The Awful Truth
The idea that I am going to state here for the first time is really nothing but the convergence of many observations, most of them not new, that by means of some internal attraction have gravitated toward one another, bumping through the racket in my head. I can't put a date on the moment of crystallization, but I can say that it was the opposite of a "Eureka" moment. Archimedes was working toward the solution of a problem. I was just minding my own business whistling "Dixie" - "Is It True, What They Say About Dixie?" to be exact - when the idea sloshed over me like a barrelful of cold water. It was a new way - new to me, anyway - of understanding how this country got to the situation that it's in.
I discussed the idea with Kathleen, who made lots of refining objections even while she agreed more or less from the start. I may have ventured it in casual conversations with M le Neveu and Ms NOLA. It popped up parenthetically in some Front Pages, as the home page of Portico was called before I started blogging. For the most part, though, I kept it to myself for months. Although I thought it explained a great deal with a satisfying elegance, I thought that broaching it here would simply upset people. But when I read Paul Krugman's column this morning, I knew that it was time to get my idea into presentable shape, because Mr Krugman had said much the same thing, with just enough difference for me to claim a little attention for mine.
In "Tragedy in Black and White," Mr Krugman traces the origins of the Katrina disaster - the human part of the disaster, not the storm itself - to the Civil Rights Act. (See below for the full text.)
But in a larger sense, the administration's lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina had a lot to do with race. For race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need.
Race, after all, was central to the emergence of a Republican majority: essentially, the South switched sides after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, states that had slavery in 1860 are much more likely to vote Republican than states that didn't.
And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I." A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, "Why should I be taxed to support those people?"
You may think that this is far-fetched. To me, it has been God's own truth for quite a while. The aspect that has captured my attention is the connection between the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1960, 1964, and 1968 (see Wikipedia entry) and the erosion of American public spirit. The first unpleasant thing to say is that solid groups almost always reaffirm their identity by demonizing an excluded group - so there was nothing uniquely wicked about White America's disgusting treatment of American Blacks. If I were to write "Black America" there, I'd be committing an anachronism, because prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act there was no "Black America." America was a country for Whites only; Blacks were suffered.
The Civil Rights Acts proclaimed that Blacks were equally American. At first, this was just a law, something to be got round or accommodated. After all, nobody could require Whites to like the new arrangement. The initial response was "White Flight," private schooling, and recourse to clubs. This was the first step in the abrasion of our social fabric, because it spelled the end of White commitment to public projects. Now that the res publica was as accessible, at least in theory, to Blacks as it was to Whites, White America would take care of itself without relying on the government. Or by co-opting the government through pork. Civic projects intended for the good of one and all, however, dried up, and the United States became two countries living side-by-side. The only crossing over was done by Black bureaucrats and, of course, Black servants.
The second unpleasant thing that I have to say is that the initial Black response to the Civil Rights Acts was equally regrettable, and possibly even tragic. Tragic in flowing inexorably from centuries of injustice; tragic precisely to the extent of its foreseeably. If Whites wanted their own America, well, so did Blacks. Many young Black men went out of their way to make White America's worst fears seem to come true.
As the decades passed, and increasing numbers of Blacks achieved eminence in America, racism came to be replaced, at least in most people's minds, by poorism. My bet is that Dick Cheney does not harbor a well-concealed contempt for Condoleezza Rice. He accepts her - her. Many powerful and privileged White Americans have opened their arms to the Blacks who have scrambled to their altitudes, and I don't think that the sincerity of the welcome should be questioned. But in the vast middle of the body politic, where people are neither rich nor poor, such openness does not appear to have taken root. Middle-class Whites probably do bite their tongues and pretend to be gracious. Blacks certainly attest that they can see through the pretence. It is not clear to me that either American wants to unite. Coexistence, yes, with minimal services in common.
And nothing for the poor. "Why should I be taxed to support those people?" It would not surprise me to learn that this is a biracial attitude. After all, the Civil Rights Acts opened the door; anyone not persevering enough to escape the pen deserves to stay there. This is poorism, and it is as bigoted as racism. Whereas racism belabors skin color with imaginary negative attributes, poorism just as blithely assumes that comfortable people deserve their comfort because they have worked for it without outside help. Almost nobody in this country gets anywhere without outside help. Sure, there are isolated cranks who make the occasional fortune, but it is nonsense to downplay the role of connections in achieving social and financial success. That is why little Manhattanites are routinely confronted with batteries of admissions tests to pre-schools. It is true that connections, in America, signify open doors, not magic carpets; they confer the opportunity to demonstrate skills, not a guarantee against the lack of skill. But they're vital, and luck has a lot to do with them. This cannot be acknowledged. The power of luck is perhaps this country's deepest taboo.
