The Riding Goes Deep

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 28 of the newsletter I have written weekly since March, 1997. Enjoy.

Back in April I wrote about the 4^th
Riding of the KKK mainly in terms of the Republican leadership.

But leaders don't go where their
followers won't. This riding of the Klan, like all previous ridings,
is based in the grassroots.

The first riding was based on a real
fear that blacks were taking over the government. Reconstruction made
white voters ineligible to vote in the 1860s, so blacks did take
over, and the purpose of the riding was to put blacks back in “their
place,” a virtual slavery to replace what was now illegal.

The
second riding, which coincided with the fall of populism early in the
last century, was designed to enforce Jim Crow laws, and pushed
millions of blacks into the new industrial ghettoes of the north,
which had a brief golden age in the 1920s.

The third riding, starting
in the 1950s, was in reaction to the Civil Rights movement, and was
designed to minimize the gains of Dr. King and his followers. That
movement eventually metastacized into an uneasy racial peace, with
whites becoming Republican and suburban while blacks were given the
crumbling cities.

It's no coincidence that the Fourth Riding coincides with the Presidency of Barack Obama. But what many
white people don't know is how successful it has been in
marginalizing young black males. For black male dropouts, the
unemployment rate is now 95%.

It's pretty high for all young people.
My daughter hasn't had a paying job in years. But she has spent that
time getting an education. We could afford it. She is lucky. And
while it will take her time to get into her chosen career, she has a
path.

If she were male, if we were black, the
failure of the Atlanta Public Schools to educate my daughter might
have been fatal. Her black, male contemporaries on our street have
mostly been lucky. One is a line cook. But not all have been so
lucky. Another had sex with his girlfriend before she was of age, got
branded as a sex offender, and may never get a chance in life.

As the recovery from the great
recession has proven to be job-free, at least for young blacks, it's
no surprise many have turned to crime. Here's an example, from my
neighborhood. But I want you to note particularly the comments below the story:

• “Where's
  the outrage from the black community? Oh wait…this is Atlanta. The
  judges will just give them probation and they'll be back on the
  streets in no time.
• Shoot
  their african american butts and solve the problem
• It's
  Atlanta. What do you expect? I'll bet I can correctly guess the race
  of all of the thugs.”

Notice
a pattern? The failure of the young is passed on to the old, the
failure of the poor is passed on to the middle class, and gross
racism against blacks is thus excused. The kids are crap, their
parents must be crap…the next word starts with the letter “n”
and rhymes with “bigger” – it's not being written but the
sentiment is there.

And
this is typical. What's developing is nothing less than a race war,
one black people are bound to lose. Our children and our childrens'
children will have to live with the consequences of this, just as we
have to live with the consequences of the last riding.

White
resentment of blacks has an impact on policy. What were formerly
called food stamps are being limited or eliminated entirely by
whatever white, Republican government can make it happen. North
Carolina has completely eliminated unemployment benefitson
the assumption that they go to the “undeserving,” in other words
blacks. This, along with deep cuts to food stamps, formerly called
SNAP, has a long-lasting impact:

 Examining
adults aged in their thirties to fifties who had differential access
to the Food Stamp program during their childhoods in the 1960s and
1970s, we found that adults’ health – as measured by
self-reported health status, obesity, and reported diagnoses of
diabetes and other chronic conditions – was markedly improved if
they had access to the safety net during childhood. In particular, we
found that access to food stamps mattered most in early childhood,
through ages three to five.

By
eliminating aid to young people now, you get a generation of
underweight, undereducated criminals, who have to be jailed and
produce yet-another generation of the same. The cure starts in early
childhood, with nutrition and health programs, and it's no
coincidence that today's riding of the Klan is cutting off those very
programs that do the most good.

You
may ask, what ends the riding? What ends it is a counter-attack that
yields a new status quo. Despite the hopelessness of what I've
written here, each riding was countered, and what came after was
slightly better than what the riders wanted. Leaders rose from the
ashes, the middle class increased in size and power, and more blacks
rose to real prominence after each riding. It was frustrating for
those who wanted real change, but it was always in the direction of
progress

So
it will be again. The counter to this riding is already rising,
across the country. Republicans are going to have a hard time winning
election next year, and that problem will increase, year by year,
until they abandon their racist grassroots and turn in another
direction. The very wealthy know this, which is why they're propping
up people like Marco Rubio. It's a Republican Civil War the money power will, in time, win,
partly by putting that power into the hands of Democrats.

And the irony here is that the same thing happened over 100 years ago. The Second Riding destroyed the Democratic Party for a generation, as populism turned to racism and southern interests took over the party. (Their only President during that generation was Woodrow Wilson, born in Virginia, a former Georgia lawyer. He was also our most racist President ever.)

Progress,
like markets, does not go in a straight line. It's stop-and-start, up
and down, but it does tend to trend upward, because the amount of
wealth available to distribute keeps going up. It won't take much
redistribution to solve today's problems, but that is coming, whether
the racists like it or not.