Saturday, December 15, 2012

American Manifesto Part Four: Prejudice


American Manifesto Part Four: Prejudice
A country that does not want prejudice should not legalize prejudice

"Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective." Martin Luther King

This section of the blog is the shortest, because as a nation I think it is where we have progressed the farthest; however we still have a long journey to go.  Then again, I am a white male; how would I know? How far have we come in race relations in America?  We fought our greatest war over slavery?  Was the war over recognizing the basic human dignity of each human being?  Did humans fight for an inherent truth?

How much of it was economics or state’s rights?  How much of it was the preservation of wealth?  The South concentrated its economic power in the exploitation of African slaves as free labor to fuel an agricultural economy as new American wealth.  The North was more industrialized and modernized, and by its nature less capable of growing such cash-crops due to weather.  The North was filled with shipped-over older European wealth, yet our founding fathers owned slaves.  Did the North just want to eliminate the South’s biggest economic engine and cement its foothold as the head of the nation? 

The inherent truth is humans should not be slaves.  People should never own people.  It is wrong.  If the Civil War effectively ended slavery in America as an indirect rather than direct consequence of the North’s victory so be it.

People have died, families destroyed, and children’s innocence replaced with fear because of racial hatred, ignorance and prejudice.  That fear breeds misconceptions. The separation of conversations from face-to-face families interacting across racial barriers has impeded our ability to see our common humanity. 

People want the same things, those base needs of health, education, food and security to be met.  Humans want to help our kids grow, learn, and develop into happy functioning adults.  Regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, political party, religion or North or South, our inability in America to be honest about this common desire is one of our greatest flaws.  This insecurity will die under the foot of Generation X from children swaddled by the adolescents of the 1960’s, who had the benefit of every prior generation. 

"Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it." Martin Luther King

Our media exploits victimization based on race, gender, sexual orientation or religion to perpetuate the gullibility of TV viewers.  Gullible viewers vote for the candidate media advertisements endorse.  Gullible viewers buy the products media companies advertise and boost their profits.  Gullible viewers allow the media to focus on inexpensive puff human-interest pieces rather than real news because fluff gets higher ratings.  Gullible viewers will protest in bands of political outraged citizens over the use of one person’s word rather than actions in the name of civil rights.  Hell, there is more outrage over one utterance of the word nigger by the collective mouthpiece that is CNN, Fox News, CNBC, and World News Tonight, then for hundreds of African Americans slain in our streets every year through gun violence. 

How many kids have to die before it is called genocide?  In the words of Chris Rock, “it’s not the word; it’s the context in which the word is used.”  Why not let our words hold us together to have real conversations about what we can work towards with a common focus?  Let us not ignore our history and our scars, but let us not let our scars paralyze us from concentric living.



The Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement was not about political correctness.  The civil rights movement was trying to stop human necks from being roped up in trees, blind-eye murders, and stone-walled access not the implied sentiment of quotes taking out of context.  The civil rights movement took a stand for our common humanity and our equal ability to succeed and fail in life’s inherent dignified pursuits. 

The movement for the man shot down at the Loraine Motel was about seeing people for who we are, in our greatness and in our flaws.  People like Dr. King lived so that we can talk about race or our career or any aspect of human experience in an open conversation without being fixated on over-sensitivities perpetuated by ignorance. 

We should be allowed the freedoms to succeed or fail with the same consequence regardless of race.  Why do we preclude or exclude someone from understanding the mechanics of our soul based on a divergent path of a family history to arrive at our current position? 

"All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality." Martin Luther King

We are creatures of change, whether we choose to or not; the world around us can not be still.  Generation X knows the paradigm has shifted.  The experiences of the teenagers and adults living through 1960’s America saw a harsh and raw transition to generate the bulb that is only now blooming.  As those individuals approach retirement their children and grandchildren have brought some of Dr. King’s dream into partial fruition.  It is Generation X’s duty to finish the cross-pollination in the way we live, raise our kids, elect our leaders and vote.  So that after us, every subsequent human will reflect on such proponents of prejudice like people who use to believe the Earth was flat as the ignorant-flawed humans they were.

When any of us see racists acts carried out by individuals, groups, or own government rationalized by stereotypes or profiling to gloss over them as the status quo we need to stand, call it out and demand consequences.  The internet is often most helpful in this respect.  However, we are often given bits of facts or reality.  In the confusion sometimes we take our outrage and make it fit to lash out like a hand grenade or sometimes the funnel where outrage should be is muted by ignorant assumptions.

We can not raise the dead, but we can change perceptions.  I can see why black America feels a twisting blade in a wound, that no matter what year it is there will always be the reconstruction of past racial atrocities in the mental perception of killings.  But we can not let either side of that pain paint the picture of how we view entire races based upon the actions of the ignorant.

