This is to lend my own perspective in support of what my colleague Warren Bolton has to say in his column today.
There are an awful lot of white folks out there who are by no means racist but who nevertheless get impatient with black folks seeming to talk about race "all the time." I’ll admit that while I don’t quite go that far, I have had a similar reaction: Sometimes it just seems odd to me that black writers or speakers will inject race into their comments on a subject that seemed — to me — to be totally unrelated.
But while I’m not the most empathetic person in the world, I have managed to figure out that the reason I have that reaction is that I’ve never had the regular experience that black folks have of race being thrown in their faces, and usually in an extremely unpleasant way. This usually happens out of the view of the kind of white folks who would never dream of doing, saying or thinking anything racist, and thus such well-meaning folk think it’s their black neighbors who have an unhealthy fixation.
Working with Warren has helped me see this. I’ll give you an example.
Sometime after Warren Bolton joined our editorial board, he wrote a column or two about the Confederate flag that was then atop our State House dome. At that point, I had already written on the subject — demanding that it come down — about 200 times since I had joined the board myself in 1994.
Warren’s style of writing about it was milder and more polite than mine. He objected to the flag’s presence in a kinder, gentler manner than was my wont. This was partly due to the difference in our personalities. But I suspect it was also because Warren knew, far better than I, what was coming.
You see, I thought I’d seen it all in the way of negative reactions from flag defenders. The editorial department secretary hated the days that one of my pieces on the subject ran, because it meant a day of fielding — and passing on to me — angry call after angry call, followed by a flood of letters.
But what I’d experienced was hugs and kisses compared to the slime that came bursting out of the woodwork from the very first moment that Warren dared to touch upon the subject. The vitriol, the pure hatred that was aimed at him was like nothing I had seen. And what was the difference between his columns and mine? Well, there were two: Mine were somewhat more provocative, and a picture of a black man ran with his.
I was already at that point tired of hearing the canard about how support for the flag never had a thing to do with race, but I really got fed up with it at that point. What provoked the hatred; what was Warren’s offense? Simple. He was guilty of having an opinion on the flag while being black.
This did not surprise Warren. He had, after all, been black all his life. But it was an eye-opener for me.
Warren quotes — with epithets blanked out — one of the worst recent phone messages he’s received. But reading about it doesn’t communicate it. You need to hear it to get the full impact (and sorry, but my attempts to convert the recording to a format that I could link to here have been unsuccessful). The caller starts out speaking VERY softly, so that Warren or anyone else listening would press the receiver more tightly to his ear, and turn up the volume on the phone. Then, without warning, he SCREAMS the really nasty parts at a volume intended to hurt the eardrum of the listener. That this stranger hated Warren could be in no doubt. Nor could the reason be obscure. He hated Warren simply because he was black, and he wanted to put that point across in as offensive and painful a manner as possible.
I’ve never had anything quite like that aimed at me. And if you’re white, you probably haven’t either. If you and I suspect black folks are just a little on the touchy side about race matters, that’s probably because they are. And they have reason to be.
Related Posts
I always enjoy Warren’s columns whatever the topic, even when I disagree with the argument he makes, which is most of the time. But what he writes is important and needs to be said.
For example, payday lenders perform an economic benefit, extending credit to those with troubled credit histories and who have no other legal source. Unlike Warren, I think that their business should remain legal. But folks like Warren – and maybe even I – should write about how this last-resort lending is a sign that we need to educate, cajole, and browbeat folks into exploring all alternatives before dealing with a type of business that breeds on desperation.
It’s obvious that Warren’s passionate about much of what he writes about, but he conveys the passion without histrionics. What’s disappointing is that it’s not surprising that he gets the kind of calls and letters you and he mention. It’s okay to attack his ideas, but disgusting to attack him and where he comes from. Criticizing a black guy for focusing on things black is like criticizing a woman for writing on things that women understand and men — regardless of color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or availability of power tools — don’t.
I also know that even in these times, if Warren and I wore identical clothing and departed on a 500 mile trip in identical cars, we’d have different experiences, good and bad, on the journey simply and solely because of skin color. Several years ago when my company was doing a big job here in Columbia, a bunch of us would go to local eateries for some down-home cooking. I couldn’t help but notice how those of Indian (the Punjab, wot!) and Chinese origin got different reactions from the staff and fellow diners. But I remain optimistic about a perfect world.
