The Civil War was fought because the wealthy in the southern part of the United States wanted the right to have their African slaves working anywhere they damned well wanted them to.  There was a raging debate, as native Americans were slaughtered, or otherwise removed from lands that were to be settled by “white” Americans, about the expansion of slavery into these new territories.   America by then had a strictly race-based slavery, the only slaves working were from Africa.  

Americans who hated slavery, as most of us today do, were determined to stop its expansion.   Americans who profited handsomely from slave labor stood on their Constitutional right to own and sell as many damned slaves as they could afford to and do pretty much anything they damned well pleased with them.  The Bible was called into play by supporters of slavery to justify God’s supposed approval of this arrangement.   Abolitionists also cited the Bible as condemning the Peculiar Institution, which just goes to show you.

So why did hundreds of thousands of brave, warlike working class Rebels, men who could not afford to own slaves, charge into Union fire defending an institution that did not benefit them in any way?   How is it that the Civil War itself has come to stand for “states’ rights”, Americans’ right to disagree and the overreach of vindictive northerners (the damned meddlesome federal government) in punishing the south after its surrender?   Why is there any debate over the flag of the former Confederacy, the states who took up arms against the country they seceded from , flying over southern government buildings?   (Shoot, it’s not like the stars and bars is a damned swastika, just the colors of an army that rose up to defend a damned way of life, a genteel and good one too…) 

We have to recognize that a lot of this, like racism itself, defies strict rational analysis.   These are emotional issues that do not call the higher functions of the analytical mind into play.   Why did millions of angry, hurting Americans recently vote for a callous billionaire who spoke as though he was their friend and champion, as if his only interests were not more money and more power?  Same deal.  Our question today is not why people vote and act against their own best interests, it’s why racism?

Howard Zinn, in his groundbreaking A People’s History of the United States, described the situation in early colonial America.  Many poor people arrived as indentured servants.   In return for their passage, poor “whites” contracted to work as unpaid servants for a certain number of years, after which indenture they would be freed.   They worked side by side with African slaves and sometimes enslaved Native Americans.   But there was a problem.  

They made common cause with their fellow slaves, resisted brutal treatment together, ran off together, married.   Those who benefitted from slave labor were in genuine danger from this united front.  There could have been no United States of America as we know it if these unpaid laborers were not divided and set against each other.  It was not profitable for the wealthy to have to pay workers for labor-intensive monoculture cultivation.   The solidarity of the enslaved presented a real dilemma for the new barons of the vast, fertile American wilderness.

The colony of Virginia, very early, in the 1680s, I believe, addressed this vexing problem for the wealthy.  A law was written guaranteeing certain rights to White Indentured Servants.   They could not be stripped naked for whipping, for example, though black slaves certainly could.  The white slaves were given certain other rights including the right to receive way more than the mythical 40 acres and a mule when they were liberated from their indenture.  In addition to land (100 acres, I think) and animals, they got a good supply of food, some money and a gun with plenty of powder and bullets.   Thus, by this ingenious device, Virginia made white slaves far superior to Negroes who were most often destined to remain slaves from birth to death.

This is one calculated, cultivated reason for American racism. It is based on the tribal human need to feel superior to the “other”, a phenomenon seen throughout history in most places.   It is often exploited by the privileged few who control populations by keeping those with common interests as divided as possible.  This need to feel superior becomes an unbearable ache during times of crisis, famine, fear, uncertainty and is often expressed violently.  It can be stoked pretty easily.

After the Civil War there was almost a century of terrorist lynching, tolerated by the states, while Southern legislators blocked federal laws to stop it.  The Turks massacred more than a million Armenians, when the supposed circumstances arose, around the time of World War One.  The Japanese tortured, raped and beheaded “racially inferior” Chinese during their infamous Rape of Nanking in the years prior to full-blown World War Two.   The Germans systematically murdered millions of “others” including several million Jews.  

In each case these genocides were fueled by racist beliefs. The people being killed were not fellow human beings, they were inferior races that needed to be destroyed, usually because of the grave danger they supposedly represented.

In order to commit unspeakable acts against other humans, it is generally necessary to hate those humans. How do good, decent, law-abiding, God-fearing Americans torture people?  By believing they are torturing inhuman terrorists who will stop at nothing to inflict unthinkable atrocities on innocent Americans.  That an individual recipient of torture may turn out to be an innocent, sixty year-old pediatrician does not mean the rest of them aren’t the worst of the worst.

