In my final blog entry on the George Yancy situation I will presume to take a stab at analyzing America’s current situation. My analysis is free, take it for what it is worth. It’s just my two cents added to the conversation. What we have seen since the end of the 1970’s is twofold:  a belief among many folks that we are living in a zero sum game where if someone else is winning they must be losing; and a loss of a sense of community that people outside of our “tribe” are part of our community. “Tribe” can be defined many ways and most anthropologists are loathe to use the word because it is so slippery. I am using it to describe the group a person identifies with at a given time. As we have several crosscutting identities we can in a sense belong to several tribes at any given moment. We can define that tribe by class, skin color, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual preference, politics, nationality, or region among other things. In any case it is defined by “us” versus “them.” By “community” I mean those within our orbit including those who are not part of our tribe.

To over-simplify, the civil rights movements of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s was really a clash of two senses of community. Segregationists wanted to include African Americans as a subservient part of their community because of the belief that they were subhumans who were fine as long as they knew their “place.” Enough other white Americans felt that blacks were part of the larger community and deserved the same rights as all Americans. Other groups like women or gays started movements to be included with equal rights in the larger community. There has always been opposition to the idea that people not members of our tribe should be be included in our community and many rationalizations as to why they should be excluded. Over time this backlash against the expansion of the idea of community has grown with a sense that as other groups have gained rights one’s tribe (if different from the groups that have won rights) has lost something. Tribes have become more insular and more defensive. At the same time America has grown more diverse because of changes in the immigration policies and demographic change thus exacerbating the problem.

All of this has put the brakes on the granting of equal rights which has not progressed much past the stage of removing discriminatory laws and policies plus condemning those who overtly use derogatory terms. We have barely begun to examine how racist policies are built into the structures of America so that we have been unable to do the sort of self reflection that George Yancy recommends. The most we have done is to pursue “diversity” to offset the “tribal” effects of the deep structures within America.

We are now facing a situation in which the tribal exclusion of others has reached the point where a president of the United States can be elected solely because of his defense of the white tribe. The exclusion of derogatory words or actions towards non members of the white tribe is derided as “political correctness,” instead of common decency. The non-members of the white tribe be they excluded by race, religion or country of origin, have become an enemy to be feared, attacked, or killed. Juries keep acquitting cops who kill black people because they believe the defense “I was in fear for my life” for they too fear the outsider who is not a member of the tribe. “Make America Great Again” is dog whistle code for rolling back the advances by non white groups so that the white tribe can feel safe again. The vehemence of the reaction to George Yancy’s piece is just a sign of how nasty the defense of the white tribe has become for some people.

Let me be clear here. I am not saying that this disease only affects whites or that all whites exhibit it. I have met plenty of people both black, white and other colors, who are working to eradicate any such feeling within themselves and others. I am saying there is work to be done before we have a society as a whole that has enough such people in it. I’m not as sure as Martin Luther King that we’ll get to the promised land though I’m pretty sure I won’t get there with you for we are far away from it. My hope is that my little granddaughter will see it or a version closer to it than we are now.

Before the presidential election a few months ago I mused about whether it is more upsetting to live in a country where Donald Trump was president or in a country where people would elect a Donald Trump to office. I have decided that it is the latter. The election of Donald Trump reveals that my fellow citizens are not only desperate, racist, and selfish, but they are incredibly ignorant of how things work in America. I am not talking about the 1% who have a rational interest in Trump because he will protect and advance their interests. The ideological conservatives who argue that government needs to be as small as it can be, that government should be run like a business, and that it needs to be fiscally responsible so as not to inflate the national debt, do not understand the purpose of government. The middle and lower class who believe Trump will work in their interests do not understand that Trump works mostly in the interest of himself and those like him. The interests of the middle and lower classes will be way down the list in his imperial presidency. When push comes to shove he will throw them under the bus like in the health care bill. Those who claim they are self made and resent assistance given to the “undeserving” or “lazy” poor are not only selfish, they usually do not understand or acknowledge how much help they may have received along the way to their so called self sufficiency. They also do not understand how late capitalism with its automation and concentration of wealth has produced and continues to produce poverty until it reaches their doorstep. When it does they still worship those who are strangling them, blame immigrants or non-whites, resent those who are doing better than they, and refuse to unite across racial lines with those who are in similar straits

Even the racists will find that America cannot run (and never has) without people of other races. Farmers fear that their Mexican farm workforce will be diminished by immigration policies; medical facilities would be hamstrung without foreign doctors; entertainment or sports would be far different without people of different races, and the list goes on and on. America’s diversity is its strength not its weakness. The religious zealots who espouse their own self-serving brand of Christianity want to impose it on the government. They are no better than the Taliban and want nothing more than a Christian sharia. It is fine to hold your own religious beliefs, but to impose them on others or the government, especially in such a multi-religious place as the U.S. is directly counter to the reason this nation was formed and the Constitution. This is ignorance unbound.

