The Chris Moeller Archives

How white people *still* steal from Black people

You’ll be forced to duck furrowed brows coming back at you if you call it looting, but the wholesale transfer of Black investment and savings to white wealth is exactly looting and it continues today virtually unabated despite claims of social progress. I’ll relate a pair of examples of this phenomenon culled from the new book “The Broken Heart of America,” by Walter Johnson.

We start in North County St. Louis and a sight that holds the eye when you’re driving eastbound on Interstate 70 near Lambert Airport. It’s a large business campus straddling the freeway belonging to Express Scripts, a large company now part of Cigna after a $69 billion(!) purchase in 2018. They’re a prescription drug provider and the largest company by annual income whose headquarters is located inside the state of Missouri.

It’s already underappreciated how much government money gets spent in the United States that directly or indirectly serves to elevate its white citizens economically at the expense of their Black neighbors. The interstate highway program is itself a very visible but ignored example of it. In St. Louis, the impressive and efficient freeway circuits that snake in and around the city were sliced deepest through the heart of Black St. Louis during the 1950’s and ‘60’s and their impact and ongoing purpose is to permit white residents to isolate themselves, living further and further away from the city center, to bypass Black St. Louis altogether if they venture downtown for a ballgame or to visit the Arch.

But this Express Scripts campus-- 496,000 square feet in all-- is a special case of reverse-Robin Hood. It sits within the boundary of the Normandy School District, which graduated as one of its students in 2014 police-shooting victim and Black Lives Matter martyr Michael Brown. Thanks to tax abatements that don’t extend to any of the residents in the overwhelmingly-black district, the company took to its breast pocket more than $63 million in tax incentives for its new headquarters.

The deal to draw Express Scripts to this location was a tremendous one financially for the state of Missouri and for the Republican-controlled (and mostly rural-white) legislature in Jefferson City that approved it. The payroll tax revenue from the company far outsizes the tax subsidy. But it didn’t do anything for Express Scripts’ closest neighbors. The Normandy school district lost its academic accreditation in 2014, the same year of Brown’s graduation, and state law allows for Brown’s former schoolmates to transfer to nearby suburban districts, providing that Normandy also pay those districts $20,000 for each student they take. That’s a number that far exceeds what Normandy receives per student in revenue while Express Scripts is busy not paying its share of taxes. Giant parking lots ring the corporate campus and allow Cigna/Express Scripts employees to easily navigate the I-70 exit and entrance ramps mere yards away and live anywhere else in the metro area other than Normandy. And it’s cash-strapped Normandy that gets to subsidize the schools in wealthy suburbs like Ladue and Clayton as their young people leave.

So many of our cities, including St. Louis, issue bonds on behalf of wealthy developers, and then those bonds are bundled and swapped out on the secondary market where their purchasers become, basically, the creditors of the cities. By law, bondholders have the legal status of what’s called “first-paid creditors.” That means they have to get paid by the city before the city can pay for anything else that needs to be paid for. It makes land that is populated by Black St. Louisans here very valuable to the rich, but the rich don’t want to pay for it. No, that would be foolhardy. In the city of St. Louis, the city takes on many properties because the poor owe on their taxes. Property taxes have skyrocketed because the city, in a clear declaration of priority, has agreed to forego tax collection on property developers. Meanwhile, an individual’s reward for repairing a home is a larger tax bill.

The city doesn’t rehabilitate the vacant properties in their possession. It doesn’t fit their model for them to rebuild house-able units. They simply categorize the property, or the area, as “blight.” Under city codes, even being located near “blight” makes you “blight” as well. As of last year, St. Louis holds over 12,000 properties, most of them on the majority-Black Northside, and most having been seized because of unpaid taxes. An irony is that it’s happening when so much commercial development in the city is tax-exempt. Another irony, more bitter, is that the repossessed homes stay vacant, deteriorating, and awaiting the developer’s pitch while the ranks of the city’s homeless population continues to grow.

We first ghettoized the Black population in the city, locking them in for generations with redlining and racist housing covenants (as well as those pesky and enduring threats of violence), and placing the freeways where they are to drive a stake through their neighborhoods and to also establish a fresh boundary between Black and white. This has happened in city after city. Now we finagle, often through the use of eminent domain as well, to take back the land, which lies economically-convenient to the city’s center.

Episode two of season one in our story of theft involves the hustle called “Black capitalism,” which has been sold as a consumerist salve to African-Americans by everyone from Jay-Z to Richard Nixon to Barack Obama to Donald Trump. Instead of a focus on the large federal government response that’s necessary to help undo racial economic inequality-- whether that be anti-poverty programs or financial reparations for slavery, Jim Crow and white violence, “Black capitalism” doubles down on the neglect of those necessary elements and shrinks Black spending power into a segregationist economy. It’s subjecting start-up small Black-owned business to the same disadvantages endured by all small businesses in the modern-day U.S. economy--higher insurance prices, unshared supply chains, damage from recessions (and pandemics!), regulators, predatory loans, and the unrelenting assault from above by American monopolies and corporate pirates. It also fails to acknowledge the inter-generational wealth gap between white and Black families. In summary, it’s downright goofy to attempt to promote social and racial equality through a lens of “economic development.” And the fact that Trump is for it should be enough to tell you what a crock it is.

We land then in Kirkwood, Missouri, and its adjoining, once-unincorporated Meacham Park neighborhood in the southwest suburban ring of St. Louis, about 17 miles from Normandy. Kirkwood is majority-white and affluent. Meacham Park is majority-Black and poor. Kirkwood annexed the neighborhood in 1992, when the average income in Kirkwood was four times that of the neighborhood and its average home worth three times as much. This marriage of municipalities was presented as economic opportunity to the residents of Meacham Park-- improved public services and the like. The mostly white voters in Kirkwood certainly saw the partnership in altruistic terms, to some degree, but the possibility also undeniably existed there for economic development for the city.

