I’m pretty sure that non-white people pay taxes. Indeed, my suspicion is that non-whites are paying an increasing share of federal taxes as the demographic composition of the population changes. In a post on “Faith, Education, and Income,” David Leonhardt observed that Hindus and Jews are the most affluent and educated religious groups in the United States. As I understand it, most Hindus are understood in the American context as non-white, though of course many are quite pale.

This came to mind as I read Michelle Alexander’s New York Times op-ed on prison reform:

THE legal scholar Derrick A. Bell foresaw that mass incarceration, like earlier systems of racial control, would continue to exist as long as it served the perceived interests of white elites.
Thirty years of civil rights litigation and advocacy have failed to slow the pace of a racially biased drug war or to prevent the emergence of a penal system of astonishing size. Yet a few short years of tight state budgets have inspired former “get tough” true believers to suddenly denounce the costs of imprisonment. “We’re wasting tax dollars on prisons,” they say. “It’s time to shift course.”

Rather than welcome this development, Alexander sees a kind of racism behind this shift:

A majority of those swept into our nation’s prison system are poor people of color, but the sudden shift away from the “get tough” rhetoric that has dominated the national discourse on crime has not been inspired by a surge in concern about the devastating human toll of mass incarceration. Instead, as Professor Bell predicted, the changing tide is best explained by perceived white interests. In this economic climate, it is impossible to maintain the vast prison state without raising taxes on the (white) middle class.
Given this political reality, it is hardly a surprise to read a headline that says, “N.A.A.C.P. Joins With Gingrich in Urging Prison Reform,” rather than the other way around. If there were ever an illustration of Professor Bell’s theory that whites will support racial justice only to the extent that it is in their interests, this would seem to be it. [Emphasis added.]

As I suggested above, it is not just non-Hispanic whites who belong to the taxpaying middle class, but also a large and growing number of Latino and African American and Asian American workers. Moreover, budget constraints helped spur the overhaul of the Rockefeller drug laws in New York state, where the African American civi and political leadership played an important role in moving the ball forward.

Those who believe that righteous indignation and protest politics were appropriate in the struggle to end Jim Crow, but that something less will do as we seek to dismantle mass incarceration, fail to appreciate the magnitude of the challenge. If our nation were to return to the rates of incarceration we had in the 1970s, we would have to release 4 out of 5 people behind bars. A million people employed by the criminal justice system could lose their jobs. Private prison companies would see their profits vanish. This system is now so deeply rooted in our social, political and economic structures that it is not going to fade away without a major shift in public consciousness.
Yes, some prison downsizing is likely to occur in the months and years to come. But we ought not fool ourselves: we will not end mass incarceration without a recommitment to the movement-building work that was begun in the 1950s and 1960s and left unfinished.

This strikes me as any ingenuous reading of the civil rights movement, when Cold War interests played a central role in the decision of President Kennedy and President Johnson to embrace ambitious federal civil rights legislation. That is, “white interests,” narrowly understood, were very much a part of the story. Righteous indignation and protest politics were part of the story, but so was a high-stakes international ideological conflict, the pervasive elite sense that segregation was a barrier to economic advancement not only for African Americans but for the economies of the Deep South as a whole, and much else.

Alexander treats the fact that “a million people employed by the criminal justice system could lose their jobs” as an aside. It is worth noting that this group of public employees, many of them unionized and politically active in both political parties, with if anything a slight rightward tilt, is the interest group that fiscal conservatives in statehouses have been taking on directly. Surely this complicates Alexander’s racial morality play. “Righteous indignation” could be the way to defeat these interest groups. But my guess is that sober arguments centered on achieving a high level of public safety at reasonable cost is the best approach. Alexander also fails to acknowledge the explosion in violent crime that began in the early 1960s, and that has had enormous consequences for our metropolitan geography and the life chances of the most vulnerable Americans, a disproportionately large number of whom are African Americans.

For whatever reason, Alexander seems to have decided that she doesn’t like her unlikely allies on the right, and so she has chosen to implicitly accuse them of narrowness if not racism. This doesn’t strike me as a savvy exercise in coalition-building.