Speaking at the Just Economy Conference on March 26, 2025, National Community Reinvestment Coalition President and CEO Jesse Van Tol criticized federal attacks on the racial economic justice movement and shared personal perspectives on what it will take to overcome the stark new challenges the movement faces in 2025.
JESSE VAN TOL (Remarks As-Prepared)
I want to start, as I often do, with a personal story.
I grew up in Memphis, TN, in a mixed neighborhood just by the University of Memphis. Now when I say mixed, I don’t mean racially mixed, although it was that as well.
I say mixed because on our block there were those of us who believed that the Civil War was over, and there were those neighbors who believed that it was not.
They were believers in what is sometimes called the Lost Cause theory of the Civil War: that the Confederacy’s war against the Union was an honorable battle over succession and State’s Rights. That confederate generals were heroes. And that the Old South was an idyllic place, a great place.
In their version of the history the Confederates were victims. A great harm had been done to their way of life. ther people, using the power of the federal government had wrested it away from them. In this telling the past wasn’t just behind them as a memory, it was ahead of them as a goal, as a vision, as a dream. It was a place to be restored, a place that could be made again.
I’m sure you see where this is story is eventually going.
There was one neighbor whose conviction in these beliefs is seared in my memory: his name was Gary.
Gary was a Pontiac Firebird driving, gun-toting, honest to God son of the American Confederacy. Gary was a person who celebrated Robert E Lee day, a holiday commemorating the Confederate General in many southern states. It was chosen — not by accident — to fall on the same day as Martin Luther King Day.
Every year, on Robert E Lee Day, Gary would proudly fly the confederate flag – two of them, one out of each window of the Firebird. A third hung year around, above his porch.
I could tell you stories about Gary for days. But one above all others one sticks out. It happened when I was just ten years old.
That day, I was walking and eating an apple in the hot Memphis sun. I passed in front of Gary’s house, which was right next to ours. As I finished eating, I flung the apple core into his bushes. As the apple arched, Gary rounded the corner.
But I had misjudged the distance, and instead of landing in the bushes, the apple flew over them and landed on his porch. The core bounced on concrete and then against glass as it ricocheted off his door. I held my breath.
Gary screamed: “YOU LITTLE SHIT.” He jumped off the porch. In two bounds he was on me. He wrapped his hands around my neck, he lifted me off the ground and he shook me.
The world went blurry. As I hung there, legs kicking in the air, I soiled myself. Urine dripped all the way down my leg. In the end, I think it was the fear that I would pee on him that caused Gary to drop me.
My legs were moving before they hit the ground. I ran, as fast as I could. I bypassed the front door for fear he would catch me as I fiddled with the door-knob. I burst through the back screen door, crying.
The assault that Gary perpetrated against me was an expression of power. All physical violence is.
I want to, for a moment, take you on a short journey through history, that ends right back where I left off a moment ago with Gary and Jesse, hanging in the air. Keep that image in your mind because I’m coming right back to it.
I want to take you all the way back to 1776, almost 100 years before the Civil War. Not because that’s the year of our Nation’s birth, but because it’s the year Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations, his defining work on capitalism.
If you’ve read the 1500 pages of his book, you know that it’s well…it’s a real snoozer. But it also revolutionized the way the world thought about the economy.
If you haven’t read it, then don’t worry, I’m going to summarize Adam’s life’s work in the next 90 seconds. Here are the essential concepts: [GO FASTER HERE]
Adam Smith argued that a nation’s wealth was best fostered through free markets and limited government intervention into the economy. He believed that the individual participants in a market economy each pursuing self-interest would produce benefits to each other.
In this way, he believed that government did not need to intervene to assure a particular outcome. That the “invisible hand” of the market would guide those outcomes in a way that ultimately produced the most benefit for society as a whole.
Central to this theory is the individual market transaction. Adam Smith posited that people would transact only when it was in their self-interest to do so: that a seller normally would not sell a good for less than what it cost them to produce, and that a buyer would not pay more for a good than the utility that it provided them. In this way, buyer and seller would reach a price that produced mutual benefit to each other.
Multiplied by a thousand, a million, billions and trillions of transactions and that mutual benefit would produce broad scale social benefit. Indeed, in Adam Smith’s view it would produce “natural liberty” – the freedom to pursue one’s own interest.
