♪ My head can’t tolerate this bobbing and pretending
Listening to some bullethead and the madness that he’s saying ♪
— “Your Racist Friend,” They Might Be Giants
Accept, without excusing, the incendiary title of this WPT installment as Uvular running out of patience and bromides for discussing America’s original and festering sin. To turn a phrase, he demands to call a spade a spade.*
An Economic Policy Institute analysis released two weeks ago concluded that since 1968 black people in the United States saw no progress toward equality in terms of economic attainment, home ownership, overall health, or treatment by the criminal justice system. In many ways, blacks as group have lost ground to whites.** The EPI study follows up the 1968 Kerner Commission report that concluded, in so many words, that white racism made life difficult-to-impossible for African Americans and other non-Northern Europeans.
The damning quote most often extracted from the Kerner report reads, “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” Intended as a dire call to action on keeping Americans off the darkest timeline, the warning stands as prophecy.
From EPI:
America has failed to deliver any progress for African Americans over the last five decades. … In 2017 the black unemployment rate was 7.5 percent, up from 6.7 percent in 1968, and is still roughly twice the white unemployment rate. In 2015, the black homeownership rate was just over 40 percent, virtually unchanged since 1968, and trailing a full 30 points behind the white homeownership rate …. And the share of African Americans in prison or jail almost tripled between 1968 and 2016 and is currently more than six times the white incarceration rate.
And, “Black workers still make only 82.5 cents on every dollar earned by white workers, African Americans are 2.5 times as likely to be in poverty as whites, and the median white family has almost 10 times as much wealth as the median black family.”
None of this equality not happening happened by accident. Politicados have certainly read or familiarized themselves with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” and one or more of his books building on the ideas he introduced therein.
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow likewise lifts the veil on America’s ugly face of willed-into-existence systemic racism. She leaves no doubt that Nixon’s War on Drugs and Clinton’s crime bill, largely with intent and regrettably supported by some leaders in minority communities, removed entire generations of potential from black neighborhoods even as the ever-rightward Reagan Revolution snuffed out the few greening shoots of societal healing.
Sadly, eight years of an Obama presidency fixed little, primarily because six years of Senate leadership by Yertle the Turtle made sure no correctives became law. But just in case some hope remained, a lit more than 60 million racists — 77,800 in exactly the correct Electoral College states — put Trump and his cabal of neo-Confederates in charge of the country. And before anyone cavil at the racism broad brush, watch this fan-made ‘Your Racist Friend” video.
As the Johns remind in the final verse, “Can’t shake the Devil’s hand and pretend you’re only kidding.”
Uvular hates racism. Intentional injustice pisses him off. He knows nothing of how to lessen the existence of either beyond highlighting them, denouncing each, and demanding that those who would further racism and injustice lose power and influence.
And that leads to Politicados’ unwanted exposure to nearly 600 words of shouting at a cloud-based discussion board. Captive audiences need not appreciate, but they can join the choir when the spirit moves them. Feel like commenting?
++++
n.b. Never to mistake for the egregiously earnest scolding from the least special iteration of The Specials.
*Strictly in the playing card suit sense, with a wink at the loaded nature of the terms and an oblique pun with “turn.”
**May or may not include European Jews. Definitely does not include Muslims from Southeastern Europe or the Caucuses. No one with an accent more exotic than German need apply. Do not even ask about North Africans, nor the colonial/settler populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and South America.