Super Tuesday is over, now comes the rush of political punditry. Large panels of angry white men appear across the news echo chamber to discuss race and gender issues they know nothing about. Who got the Latino vote? The Black vote? The Female vote? They flap their lips about political power in this country with all the statistical data and enthusiasm of a Monday morning sportscast. As an American comprised of many races and nationalities, I find all this talk about race tiring and distracting. Although, perhaps that’s part of being a mutt. I’ve never seen a point in choosing between my Latino, Irish, Muskogee Creek Indian and various other ancestral facets and never fill in those annoying race bubbles on questionnaires. Perhaps that’s why I’ve seen racial compartmentalization for what it really is: a political tool of division.
You’ve gotta love our media. They sure know how to entertain. Unfortunately all this entertainment draws from their ability to inform, not to mention their efforts to create drama have been absolutely destructive to the electoral process. First of all, they’ve been wrong so far about virtually everything, framing the 2008 election as a battle between Rudy “can’t get it up†Giuliani and Hillary “media consolidation†Clinton. Next the media wrote off qualified candidates, practically ignoring the populist candidates Edwards and Huckabee. They’ve failed to ask the hard questions, choosing instead to play into the controlling hands of corporate sponsors and the politicians they own. Lastly, they’ve beaten us over the head with questions of race, sex and other compartments in which to stuff the American people. The major media’s continuing quest for a narrative has proven without question that they’ve not only become useless to the American discourse, they’ve become destructive.
All I hear today is race, race and gender. How did Latinos vote, how did African-Americans vote, how did women vote, how did African-American Women Vote. The endless pursuit of statistical data is tiresome, with meaningless divisions of meaningless divisions and how THEY vote, as if they were acting with one voice.
Steven Colbert did a little bit on this that I found humorous.
LATINOS?
The “Latino†vote in this country underscores the problem. What is a Latino? Latinos know the answer to this question about as well as the media does. I’ve received many different answers to this question over the years. Is a man from Spain Latino? Portugal? Italy? They are Latin of course, however, for now, it appears a Latino is from Latin America. It’s not about color, I’ve known many white Latinos who had 100% blood from the old country. It’s not about language as Brazilians are Latinos and they speak Portuguese. It’s not about nationality, as a Latino can be from such diverse places ranging from Cuba to Argentina. They share very little common experience, very few of the same values. Each nation’s history is wildly different from its neighbor. They have virtually nothing in common aside from the historic exploitation at the hands of an imperial nation, 3rd world styled export-led-development and of course, they’ve all been manipulated by the United States with disastrous consequences. Bottom line is that even neighboring nations Cuba and Puerto Rico have produced very different Latinos.
Then of course there are American forged divisions. The generational divide, for one, separates natives from newcomers. Even in the Prison system, Southsiders (American born) divide against the Picas (immigrants). Generational divide also creates animosity between 5th generation to 2nd generation families as the American experience shapes the family into the main fold. Geography as well, plays into the mix. A Mexican family living in Oklahoma will have very little in common with a Mexican family living in Los Angeles. Religion divides the recently converted evangelicals against the devout Catholics and many Latinos are even strongly against religion. Politics divides many Latinos into wildly varying groups from radical socialist to die-hard conservative. Some California Mexicans join the La Raza movement (a hard to define radical movement that often espouses the desire to “take California backâ€), others blend in seamlessly to the elite conservative establishment like a Miami Cubano. Then, of course, there’s class. A wealthy man from Chile has as much in common with a poor farmer from Mexico as a farmer in Iowa does with a NY Stock Broker.
The point I’m trying to make is that Latino is a very poor definition. It is an attempt to both marginalize and unify Latin American descendents. Latinos in the radical movements feel they are on the verge of real change, strength in numbers is the only way to create change a la Ceasar Chavez, the same way African-Americans felt that Black Power was coming. In the end however, it has turned off the non-Latin masses, marginalizing their power into a divisive voting block. It becomes more a tool of the establishment. Those like Pete Wilson in California used proposition 187 to scare the Whites into voting Republican. Illegal immigration has become the age old Republican scapegoat, manipulated for cheap labor that ironically makes Republicans richer.