A Short Insufficient Historical Recap Attempt
The end of the civil war around 1865, and the 13th and 14th amendments to the constitution ended slavery and guaranteed blacks the ability to vote and sit on a jury, but a score of Jim Crow laws and Black Codes ushered on a new form of racial segregation for the next one hundred years. 

In 1892, Homer Plessy led a failed political statement to root out racial discrimination on a train car in Treme, a neighborhood in New Orleans.  Treme was home to the largest population of free blacks in the United States prior to the ending of slavery.  Treme is an historic neighborhood built from home owners.  Plessy and his lawyer Albion Tourgee intended to point out the unconstitutionality of segregated transportation and instead, in what I consider the worst supreme court decision in this nation’s history legalized separate but equal for seventy years in a devastating blow to progress. 

Education, transportation, and public places were now segmented with the blessing of the federal government.  A new form of slavery was born in the name of avoiding imputed public-discomfort from races interacting.  This separate but equal brought about disproportionate funding and the same implied-inferiority of the “colored” system, Plessy and Tourgee were arguing to end. 

We wonder why we have so much trouble in America talking with each other as human beings first rather than rationalizing silence because of our racial group.  Only by looking at the ugliness of the past and letting it go, can we move forward.

It was not until 1954, in Brown versus the Board of Education that the segregation in schools legitimized through the failures of Plessy versus Ferguson, was deemed illegal under the work of Thurgood Marshall.  In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was finally passed. 

"The value of love will always be stronger than the value of hate.  Any nation or group of nations which employs hatred eventually is torn to pieces by hatred..."Franklin Roosevelt

Racial segregation both legalized and indoctrinated are examples of where we have failed as a people, of where we allowed ignorance to guide the masses to make judgments based on fear of what was different from the proclaimed norm.

The Evolution of Affirmative Action
To counteract that history we passed affirmative action policies.  Policies which were meant to correct injustice and to prevent exclusion, but by their nature they are inherently racist.  Justified by a sorry-ass history I can see how at one point in time those policies did more good than harm.  But in today’s world, I am not certain they do, but then again I am white and I don’t know. 

Being white I put my race in my back pocket like a biometric asset pass-card to enter and go as I please.  I do not think about the shade in my skin or my diction as a consideration at border crossings.  I rarely if ever feel the alternative.  I admit ignorance, but at some point I hope we can choose love-based over fear-based policies.  

Advanced digital software allows racially-blind decision making tools to be far more pragmatic in various situations where affirmative action may have been utilized in the past.  I think we are better if we focus on income (class)-based assistance in our education and entitlement subsides where the selection process is done blind to race, and possibly name and focus on applicant qualifications without racial quotas, but possibly income quotas of the individual or the parents of the individual based on the applicant’s age.  Although that may just be a distant utopia and people will always be racist idiots, but who knows with a few generations churned?  Possibly by recognizing the struggles of class, rather than race, in a weird relation we can see communalities independent of race born by society rather than genetics.

The underbelly of affirmative action is that it implies a compromise of quality to rationalize its continuance or maybe it just implies Darwinian human imperfection in those selecting.  An implication that the individual chosen for the job, the contract, or the admittance to the university due to the policy was chosen not for their intelligence, capabilities or the content of their character, but because of their race or gender.  That is demeaning and condescending. 

Affirmative Action leaves unnecessary lingering question marks in the minds of everyone affected about why the decision rendered utilizing affirmative action criteria came to a just conclusion.  Plessy’s case was to argue against the implied inferiority of the colored train car versus the white train car despite the argument of equal but separate at the time.  Affirmative action inherently possesses the same sentiment of implied inferiority, but instead of the services provided to a people it implies it in the people.  At minimum it implies, humans are self-interested fucks, who will prioritize the mirror of skin, culture or gender we see in the arbitrary decisions our government permits us to make to reaffirm our own status and Darwinian self-interest, subconsciously or consciously.

Any implied inferiority to me is the biggest clog in the pipes to truly acknowledging the racial progress we have made in America and opening the flood gates to a system of true equality and to close the gap of mental segregation we have been taught at our respective dinner tables.

The idea that there is a difference in the goals of African, European, Latino, Middle Eastern and Asian Americans etc. in what we each want for ourselves and our family is ridiculous.  The true victory of a people is to self-actualize into our greatest potential and be allowed to fail or thrive in doing so. 

How can we progress as a nation if we stereotype part of America in allocating success of security and economic independence as some how a crime and incarceration and having it painful to make ends meet each month are treated as keeping-it-real to a racial identity?  This is a dangerous psychology to combat.

