“No Excuse For Inaction”: The Awful Race Disparities That Still Haunt Us
Even though a black family lives in the White House, hardly anyone seriously argues that we live in a postracial society. That aspirational description of 21st century America came into vogue about four years ago, as President Barack Obama raced to victory in the 2008 presidential election, and a great number of black and white Americans wanted to believe the nation was finally closing the books on its discriminatory history.
But no. President Obama’s election didn’t suddenly sweep away all the accumulated consequences of past racism in our society. The preexisting racial disparities, so engrained in the fabric of our economy and culture, didn’t erase themselves in the wake of his victory.
As my Progress 2050 colleagues Christian E. Weller, Julie Ajinkya, and Jane Farrell make regrettably clear in their recently released report, “The State of Communities of Color in the U.S. Economy: Still Feeling the Pain Three Years Into Recovery,” racial and ethnic minority groups aren’t living in a paradise free of racial disadvantage. Quite the contrary, their research demonstrates that people of color aren’t benefiting apace with white Americans as our nation gradually rebounds from the financial collapse and economic recession that gripped us all when President Obama took office:
[T]he data we summarize in this report shows that communities of color are substantially less likely than their white fellow citizens to enjoy the opportunities that come from having a good job, owning a home, and having a financial safety cushion in the form of health insurance, retirement benefits, and private savings. This difference exists because economic opportunities eroded faster for communities of color than for whites during the Great Recession—and those opportunities have been coming back much more slowly for communities of color than for whites during the economic recovery.
The disparities Weller, Ajinkya, and Farrell write about aren’t new. Anyone who’s paid scant attention to the drumbeat of sour economic news knows that white unemployment, while at near-record heights, never drew within spitting distance of the chronically high rates suffered by African Americans and Latinos. As a result of this one fact, my colleagues write, a host of other calamities followed for people of color during the economic downturn like toppling dominoes, including:
— Black Americans enjoying fewer job opportunities than all other racial and ethnic groups.
— Poverty rates, already higher for communities of color, rising faster in the recession and declining slower during recovery than for white Americans
— Homeownership, a major source of financial security, disappearing faster for black Americans during the recession and recovery than for white Americans
Those are old, bitter, and racially disparate facts. But what is especially galling is the yawning silence and indifference that seems to accompany the periodic recitation of them. Worse, there exists in some conservative quarters a refusal to acknowledge the truth and an eagerness to embrace discredited notions about postracialism. Acting as if racial disparities don’t exist or believing we’re now living in some fantasy world free of racial divisions is nothing more than an excuse to preserve the status quo. It serves to protect the advantages of those who are already employed and comfortable, while keeping racial and ethnic minorities locked out of the improving economy.
But despite the cloudy pessimism disclosed in the report, there also exists the opportunity for hopeful change. More than a catalogue of racial disparities, the report provides a roadmap for policies that, if implemented, would help equalize the burdens faced by people of color. Specifically, it suggests federal policies that would accelerate job creation, shore up unemployment insurance, raise the minimum wage, increase access to health insurance, and implement comprehensive immigration reform to protect workers’ rights.
Armed with the facts of disparity and a prescription for change, policymakers have no excuse for inaction. Reporting the bad news, as Weller, Ajinkya, and Farrell have done, removes the blinders from their eyes. Policymakers’ indifference to the pain of their fellow citizens can only be interpreted as willing refusal to ensure that all Americans—including communities of color—share equitably in the rebuilding and recovery of the nation’s economy.
By: Sam Fulwood III, Center for American Progress, Published in AlterNet, April 17, 2012
“Food Stamps” Bigotry Feeds GOP Anti-Government Agenda
Newt Gingrich has rightly earned the derision he’s been getting for his performance last Monday night when he threw red meat wrapped in black skin to South Carolina Republicans who gave Gingrich a standing ovation for calling Barack Obama “the greatest food-stamp president in American history.”
When the master propagandist said President Obama “put” more people on food stamps than any president in American history he was deliberately confusing cause with effect.
