The morning after the night before....can history be made in South Carolina and beyond in race relations?
The morning after the night before....the New
Hampshire primary.....is another morning of mixed weather, and a complex muddle
of candidates for the Republican nomination for president. Of course, Trump
claims victory, as does Kasich, and as do Cruz, Rubio and Bush.... As for the
others, it is often hard to remember their names. On the Democratic side, with
a 20%+ margin of victory, Bernie Sanders acts as if securing the nomination is only
a few weeks away. The Clinton “establishment” might have something to say about
that perspective. Nevertheless, waiting just offstage, almost panting for the
slightest crack of opportunity to open, calling the campaign thus far an
“insult to the American people,” Michael Bloomberg, of cavernous pockets filled
with cash, of considerable experience as Mayor of New York city for three
terms, and of considerable impatience with the state of the current campaign
and its candidates, threatens to run as an independent candidate. The history
of that experiment, however, does not foreshadow his success in a general
election, except that this is not a ‘normal’ election cycle. On that pundits,
candidates and even the political establishment agree.
The American people are angry. And most of their
anger is completely justified and directed at many of the icons of what has for
centuries been considered the foundational stones of the very institutional
structure of the country. Targets for that anger include police, the courts,
the legislatures, the executives, the corporations, the media and to some
extent the economy which promises fading prospects for university grads,
burdened with billions of student debt, most of it under the weight of high
interest rates. Both Clinton (Hillary) and Sanders are proposing either reduced
costs for higher education, or in Sanders’ case, free tuition for all who
qualify. Underlying the street expressions of anger at police killings of
unarmed and purportedly innocent black men, linked to a history of racial
discrimination, as disclosed by the Justice Department’s investigation of
Ferguson’s police department, in a substantial strain of racial bigotry dating
back to Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, the mentality for which has never been
erased or excised from the American psyche. How can a culture born on the
trigger of muskets and sustained on the magnums of millions of gun-owners,
infused with the stories of class consciousness saturated with the hubris of an
upstart country, determined to demonstrate its “achievements” not unlike the
struggling young man who is desperate to prove himself to his ungrateful, blind
and often abusive father, grow up to put away its guns and its justification
for those guns, put away its need for climbing over the backs and the
reputations and the contemptible history of its inferiors, and turn its massive
arsenal of bombs and missiles into the “ploughshares” it says it believes in?
If there is a way, just as the biologists searching
for a way to impede if not destroy the breeding of Great Lakes lamprey, then
the political class, dependent as it is on the drama of internecine warfare,
seems unable to find it, even if their search does not bear the urgency of the
biological search for a lampricide. And just like the lamprey themselves, the
racism in American threatens to suck the life blood and juices from its prey,
the American idealism that clings to the words and the lives of the poets and
the activists and the peace-makers. (Elongated tubular creatures with a suction-cup-like
mouth filled with hooked teeth, lamprey latch onto their innocent prey and suck
the blood and life juices out for up to four months, leaving the weakened fish
verging on death, the almost inevitable conclusion to the attack.) Without a
physical body, racism, nevertheless, attaches to all the institutions,
including the people inside, and with a force that emulates the most vehement
toronado or hurricane, sucks the ethical, moral, spiritual and even
intellectual blood and juices from the culture.
And while there have been significant positive steps
toward the goal of equality, justice, integration and racial harmony, including
the election of Barack Obama, the elevation of significant black leaders in the
Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security
Agency, plus the mayors of major United States cities, there continues to be a
really vehement and virulent monster eating away at the ideal of racial
harmony. Witness the high proportion of black men sitting in prisons, the
parade of shootings at the hands of white police officers, the unemployment
rate of black men in the inner cities, the drug dependency of so many young
black and white men, whose lives face a horizon of hopelessness, and even the
hundreds of “black slaves” earning millions in both the NFL and the NBA,
positions for which millions of young black men aspire, yet which millions of
black men will not achieve, given the small ratio of entry to applicants.
Poverty, also, impacts the black community profoundly, as does the drop-out
rate of young black men from formal education. A high proportion of children,
especially among the black community, are raised in single-parent families. And
the dynamic of black oppression has grown so familiar that the rest of the
culture is emotionally immune to its ugliness, its persistence and its
devastation.
