The inconvenience of being racist

Growing up as an airhead, oblivious to the forces in the world around me, I never realized how much my life overlapped with the era of the great civil rights movements until years later. I was a toddler when we got orders to Brownsville, Texas, for my father's first ship command, and moved steadily northward from 1960 to 1965, landing on mid-coast Maine for my father's second ship command.

In Maryland from 1960 or '61 to 1964, there must have been signs of segregation somewhere, but I didn't run into them. In fact, I remember a Black family in our church and school system. I had no idea how ground-breaking that was. Particularly socially inept, I wasn't mingling well with "my own people," let alone exploring across racial lines. I was still just figuring out toilet discipline and the proper way to dispose of boogers.

There were Black sections of town in Annapolis. I just figured they preferred it there. My own family lived in a weird little rental neighborhood called Rogers Heights. Our finances were artificially strained for the first ten years of my life because my parents were unable to unload the first house they'd bought, in an area of Connecticut they wouldn't live in again for another thirty years. The house did sell eventually, which bumped us up a few notches in the middle class from then on.

In all of our travels, from one duty station to the next, or to make regular visits to my grandparents and the cousins who lived in their vicinity, we just piled into the station wagon and went. Motels might be kind of nice or a little weird, but nothing interfered with our passage beyond the usual risks of travel by car.

Thanks to the Internet and social media, we get to see story after story of famous people who stood up for their Black companions looking for rooms and meals in various contexts during the long era of open and legalized segregation. Travel in white supremacist America placed challenges in front of Black and other minority citizens and visitors that could go far beyond mere inconvenience.

The white people who began to push back on segregation could have retreated if the situation escalated to violence. Only when white activists ventured into the deep South to mess with the foundations of political repression did they fall victim to racist murderers themselves. The movement never hinged on one specific act of white resistance. It built on each and all of them. In the case of entertainers and sports figures, the white celebrities used the leverage of their marketability to force the issue on behalf of Black colleagues. The conflict was much more dire in the trenches of voter registration and integration of general public spaces.

Everyone benefitted from the diminishment of segregation. I would say the end of it, but we know that it didn't end. Racists don't stop being racist when they no longer have as much legal right to express it openly and by force. But the freedom to mingle if you so choose and the convenience to travel in whatever racial mix you happen to collect makes your life simpler.

Martin Luther King, Jr. knew that racism and labor rights were entwined. He presented a threat to the economic order that went well beyond just free movement through the infrastructure of society. Aside from the uber-wealthy, we all benefit from dropping racial and ethnic concerns and talking instead about the division and distribution of resources and the fruits of our labors. The ownership class wants you talking about anything but that. They want you embracing the inconvenience of segregation again. Segregation cements a class structure that benefits the people on top no matter how they got there.

In the old world from which the Americas were colonized, aristocracy led to money -- until it didn't, as the 19th and 20th centuries converged, but that's another story. In the Americas, particularly the one the United States refers to as America, money conferred aristocracy. Fortunes were made, exploiting the land and imported labor, and conning the indigenous people with treaty after broken treaty.

Right now, the top job in the US government is occupied by an actual criminal, a convicted felon with a long history of fraud, wage theft, and bad debts. All signs indicate massive insider trading by the chief executive, his family, his cabinet, and many other elected officials. The corruption and bribery are off the charts, to the outrage of some and the admiration of others. The racism is just bait to keep a passionate minority of segregationists voting Republican. We're all getting screwed by the corruption and incompetence of the party in power.

I don't have Black friends, only Black acquaintances, and I've never been in a romantic relationship with a Black person, but I refuse to let the government tell me who I can associate with. It goes beyond me, to every citizen. I don't want this to be a country where race or political party become more important than human rights and full participatory citizen government. Anything less is just an unnecessary pain in the ass. The people who look back on the period of segregation as some kind of golden age are either idiots or calculating greedheads using bigots as a reliable voting bloc oblivious to the underlying financial motives.