Obama “put” no one on food stamps, as the New York Times rightly notes. People did that to themselves when they signed up for food assistance because they were poor, jobless or hungry. And the reason they were hungry was because America is suffering the worst recession since the Great Depression.
Indeed, as former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum helpfully reminds us, in South Carolina where Newt Gingrich is now slyly insinuating his poison, residents may be hungrier than most since portions of the state suffer the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the nation and where 100,000 households now depend on food stamps for their daily diet.
By waving foods stamps around like the Confederate Battle Flag which flies aloft the South Carolina statehouse, Gingrich is clearly trying to “feed the prejudice of people who already believe that blacks and other poor people don’t really like to work,” argues the Times.
But the facts belie the bigotry since whites far outnumber blacks who receive foods stamps, notes the Times, and where 30% of those depend on food stamps to supplement the income they earn from working.
So, if you’re looking for the logic behind Gingrich’s raising of the food stamp non-issue forget about it, says the Times, because it just isn’t there.
Gingrich’s comments have been singled out for the scurrilous dog-whistle politics they are, and rightly so. But more important than the racially-charged implications of his coded messaging against minorities is the fact that Gingrich’s impugning of food stamps as a collective response to collective suffering is another manifestation of the larger Republican strategy to blame the current crisis entirely on government itself.
Newt Gingrich’ argument that the President of the United States would deliberately “put” millions of Americans on food stamps, like some drug pusher trying to get the public hooked on government the same way addicts get hooked on crack cocaine, is not all that different in its underlying assumptions and premises from the charges global warming deniers level against climatologists who deniers say exploit fears of the earth’s impending doom to grab power for themselves – or to make life miserable for oil magnets Charles and David Koch, whichever comes first.
It turns out the big banks weren’t the only ones whose failures the government bailed out in 2006 and 2008. Conservatives and Republicans, too, discovered that government can be a life-saver.
For, just as banks dubbed “Too Big To Fail” were able to press the government to cover their losing bets with taxpayer money, so too were true-believing conservatives able to target the government as a ready-made scapegoat for their own grievous blunders and so keep intact their blind faith in economic orthodoxies thought to be Too Veritable to Fail.
Be that as it may, never before had a worldview been more thoroughly repudiated than was the infallibility of unregulated markets by the economic calamity of 2008.
That left Republicans with an important choice to make. They could either man up and defend their record and supply-side principles against mounting evidence they had failed. Or, they could oppose everything the in-coming president did or stood for, and thereby take the emergency steps Barack Obama was forced to make to rescue the country from the disasters bequeathed to him by his retreating Republican predecessors and recast them as steps down some nightmarish path as America’s ancient liberties succumbed to a hostile government takeover.
The GOP left no doubt about which fork in the road it intended to take when right out of the gates House Republicans on a unanimous party line vote rejected Obama’s first $780 million stimulus bill at the height of the economic crisis in early 2009. This set the tone for all that has transpired in the preceding three years as Republicans execute their strategy of “blame the government first.”
While Republicans in Congress dig in with their rear-guard action to prevent President Obama from governing except on Republican terms, conservatives outside government are engaged in the task of feverishly rewriting history.
It’s what author Thomas Frank in his new book, Pity the Billionaire, calls “the classic switcheroo.” Republicans have been successful, says Frank, because they’ve been able to lay down a “thick smokescreen of deliberate bewilderment” that replaces real economic fears among middle class families facing job loss and foreclosure with false ones about the impending government takeover of society. It’s a bait and switch tactic being used so that a new villain (the government) can be pushed on stage as target for all those rotten eggs and tomatoes meant for the real villain (Wall Street).
A falsity this vast requires an all-consuming effort to round up and smash any incriminating evidence that might expose the nonsense behind the resurgent Right’s fairy tale for what it is, much like a criminal syndicate does when it ties up loose ends.
And so, says Frank, when the Right refused to accept that the infallibility of “free markets” was a myth, the only other road available to it in 2008 and 2009 was to “declare their true faith in the myth” and then to preserve the delusion by casting out as heretics all those unwelcome reminders conservatism and capitalism had failed — which meant in real life purging from Republican ranks most of the previous generation of people who also called themselves “conservative.”
