The beat poet Gregory Corso, one of my favorites, way back 60 years or so now wrote the following:
O this political air so heavy with the bells
and motors of a slow night, and no place to rest
but rain to walk—How it rings the Washington streets!
The umbrella’d congressmen; the rapping tires
of big black cars, the shoulders of lobbyists
caught under canopies and in doorways,
and it rains, it will not let up,
and meanwhile lame futurists weep into Spengler’s
prophecy, will the world be over before the races blend color?
All color must be one or let the world be done—
At about the same time, Corso was writing this, I was president of the Catholic Interracial Council. The Council back then was one of the largest civil rights groups in the nation along with the NAACP. The Urban League had just been formed. The freedom riders, Selma, SNICC, and the Civil Rights Act were all in the future.
I convened one of the largest gatherings of civil rights leaders at the time for a conference of several days to discuss what we need to do next to reverse this shameful blot on our nation and yes the world. As convener and chairman, I was the introductory speaker at the conference. While preparing my notes for that speech, I was offended at the lengths other speakers in their prepared talks painfully asserted that interracial love and marriage was off the table. So, at the end of my talk to the 2500 attendees at the general session, I concluded with the message that we cannot hope to close the racial divide that so sickens our nation if we insist that love and marriage continue to remain segregated.
We are now faced with an election that some have called perhaps the most consequential election of our times. And, if you do not believe that racism is the underlying factor in the election and the most important. Yes, climate change is an existential threat to humanity’s future, but it is racism and their support of racist political leaders that is used by the natural resources industry to maintain political control to protect their interests and especially the value of their hydrocarbon reserves.
As Peter Grenell in the introduction to his study wrote:
“Racism and economic inequality have been embedded in our, and are intimately linked society from America’s beginnings and are intimately linked. America’s political, economic and social structures have been profoundly influenced by an insatiable urge to obtain wealth, from early settlers to the present. Together with an ultra-individualism and a predilection for beliefs not based on facts that Kurt Anderson has called ‘Fantasyland,’ and enhanced most recently under the regime pathologically narcissistic, authoritarian, psychopathic and racist president, racism and inequality are directly responsible for today’s perilous conditions.”
(https://www.amazon.com/GREAT-EXPERIMENT-FREEDOM-RACISM-AMERICA-ebook/dp/B08FRSBTDB). See also, (https://trenzpruca.wordpress.com/2020/10/27/peter-on-top-the-great-experiment-freedom-greed-and-racism-in-america/)
While in should be clear that racism has been encouraged, managed, and funded by a smaller group of wealthy men, a small group of ideologues, and owners of a few media companies, it has been directed primarily towards that large politically potent, group, white males without a college education. Although the political power of this group was effectively manipulated in the 1916 presidential election the voting power of this cohort has been decreasing steadily for the past decade or two. About two years ago I wrote:
“Poorly educated white males are the first large socioeconomic group in America less educated and expected to do less well economically than their parents. I even have heard of recent studies that indicate that they will not live as long as their parents as well. Whether this last fact is a sad truth or this group is serving as the canary in the cage for society as a whole, I cannot guess.”
“I feel sad for these men; deluded by their history of ascendency over women of their class and other minorities, lied to by their political and religious leaders and misused by their employers, they have been misled to believe their ever so slight social standing was theirs by right and not earned by effort.}
“In 2016 Presidential election they marched to the polls and elected someone who promised them he would tear down every government program that they believed encouraged those who threatened their tenuous social standing. In return, they, perhaps unknowingly, agreed to cede control of the nation and the economy to those who would abandon them at the slightest evidence it would be to their advantage. In return for these meager benefits and support for the psychological comfort of meaningless symbols and rituals such and flags and songs that they cling to as evidence of some misbegotten reality, they were willing to give up much of their freedom. True, they now would be free from the competition of those they believed their inferiors who were being given unfair advantages. In return, they seem to accept enslavement by those they were sure were their betters.”
(https://trenzpruca.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/poorly-educated-white-men-the-death-of-an-american-original/)
These voters were ripe for the racist promises:
“They, this modern day Lumpen Proletariat, who subsist at the poverty line and slightly above it do not see the threat from above, but from below — those they fear will take the only things that keep them from abject poverty and despair, their jobs and the few items of value they may have acquired. As a result, they also hate those above who they perceive encourage them to do so. There is probably nothing that enrages them more than to be accused that they, clinging (often barely) to the lowest levels of the economic ladder, have benefited from “white privilege” to get there. They are more angry than racist more fearful than ideological.”
(https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/3/16/1502258/-More-angry-than-racist-more-fearful-than-ideological)
Despite their racism and fascist leanings should the Democrats succeed in winning the coming election as they seem poised to do we need to actively root out racism especially the political advantages of certain rich and powerful while winning back as many of those who have been led astray as possible.
“ Fascism and the politics of hate have no place in any just society. It is time for Americans to throw back at these evil gangsters their own slogan and say, “No more, Not in our Country and Not on our Soil.” It is time to act massively. And if it comes to millions of citizens surrounding the White House and dragging these criminals out by their heels so be it.”
(trenzpruca.wordpress.com/…) (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/8/12/1787709/-Wake-Up-America-Charlottesville-the-American-Kristallnacht-One-Year-Later)