Jena: Racism and Class Politics

It's true that racism never went away, as a commentator noted in the Washington Post (9/23), but the right-wing trend of national and state politics, pushed not by the people, but by the media, the parties and the governments, has led to the return of Jim Crow. It has also led to the promotion of prejudice by conservative African Americans and Hispanics, who have been brainwashed into, or lavishly rewarded for being the spokesmen of the new racism, a revival of the old.

In so many places, such as affirmative action, a conscious attempt to redress the injustices of racism has now been overturned, especially by the most conservative Supreme Court since Herbert Hoover. And all down the line, in courts and Sheriff's offices, and Police stations, there has been a renewal of racist practices, even while denied, or more often winked at by higher authorities.

It's all part of the conservative project. It's like Pataki, the former Republican governor of New York, when he first came into office in 1994. He insisted that the college in prison project in which I was a teacher (the overwhelming majority of my students were African-American and Hispanic) be closed down. He even called the local community college president personally; he told him that he would lose all state funding (he reportedly asked "You receive state money, don't you?") if the college president continued to try to find alternative funding to maintain the program. Pure vengefulness, mean-mindedness and racism.

1994 was the year the conservative project finally gained control of the Congress. Officially sanctioned racism, I think you should notice, has escalated since. There are economic reasons for it, having to do with the nature of the conservative movement. It is funded by the wealthy, who are perfectly happy to perpetuate and increase the size of the underclass in order to keep wages down. If minorities are oppressed again, then they will be forced to accept lower and lower wages, be willing to compete with Indians and Chinese just to survive, and that will drive down wages for everyone--especially since there is no safety net anymore; it has been shredded with the cooperation of the "middle of the road" Clinton Democrats. Racism also enables the powerful to play "divide and rule," something the aristocrats of the old South knew about long ago.

So, Jena is not just proof that racism still exists, but that there is a revival of it, and that it has come not from some little town in north Louisiana, but from Washington, and New York, and Los Angeles, from our government, from our media that does not report it, and from our entertainment media that manages to legitimize it with its derision of "political correctness," and its promotion of new and old stereotypes.

The education system has been re-segregated, and the No Child Left Behind Act has its most poisonous consequences for minority schools; the tax system has been redesigned to favor "the winners," who are disproportionately white and wealthy; the death penalty has been revived (it was outlawed in the 70's) and what is the predominant color of the executed? Corporations have welfare, but people don't. Racism is also displayed in our war policy: who are the recruits, after all: either minorities, or white poor who cannot find adequate jobs after school, because of the pro-corporate trade policies followed by the government.

Racism is part and parcel of the conservative movement that completely took over the country when Bush gained control of the Senate in 2002, and it's not just Republicans; conservative Democrats also participated, and many business leaders will deal with either. It's not really conservative at all; it's a radical movement to create a plutocracy in place of our democratic institutions.

It almost succeeded. It might still, if people don't realize what is at stake.

A first small, pitiful step away from both conservative control and racism was the small majority won by Democrats in Congress, who are still too timid to challenge most of the conservative revolution, and ineffective so far because of Bush's veto, and the veto of the Republican filibuster.

The demonstrations at Jena and those in its support, the mobilization of thousands by black radio personalities like Michael Baisden, the peace movements against the Iraq war, the revulsion against torture, the blogosphere, and maybe a new militancy by labor unions, as well as the wholesale rejection of the politics Republican conservatives stand for, all these are hopeful signs that maybe, just maybe, Americans are waking up to the facts: conservative, fundamentalist capitalism and war capitalism, driven by fear and hatred, are toxic for ordinary people.

Only the connected--the good ol' boy or prep school buddy--will flourish. There are the token Condoleezas and Gonzaleses, but you know as well as I do that the overwhelming majority of the rich and powerful are white and wealthy.

In my book, The Selfish Class, I wrote about how this coup by conservatives paralleled the dominance by wealthy Senators of the late Roman Empire in the fifty to 100 years before it fell. It fell largely because of what the Senatorial monopoly of power had done to the Empire and its people. Let's hope that maybe we have begun to prevent that from happening again here.