Savage Inequalities
One of the most ardent points argued in Savage Inequalities is the inherent connection in America between poverty, racism, and the unwillingness of the haves in society to open the doors of education to the have-nots. But this link between poverty and racism is not clearly defined in the book, which is one of its glaring flaws – it is simply assumed to exist for obvious reasons. The problem I have, a problem shared by many concerned bourgeois citizens, is that there is no clear-cut method for deciding when the haves are being racist or discriminatory towards poverty. The two are so inextricably intertwined in our collective subconscious for the obvious reasons in both cause and effect that it is impossible to separate the two problems and divide and conquer. For example, we know that the black twenty-somethings are hanging out in front of the 7-11 at midnight because they have been born of and into poverty and denied an education by the wealthy and therefore are escaping through drugs, the only way they know how to make money and throw off the burden of a difficult existence (Or are they?), but do we look down on them because they are black or poor?
The answer is both. You cannot have one without the other in the collective American mind, and by God, they should be working that much harder than the rest of us to overcome not one but two crippling social stigmas. Those of us in the know feel sympathy for their plight, but not many of us are willing to do what it takes to solve the problem. And it is even a sad fact that I am compelled to write “those of us in the know” in the first place. Being a disciple of Noam Chomsky, I am fascinated by his at once superficial and in depth analysis of the American media in his book Media Control, in which he argues elaborately against the capitalist media control machine. A free democratic society can only properly function when its citizens are informed and information is disseminated thoroughly the Founding Fathers thought, but there is so much information that is not reported to the public. One does not have to be highly literate or interested in education to appreciate a book like Savage Inequalities, but how many Americans actually have? I am among the best-educated persons in America, and I did not even know what the Mississippi Delta was before I arrived here last summer. It seems as though our activism is censored; we do just enough to affect change so that the majority does not even have to know that there is something to be changed.
The question then becomes: why this censorship? On the surface, Americans cry out for equality, but in reality, we cannot achieve this equity in a capitalist society. (And this touches on the argument from the article “Black Boys”.) Nor do we want to. Upper-middle class Americans need someone to work below the poverty line so we can buy a Big Mac for two dollars and a CD from Wal-Mart for ten. The common ethos, which is a gross misperception, is that if everybody is treated fairly and given the same chance, then those who work hardest will succeed – that is after all what the Puritans who landed on Plymouth believed. But by definition, capitalism must have its winners and losers, and moreover, the winners and losers are already predetermined by the caste system in America that no one wants to admit exists. So the machine is controlled: the haves remain haves, the have-nots remain have-nots, and those decent people among us who have the good grace to selfishly look past our own selfish selves are piped into programs like the Mississippi Teacher Corps by means of a controlled media to help balance the gap enough to satisfy the bleeding heart liberals but not enough to rock the boat of the die hard conservatives. And all this going on without most Americans even realizing it!
Returning to the idea of the link between poverty and racism, one wonders today how Alexis de Tocqueville was able to make the claim that Americans actually value equality more than liberty. But we no longer live in the fledgling middle class society that Tocqueville was describing. Kozol, living in and analyzing an America radically different both racially and economically, argues that Americans, at least when it comes to public schools if not public transportation and utilities, value liberty – the liberty to spend money discretely - much more than equality. But who possesses the liberty to spend money? Those who have it. Americans value freedom for the rich and the rich only, because if they valued freedom for all they might have found a way to block Bush’s tax reforms and redistributed the hundred billion dollars spent to terrorize innocent Iraqis on the domestic agenda instead. The problem with American capitalism in relation to education is that it has somehow managed to brainwash both the haves and have-nots in society to detest and abhor the legend of Robin Hood based on the notion of private property, as Kozol points out. But who else but Robin Hood is going to even pretend to help out the poor and the disenfranchised?
Poor Americans are taught that through hard work they can transcend the system. (The Protestant Work Ethic returns!) But this is only another form of social control by the media and those who control the media. Kozol, along with many of his colleagues, continuously point out that even after such exposes as his reach the shelf, it is only the specific instances examined that are fixed. That is, only John F. Generic School studied in John Doe’s brilliant muckraking book receives aid after its fifteen minutes of national attention, and the larger issues that affect millions more children at thousands of other American schools remain unchanged. But at least the elitists are hard at work to equalize and provide opportunity! For every one success story like Bill Clinton rising from the nothingness of poverty there are uncounted millions who by definition cannot rise and must not rise for capitalism to continue to feed its own monster. But at least we had a Bill Clinton one time, let us cover that story again and ignore the others who are not Bill Clinton! And even more recently, nobody seemed to know or care how poor a city New Orleans was until all the sudden all those poor blacks were invading our communities looking for a place to live and begging for inadequate government housing. Now that they are bothering us and staring us in the face do we begin to speak about those forgotten poor black citizens. The guilt, of course, will only last until we can forget about them again after shipping them back to the hell they came from, but at least we will have raised enough money to do that.
In America, if you are poor you are probably black and if you are black you are probably poor. One would be difficult enough to overcome but when combined it is near impossible. There are multitudes trying to help, but those with the real influence, money, do not wish the system to change in any sweeping, meaningful way. Perhaps the next generation of activists can convince America of the truth and attack both issues at the same time, but in the meantime, how many more millions of children will perpetuate the cycle of racism and poverty unwittingly and as unwilling victims? And how many more poster-children will the corporate whores hold up to trick America into thinking that they are not to blame?