I've written before about how democracy is itself a pain in the ass of a different kind. Government by the people requires that the people, generation after generation, pay attention to what their supposed representatives are doing. All government invites corruption, because officials have power as well as responsibility. Power is a drug. Responsibility is a burden. Which one sounds more attractive? But our only hope at some measure of control over corruption rests in the democratic process at some level.

James Madison believed that educated voters were essential to a thriving democratic republic. He wasn't wrong, although he overestimated the American thirst for education. By the time I came along, school was something to endure until you either dropped out or graduated and got down to the fun part, earning as much money as you could, to spend on self indulgence.

The government had been controlling our information since the Second World War, because of national security concerns. Students succeeded in the social settings of school in various ways, peaking at different times: the high school quarterback and the head cheerleader who went no further afterward; the brainy kid who went to an Ivy League college; the ones who became lawyers or doctors; the vast rabble who just found jobs of some kind and lived their lives while The Government operated in the background. Depending on your era, you might have had to perform mandatory military service, but the Vietnam War finally ended that. Little by little, government got turned into a separate entity, or so it seemed. Our grubby little hands didn't have to be pried off of the levers of power. We just let go.

To meet our constitutional responsibility, adult citizens need to think of ourselves as pre-legislators. The function of the system needs to occupy more of our time than we would like it to. Democracy in this country, or probably any country, has never received the attention that it should. The business of being human  is so much more compelling, and generally easier to connect with.

The citizens of the privileged majority have known intellectually that we have freedoms and powers legally guaranteed, but we leave them sitting, for the most part. The First Amendment protects the press and free expression in general. Provocative shit-stirrers troll the public to remind us that they can. The Second Amendment facilitates the gun industry and enables individuals to amass ridiculous arsenals of killing hardware to remind us that they can. All well and good, but the corporate press has decided to be more corporate than journalistic, and the arsenals will not stop moneyed interests from skewing financial policy to direct more and more wealth their way.

In November, remember that districts don't vote. People do. We don't have the luxury of more than two parties, and only one party is making the slightest effort to maintain and expand the progress we made toward a freer and more convenient society before conservatives started cranking us back the other way beginning in 1981 and ratcheting up steadily to the present crisis.

The paranoid electorate

 Your vote matters. It is still the first step by which officials gain their positions of responsibility and power. That's why it's worth billons of dollars to dark money groups seeking to install corporate tools.

Cynicism has eroded participation in elections, but so has anxiety based in paranoia. No one wants to vote for someone who turns out to be bad. Not just controversial. Outright bad.

As we see now, a certain core of voters will try to redefine badness as goodness through various filters. Others will just go quiet, still content to see how it plays out in their favor. But elections are not decided on the faithful. They're decided on the undecided.

Some people don't vote because they think it's pointless. Some of the ones who say that actually don't vote because they don't understand the issues, but believe that appearing cynical is cooler than appearing ignorant. I guess that's true, but either way you have handed off your fate to the people who do pick a side.

I didn't vote for a long time after I was old enough, because I wasn't intelligent and focused enough to study the candidates and the issues. In my family, we talked about policies and principles, but I seldom heard one of my parents tie the policies to a party. Because my father was a Coast Guard officer, he took his responsibility to present as nonpartisan very seriously. He took all of his responsibilities very seriously.

Observing the Republican Party from Nixon to Reagan, I had a strong inclination to favor Democrats, but I wasn't sure enough to place a bet. Then when I finally did, on Bill Clinton, he dropped the universal health care promise when corporate money growled, and then acted like a horny teenager in his second term, seriously handicapping Al Gore's stature going into the 2000 election. Thanks, Bill. His presidency was a net good, but not by as much as it could have been if he had had more courage and zipper control.

