RACE, ECONOMICS, POLITICS: 2012

It's the ECONOMICS, Stupid??

Richard Frye and Michael Wallace, http://www.c-span.org/Series/Washington-Journal/ reported today on their work analyzing the social segregation of the rich and the poor within neighborhoods across the country.  Two findings jump out: the rich are gathering in separate neighborhoods (both black and white, together) and everyone else is being squeezed in a direction leading to poverty and away from home ownership.

Hooray!  We've fought Segregation and Segregation won!, Only now we're being segregated by whether or not we're included in the 1%.  On second thought, given the way President Obama has been treated by U.S citizens, its true that Integration failed to change basic racial attitudes completely.  Education and Wealth can carry non-whites only so far! 

Born in 1939, as "Negro" (on my birth certificate), I know a thing or two about Segregation (U.S., Course 101).  Make no mistake, Economics is the over-arching theme; then and now.  Notice also that the new data is reported by neighborhoods; not states, regions, or even cities or towns.

Looking back, it is clear now that Segregation, Jim, Crow, or whatever name it was called, was first and foremost an ECONOMIC system (also known as Peonage).  It was the system Chattel Slavery morphed into when Reconstruction was aborted following the Rutherford B. Hayes administration.

The families who showed up, in the 1950's, on the black side of the tracks in my small town in Missouri (with only the shirts on their backs), were escaping in the dark of night from Sharecropping in the southern states.  Re-visit "Miss Hilly" in the Mississippi of the 1960's in "The Help", to see peonage in full bloom.  Look at our privatized prison system to see the 21st century version of peonage. 

Racial Segregation in Missouri and outside the deep South was more social than economic.  The wealthier blacks were highly educated and were bound by the system with lower class and less educated blacks.  After the end of legal Segregation in the 60's, the wealthier and better-educated blacks escaped, leaving the less-wealthy and lesser educated blacks behind.  Only the black church and the general racial attitudes of whites kept the color bond intact.

I remember when they integrated the police force in my small town.  Blacks were given uniforms and billy clubs, but not allowed to carry guns.  If they wanted to exert authority over a black disobeying the law, they could do so.  If they discovered a white disobeying the law, they had to go tell a white officer.  We've gone some distance socially, but an even greater distance economically, for some,

The recent shooting (yes, there's been another mass killing since DKS) at the Sikh Mosque, shows the growing violence of disaffected whites who have fallen out of the Middle Class and blame non-whites and members of non-Christian religions.

As the winged swirl of  the ascending, monied, Undertaker class advances, expect more of this news.