Smith’s view was in contrast to the dominant economic theory of the time: mercantilism. Mercantilism was different. Mercentalism featured significant government intervention in the economy, including state-run industries and government granted monopolies. Mercantilism was concerned with the balance of trade, and often featured the heavy use of tariffs to control national trade as a zero sum game.
Now Adam Smith’s theory was brilliant, but terribly flawed. Indeed there are a great many problems with Adam Smith’s theory. But the biggest one is how he ignored the effects of power on market transactions.
Put simply, his model assumed two parties to a transaction each had equal information about the transaction. In essence, he assumed a level playing field. He assumed the two parties came to the transaction with equal power.
But that was never true. It wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now. Indeed, Adam Smith’s vision of a free market has never existed, because the balance of power has never been equal.
In the decades that followed Smith’s treatise, the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade reached its peak. For hundreds of years, African peoples were subjugated, the fruits of their labor robbed from them. They were subjects of transactions, not the beneficiary of market transactions.
Around the world including in this country, the forces of imperialism captured land, subjugated indigenous peoples, and extracted resources. Sacred lands that had only ever been free, ripped apart and harvested and poisoned, so those with more power could buy and sell stuff.
And just as those empires projected force across oceans and continents, their greed projected force across time. It flung its power forward to oppress the future. To always feel they had control over not just their neighbors, but their grandchildren’s neighbors.
Wealth inequality grew, and with it, the inequality of power entrenched. The balance within market transactions became more lopsided, not less.
Move forward in history. When the owning of people as property ended in this country, new methods of controlling people and property arose. Jim Crow. Redlining. Mass incarceration. Predatory inclusion. Zoning laws. The expression of power over people in the economy never disappeared, it only became more subtle. Below the surface.
Until today.
Now what does all of this have to do with the current moment? Come back to that image, of little Jesse hanging in the air, with Gary’s hands around his neck, legs kicking in the wind.
That’s all of us right now. The billionaires have their hands around our necks; they’ve taken control of our government and they are not letting go. Not unless we do something.
They have resurrected that story of the Lost Cause, the myth of the antebellum South. They have modernized it, stripped of its geographic specificity, and applied it to the whole country.
This narrative is remarkably similar to the lies told about the Old South: it’s a story that says that some OTHER group of people have prevented the progression of the idyllic past into some better future. It’s a vision of the future that says that if we could just go back to this mythical, magical past that never was…we could move forward into a greater future, a great America.
They have leaned into and embraced an economic theory that is all about the expression of power: it bears more resemblance to mercantilism than it does to the type of free market capitalism that Adam Smith envisioned. Indeed, there are a great many labels that could be applied to the current economic theory that we see expressed today: trickle up economics, crony capitalism, oligarchy.
Well here’s what I call it: It’s government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires. Its defining feature is not free markets or any real notion of liberty and freedom at all. Its defining feature is the wielding of power.
Not to do good, not to produce benefits for society, not for the expansion of liberty and freedom but for ITS CONSTRICTION. For the benefit of a narrowly defined few.
Indeed, this form of economic theory is about picking winners and losers. In thinly veiled attacks on people of color, they have demonized DEI. While claiming to fight for a meritocracy, they have filled our government with the least qualified group of people we’ve ever seen.
Where constitutional rights are not promised, they have gone even further. Attacking our nation’s immigrants. They see a tattoo in honor of someone’s mother, insist it’s a gang tat, and throw those innocents into prison camps in countries they’ve never even been to while they brag about it on social media.
They have decided that federal workers and non-profits are enemies of the state. They’ve taken a chainsaw to the ecosystem that was built to serve the people. Gutting budgets to the detriment of the Americans who rely on them. Eyeing up agencies like the CFPB that seek to balance the power in market transactions, and protect our wallets from scammers and swindlers. Aiming their fire at the CDFI Fund, and who knows what else?
Elon Musk’s DOGE might as well be called the Department of Government Extraction. They are cutting benefits and services for millions of Americans. They threaten to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the bedrock of the American safety net. They do this not for our benefit – but for what? So they can award new billion dollar contracts to themselves and their friends. So they can deliver tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans.
