[Mb-civic] Bush--not a racist but....+ Poor, Black and Left Behind

[Mha Atma Khalsa]

The second of these essays was presciently written over one year ago...
 
CounterPunch - Oct 5, 2005
http://www.counterpunch.org/jensen10052005.html

Is Bush a Racist?

... Or Just Another Soulless Son of Privilege?

By ROBERT JENSEN

George W. Bush has been unfairly tagged with the label "racist" in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

It's true that the response of the government -- at all levels, but
especially the federal government and it's feeble emergency agency --
was inadequate and incompetent, and that the poor suffered the most,
and that the poor of New Orleans are disproportionately black. It's
also true that Bush displayed an appalling lack of basic human
compassion in his slow reaction to the suffering.

But our president is almost certainly not an overt racist. He's just a
run-of-the-mill overly privileged American who appears to have no
soul. I'm reasonably sure he doesn't harbor ill will for anyone based
solely on race. Instead -- like many people in similar positions and
status -- he's incapable of understanding how race and class structure
life in the United States. His privilege has not only coddled and
protected him his whole life, but also has left him with a drastically
reduced capacity for empathy, and without empathy one can't be fully
human.

This is not a partisan attack; such a soulless existence is not a
feature of membership in any particular political party. Nor is it
exclusive to men. Though we tend to assume women will be more
caring, this deficiency among the privileged crosses gender lines;
probably the most inhuman comment by a public figure after Katrina
was made by the president's mother, Barbara Bush. After touring the
Astrodome stadium in Houston, where many who were displaced by
the disaster were being warehoused, she said, "And so many of the
people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,
so this -- this is working very well for them."

In our president all we see is an extreme version of a more general
problem in an affluent but highly unequal society, in which people on
the top have convinced themselves they are special and therefore
deserve their positions.

For his entire life, Bush has sat on the very top of the privilege
pile. He is white in a white-supremacist society; a heterosexual man
in a patriarchal culture; born into wealth in a capitalist economy;
and a U.S. citizen in a world dominated by his nation. In the identity
game, it's hard to get a better roll of the dice.

The downside to all this for folks like Bush is that privilege doesn't
guarantee intelligence, empathy, wisdom, diligence, or humanity.
Privilege allows people without those qualities to skate through life,
protected from the consequences of being dull-witted, lazy, arrogant,
and inhumane. The system of privilege allows failed people to pretend
to be something more.

And, unfortunately, that system often puts those failed people in
positions of power and forces everyone else to endure their
shortcomings.

That's probably the most pressing race problem in the United States
today -- a de facto affirmative-action program for mediocre middle-
and upper-class white men that places a lot of undeserving people in
positions of power, where their delusions of grandeur can have
profound implications for others.

If the deficiencies of George Bush and people like him were simply
their problem, well, most would find it hard to muster much sympathy.
But they become our problem -- not just the United States', but the
world's problem -- when such folks run the world.

Let's go back to Bush's resume. Whatever one's ideology or evaluation
of Bush policies, it's impossible to ignore how race, gender, class,
and nation privilege have worked in his life. By his own admission,
Bush was a mediocre student, gaining access to two of the most
prestigious universities in the United States (Yale and Harvard)
through family connections, not merit. His lackluster and incomplete
service in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War was, to
say the least, not the stuff of legend that will be told and retold
around the family hearth.

After that he went into the oil business, where he also failed. He
then used money he had managed to take out of a failed oil endeavor to
buy into the Texas Rangers baseball team, his one great "success" in
the business world. From there, despite having no relevant experience,
he was molded by Republican Party operatives into a successful
gubernatorial candidate. After a thoroughly uninspired first term, he
was re-elected governor before moving on to the White House, where the
most successful public-relations team in U.S. political history has
kept him afloat despite two illegal and failed wars, a frightening
rise in the national debt, tax cuts for wealthy that have contributed
to the gutting of the already weak social safety net, and most
recently the criminally negligent response to Hurricane Katrina.

Welcome to the United States of Meritocracy. How is it that a society
can hold onto fantasies about level playing fields and equal
opportunity when every day we turn on the television sets and see
Smiling George the Frat Boy President?

The problem, of course, isn't limited to Bush; he's a fraud, but only
one of many. In my life I have worked in offices of the federal
government, non-profit organizations, for-profit corporations, and
universities. In each, I have seen mediocre white men rise to
positions of power for reasons that have more to do with the informal
networks based on identity than on merit. No doubt, as a white man, my
own career has been aided by this system. I also have seen women and
non-white people advance by playing a similar game, but far less often
and typically only when they internalize the value system of the
dominant culture.

That does not mean there are no white men who are talented and
hard-working or who do not deserve the success they have achieved. It
is only to recognize that this system of unearned privilege will
regularly put into positions of power people who are unfit for the
duties they take on.

That means -- independent of the strong moral argument for equality
and justice -- subverting a system of white supremacy and white
privilege is in all our interests. In fact, the fate of the world may
depend on it.

[Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at
Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist Resource
Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the author of The Heart
of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the
Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights
Books).]

***

http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2004/09/09_414.html

Mother Jones September 24, 2004

Poor, Black, and Left Behind

News: On the fortieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the United
States seems to have returned to degree zero of moral concern for the
majority of descendants of slavery and segregation.

By Mike Davis

The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked
sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white
people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less -- mainly
Black -- were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks and aging
tenements to face the watery wrath.

New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the
storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded they
had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case scenario.
But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate the city's
poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane hit the Gulf
Coast, New Orlean's daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming story about
the "large groups mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods" who wanted to
evacuate but couldn't.

Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did Mayor
Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to
desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees
might damage or graffiti the Superdome.

In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans, but official callousness
toward poor Black folk endures.

Over the last generation, City Hall and its entourage of powerful developers
have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest segment of the population --
blamed for the city's high crime rates -- across the Mississippi river.
Historic Black public-housing projects have been razed to make room for
upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing projects,
residents are routinely evicted for offenses as trivial as their children's
curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist theme-park
New Orleans -- one big Garden District -- with chronic poverty hidden
away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.

But New Orleans isn't the only the case-study in what Nixonians called
"the politics of benign neglect." In Los Angeles, county supervisors have
just announced the closure of the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr.
Hospital near Watts. The hospital, located in the epicenter of LA's gang
wars, is one of the nation's busiest centers for the treatment of gunshot
wounds. The loss of its ER, according to paramedics, could "add as much
as 30 minutes in transport time to other facilities."

The result, almost certainly, will be a spate of avoidable deaths. But then
again the victims will be Black or Brown and poor.

On the fortieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the United States
seems to have returned to degree zero of moral concern for the majority of
descendants of slavery and segregation. Whether the Black poor live or die
seems to merit only haughty disinterest and indifference. Indeed, in terms
of the life-and-death issues that matter most to African-Americans --
structural unemployment, race-based super-incarceration, police brutality,
disappearing affirmative action programs, and failing schools -- the present
presidential election might as well be taking place in the 1920s.

But not all the blame can be assigned to the current occupant of the former
slave-owners' mansion at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The mayor of New
Orleans, for example, is a Black Democrat, and Los Angeles County is a
famously Democratic bastion. No, the political invisibility of people of
color is a strictly bipartisan endeavor. On the Democratic side, it is the
culmination of the long crusade waged by the Democratic Leadership Council
(DLC) to exorcise the specter of the 1980s Rainbow Coalition.

The DLC, of course, has long yearned to bring white guys and fat cats back
to a Nixonized Democratic Party. Arguing that race had fatally divided
Democrats, the DLC has tried to bleach the Party by marginalizing civil
rights agendas and Black leadership. African-Americans, it is cynically
assumed, will remain loyal to the Democrats regardless of the treasons
committed against them. They are, in effect, hostages.

Thus the sordid spectacle -- portrayed in Fahrenheit 9/11 -- of white
Democratic senators refusing to raise a single hand in support of the Black
Congressional Caucus's courageous challenge to the stolen election of
November 2000.

The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, steers a straight DLC course toward oblivion.
No Democratic presidential candidate since Eugene McCarthy's run in 1968 has
shown such patrician disdain for the Democrats' most loyal and fundamental
social base. While Condoleezza Rice hovers, a tight-lipped and constant
presence at Dubya's side, the highest ranking, self-proclaimed "African
American" in the Kerry camp is Teresa Heinz ((born and raised in
white-colonial privilege).

This crude joke has been compounded by Kerry's semi-suicidal reluctance to
mobilize Black voters. As Rainbow Coalition veterans like Ron Waters have
bitterly pointed out, Kerry has been absolutely churlish about financing
voter registration drives in African-American communities. Ralph Nader -- I
fear -- was cruelly accurate when he warned recently that "the Democrats do
not win when they do not have Jesse Jackson and African Americans in the
core of the campaign."

In truth, Kerry, the erstwhile war hero, is running away as hard as he can
from the sound of the cannons, whether in Iraq or in America's equally
ravaged inner cities. The urgent domestic issue, of course, is unspeakable
socio-economic inequality, newly deepened by fiscal plunder and catastrophic
plant closures. But inequality still has a predominant color, or, rather,
colors: black and brown.

Kerry's apathetic and uncharismatic attitude toward people of color will not
be repaired by last-minute speeches or campaign staff appointments. Nor will
it be compensated for by his super-ardent efforts to woo Reagan Democrats
and white males with war stories from the ancient Mekong Delta.

A party that in every real and figurative sense refuses to shelter the poor
in a hurricane is unlikely to mobilize the moral passion necessary to
overthrow George Bush, the most hated man on earth.

----

Mike Davis is the author of Dead Cities: And Other Tales as well as Ecology
of Fear and co-author of Under the Perfect Sun: the San Diego Tourists Never
See, among other books.


		
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