The answer is both. You cannot have one without the other in the collective American mind, and by God, they should be working that much harder than the rest of us to overcome not one but two crippling social stigmas. Those of us in the know feel sympathy for their plight, but not many of us are willing to do what it takes to solve the problem. And it is even a sad fact that I am compelled to write “those of us in the know” in the first place. Being a disciple of Noam Chomsky, I am fascinated by his at once superficial and in depth analysis of the American media in his book Media Control, in which he argues elaborately against the capitalist media control machine. A free democratic society can only properly function when its citizens are informed and information is disseminated thoroughly the Founding Fathers thought, but there is so much information that is not reported to the public. One does not have to be highly literate or interested in education to appreciate a book like Savage Inequalities, but how many Americans actually have? I am among the best-educated persons in America, and I did not even know what the Mississippi Delta was before I arrived here last summer. It seems as though our activism is censored; we do just enough to affect change so that the majority does not even have to know that there is something to be changed.
The question then becomes: why this censorship? On the surface, Americans cry out for equality, but in reality, we cannot achieve this equity in a capitalist society. (And this touches on the argument from the article “Black Boys”.) Nor do we want to. Upper-middle class Americans need someone to work below the poverty line so we can buy a Big Mac for two dollars and a CD from Wal-Mart for ten. The common ethos, which is a gross misperception, is that if everybody is treated fairly and given the same chance, then those who work hardest will succeed – that is after all what the Puritans who landed on Plymouth believed. But by definition, capitalism must have its winners and losers, and moreover, the winners and losers are already predetermined by the caste system in America that no one wants to admit exists. So the machine is controlled: the haves remain haves, the have-nots remain have-nots, and those decent people among us who have the good grace to selfishly look past our own selfish selves are piped into programs like the Mississippi Teacher Corps by means of a controlled media to help balance the gap enough to satisfy the bleeding heart liberals but not enough to rock the boat of the die hard conservatives. And all this going on without most Americans even realizing it!
Returning to the idea of the link between poverty and racism, one wonders today how Alexis de Tocqueville was able to make the claim that Americans actually value equality more than liberty. But we no longer live in the fledgling middle class society that Tocqueville was describing. Kozol, living in and analyzing an America radically different both racially and economically, argues that Americans, at least when it comes to public schools if not public transportation and utilities, value liberty – the liberty to spend money discretely - much more than equality. But who possesses the liberty to spend money? Those who have it. Americans value freedom for the rich and the rich only, because if they valued freedom for all they might have found a way to block Bush’s tax reforms and redistributed the hundred billion dollars spent to terrorize innocent Iraqis on the domestic agenda instead. The problem with American capitalism in relation to education is that it has somehow managed to brainwash both the haves and have-nots in society to detest and abhor the legend of Robin Hood based on the notion of private property, as Kozol points out. But who else but Robin Hood is going to even pretend to help out the poor and the disenfranchised?
Poor Americans are taught that through hard work they can transcend the system. (The Protestant Work Ethic returns!) But this is only another form of social control by the media and those who control the media. Kozol, along with many of his colleagues, continuously point out that even after such exposes as his reach the shelf, it is only the specific instances examined that are fixed. That is, only John F. Generic School studied in John Doe’s brilliant muckraking book receives aid after its fifteen minutes of national attention, and the larger issues that affect millions more children at thousands of other American schools remain unchanged. But at least the elitists are hard at work to equalize and provide opportunity! For every one success story like Bill Clinton rising from the nothingness of poverty there are uncounted millions who by definition cannot rise and must not rise for capitalism to continue to feed its own monster. But at least we had a Bill Clinton one time, let us cover that story again and ignore the others who are not Bill Clinton! And even more recently, nobody seemed to know or care how poor a city New Orleans was until all the sudden all those poor blacks were invading our communities looking for a place to live and begging for inadequate government housing. Now that they are bothering us and staring us in the face do we begin to speak about those forgotten poor black citizens. The guilt, of course, will only last until we can forget about them again after shipping them back to the hell they came from, but at least we will have raised enough money to do that.
In America, if you are poor you are probably black and if you are black you are probably poor. One would be difficult enough to overcome but when combined it is near impossible. There are multitudes trying to help, but those with the real influence, money, do not wish the system to change in any sweeping, meaningful way. Perhaps the next generation of activists can convince America of the truth and attack both issues at the same time, but in the meantime, how many more millions of children will perpetuate the cycle of racism and poverty unwittingly and as unwilling victims? And how many more poster-children will the corporate whores hold up to trick America into thinking that they are not to blame?
posted by David Jones | 18:42
2 Comments:
Okay. Curiosity leads me to Census 2000 data on factfinder.census.gov. Out of 281,421,906 Americans, individuals identified as "below poverty level" (whatever that means) number 33,899,812, or about 12.4 percent.
The number of blacks is listed as 34,658,190. The number "below poverty level" is 8,146,146, or about 23.5%.
Dividing the number of Americans beneath the poverty level by the number of blacks beneath the poverty level indicates that about 24% of Americans beneath the poverty level are black.
Now, it is not clear to me what defines the poverty level, or whether you might argue that some group above the poverty level remains "poor;" but it appears to me from these statistics that, though the rate of black poverty is about double that of undifferentiated American poverty (presumably more than double the rate of white American poverty), it is not true that most poor people are black or that most black people are poor. Of course this is no profound defense of American equality, but I do think it precludes the notion that "if you're poor you're probably black, if you're black you're probably poor." Thankfully the truth is messier than that (even if its messiness makes it more difficult to fix).
Well met - although I would argue that the poverty line is probably about half of the 'real' poverty line, and I would be curious myself to see some statistics about that, my comments were pretty over the top. I should be more precise in my language and stay away from the shotgun comments. And, perhaps, I should write when I'm a little less moody and susceptible to the rhetoric I've read most recently and be more aware of the ol' martyr complex...
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