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Taking
Our Country Forward
November
5, 2003
By The Plaid Adder
 And
now, for a special treat, this week's column presents a brand
new musical act! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Trent Lott
and the GOPspel Singers performing their new interpretation
of a traditional sea chanty:
We've got an excuse now that they're fighting back,
Way, hey, mow the place down...
Don't mind the civilians, it's only Iraq,
We'll try so hard to mow the place down.
We came here to liberate, and we will yet,
Way, hey, mow the place down...
Or was that 'obliterate'? Damn, I forget,
We'll try so hard to mow the place down.
All right, that's quite enough of THAT.
Indeed, we would all be better off if we could stop this
crowd from writing any more verses to this depressing and
repetitive tune. And it is in hopes of cutting this song off
entirely before it reaches its bloody climax that I want to
talk about an epiphany I experienced not too long ago during
the California recall election. At some point, back in late
September, I said to myself:
"Arnold Schwarzenegger is the frontrunner...and Al Sharpton
is not a serious candidate. What the hell is up with that?"
Sharpton has been written off by almost everyone, despite
his considerable talents as a speaker, his strong performances
in the debates, and the same willingness to challenge the
party leadership that has paid off big time for Howard Dean.
Even when Sharpton does get a nod for something, it is usually
followed by a ritual repetition of "...but of course he could
never really be elected." Well, it is time to stop and ask
ourselves: why not?
I'm serious about this. Because the major thing underlying
that attitude, whether people state it or not, is that America
"isn't ready" for an African-American president. And my contention
is that if we want to finally prevent Trent Lott's genocidal
fantasies from playing themselves out, we cannot take "the
country isn't ready" for an answer.
Now there are many who would say that the Reverend Al Sharpton
is unelectable not because he is an African-American, but
because he is the Reverend Al Sharpton. And indeed, in a sane
country, these people would have a point. Despite unexpectedly
strong showings in several local Democratic primaries, Sharpton
has no experience holding public office. He is better known
for his one-liners than for his policies. He has been accused
of anti-Semitism. And thanks to some skeletons in his closet,
he is seen by most people who know his name not as a credible
politician, but as an irresponsible attention-seeking celebrity.
To all of which I have a three-word rebuttal: Governor
Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Similarly, you could argue that as an ordained Pentecostal
minister, Sharpton would be unduly influenced by a Christian
zeal that might lead to poor decision making in the global
arena and the erosion of the separation of church and state
at home; or that his somewhat unorthodox resume might leave
him unprepared to handle the tremendous demands that the job
of President of the United States would make on him.
To all of which I have a three-and-a-fraction word rebuttal:
President George W. Bush.
My point is not to rejoice in America's record of electing
musclebound ass-grabbers and zealous dimwits; my point is
that the Republican party, when they want to foist someone
or something on the American public, does not ask if the country
is ready; they get the country ready. Is California
ready for Governor Conan? I don't think so. But they've got
him anyway, because the Republican Party made it happen. And
the country was definitely not ready for a George W.
Bush presidency - and yet there he sits. Because instead of
accepting reality, Bush's party went out and remade it. The
Republican party does not succeed by pitching its message
to the opinions of the average American; it succeeds by molding
the opinions of the average American to fit its message.
So if we're going to play this game for real, we have to
learn how to make a majority instead of passively accepting
the minority the Republicans leave us. And one of the ways
the Democratic Party could do that would be to connect with
the segment of the population for whom, right now, Reverend
Al Sharpton is the only serious candidate: the disenfranchised,
disaffected, and disgusted working-class and underclass African-Americans
who have suffered the worst since the Reagan Revolution.
That's Sharpton's constituency; and that's exactly why he
hasn't been taken seriously by the party establishment, the
media, or even people like us leftist wackos on Democratic
Underground who are willing to back lunatics like Kucinich.
Sharpton's background is not in Congress or state government;
it's in activism, and specifically he has made a career out
of protesting the violence directed by the state and by white
Americans against urban African-Americans. The name everyone
knows is Tawana Brawley, the African-American teenage girl
who fabricated a story about being abducted, abused, and raped
by a gang of white men (including policemen). Sharpton championed
her cause, and so of course he was discredited along with
her.
What is less well known is Sharpton's subsequent work on
behalf of victims whose cases were absolutely legitimate -
such as Amadou Diallo, a West African immigrant who in 1999
was shot 47 times in the lobby of his building by a group
of New York police officers who never wavered in their insistence
that their perception that Diallo was armed and dangerous
(even though he was neither) absolutely justified the overwhelming
lethal force that they used against him. At the time, I found
that shocking - the assumption that just by standing there
and reaching for his wallet, Diallo had somehow provoked the
horrible death he died. Now, we all realize that those police
officers were simply visionaries who anticipated our President's
policy of preventive war. Get them before they get you; shoot
to kill before you even know if they're armed. We do it at
home; no wonder we do it abroad.