One could sigh and echo Mark 14:7 or Matthew 26:11. But even setting the awful plight of the poor to one side, we're left with the fact that there are two Americas that show little interest in maintaining their common fabric. That may be why no one will attend to our soaring debt, our unraveling health-care system, our impending fuel crises, and, perhaps most signally, the environmental concerns that Katrina dragged right to center stage, and dumped there as an awful truth.
Note: As of today, The New York Times no longer makes every daily feature available at no cost. Home subscribers have access (as we damn sure ought to!), but others must subscribe to the on-line edition in order to see such things as Paul Krugman's column today. For that reason, I have copied the text and pasted it here, below the jump. I am not going to make a habit of doing this, and do so today only because the appearance of the column was of such great importance to me.
Note: As of today, The New York Times no longer makes every daily feature available at no cost. Home subscribers have access (as we damn sure ought to!), but others must subscribe to the on-line edition in order to see such things as Paul Krugman's column today. For that reason, I have copied the text and pasted it here, below the jump. I am not going to make a habit of doing this, and do so today only because the appearance of the column was of such great importance to me.
Tragedy in Black and White, by Paul Krugman
By three to one, African-Americans believe that federal aid took so long to arrive in New Orleans in part because the city was poor and black. By an equally large margin, whites disagree.
The truth is that there's no way to know. Maybe President Bush would have been mugging with a guitar the day after the levees broke even if New Orleans had been a mostly white city. Maybe Palm Beach would also have had to wait five days after a hurricane hit before key military units received orders to join rescue operations.
But in a larger sense, the administration's lethally inept response to Hurricane Katrina had a lot to do with race. For race is the biggest reason the United States, uniquely among advanced countries, is ruled by a political movement that is hostile to the idea of helping citizens in need.
Race, after all, was central to the emergence of a Republican majority: essentially, the South switched sides after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Today, states that had slavery in 1860 are much more likely to vote Republican than states that didn't.
And who can honestly deny that race is a major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other advanced country? To put it crudely: a middle-class European, thinking about the poor, says to himself, "There but for the grace of God go I." A middle-class American is all too likely to think, perhaps without admitting it to himself, "Why should I be taxed to support those people?"
Above all, race-based hostility to the idea of helping the poor created an environment in which a political movement hostile to government aid in general could flourish.
By all accounts Ronald Reagan, who declared in his Inaugural Address that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem," wasn't personally racist. But he repeatedly used a bogus tale about a Cadillac-driving Chicago "welfare queen" to bash big government. And he launched his 1980 campaign with a pro-states'-rights speech in Philadelphia, Miss., a small town whose only claim to fame was the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers.
Under George W. Bush - who, like Mr. Reagan, isn't personally racist but relies on the support of racists - the anti-government right has reached a new pinnacle of power. And the incompetent response to Katrina was the direct result of his political philosophy. When an administration doesn't believe in an agency's mission, the agency quickly loses its ability to perform that mission.
By now everyone knows that the Bush administration treated the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a dumping ground for cronies and political hacks, leaving the agency incapable of dealing with disasters. But FEMA's degradation isn't unique. It reflects a more general decline in the competence of government agencies whose job is to help people in need.
For example, housing for Katrina refugees is one of the most urgent problems now facing the nation. The FEMAvilles springing up across the gulf region could all too easily turn into squalid symbols of national failure. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which should be a source of expertise in tackling this problem, has been reduced to a hollow shell, with eight of its principal staff positions vacant.
But let me not blame the Bush administration for everything. The sad truth is that the only exceptional thing about the neglect of our fellow citizens we saw after Katrina struck is that for once the consequences of that neglect were visible on national TV.
Consider this: in the United States, unlike any other advanced country, many people fail to receive basic health care because they can't afford it. Lack of health insurance kills many more Americans each year than Katrina and 9/11 combined.
But the health care crisis hasn't had much effect on politics. And one reason is that it isn't yet a crisis among middle-class, white Americans (although it's getting there). Instead, the worst effects are falling on the poor and black, who have third-world levels of infant mortality and life expectancy.
I'd like to believe that Katrina will change everything - that we'll all now realize how important it is to have a government committed to helping those in need, whatever the color of their skin. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Comments
A brilliant, different analysis. It should be widely read. I certainly am going to be sure my friends have the opportunity to read it. Bravo, RJ! It isn't necessarily comfortable or nice, but it is the "Awful Truth."
Posted by: PPOQ | September 21, 2005 07:55 AM
I have no doubt that race played a role here, but there was another factor as well: contempt for government, which started under Reagan but has been taken to extremes under W. Thus, FEMAs abysmal performance wasn't just a result of classist or racist attitudes, but because of assumption that government is doomed to perform badly, so we needn't even try to put good people in key jobs.
The question for me now is whether the Democrats can come together effectively enough to make this horrid misjudgement of the impertance of competent government matter from a political viewpoint. Part of this problem is on them, not the Republicans. The Republicans developed a massive thinktank infrastructure that helped them generate message and put effective spin on any eventuality that came along. That infrastructure includes a lot of people smaerter than our President. The message is positive as well as negative; it talks about a rosy future that is much more a fiction than a reality, but it hits home with middle America.
So, the question is, can the Democrats turn this solid, irrefutable proof of the mismanagement and misdeeds of the Administration into a set of messages with impact and stayiong power? There is so much to hit at. The Republicans can't even claim that they are the low-spending party any more, after passing bills like the transportation bill that are rife with pork. What then, are the Democrats going to do to create an articulate set of messages that resonate with the millions of Americans who are now pissed at Bush, and doubtful about their own economic future? Can they incorporate the issues of classism and racism into this in a way which makes it clear that classist and racist policies are ultimately bad for everyone? I am not confident, as yet, that they are capable of doing this. If they can't, shame on them, and too bad for the country.
Frankly, although Krugman has been right on some things, his economic armageddon commentary has been far from on the mark, so I don't find him all that helpful. Where are our spokesmen?
Posted by: George Friedlander | September 21, 2005 10:49 AM
I absolutely agree about the racism, as far as it goes; extremely well thought out. I am leery, however, of ascribing one root cause to such a complex issue. Long before the Civil Rights Act, the "Horation Algerism" of this country, as well as the Social Darwinism that swept the world, the Rugged Individualism of Teddy Roosevelt and the Pioneer Spirit, all illustrate and support the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps or it is all your own fault" mentality of this country. This did not change until the Great Depression, when virtually everyone found themselves in the same boat. One wonders how advanced Italian and Irish immigrants as a whole, to say nothing of the various Asian groups, would be in this country today had it not been for the economic leveling of the Depression and the subsequent opportunities afforded by the economic expansion in this country at the end of the Second World War. Now that the generation who remembers what it was to go to bed hungry through no fault of one's own is almost gone, the law of the American jungle, "all are welcome who can fight their way to the top" seems to be is re-asserting itself. That it feeds so well into the country's racism and deeply seated bogey-man fears of a "white culture" (though there has never really been such a thing per se) becoming swamped by the "dark" forces is just a tragic "bonus".
The truly frightening aspect of this is that almost no one seems to understand, or more importantly, remember, that we are all in this together and that Ben Franklin's response to John Hancock's admonition that we must all hang together still applies; if we do not, we must certainly "all hang separately."
Posted by: Walter Wade | September 21, 2005 01:18 PM
George hits on a point I recognize only too well from my upbringing in a conservative, rural Western New York State liberal university town, in an old-fashioned ownership bootstrap Republican family: the assumption of government ineptness, corruption, and hopelessness. That sure needs to be reassessed! Walter's observation about the American jungle culture reasserting itself is equally pithy. It is important to open the painful issue of the history and fundamentals of race and class, including the long-standing tacit complicity of isolated and underinvolved sympathizers. Bravo, and brave, both, RJ.
Where are the speakers, indeed. I heard an interview with Barack Obama on NPR last night. I long for him to rise and evolve and become that person. Son of a white mother and an African father, he is the perfect metaphor for the blending we've resisted. His ideas and his messages are solid, but not yet incandescent. He is on the cusp, but so far not impressing me as a natural orator. Perhaps it is too much to expect of him alone. Another thing I'm looking for is an open door or a bridge between my own comfortable upper middle class island to theirs. The best and most enduring solutions are from grass roots. Where is the incentive, the desire to bridge cultures? Is it incipient in some places, among some groups, already? Can we grow that? A propos of bootstrapping, there are some important things to understand as we approach the problems of poverty and lack. When people are mired in despair, often there's neither hope nor desire to lift themselves out, let alone the opportunity. This is where intervention to provide safety and a measure of security are needed. Call it rescue: A clean pleasant place to live, adequate healthy food, money, schools, transportation. That alone is huge. After recovery and the meeting of basic needs, another phase begins where help shifts to educating, training, and meaningful employment. These scenarios require a tremendous investment of not just money, but individual attention, assessment and guidance. From a grassroots perspective, this could occur in pods, where professional organizers could train and empower coaches and teachers from within the ranks of the social group that is in need, creating a system of help coming from within with resources and tools from the stronger parts of our culture, those with means, motivation, and heart. If there were such a system in place, reproducible and well-defined, the volunteerism virus that has felicitously infected many young people on college campuses could become the rule rather than the exception. Our orators could make it not only shameful not to contribute, but attractive to elevate our communities and our lives by participating in a group effort. "Random acts of kindness" become commonplace. I can at least start with that vision. I can at least begin a dialogue with the leaders in my own community. I can at least commit my random thoughts of the family of man to a web log. TBC...
Posted by: Anonymous | September 22, 2005 11:58 AM