You can flip through pages of recent propaganda posters to get a nice glimpse of racism made graphic.  Ever see the American depictions of “Japs” during World War Two?   Vicious, squinting, buck-toothed rats.   Look at Nazi cartoons of Jews, same kind of deal.   Cartoons of American Blacks, similarly vicious.   It is necessary to ridicule and hate before you can commit atrocities against a group of people.  

Not everyone is cut out to massacre with machetes, as one African tribal group, the Hutus, did to 800,000 Tutsis in a frenzy of killing in Rwanda in 1994.   The Nazis had a challenge figuring out how to kill so many Jews.  The men in the killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, who shot Jews into mass graves, became drunks, went mad.  A few idealistic sadists excelled, but the sheer number of Jews to be killed was overwhelming.  Eventually a program was developed that mechanized the killing process, lessening the toll on those tasked with the mass murder of the villainized, subhuman groups.

If those who exploit others for their own profit do not divide their potential opposition and make them hate each other, their lucrative enterprise is often in danger.   Martin Luther King, Jr. was a greatly admired Man of the Year, and won the Nobel Peace Prize, when he was peacefully fighting to integrate lunch counters, buses, urging his followers to endure great hardship and exert moral force to end segregation.   Once he began speaking of the infamous triad of racism, militarism and poverty, and uniting the poor of all races, he became an enemy of America who had to be killed.  Listen to his “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam” speech, delivered at Riverside Church in New York, a year to the day before his murder:

The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. “Ye shall know the truth,” says Jesus, “and the truth shall set you free.” Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal…

… It seemed that there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.

(source)

Men who speak such truths are often killed– if heeded they could cost those who profit from war billions of dollars.   Murdering such troublemakers has always been  part of the history of guns in America.   Gun violence was always integral to the rule of racists in America. “The Equalizer” was a Colt 45 revolver that made the man holding it the equal, physically, if not morally, of four or five stronger men who did not have guns.  An Equalizer tucked in the belt of a white overseer meant that, no matter how brutal he may have been to the slaves he worked, he was equal to a bunch of the strongest of them who hated him.  Unlike its predecessors, guns that had to be reloaded after one shot, leaving the shooter vulnerable, the Equalizer had a revolving chamber and was able to fire and kill six times.  Suck on that, muscle man.  

Why racism?  It benefits those who, like our current president, stoke it and use it to send messages that divide and conquer.   Mexicans are no more likely to rape than anyone else.  The very idea is ridiculous.  And yet…

We call racism by many names, deny it most of the time. We obscure our infamously racist history here– we  had race-based chattel slavery here for more than two hundred years, annihilated most of the native people who lived on what is now the USA (savages, we remember them as), excluded the Chinese, once they had died building transcontinental railroads, tolerated more than a century of terrorism against former slaves, discriminated against Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans and other “ethnic” types, and so forth.    

“Race” is largely an arbitrary construct, and a very mutable one.  At one time here in the United States (and still, among some) Italians, Irish and Jews were considered “niggers”.   As a Jew, I take my solidarity with my fellow niggers quite seriously, as my father before me did.

In our greatest moments as a nation, these arbitrary differences have been put aside and masses of our people have moved forward together to face some grave challenge or to enjoy the fruits of liberty.  In our worst moments, these cultural differences are exploited by ruthless demagogues, pointing to the evil “other” and inspiring violence as they quietly do their dirty deeds. 

Fuck racism, you know what I’m saying?  But in order to fuck it, you first have to talk about it.

We don’t often question hierarchy as an organizing principle, or reckon how destructive its effects often are.   The ranking of humans by their importance, arbitrary and unfair though it often seems, is simply the way it is, like a lot of things we ask God to grant us the serenity not to worry about.  Hierarchy is ubiquitous in human affairs, going back to before recorded history, one suspects.   Societies based on competition and conquest are particularly hierarchal.  

You can picture dozens of examples.   At the top of the pyramid is a person, or small group of people, with vast power.   The will of these at the very top, often praised, guides the actions of everybody below them.  At each level people give orders to those below them and are responsible for making their immediate superiors look good.  Responsibility flows in one direction, bottom to top.  Each group of supervisors are accountable only to their more important superiors.   If they carry out their orders diligently and produce the desired metrics they might be promoted to the next rank.   Every tyranny in history has run on this model, just as every corporation does, every army, virtually every human organization you can think of, organizations that do little or no harm, even organizations that do the most good.

