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Tim Wise has many things to say on the topic of racism in America. His analysis is deft and competent, I reprint the introduction to his essay “Getting What We Deserve? Wealth, Race and Entitlement in America” for the benefit of the education of my readership. Educational purposes aside, many of the complaints/justifications that seem to come up in the comments section of DWR are mentioned in this essay, and are given a thorough rebuttal and explanation. I may dedicate a page to the entire essay for sake of easy reference.
Everywhere you turn, conservatives are bemoaning the so-called “mentality of entitlement.”
“To hear such folks tell it, the problem with America is that people think they’re owed something. Of course, income support programs, nutritional assistance, or housing subsidies have long been pilloried by the right for this reason — because they ostensibly encourage people to expect someone else (in this case, the government, via the American taxpayer) to support them. But now, the criticisms that were once reserved for programs aimed at helping the poor are being applied even to programs upon which much of the middle class has come to rely, like Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance.
Increasingly one hears conservative politicians and commentators arguing for cuts in these efforts as well, and critiquing those who rely on them for health care, retirement, or income in-between jobs. To the right, the elderly and unemployed apparently refuse to do for self. They aren’t far-sighted enough, one supposes, to invest their money in a high-growth (and high-risk) private retirement plan; they aren’t responsible enough to purchase good health care, and they’d prefer to sit at home collecting a couple hundred dollars a week in unemployment insurance than find a job that might support them and their families. In other words, there’s something wrong with these people: they’re lazy, have the wrong mindset, and need to get out there and show initiative, presumably the way rich people do.
Though this critique is not solely aimed at persons of color, there is little doubt but that the history of growing opposition to social safety net efforts — which were wildly popular among most whites from the 1930s through most of the 1960s — mirrors, almost perfectly, the time period during which black and brown folks began to gain access, for the first time, to such programs. While blacks, for instance, were largely excluded from Social Security for the first twenty years of its existence, and while very few people of color could access cash benefits until the 1960s, by the 1970s, the rolls of such programs had been opened up, and the public perception was increasingly that those people were the ones using (and abusing) the programs. So in large part, the critique of “entitlement” has been bound up with a racialized narrative of the deserving and undeserving, which can be seen, in many ways, as a racist meme.
But if we look and listen closely, what we discover is that the mentality of entitlement and expectation is far more embedded among the affluent and among whites than among the poor or people of color.”
From the CBC:
“Emergency crews have found a second body in the wreckage where a small plane smashed into an Austin, Texas, office building that houses a U.S. Internal Revenue Service office.”
Okay, flying a plane into a building. We’ve seen that before. But what is different this time? It seems that it is taking awhile to classify the act itself. Would there be as much confusion if the pilot was of Arabic descent or had a Arabic surname? That is the question ‘Big man” poses at the blog ‘Stuff White People do“.
Big Man says:
“I’m watching the coverage of this plane crash in Austin. The one where a dude flew a plane into the IRS building after burning his house.
And everybody is falling all over themselves not to call this cat a “terrorist.”
It’s “possible terrorist-related activity” but it’s not terrorism and he’s not a terrorist. What the hell?
How can you fly a plane into a building out of spite, and have folks call it “suicide by plane?” That’s like calling it “suicide by portable chest bomb.”
We often think of racism is a in your face type of action. Overt discrimination, the name calling, the hiring practices but here we have a possible example of the more subtle systematic nature of racism and what that entails. Patriarchy sneaks up on one like this as well.
I tend to agree with BigMan that the story would have been framed quite differently if the pilot was not Caucasian.
At least, to the Harper government.
At first it was just Omar Khadr and Maher Arar. Oh, and Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin also had lovely “vacations” in Syria. Abousfian Abdelrazik was detained and tortured in Sudan (with apparent collusion, if not at the direct request of, our government), and when he finally got out of prison, Ottawa put every hurdle they could come up with against bringing him home. Then there are Abdihakim Mohammed and Suaad Haji Mohamud, who in separate incidents were stranded in Kenya and left to fend for themselves by their government – in fact, in Mohamud’s case it was the Canadian government that accused her of identity fraud. These people seem to have something in common besides having gotten the shit-end of Harper’s foreign policy stick*. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m reading a piece in Harper’s right now by Naomi Klein titled “Minority Death March: Jews, blacks and the “post-racial” presidency. This article is chock full of blog fodder, from US/Israeli obstructionism in the UN to the denial of racism and responsibility of the ‘first’ world. One section caught my eye as it focused on Mr.Obama and the job he is doing as president of the US. The article references what one Juan Santos wrote in an open letter to Mr.Obama. You can find the whole post here.
Barack Obama is the living symbol of our silence. He is our silence writ large.
He is our Silence running for president –
With respect to Black interests, Obama would be a silenced Black ruler: A muzzled Black emperor. A Black man at the head of the White Amerikkkan State – one who’s unwilling to speak truth to power, but more than willing, like a Condi Rice or a Colin Powell, to become that power and to launch wars of aggression against other people of color.
In Obama’s case the targets will be Iran (which he has threatened with “surgical” missile strikes) and Pakistan, rather than Iraq. That’s the only difference between Obama and Rice and Powell, or Bush, for that matter.
Between the Harper’s article and Mr.Santos’s own denunciation of Obama and what he stands for, it seems like the current president of the US is in a fair bit of trouble. Where is the reform promised by his campaign? It was my first impression that Obama was taking his time being conservative in his governance as to size up his opposition and his own capacities. The more I read the more it seems that Obama is not about hope and change, but rather maintain and remain the same (maintaining the status quo of the last 8 years is reprehensible) .
I hope that Obama begins to move in a genuine progressive way soon. He is at risk of losing his base of people who genuinely thought he would fight for change.
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