[Peace-discuss] My letter in yesterday's News-Gazette

[David Green]

In our country’s economic history, the roles of slavery and racial
ideologies have been central to class exploitation. This no longer has much
to do with discrimination as a primary force, or lack of “equal
opportunity,” but with the realities of neoliberal wealth accumulation of
the “meritocratic” top 10% through dispossession of the broad working
class; with African-American workers and families bearing the brunt of
income stagnation, wealth loss, foreclosure, blight, indebtedness,
austerity, and incarceration.

The relationship between race (an ideological fiction) and class
(capitalist exploitation and immiseration of labor) has, in academia, been
disappeared by identity politics, an absence also noted in Democratic Party
politics.

Moving from gown to town and our local newspaper, critical sociological
notions of class and race are absent, as we encounter narratives of
individual achievement, inspiration, tragedy, and criminality,
contextualized within families and neighborhoods seemingly inexplicably
characterized by majority black populations, poverty, and high social
risks. This is venerable bourgeois racism, modified by current
sensibilities of “post-racial” civility.

Meanwhile, Brian Holding (10/14), former C.E.O. of Human Kinetics, claims
that his foundation and the City of Champaign will “develop” and “program”
black neighborhoods out of poverty. But these efforts will—with continued
neoliberal top-down economic warfare—prove to be superficial and futile.

The “social pathologies” of poverty commonly referred to by editors and
columnists serve to absolve the wealthy and powerful of their obvious
complicity in national policies that assure, in our rich society, that half
of us struggle to maintain a decent standard of living.
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