That is why George W. Bush is a forgotten man and likely to remain a silent one all throughout the 2012 campaign. It is also why so many veteran Republican incumbents were consumed in the purifying fires of the Tea Party or beaten by Tea Party challengers whose single claim on political virtue was that they had virtually no political experience at all.
“Many Americans who had never been politically active, never walked a precinct, never interrupted their golf games, family gatherings or vacations to discuss politics, government or the Constitution were suddenly gripped with the sense that their government, nation and way of life were being stolen from them.”
Listening to that you might think the source of the writer’s worries was the growing concentration of wealth at the top, the theft of our government by Wall Street, the attacks on unions and the right to vote or a Supreme Court that had unleashed an unchecked flood of corporate cash with which to swallow our democracy.
But you’d be wrong. The words above are by right wing Red State blogger Erick Erickson, who gives voice to Tea Party paranoia that providing a lifeline to states to keep teachers in the classroom or cops on the beat or to extend unemployment insurance another few weeks to those who have lost jobs in the worst economic downturn in a century, wasn’t part of the rescue mission we’d expect from any decent government in a crisis like this but was instead a milestone that marked the way as President Obama and lead us down the perilous road to “European-style socialism.”
When Roger Ailes hired Glenn Beck shortly after conservatives were booted from all three branches of government in 2008, he told his new host: “I see this as the Alamo. If I just had somebody who was willing to sit on the other side of the camera until the last shot is fired, we’d be fine.”
Beck’s assignment was to take Barack Obama’s recovery challenge — that by logical implication exposed the Republican Party’s manifest failures with every problem President Obama managed to solve — and to turn that rescue effort into some vast left wing conspiracy to usher in a new “era of socialism.”
We were soon to learn what that assignment meant. Typical was a show aired in March 2010 when Beck said: “Most people will dread economic recessions and depressions. But some people don’t dread them. Some people are a little more opportunistic. They view this as their big chance, a window of opportunity to seize power to fundamentally transform things. They don’t see this as, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re struggling.’ They see this is as, ‘Now is our time.'”
You’ve got to hand it to Republicans. After their worldview collapsed in a pile of rubble around them they did not retreat or take time to rethink the fundamentals of their major premises. Instead, they responded like French Marshal Ferdinand Foch at the First Battle of the Marne when he declared: “Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I attack.”
Watching the way the Republican Party pursues power, I’m reminded of another quote, this one from the character Matt Hooper in the Spielberg classic, Jaws, when the marine biologist calls the Great White Shark a “machine” – a machine that does nothing all day but swim and eat and make little sharks. And that’s all.
Republicans today are just that single-minded — and also that ruthless and unsentimental — just like those Manifest Destiny expansionists that historian Robert W. Merry describes as rallying behind President James K. Polk and his war of conquest against Mexico to divest that often tragic country of its American possessions.
Unlike those Northern Whigs like Abraham Lincoln who opposed the Mexican war on moral grounds, or Southern Democrats like John C. Calhoun who opposed it for disturbing the delicate balance of power between slave state and free, Polk’s land-grabbing supporters understood that ethical considerations miss the fundamental truth about history, which Merry says is this: History does not turn on “normal suasion or concepts of political virtue” but instead moves forward “with a crushing force,” based on “differentials of power, will, organization and population.”
And so from the point of view of history, says Merry, the dismemberment of a “weak and dysfunctional” country like Mexico by a “vibrant, expanding and exuberant” democracy like America was not so much justified as inevitable.
These are the narratives and propensities that Newt Gingrich embodies with a vengeance with his dog-whistle references to food stamps that feed not only racist appetites but also the right wing/Fox News survival-of-the-fittest storyline that doing anything to repair the damage Republicans and free market capitalism have wrought — short of applying an even purer and more robust version of unregulated, untaxed capitalism – is nothing more than socialism and so contrary to the American Way of Life.
By: Ted Frier, Salon, Open Salon Blog, January 20, 2012
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