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How racism supports animosity towards "humane ideals" of social welfare
-- By MalaikaJabali - 14 Feb 2012
Thurmond Arnold notes the success of Swedes in their ability benefit from the “comforts” of government subsidies without hostility towards them. Progressive Americans and foreigners are apt to praise Canada and Europe for their high standard of living-- free healthcare! High wages! racial utopia! This mode of thinking disregards some reasons why non-US industrial nations can create social nets for the majority
of their citizens. I find in a lot of the discussions on the faults of capitalism that they tend to
exclude how racism plays into its success (failure?) in the United States. To create a society that is unafraid to act on humane ideals, I find it important to be aware of this this link and its history to achieve those ideals.
There is a disparity between reality and the progressive halo Europeans fix upon their continent’s head which progressive Americans celebrate. This was clear to me in a conversation with my ex-boyfriend, a Spaniard. In the U.S he would be considered “progressive” though in his country he was deemed conservative. Free healthcare and free graduate education are par for the course in Spain. He found it rather despicable that these are considered entitlements (evil socialism even!) in the United States. We found common ground in equally despising America’s various industrial complexes. Yet when it came to me addressing how Europe and America evolved differently that afforded his continent that luxury, he put on the color blind goggles that many like to don in the face of race discussions.
The appendages of American capitalism, and the wealth inequalities that have since evolved from it, find their vestiges in the slave societies of pre-Civil War America. There was a land owner (Chairman of the Board) who amassed the wealth. He micromanaged his overseers (managers) to make sure the employees (slaves) didn’t get out of hand. For decades, however, there were groups of the working class and poor (unions) consisting of both blacks and whites working together to check, even if only moderately, the landowners’ power. This changed significantly after Bacon’s Rebellion, which solidified race-based slavery. In creating a loyal, race based managerial class, the ruling class awarded the white poor some crumbs of the pie after the rebellion to appease them, and they perpetuated scientific racism [i.e. blacks are inherently lazy, dumb, strong, fun-loving, immune to pain, and fertile (so more slave babies!)] to curb inter-racial unions and defend the inhumane practice of slavery.
Of course these were all strategies to maintain the wealth of the white landowners, yet, after 400 years these falsehoods about Black people still persist. The appeal to racism is still a clarion call for modern day elites to rally the white masses (and lord have mercy some blacks) to vote against their own interests. Why should we have food stamps? So, the baby having black welfare queens can use it all up (despite the fact that welfare was created for widowed white women whose husbands died after WWII).? Why no free healthcare? Blacks need to stop being so lazy and get jobs with health care so we don’t pay for them! (despite the fact that until affirmative action, which has since mostly benefited white women, black women were in the labor force more than females of any other race and of all those unemployed blacks are the most likely to look more extensively for work and the least likely to be hired). Why no free education? I don’t want my hard earned money used for folks (mostly blacks and Mexicans of course) who aren’t as smart as me!
Europe avoided such racial conflict simply because they had few other races to contend with (yet recent riots in England and France shows us what happens when they do). Europeans started the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and, like American elites, their “enlightened” biologists and anthropologists mired in racist thinking to defend it. Except they didn’t have to deal with the consequences. Spain, which my ex heralded as some color blind bastion of progression, is not only not free to claim being above using racism currently to maintain the status quo, but they were pioneers. They enslaved the first group of Africans that landed in the Americas and benefitted for centuries from the goods enslaved Africans cultivated and the wealth this free labor brought Spain under the tyranny of slavery. Europe didn’t magically form an Industrial Revolution from which working class Europeans found well paid manufacturing work, joined unions, and became educated enough to know how to not vote against their self-interest. Free labor will do wonders for anyone’s standard of living .
As slave labor spurred manufacturing in the US and Europe from which a middle class could grow, Europe got the bonus of not having to figure out what to do with people that they’d shackled up for 300 years. The Dutch and Portuguese didn’t have to maintain lies that blacks were ungodly and dangerous to keep them from sharing the same schools or job opportunities because they were out of sight. They kept them working in neo colonies in the Caribbean and Brazil and in the mines of the Ivory Coast and an apartheid South Africa. The racial politics stayed in the favelas and plantations with the workers, so no need for the CEOs in England and France to get worked up about race, heavens no! So free education for all, except you know, the North Africans and Cameroonians escaping our colonies to get a taste of the benefits their ancestors’ labor provided.
Despite this history, America can change. If Americans address racism and how it affects their animosity toward necessary, humane social programs, they may be more apt to combat the centuries long stranglehold the 1% has had over its disproportionate wealth. If people are less apt to think some poor "other" is more responsible for their economic well-being than the people actually in power, they will be more likely to direct their vitriol, and hopefully their votes, where it belongs.
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