Over the years of reading his columns, I’ve savored his anecdotes about growing up. He comes from a large family with a great mom, as do I. These glimpses into Warren’s background underscore the humanity that powers what he writes.
A few months ago, The State ran an op.ed. by Ken Burns, perhaps our leading producer of award winning historical documentaries for television. Burns had just completed a documentary for PBS about the life and career of Jack Johnson, the great black heavyweight boxing champion of the world in the early 20th century. Johnson was convicted in a federal prosecution for “taking a woman across state lines for immoral purposes” and also for “crime against nature” because he was black and she was white even though he later married her. Johnson served a year in prison for the convictions and Burns had established a established an organization including folks like Sen. John McCain to attempt to obtain a posthumous Presidential pardon for Johnson.
After reading the piece I wrote an op.ed. submission for The State contending that posthumous pardons and apologies were insufficient recompense and that restitution and/or reparations were due Johnson’s heirs. I also pointed out that his case was the “tip of an iceberg” when we consider the injustices done to black folks in the United States during the 350 years of the African-American holocaust. As well as I can remember The State finally printed my piece as a letter and left out the word reparations. I’m hopeful that the omission had nothing to do with the fact that the previous owners of The State until about 15 years ago was the Hampton family. The Hampton’s great wealth was established by Wade Hampton, former Confederate General, S.C. Governor, and Red Shirt Terrorist leader. Hampton was one of the largest slave owners in the South.
I would like to commend The State for publishing the following letter a few weeks ago entitled..”Black Americans deserve reparations for centuries of economic depravation” by Glenice Pearson of Columbia. It reminds us of some of the history of racial injustices:
“I am always strangely drawn to the letters to the editor that remind black Americans that their own people sold their ancestors into enslavement, as if that should be sufficient to close the debate regarding reparations for slavery and segregation. As we all have witnessed, there are people in every part of the world whose greed clouds their humanity.
However, people who single out this aspect of the historical record have clearly chosen to absorb only those pieces of information that suit their personal ideology.
They’ve overlooked the records of resistance by many African people to being taken into slavery and the absolute brutality with which all slaves were captured and transported to the Americas.
Moreover, they’ve sidestepped the ethical issues regarding this nation’s actions over the centuries since Africans were taken from the shores of their home continent to help build this nation’s massive wealth and military might.
As the recent political battles over the estate tax demonstrate, the right to one’s inheritance is considered fundamental in this country. Yet, black Americans were essentially denied the benefits that other groups in this country have gained via the ability to inherit the fruits of their ancestors’ labor.
Most of the public debate about the disproportionate levels of poverty among black people is totally disconnected from historical realities: labor without pay, stolen lands and businesses, payment of taxes for public goods that were forbidden to non-whites, rejections of bank loans on specious grounds and other forms of economic subjugation.
This listing does not include the many fear tactics that were designed to keep black people from even attempting to gain a foothold in the economy, ranging from daily insults heaped upon adults and children to jailing and lynching without evidence of guilt or trial by jury.
I know that part of my reaction to these letters is the all-too-present memory of attending the funerals of cousins and friends who died in wars on foreign shores when I could not use the public library. No other group of people that America has wronged has ever had to work so hard to demonstrate that they deserved some type of economic compensation for systematic discrimination.
Even Japanese-Americans have received reparations, although the length of time in which their loss occurred was substantially shorter than that of black people. In fact, systematic exclusion of blacks from the economy persisted well after the release of Japanese citizens from internment camps.
While I recognize that the society in which I was forced to grow up skewed my perspective as it relates to the human condition, I find it difficult to understand why other people have such a hard time seeing the same trait in themselves.”
Racial injustice in America is so big and so bad that we white folks have much denial about it. It is very hard to understand the extent of racism in our culture if you have white sin and the privilege that goes with it. Empathy is what we must try to muster a bit more of, Brother Brad.
Thanks for bringing up the subject.
Tom Turnipseed
The problem with black columnists like Bolton and white liberals like Warthen is that they see Bolton as a “black columnist”. They think and discuss in terms of race when it is inappropriate to the issue, and it becomes a crutch for them to avoid confronting problems.
Tom –
You’re asking not for empathy, but for cash.
The facts are stubborn and simple
There’s more in the linked article that runs counter to Pearson’s assertions. For example, poverty rate among blacks fell by half between 1940 and 1960, years during which black males’ number of years of schooling doubled. Yet with the expansion of the welfare state under LBJ’s Great Society, much of the progress was arrested and a decline set in. We can thank AFDC for that.
The drive for reparations has failed in the courts and in Congress. The only purpose it serves now is as a political tool.
But, Mike, a tool must have utility. What is the utility of continuing to call for reparations?
Either people sincerely believe that reparations are a good idea and are therefore willing to advocate the idea in spite of its being a nonstarter politically (that would be Tom’s position, I believe), or they are engaging in a strategy of towering cynicism, putting out an untenable proposal so as to have an excuse to be perpetually aggrieved.
The latter is the only way I can see such advocacy having political utility. Is that what you are suggesting?
Those “leaders” pushing for reparations have two aims:
As I pointed out in my blog entry Banking on Success, these guys, like Willie Sutton, know where the money is and managed to get $10 million from Wachovia “for something Wachovia didn’t do, in an era when it didn’t exist, under laws it didn’t break” as Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby so aptly put it.
Dr. Sowell’s big hammer hits a lot of nails on the head when he writes:
Given my engineering bent and obnoxious disposition, in my blog entry I speculate on how we’d finance reparations and who would qualify. I also touch on the issue of Japanese internment and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study because they touch on the notion of compensation to victims of wrongdoing.
I am personally not concerned about reparations because, thanks to the gracious and quite generous Dr. Walter E. Williams, I have one of these.
For example, poverty rate among blacks fell by half between 1940 and 1960, years during which black males’ number of years of schooling doubled. Yet with the expansion of the welfare state under LBJ’s Great Society, much of the progress was arrested and a decline set in. We can thank AFDC for that.
Do you have any numbers to back this claim? Assuming what you’re saying is true – that expansion of the welfare state has increased the very poverty that it sought to reduce – why has the poverty rate amongst whites not increased as well?
I understand the history of the political power of the white male power structure that has formed the basis of the great American Empire. The statement of former Republican education secretary and “drug czar” William Bennett that the crime rate could be reduced through the abortion of all African-American children represents that power structure.
It lives today with with our knowledge of the actual conditions of slavery which have been detailed in several PBS documentaries. Try as we may we cannot wipe away the history of the enslaved black race in the U.S. Many slaves were routinely lashed and beaten for not making their work quota and if they ran and/or tried to get away were lashed and beaten, some were castrated, hung or drawn and quartered in front of all the remaining slaves on the plantation, including small children.
I am not naive enough to believe that the cornerstone of our judicial system of righting wrongs through the judicisl process will ever bring about substantial restitution or reparations to Afrrican-Americans. Most of us are into a denial syndrome and bring up the “incalculable amount” problem and most of all we have bought into the same greed and dehumanization that extolled the virtues of human bondage as a Christian practice that actually benefitted the black slaves where in dear ol’ Dixie, the land of Wade Hampton.
There are many precedents like the Japanese-Americans, as Ms. Pearson pointed out. Actually, the Florida Legislature awarded reparations to the survivors and heirs of the Roseboro massacre. Victims of the Jewish Holocaust have been awarded reparations by the German government.
Remember the continuing injustices of Jim Crow and the barbarism of the lynchings throughout the remainder of the post Civil War 19th century and most of the 20th century? Remember that blacks never really got the right to vote, equal accomodations and economic opportunity until about 4o years ago?
If the irresistable humanity and logic of restitution/reparations argument can get you guys to thinking out of the box a bit, then that is a good thing.
I was very happy and somewhat surprised that Brad’s newspaper has done such a wonderful job in pushing for funding of the poor, majority black public schools in South Carolina which have been underfunded for all these many years.
It is always a pleasure,
Tom Turnipseed
Tom –
Perhaps I’ve not been clear. For the Japanese-American detentions, for the Holocaust, etc., the victims – those who’d been interned or jailed – were the ones who received compensation.
There’s no doubt that slavery was horrific, but there’s no one alive today who was a slave in the US.
Joel B –
I took the numbers from the column of Dr. Sowell that I’d linked to. The same data appear in this column:
Where the author provides this reference:
You ask if “that expansion of the welfare state has increased the very poverty that it sought to reduce – why has the poverty rate amongst whites not increased as well.” There are two issues. First, there was a lower percentage (but greater numbers) of whites in poverty and there was an increase, but neither as noticeable nor as dramatic among blacks.
The second reason has to do with a point I made above, that civil rights activism caused some well-intentioned liberals to recommend, boost, sell, advertise – choose your word – existing welfare programs to the black community as a way out of poverty. Charles A. Murray describes this well in his book Losing Ground : American social policy, 1950-1980. He points out that FDR’s big four social safety net programs – Social Security, Workers Comp. unemployment Insurance, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) – were designed to provide minimal support to fine upstanding citizens who had gotten a tough break or who were too old to be expected to take care of themselves. Nothing in the New Deal provided help just because a person was poor or hampered by social disadvantages. For example, AFDC was intended for widows with small children, unemployment insurance for workers thrown out of jobs for reasons beyond their control, etc. The American public liked this arrangement because it helped the responsible, truly needy; the size of the dole was defined as “adequate,” sufficient, if used frugally, to buy life’s necessities. This agreement and these programs had public confidence though the 1950s.
But, not only were the programs, especially the pernicious AFDC, marketed widely throughout the black community, their payments were increased and restrictions eased. With AFDC, teenage gals could have babies, get an apartment, and have a reasonable living as long as no husband was around. Folks with poor work habits – inability to get to work on time, perform job-related tasks, etc. could collect unemployment despite their lack of a job history.
Tom, I would like to hear your thoughts on the human bondage that is thriving right now day in and day out. Where? Africa in particular. Slavery was outlawed in the USA generations ago yet you are obsessed with what happened then. What about the Black Muslim genocide being conducted right now against the Christian blacks in Darfur in the Sudan? Also, free blacks in the US had slaves. Do the heirs of those slave holding blacks get reparations (due to color) and then have to also pay reparations? Then, what about the Indians? Maybe the entire states of N. and S. Carolina can be handed back to the Cherokee, Pee Dee, Lumbar, Catawba, and other tribes. But then, we would be taking private land from the black population and then how would that sit? I think this reparations talk is theoretical nonsense. I never look at myself as a victim and the whole world would be better off if the victimhood was ended.
As for insufficient funding of poor rural schools, that is another subject that requires intense scrutiny. Lee County has a huge brand new high school called Lee Central. Beautiful, shining, new facility. Is education improving there? Not much. Yet a poor backwoods young person like Abe Lincoln and countless others sat many years ago in a one room shack of the most spartan type of facilities and learned enough to write the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. And he got enough education to free the slaves (at least in the south). I have said it before, and Brad hates it I know, but just how much money does everyone ante up to ever satisfy the educators? I think the number may be infinity.
I vote for a color blind society and that is the only way this internal resentment, bitterness, and hatred of white and black, and any other color will ever end.
Joel,
You are
right to be suspicious. Poverty as a relative measure has greatly increased
since the early 1980s. Since black people as a whole started off in economic
dire straights to begin with, and since the onset of pro Globalization policies
of the late 1970s, black people have
been devastated in terms of relative wealth (they are not alone!). Free market
capitalism, by its nature, takes the wealth generated by workers and
redistributes it to a small fraction of the population.
In 1979, the top 1% of the US population earned, on average,
33.1 times as much as the lowest 20%. In 2000, this multiplier had grown to
88.5.
If you travel to Northern Europe, you can see just how
far we have fallen behind Nordic social democracies. Our free market system is
obviously failing the vast majority of our citizens. Click here to read about
the successful Nordic model, and here to learn about the different
types of
European social democracy.
I think Mike’s entire analysis is wrong. Mike’s ideas are
just a euphemistic rehashing of the same racist diatribes I used to hear when I
was a kid:
“With AFDC, teenage gals could
have babies, get an apartment, and have a reasonable living as long as no
husband was around. Folks with poor work habits – inability to get to work on
time, perform job-related tasks, etc. could collect unemployment despite their
lack of a job history.”
Replace the words “gals” and
“Folks” with “niggers” in Mike’s passage above, and you’ll get to Mike’s true
meaning-the same racist message of old that the right has pushed since the 60s.
Mike’s arguments reflect modern right-wing rhetoric by bundling racist ideology
in the lexicon of class.
Of course, Mike is Brad’s boy, and Brad promotes Mike and
Mike’s ideas via an internet link in Brad’s opinion piece above. I wish Mike
would get off his lazy butt and see how hard black people really work-usually
for puny wages. I wish Mike, if only for a day, could enjoy the privilege of
being a millwright in a steel mill! You ought to see the black people (70% of
my coworkers over the years have been black) that I work with-their stamina is
incredible! They work ten hours a day for six days a week doing all of
society’s crap jobs. They’re continuously exploited by criminal management
(people of Mike’s ilk). Yes, plenty of working class white people are used and
abused by this scum also.
