Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Each Friday, we pull articles from our archives to propel you into the weekend.

“I knew no black people—young or old, rich or poor—who didn’t feel injured by the experience of being black in America,” wrote Roger Wilkins in his 1982 biography. In 1973, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials about the Watergate scandal. In the 1960s, he worked in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. His close personal mentor was Thurgood Marshall. Wilkins was also a regular contributor here at Mother Jones.

He wrote for this magazine in 1992 a piece titled “White Out.” In it, he describes “an even bigger hurdle” than 1960s segregation, to his mind: “the power of whites to define blacks.” (Throughout, when quoting, I am adopting Wilkins’ use of a lowercase “b” for Black; our magazine’s style now, and my belief, is that an uppercase Black is better suited.)

He describes how he’d noticed, from talking with his white students (Wilkins taught at George Mason), that “many suburban racial attitudes have actually rolled back to something like the fifties.” He remembers how in more “innocent” days, before integration, racism would be thought of not as systemic, but as “individual.”

“We believed that the power to segregate was the greatest power that had been wielded against us,” he writes. “It turned out that our expectations were quite wrong. The greatest power turned out to be what it had always been: the power to define reality where blacks are concerned and to manage perceptions and therefore arrange politics and culture to reinforce those definitions.”

It reminded me of the argument made in a recent essay for this magazine that so-called “cultural” concerns cannot be so easily cleaved from the material. They are intertwined. For example, Wilkins notes that the Black unemployment rate in the United States in the early 1990s had never gone below 10 percent since the early 1970s.

I looked up the current numbers. That’s no longer true. It has gone below 10 percent. But, still, look at the vast gulf over the past 50 years between the Black unemployment rate and the white one.

Except at the very peak of the pandemic, the Black unemployment rate is close to double the white one. As the economy has pseudo-normalized into its active inequality, that gap has reasserted itself.

Wilkins, in discussing racism, never separates these two concerns; he wants to change material policies: “For me and other black people, there is nothing to do but stay the course. That means, more than anything else right now, fighting to get decent jobs for poor blacks, fighting for support for poor families and for good education for black children,” he writes. And he wants to enact cultural change. “What can I say to decent white people? I think the best answer is what so many whites invariably preach to us—self-help… We can’t save white folks’ souls. Only they can do that.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate