial and economic oppression. So the upshot of this discourse centers on the fact that an examination of the socioeconomic critiques of Du Bois/King reveals the victimization of Black males within America’s capitalist and patriarchal political economy which is what is responsible for the destruction of the socioeconomic status of Black family and not Black males.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

ORCID iD

Adebayo Ogungbure

Author Biography

Adebayo Ogungbure is a lechner scholar and a doctoral student in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. His areas of research interest includes, Black Male Studies (The racial & sexual discrimination of Black Males under Jim Crow oppression and within contemporary society), Africana Philosophy, Social Epistemology and Critical Race Theory. He currently serves as an instructor of record for the Ethics & Engineering course at Texas A&M University.

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