Mike summarizes Charles Murray’s (that’s right, co-author of
The Bell Curve-the neo fascist manifesto) assessment of New Deal programs as
not being designed to provide help “just because a person was
poor or hampered by social disadvantages.” Talk about revisionist history! I’m
sorry Charles, Brad, Mike, et al, but the New Deal was created precisely to
mitigate and assuage the before mentioned poverty and social disadvantage caused
by free market capitalism’s abject failure. The New Deal permanently changed
American politics and the definition of liberalism. The New Deal is the reason
that people who share the ideology of Brad and Mike are no longer called
“liberals”. Keep living in that pre New Deal, Woodrow Wilson’s America fantasy
if you want-we’re not going back.
So, what is wrong with The Bell
Curve style argument of Murray and company? Well, for starters, wealth (and
consequently poverty) isn’t based on differential ability (perceived or
otherwise). It’s mostly based on how much one owns or inherits from the
beginning. How do I know this-by the statistical distribution of wealth, of
course. For any given large population, if wealth were in fact based on
differential ability, then the distribution would presumably be shaped like an
inverse normal distribution for wealth vs. a population ranked in order of
wealth from richest to poorest. The US wealth distribution is shaped nothing
like this-rather, it follows the incredibly skewed Pareto power law
distribution at the high end, and the exponential Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution
at the low end. The only way to account for the real distribution of wealth is
through hierarchy, stochastic returns on investment, and monetary exchanges. Here
is an explanation with links from my website:
“It’s important to understand why wealth is distributed in such an unfair
fashion-why taxing the wealthy rather than the middle class and the poor is
crucial to maintaining a democratic state. Three main factors contribute to the
exponential distribution of wealth: monetary exchange, stochastic return on
investment, and hierarchy. Exchanges in the short-term (where money is
essentially conserved) result in a Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution. Income
distributions have been shown to closely follow Boltzmann–Gibbs for about
the bottom 95% of a population. The Boltzmann-Gibbs effect carries over for
wealth for a smaller portion (the poorest part) of a given population. The
second main cause of the unfair distribution of wealth is the stochastic
(random) and multiplicative nature of capital investment. The stochastic/multiplicative effect is
responsible for the development of the very skewed Pareto distribution in the
upper wealth ranges. The Pareto distribution itself implies an efficient
market. The third, and I believe, the crucial component of the exponential
distribution of wealth, is the concept of hierarchy. Stochastic returns on
investment and exchanges alone do not sufficiently explain the nature of
capitalism, whereas hierarchy is the glue that holds them together. In order to
maximize return on investment, it is necessary for economic entities to invest
in wealth tiers just below their own: the investment money of a wealthier
economic agent(s) becomes the labor income of agent(s) in the next lowest
tiers, who in turn invest in tiers below them. When exchanges are taken into
account, then it is possible to
create realistic simulated distributions of wealth in a model economy.”
Yet the intrinsic properties of capitalism and the legacy of
racism are not enough explain the economic plight of black people today. Racism
still exists, granted in the more gentile forms of the Good Ole Boy mentality
and the Brother-in-Law effect. The race and class based supposed “merit” system
has polished-off the prospects for most black people. That’s why I still
support affirmative action (although I want to expand it to include class
oppression). If we insist on using a system such as the one we have, then all
races and classes need to be proportionally represented in terms of wealth-then
you’ll see change!
According to government demographers, if you factor out the illegal immigrants, the poverty level has continued to fall, not rise, as reported by the liberal media.
If you really don’t want poor people, stop importing ignorant, illiterate, unskilled poor people by the millions.
Mark –
Wow! It’s amazing how wrong — and slanderous — you can be. What’s annoying is your pretense that you can see others’ motivations, peer into their minds and hearts, discern things that are not readily evident from what they write or say. You always see the worst. From what I’ve seen, that’s a tack taken often by those on the left: they have to question motives because they’ve neither the facts nor the arguments to prevail.
But, for a person of pallor, I’m a pretty good sport, so I’ll play along again for a bit.
Where the right has the advantage today is in the peer-reviewed research conducted by folks like the Thernstrom’s, the Charles Murray’s, the various Wilsons’, etc. There are plenty of black intellects — Sowell, Williams, McWhorter — who’ve joined in, and I’ve quoted liberally from them in making the conservative case. The New Deal programs were always about a subsistence level of support for unfortunates. We just let it get out of hand in the 1960s to the point where it became a free ride for a lot of folks of all colors, something that the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 sought to fix.
