08-16-2020, 10:33 AM
(08-16-2020, 08:30 AM)David Horn Wrote:(08-15-2020, 03:34 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: One need not be reminded, as it should be quite obvious to most, that for the past four decades the poorer people of this country, regardless of skin color, have been treated as livestock at best, vermin at worst. In the city of Chicago the poor are now nearly invisible with a sanitary conforming look in areas where the less well off among us used to often congregate. Not even referring to the few areas of the city where you pretty much take your life in your hands venturing into them.
Sometimes, it takes a book. Isabel Wilkerson's Caste finally addresses what should have been obvious to everyone: we, like most of the world, live within a caste system intended to keep the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless right where they are. She puts racism inside that system: a tool of repression, but not the system itself. Like the more famous caste system of India, there always has to be a lowest caste. In America, it's Black. But just because you aren't at the bottom, the next few rungs aren't all that great either: Native American, Latinx, poor white, immigrants, Asians -- everyone trained to look down on the castes below them and accept the primacy of the casts above them.
Maybe ... just maybe ... that's finally changing.
On Hispanics -- they are developing their own worlds complete with a commercial infrastructure in the knowledge that Corporate America offers little other than abysmal pay and no opportunity for advancement. often recent immigrants or children of recent immigrants, they have seen Corporate America at its worst. Owning and operating a small business, often a bodega, is often more promising than working in a sweatshop or a store. Second, some can pass as white because they are or are very close... and they intermarry heavily with non-Hispanics. Whether they assimilate into Anglo culture or assimilate non-Hispanics into Hispanic cultures is unpredictable.
"Native American" includes people who, perhaps as little as 1/8 in origin, are basically white and have some choice. I have known someone stereotypically white (blond with blue eyes, and with a very fair complexion) who identifies as Native American for one reason: access to peyote. Such is hardly a noble reason. The "one-drop rule" does not apply for First Peoples as it does for blacks.
Asian-Americans, with relatively few exceptions (probably Hmong) on the average have higher social-economic status (SES) than most white people. White men often marry Asian women, if often for the wrong reasons (as in expecting a servile and submissive wife. For that, avoid Korean women who come from a relatively equitable society in gender relations... and highly-assimilated Japanese-Americans who know America well because they are American). Higher SES means that someone is ahead of the system. I can easily imagine people of east-Asian origin being recognized as "white" if only for skin color. European skin color would fit in well in Korea, Japan, and much of China... and vice-versa.
Blacks have long had their "Talented Tenth" who can compete with the white middle class in ability. Note well that the "one-drop rule" still applies to blacks, and no achievement -- not even becoming President of the United States -- can "whiten" someone. Almost invariably any assimilation between white people and the African-American "Talented Tenth" goes one way, with the non-black genes of anyone marrying and having children by one of the Talented Tenth being absorbed into the African-American gene pool. "Passing" is rarely possible, and it requires that someone with any sub-Saharan African ancestry win the 'genetic lottery' so that one looks white. The best that African-Americans can ever hope for from white people is to be treated with dignity, something that many white people do not do to white people who lack some social advantage. If white elites treat poor blacks badly, then remember that those white elites also treat poor whites badly.
Over the last forty years, comprising the tail end of the Boom Awakening (when it became largely the discovery of religious fundamentalism among political and cultural conservatives), the Culture Wars, and most of the current Crisis Era (I say most because I see it approaching an end), we have been expected to accept that the only way in which to create some super-prosperity is to intensify poverty, destroy economic security of anyone not in the Master Class, to redefine labor-management relationships so that ownership and management has nearly-absolute power, to promote monopoly and vertical integration that make small business irrelevant, and to change tax laws to reward people for doing horrible things to most people. As one who remembers times before that, I recognize few improvements: technology is more marvelous, America is more culturally diverse (which means that we get a wider variety of cuisine and festivals), and entertainment is slicker (if often witless). Except for the diversity which makes life richer due to the diversity, some technological and medical improvements, better roads, and a richer stock of entertainment (in literature, art, and film, if not music.. .rap is ugly and country is witless) I am not sure that we are that much better off than we were in the 1970's.
The elites are certainly better off, being able to live like sultans while they treat us much like sultans treat the fellahin in their countries -- expendable people, cheap labor to do the dirty work including service as cannon fodder in war. Intensify inequality in American life, and American soldiers drafted into wars for profit will be cannon fodder as in aristocratic societies in the final stages of decadence -- and such a war will culminate in a disaster like World War I for Germany, Austria-Hungary, or imperial Russia... or the Confederate States of America.
High technology is nice, but most of us do what we used to do by some other means. It is not that different to read a book on a Kindle Fire than a dead-tree edition, and YouTube offers what many of us used to get on records and tapes. We use e-mail as an over-worked telegraph... oh, what I would like to do with all the spam e-mail! Job offers to work for minimum wage in different and unattractive parts of the country, job offers for what I am unqualified, 419 scams... maybe communication is too cheap for our own good.
The super-rich have told us to spare them of responsibility so that we can do better. Now many of them threaten us with consequences for 'failing' to adequately suffer for their unrestrained greed. We must call their bluff if we are to have any dignity at all.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.