Whhooooo Child

I'm watching Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander on Bill Moyers Journal. They are two Black scholars talking about the illusion of race progress after Obama's election. Specifically, they are talking about how the war on drugs, started in the Reagan administration as a way to pacify poor whites who were resentful of civil rights legislation that abolished Jim Crow and segregation. They assert that the Republican party intentionally crafted the war on drugs to focus on Black and Brown peoples in disenfranchised areas, specifically, Black men and Latinos. Dr. Alexander says that if the focus had been on White suburban communities, there would have been just as much drug use and dissemination as there were in the inner cities. The White boy who lives on a rural road in Minnesota is not getting his meth from the homie on the street corner. Use of the politics of fear and anger to disenfranchise people.

And we're right back in it. Witness the tea party and those ignays who spit on the Black Congressman and called Barney Frank a "faggot." Witness the Assinine Alaskan and her brain dead followers. Witness the fog of rage over universal health care to the point where the very people who will benefit the most from it are up in arms to stop it because a Black man is sponsoring it--I truly believe a lot of the protest is racial backlash.

I love people who say to me, "You must be so happy we have a Black president. We're in the post-racial era!" It may look like that from your desk at your job and in your car as you drive to your home in your safe neighborhood, and I'm not faulting you for having those things, but don't ignore all the people who don't have it, Whites as well as Blacks and Latinos, and don't ignore the economic injustices that keep many people from having what we all consider basic rights and don't ignore that we all, as humanitarians, have a job to do to make things as right as they can be.

It is horrifying to me, what I wrote in the first paragraph--could this really be true? Maybe it's an amalgam of intention, political expediency, the projection of hopelessness that we put on poor communities, the hopelessness that the economically disenfranchised learn to internalize. But let's not be fooled by all of the post-Obama rhetoric--we ain't out of it.

I've been talking to a friend who is a probation officer about the discrimination parolees face--they can't get jobs, they can't vote, they are the victims of legally sanctioned type of the discrimination we decry in general. And they are overwhelmingly minorities. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man how to fish and he feeds himself, his family and his community for a lifetime. Wholesale reform is called for.

Lest my blood pressure goes any higher, let's not talk about people of our acquaintance getting stopped and followed because of their skin color. Let's save for another time the fact that women still make less than men for the same job. Let's not even get into the institutionalized discrimination and pseudo-criminalization of the disabled, and the automatic assumption that if you aren't skin and bone or in a wheelchair, you must be fine. Let's not discuss, without alcohol, how women over 40 are marginalized, how people over 60 aren't considered sexual beings, how the Catholic church would rather ruined numbers of young boys lives by keeping things quiet rather than see justice done. Let's not even go there today.

It's the irony of Easter. Let's resurrect our feeling for our fellow human.