Race and Class in the Current Election

Sanders says that economic pain - fk ‟anxiety,” when people are committing suicide that's not anxiety any more - makes racist scapegoating easy. That doesn't mean there's not racism at other times, that doesn't mean it's not a problem. It means when times are hard it's easy to use racism to persuade people to fight each other, rather than the people who made the times hard. This is obviously historically true.

Sometimes racism is used as a tool to create customary disparities of wealth - a class system. Again, obvious. Look at the segregated South. Were most white people rich there? No. So all this machinery of oppression and racism was deployed to oppress not only blacks, but most whites, and to get the poor whites to oppress the even poorer blacks. LBJ knew: ‟If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” This is also obviously historically true.

Immiseration fuels fascism. Hitler would have had a much harder struggle without the great depression. One cannot, however, unsow the wind. We need methods of creating peace and justice within our societies and no candidate is talking very much about this. (Except for Marianne Williamson, and she was otherwise a dangerous crank.) It is, in fact, nearly impossible to even speak of it; Hillary Clinton was roundly lambasted for bringing up ‟deplorables.” It is like talking about slavery in the pre-Civil War USA. Everyone knew it was a problem, knew it was the problem, but there was no way to discuss it.