It's an irony of my life that while I wanted as much or more than anything to belong to some kind of larger institution that shared my values, I have instead become more of an intellectual lone wolf every decade. So it is what while I have for the last 12 years subscribed to the same newspapers that I did through the 1970s, I continually find myself taking issue both with their opinion pages and their reporting. Two noteworthy examples of this popped up during the last week.
Last Tuesday, in the New York Times, the venerable Thomas Friedman told Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the victorious Democratic candidate for Senator in Michigan, how he should change his position on Israel and Palestine so as to win the election in the fall. Astonishingly enough, he recommended that the candidate adopt Friedman's own position in favor of a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and endorsing "the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state." Criticizing Hamas, Friedman blames them for wrecking the Saudi peace initiative that he has personally taken credit for for 24 years, a proposal for peace with Israel in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, by starting the second Intifada. Any solution except a two-state solution, Friedman says, "is a geopolitical loser for America and a loser for Palestinians, Israelis, Arab Americans, Jewish Americans and Muslim Americans, and every other American."
That might be true, as General Giap once said, but it is also irrelevant. It is irrelevant because the government of Israel in the last 60 years has only shown one fleeting period of interest in a two-state solution, in the mid- and late 1990s, before the second Intifada. Yitzhak Rabin, who took the first big steps towards such a solution, was assassinated by an Israeli extremist as a result, and the final Clinton administration proposals in 2000 left the Palestinians far short of actual national sovereignty as it is usually defined. We are not in any case dealing with the Israeli government of that era any more. The current Israeli government, from Netanyahu on down, explicitly rejects any two-state solution. More importantly, in my view, it has in the last three years made the entire Gaza strip virtually uninhabitable, forcing most of the remaining population to live in tents, and allowed West Bank settlers to carry out a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing there. Some in Israel worry openly that the Israeli government is hoping for a full-scale Palestinian uprising there so that they can treat the Palestinian areas the same way that they have treated Gaza. They have already treated the population of a good chunk of southern Lebanon that way. This, tragically, is what the Zionist project has become. Opposing it is not an automatic proof of anti-Semitism.
Friedman, like a number of others, is calling for support of Israel as he would like it to be. I have also heard prominent liberals say that while they support Israel, they oppose the settlements, which successive Israeli governments have continually increased since 1967. I do not think at this point that much can be done about the situation--I suspect that the Israeli government will drive out the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank in the next five or ten years. I also doubt that most Palestinians and their leaders have ever really believed in a two state solution as anything but a step to full control of the territory for themselves. And I doubt that many Palestinian or Israeli leaders care what Thomas Friedman thinks. And meanwhile, Michigan's population includes roughly 245,000 Muslims and somewhere in the neighborhood of 90,000 Jews. It's far from clear that Friedman's strategy would work electorally either.
Exhibit B is a story in the Boston Globe from last week detailing a racial wealth gap, which unfortunately cannot be shared. It begins as follows.
"A decade ago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released a shocking study that showed US-born Black Bostonians had a median net worth of just $8.
"The results reverberated widely, although the survey itself had some drawbacks. The Fed has now revisited the subject, but with a more comprehensive analysis that includes the entire state.
"And again, the results show a staggering wealth gap.
"The new report, released Wednesday, found Latino families in Massachusetts have a median net wealth of just $1,200; Black families have only slightly more, at $7,800.
"White families, on the other hand, have a median net wealth of $549,200, while Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander families are at $305,000."
Continuing, the entire article treats the wealth gap entirely as a racial problem. The problem of wealth inequality and the problem of poverty are indeed very serious, but the use of other statistics suggests that those problems are not primarily racial at all. It turns out that of the households without any positive net worth, about 200,000 of them are white; about 88,000 are black; and about 165,000 of them are Hispanic (no detailed data, apparently, is available for Asian American, etc.) The figures on Massachusetts residents in poverty are equally striking: 304,188 are white, 189,451 are Hispanic, 85,618 are black, and 56,222 are Asian. The Globe piece totally ignores the white people in these categories, who represent a plurality of them in both cases.
In my opinion, these statistics show that the wealth gap and poverty are not primarily racial problems. They derive from structural problems in our utterly unregulated capitalist economy, which has been making the rich richer while the lower half of the population holds steady or declines, for about half a century. They do affect higher percentages of nonwhites than whites, but they affect larger numbers of whites than any other particular group. For anyone who believes race is at the bottom of this, I have a question: why are there so many poor whites and whites without wealth? Since it can't be racism, is it because they are stupid, shiftless, or lazy? The Globe's view of these issues is typical of the mainstream media and the Democratic Party, and it is the reason, I think, that poorer white people now overwhelming vote Republican. They get the impression that the Democratic Party doesn't care about them at all.
We need a better class of pundits and of journalists.
2 comments:
I know you're fond of this argument--that racism can't be a factor because there are a lot more white people than Black people--but have you ever considered that two things can be true at the same time? (Those two things being, "many societal elements, because of racism, disproportionately disadvantage Black people and other minorities" and "these same societal elements disadvantage a great many white people".)
Also, you're trying to convince me of a world in which poor white people are very stupid. The poor poor white people a) don't believe that the Democrats care about them, despite Democratic campaigns and policies that do offer help for them, and b) do believe that the Republicans care about them, despite real history in which Republicans put the screws to them in any number of ways.
Isn't it more likely that the white people in question have just decided that the most important thing is that they continue to maintain the racial hierarchy in which they're above Black people? And reward the party that promises that? Would William of Ockham not agree?
I don't think it's *entirely* a racial problem... but I do think that in the United States, there is no problem that isn't hopelessly intertwined with racism. Which is it: the billionaires oppose any reform that would help poor people because some of those poor people are Black, or, the billionaires oppose any reform that would address structural racism because racism is too useful a tool for them in keeping poor people disunited? It's tricky! My best guess is that (again!) both are simultaneously true: racism is useful to them, but they also believe it deep down. And the end result is the same.
I think what you think is, and by all means correct me if I'm wrong, if you, we, they, just address the class problems in the USA sufficiently, then it'll fix all the other problems too. I disagree. I think that when you're doing stuff in the U.S.A. you need to explicitly plan for how your actions will be anti-racist, or they will end up perpetuating racism. There are just too many people in the U.S.A. who really want to keep the racism rolling.
(If it sounds like I am singling out the U.S. and letting Canada (for instance) off the hook, I am not: Canada is similar in this sense but with some subtle differences.)
You say, "They get the impression the Democrats doesn't care about them at all." And they are not wrong! I vote Democrat not because the party is a good one, but just because it is slightly better than the Republican Party. The Republican Party should die out because of its unwavering support of a Fascist. The Democratic Party may die because of its invertebrate leadership. We need better choices than these two parties.
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