[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Jensen / Bush Isn't A Racist -- Just One More Privileged, Soulless Person / Oct 21

[Morton K. Brussel]

Nicely put grave problems of government, especially ours.  --mkb
A ZNet commentary.

>
> Today's commentary:
> http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-10/13jensen.cfm
>
> ==================================
>
> ZNet Commentary
> Bush Isn't A Racist -- Just One More Privileged, Soulless Person  
> October 21, 2005
> By Robert Jensen
>
> George W. Bush has been unfairly tagged with the label "racist" in  
> the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  It's true that the response of  
> the government -- at all levels, but especially the federal  
> government and it's feeble emergency agency -- was inadequate and  
> incompetent, and that the poor suffered the most, and that the poor  
> of New Orleans are disproportionately black. It's also true that  
> Bush displayed an appalling lack of basic human compassion in his  
> slow reaction to the suffering.
>
> But our president is almost certainly not an overt racist. He's  
> just a run-of-the-mill overly privileged American who appears to  
> have no soul. I'm reasonably sure he doesn't harbor ill will for  
> anyone based solely on race. Instead -- like many people in similar  
> positions and status -- he's incapable of understanding how race  
> and class structure life in the United States. His privilege has  
> not only coddled and protected him his whole life, but also has  
> left him with a drastically reduced capacity for empathy, and  
> without empathy one can't be fully human.
>
> This is not a partisan attack; such a soulless existence is not a  
> feature of membership in any particular political party. Nor is it  
> exclusive to men. Though we tend to assume women will be more  
> caring, this deficiency among the privileged crosses gender lines;  
> probably the most inhuman comment by a public figure after Katrina  
> was made by the president's mother, Barbara Bush. After touring the  
> Astrodome stadium in Houston, where many who were displaced by the  
> disaster were being warehoused, she said, "And so many of the  
> people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so  
> this -- this is working very well for them."
>
> In our president all we see is an extreme version of a more general  
> problem in an affluent but highly unequal society, in which people  
> on the top have convinced themselves they are special and therefore  
> deserve their positions.
>
> For his entire life, Bush has sat on the very top of the privilege  
> pile. He is white in a white-supremacist society; a heterosexual  
> man in a patriarchal culture; born into wealth in a capitalist  
> economy; and a U.S. citizen in a world dominated by his nation. In  
> the identity game, it's hard to get a better roll of the dice.
>
> The downside to all this for folks like Bush is that privilege  
> doesn't guarantee intelligence, empathy, wisdom, diligence, or  
> humanity. Privilege allows people without those qualities to skate  
> through life, protected from the consequences of being dull-witted,  
> lazy, arrogant, and inhumane. The system of privilege allows failed  
> people to pretend to be something more. And, unfortunately, that  
> system often puts those failed people in positions of power and  
> forces everyone else to endure their shortcomings.
>
>
> That's probably the most pressing race problem in the United States  
> today -- a de facto affirmative-action program for mediocre middle-  
> and upper-class white men that places a lot of undeserving people  
> in positions of power, where their delusions of grandeur can have  
> profound implications for others. If the deficiencies of George  
> Bush and people like him were simply their problem, well, most  
> would find it hard to muster much sympathy. But they become our  
> problem -- not just the United States', but the world's problem --  
> when such folks run the world. Let's go back to Bush's resume.
>
> Whatever one's ideology or evaluation of Bush policies, it's  
> impossible to ignore how race, gender, class, and nation privilege  
> have worked in his life. By his own admission, Bush was a mediocre  
> student, gaining access to two of the most prestigious universities  
> in the United States (Yale and Harvard) through family connections,  
> not merit. His lackluster and incomplete service in the Texas Air  
> National Guard during the Vietnam War was, to say the least, not  
> the stuff of legend that will be told and retold around the family  
> hearth.
>
> After that he went into the oil business, where he also failed. He  
> then used money he had managed to take out of a failed oil endeavor  
> to buy into the Texas Rangers baseball team, his one great  
> "success" in the business world. From there, despite having no  
> relevant experience, he was molded by Republican Party operatives  
> into a successful gubernatorial candidate. After a thoroughly  
> uninspired first term, he was re-elected governor before moving on  
> to the White House, where the most successful public-relations team  
> in U.S. political history has kept him afloat despite two illegal  
> and failed wars, a frightening rise in the national debt, tax cuts  
> for wealthy that have contributed to the gutting of the already  
> weak social safety net, and most recently the criminally negligent  
> response to Hurricane Katrina.
>
> Welcome to the United States of Meritocracy. How is it that a  
> society can hold onto fantasies about level playing fields and  
> equal opportunity when every day we turn on the television sets and  
> see Smiling George the Frat Boy President?
>
> The problem, of course, isn't limited to Bush; he's a fraud, but  
> only one of many. In my life I have worked in offices of the  
> federal government, non-profit organizations, for-profit  
> corporations, and universities. In each, I have seen mediocre white  
> men rise to positions of power for reasons that have more to do  
> with the informal networks based on identity than on merit.
>
> No doubt, as a white man, my own career has been aided by this  
> system. I also have seen women and non-white people advance by  
> playing a similar game, but far less often and typically only when  
> they internalize the value system of the dominant culture.
>
> That does not mean there are no white men who are talented and hard- 
> working or who do not deserve the success they have achieved. It is  
> only to recognize that this system of unearned privilege will  
> regularly put into positions of power people who are unfit for the  
> duties they take on.  That means -- independent of the strong moral  
> argument for equality and justice -- subverting a system of white  
> supremacy and white privilege is in all our interests. In fact, the  
> fate of the world may depend on it.
>
>
> Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas  
> at Austin and a member of the board of the Third Coast Activist  
> Resource Center, http://thirdcoastactivist.org/. He is the author  
> of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and  
> Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both  
> from City Lights Books). He can be reached at  
> rjensen at uts.cc.utexas.edu .
>
>
>
>