The issue of poverty and culture comes up over and over again in my classes. I’ve increasingly found myself referencing this piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates (which is part of a larger debate with Jonathan Chait) to anyone who will listen. So I thought I’d share it with you. Here’s a powerful excerpt, but please read the whole thing: 

Chait’s jaunty and uplifting narrative flattens out the chaos of history under the cheerful rubric of American progress. The actual events are more complicated.It’s true, for instance, that slavery was legal in the United States in 1860 and five years later it was not. That is because a clique of slaveholders greatly overestimated its own power and decided to go to war with its country. Had the Union soundly and quickly defeated the Confederacy, it’s very likely that slavery would have remained. Instead the war dragged on, and the Union was forced to employ blacks in its ranks. The end result—total emancipation—was more a matter of military necessity than moral progress.

Our greatest president, assessing the contribution of black soldiers in 1864,understood this:

We can not spare the hundred and forty or fifty thousand now serving us as soldiers, seamen, and laborers. This is not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force which may be measured and estimated as horse-power and steam-power are measured and estimated. Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it.

The United States of America did not save black people; black people saved the United States of America. With that task complete, our “ally” proceeded to repay its debt to its black citizens by pretending they did not exist. In 1875, Mississippi’s provisional governor, Adelbert Ames, watched as the majority-black state’s nascent democracy “progressed” from terrorism to anarchy and then apartheid. Taking in regular reports of blacks being murdered, whipped, and intimidated by the Ku Klux Klan, Ames wrote the administration of President Ulysses Grant begging for aid. The Grant Administration declined.