American Democracy has not been Democratic

Is there anything that will make the masses of white people own up to the fact that there is such a thing as white supremacy in these United States, that it has existed for years, and that it has produced “side effects” which continue to affect African-Americans today?

I listened to Bill O’Reilly go toe to toe with Dr. Cornel West, and in their discussion, O’Reilly said he did not believe there is such a thing as white privilege. (http://newsone.com/3168784/cornel-west-schools-bill-oreilly-on-white-supremacy-trickle-down-economics/) O’Reilly is an historian of sorts. He knows what the history of this nation has been as concerns black people. So when he said that, I just sat back, frustrated.

Nowhere do we hear from this nation’s white “leaders” except, maybe, from former President Jimmy Carter, that America has a sordid past as concerns its treatment of black people for which there needs to be atonement. While America blasts ISIS for brutal behavior, her leaders keep her brutality under wraps. The lynching of black people, a huge reality, is something we just don’t talk about. We, Americans, burned black people for being accused, not necessarily convicted of, crimes. We denied people “fair” trials by juries “of their peers.” White people, claiming to be Christian, led by their pastors, treated black people like rabid animals, not human beings with needs, feelings and emotions. White slave traders broke up black families as they looked for the best “deals” to wield the greatest profits for America’s growing economy, and now they complain about the broken black family which too often has no father figure present. White politicians ignored the right of all children to get a good education, denying funds to schools in black rural and urban areas for those schools to provide solid educations for black children. White systems made it impossible for black people who fought in America’s wars to get loans for homes and for education, once they returned home from serving their country. White law enforcement officers often participated in violence against black people; white presidents turned deaf ears and blind eyes to the needs of black people.

I read about the lynching of Sam Hose (http://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/502), accused of killing his boss, and I wept. The going reason for lynching black people was that black men were raping white women. Facts show, however, that it was white men who were raping black women – without ever having to pay for it. Black women were pieces of meat, owned by white men. They were desecrated and humiliated, and were impregnated at the same time. I am sure some black men raped white women, but in many cases, the sex between black men and white women was consensual. White women would lie and say they were raped in order not to be killed by their husbands. Why won’t white people talk about how they are not so “holy,” not so “blameless?”

White people have no idea about how their racism has impacted black people, making masses of black people live in fear. The Great Migration, brilliantly written about in The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, happened in large part because white people terrorized black people in the South, behavior sanctioned by and participated in by politicians and law enforcement officers.

Surely, Mr. O’Reilly knows this and more, and surely, he recognizes that emotional trauma like this – which has not stopped – yields side-effects. Surely too he knows that mass incarceration, on top of black people having limited access to employment, has resulted in disintegration of the African-American community. Surely …

White people seem oblivious to their history. They seem, for the most part, to want to keep their heads in the sand; many refuse to admit that the Civil War was about slavery (states’ rights meant states wanted the right to own slaves). They refuse to admit that Jim Crow worked to dehumanize black people, even as it worked to undo the freedoms black people enjoyed for a short time. They will not own that their participation in job and housing discrimination was something they could do because they were and are white – that their whiteness gave them the privilege of participating in a system which was bullying black people further and further into second class status.

All this happened as white Christians abdicated the dictates of Christianity to live in and with agape love for all people.

America’s democracy has not been democratic, not for black people, and white people will not own it.

A candid observation

Talking “Stuff”

It is the day after Thanksgiving, and Black Friday sales have lured shoppers into stores. Some people finished dinner yesterday and then went shopping. It is an American tradition – this Black Friday thing, and it is the love of almost everyone – to shop.

After President Obama was re-elected, Bill O’Reilly, apparently disappointed about the outcome of the election, said ” “It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.”

Is that accurate, about the percentage of Americans wanting “stuff?” Doesn’t everyone want “stuff?” Don’t wealthy people want “stuff,” too, and the more “stuff” they are able to purchase, the more they want to purchase? Isn’t the knowledge that people want “stuff,” stuff they do not need, the driver behind capitalism? Isn’t the desire for stuff the reason wealthy people buy the most expensive clothes, buy as many homes as they want, and engage in collecting art and jewelry. and cars. Stuff. And the more they can get, the more stuff they want to get.

O’Reilly was criticizing the president’s base, that “50 percent” which, he says, is the proof that we don’t have a “traditional” America anymore. These people, he says, feel entitled to “stuff” from the government, things like health care, mortgage assistance, provision to make it easier to go to college. Said O’Reilly: “The voters, many of them, feel this economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You’re gonna see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things — and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?”

Everybody wants stuff. When it comes to some of the entitlements that are so expensive, the government helping “the least of these” is making fiscal conservatives worried and angry. I understand the worry…but if the government did not help those who are suffering unduly because they are poor, what kind of government would we be? While we are engaging in wars all over the world to help people attain “freedom,” what does our “freedom” here look like? I heard yesterday that there ought to be a distinction made between those who are “rich” and those who are “wealthy.” This economist said that the gap between the wealthy and the rest of us is getting larger and larger, making us look like the oligarchies of Third World countries that we criticize.

