I live in New Jersey where Governor Christie has just given Exxon a pass on $8,650,000,000 in potential punitive damages and where a couple of guys with different interests settled a conflict over a placard touting White History Month in a storefront window. Christie, in his own mind at least, remains a presidential hopeful. Do the issues of race and money fuel decisions that are made in D.C. as well? You betcha.
Did you know that since passage of the “Cromnibus” Bill this past December, the average couple is now allowed to give up to $3.1 million to a political party over a two-year election cycle? So let’s get to it folks! Start donating!
Oh wait. Wait just one moment. It appears that the average couple does not fit the parameters worked into the great Cromnibus Bill. In fact, the passage dealing with campaign contributions was written into, allowed to infiltrate the legislation, as a rule applicable to only . . . let’s see . . . under 1% of . . . 1% of the entire population of these good old United States of America. checks figures Yup, that looks right, under 1% of 1%. C’mon 99.999%, Let us give thanks to the great God of the Bible for the divinely appointed leadership who fought tooth and nail to get this clause in there!
Less than one percent of one percent.That’s okay though, right? Because, c’mon, we’re all in this together. Everyone, all filthy rich and all the filthy poor alike, agree that a strong minimum wage and funding for education are two primary concerns in this Republic of republics, no? Naturally every good American maintains that working families, middle-class families, and people of all races, religions and classes require equal consideration under the law, no?
Um, checking actually, my notes indicate that folks lounging somewhere around the top 1% of wealth and income are most keenly focused on keeping taxes on capital gains (the source of their enormously rare <1% of 1% incomes) as low as possible. I think the very astute and charismatic Governor Christie understands this as well. All one can say is, hmmmmmm, and scratch one’s chinny-chin-chin. And that’s no reference to a Chinese phone book.
Remember the good old early 20th century when San Francisco relied upon laboring immigrants from China? Racially inferior Coolies, right? Yeah.
Curiously, right around that same time, all the way on the other side of the country, not Chinese Coolies, but Kikes and WOPs were the most popular nonwhites. That’s right. Jews and Italians were considered racially inferior (Racially Inferior to whom, you ask? Hm-hmm, you’re beginning to get it.)
There was even a time when Irish folks were thought to be 30 percent Nordic and 70% Mediterranean (a racially inferior breed, no doubt). Over the years, different measures of racial superiority have been used, including blood-lines, head measurements, and having come to prominence during WW I, intelligence testing set the standard between superior and sub-standard human beings. The final analysis made by that latter method placed Americans of English ancestry at the top of Army rankings while Polish Americans ranked very Nick Bottomly. Did I ever tell you why Polish men prefer ice cubes in their condoms? I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist a little “rank humor.”
Hold your horses there bucko; I myself am three-quarters Irish and one-quarter English. According to the foregoing, that can’t be good. Just imagine how another Irishman I recently read about in the news must feel.A fellow New Jersey fellow named Bhakti Curtis is not only Irish, but also Polish! Oh my god, and in addition, Curtis also self identifies as “big and black” and, not unlike New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, has a loud booming voice.
Despite the genetic disadvantages of being Irish, Polish, and Afro-American, Bhakti Curtis can read. So imagine his dismay when he showed up for breakfast at one of his favorite New Jersey delicatessens the other morning only to find a sign in the window that read, “CELEBRATE YOUR WHITE HERITAGE IN MARCH, WHITE HISTORY MONTH.” Curtis, as many do, must have felt very confused. Could he celebrate, or could he not? After all, we’re barely out of Black History Month. On top of all of that very confusing stuff, Curtis’s home is now also being patrolled in a kind of protective surveillance because of threats he received, threats allegedly made by superior threat bearing races after going to the police because business owner James Bogess refused to remove the placard. Curtis claimed it mocked Black History Month; Bogess believed he had a right to proclaim his proud heritage in public.
In all fairness top Bogess, EVERYBODY’S heard of Black History. We, quite magnanimously by the way, study it in our schools. We are familiar with Black historical figures and the Civil Rights Movement. But who on earth ever heard of White History or an Uncivil Rights Movement? (I would nominate the Civil War for that one.)
White history should be celebrated. EVERYBODY should know that, way back when, a genius among geniuses, the Dutchman Petrus Camper, calculated the statuesque beauties, proportions and angles of the heads of Greek Gods and found that European head attributes far outdistanced all other competitors, matching 80 out of 100 of those general traits. And EVERYBODY except the ancient Greeks (who made note of the dark color of their own skin when compared to that of the barbarous White Scythian and Celtic attackers to their north) knows that the ancient Greeks were in every war-like, slave-holding way, a superior and White race, according to that reliable "he looks-like-me" Northern European dude, Petrus Camper.
