~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The only way to have a decent life for everyone is to have a democratic government. It’s harder to keep it going than a dictatorship or an oligarchy, but the idea of it is for everyone, however many times we forget that.
The undermining of it in this country and around the world is currently headlining the 24-7 news of the day: In the U.S., we’re learning that we will continue un-educating young Black students, refusing loans and mortgages to Black couples, disenfranchising Black voters. Many believe that Civil Rights made voting available to all years ago, that integrating schooling became the norm, that Blacks can live in “white” neighborhoods.
So much for that actually happening across the board.
It is becoming clear that it is not merely the Black population that is being hurt. They are questioning everything politicians say about “helping” this underclass. American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics, people of color from all over the world who live here and all those who lived here before any of our ancestors are also questioning a promise disseminated by the leaders of America. Why aren’t we middle class Americans questioning right along with them?
We’re all migrants, and most of our ancestors who came here from another land suffered the prejudice of being less than the ones who got here before them. If they were “white” enough, they eventually assimilated into the accepted class.
It was the first “whites” from Europe who decided soon enough they were white people, and it made a difference.
If we were honest, or even merely observant, it would be obvious who’s brown, who’s pink, who’s pallid, who’s deep purple, who’s pale; and who’s tan and who’s amber or gold or burnt sienna or raw sienna, copper, gray, reddish, milky.
The idea of “race” meaning white or black or brown or yellow came from Whites of the upper class in the 1600s in the U.S. to keep the workers apart. Those leaders came up with the dastardly idea to get the “white” underclass – indentured servants and slaves who were not from Africa and who were not dark in skin color – to think of themselves as better than the African enslaved. The two were in the same condition of having to work too hard under mean conditions, and they had found support and camaraderie in one another; there were more of them in the lowly classes than of the wealthy who owned them, and out of fear of retaliation from their treatment of the workers, the wealthy began to plot.
Slaves and indentured were mostly African or Irish, and they endured and shared the strictures of low life as cotton and tobacco pickers, maids, cooks, bricklayers and other hard-work labor. They sympathized with one another and became friends, lovers, couples. Edgy Whites became very fearful after a rebellion of the working classes – Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676, it is called, after the instigator. The owners of other people became fractured with horror as they put it together that there were a lot more put-upon people than there were people who tyrannized them.
The ruling class did a brilliant thing, for themselves; they gave the lighter-skinned working class the idea that they were better than anyone with dark skin, and they told them they were the kind who could work their way up into the upper classes; the darkies could not.
It worked.
The conservative and radical-right folks of today are nervous again. They know that soon they will be the minority; they already are if we’re talking the population of the planet. The one percent of the population that is richer than all the rest of us put together is afraid they’re about to have to eat their 400 years of lying words and apologize for their degrading deeds.
The civil rights gained in the last 60 years, a purely annoying setback to the wealthy and powerful, have been whittled on quietly but persistently by the upper-class purveyors of class distinction by color. The end of their brilliant idea must be in sight, because they are putting up what looks like a last-ditch fight.
Through decades of planning and executing pernicious legislation in state houses across the country, through gerrymandering into puzzle pieces the neighborhoods in every big city, through then being able to select individuals who will judiciously take apart our Constitution word by word, the Blacks will be returned to and kept in their place, and so will we, the rest of the classes that are not the one percent.
We may think that attacks on Black History have nothing to do with us, but the attack is for us as well. The one percent rich and powerful are passing laws that deny any education that tells the truth about plantations and slaves and how smart Africans were when they arrived unwillingly on our shores. They knew farming, animal husbandry, construction, cooking, art, music and the value of community.
This kind of history was not taught to us, and the in-charge folks are doubling down now so that it will be taught to no one. No more history taught in the schools that tells the truth of a ruthless system of labor done by people owned by other people. There will be no easy way to vote so that laws favoring the rich might be taken off the books by the informed. There will be no more affirmative action for those uneducated as thoroughly as the children of the silver spoons. Hard-to-get medical care is already the norm for the low classes so they will have fewer healthy children and selves. There will be continuing dividing of lower-income neighborhoods by massive freeway expansions. And on and on.
In several states, the teaching of honest history of America regarding its enslaved is being forbidden in grade schools, high schools and colleges. Books of all kinds are banned – it’s difficult to figure out why most of them are – is it sex or politics or just truth of any kind they dislike? – but banned is banned, and this is the frightening beginning of control of one’s own thoughts. The number of voting precincts have been reduced in many a district. Registering to vote is now riddled with new rules making it more difficult. And in many places in the South, simple mean laws are being passed: No offering of water to people waiting in long lines to vote. What creep would come up with that?
Who cares about Black people? People of color? Poor people? We’ve got our own problems, and if I can’t help myself, too bad.
The obvious is that the suppression of Blacks in this country, the creepy and creeping malady that it is, has crept way up the ladder. It is power doing what it does because its power makes it possible. The fight now is not limited to the Blacks but has already subsumed the lower middle class, is moving in on the middle class and is snipping at the edges of the upper middle class. Once power becomes complete in a human, it consumes all before it.
As you can see by our news sources, our freedom of speech has been purposely undermined – we can’t figure out what’s a lie and what’s truth. The idea of purity of expression is thus besmirched. The great hope of the exceptional idea that all are created equal scares the pants off those who have money and power; do they think that if they have it, we might want to take it?
We don’t.
We simply want to control our own lives in a way that is made possible by the equalization of us all.
So, show up, speak out, support others, don’t think less of Blacks and the poor, of immigrants and women, of teenagers and old folks. We’ve been taught by the top dogs not to mess with their power; that we must respect power and the law and the order it brings to our country.
They’ve made laws so we behave not for our good but for theirs. Baloney. Speak up. “Say B.S., Man.”