Within two years of the annexation, by ’94, the government of Kirkwood was interviewing developers and making moves to clear out half of Meacham Park to build a Walmart. It later became publicly-known that Kirkwood had offered up the entirety of Meacham Park but the builders told them that half would be enough. There were promises made to the residents of the neighborhood along the lines of-- $150 million in taxable business coming to the area, 700 short-term construction jobs, along with 600 permanent ones, construction upgrades for those that would stay in their homes, and fair-market payouts for those that were slated for the bulldozer.

What came instead was a Walmart-centered property development ultimately ten square blocks larger than the proposal. Six new houses sprouted up but 85 had been promised. An historic school that had been ticketed to become a community center never became one and now houses instead a private business that offers injury-rehabilitation services to wealthy professional athletes. On the day the city signed with the developers, many residents found notices of seizure and condemnation stuck to their front doors. Those same residents believed that the process was still at the stage of price negotiation.

In the middle of it all was an African-American man named Charles “Cookie” Thornton. Cookie was a small business owner that accepted the wager of “Black capitalism.” A Meacham Park native, he owned a small demolition and construction operation, and did so out of his home. Thornton had been one that had hoped for a contract for his professional services that never came about behind the development. He contended that promises had been made, but a council member says that only the possibility of work had been extended. He had bought a new dump truck that would make him qualified for the work. As he routinely parked his truck on his lawn, the city-- in or around the year 2000-- started issuing him citations for it, and also for not properly posting work permits in places where he worked around the neighborhood. By the end of 2001, he owed the now-larger city of Kirkwood $12,000 in fines, and by 2008, that figure was up to $20,000. Certainly this growth in the tally was the result of some bullheadedness on Thornton’s part, but it was also a very punishing amount of money for doing business the way he had always done it.

Thornton started attending council meetings and speaking at length there in front of the members until an ordinance was passed that limited citizen comments to three minutes each. So he began approaching the microphone out of order and addressing the council directly. That led to a crisp velvet rope being placed at the front of the seating area. Losing that avenue, he would then lie down in the aisle and make disruptive animal noises. When police attempted to remove him, he would go limp in the age-old tactic of civil disobedience. He had lost his wife, his business, his house, and then a federal lawsuit he had filed against the city of Kirkwood, the cost of which had been paid for on his end by mortgaging his parents’ home. Thornton was one of those Meacham Park residents long ignored by the people of neighboring Kirkwood until they found a way to make money off of him. His land had value anyway. And his vote mattered until it didn't. That was the extent of his value.

It was significant that he was Black because a percentage of Black-owned demolition and construction work was written into the verbiage of the agreement. That’s the type of promise made by capitalists that often gets attached in order to project a morality that's actually non-existent. What wasn't significant to the people of Kirkwood was that he was their neighbor. After the deal was in place, the city and developers could look anywhere they wanted for other Black capitalists that could undercut Cookie’s bid and satisfy their minority requirement. He had supported the development, had even gone door-to-door to help convince his reluctant neighbors that the project was worthy of their support.

He was humiliated and broken, with nothing left to lose when he walked into Kirkwood’s city hall in 2008, having already shot to death a police sergeant across the street, and there he would also murder a court officer, two council members, and the city’s public works director. He shot the mayor twice in the head and the mayor would die too, a year and a half later, from complications of the shooting combined with ongoing cancer treatment. Police responding to the council chambers shot Cookie Thornton dead inside the government room moments after the rampage. He was lying next to a placard he had brought with him that referred to the city as a “plantation.”

Ninety-seven-percent-Black Meacham Park was the plantation. Thornton had been a leader there-- a member of civic boards, the head of charitable organizations, and a mentor to children. He had once run a campaign for a seat on the council. His community was now a part of Kirkwood, Missouri, but Kirkwood, Missouri had a very narrow interest in the neighborhood or in the people of Meacham Park. Said one Meacham Park resident after the annexation and the development, “Ain’t nothing changed but the year.” The undeveloped, remaining part of Meacham Park still has dirt roads.

Large swaths of Black St. Louis appear to be abandoned-- as the larger metropolis of St. Louis possesses one of America’s most famous among the growing number of “urban prairies,” but the areas are not abandoned in the slightest. The land is held by investors and banks. There is what Walter Johnson calls “speculative capital” located in every vacant strip mall and in so many of the houses. It’s a long game for the deed holders-- and the deed takers-- to clear the land. They’ve stripped down the schools and the general public services the way investors strip down companies for a sell-off. It’s the same thing. They’re just waiting for the highest bids.

There are also storefronts and billboards-- un-abandoned-- for white-owned businesses and their shadowy, Wall Street investors that advertise fast loans, easy loans, quick cash, title change, you know them. They’re all making money off Black people behind high-interest usury here in the heart of the “wild west” of American deregulation. An activist named Jamala Rogers, “Mama Jamala,” says there are twice as many payday stores in the state of Missouri as there are McDonalds and Starbucks branches combined, as of 2015.

Along with the incarceration-for-profit industry and the racist policing that not only includes trigger-happy cops but selective, targeted enforcement of the laws, wide variances in criminal sentencing, and oppressive fines for committing misdemeanors and for breaking simple ordinances, we’re bleeding dry financially a population that already lives on the perimeter of survival. This is looting and this is white violence. Plain. Simple. It’s a knee on their necks that is the degradation of their humanity-- and of ours-- and the barbaric, true nature of capitalism.

posted by CM @ 4:42 PM