Another instance is when Latinos were pitted against African-Americans in the last two Los Angeles Mayor elections. The pundits had a field day, as two wealthy elite candidates, courted the two working class factions as if they understood their plight.
I’m not saying that Unity is not important. I’m saying that unity fails when it is along racial or former nationality lines. The desire to racially unify leads to purity, which discourages those on the periphery, like mixed Latinos. Then where does it stop? I’d put my money on one place it will never stop, at the class level. Putting people in a box is just another way to divide the mid to lower classes. This of course is nothing new and is a familiar pattern in history. It is often not direct manipulation, it’s human nature to divide. The wealthy simply profit from our inability to broadly unify.
Puerto Ricans rarely agree with Cubans, Mexicans rarely agree with Salvadorians, Brazilians rarely agree with any of them. However a poor man from every country, including the United States shares more in common than they do with a wealthy man from their respective nations.
INTERGRATION
What do these terms mean? Latino, White, African-American. What does it mean to be white? Irish were the nation’s first pests and then the Germans, Italians, Russians, and Poles came into the fray. They were cheap labor that fulfilled the American capital machine’s needs. They built canals, bridges, skyscrapers, worked in meat-packing, textiles and farming. These Americans made poor wages, then bore children who went on to strive toward the middle class. They endured hatred while simultaneously making those who hated them wealthy. Today the decedents are virtually all considered White, despite the history of persecution. Jews, on the other hand, hail from many of the same European nations and are still largely considered Jews despite increasing integration. While they continue to remain unique in a society of assimilation, it is truly a success story.
African-Americans are only just beginning to feel the effects of integration. Many African-Americans have generational ties that go back hundreds of years, many are mixed racially to remarkable proportions. Yet the “one-drop†blood rule united these mixed Americans through a common experience of injustice. They created a counter culture of music, art and literature that overshadowed the main culture as it was gradually integrated. As the injustice continues to evaporate, the culture is beginning to fade. Many in the African-American community are seemingly frightened, dividing assimilated blacks (wannabes) against the culturally pure.
While there is still much to do to keep us all moving toward a fully integrated society in the vision of Dr. Martin Luther King, most of what is left is in the slow evolution of human mind sets, the responsibility lay with individuals, not governments. The most important goal is to prevent fascist right-wingers from manipulating the people against each other. This often occurs, as it did in the South, to distract the lower classes from the poor economic situation they suffer at the hands of the elite. Division was used to hide the inequality of sharecropping, turning hatred into a political issue. Hate is a very powerful tool and can destroy progress that took decades to build in a matter of minutes.
Will Latinos integrate into American society? My honest belief is that Latin American immigration will ebb and as America struggles to find a source of cheap labor, it will decline or find new cheap labor to be exploit and be frightened of. Latinos will always stand out as Italians or Irish do and yet as the generations settle, they will become just another brick in the American wall.
SEX
Women of course are more complicated, they are a unique division that has erupted from the chaos of sexual liberation. Many women did not desire to be politicians, fight in wars or be truck drivers, enough women did to unsettle the age old roles of women as mother, men as worker. Or, so we are led to believe.
Poor women in the industrial revolution (late 1800s) worked long hours to help make ends meet, as did children. Middle class women could afford to be delicate, dainty flowers as well as loving mothers. Many middle-class women of this era rose to the causes of Progressivism, enacting more change than ever occurred before in this country. Ironically, many of the laws that prohibited women’s role in the workplace came from this era, as did a woman’s right to vote.
