The horrors that we are witness to in the Gulf States in the aftermath of Katrina are sparking debates ranging from racism to the decadence of the welfare state. More often than not those advocating a position merely address the symptoms without exposing and discussing the cause.
First, progressives need to use the appropriate vocabulary. Xenophobes are not necessarily bigots and bigots are not always racists but each of these characteristics have a socio-historical and political basis.
From its inception we clearly observe that American society was organized around culture, language and skin. Racism was the bulwark that had justified slavery an economic system that created a plantocracy that disenfranchised the poor Southern white. Often the favored slaves were allowed to earn pursuing trades outside the plantation but since they were housed and fed by their owner they were diminishing the poor white's ability to charge enough for his sustenance. But rather than blame the master who they feared to alienate they saw the black perversely as the enemy "who enjoyed the master's pity and the advantage
because he was inferior" and these same sentiments persist today. It is the reason you often hear the counter-intuitive comment from racists that they don't like blacks because they "
think they're better than everybody".
Now let's turn to the bigots. These are folks who observe the social structure and assign its inequities to racial traits. They do this because they aspire to share what are commonly called "middle-class" values but which at root are really patterns of behavior that grew out of suburban isolation and the corporate mindset where differences are considered taboo. Ironically just as the government was seeking to eradicate the gulf between America's rich and poor red-lining which devalued and ultimately destroyed our integrated communities would accelerate the process, institutionalize "white flight" and appear to justify the prejudices of the bigot:
"During the post-war years, there was a general consensus among policy makers that taxes should be progressive and used as tools for economic management. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, this Keynesian logic made possible spending on large social programs and the investment in infrastructure. Business and the wealthy paid large marginal tax rates as opposed to the poor, working, and middle classes. This form of redistribution that allowed working people and even entire regions of the country to migrate to improved living conditions and to enjoy improved social services and public goods.
http://www.logosjournal.com/thompson.htmLastly we come to the xenophobes who though they do not correlate antisocial behavior with a particular race- because they live in insular "bedroom" communities often far from the cities where they work they begin to feel alienated and the targets of crime. This fear was magnified during the crisis caused by Katrina where you saw people who were blind to racial distinctions in their own smaller desperate group would loudly condemn "those others" as all thieves even as they scavenged and looted to survive themselves.
The right is only too happy to foster these superficial divisions for just as it benefited the plantation owner to cast the slave as inferior while exploiting labor black or white the 'investor class' are growing rich at the cost of our atomization which they ascribe to a "culture war" when America has always been the land of "many".
"Look, the center right coalition in American politics today is best understood as a coalition of groups and individuals
the issue that brings them to politics what they want from the government is to be left alone. Taxpayers, don’t raise my taxes. Property owners, don’t restrict or limit my property. Home-schoolers, let me educate my own kids. Gun owners, don’t restrict my Second Amendment rights. All communities of faith, Evangelical Christians, conservative Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, Orthodox Jews, people want to practice their own religion and be left alone to raise their own kids."
-Grover Norquist
Until we successfully explain the importance of true political integration and progressive taxation we will continue to lose both our wealth and rights and in the end the nation as we've known it.
"A house divided upon itself cannot stand"- Abraham Lincoln
http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-03-05.htm
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