Hierarchy is one of those principles that seem inevitable and organic.  It seems to have arisen from nature herself.  In the jungle there is the hierarchy, we are taught, a King of the Jungle , the top predator.  The Catholic Church has a Pope, the corporation the C.E.O., the school the Principal.   When Capitalism was rising to strangle every other possible view of economic and cultural organization its rationale was as scientific as Phrenology or Eugenics, as irrefutable as Manifest Destiny: Social Darwinism.  

Charles Darwin articulated a once-controversial theory of evolution based on species changing to adapt to changing conditions.  This theory, backed by long historic and ongoing evidence, is no longer controversial among educated people [1].   Under Darwin’s theory of evolution, those individuals of a given species best able to adapt to the changing conditions survive to reproduce, their offspring who inherit these new traits have the best chance of surviving and reproducing and so forth.  There was nothing moral about evolution, it was based on natural selection, adaptation to the changing environment and survival.

“Survival of the Fittest” became the self-justifying credo of modern titans of industry, Robber Barons, the greediest, most determined and most able to amass great wealth.   Their offspring, they believed, were genetically fittest to inherit everything.   Though we may have cause to lament this arrangement at times, we don’t seriously question it, it has always been thus.  You had prehistoric tribal leaders, ancient warlords, kings, all flowing, one imagines, from obedience to the first homo sapiens who figured out how to use a devastating new weapon to kill and didn’t hesitate to use it.  

I am not thinking of hierarchy now just because I heard the president on the radio affecting tremendous, unshakable nonchalance as he danced around an interviewer’s questions.  Some see this man we have as president now as the personification of our sick society, the embodiment of everything wrong with our culture.   He was born wealthy, privileged and entitled to the best things money can buy.  He is boastful, the most boastful, he has the best boasts.   He is often untruthful.   He does not keep his word, although sometimes he does.  He does, he really does keep his word, always?, no, but sometimes he keeps his word, he keeps his word.  He surrounds himself with others born entitled as he was, like his daughter, his son-in-law, also born very, very rich because he’s a very great person.  His cabinet of billionaires dedicated to dismantling the protective agencies they were appointed to head, same deal.  The best people.  Those in his administration who are not very wealthy are very, very loyal.  They supported the president when many considered his candidacy a joke.  Who is laughing now?  Are you laughing?  I don’t see you laughing.

It would be an easy place to go in a discussion of the downside of hierarchy, but let’s not go there.   I want a simpler, more mundane example to lead off.  Your average public school in America.   The individual school that the inexperienced, platitude-choked, religious fanatic daughter and wife of billionaires now in charge of the Department of Education has vowed to privatize.  Forget her, for a moment, if you can.   We are looking at the individual school, say twenty, fifty or a hundred years ago.

The original theory of mandatory public school was to educate all children in America and give each one a real chance to participate in, and contribute to, our democracy.  The public education system produced some impressive results at certain times.  My alma mater, The City College, was once known (long before my time there) as the Harvard of the Poor.  CCNY produced many illustrious alumni in a wide range of fields, including ten Nobel Prize winners.   It remains a shining example of what low-cost or free education can do for motivated citizens.  The GI plan after World War II that gave many poor veterans college scholarships and brought many into the middle class is another example.

Public education was almost never available to all, and it was also never truly a meritocracy.   Early advocates like the genius Thomas Jefferson spoke of raking the educable few from the rubble of the masses (a phrase I got from my father, and is apparently, if one believes Google, only cited on this blahg, several times over the years).  The actual Jefferson quote, in advocating the common school, was:

“By this means, twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually and be instructed in Greek, Latin, geography, and the higher branches of arithmetic at the public expense, creating a new generation of leaders without regard to wealth, birth, or accidental condition.”  

Hierarchy, again, but at least here it is proposed as some sort of meritocracy, if you can stand the stink of the poor who are not actually slaves owned by superior people, have someone rake out a few brilliant souls from the shit and you can send them to an excellent and exacting public school where they will have the opportunity to prosper.  A scholarship for those who, but for the unfortunate accident of their birth, would deserve to sit among the greatest of our nation.  

This is not the place for a discussion of the hypocrisy and failure of this exalted vision of creating a true democracy by giving all young people a good education.  It is enough to agree that the original impetus for public schools was largely a noble one.   Give a child a good, solid education that instills a lifelong taste for learning and you create an intelligent, productive, problem-solving citizen.  In the process of doing this you will find that the rate of brilliance among the children of the poor is about the same as it is among the children of the rich– once we correct for the damage done by things like malnutrition, poor prenatal care, the violence of slums, PTSD, parental despair and the like.