Although you won't hear people say it, Sharpton's involvement
in the Diallo case is as much a political liability in some
ways as his involvement with Brawley. Nobody in the establishment
- on either side of the aisle - wants to hear about the racism
that still permeates police culture and underwrites police
practice in major American cities. And that's a shame, because
if our national lawmakers had been paying more attention to
the way our majority white police departments deal with minority
neighborhoods, they might have learned a thing or two about
the problems that were liable to crop up during an occupation
of Iraq. Because in the majority-Black, majority-poor neighborhoods
of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, it can start to look
an awful lot like an occupation. You have the same fundamentally
antagonistic relationship between the policers and the policed,
the same problems with misunderstanding and mistranslation,
the same assumption on each side that the other is always
out for blood and acting in bad faith. And you get the same
results we are getting in Iraq: the abuse of deadly force
on one side, the resort to 'any means necessary' on the other.
Nobody in the establishment wants to consider doing what
it would take to get the people who are most endangered by
that violence onto the voter rolls and into the polling booths.
Because that would involve giving them some kind of stake
in the outcome; and that would involve making changes to our
society so that it no longer excludes, deprives, and exploits
them. And the issues that would really lead to that kind of
change are not currently on the table.
After all, if the Democratic Party is serious about getting
out the African-American vote, why is nobody bringing up...
The war on drugs?
Mandatory minimum sentencing for relatively minor drug offenses
has had a disastrous effect on urban African-Americans, who
have been disproportionately targeted by the machinery of
law enforcement and by the laws themselves, which go easier
on cokeheads than on crack addicts. Not only has it criminalized
a sizable chunk of the African-American male population, and
thus rendered many of them temporarily or permanently ineligible
to vote, but it has fueled the growth of a prison industry
which is now a powerful presence on lobbyists' row. Since
the fortunes of the prison industry are inextricably linked
to the spread of crime, the increasing financial and political
clout of this particular growth sector ought to give all of
us pause - and it certainly ought to worry the Iraqis who
are watching the same companies spend tens of thousands of
government dollars building shiny new prisons in their own
country.
Welfare 'reform'?
The Democratic Party doesn't want to touch this because
it was one of Clinton's 'successes;' but with the economy
as deep in the toilet as it is, it is high time to reassess
the way our country treats its poor, because now there are
a lot more of them. The idea that even people who cannot find
work are still human beings who deserve shelter, food, medical
care, and a little fucking dignity is something that apparently
went out of style sometime in the late 1960s. Well, bell-bottoms
are back; let's see if we can resurrect this much more useful
trend. Because one thing that both Bushes have been very
good at is creating more poor Americans - especially in depressed
urban centers that used to be kept alive by the dying manufacturing
sector.
Education?
I'm not talking about school vouchers. I'm talking about
confronting the basic, foundational injustice on which public
education in this country is founded: the fact that individual
public schools are funded through local property taxes. To
anyone committed to economic justice, it is clear that this
simply makes no sense, as it guarantees that those
children who would most benefit from a good education are
least likely to get it. This structural inequality has been
the elephant in the living room for decades now, and the elephant's
tread falls most heavily on those who are most likely to live
in depressed urban areas with extremely low property taxes
and drastically underfunded schools. The Bush administration's
all-out assault on public education in America - and that
is what his approach amounts to - is in many ways simply the
logical extension of that foundational inequality. To those
that have, more shall be given; from those that have not,
more shall be taken away.
Without real equality in education, it will always
be impossible to achieve more than a token success in breaking
the cycle of poverty. Of the children born in depressed school
districts to struggling parents, only the lucky and/or exceptional
few will even get to the point where they could benefit from
affirmative action. And most of those children will always
be non-white - until we can do something about
Integration?
Segregation did not die with Jim Crow; and it is not just
the Southern man's problem, either. I live well north of the
Mason-Dixon line. For a while, my partner and I were among
the few white households in a relatively prosperous majority-Black
neighborhood on the fringes of a very depressed city. We liked
the neighborhood, but were frustrated by the fact that it
could not seem to attract any businesses, apart from fast-food
chains. The grocery store closed and was replaced by a Giant
No-Money Bottom Bargain Basement Food-Mart which closed down,
I assume because it looked so depressing and soul-destroying
that nobody ever wanted to enter it. Meanwhile, if you wanted
to buy clothing, you had to drive half an hour to a town which
appears to have been created entirely for the purpose of giving
a home to all the retail stores that fled screaming in the
wake of White Flight. Eventually, when it came time to buy
property, we were so worried about being stuck with something
we couldn't resell that we gave in and flew too. We now reside
in a neighboring town with plenty of retail and a large and
beautiful supermarket - which is, as far as I can tell, about
98% white.