And while the world champions the first black family
to reside in the White House (and Obama has consistently acquitted himself in
an exemplary manner!) it is argued in some quarters that his election has
enraged those white racists, especially the white supremacists, and fueled the
kind of anger that provoked the shooting of nine blacks in the midst of their
prayer meeting only a few months ago. Single incidents, by themselves, of
course do not constitute an epidemic; yet the stream grows from a mere trickle
to a kind of theme that divides especially the political class, although public
discourse would seem to ‘cover’ the buried hatred under a veneer of
sophistication. What has not gone unnoticed, outside the U.S. however, is that
Obama has endured the most nefarious and persistent political opposition from
Republican in both houses of Congress that we have witnessed in decades, if not
in the whole history of the country. And, while they will deny it in a chorus
of megaphones, there is little doubt that the president’s race is a factor in
their contempt for him and his policies. Their nearly absolute refusal even to
negotiate the many reasonable proposals, like immigration reform for example,
and the enhancement of gun controls while the public approves such measures in
sizeable proportions (70+%), signals their political obstreperousness, but also
thinly veils their innate racism. And it is a kind of racism that has not and
will not be openly charged, since the opposition is focused on some specific
approach of the White House.
There is little doubt that the racism that bursts
from the barrels of those hand-guns fired by white law enforcement officers is
connected, either directly or indirectly, to a country’s writhing under a
growing income divide, and that growing income divide is comprised also of a
racial divide. Far more blacks are living on the edge than are either whites or
Hispanics; far more blacks are unemployed than are either whites or Hispanics;
far more blacks drop out of school than do either whites or blacks. And
although the insurgent Democratic candidate for president, Bernie Sanders,
champions the movement for income equality, he needs to break out the racial
overtones and the racial implications of that income inequality. For his
opponents to say ‘he has no track record on race’ (as compared with Hillary
Clinton, for example) is for them to demonstrate their failure, or their
unwillingness to observe more penetratingly the inscrutable connection between
income inequality and rampant racism that festers in every urban centre in the
United States.
And unlike the Great Lakes lamprey, racism is not
confined to a single beast; it infects a multitude of beasts, especially those
human beasts who require a ‘lower’ group beneath them to elevate their social
and political status. And the neurosis, even the psychosis, that requires a
drug like racism for its psychic snobbery mask is not easily impeded even with
enhanced and vigorous education programs, nor with Pell Grants. Even free
tuition, which is eminently desireable, will not eradicate the kind of
intolerance and bigotry that suffocates too much of the national budget and the
national dialogue and the national sprit.
And it is the spirit of the American culture that
provides sustenance for the dream of the city on the hill, to which so many
leaders like Ronald Reagan have rhetorically appealed. And when (not if) that
spirit flags, then there is an enhanced window of “opportunity” for
charismatic, and vacuous leaders to begin to seduce many who feel both angry and hopeless, that not only is the
political class not living up to expectations, but there is so little hope that
‘we might as well risk it all’ on somelike the Trump bandwagon.
This is not the only space that has declared Trump a
danger to American and to the world. Holocaust survivors have likened him to
the Fuehrer, so frightening is he and his rantings to their ears. Claiming to “employ”
thousands of blacks and Hispanics is no substitute for social policy that
offers a substantial hand-up to those in need of work, training, re-training,
adequate and decent housing, health care (29 million are still without health
care, and many more are underinsured); calling Mexican immigrants rapists,
criminals and unwanted to the point of proposing an $8 billion wall, “paid for
by the Mexicans is no recipe for integration, nor is it even remotely within
the spirit of the Gettysburg Address, and the Emancipation Proclamation.
Neither is deporting 11 million “illegals” either sustainable or even
supportable from an ethical, moral and politically appropriate response to the
mess that is the current immigration system.
This is not to argue that racism is the single or
even the most important cause of the Trump drama; however, it is to suggest
that without a dramatic change in the relationships between the have’s and the
have-not’s, (currently beset by racism) there is little hope of the middle
class regaining its lost hope and its flagging spirit, not to mention its empty
bank accounts and retirement accounts. And that is not the American the world
either needs or wants.
Bernie Sanders must start a full-throated effort
that links his income equality gap theme to the issue of racial discrimination
if he is to begin to close the near-40% gap in the opinion polls in South
Carolina. (Hillary leads him by that kind of margin!) And he has to mount such
an offensive without patronizing or condescending to the black community, and
without invoking the “Nanny government” charge from the Republicans and from
Clinton herself. This could be a significant turning point in the life of the
nation if Sanders’ message catches on inside the “black community” which voted
at a very high rate for Obama in both 2008 and 2012. Without the black vote,
Sanders cannot win the White House, so the time for testing his mettle to reach
out to that community is now.
Clinton does not compete with his imagination, nor
with his courage to make substantial changes, even though such changes are
warranted.
Let’s watch the next few days and weeks, as the
rhetoric sharpens and the stakes rise. Those who eventually carry their party’s
banner into the general election will have the opportunity to right the ship of
state, should they choose to make some history of their own.
For more read this from an African American Legal Scholar from Ohio State University:
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