Economic decline pushed white Americans to blame black people for national woes

Evidence

Economically, the post–World War II boom had come to a startling halt as stagnation and deindustrialization shattered the American dream for many white Americans. Jobs at the local factory, which once provided a wage sufficient to take care of a family and send children to college, were disappearing at alarming rates. Once-vibrant cities and towns in what would become known as America’s “rust belt” were transformed into monuments of national decline. Factory doors shuttered and landscapes from Ohio to Maine were filled with abandoned buildings with broken windows and tattered cloth swaying in the breeze, ghostly reminders of what had been. A new service economy was taking hold as manufacturing moved abroad in search of cheaper labor and larger profits. Financialization started to shift the emphasis of the economy from stakeholders to shareholders, and immediate profits, a symptom of the narcissism of the times, mattered more than anything else—especially more than workers. The “American Century,” as Time publisher Henry Luce declared it in 1941, had come to a premature end. And many white Americans who suffered, whether they lived in cities or in the suburbs, blamed the troubles of the nation on the tumult of the sixties revolution and the black people who were at the center of it all. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 443

Categorization

• XREF: Shows how the after-times resentment Baldwin tracked was economically powered — connects to broader racial-resentment literature. — connects to: Municipal neglect caused the decay whites blamed on black residents — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 180