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The
Resegregation of America
December 18, 2002
By Boyce Brown
 The
neo-confederate tripe recently served up by Trent Lott at
the 100th birthday party of Strom Thurmond was clearly reprehensible
and should rightly cost Lott his leadership position. What
all the pious hue and cry over such blatant racism obscures,
however, is the fact that widespread belief in the useful
fictions of civil rights and upward mobility facilitates the
maintenance of a two-tiered society every bit as effectively
as Plessy v. Ferguson ever did - so effectively as
to essentially render moot the animosity towards that Supreme
Court decision long held by Lott, Thurmond and even Chief
Justice Rehnquist himself. With the transformation of Kennedy's
war on poverty into Reagan's war on the poor - lately and
dramatically reinvigorated by the Bush Administration - de
jure integration only masks a greatly intensified de facto
resegregation. A key distinction of this new resegregation,
however, is that it is less about whites repressing blacks
than the rich repressing everyone else.
Even as landmark civil rights legislation was passed (in
spite of epic filibusters from Strom Thurmond), white flight
into the suburbs was already decimating the property tax base
available to inner city schools and obliterating much of the
gains made possible by Brown v. Board of Education.
Even today, limited educational opportunity remains the central
factor in keeping down the income and - more importantly -
asset development levels of the working poor, a trend which
continues to impact blacks disproportionately. For example,
in the 1990s they earned about 80 cents for every $1 in income
earned by whites but only owned a shocking 10 cents for every
$1 in assets owned by whites.
This inequity makes it extremely difficult for the working
poor to gain access to the higher education, home ownership
and small business development they need to pass on even modest
amounts of wealth to their children. This is, of course, greatly
exacerbated by a regressive tax system, in spite of recent
editorials in the Wall Street Journal about some working poor
being "lucky duckies" for paying little or no income tax,
asinine comments designed to hide innumerable examples of
outright legalized property theft, such as the fact that half
of the recent "tax cut" stolen from Social Security went to
the richest 1%. The economic distinctions of this reverse
Robin Hood syndrome have frequently been given physical form
in recent decades in mass public housing and major highway
development. All too often, the new interstate or ring road
identifies and consolidates the racial and class divides of
a community.
These circumstances force the economic conscription of the
working poor into the military during times of "peace" and
their legal conscription during times of war, when potential
long-term "overproduction" and social equity is prevented
by enforcing the periodic destruction of a mass of productive
forces - not simply weapons but bodies as well. While defense
and corporate welfare spending continue to rise dramatically,
valuable social service programs comprising a comparatively
small portion of the national budget are eviscerated. This
leads many seeking solace or misguided economic opportunity
to drugs, which continue flooding into our inner cities in
spite of a decades-old war on drugs. Even when transport isn't
directly facilitated by the CIA, narco-trafficking all too
often provides lucrative off-the-books financing for the allies
and goals of misguided American foreign and intelligence policy,
a strategy of truly monstrous cynicism that, needless to say,
dooms interdiction efforts before they begin.
Amidst this urban environment of strategically created hostility
and hopelessness, the police are more often seen by minority
communities as colonial armies than as forces designed to
"serve and protect" them, a hypocrisy which also extends to
the courts, who regularly give harsher sentences to, say,
blacks on crack charges than whites on powder cocaine charges.
New jail construction can hardly keep up with campaign promises
by politicians to be tough on crime, with little noticeable
effect on crime rates. Our ever-increasing incarceration rate
is already many times higher than that of any other nation
in a category we used to belong to - democracies. This disenfranchises
huge percentages of young black men in particular - and "justifies"
the illegal scrubbing from voter rolls of many more by incorrect
felony records, most recently and dramatically in Florida
in 2000 and 2002. Blacks also remain the predominant target
of disinformation and intimidation campaigns aimed at preventing
them from voting, as we saw across the country during recent
elections - again.
When does complicity bleed into collusion? When does collusion
become conspiracy? It's impossible to say in one sense, and
irrelevant in another, a matter of semantics that has nothing
to do with the fact that, taken as a whole, lowered education
funding, regressive taxation, reactionary urban planning,
perennial militarism, reduced social spending, the influx
of drugs into inner cities, a double standard in the law enforcement
and criminal justice systems, the dramatic development of
the prison-industrial complex, and enduring voter harassment
have all been incredibly effective in systematically perpetuating
a permanent underclass - composed not only of blacks but the
working poor as a whole - by keeping them broke, disorganized,
unhealthy, disenfranchised, and subservient.
In a very direct and real sense, it has also enabled the
laying of the statutory foundation for a constitutional dictatorship
over the past two years. The basics are already in place and
there's more to come with the next Congress - with or without
the cheer leading and rubber stamp of Trent Lott. The very
shamelessness and scale of this hypocrisy and greed would
be laughable if it weren't so incredibly immoral and counterproductive,
if it didn't create so much tangible human misery. While Lott
may have inadvertently shown America the casual cruelty and
painful ignorance at the heart of the militarized plutocracy
of the Republicans, we cannot afford to delude ourselves into
thinking that the censure of one man ends our obligation to
challenge the less noticeable but far more nefarious examples
of racism already in progress. As we stand poised on the cusp
of losing democracy, security and prosperity for some time
to come - perhaps indefinitely - the fate of the battle for
racial (and by extension social) justice may well end up serving
as the canary in the coal mine of the American experiment.
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