The political exploitation of low income voting blocks, the current tax system, disproportionate incarceration rates for similar crimes (especially drug-related offenses) and federal distribution of benefits incentivizes the poor to remain unemployed, unmarried, and with an increased family size exacerbates the proliferation of this negative stereotype in a disproportionate manner along racial lines.  Addressing these issues for the good of all of us will be described in part eight.

"Nothing will work unless you do." Maya Angelou

How can we end prejudice in America if we believe that passing prejudicial laws in this country is ok?  Will ending affirmative action end racism, no.  In many ways I argue with myself that the exact opposite is true, because the idea of love over fear may belong in fairy tales rather than New York, Atlanta, or Los Angeles.  Racist assholes will be racist assholes.  In my opinion in the long run the inferences of inferiority cause a greater disconnect between our common humanity that is a greater detriment to our society then the benefit of the actual instances of unearthed opportunity to qualified applicants that the policies create if we can not reward the growth of our collective. 

Some people will hold on in fervor that racism still exists at levels rampant enough to validate affirmative action’s continued necessity.  They would argue that these laws and standards assist in balancing out that unfairness along with countless unbalanced injustices throughout our country’s history.  When we look at poverty, unemployment, health care coverage and standard of living rates the mathematics do not lie.  Race affects life.

Neo-slavery incarceration disproportionately affects colored children.  The color-by-number human book of prison is bathed in a brown skin hue disproportionate to the total population.  Juvenile detention centers play social trap games. 

Every parent has hope for his child.  Bloods, Crypts, Latin Kings, ghettos and barrios: everybody’s strapped.  What will you carry?  Love or fear?  Decreased funding for prophylactic shots, universal healthcare-funded voluntary vasectomies, Plan B pills and I.U.D’s; taxpayer religious righteousness trumps finance.  Penises and vagina’s of poor teenagers reach for love in a world vomiting violence and fear.  Hypocrites spit from ivory towers on cycles of papoose poverty. 

Racism exists.  It always will, but the neo-1960’s millennial teenage decade battle crier would like to believe it is a decaying mantra of the fringes of the fearful extremes in our country white and black.  Based on the evolution of America, Generation X is the first generation blessed with the tools to entomb rather than simply suppress such prejudice on a macro-level.  But we still need to combat poverty like the mutual burden it is red-state Nebraska and blue state California.  The path away from racial prejudice and affirmative action policies runs through properly addressing the challenges of class, number one of which is poverty.  We must reframe the argument.

I believe the man who says it will never be fair has to let go of the fear he holds in his clenched hand and open it up to hold the hand of his neighbor who is just like him to allow this country to transcend its past failures.  Trust and love are fragile assets.  Generation X is opening our hands with the aid of the obliteration of ignorance the civil rights movement provided to our parents. 



If we can continue to reform our public schooling and health care delivery systems to encourage level playing fields, natural racial assimilation in the human pipelines will diminish ignorance produced from racial segregation perpetuated through class.  Maybe affirmative action helps get us there better.  I am not sure.  The pandemic of poverty transcends race, yet we ineffectively fight with blame over empathy.

Eventually we need to open our voice that we are ready to let go of our fear and replace it with a common faith.  We need to fulfill Dr. King’s dream and the people who fought for it should have enough faith to open up the possibility of it being achieved in their own lifetimes.

"Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love."  Mohandas Gandhi

Homosexual Prejudices
The other major bastion of prejudice in America is against homosexuals.  The hypocrisy of those who use God’s name to trivialize the connection between two people of the same gender who live committed and loving lives with one another as merely an issue about sex is overwhelmingly ignorant.  To claim an act of sex between two consenting adults is a sin in a given religion to justify a public law outlawing such practices or the marriage of those individuals on “religious” grounds oversteps our constitutional rights for a separation of church and state.  No matter how wide spread Christianity, Islam, or any religion may be in America; such judgmental discretions are a matter of personal preference not personal “religious” legislation.  This is an equal rights issue.

Homosexual rights have nothing to do with sex and everything to do with the recognition of equalities that the 14th Amendment purports to provide under the law.  The most glaring question I have for people who are so adamant in opposition to the issues of legal gay marriage or civil unions and divorces and the provision of all the legal and tax benefits and consequences under the law is, “Who does it hurt to deny this except for the only people seeking to engage and participate in the activities which the State is making illegal?”  There is no negative externality to allowing such freedoms what so ever, but there are real world consequences that breed a culture of ignorance and intolerance. 

Some people might concoct to the degradation of traditional heterosexual marriage, which is the same sort of logic that generated fear in Plessy versus Ferguson.  Some people fear the delusion that if straight people interact with gay people that will indicate that straight people were some how less-heterosexual or that children being exposed to the idea that gay marriage exists will encourage homosexuality. 