Bush 43 did nothing to shake my observation that the Democrats presented the less worse option, with strong potential actually to do good eventually. And the Republican Party since then has simply spiraled downward into a criminal syndicate in league with white supremacists and the Russian mob. However, the price of gas and groceries, blah blah blah, and boys who would be girls, oh my. Not to mention the undercurrent of racism in the depressing percentage of people who wouldn't actually initiate a lynching, but wouldn't do anything to stop one, either.

Political violence has always been with us, particularly in matters of race and labor relations. Domestic violence becomes political in its expression that women need to stay in their place and let their men do the talking. And violence scares most people. It scares more people than will admit to it. It keeps people from joining public protests. It keeps bystanders from interfering when they see it happening to someone else. Law enforcement uses the threat of it to intimidate witnesses. Criminals do the same thing. These forces aligned to do violence to each other live in that world. They express themselves only in that language. It's their medium of exchange. It's one more thing to fear: the violence of uncontrolled society versus the violence of over-controlling law enforcement.

Into this time of high-stakes decision making steps the paranoid voter, wondering if they'll have to answer for the spectacular failure of their champion. In walks the persnickety voter who doesn't want to listen to a woman's voice or annoying laugh for four years, who falls back on sexist tropes to justify voting for an obvious unrepentant criminal traitor to the nation, backed by religious bigots. Who makes a bad choice and digs in his heels -- or her heels, to please her man. We're tired of being embarrassed and let down. We want to believe that we could amass enough candidates to vote in a government that will change laws to control the bribery and violent coercion that have dug in and fortified themselves over a couple of centuries with only brief interruptions. Those interruptions were the template for actual improvements, but those lights need to be tended and defended against the powers of greed and class structure that seek to perpetuate the power of wealth as privilege without responsibility.

To get there, we need a bunch of paranoid people to take a risk. It's a lot to ask, and we have a very short time to figure out how to present the request.

Calling them "critters" erodes democracy

 I love Heather Cox Richardson, and I'm extremely grateful for her work, but she uses a term that weakens the position of all of us trying to restore some level of respect to elective office and the citizen government established for us by the constitution that everyone seems so eager to wield in their own interest.

Back when government was all men, the term "congressman" served to describe the role in a neutral way. When women joined the ranks, "congresswoman" joined the lexicon. It doesn't flow as smoothly in speech, and now faces additional problems for gender oversimplification. So I understand the need for a gender-neutral, generic term for a member of congress. "Congressional representative" is bland, boring, pedantic, and takes too long to say. "Congrasshole" is not emotionally neutral or supportive of the institution. But "critter" makes them seem harmless, cute, and ineffectual. Either that or like vermin that you call an exterminator to eliminate because they're destroying your stuff.

Cynics will say that this term therefore accurately depicts members of Congress, because they are all those things. However, political commentators will also exhort us to go out and vote. Vote! It's your voice! Choose that candidate who will get in there and work hard to represent your interests! And magically transform into a critter as soon as confirmed in office, apparently. It makes the whole thing seem pointless and hopeless, which pleases both the oligarchs and the accelerationists who want to collapse civilization. Do you really want to live under the boot heel of robber barons or through the deadly chaos of civilization's collapse? If so, turn loose your last fingertip grasp of political control. Embrace the cynical resignation. Call your representatives critters and expect nothing more of them than you would of rats and roaches.

Oversimplification does not aid communication. Complex concepts are made up of simple parts, but they're made of lots of simple parts. Not everyone of voting age and eligibility has the patience to wade through all that. We're in the mess we're in right now because of decades trying to accommodate that on one side and exploit it on the other. The exploitive side has done all it can to undermine trust in experts. Education moves too slowly to keep up with the pace of events. That's why the brainiacs in the tech sector want to impose their own dominion over the common herd, because they're so much better than the rest of us. Can't boil an egg or change a tire, but they can design a surveillance system that knows how often you fart.

If we can't believe that we're able to find and vote for responsible people who will do their best for us in a tough job for what is actually fairly low pay, why show up at all?

Find a better term.