Many feminists paint a picture of women being horribly oppressed like African-Americans. This is misleading. Don’t get me wrong, women WERE treated unequally, but the view point that women were oppressed to stay in the home at the hands of a manipulative and controlling husband is exaggeration. It is hard for us to understand the old concept of marriage as a tool of survival, breeding and in the case of the elite, a toll for maintaining power. A wealthy white woman did not have a horrible life, she was denied the ability to make a name for herself and forced to rely on the husband she often did not choose. If a woman was stuck with a dud, a woman could be forced to endure unspeakable pain. However to suggest that ALL women had it bad is to say that ALL men were bad. Any statement with ALL in it is often false from my experience. The times were different. It is arrogant to look back and assume that women had it bad because it does not match our experience. It also suggest that women have it so good today. Some may see a land of opportunity, I see a whole segment of our population empowered by the use of sexuality, increasingly identified by singular means and while many women have risen to the challenge, large segments are confused, unhappy struggling to be a mom while working at miserable places like Walmart for very little benefit.
The division of men and women seems largely political as well. In the same familiar pattern, follows a minority empowered by unification. The unification fails, as it did with women in the Equal Rights Amendment which was exploited by the wealthy to their benefit. How? The rise of the two income family is what brought prosperity to Reagan’s America, ironically sealing the fate of the one income bread winner that composed Reagan’s family values. The price of women working created the need for more women to work, as wages fell and the cost of living rose. Pretty sneaky isn’t it?
Since the sixties, the traditional male-female relationship has changed. It feels like it’s moving in the wrong direction, as decadence distracts us from our the real prize of equality, however as the Progressive Era begins to approach I’m confident that men and women will find a way to make families work in these times of social upheaval. There is no turning back the clock, as conservatives would like to do. So we must find a way to work together again and cease all this gender warfare as if men and women are really from different planets. My experiences have led me to believe the opposite. Women and men are different, although, only by way of different hormones, sexual desires and instincts. As a whole, women and men have a lot more in common than we are led to believe.
ARE WE READY?
Division is a powerful political tool, often started from the bottom before ultimately becoming manipulated by the top. It leaves deep scars as well. The Austrians used division in the Balkans, leading to Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Kosovars and Bosnians to be fighting each other over a century after it was first used to regain territory the Austrians lost in the Revolution of 1848.
Racial division may be effective at rallying political power in the short term, however it ultimately leads to manipulation at the hands of the elite, who use a simple tactic known as “divide and conquerâ€. Gender division may sell books about relationships and movies on the Lifetime channel, however it is destructive to the concept of “We the People†as a whole. When will we all wake up and realize that our differences are nothing to fight over, only to celebrate. It makes us unique and interesting. Compartmentalizing people leads to several brands of assimilation. If your black you listen to Hip-Hop, Latin: Reggaton, White: Country or Rock, sounds boring to me.
It doesn’t sound boring to the corporations. Their attempts to have a sure-fire business deal with no risk of loss is made easier by predictable blocks of minorities. They take the divisions we made for ourselves and sell it back to us, claiming that we are not who we say we are unless we buy what they tell us to buy.
This brings us full circle to media, who are connected to this whole debacle. The same corporations who pay their bills profit heavily from division. Now I’m not suggesting that the news media is deliberately colluding with the major corporations to keep the masses divided. Having worked for an ultra-conservative at a magazine however, I can tell you, that when someone pays your bills, you have very little incentive to bite the hand that feeds you. You may suggest that this is paranoid, or even naïve. Then again, to suggest that multi-billion dollar multi-national corporations have no vested interest in who controls the world’s most powerful nation is as naïve as naïve gets.
So as these so-called journalists struggle to bring narrative to the issue of power in this country, they are doing it through the lens of division which has emerged through a century of political strife. Are they perpetuating an antiquated system, or are they calling it like they see it? My guess is that Americans are fed up with marketing data, racial division, scapegoating and an incompetent media that is manipulated by a powerful collection of corporations.
Is America ready for a BLACK president? Is America ready for a WOMAN President? As long as we keep asking these questions, I’d say no. However are the ones asking this question the American people, or the owned media?
That is the real question.