Our failing educational system has left them not only ignorant, but willfully ignorant of the true nature of the world around them. The medical system has left them dependent on opioids and now changes in the health care system threaten to withdraw even that. Neither the Democratic or Republican parties have offered much real relief to those who elected Trump. They have sold out to corporate interests instead of serving the people they supposedly represent. I read somewhere that when the people act stupidly it means their leaders have failed them.

The real question is “how do we get out of this mess we are in?” We are certainly not going to do it with the two political parties we currently have. The Republican party has abdicated care of their constituents in favor of an ideological commitment that says “damn the torpedoes, (and even the loss of lives) full speed ahead.” They are even willing to swallow clear Russian involvement in our electoral system if it gives them an opportunity to pursue their agenda. The Democrats aren’t much better. At best they provide a thin shield and ragged opposition to the Republicans. They refuse to see that success involves a wholesale change to a people centered outlook and content themselves with small piecemeal changes that have been and will continue to be ineffective. We are left with two alternatives. We either start a new party or seize the controls of the Democratic Party. It is very difficult to start a new political party in the United States and the odds are stacked against it. No such party has emerged dominant since the birth of the Republican party in the 1850’s. It took a Civil War to do that. The second option has also been unsuccessful so far. The Democratic Party has rebuffed the challenge of Bernie Sanders, kept the leadership of the party in party hack hands, and, as seen in the Jon Ossoff election, not learned its ways. Still this seems like the best of the bad options we face. It might take Democratic failure in 2018 and 2020 to accomplish it, but it looks like the only viable alternative.

W.E.B Du Bois said in 1906 that “either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.” I fear we are in the midst of watching the latter.

All around us we see people playing the game of “Comparative Deprivation.” Its signature meme is “Those people don’t have it as bad as (fill in the blank here.)” Some conservatives for example like to point out that poverty in the United States is not “real” poverty such as in underdeveloped countries.  American “poor” have refrigerators and televisions unlike say all those Syrian refugees. On Facebook recently I entered a conversation when someone mentioned an old quote from sociologist Orlando Patterson that he made in a New York Times op-ed piece defending Clarence Thomas in 1991. He said, “[America] is now the least racist white majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any society white or black; [and] offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society including all of Africa.” This quote is posted by “Praeger University” (which is not a university at all but a conservative web site) and has been used recently by conservative radio host Larry Elder, a black man.

It is an argument rarely made by the poor themselves but by those who have more and are trying to justify it to themselves or to others. This is like being told to eat whatever slop is put in front of you because others don’t have even that. I have to admit from the outset that for some these arguments are objectively true though irrelevant. Deprivation like many things is relative. To be poor in a rich society is quite different from being poor in a poor society. In both types of society however, the poor are at the bottom of the society, lack the rights or opportunities of others, and that is what feels the same.

“Comparative Deprivation” also works another way. In whatever group you define yourself one compares the deprivation of that group to others. This is why it is so hard to explain white privilege to a poor white person. His poverty doesn’t feel like privilege to him. Being a poor white in a society in which there is white privilege and watching a non-white who has more creates resentment. Feeling that the government has done more to help or protect the rights of nonwhites was the basis for much of the Trump support as revealed by a new American National Election Study. In it racism rather than income or belief in authoritarian regimes, played a bigger role among Trump supporters many of who were in the lower class.

Being at the bottom of one hierarchy doesn’t mean that you can’t be higher in another one. White women may be at the bottom of a male privilege hierarchy yet still be above blacks in the white privilege one. Some of the early suffragettes felt it unfair that women were denied the vote while black men sometimes had it. Black men who were at the bottom of the white superiority hierarchy may still have been higher in the gender hierarchy than women. Black women have complained for years that white women may be low in the gender hierarchy but still benefit from the white privilege hierarchy.

Comparing your deprivation to others has for centuries prevented an effective coalition against those who control the political system. Being at the bottom of a hierarchy feels the same no matter which hierarchical system it is. Yes there are different things oppressing us and different tactics needed to combat them, but a coalition of those at the bottom is the best way for all to rise. For that to happen we have to give up what we think is the uniqueness of our identity group’s blues, don’t listen to those who want to mollify or incite us by comparing deprivations, and recognize “someone else’s blues are like mine.” It is a tall order, but it is the way forward.

Maine’s governor Paul LePage recently said that 90% of Maine’s drug dealers were black or Hispanic. When a state legislator said that such statements contributed to racism LePage responded by leaving an expletive filled voicemail message that he was not a racist and had instead devoted his whole life to helping black people. First things first.  I don’t know the actual statistics or indeed if anyone is keeping them. LePage says that he has been keeping a scrapbook of pictures of drug dealer arrests mentioned in the media and they are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. I guess the idea that the media is an accurate gauge and that they did not just publish such pictures because they were racially profiling or because it was rare enough to be of interest (maybe pictures of white drug dealers would have been so common as to lack interest.) I lived in Maine for over thirty years and LePage’s statement fails the eye test. There were so few people of color that if every black and Hispanic person I ever saw was a drug dealer there still were not enough of them to comprise 90% of the drug dealers in Maine. The state legislator’s comment was that such statements as LePage’s did not serve to help stem the epidemic of drug overdoses in Maine but rather only stirred up racial animosity. The only statistics that I could find in a quick internet search  were that nationally 48% of drug dealer convictions were white and 46% of the convictions were of blacks. Admittedly this seems high but is probably the result of a racially biased judicial system. Although this measures drug dealing convictions rather than drug dealing itself there is no reason why Maine, one of the whitest states in the Union, would be as far off the mean as LePage says.

