RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) Two horrendous images will be forever imprinted on my mind. One is George Floyd’s body, dying under the knee of Derek Chauvin slightly more than one year ago. The other is the trussed up and tortured flaming body of a punished slave while the slaveowners danced as if it were a normal afternoon tea party, witnessed in the first episode of the new and widely acclaimed series, ‘The Underground Railroad’ streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
That millions of people throughout the world have seen these images and not viscerally connected them with a cultural disconnect poisoning our societies makes this gringo wonder if there is any hope for a future that is not drowned in violence and driven by hate and fear.
There is no question that fear is the prime driver of the explosion of hateful racial discord in the U.S. The worst excesses of violence and fear come from “nativists’” a cohort composed principally of white males without college degrees. Their realistic anxiety is based on the increasing difficulty of finding jobs, and the perception that many of the jobs and privileges once uniquely available to them are being stripped away, by automation, immigration, and people of color.
The Declaration of Independence may have proclaimed “all men are created equal” but the more than 12 million slaves kidnapped from Africa, some even owned by liberal aristocrats like Thomas Jefferson, hardly participated in that equality.
Nativists have long seen themselves as the “true” Americans, although, ironically, they are immigrants like all but the native Americans who had roamed the land for centuries before the white man “discovered” the new world. Armed and angry at their increasing loss of status and power, and more than willing to embrace racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Proud Boys, and trumpet their alternative realities, their growing numbers encourage increased racist rhetoric and violent action.
The affirmative action programs of the 1960s (now banned by some U.S. states) were designed to help level the highly uneven playing field for minority groups. These are now increasingly denounced as “socialist”, a derogatory taunt flung by GOP right-wingers at anyone who acts to strengthen the safety net, modify the status quo or, God forbid, improve the environment.
As Nobel laureate Paul Krugman writes: “White rage has been a powerful force at least since the civil rights movement. …The point is that neither megalomania at the top nor rage at the bottom explains why American democracy is hanging by a thread. Cowardice, not craziness, is the reason government by the people may soon perish from the earth.”
There have always been cowards, individuals unwilling to stand up against the flow, afraid that their words or actions would identify them as different, outside the mainstream – not the kind of person you would want as a neighbor or for your daughter to marry.
This spinal weakness used to infect a relatively small group located primarily in the former slave states of the South. But over the past few years, disbelief in the government has spread like the pandemic. According to the latest Pew research, a combination of deep recession, high unemployment, and a non-functioning Congress has moved the ‘distrust’ needle to an all-time high of 80%. This distrust is a dangerous invitation to government “by the people’” – as long as they are “our people”.
How this will affect the world going forward is the key question. Will reasonably minded people swing back and become reabsorbed in the direction of rational behavior as the Tea Party did after 2010, pushing their policies but once again accepting democratic processes, however inefficient by some standards? Will they turn off the Fox News and Newsmax surreality shows that dominate TV entertainment and the internet? Or have we now become so addicted to the chaos which surrounds us that they will be acquiescent in letting it take us where it will?
It does not look very promising when someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, an unhinged freshman GOP congresswoman from Georgia, already mildly disciplined by having her committee assignments taken away, can raise millions of campaign dollars by being what one pundit called “an outrageous machine seeking only brand recognition”.
Just days ago, she attacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to continue masking requirements for House members on the chamber floor, saying sensationally (and to a massive media audience) that being forced to wear these emblems was “exactly the type of abuse” Jews experienced under the Nazis.
That it took five days for the Republican leadership to react and condemn her anti-Semitism, and then only half-heartedly, is a very bad sign, and reflective of a political party with neither leadership nor spine.
That’s just one deranged legislator seeking headlines. If she were unique it would be easy to ignore her completely. Much more serious has been the expanding efforts to distort and rein in the spread of critical race theory, a movement which has grown out of the work of US legal academics to provide an overview of where law “intersects with issues of race and to challenge mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice.”
Critical Race Theory (CRT) had been gaining an increasing number of educational, organizational, and even corporate advocates, eager for their constituents to have the unvarnished opportunity to learn about the place of race in America. One would hope this initiative would be widely embraced, but as Florida’s Tampa Bay news outlet reported:
“Conservative lawmakers in over a dozen states, including Missouri, Idaho, Tennessee, have introduced bills aimed at barring critical race theory in the classroom.” Educators warn these new laws will have their intended effect — “turning teachers ultra-cautious, confining their lessons to a limited view of American history and current events.”
That “limited view” is a clear indication of the conservatives’ desire to put anything historically unpleasant (racism), or contemporarily contentious (the big lies of election fraud and capitol insurrection) as far behind them as possible, wiped clean of controversy; better forgotten entirely if possible.
It is often repeated, but sadly ignored, that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. Will the images of George Floyd’s face-down body or the tortured slave on fire simply fade into distant memory, or will they help broker a truce in today’s culture wars?
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