Race and politics in the US

Wilberne Persaud, GUEST COLUMNIST

On occasion at a cocktail party, where chatting with people you've just met and do not know, awkward issues might arise. I've been mistaken for a diplomat. Whenever that happened, I've murmured something like: "Thanks for the compliment." If it were a conversation I wished to pursue, I'd clear up the issue and continue. Once, discussing 'inconvenient stuff' with my almost adult children, the retort came: "Daddy, you can take off the gloves, you know."

I mention these two seemingly unconnected issues merely to establish that I am capable of being 'diplomatic' in handling sensitive, perhaps - or rather usually - complex matters that can create discomfort, embarrassment or even provoke outrage.

There's one issue, however, for which seemingly we can find no allowable way to explore the issues without evoking emotion, hurt feelings or a commonly difficult to camouflage discomfort. This is the issue of race in America.

Historians and social scientists often speak of 'the troubled history of race in America'. This history, with the legacy of attitudes, biases, stereotypes and prejudices it has generated, makes open discussion rather difficult. But there's one time the issue seems inevitably to arise - election year. And it does so in so many forms.

Who's welfare is it anyway?

We hear reference to 'welfare queen', the 'race card', 'dog whistles', 'take back our country', 'food-stamp president' - the list goes on. These are the code words and concepts which some may see as 'diplomatic' references to stereotypes about black people - African-Americans in America. Seemingly, the fear among some white people in America has multiplied as the long-developing 'browning' of American demographics has become reality.

During the 2010 election season, the chairman of the Virginia Beach Republican Party sent around an email with a joke: "My Dog. I went down this morning to sign my dog for welfare. At first the lady said dogs are not eligible to draw welfare. So I explained to her that my dog is black, unemployed, lazy, can't speak English and has no frigging clue who his daddy is. She looked in her policy book to see what it takes to qualify. My dog gets his first check Friday. Is this a great country or what!"

After the uproar, the chairman offered to, and did, resign. Another more recent 'joke' surfaced in June this year. Inge Marler, a board member of the Ozark Tea Party, gave her take on democracy. "Okay," she says, "the new definition of democracy. A black kid asks his mom. 'Mama, what's a democracy?' 'Well, son,' she says, 'that be when white folks work every day so us po' folks can get all our benefits . ... 'But Mama, don't the white folk get mad about that?' She said, 'They sure do, son. They sure do. And that's called racism." The meeting erupted in applause at this punchline.

Now that Mitt Romney wants an issue to shift focus from his refusal to show more than two years of his tax returns, his campaign hits on what? Welfare. Obama, the Romney campaign claims, has a plan to reinstate welfare as pure handouts. That's a lie, but of no relevance.

The base of the Republican Party should gather that those lazy, poor blacks who can't speak English and don't know who their father is get free money, while whites must work hard every day. Yes, this is the uglier side of American politics, Republican politics, for several decades now.

Retracing racism

What's the picture, actually, closer to reality? The history and genesis is long, but let's take a stab at it. The Europeans, actually the British, established control over the world's largest ever territorial empire under capitalism. It happened in a process that still puzzles many because Ming China was in a much better position than the Europeans to undertake such world territorial expansion.

China didn't because, as a noted student of these matters points out, "The expected benefits for Portugal and other European states of discovering and controlling a direct route to the East were incomparably greater than the expected benefits of discovering and controlling a direct route to the West were for the Chinese state. Christopher Columbus stumbled on the Americas because he and his Castillian sponsors had treasure to retrieve in the West."

Britain prevailed among European rivals and established colonies relying on settlers and the well-known state and private-capital companies such as the East India Company. But human labour provided by natives of conquered territories couldn't generate enough material product to make the enterprise sufficiently profitable. Slave labour provided the solution. Outnumbered and in fear of rebellion, cruel and unusual treatment provided the only available solution to the problem of control.

Inhuman justification

Rationalising inhuman treatment was a simple next step. If enslaved Africans were really less than human, such treatment could be 'justified'. Slave masters could sleep comfortably knowing the body that suffered 100 lashes and a severed ear was really not that of a human being.

America did not have to become a colonial power because its territorial expansion could be achieved in one contiguous space. Its war of independence, consolidation into the United States of America, and subsequent wars begun in Europe left it as the world's only superpower for a brief period prior to the cold war.

Interventions of Martin Luther King Jr, among others, and Lyndon Johnson's understanding and resolve finally brought blacks freedom and the vote.

But attitudes and fears so long in gestation and creation do not evaporate with the inking of 'freedom' and 'voting' legislation. When we add to this the fact that politics, in a democracy, thrives more on invoking and fuelling fear of 'the other', we can begin to understand the role race plays in America.

It's going to be a long time before thoughts of white people as witches, because they are so pale with strange blue eyes, and black people are either inferior or not really human, because they have thick lips, big noses and woolly hair, recede and are finally discredited and eviscerated.

Science is not enough. Our understanding of genetics now allows us to know definitively that human life began in Africa. Populations moved up and across to India and populated the world.

If we continue to have those who deny evolution fuel fear of 'the other' in seeking power and generally pursue paths of immediate, almost purely material self-interest at any cost, high-sounding declarations of the United Nations shall remain just that, for a long time to come.

Wilberne Persaud is author of 'Jamaica Meltdown: Indigenous Financial Sector Crash 1996'. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and wilbe65@yahoo.com.