[Marxism] Socialist prophet

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

<<http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2004/09/09_414.html>http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2004/09/09_414.html>

Poor, Black, and Left Behind

NEWS: On the fortieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the United
States seems to have returned to degree zero of moral concern for the
majority of descendants of slavery and segregation.

By Mike Davis September 24, 2004

The evacuation of New Orleans in the face of Hurricane Ivan looked
sinisterly like Strom Thurmond's version of the Rapture. Affluent white
people fled the Big Easy in their SUVs, while the old and car-less --
mainly Black -- were left behind in their below-sea-level shotgun shacks
and aging tenements to face the watery wrath.

New Orleans had spent decades preparing for inevitable submersion by the
storm surge of a class-five hurricane. Civil defense officials conceded
they had ten thousand body bags on hand to deal with the worst-case
scenario. But no one seemed to have bothered to devise a plan to evacuate
the city's poorest or most infirm residents. The day before the hurricane
hit the Gulf Coast, New Orlean's daily, the Times-Picayune, ran an alarming
story about the "large groups mostly concentrated in poorer neighborhoods"
who wanted to evacuate but couldn't.

Only at the last moment, with winds churning Lake Pontchartrain, did Mayor
Ray Nagin reluctantly open the Louisiana Superdome and a few schools to
desperate residents. He was reportedly worried that lower-class refugees
might damage or graffiti the Superdome.

In the event, Ivan the Terrible spared New Orleans, but official
callousness toward poor Black folk endures.

Over the last generation, City Hall and its entourage of powerful
developers have relentlessly attempted to push the poorest segment of the
population -- blamed for the city's high crime rates -- across the
Mississippi river. Historic Black public-housing projects have been razed
to make room for upper-income townhouses and a Wal-Mart. In other housing
projects, residents are routinely evicted for offenses as trivial as their
children's curfew violations. The ultimate goal seems to be a tourist
theme-park New Orleans -- one big Garden District -- with chronic poverty
hidden away in bayous, trailer parks and prisons outside the city limits.

But New Orleans isn't the only the case-study in what Nixonians once called
"the politics of benign neglect." In Los Angeles, county supervisors have
just announced the closure of the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr.
Hospital near Watts. The hospital, located in the epicenter of LA's gang
wars, is one of the nation's busiest centers for the treatment of gunshot
wounds. The loss of its ER, according to paramedics, could "add as much as
30 minutes in transport time to other facilities."

The result, almost certainly, will be a spate of avoidable deaths. But then
again the victims will be Black or Brown and poor.

On the fortieth anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the United States
seems to have returned to degree zero of moral concern for the majority of
descendants of slavery and segregation. Whether the Black poor live or die
seems to merit only haughty disinterest and indifference. Indeed, in terms
of the life-and-death issues that matter most to African-Americans --
structural unemployment, race-based super-incarceration, police brutality,
disappearing affirmative action programs, and failing schools -- the
present presidential election might as well be taking place in the 1920s.

But not all the blame can be assigned to the current occupant of the former
slave-owners' mansion at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue. The mayor of New
Orleans, for example, is a Black Democrat, and Los Angeles County is a
famously Democratic bastion. No, the political invisibility of people of
color is a strictly bipartisan endeavor. On the Democratic side, it is the
culmination of the long crusade waged by the Democratic Leadership Council
(DLC) to exorcise the specter of the 1980s Rainbow Coalition.

The DLC, of course, has long yearned to bring white guys and fat cats back
to a Nixonized Democratic Party. Arguing that race had fatally divided
Democrats, the DLC has tried to bleach the Party by marginalizing civil
rights agendas and Black leadership. African-Americans, it is cynically
assumed, will remain loyal to the Democrats regardless of the treasons
committed against them. They are, in effect, hostages.

Thus the sordid spectacle -- portrayed in Fahrenheit 9/11 -- of white
Democratic senators refusing to raise a single hand in support of the Black
Congressional Caucus's courageous challenge to the stolen election of
November 2000.

The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, steers a straight DLC course toward
oblivion. No Democratic presidential candidate since Eugene McCarthy's run
in 1968 has shown such patrician disdain for the Democrats' most loyal and
fundamental social base. While Condoleezza Rice hovers, a tight-lipped and
constant presence at Dubya's side, the highest ranking, self-proclaimed
"African American" in the Kerry camp is Teresa Heinz ((born and raised in
white-colonial privilege).

This crude joke has been compounded by Kerry's semi-suicidal reluctance to
mobilize Black voters. As Rainbow Coalition veterans like Ron Waters have
bitterly pointed out, Kerry has been absolutely churlish about financing
voter registration drives in African-American communities. Ralph Nader -- I
fear -- was cruelly accurate when he warned recently that "the Democrats do
not win when they do not have Jesse Jackson and African Americans in the
core of the campaign."

In truth, Kerry, the erstwhile war hero, is running away as hard as he can
from the sound of the cannons, whether in Iraq or in America's equally
ravaged inner cities. The urgent domestic issue, of course, is unspeakable
socio-economic inequality, newly deepened by fiscal plunder and
catastrophic plant closures. But inequality still has a predominant color,
or, rather, colors: black and brown.

Kerry's apathetic and uncharismatic attitude toward people of color will
not be repaired by last-minute speeches or campaign staff appointments. Nor
will it be compensated for by his super-ardent efforts to woo Reagan
Democrats and white males with war stories from the ancient Mekong Delta.

A party that in every real and figurative sense refuses to shelter the poor
in a hurricane is unlikely to mobilize the moral passion necessary to
overthrow George Bush, the most hated man on earth.

----

Mike Davis is the author of Dead Cities: And Other Tales as well as Ecology
of Fear and co-author of Under the Perfect Sun: the San Diego Tourists
Never See, among other books.




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