Member-only story
Should Your Country Have A Conscience…
…even when you don’t exercise yours?
Now and then, I hear white US citizens say “I don’t need no uppity government types far away in D.C. tell me how to handle my business here in podunk, somestate.” It’s usually a hard-working guy who lives in a rural area who values historically traditional roles in a patriarchal society. The race of influential officials in the communities where people like this live is so homogeneous that this type of individual tends to reject ideas introduced by “outside agitators." The latter almost always look different than the accusers in terms of race, ethnicity, or/ and gender, though they are all US citizens.
The differentiators that set the “outside agitators” apart somehow invalidate their ideas that challenge the insulated community’s social norms based on a “the way things have always been done” mindset. From the perspective of those who want to conserve the status quo, human nature dictates that they will rationalize the outcomes of any customs that harm outgroups as long as their ingroup thrives. Thus, the essence of this issue is socioeconomic status. Wealth makes the ingroup’s world go round. This has been the American way to the advantage of European descendants since before the country was established.
State laws were passed to ensure the second-class status of any citizen who did not hit the socioeconomic “jackpot” of being born white, Anglo-Saxon, and protestant. Those who meet the criteria always have a social safety net that protects the majority of them from abject poverty. Evidence of this public policy can be seen in tracking US family wealth by race:
From this chart, you can plainly see the outcome of two centuries of oppression of all but white citizens. Since the society of the United States is based on capitalism, wealth is aggregated through generations. However, public policy consistently inhibited the economic growth of African-American citizens first by the white community declaring that Blacks were property and thus couldn’t make ownership claims, then by whites enacting laws that relegated Blacks to second-class citizenship until 1965.
