They’ve gone too far

17th May 2011   ·   0 Comments

By Edmund W. Lewis
The Louisiana Weekly Editor

So I’m enjoying a leisure Saturday morning recently when I stumble across a piece of information that brings a smile to my face.

Apparently, someone who is still angry about the United States electing a Black president is seeking to take steps to make sure that it never happens again.

Good luck with that.

This time it’s Judson Phillips, the president of Tea Party Nation, who recently told listeners on Tea Party Nation Radio that Americans who rent their living spaces should be stripped of the right to vote.

“The Founding Fathers originally said, they put certain restrictions on who gets the right to vote,” Phillips said. “One of those was [that] you had to be a property owner. And that makes a lot of sense, because if you’re a property owner, you actually have a vested stake in the community.

“If you’re not a property owner, you know, I’m sorry but property owners have a little bit more of a vested interest in the community than non-property owners.”

Those remarks were like a jet-black cup of coffee that reminded me that there are still tens of millions of Americans who have little or no understanding of the history of this nation and the mistakes it has made in the past in trying to extend “the blessings of liberty” to only a small group of people.

Like many of today’s Tea Party sympathizers and ultraconservatives, previous generations also thought they were doing God’s work — under the banner of “Manifest Destiny” — when they massacred millions of Native Americans by placing bounties on their scalps, giving them smallpox-infected blankets and driving them off their ancestral homelands; kidnapped, enslaved, raped and exploited tens of millions of African men, women and children; and exploited the labor of tens of millions of poor white men, women and children.

Some of the “old money” accumulated through unjust practices like slavery, genocide and unfair labor practices is being used today to finance campaigns aimed at ending progressive efforts that seek to level the economic playing field and give every U.S. citizen a shot at realizing the American dream.

After last fall’s mid-term elections, anti-racism activist Tim Wise penned an essay addressing those who were giddy about throwing a monkey wrench into the Obama administration’s efforts to bring positive change to the United States. Excerpts from that essay, titled “An Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum,” follow:

“I know, you think you’ve taken ‘your country back’ with this election — and of course you have always thought it was yours for the taking, cuz that’s what we white folks are bred to believe, that it’s ours, and how dare anyone else say otherwise — but you are wrong.

“You have won a small battle in a larger war the meaning of which you do not remotely understand.

“‘Cuz there is nothing even slightly original about you.

“There have always been those who wanted to take the country back.

“There were those who, in past years, wanted to take the country back to a time of enslavement and indentured servitude.

“But they lost.

“There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when children could be made to work in mines and factories, when workers had no legal rights to speak of, when the skies in every major city were heavy with industrial soot that would gather on sidewalks and windowsills like volcanic ash.

“But they lost.

“There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when women could not vote, or attend any but a few colleges, or get loans in their own names, or start their own businesses.

“But they lost.

“There were those who wanted to take us back to a time when Blacks ‘had no rights that the white man was bound to respect,’– this being the official opinion of the Supreme Court before those awful days of judicial activism, now decried by the likes of you – and when people of color could legally be kept from voting solely because of race, or holding certain jobs, or living in certain neighborhoods, or run out of other towns altogether when the sun would go down, or be strung up from trees.

“But they lost.

“And you will lose.

“So make a note of it.

“Tweet it to yourself.

“Put it on your Facebook wall and leave it there so you’ll remember that I told you so.

“It is coming, and soon.”

What’s amazing is that wealthy white puppetmasters can always seem to find poor and working-class whites to do their dirty work and bidding. You saw it when plantation owners sent poor whites on voyages across the ocean to capture and enslave Black Africans.

You saw it even more clearly when poor whites were sometimes given jobs by plantation owners as overseers and paddyrollers, a group of people who were used to hunt down, track and round up escaped Black slaves. It was even more clear when wealthy white property owners convinced poor Southern whites to go to war and die for a way of life that they had never been able to enjoy themselves. The descendants of those poor whites are now celebrating the 150th anniversary of the “War of Northern Aggression,” a war that was more about who controlled the nation’s economy than it was about freeing enslaved Africans.

They can also find lots of Clarence Thomases, Michael Steeles and Piyush Jindals who apologize every single day for who God made them and spend every waking moment trying to earn the love and acceptance of White America.

Because of the work of these misguided souls and those who fight tooth and nail to protect white privilege, Black people find themselves in the unenviable position of having to continue to fight to preserve hard-fought victories and rights that others who live in the United States can take for granted. As a result, no lasting progress has been achieved to date. Someone is always challenging the constitutionality of our voting rights or civil rights, as if our increasing freedoms diminish the rights, freedoms and stature of other groups of Americans.

But fight we must and fight we shall.

Above all else, It’s important to remember that while Black people may have won some hard-fought battles in the 1950s and 1960s that made life better for all historically oppressed groups in the United States — including the passage of legislation prohibiting racial segregation, civil rights violations and voter disenfranchisement — the war is far from over. Anyone who knows anything about the history of racial oppression in the Western Hemisphere and the nature of white supremacy might say that we are just getting started.

We can’t afford to get tired, frustrated or discouraged. The stakes are way too high for any of that.

In the essay mentioned earlier, Tim Wise has a message for those who think that they can win an unjust war because they believe it is their God-ordained right to dominate, oppress and exploit other groups of people:

“You have had this confidence before, remember?

“You thought you had secured your position permanently after the overthrow of reconstruction in the wake of the civil war, after the elimination of the New Deal, after the Reagan revolution, after the Republican electoral victory of 1994. And yet, those you thought you had cowed and defeated are still here.

“Because those who have lived on the margins, who have been abused, maligned, targeted by austerity measures and budget cuts, subjected to racism, classism, sexism, straight supremacy and every other form of oppression always know more about their abusers than the abusers know about their victims.

“They have to study you, to pay careful attention, to adjust their body armor accordingly, and to memorize your sleep patterns.

“You, on the other hand, need know nothing whatsoever about them. And this, will surely prove politically fatal to you in the end. For it means you will not know their resolve. Will not fear it, as you should.

“It means you will take their greatest strength — perseverance — and make of it a weakness, called losing.

“But what you forget, or more to the point never knew, is that those who lose know how to lose, which is to say they know how to lose with dignity.

“And those who suffer know how to suffer, which is to say they know how to survive: A skill that is in short supply amid the likes of you.

“You, who could not survive the thought of minimal health care reform, or financial regulation, or a marginal tax rate equal to that which you paid just 10 years earlier, perhaps are under the illusion that everyone is as weak as you, as soft as you, as akin to petulant children as you are, as unable to cope with the smallest setback, the slightest challenge to the way you think your country should look and feel, and operate.

“But they are not.

“And they know how to regroup, and plot, and plan, and they are planning even now — we are — your destruction.

“And I do not mean by that your physical destruction. We don’t play those games. We’re not into the whole “Second Amendment remedies, militia, armed resistance” bullshit that your side fetishizes, cuz, see, we don’t have to be. We don’t need guns.

“We just have to be patient.”

All power to the people.

This story originally published in the April 25, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.