I listened to several hours of NPR on Sunday while I worked on painting the trim in the kitchen. While I certainly did not delight in the content of what I was listening to, I definitely delighted in gaining more knowledge and learning more about the history of our world, even if what I was learning was incredibly sad and disheartening. It was fascinatingly upsetting to me that in three different radio shows I learned three different facts that point to racism that was built into the laws of our society.
1. On this week's episode of "Reveal", they featured a story from the podcast "The Uncertain Hour" from NPR Marketplace, which this season is looking into how businesses legally get around providing basic employment protections, like a minimum wage and overtime. This story centered around minor league baseball players, who do not get paid for things like spring training. Often their wages average out to $3-$5 an hour when taking into account the multiple hours they spend practicing, traveling, etc. Apparently, team owners get around the minimum wage laws by calling the minor league players "trainees" who have "apprenticeships", instead of "employees" with a "job", so they do not qualify for workplace protections. These kinds of loopholes have been built into the law ever since the origin of the minimum wage, and the loopholes are pretty glaringly racist.
The federal minimum wage law originated back in 1930s. In the midst of the Great Depression, there were few jobs, and those jobs that did exist paid incredibly poorly. People were desperate, and were willing to work for basically nothing. In response to this, Congress, under President Roosevelt, passed the Fair Labor Standards Act to enact a minimum wage. The law was controversial, especially in the South, where people were against paying Blacks and whites the same wages. So in order to get the law passed, it was written to exclude agricultural workers and domestic workers, who just happened to be mostly Black people (and also Latinx, women, and poor), to appease the South and their inherent racism. Eventually, the Civil Rights Act on 1964 corrected this racist exclusion and opened up federal minimum wage laws to most agricultural and domestic workers. But 34 exclusions still exist within the law to prevent certain types of workers from the protected rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act (including some funky ones like people who harvest shellfish don't have to be paid minimum wage and those who harvest sap for maple syrup don't have to be paid overtime-- most likely due to lobbying by big corporations who would rather pay exorbitant amounts of money to fight a law that would force them to pay their employees fairly instead of just paying the employees fairly!!).
The Supreme Court has ruled that "trainees" can be excluded from the Fair Labor Standards Act, and thus can be unpaid or barely paid, but "a trainee must benefit more from the training than the business benefits from their work." The MLB continues to use this loophole to exclude minor league players from receiving minimum wage or over time. This totally reminded me of the struggle of NCAA college athletes to get paid for their work, and the South Park episode parodying this struggle. I would argue that in both cases, the MLB and the NCAA benefit WAY more from the players, than the players benefit from the "training", and the businesses makes TONS of money off of them, especially considering advertising, using the players' likenesses for video games, etc etc. Also there's the disturbing fact that coaches make millions of dollars and franchises makes millions in profits, so why can't the athletes themselves, who do all the actual work, get paid more?!?
2. On NPR's Marketplace, Kai Ryssdal interviewed Dorothy Brown, professor of law at Emory University and author of "The Whiteness of Wealth", about how for decades, the U.S. tax code has discriminated against Black Americans. She wrote in her book that she chose to study tax law because it was supposed to be about math, not about race; she dealt with race enough in her personal life and did not want her career to also be about race. In choosing tax law, she was sure that she had chosen a career that had nothing to do with race. but she discovered she had never been more wrong about anything in her life. Race is everywhere, including the IRS code. One example: US tax law overvalues a married couple with one partner who make a big salary (more often white couples) over two partners who make two smaller salaries (which often just happen to be Black couples). The "Joint Tax Return" was created under a "white married couple lens." Another example: Black Americans are disproportionately in jobs without tax free benefits, and often send their taxed money to older generations in their families, while White Americans, in jobs with lots of tax-free benefits, receive tax-free assets from the wealthy older generations in their families. Generations of lawmakers have optimized the system for White people with the result that in the U.S.’s supposedly progressive and race-neutral tax code, Black people end up paying more than White people with the same incomes.
3. I listened to another story on Sunday evening but I cannot remember which radio program and I cannot for the life of me find it on the internet (I am still searching and will update if I find it!) The story was about incarceration for drug crimes and the failure of the war on drugs. One thing I learned was that a hidden piece of racism tucked into the war on drugs legislation regarding jail time for different types of cocaine. Someone convicted of possessing one gram of crack cocaine would receive a sentence 100 times longer than someone possessing one gram of powder cocaine (at time because crack was mischaracterized as being more potent, more addictive, and more likely to lead to violence than powder, all proven to be demonstrably false). But is true is that crack is cheaper than powder, so it was the drug of choice for poor people, including many Black Americans, so the extra tough sentencing on crack just happened to hit Black communities the hardest. Yet another example of hidden racism built into the system.
I am extremely disturbed (though sadly not surprised) by these three hidden pieces of racism in our laws, and am sure that there are many, many more examples. There is no way for our society to be "colorblind" within in a system that sets up Black people to fail, and it's so much harder to overcome these barriers when they are not blatantly racist. Some people think that because we no longer have signs at water fountains for "colored only" that we are no longer a racist society. But racism is built into every system of our society, and until we are admit this and dig deeper not only to find the racist tendencies but actively fight against them, we will never be a "post-race" society. I was delighted to hear all three of these stories, because at least that means this information is being found and shared, and it hopefully brings us one step closer to an equitable society, because knowledge is power.
With delight (and hope),
♥Jamie
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