I don’t do Black Friday. I like “stuff” too, but I don’t have a need or desire to buy “stuff” just for “stuff’s” sake. We capitalistic system teaches us to want stuff; we are manipulated by skillful marketing to look at “stuff” so that we keep making the rich richer. Our spending is what keeps capitalism rolling along. And that spending and desire for “stuff” is not limited to 50 percent of the populace who voted for President O’Bama.

I hate it when the masses of people are criticized for wanting what the elite want. We all see the same commercials, and yearn for “more and more.” Elite as well as commoners are deeply in debt. The majority of people want to live beyond their needs.

It’s the desire for “stuff” that keeps everyone spending, and keeps the rich, or perhaps the wealthy, as comfortable as they are.

It’s human nature, Mr. O’Reilly. It’s not Democrat or Republican. It’s not black, Hispanic or white, male or female It’s human.

O’Reilly wants America to stop giving what he thinks are hand-outs to people in need. There is nothing wrong with wanting health care, or wanting a college education to be more affordable, with wanting to be able to make it in America. It’s the American way. The people out shopping now are going to be using credit cards, keeping credit card companies in the black. Retailers are salivating, hoping more and more people will come out for “stuff.” The purpose of being in business is to make money, make a profit. Companies don’t care where people spending money got their money. They just want the money. They want us to want …stuff.

Mr. O’Reilly, your comment was one of the most ignorant I have heard in a long time.

A candid observation…

When Things Fall Apart

Clearly, for a large number of Americans, things either have fallen or are falling apart in this nation.

Conservatives, bitterly disappointed over the outcome of this week’s presidential election, have resorted to calling for a revolution (Donald Trump) to saying that “America died” (Victoria Jackson), to a musing that America is no longer, “traditional,” the country of our forebears (Bill O’Reilly) to Karl Rove refusing to acknowledge President Obama’s victory on Fox News. Gov. Romney’s loss has left a bitter, bitter taste in the mouths of too many.

America, for many, is suffering, a suffering that goes to her very soul. Things as they were, comfortable for white males, have changed, and the change is horribly bitter. I am reminded of Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” where he writes:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

For many, anarchy has come to America.

Karen Armstrong said that when things change as radically as they are in America, there is a resurgence of fundamentalism. People run to that which they know, that which seems safe. But it seems that even fundamentalism in this nation, that which the Christian Right has held onto and used to its political advantage, is changing. Younger religious people are pulling away from a religion that is exclusive and, too often, mean-spirited in the name of Jesus.

Things fall apart.

Joan Chittister, in her book, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, writes that we are living in an era in need of a spirituality of struggle. Nothing is the same as we knew it, no matter who we are. With the emergence of a global economy and a global political awareness, everything has changed. We are no longer able, as Americans, to sit content in a cocoon. We are touched by the whole world; the whole world has access to us as never before. We, for a while had access to them. Now, they have access to us. We don’t like it. This new reality is not comfortable.

In our own country, the demographics of a nation clearly in the grip of change has upset everything. I watched rallies at which Gov. Mitt Romney spoke during the presidential campaign, and was sad. There were so many white faces, and so few black and brown faces. Did he really think he could ignore such a large part of America? Chittister says that “we are people born in a white, Western, Christian culture that we watch become more brown, more Eastern, more polyvalent every day.”

And, she says, “it shakes us to the center of our souls.”

Change for individuals, things falling apart for individuals, is no easier for them than it is for a nation as great as is the United States. We as individuals, many of us, are experiencing change so radical that our souls have been shaken almost to annihilation. We do not like what we are feeling, and we want it to stop. But change, once it begins, seems to have a mind of its own. It continues to its fruition, and all we can do is deal with it.

Chittister says that some of us fall into deep depression as the change in our lives takes its course. She says that “the spiritual question becomes how to go about each dying day without giving in to the death of the soul.” That question, she says, is at the crux of a spirituality of struggle. And how we handle things falling apart will either result in clinical depression or spiritual growth.

It feels like much of Conservative America is headed toward clinical depression. We as a nation are not doing so well with the onslaught of change that is confronting us. We grew comfortable in our complacency. We didn’t want to change. But in spite of our protests, change is marching through our very cores. Things are falling apart.

My prayer is that fewer and fewer individuals are reacting as poorly to the changes and challenges and struggles that are happening in our personal lives. Most of us don’t want the changes that come into our lives, sometimes uninvited and sometimes, invited by our own actions. We like sitting in our saucers. It’s comfortable there.

But life is about change. Life is about things, as we have always known them, falling apart.

The hope is that even as things fall apart, we will remain intact, and become stronger. That is especially the hope I have for America. Maybe it’s because the re-election of President Obama is still too new, too raw, but right now it doesn’t feel like America is growing stronger. A politician from Texas said something about “divorcing” from America. That would be secession, right? We as a nation don’t seem to be doing too well with the changes. It feels like we are …falling apart.

A candid observation…