As I’ve pointed out before, the failure in Mark’s application of the Pareto distribution is that it does not take time into account; it’s a snapshot taken at one instant. For those not in the know, the Pareto distribution, sometimes called the Bradford distribution, is a probability distribution found in a large number of real-world situations and is commonly referred to as the “80-20 rule.” I find that 20% of my tools gets 80% of my work done; when I worked in a food warehouse 20% of the commodities fulfilled 80% of the orders, so we kept that stuff up front.
But over time, work changes and tastes change such that the composition of that 20% changes. That’s what Mark doesn’t account for when he grieves that 20% of the population owns 80% of the wealth. He considers membership in the 20% to be static, when it’s dynamic. Was BET founder Robert L. Johnson always a billionaire? Bill Gates? As I’ve pointed out previously on Brad’s blog, the composition of the Forbes 400 richest changes yearly — that’s what’s stochastic. Mark’s insistence that the rich get that way because they are born into wealth ain’t true. Sure there’s inherited wealth — take the Kennedy’s, please — but most high-income earners got to the top through hard work, talent, and luck. (I define luck in this context as preparation meeting opportunity.)
Is it bad that 20% owns 80%? In a free market, doesn’t that give folks something to aspire to, to be rich? Isn’t that what America’s all about? Living your dream?
What if we do what Mark suggests and flatten that out a bit by taxing these stinking rich folks out of their sox, like the Nordic countries do. Would that help the US? No, but It would probably help Switzerland. Of the ten richest Swiss, five are foreigners who moved in for lower taxes. Among them is Ingvar Kamprad, the Swedish businessman who founded furniture retailer IKEA and the richest guy in the world. If you penalize success, folks won’t work to succeed.
The Nordic nations have high fuel prices and a tax on new vehicle of about 100%. That may make sense with a relatively small homogeneous populace living in a few densely packed urban areas, but that’s not America’s landscape and diversity of origin.
So there are all sorts of ways to be coercive, to force people to do things. Heck, the stinking commies succeeded not in making everybody rich, but in spreading the misery, not spreading the wealth. As the old commie joke goes, speaking of the government, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”
Wealth (i.e., accumulated assets) aside, people’s incomes change as they progress through life, some years are better than others, with the very young and very old not making big bucks. If you look at the chart here, you’ll see that there’s substantial mobility through the income ranges over a period of time. Some do stay stuck, and we need to find out why. Mark wrongly attributes a racist motive to my simple point that if one tells a person that he doesn’t have to work hard to succeed, he won’t. If you provide a supplementary income in return for no effort, many folks won’t put out any effort. That’s human nature, no matter what your color is.
It’s a terrible mistake to tell folks that the government will take care of them, because the government will do a poor job of it. That has nothing to do with the civil servants or elected officials, but more to do with the nature of the enterprise. A bureaucracy has rules that civil servants must follow under penalty of dismissal or sanction; elected officials need to pay heed to those responsible for their election and re-election. Objectives are skewed even with good folks trying hard. But the American public won’t support those who won’t support themselves.
The real message for success is, “it’s up to you, kid; you are the primary determinant of your future.” That goes for everybody. Get the training and education you need to succeed, get to work on time, do a good job, watch out for advancement opportunities, and you’ll be better of than those who are looking for someone else to lend them a hand.
Mark would also have us believe that the Good Ole Boy mentality and the Brother-in-Law effect drives success in America. People do prefer going with a known quantity and I’ve have seen relatives and friends get hired. But you’re a fool if you believe that they’ll stay on the job if they can’t cut it. Today’s workplace is highly competitive, companies are beating each other over the head daily to survive.
One of the reasons that I wrote about the Vietnamese shrimpers devastated by Hurricane Katrina at my blog was that very few folks knew about them and their plight. It’s not that no one cared, but that they never had much political clout; they knew they were on their own and worked hard to achieve remarkable success. Yet even today I hear black and white complain that those Vietnamese boat people who risked life and limb to come here got some sort of government subsidies that all immigrants get but that the native-born don’t. It’s another despicable urban legend that won’t die.