LePage’s response was typically crude, coarse and unhelpful. The legislator did not call him a racist but only said that his comments stirred up racism. LePage’s personal history includes the fact that he has “adopted” the black young man who caddied for him when he vacationed in Jamaica and has paid for him to attend college in the United States. I put adopted in quotes because LePage has not officially adopted Devon Raymond although he has invited him to some family events. LePage evidently feels that being nice and charitable toward a person of a darker hue means he cannot be a racist. I am sure there were many kindly slave-owners who felt the same way. This highlights one of the core differences between white and black charges of racism. Whites tend to see racism in presence or absence in personal interactions while blacks see it in the way they are treated, portrayed, stereotyped, and presumed to behave by the society around them. LePage obviously sees what he says as simple truth not realizing that racism, perhaps structural racism, has created what he sees as true and that what he said is untruth that contributes to that racism.

Recently a friend who was a couple of classes behind me in college and who is a reasonable but die-hard conservative mentioned “government sponsored systematic racial inequality.” By this I take it that he was implying that current social welfare programs like TANF and food stamps trap African Americans in cycles of dependency that reify racial inequity, that is, turn it into a reality. That is a variation of the usual conservative argument against social welfare programs: they sap individuals’ motivation to go out and get a job, encourage laziness, and in general hold back the poor. This is of course based upon the tenets of personal responsibility and individualism that form the core of conservative thought. I have recently been researching the New Deal where many of today’s social welfare programs were born. There is much evidence of “government sponsored systematic racial inequity” in those programs.  The Social Security Act for example excluded agricultural workers and domestic workers which were common occupations for blacks and women. Whether this was intentionally racially or gender biased is a point of contention among New Deal historians and also irrelevant.  The effect if not the intent of the law  was to exclude many African American workers. Many of the programs to put people back to work were skewed towards whites rather than blacks. Blacks not only received fewer subsidized work opportunities than their presence among local populations of workers and in unemployment lines warranted, these programs were usually administered by local officials who imposed restrictions, limited opportunities, segregation and lower wages paid to black workers. Most importantly the liberals of the New Deal conceived of the programs that helped whites as “work’ programs and the programs that helped most blacks as “relief” programs. This set up a dichotomy between positively perceived and unacknowledged government supports to workers and business, versus negatively perceived “charity” to poor and especially black poor people. Although many more people who now receive the social government payments called “welfare” are white, “welfare” has been stigmatized in common perception as going mostly to black people and poor black people have been stigmatized as “welfare queens’ or as recipients of charity.

Conservatives have used these perceptions to press their political agenda which calls for a cutting back of social welfare or so called “entitlement” programs. My own experiences among the poor and my social worker wife’s experiences among the poor as well, indicate that most poor people would rather work than receive “welfare.” National surveys concur. Given the limited support both in duration and amount that “welfare” programs provide, the restrictions which such programs demand, and the social stigma attached to them, this is not surprising. Most of the people on “welfare” are children and the elderly thus unable to contribute much to the workforce. Limited job skills may explain why some do not find jobs and get off “welfare” and so programs galore to improve those skills have sprung up with government funding. The lack of quality education plays a role here but don’t get me started on that. The major reason why they do not get off welfare is a shortage of jobs for which the poor are eligible. There are many reasons for this shortage: the export of unskilled or semiskilled jobs abroad, cheaper wages abroad, the corporate depression of American wages, the structural transformation of the American economy into more of a service economy than a productive one, and on and on. It is not a lack of personal responsibility but low wages, a shortage of jobs, and limited economic options that push people onto the “welfare” rolls. Putting further restrictions on welfare, for example restricting what one can use food stamps to purchase, and cutting “welfare” benefits in the economic reality of fewer jobs that provide a living wage, is not just cruel and shortsighted, it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem. Once again conservatives have let theory blind them to reality, ignored the facts because of ideology, condescended to their constituents, and let their privilege prevent them from seeing, hearing about, knowing and understanding how the people they are supposed to serve really live. At their inception government sponsored programs reproduced racial inequality. I would only need to cite the New Deal programs but later Federal Housing Authority lending programs have done so as well. Over the years many have worked to eliminate these racial inequalities so that the programs work better today. The government sponsored programs do not produce racial inequality but rather racial inequality makes government programs look the way they do.