In recent years there has been a growing interest in the relationship between race and the neoliberal policies ushered into existence by the structural adjustment programs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, institutionalized by the platforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and perfected throughout the 1990s by the governments of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Though precise definitions vary, neoliberalism is generally characterized by the application of liberal market principles to the operation of public institutions. Scholars generally attribute the rise of neoliberalism to the economic crises of the 1970s that led economic analysts and political elites to question the wisdom of Keynesianism, which had been the driving force behind economic policies in most Western societies in the post-war era. In Race and the Origins of American Neoliberalism, Randolph Hohle challenges these standard accounts by tracing the antecedents of American neoliberal policy to an earlier time period and an often-overlooked economic zone.
Hohle argues that the architecture of the American neoliberal project arose from the political struggles in the American south in the 1950s, which sutured racial motives and meanings onto economic policies. Neoliberalism is defined by four policy positions: austerity, whereby state budgets attempt to promote economic growth through the reduction of public spending; privatization, which refers to the transfer of public subsidiaries to private ownership, including the development of public–private partnerships, the use of sub-contracts to administer public works for a profit, and the proliferation of the non-profit sector; deregulation, the process of changing existing regulations, especially those that govern the market; and tax cuts, which can reduce the revenue necessary for governments to pay for state services. Hohle contends that as civil rights victories in the 1950s and 1960s desegregated the public sphere, southern whites abandoned their support for public life and the welfare state. This shift empowered the white liberal business class, comprised of bankers, insurance executives, and real estate elites, who were able to appeal to segregationists whenever civil rights issues coincided with economic policy to bring pro-business neoliberal reforms to life. The white backlash against the black struggle for civic inclusion embedded a white-private/black-public binary into debates over social and economic policy, as middle class whites increasingly associated public entities and spaces with African Americans and thus began to support the use of public money for private development. For example, in Chapter 5 Hohle traces white flight to the suburbs and black expulsion from city centers, as city planning initiatives used public revenue and zoning laws to create (white) central business districts and to prevent neighborhoods from becoming racially integrated.
There are a number of interesting elements to this analysis. First, in methodological terms, the comparison of three states of the American south—Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi—provides a novel lens through which to examine states not simply as laboratories of democracy, but also as laboratories of experimental economic and social policy. Hohle's analysis reveals that while these states were competitive in their attempts to attract businesses and manufacturing firms from northern states, all sought to avoid national intervention, at times opting out of federal dollars in order to delay or avoid forced racial integration. Secondly, Hohle painstakingly details the shifting political alliances that characterize this period of economic innovation and the ways that racial integration made strange bedfellows of groups that had previously held opposing policy positions. The different political dynamics in AL, MS, and GA, especially in terms of the degree of urban–rural tensions, whether the liberal business class was influential, and whether there was an active civil rights movement, enabled and constrained the emergence of coalitions among agrarians, the liberal business class, segregationists, and sometimes black political elites, leading to different outcomes across the three states. Ultimately, Hohle finds that the “key variable that best explains why some southern states emerged as sun-belt winners is the presence of a politically influential liberal business class. However, the key structural condition that best explains the activation of the neoliberal project is the presence of the black civil rights movement” (Hohle 2015, 22).
Finally, Hohle's use of the black-public/white-private binary is a useful theoretical tool that allows for an examination of the ways that public policies are saturated with normative distinctions about which populations are constructed as deserving or undeserving. As southern economies shifted away from their agrarian bases, purposeful attempts to create images of the “good white worker” and the “southern white businessman” fueled white resentment at the idea that state funding would now be siphoned to poor black communities that had overtaken the public sphere. Though binaries can gloss over important details, often hiding as much as they reveal, Hohle is careful to illuminate the contradictions of the public–private divide. At the same time that white citizens used their control over southern legislatures to protect white economic privilege, for example, there was also a simultaneous shift in white perceptions about the role of the state, which was now associated with attempts at forced racial integration.
Race and the Origins of American Neoliberalism ultimately raises important questions about what truly defines the era of neoliberalism. If neoliberalism is a bundle of economic and social policies, then Hohle's analysis forces us to recognize that the pretext of contemporary neoliberalism emerged rather haphazardly and far earlier than originally assumed. More importantly, the book demonstrates the ways that neoliberal policies were designed and employed to purposefully lock African Americans out of processes of economic development and growth, thus protecting white economic privilege.