And our banking friends cannot rest any easier. A defining feature of mercantilism was the granting of government sponsored monopolies. Charters were granted only to those aligned with the King. Banks cannot assume a deregulatory agenda that solely benefits them; more likely is the kind of government intervention in the economy that puts a thumb on the scale for the crypto agenda. The Elon Musk agenda.
I am sure you have all had the nightmare which was my reality. You know the one: someone attacks you and you can’t scream. Gary had his hands around my neck. You’re running away, but the person is catching up to you…or worse, your legs won’t move.
We’re in that nightmare. But we have got to get our legs moving. We’ve got to do whatever we can to get those billionaires hands off our necks. Take a lesson from little Jesse…do whatever it takes. Pee on their legs if you have to [If laughter…I hear that might work]
Look nightmares are about inaction. About feeling powerless. There is a reason that Dr. King wrote a speech about a dream, rather than a nightmare. Dreams are inspiring. Dreams provoke action. Dreams are empowering.
We are in a moment where we must return to a movement mentality. To do that, we must dream bigger.
Our dreams have to aim at the right goals. For a long time, we have aimed for the mitigation of inequality, not the elimination of it. But it is clear to me that the wealth inequality that we have is unsustainable. That the incredible concentration of power in the hands of the few is subverting our democracy and undermining our freedom. A free market economy of the type Adam Smith envisioned won’t work – cannot become a reality — unless there is a balancing of powers.
Free markets can’t be free unless people are free.
I don’t know about you, but freedom doesn’t look like people can’t disagree with the President for fear of retribution. Freedom doesn’t look like fear.
Our dreams have to aim to build power, and to wield it responsibly.
To use it to ensure true liberty. You see racial equity, diversity, equity and inclusion was never about putting a thumb on the scale for one group of people over another: it was about taking the thumb off the scale.
It was about balancing out the power – the violence – that has been expressed through our economic system against people of color.
Our dreams have to inspire others. It’s not enough to be right, we need to build a bigger tent. We have to realize that many people feel harmed by the economy that we have. They are not our enemies, even if they might think that we are theirs.
Years ago I forgave Gary, in my head anyway. I didn’t look back once when I ran away from Gary. I didn’t see what expression was on Gary’s face as he watched me go. But I have reflected on that moment for many years, and I have always felt sorry for him. Because after attacking a child to feel strong, Gary was headed back to a life where he felt like the victim. A life where he didn’t feel in control very often.
I want to be clear: Gary was not a good person. Gary did bad things. Gary committed violence against a child. And he could have, and perhaps should have, gone to prison but for the unwavering belief in grace and redemption that my parents held.
But Gary was a symptom, not a cause. Gary lashed out with violence in an attempt to control a life over which he felt very little control. I doubt very much that Gary believes that his life turned out the way that he wanted it to.
Now listen, I don’t stand before you with all the answers. The beauty of NCRC is all of you. It’s the collective intelligence, the collective power of the group. It’s the connections that get made, the relationships that are built.
When I look around this room: I see a room full of lions. Puff out your chests with pride. You have done great things. You have fought for liberty and justice for all. You have dedicated your lives to making this world a better place.
But here’s the part that might be tough to hear: Sometimes this room full of lions acts more like a cage full of kittens. We’ve become domesticated. We’ve forgotten that a tax status is not a movement.
In short, we’ve forgotten how to roar. You see the movement for civil rights and economic justice was never about making it simpler for folks to do easy things: click here, donate five dollars, come to our event, tell people what you believe in endlessly online. It was always about building support for people to do the hard things that are required when you want to make change.
Good men and women are easy to find. Look all around you. But courage is a thing in much shorter supply. Not every person can raise their voice. Not every person can run towards danger. Not every person can speak their dreams without fear of reprisal.
But we can support each other to do hard things. Those of us who can, must. The life you save may even be your own.
So I’m hear to ask you: Let them. Hear you. ROAR. From here to the White House, to the halls of Congress and the benches of the Supreme Court. In every city and town, in every forum. Let them hear the patter of your feet. Let them see the power of your dreams. Tell them to get their Hands Off the programs and services that benefit millions of Americans.
Nobody else is going to save us. We’re the only ones coming. It’s not going to be easy.
Do it together now: Let them hear you roar.
Thank you.
