The latest book from UC Santa Cruz Professor Emeritus of Politics Michael K. Brown takes a look back over a century of American history to explore how shortcomings in political philosophy have kept racial inequality problems stuck in place in the United States. Brown has spent decades studying race in modern America, from conceptions of equality to welfare policies to disparities in economic opportunity and policing. The UC Santa Cruz news team interviewed Brown about his book, Unjust Restitution: A Century of Black Struggle for Equality, and how lessons from the past could help to produce more just outcomes in the future.
How would you explain the basic premise of this book, and can you give us a little bit of background on what inspired you to write it?
In Unjust Restitution, I ask whether equality of opportunity was a viable path to racial justice for African Americans after slavery and Jim Crow, and whether it is the means to equality today. African Americans and national political leaders considered it to be the touchstone for economic justice during Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society.
Although the vast majority of Americans believe the government should adopt policies to promote equality of opportunity, they are deeply divided about what the idea means. To many, equality of opportunity connotes a color-blind society based on meritocracy; anything else is unjust and unconstitutional. For many others, the reality of deeply embedded racial inequality sixty years after the civil rights revolution requires restitution and the provision of genuine economic opportunities. Unjust Restitution is my effort to reconcile the widespread support for equality of opportunity with the deeply embedded racial inequality of today.
This book grows out of 35 years of research on racial inequality and my frustration with the contemporary political debate about racial policies. That debate has been stuck on recurrent controversies: race conscious versus colorblind remedies, group versus individual rights, the justice versus injustice of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. I wrote this book to move away from sterile debates and dated formulations of the idea of equality of opportunity. And the way to do that, I concluded, was a historical study of how Black people, their white allies, and white opponents understood equality of opportunity.
What has been the challenge with the concept of "equality of opportunity" historically?
Politicians of all political stripes favor equality of opportunity, but there is no consistent or enduring meaning of the idea. It is always contested. Political movements and politicians have tried to put their own stamp on the idea, but its meaning can be untangled only through a historical analysis of how it has been interpreted and used.
I begin my analysis in the 1830s, when the idea divided the two political parties of the time: Andrew Jackson’s Democrats and Daniel Webster’s Whigs. The Democrats’ idea of equality of opportunity was based on the idea that inequality stemmed from unjust political and legal privileges. Privileges, unlike rights, are exclusive and granted to only small groups, thereby denying opportunities to others. An example were the monopoly charters states awarded to private individuals and corporations that privileged the recipients. Equality of opportunity could only be achieved by abolishing these privileges. I call this conception “antiprivilege egalitarianism.” It seeks to change the structure of opportunities people face.
For the Whigs, equality of opportunity was the doctrine that citizens have equal rights to develop their talents and capacities and then reap the rewards for their efforts. They believed equality of opportunity required equipping individuals with the skills and capacities to move up the economic ladder. They aimed to rehabilitate the victims of oppression. In the 1830s this meant former slaves, among others. “Rehabilitation” seeks to change individuals’ skills, capacities, and moral outlook.
These rival conceptions formed the templates for conflicts over racial justice during Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society.
How was equality of opportunity approached in similar or different ways across Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society, and why are these especially important time periods to consider?
These three historical periods were unique periods of conflict and innovation, when real change appeared to be a significant possibility. It is only by focusing on political conflict over racial justice at pivotal moments like these that we can decipher the underlying conceptions of equality and equality of opportunity that quotidian political conflict obscures.
Political leaders from the 1860s through the twentieth century believed slavery and Jim Crow degraded Black people, and they created policies to rehabilitate them. African Americans challenged these policies, asserting claims to economic autonomy and restitution. Their vision of economic justice was based on the idea that a just restitution for their oppression required abolishing the political and legal privileges of whites and creating viable economic opportunities.
Unjust Restitution analyzes this conflict in the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Farm Security Administration, and the War on Poverty in the Deep South states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. I use an analytical history of the policies of these three agencies—similar in significant ways, but acting under three different political regimes—and Black opposition to address the scope and meaning of racial equality. This history traces the arc of Black lives from the short-lived freedom of Reconstruction to the depths of Jim Crow to their liberation by the Civil Rights Movement.
Are we any closer to solving this issue today? Why or why not?
There is no doubt that Black lives have improved significantly since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. The Second Reconstruction established political and legal equality for African Americans, but failed to undo fully the harms of slavery and legal racial apartheid. There remain significant disparities in employment, poverty, wealth, access to health care, policing, and incarceration. Contemporary policies of rehabilitation are insufficient to overcome the remaining disparities.
What lessons should we learn from the past in order to make economic justice a reality?
A key lesson of the history I recount in Unjust Restitution is that racial justice requires a conception of equality of opportunity centered on the structure of opportunities individuals face, not just their individual perspectives. I argue for a modern version of antiprivilege egalitarianism. Opportunity is not just a matter of pursuing one’s goals, but a process by which individuals or groups make relevant choices. This requires enlarging the realm of freedom; the choices available to people to improve their lives. This conception of economic opportunity will benefit all citizens, not only African Americans.