Some people equate this as against a religious law and equate homosexuality with sins with killing or lying.  Some people dole out some sort of connection between pedophilia and homosexuality, as if the monsters who commit such crimes are not more often heterosexual.  Similar logic led to the separate but equal laws on the train cars and the school rooms of the early 1900’s; that were rationalized because some how everyone was just more comfortable with a segregated society.

Homosexuals are human beings.  The concept of segregating adults because of who they love is cruel and unusual punishment rationalized by our inability to be honest about humanity.

Zealots preaching from the Bible may argue clauses that God said marriage was the sacrament joining a man and woman for life.  They may espouse that homosexual marriage is an abomination against what God says because it was printed in the Bible.  Fundamentalists may bring up polygamy, bestiality, or the marriage between an adult and a child to vomit frantic unrelated fear-based arguments to oppose gay marriage under a mandate for required definitions and rules.

People can argue all day about the intent, author, or relevance of religious texts or if it should have any relevance to our secular constitution.   But one of if not the most highly held Christian beliefs in the Bible also says that Jesus said, “the greatest commandment above all is to love your neighbor as yourself,” and what greater lesson is there for a Christian to allow two people to share their love and commitment in a dignified manner that perpetuates that greatest commandment rather than violate some clause from the Old Testament written by some man who had no concept of the tax or legal ramifications of marriage leading to a woman being banned from sitting aside the hospital bed of her partner. 

Penises in assholes, cunnilingus; get over it. Adults have sex.  Conservative puritans aghast at sodomy, jerking off to the U.S. bombing Baghdad; gay couples don’t make welfare babies and don’t have abortions, but do pay taxes.

No one in America today would seek to deny a Muslim or a Catholic from getting civilly married or a white woman and an Asian man.  No one should deny that freedom to two women or two men.  It is selfishly laden with bigotry to deny this personal freedom, even more so in a secular country and at its root unconstitutional.

The reality is there have been closeted and now openly out homosexuals walking the floors of congress.  The discrimination and bigotry carried out as legislation to deny homosexuals the spirit of the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution has been perpetuated by both sides of the aisle and in some cases most adamantly by some of those suspected to being closeted gays living a lie.  What kind of self-hatred and fear must our society impart to a human being to carry out such a duplicitous lifestyle?  People have a right to fuck who they want, just don’t fuck the American people.

America needs to be honest with her self.  Coming out is no different.  In the same sentiments of Harvey Milk, if every homosexual in the world came out openly to everyone he or she knew, how many people would have a face for homosexuality to relate to a human reality, and would desist perpetuating the bigotry of ignorance that allows the political room for such discriminations against homosexuals to exist in this country?

Pass a federal law legalizing every adult’s right to marry any other adult over the legal age of marital consent, given the other party’s consent and the consent of any adult currently married to either party which conveys all the legal rights and privileges of marriage.  The only role the government has in marriage is in the legal rights marriage conveys and ensuring a level playing field.  This is an equal rights issue.

Progress
Progress comes in leaps of faith in our own humanity to accept our inherent truths and to parcel out and extinguish the calamities created through the history of our collective mistakes.  What kind of life do we want to lead and leave for our children?  We can hold on to fear.  We can gloss over the realities of injustices still existing in our country, but our greatest weapon to combat ignorance is truth. 

The truth is no law that utilizes race or sexual orientation as a line of demarcation will legislate one America with justice for all.  Justice can only come from communication, friendships and sharing our lives.  We have honesty in our common humanity, yearning to love other humans, to raise our families in peaceful homes, and to break bread to eat the same foods, to drink the same water, and to say today or maybe one day we live in the same America. 

People get incomplete answers by judging humans on our appearance rather than our actions.  People could look at me and my best friend and call us natural enemies, but in the words of my favorite punk band Rancid, “He’s a different color, but we’re the same kid, I treat him like my brother and he’ll treat me like his.”  People could look at my religion and call me a bigot against homosexuals, but having religious faith, does not mean you follow blindly or are ignorant to scientific facts, or let the extreme views of pieces of a religion cannibalize the heart of what you believe. 

Love is always stronger than hate, so is common sense.  People could look at my friends from a punk show and call them hooligans when punk is some of the most inclusive unity music in the world.  Each book has thousands of words, but only one cover, all you have to do is display the discipline to read the pages.

People in America have made this unfortunate voluntary segregation, which has diminished our children’s ability to interact and uncover our communalities.  The first step is to open our own minds and re-define our preconceptions and methods of judgment, to allow for systematic change. 

"Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk."  Carl Jung

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