How Racism Is Destroying America - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...-hostility-eduardo-porter.html
racism American idea polarization safety net empathy culture politics
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liberal astigmatism — our belief that history is a story of racial progress, and our faith in our own empathy — makes Eduardo Porter’s “American Poison” a tough read.
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It is a learned, well-written but relentless survey of social science studies on the racial polarization, animosity and social fragmentation of American life.
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One such illusion is that increasing racial proximity by integrating schools and housing is a good way to break down racial animosities and paranoias.
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Empathy, Porter argues, has always waged an unequal struggle against the racial animus that courses through American history, poisoning both those who hate and those who are hated
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Race has contaminated American solidarity, making it impossible for poor whites, threatened by job loss, globalization and the death of carbon-intensive industries, to make common cause with African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and immigrants
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“Unwilling to share the bounty of state with people of other races and creeds, heritages and colors, real Americans — the white ones — have prevented the erection of a welfare state at all.”
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The great achievement of American liberalism — Franklin Roosevelt’s social security state — was passed
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only by a devil’s bargain with Southern segregationist senators. Liberal social security systems perpetuated black exclusion until Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms of 1964.
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“Johnson failed to grasp the scale at which inviting people of color into the network of rights and assurances created in the 1930s by F.D.R. to protect the well-being of white American workers would undermine support for the safety net altogether.”
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he points out the tragic irony of a white working class, decimated by deindustrialization and wasted by substance abuse, focusing their hatreds on minorities and turning against the very social programs — Obamacare, for example — that might actually help them
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“The America that built the most prosperous working class the world had ever seen collapsed into a heap of pathologies — deaths of despair — simply due to a lack of empathy. The greatest irony is that while the black and the brown suffered most intensely from the fallout, the collapse in social trust wiped away the American dream of working-class whites too.”
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it overestimates race and underestimates class and a free market political culture in explaining why America collects a far smaller percentage of national income in taxes compared with European countries that have more adequate public health, education and welfare services
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Porter treats racial hatred as a fixed dose of poison coursing through the veins of the public and neglects politics, the systematic way in which Republican politicians from Richard Nixon onward fed the poison with envenoming rhetoric about “welfare queens,” “dysfunctional black families” and the shame of welfare dependency.
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Racial polarization, Porter claims, has led to the collapse not only of “Americans’ support for the safety net,” but also of “their general support of public goods and the entire apparatus of government.”
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Porter’s jeremiad makes it impossible to understand the equally tenacious history of American progressive government: from Roosevelt himself, through Truman’s integration of the United States military, the Supreme Court ban on racial covenants in housing in 1948, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the struggle to desegregate American schools and finally — an achievement barely mentioned in Porter’s story — the passage of the Affordable Care Act.