Recent events - two more shootings of black men by police under dubious circumstances and the apparent "revenge" shooting of eleven uniformed officers by a sniper overlooking what seemed to be a peaceful protest organized by the group Black Lives Matter in Dallas - have further sharpened the public focus on racism in the United States of America.
My long-time readers will not, I'm sure, be surprised to know I have a somewhat different view of the current state of race relations in the USA. Different from what you're hearing from the pundits on television and online. I posted a somewhat shorter version of these thoughts on Facebook, and a friend suggested it be made into an essay for this blog.
I have many friends who think African Americans should just "get over it" and "take race out of the equation," accepting the notion that all lives matter, and it's really just a matter of embracing the notion that people must stop killing each other. Effectively, they are declaring that Barack Obama's vision of a post-racial society has been realized, or at least we should all behave as though it has, and somehow by doing that we will make it so. In other words, it is really all a matter of state of mind, and all we need to solve the problem is the power of positive thinking.
Get over it? Just take race out of the equation? These directives reveal monumental ignorance and misunderstanding.
Taking race out of the equation is not something that can happen in a nation in which such a large proportion of citizens of African descent are trapped in an economic underclass by centuries of mistreatment.
African Americans went from enslavement to citizenship as a result of the American Civil War and the subsequent amendments to the Constitution. But constitutional citizenship was unaccompanied by opportunity, and Reconstruction was ultimately one of America's great sociopolitical failures.
Then, in 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States declared, in its abominable decision in Plessy versus Ferguson, that ours could be a "separate but equal" society. Never mind that white society was unprepared to allow blacks anything remotely resembling equality.
Nearly six decades later, in Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the high court reversed its shameful stance, but that led to forced desegregation that yielded only intensification of bitter racism among Southern whites and many Northern working class whites.
Then, another decade brought the civil rights legislation of the 1960s that we have been struggling to enforce and to make meaningful for the last half century. The struggle was severely hampered by two developments in the 1990s: welfare reform, which threw millions of black Americans off public assistance and deeper into poverty; and a crime bill that facilitated, among other things, a war on drugs that was really a war on the black urban underclass, and dramatically increased the number of black men in America's prisons.
And now we have arrived in one of the ugliest places in this nation's history of race relations, in which America's wealthy, in a craven effort to distract attention from their unbridled greed, have created a new class warfare.
Historically "class warfare" has meant everyone else against the rich. But in the last two generations, the wealthy have pursued a very successful propaganda campaign to reframe class warfare as everyone else against the poor. The most important part of this construct is setting the lower and middle strata of the middle class against the poor: those who are working hard to build a middle class life for their families are told that the undeserving poor are the economic enemy, living on government entitlement programs.
Historically "class warfare" has meant everyone else against the rich. But in the last two generations, the wealthy have pursued a very successful propaganda campaign to reframe class warfare as everyone else against the poor. The most important part of this construct is setting the lower and middle strata of the middle class against the poor: those who are working hard to build a middle class life for their families are told that the undeserving poor are the economic enemy, living on government entitlement programs.
This is code for the new racism: it is the lazy, shiftless, inner-city blacks who are stealing from hard-working middle class whites. All you folks in the lower-middle and middle-middle classes, struggling to get a little bit ahead of living paycheck to paycheck, take heed: the undeserving poor are the enemy. It is they who are wasting your tax dollars and keeping you from achieving a more comfortable lifestyle.
[Never mind that the percentage of the federal budget spent on things like housing subsidies and food stamps is quite small or that many of the recipients of such aid are the working poor.]
This is how the wealthy are using third-millennial class warfare, fueling it with racism, to protect themselves from the next French Revolution.
If the struggling white working class and the black urban underclass ever figure out that neither is the other's enemy, and instead they have a common enemy, and it is the unrestrained greed of the top 0.1-0.5%, there will be blood in the streets, making the Reign of Terror look like a day at a Six Flags amusement park. The blood will not be the blood of the police or of urban blacks. It will be the blood of the 21st-Century aristocracy, and it will signal the end of the oligarchy and the return of this country to the people.
The storm is coming.
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