I get especially ticked off when Tom Turnipseed or someone else brings up black reparations because my best friend is of Japanese descent. His parents (they married after the war) were detained during WW II, did lose everything, and had to start over. They restarted from scratch and over a few decades built a successful restaurant and catering business on their own. They never thought as badly about America as Mark apparently does; my friend went to UC Berkley of all places, on an ROTC scholarship. They closed their Japanese restaurant on every big holiday, but served for their employees and their families traditional American holiday fare on those dates: roast turkey, ham, and all the works. Did you ever see a short, slight Japanese guy in a Pilgrim outfit? It’s a hoot, but all-American. They did get their internment compensation check, but they were so old it didn’t matter.
If we are to have a meaningful discussion of race and class, we have to be frank, stop the name-calling, and cease with the slander. You don’t know a durn thing about me except what I’ve chosen to disclose, so quit making things up. Those who know me and read your slurs know who the fool is.
Mike C. you seem to be getting a bit personal with Mike W.
Mike C., you need to understand that I believe in restitution/reparations for Native American victims of European American imperialism and genocide. I also favored restitution/reparations for the Japanese American victims of internment and confiscation of their property in WWII.
My family had some very good Japanese-American friends during WW II in Mobile, Alabama, and I never will forget my Father jumping all over a little super patriot DAR woman who made a racist slur against them at a camellia show in Mobile. Mr. Kiona had greenhouses and raised camellias and japonicas. His son was a member of an elite U.S. Army group that worked behind enemy lines in the Pacific in WWII.
Here is an excellent piece on U.S. poverty carried by Reuters today.
“US Poverty: Chronic Ill, Little Hope for Cure, by Bernd Debusmann
Four decades after a U.S. president declared war on poverty, more than 37 million people in the world’s richest country are officially classified as poor and their number has been on the rise for years. Last year, according to government statistics, 1.1 million Americans fell below the poverty line. That equals the entire population of a major city like Dallas or Prague.
Since 2000, the ranks of the poor have increased year by year by almost 5.5 million in total. Even optimists see little prospect that the number will shrink soon despite a renewed debate on poverty prompted by searing television images which laid bare a fact of American life rarely exposed to global view.
The president who made the war declaration was Lyndon Johnson. “Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope, some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. This administration declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”
That was in 1964. Then 19 percent of the U.S. population lived below the official poverty line. That rate declined over the next four years and in 1968, it stood at 12.8 percent.
Since then, it has fluctuated little. Last year, it was at 12.7 percent, proof that poverty is a chronic problem.
The state of poverty in the United States is measured once a year by the Census Bureau, whose statistics-packed 70-plus page report usually provides fodder for academic studies but rarely sparks wide public debate, touches emotional buttons, or features on television. Not so in 2005.
The report coincided with Katrina, a devastating hurricane which killed more than 1,100 in Louisiana and Mississippi. Live television coverage with shocking images of the desperate and the dead in New Orleans showed in brutal close-up what the spreadsheets of the census bureau cannot convey.
SCENES SHOCKED WORLD, SHAMED AMERICANS
The images shocked the world, shamed many Americans and prompted comparisons with conditions in developing countries from Somalia and Angola to Bangladesh. The pictures from New Orleans showed poor black people begging for help. Most of the rescuers, when they finally arrived, were white.
The percentage of black Americans living in poverty is 24.7, almost twice as high as the overall rate for all races.
In predominantly black New Orleans, that disparity translated into those with cars and money, almost all white, fleeing the flood while more than 100,000 car-less blacks were trapped in the flooded city.
Some commentators wondered whether the crisis showed that political segregation, America’s version of apartheid which formally ended with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, had merely been replaced by economic segregation. Poor black Americans in one part of a city, affluent whites in the other.
A host of other American cities have such divides, including Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Miami and the U.S. capital itself. It is a 10-minute drive from the White House to the heart of Anacostia, the city’s poorest neighborhood, but they could be in different worlds.
But the black-equals-poor scenes from New Orleans do not portray the full picture. There are three times as many poor whites as blacks in the United States and the poverty rate for whites has risen faster than that for blacks and Hispanics.
Academic experts also say the government’s figures minimize the true scale of poverty because they are outdated. The formula for the poverty level was set in 1963 on the assumption that one third of the average family’s budget was spent on food.
This is no longer true. Housing has become the largest single expense and tens of thousands of the “working poor,” the label for those who work at or near the minimum wage, are forced to sleep in cars, trailers, long-term motels or shelters.
U.S. POVERTY WORST IN INDUSTRIALISED WORLD
“Every August, we Americans tell ourselves a lie,” said David Brady, a Duke University professor who studies poverty.