That is as much to say that the idea of race and who is White and who is Black and who is Chinese and Native American and Sri Lankan, and what have you, is not as clear-cut as the eye would have it. There are political strains of interest that fall, almost like genes on a double-helix, along historical tendencies that overlap with a particular people’s self-interests. And in fact, there is a book that examines White heritage, published by Norton in 2010, entitled, THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE.
Now, if these things are interesting at all, and I’m not going to contend that this writing qualifies as an interesting piece as much it qualifies for what David Letterman might have once referred to as a “Hal Gurnee Network Time-Killer,” it may still be important to note this one interconnected and possibly important, possibly troubling trend: that not only did the ominous Cromnibus Bill hold the above-mentioned provision giving less than 1% of 1% of Americans a ludicrous political advantage over the interests of 100% of the rest of our citizenry who cannot take advantage of it, but more than that (as if this could become more racially and financially ludicrous) the bill was passed by a political body whose composition is 90% White folk of the Big Donor Class (Race?)—now also suddenly the recipients of the boon of $3.1 million per "less than 1% of the 1% of couples" who have that kind of cash to spread around in a country whose overall population is comprised of 37% non-white folk—or as they enjoy being referred to, people of some colorfulness with rights.
The result of this financially imbalanced mix of ethnicities and colors and classes and races is that, potentially at least, every political policy outcome in the econo-ethno divide we today call America ultimately serves only Corporate Interests and the Donor Class by design, and thereby dismisses the non-capitalized interests of most working Americans as irrelevant and without any real value except as they labor to ensure that more money flows upward to the top elites. And all of this remains especially true for those non-White folk mentioned at the end of the previous paragraph as they are here mentioned at the end of this paragraph as well. Oy.
So, should the owner of the New Jersey deli who displayed the placard in favor of White History Month, Jim Bogess, have his identity as a White American bogusfied? Not at all. I affirm his sentiment that “I shouldn't have to feel bad about being white.” I also think Bhakti Curtis, that sad and surly Irish, Polish, Afro-American subject who is presently under police protection against the threats he received for saying, basically, “the fact that my proud heritage is both Black and White is neither black nor white,” is accurate when he detects in Bogess’s sentiments an overlapping Whiteness that is indeed a part of White History, a history that may be being perpetuated even now in the annals of Congressional History, as well as in whatever history of criminal justice may be studied and written in our colleges and universities. The “justice” part of Criminal Justice is all too often easy to dismiss as impractical or even idealistic for all kinds of reasons, reasons which, in this great experiment called the United States, must be challenged if we are to survive as the Republic our White, European and very imperfect forefathers envisioned from the outset.
A day after the NJ controversy over White History erupted, Jim Bogess apologized to Bhakti Curtis and he removed the placard from his storefront window.
Dialogue is the cornerstone of democracy, and plurality, diversity, is ever the root, the raison d'être, of our politics. Like it or not, it is by nature and necessity that people relate to one another as political beings, private, public. And still, even knowing all of this, an age old battle between haves and have-nots, the unequal and inequitable distribution of wealth and inequality now structurally embedded in our laws and our national ethos, connects to both our history and our economic exclusivities, and remains contentious and ongoing.
Ultimately, the discussion is not about wealth, per se, although wealth—its accumulation and its uses—is part and parcel with what really is at stake. For, what really is at stake is this: our natures, our lives as individuals with certain inalienable rights. We are by nature socio-political beings who, because we really do need one another in order to survive, must determine how best to live together. We are Promethean by nature, both free and bound, finite. What’s best and human in us has been tethered to an economically Procrustean State. The checks and balances once in place have, in the name of greed and greed alone, been usurped by people who enjoy not liberty, but license in the form of a bought and unregulated power.
Like our two New Jersey friends Jim Bogess and Bhakti Curtis, we too must act and interact, and our politicians, along with all of us citizens, must take to heart the good and wise counsel contained in Thomas Jefferson's declaration - "When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.” Our history proffers periods apropos to the remonstrance. Ours may indeed qualify as one of those periods. Those at the top, and those who do not grasp the enormity of what's at stake today must listen. The lesson is solemn and grave. Either they fall back to moral ground or, according to duty, those citizens who do understand what's at stake must act to reinvigorate not a superior ideology, but rather, all that is noble and good about being human beings who are connected, one to another, in sundry and diverse and beautiful ways on God's good earth.