What can be done about this? It is not, clearly, as simple
as passing legislation; and yes, I admit it, I am part of
the problem. But you know what, so are the banks, insurance
companies, and other institutions that made it impossible
to finance anything in our former town if it wasn't a bar,
a strip joint, or a KFC. No development means no hiring means
further depression of property values means crappier schools
means even more depressed property values means more white
flight means less development...how do you stop this vicious
cycle? I don't know, but I can't help thinking we would be
better off as a country if someone would at least ask the
question, even if the answer was not immediately forthcoming.
De facto segregation in housing is the rule rather than
the exception in 21st century America and it is at the root
of much that is wrong with this country. It is also at the
root of both parties' electoral strategies, which assume that
minority voters will always be quarantined in particular areas
of densely populated states, while all those 'red' states
that take up so much of the West are extremely, extremely
white. If we had real integration in terms of housing in this
country, not only would it alleviate some of the racial inequities
built into our public education system, but it would limit
the Republicans' ability to play those little redistricting
games they love so much. Politically speaking, it doesn't
pay to be any more densely concentrated in any one district
than it takes to have a controlling interest. If we could
spread things out even a little, it could potentially make
a big difference.
I could go on; but my point is this. The days are gone when
the Democratic Party could meaningfully promote racial equality
simply by taking a principled stand on the issues. Legal discrimination
is no longer viable and we are left with the far more stubborn
residue created and perpetuated by economic inequality. To
give Sharpton's constituency a reason to go to the polls,
we would have to be committed to changing the economic structure
of this country - at the very least, to make it less painful
for those on the bottom, to make it easier for people to escape
from the lowest tier of the pyramid, and to dismantle the
structures that keep African-Americans trapped in that bottom
layer. And I don't see any evidence that any of the 'serious'
candidates are talking about making that happen. And that
is a serious problem.
If we (and by 'we' I mean my fellow white Democrats, from
the centrist party leadership to the progressive mavericks)
can't get our party to address the basic injustices at the
heart of our own society - if we simply accept the fact that
an enormous number of our country's citizens are still, forty
years after Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Dream" speech, in a
position where they either cannot vote or have nothing for
which to vote - then we will not be able to address the massive
injustices that we are currently perpetrating overseas. No
matter how committed or angry we are, the white left is simply
not large or powerful enough to carry this country. If we
want change, we have to be willing to really work with
other constituencies - and that means no longer expecting
to control the agenda.
The party leadership cannot approach African-American voters
the way that Bush approaches the U.N., asking for help but
refusing to share power. They have to give to get - and one
of the things that they will have to give up is the assumption
that politics will always be pretty much about the needs of
middle-class white people. Can you imagine an America in which
out of nine Democratic presidential hopefuls, only two are
white? Can you imagine a political debate in which the candidates
fall all over themselves to pander to working-class African-Americans
while only throwing the occasional bone to white middle-class
voters? Does that scare you?
I go to a lot of anti-war rallies these days, and I often
see white, college-educated activists get up and talk about
"taking our country back." I do the same thing, on my smaller
scale. But when we - and by 'we' I mean myself and my fellow
white lefties - talk about taking our country back, we betray
our own sense of entitlement, and we gloss over the fact that
many of our fellow Americans could never just assume that
the country belonged to them in the first place. Without them,
the white left is going nowhere, and for everyone's sake we
all have to realize that now.
So. We cannot take the country back without taking it forward.
It is not a coincidence that the same man who was removed
from his leadership position for frankly sighing over the
good old days of legalized apartheid in the American South
is also the one who is currently taking heat for frankly revealing
the intense disrespect for the lives of non-Americans and
non-whites that is absolutely foundational to this administration's
foreign policy. We can't fix the evil that is this war without
at least making a start on fixing the evils we are used to
living with at home.
There are plenty of principled reasons not to vote for Sharpton
- just as there are plenty of principled reasons not to vote
for Dean, Kerry, Kucinich, Edwards, Lieberman, Gephardt, Clark
and, uh, that other African-American candidate you never hear
about, Carol Moseley-Braun. But we cannot justify dismissing
him and the constituency he represents. Because by taking
Sharpton seriously, the rest of the party might finally learn
what we need to know in order to turn this country around
before Trent Lott gets to sing another goddamn verse of that
song.
The Plaid Adder's demented ravings have been delighting
an equally demented on-line audience since 1996. More of the
same can be found at the Adder's
Lair.
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