Please listen to my NPR “News & Notes” discussion of Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and Obama’s speech on race with media assassin Harry Allen, Eric Brown of the Detroit News, and host Farai Chideya.
Harry Allen and Eric Brown were on-point, I think, in their criticisms of Kilpatrick and of the right-wing assault on Obama. They articulated some searing truths about this moment in Black politics. Bravo.
If we hadn’t run out of time, I would have said that the white folk Obama mentioned in his amazing speech are oppressed by other whites, just as African Americans are. I think the anxiety white working Americans have stems from their exploitation – and the artificial division of race constructed by the elite that divides and conquers us all.
Think about it. How much better would lower-income and poor whites have prospered in the plantation-era south if slavery had never existed? Think of the jobs they could have gotten – construction worker, metalworker, stable-hand, painter, domestic, in addition to field worker, indeed, all the work on the plantation and in town – that slaves were doing for free? Heck, some poor whites lived worse off than the slaves. All they needed were some fair-paying jobs. But as long as their emotional instability, a direct result, I think, of their economic instability, remained directed at those completely dispossessed, the slaves, the slave-owners prospered over them all. Really, please: Just for a moment, imagine how different this country would have been if, in the early days of slavery, non-land-owning white folk in the south had looked around them and said, “Hey, this slave system is keeping us down, too. Until these folk are free, I’ll never be able to really support my family.” Instead, hundreds of years of potential wealth-building were lost to “Well, at least I ain’t no N-word” and all they got was the dirty and spiritually debilitating work of overseeing, slave-catching, and paddy-rollin’.
Consider the factories of the north, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the mid-20th century, where white and Black workers clashed over jobs and benefits and union membership. Think about all the exploited white immigrants and the African Americans used as strike-breakers because they weren’t allowed to join the unions. Some of the bloodiest race riots in US history took place in the north when white union members went on strike. Imagine how different this country would be if that history were different. Imagine a proud history of pay equity, shared access, and workers united across race lines. Imagine how much stronger the union movement might have been – and how much better lower-middle class whites and Blacks would have fared – had the divide and conquer of racism not kept the bosses fat and everyone else exploited.
I think there is more that unites us all across racial lines than the artificial social construction of race divides. I think Obama gets that, and he is trying to lead us to a new possibility – a future where reconciliation empowers all middle and lower-income Americans to unite and challenge the bosses acting as system controllers, feeding off of us all.
Comment(s)
“the artificial construction of race constructed by the elite” was bought into, in toto, by working class whites. And it was bought into because it was believed, accepted and most of all needed. They weren’t duped, they weren’t bamboozled and they weren’t lead astray. They benefited (was the benefit a faustian pact? probably so) from it. And the benefit was white skin privilege. Not elite white skin privilege; but the privilege (the head start if you will, the money in the bank before a lick of work is done) accorded all with white skin, regardless of class. The kind of privilege that enabled a white homeless gutter wench woman to put down a professional black women as black nigger bitch.
Yes, lower income and working class whites would have prospered better in a free system and yes, there is more that unites us across racial lines than the artificial construction of race divides us. But that artificial construction of race exists for a reason and the benefits of it are centuries of ill gotten gains. Do you know any team willing to give up homecourt advantage?