DragonI

Opinion | Blackface Is the Tip of the Iceberg

The structural problems we need to solve lie at the roots of American society.

www.nytimes.com

It took almost 16 years for House Republicans to reprimand Steve King of Iowa for his frequent expressions of explicit racism, by stripping him of his committee assignments. The catalyst? An interview with The New York Times in which he expressed sympathy with racist ideas. “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” King said.

Compare that slow-moving response with the quick dismissal of Michael Ertel, the Republican secretary of state in Florida, who resigned the same day that photos of him in blackface were revealed to the public. Taken at a Halloween party in 2005, they show Ertel with a painted face and a costume that make clear he was mocking survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

If racism is principally a problem of power and resources — of race hierarchy and the denial of life, liberty and opportunity to blacks and other nonwhites — then our political culture ought to expand the offenses that earn the kinds of swift condemnation we’ve seen over the last few days. 

American society is still structured by color. Your health, your wealth — your ability to live and act freely — still turns to a large degree on whether you were born white. Like Ertel, Northam should resign. Virginia’s history with racism is too fraught to allow this association with blackface (to say nothing of the Ku Klux Klan imagery) to stand unaddressed. But any collective reckoning with racism that comes out of this moment must go beyond the personal and offensive to the unequal depths. 

Why America is the World’s First Poor Rich Country – Eudaimonia and Co

Or, How American Collapse is Made of a New Kind of Poverty

eand.co|umair haque

The average American can’t scrape together $500 for an emergency. A third of Americans can’t afford food, shelter, and healthcare. Healthcare for a family now costs $28k — about half of median income, which is $60k.

America, it seems, is becoming something like the world’s first poor rich country. And that is the elephant in the room we aren’t quite grasping. 

So Americans aren’t just absolutely or relatively poor, but poor in a new way entirely. First, the basics of life exploded in price, to the point that they are now unaffordable for many, maybe most, households. Second, Americans bear the risks of paying those unaffordable costs to an extreme degree, bearing the risks that institutions should, and so those risks are now ruinously high.

The kind of poverty that’s developed in America isn’t just bizarre and gruesome — it’s novel and unseen. It isn’t something that we understand well, economists, intellectuals, thinkers, because we have no good framework to think about it. It’s not absolute poverty like Somalia, and it’s not just relative poverty, like in gilded banana republics. It’s a uniquely American creation. It’s extreme capitalism meets Social Darwinism by way of rugged self-reliance crossed with puritanical cruelty.

The kind of poverty America’s pioneering today isn’t absolute, or even relative , but something more like perfectly tuned poverty, strategic poverty, basic poverty— nominally well-off people whose money doesn’t go far enough to make them actually live well, constantly living at the edge of ruin, and thus forced to choke down their bitter anger and serve the very systems which oppress and subjugate with more and more indignity and fear and servility by the year.