Ed Garren’s Weblog

A friend sent me an editorial, published in the Wall Street Journal (of all places, but remember it’s now owned by Rupert Murdoch who also owns Fox News) about so-called “reverse racism.”  The author, Democratic U.S. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia basically argues that anti-discriminatory laws should be abolished because white people also experience discrimination because of those laws.  He says that white people don’t have “privilege.”

 A link to the text is below, a well as my own thoughts about this issue, and the rise of overt racism and other divisive tactics by “conservative leadership.”I hope you enjoy them.

 Ed

  Senator Webb’s Editorial in the Wall Street Journal

First off, “privilege” isn’t about wealth per se, it’s about living without fear.  Most white people never experience that fear, unless they are in the minority (like if your car breaks down in a “non white” neighborhood, particularly after dark).  People of color live with that fear 24/7 in most of this country.

 On the plantation, and in the post civil war era that leads up to today, the game has been the same, pit one group/race against another, “Massah” always wins.  This goes all the way back to plantations having white overseers, who were usually Irish, also brought in as “indentured servants.”  Their descendants would swell the ranks of the KKK and other “White Supremacy” groups later on.

 I agree with many of the statistical comments made by senator Webb.  He misses a larger point, Scotch-Irish (Southern White) culture has always eschewed “book learning” and discouraged it’s children from seeking higher education.  In my own family, my mother, who was reared by a sharecropping single mother, was the only one of her six siblings to get more than a 3rd grade education.  My mother finished high school (on scholarship at a boarding school operated by the Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs) and her mother disowned her for leaving home at 15 to do so.  I am the first and only to finish college of my siblings.

 My aunt Velma, her daughter’s father in law,   my maternal grandmother Nancy Garner, and my aunt Frances.

  In Southern culture, devotion to “family” and “staying close to home” conspire with the values which say that “bettering one’s self” equals “social climbing” and “putting on airs” that keeps most poor southern whites from completing college, or remaining “ignorant” even if one finishes college.

 I have cousins who completed higher degrees, one has a Master’s in philosophy from Harvard, who all still talk very “country” and who prefer their slow and narrow way of thinking and living.  I don’t begrudge them this, but I learned early in my life that I had to accept my father’s half-Jewish genetics and that included a highly inquisitive mind for which slow and narrow would assure boredom and depression.  In other words, I made peace with my inner “New Yorker.”

My father’s birth certificate.  He changed his name to his step father’s last name “Garren” when he was five because “Edward V. Garren” sounded more “American.” 

It is a fear of expanding, of anything new or from “outside.”  It is formed and nurtured by the Southern Baptist Church (and it’s evangelically related cousins).  It is a spiritual way of life that has a clear pecking order, that says that only “people like us” are safe, and the rest are not deserving of God’s grace, kindness, or generosity, and it is killing our country. 

To take this even further, senator Webb misses an even bigger point, we don’t really value education in this country.  If we did, our funding for education wouldn’t be at the lowest point in decades.  40 years ago, when I was in college, most of the cost was paid by the federal government.  I graduated with less than $4,000 in debt.

 Now, a student can spend twenty times that just completing a Bachelors degree, because the government doesn’t want our kids to complete college.  It’s easier to manipulate ignorant people.

 ALL of this recent chatter is part of the larger smoke screen that obscures the largest military industry and war spending in the history of the world.  Doesn’t anyone notice that this stuff always “drops” just when they need to distract the public away from something else?  The FACT that the Democrats passed an extension for unemployment was lost in the media with all of the drama about Ms. Sherrod, the tea party and the NAACP.  They ALWAYS do this folks !!!  Wake up and smell the coffee!!!  It’s the oldest game in the business.   Make a distraction at one end of the store, while someone else raids the cash register.

 The Republicans have been doing this since 9/11 and the “War on Terror.”  In case no one noticed, the Obama administration and congress announced that it did not intend to extend the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans either.  All of this hoopla over Ms. Sherrod has kept that story out of the news too.  You can bet that any opportunity for the Obama administration to get some GOOD press will be quickly distracted by their gigantic “spin” machine.

 Frank Rich put it best in a recent column: ”None of this legacy, much of it accessible to anyone who wanted to look (or ask), prevented the tarring of Shirley Sherrod last week. And it all unfolded while the country was ostentatiously marking the 50th anniversary of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

 If we are to learn anything from this travesty, it might help to retrace the racial soap opera that immediately preceded and provoked it. That story began on July 13, when the N.A.A.C.P. passed a resolution calling on the Tea Party to expel “racist elements” in its ranks. No sooner had Tea Party adherents and defenders angrily denied that such elements amounted to anything more than a few fringe nuts than Mark Williams, the spokesman and past chairman of the Tea Party Express, piped up. He slapped a “parody” on the Web — a letter from “colored people” to Abraham Lincoln berating him as “the greatest racist ever” and complaining about “that whole emancipation thing” because “freedom means having to work for real.”

 Williams had hurled similar slurs for months, but now that the N.A.A.C.P. had cast a spotlight on the Tea Party’s racist elements, he was belatedly excommunicated by the leader of another Tea Party organization. In truth, it’s not clear that any group in this scattered movement has authority over any other. But one thing was certain: the N.A.A.C.P. was wrong to demand that the Tea Party disown its racist fringe. It should have made that demand of the G.O.P. instead.

 The Tea Party Express fronted by Williams is an indisputable Republican subsidiary. It was created by prominent G.O.P. political consultants in California and raises money for G.O.P. candidates, including Sharron Angle, Harry Reid’s Senate opponent in Nevada. But Republican leaders, presiding over a Congressional delegation with no blacks and a party that nearly mirrors it, remain in hiding whenever racial controversies break out under their tent. “I am not interested in getting into that debate,” said Mitch McConnell last week.

 Once Williams was disowned by other Tea Partiers, Breitbart posted the bogus Sherrod video as revenge under the headline “Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism.” To portray whites as the victims of racist blacks has been a weapon of the right from the moment desegregation started to empower previously subjugated minorities in the 1960s. But its deployment has accelerated with the ascent of a black president. The pace is set by right-wing stars like Glenn Beck, who on Fox branded Barack Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” and the ever-opportunistic Newt Gingrich, who on Twitter maligned Sonia Sotomayor as a “Latina woman racist.”

 The worst part of all this is that “we Democrats” confuse the ability to engage in academic “debate” with real wisdom, intelligence or action.  We think that because we are “on top of an issue” in terms of “talk forums” or other media chatter, that we are in the stronger position.  That’s not how life works.  The reality is that whoever wins, wins.  And while it’s important to “play the game”, it’s also important to win, particularly when you’re facing up to a bully, which is what the Republican leadership has become, lying bullies who stop at nothing until they win.  We have decades of this in our recent history (since 1980), yet we continue to hide behind academic debate, and hope the rest of the country is listening.

 Well, it isn’t listening.  The rest of the country has been systematically reduced to sound bytes, a fifth or sixth grade reading level, and a greater appreciation for the Super Bowl than the State of the Union.  The Republicans have figured that out, what’s our problem?  We need a lot more of our folks to take lessons from Congressman Alan Grayson (the guy from Florida who did the “Republican Health Care Plan, “Don’t get sick, and if you do, just die”). All this “Bi-partisanship” is the legislative equivalent of date rape.  We have the botched “health care reform” without a public option to demonstrate that.

 Instead of compromising on the Public Option, we should have kept it, let the Republicans in the senate filibuster, and show the public just who they really are, privileged WASP men and women who benefit from the old social order.  But as usual, instead of taking the courageous stand on behalf of the American people, we caved in.  And we wonder WHY the electorate has no respect for us (Democrats)?

 When we “compromise” on important things, we prove the Republicans right, that government doesn’t work, and that it doesn’t matter who you vote for.

 We should be talking about how the Republicans in the senate were willing to throw millions of people to the wolves by denying them unemployment benefits (extension), but never object to increased war spending.  We should be talking about how under Bush, the very wealthy in this country have not paid their “fair share” of taxes to support a war they are making money off of.

 We also need to educate people that politics is not about morality, it’s about power.  My 97 year old mother said it best decades ago, “Politics is a dirty business, and most politicians are crooks.  But at least the Democrats are OUR crooks.”

My mother, Lois Edna Verner Ramsay-Garren, at 95.

She lived through the 20s, the Great Depression, WWII and like most of her generation, valued the “New Deal” politics that re-aligned wealth in this country by making sure that “working people” got a fair wage, decent benefits, Social Security, their children got a GOOD public education, and that the money they put into savings wasn’t squandered away by some stock deal gone mad.  Her other favorite quote, “I’m not wealthy enough to vote Republican.”

 The Reagan/Bush/Gingrich/Bush decades have systematically dismantled the “New Deal” which is why the economics in this country recently looked a lot like 1928 until it all came crashing down, and now the economy looks too much like 1931.

 For the sake of the future of not just the country, but the planet, we Democrats need to get our act together or we are going to remain part of the problem, not the solution.

 Edward “Ed” Garren, MA, LMFT

Psychotherapist