“The poverty rate was designed to undercount because the government wanted to show progress in the war on poverty.
“Taking everything into account, the real rate is around 18 percent, or 48 million people. Poverty in the United States is more widespread, by far, than in any other industrialized country.”
Poverty is a universal problem, as is inequality. The world’s 500 richest people, according to U.N. statistics, have as much income as the world’s poorest 416 million.
The post-hurricane poverty scenes were so remarkable for most of the world because of the perception of the United States as the rich land of unlimited opportunity.
No other country spends so much money — billions of dollars — to keep job-hungry foreigners out; no other country has an annual lottery in which millions of people play for 50,000 permanent resident “green cards,” no other country has as many legal and illegal immigrants, all drawn by dreams of prosperity.
For many Americans they remain just that: dreams. While there are arguments over how poverty is measured — conservatives say the census overstates it because it does not take into account food stamps and other subsidies — there is consensus on one thing.
The minimum wage, which rose by 15 cents to $6.35 an hour on October 1, is not enough to keep you above the poverty line. Yet minimum wage jobs, without health insurance or vacations, are the only jobs available to millions of people with only basic education.
The well-paid unskilled jobs in heavy industry which once lifted working-class Americans into the middle class are largely gone and the decline continues. Since 2001, the United States has lost more than 2.7 million manufacturing jobs. Low-paid clerical work is being outsourced to developing countries.
Another U.S. president, the late Ronald Reagan, had it right when he said, in 1988: “The federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.””
You guys really should see the excellent documentary film: “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”. “Kenny Boy” Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, the two top executives at Enron personified the idea of putting competition for money above everything else in life. That is the ultimate end of unfettered capitalism, and is an ecologically unsustainable ideal. Because I believe we should not always put money over people and should have a strong a social safety net doesn’t make me a socialist or a leftist as you and Brad like to imply.
I particularly resent it when Brad uses Atwater type descriptions of me that appeal to the right-wing sychophant mentality when he endorses my opponent when I offer for public office.
Sincerely,
Tom Turnipseed
Ton –
We’ve just rediscovered the underclass for the fourth time since WW II as Robert J. Samuelson put it in the WaPo last week. He concludes with (Link requires free registration):
There are poor folks and there’s an underclass. It’s the latter who shock us; many deal with it by seeking out closed communities where they don’t have to deal with what they can have no effect on.
Mark W.’s least favorite researcher puts it this way:
I take from this the following rules for avoiding poverty:
What this has to do with Enron is beyond me, but I do know that Lay’s company had few controls, no effective oversight board, and no one with the sense to see the obvious madness in the organization. It would make a good case for a management class were it not so unbelievable. Lay would brag that a bunch of folks just got together and started a natural gas futures trading operation. Say what? Where did they get the resources? Who approved the expenditures? Who vetted the processes? It was bizarre. The New Yorker had a great article on the chaos that was Enron a few years ago, but I can’t seem to find it now.
Tom, That classification of poor you refer to is a self imposed US only measure. Are you aware that in the US, you can own a car, numerous electronic appliances, have cable TV piped into your home, etc. and still be poor. There are no starving poor in the US. Can you please stop the liberal bleeding heart poor babble that you seem to be so good at doing? Go to Mexico City, drive north to the city’s edge, and go up on the mountainsides. There you will see genuine poor. What the world saw in New Orleans were the welfare plantation results of the Great Society War on Poverty? People living in government built high rises waiting for welfare checks, food stamps, and any other freebies while many service jobs were going unfilled in that town. My hope is New Orleans will never be rebuilt like it was for that reason alone. While hardworking Mexican immigrants stream into the US and jump all over hard but steady jobs, the welfare recipients exist like societal parasites. Gangs and criminal activity abound in these areas. Are there any decent people living in these projects. Absolutely yes, but they are the ones taking some initiative to get out. Observe how many people have indicated that they will never go back to New Orleans. They finally got out of the trap that was orchestrated and funded by the likes of LBJ, Tip ONeill, Ted Kennedy, and a host of others. I strongly support a social safety net for those who fall upon bad times for whatever reason. But the social programs that are in place, as Mike C so aptly states, are actually a disincentive to work or even try to be productive members of society. Lastly, my comments are not in any way racial. There are welfare bums in all colors and creeds, that is for sure.
Tom –
David’s point is supported by
this short piece “Broken Yardstick” by Nicholas Eberstadt originally published in the New York Times. The essence follows: