Prejudice

Jack the Ripper and Mother Theresa are both likely to be in any large crowd in New York City and other densely populated places. Obviously, one can’t generalize. New Yorkers are neither all vicious like Jack the Ripper nor angels like Mother Theresa. Similarly you can’t generalize from either of them to people who shared their gender, color, national origin, religion or any other large group defined by biology or parentage. Their presence in New York crowds is simply a statistical probability – in any large crowd there are both wonderful and terrible people. I remember witnessing a dispute between two drivers, one of whom jumped out of his car and yelled as loudly as he could “You Iranian!” That was obviously silly, they didn’t know each other from Adam, but Iranian was the curse de jure. It was all too common but by erasing all the nuances, that kind of loose mudslinging didn’t help this country figure out how best to negotiate with Iran.

People may not know the history or want to admit it, but we all have skeletons in our racial, religious and ethnic closets. Africans and African-Americans are just as decent as every other group but some Africans are still raping, slaughtering and taking slaves in Africa. Many of us, regardless of our religious affiliations live in areas dominated by Catholics, but I’m not afraid that they’re going to enslave me because Catholic religious law, called cannon law, once described at length whom Christians could and could not enslave. Participation in the East and West African slave trade was fairly widespread among European and Middle Eastern countries as well as white Americans. My Iranian hosts when I was in the Peace Corps condemned what they believed was the continuing slave trade in Arab nations. But most of the people in all of those places are lovely and trustworthy. I’ve had my pockets picked in Spain and Chile but mostly met wonderful people in both. Prejudice doesn’t work as generalization and it doesn’t work as collective responsibility. If it did, all of us would falling through the sinkhole to hell.

Generalizing good or bad traits as characteristics of everyone of particular backgrounds is the very definition of prejudice and all of us have to fight that mentality. There has been a tendency lately for progressives in this country to join the nincompoops in making generic statements about Jews as if we are all responsible for trying to destroy the Palestinians and other crimes. Actually many of us have spoken out and fought against those evils. Generalizations don’t work with respect to Jews any more than they work with respect to Blacks. Some claim that Jews need no protection because they’re rich. Even if that were true, take note that Black success and wealth was a trigger for the massacres and burning of Black communities in Tulsa, OK, Rosewood, FL, Wilmington, NC and other places. Some sort of moral grid of who can be attacked is both stupid and dangerous.

American ideology reinforced by the three post-Civil War constitutional amendments is that we are all entitled to the equal protection of the laws. Both as law and as ideology that principle is tremendously important – no one, including those who think of themselves as progressive, gets a pass on that one.

Prejudice parts the sinkhole to hell.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on June 15, 2021.

The Dagger in the Heart of Labor

Last week I spoke about labor. Next week is the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s speech at the 1963 March on Washington. I intended to connect the two. After hate intervened in Charlottesville, that’s even more urgent.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Progressive Movement was making great strides on behalf of American workers and farmers. Gradually, the political parties adopted parts of the Progressives platform and many of their proposals were eventually adopted. But in the South, white elites drove a stake through the heart of the Progressive Movement by dividing workers on race. It took the Great Depression of the 1930s to wake America up.

The March on Washington that many of us remember as Martin Luther King’s great triumph was actually called by a coalition of labor leaders. Labor understood that workers had to stand together or they would be trashed together. If you could underpay African-American workers you could underpay everyone. The AFL-CIO, clear about the ways our fates interrelate, was a major supporter of the Civil Rights Movement.

But some politicians used racial prejudice to drive a wedge into support for progress, to prevent government from providing benefits and services for all of us, and then take the “savings” as tax breaks for themselves. Far more whites land on the public safety net but politicians want us to believe it’s just African-Americans. Far fewer African-Americans than whites depend on public schools but politicians want us to think money spent on schools is wasted because “they” get it. In area after area, politicians convinced many of us to starve public services. They want whites to think we would never need what African-Americans would get. They tell us we don’t want to spend anything on “them.” We should be allies, but the politics of race turns us into competitors.

Last time, I described how states and the Supreme Court have been undermining labor’s political role even as it augments management’s. So-called free market “conservatives” don’t want to do anything for the public, for you, your kids and your parents. They tell us that the market solves all problems for the deserving and only the undeserving need help, even while sanctimonious business men poison and defraud us. The real culprits want the freedom to take advantage of us while piling on more tax breaks for themselves. Racial prejudice just makes it easier for them to hide their own misbehavior.

So I want to make three points. First, racial prejudices do the greatest harm when politicians exploit them. I applaud those who condemn the violence and the perpetrators specifically. White supremacists don’t just object to policies – they hate everyone different from them. And no, Black Lives Matter is not a racist organization – objection to racism isn’t racism.

Second, the Supreme Court handed us heavily armed racists massing and marching to intimidate the rest of us. That must stop. Guns have no place in politics or public debate. Worse, white supremacists here admire Hitler, and study his path to power. Hitler’s Brown Shirts terrorized Germany. These folks are terrorists.

Third, Trump has done permanent damage to American politics. His close ties to groups which hate a large portion of America because they think we have the wrong parents is outrageous and highlights the danger of those hate groups. Trump has shown a path to power that every decent American must reject.

I was in front of the Lincoln Memorial when Dr. Martin Luther King shared his glorious dream. I thrilled to his words. But the March on Washington which we remember for Dr. King’s words was called and organized by the labor leaders of America dreaming of unity for all the working men and women of America. It is still a dream. We have to make it come true.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, August 15, 2017.