The American public school, which served millions of poor children, particularly once child labor was made illegal (around 1930, shockingly enough) and schooling compulsory (Mississippi, we learn from Wikipedia, was the last state to do this, in 1918)  was designed on a factory model.  

The young workers (students) arrive at the same hour, assemble in the yard, line up by class, where they are traditionally ranked by their achievement and behavior, and file silently into the school.   As a body they rise to solemnly salute the flag and the republic for which it stands.  A bell rings to tell them work time has started.   Another bell rings when it is time to switch to the next task.  They file into a cafeteria at the programmed time.   The assemblies in the auditorium are carefully managed to create a sense of community, or, if you are more cynical, conformity.  The bell rings, like a factory whistle blowing, and they exit the building en masse.

I hated school when I was a kid.  Particularly the rigid structure of the place.  I chafed at everything I found stupid, arbitrary, seemingly designed only to stifle the imagination.  I recognize now that I had the good fortune to attend one of the best public schools around.  It was a small public school in a wealthy neighborhood (we lived just on the other side of the figurative tracks) with very high academic standards, where classes were small and the school was of a size that virtually everyone knew everyone else.  

I was in elementary school when the battle over integration was being viciously fought by passionate partisans.  My mother’s good friend, a fellow-integrationist, sobbed after receiving hate mail addressed to Commie (which I found hilarious) and Nigger Lover (which somehow did not seem as funny, even though the word ‘nigger’, another word I’d never heard, seemed as intrinsically funny as ‘commie’).  Those black kids who were finally bused in got a solid education, particularly compared to the inferior one they would have gotten in their unconstitutional ‘separate but equal’ shithole in the segregated areas of Queens where they lived.  

Leave aside the School to Prison pipeline, the punitive system in which unruly students are treated as young inmates to be controlled rather than young minds to be guided toward the things that will excite their imaginations the most.  I want you to consider the average public school in an average neighborhood in any city in America.  I have worked in about a dozen of them, in New York City, maybe a few more than that.   Here is the hierarchic aspect I want to highlight.  

Teaching in these schools is famously difficult and demoralizing.   The attrition rate for new teachers is very high.  A small number of dedicated teachers go on long enough to become excellent teachers.   These people, mostly women traditionally, are unsung heroes.   They are artists, skillfully improvising with the young souls in their care to teach many things.  I have nothing but admiration for great teachers, teachers who inspire a love of learning.  Having tried teaching for a number of years, I am very aware of how much talent, dedication and generosity go into becoming a great teacher.  

If you work in a system as overwhelmed with difficulty as the public school system in a nation grotesquely divided between the increasingly wealthy and the increasingly poor, there are two different career paths.  One is to do the extremely hard work of becoming a great teacher (while also practicing social work, mediation, psychology, nursing and a number of other disciplines).  The other path is to get out of the classroom as quickly as possible and take the courses and tests to become an administrator.  

Not every person who opts for this second career path is a complete asshole, though many are.  Let me make that more precise:  not everyone who opts to become the boss of other teachers, without having mastered the difficult art themselves, is a complete asshole, the vast majority, sadly, are.    Ask any teacher you know, particularly those who worked in multiple schools.  The excellent principal is as rare as the excellent teacher.  

The trouble is, while a mediocre or poor teacher is a plague upon thirty students, a mediocre or poor principal is a plague upon the entire school, every teacher, teacher’s aid and student– and all of their families.   The public school (and private schools, I think, with their ‘head masters’, are roughly the same) is one of the most black and white top-down hierarchies around.    Principals who spent as little time as possible in the classroom, finding the path upwards by taking tests, seeking promotions to special jobs, doing favors for the more powerful, showing their reliability as politicians, have almost unlimited power over teachers.  It is just the way they do it in most school districts.   One asshole principal can demoralize an entire school community and they are accountable, luckily for them, only to the political powers in the school district who appointed them and signed off on their virtually unlimited power. 

I am reminded of this example of the principal unaccountably at the top of a hierarchy largely because of a comment I once heard from a perceptive parent. I ran a program for elementary school kids ages 7-11 where the children performed every aspect of dreaming up and creating original animation.  It was a workshop that hummed like a beehive, a community of peers that worked together, rotated jobs and solved problems together.   A father came to pick up his son as the workshop was still in progress.  He stood at the door smiling and I went over to say hello.  He told me how much his son, a friendly and creative boy who did wonderful animation and also was featured on many soundtracks, enjoyed the workshop.  Then he said “I love that it is so non-hierarchic.”   I’d never thought of it in those terms, but, damn, he hit the nail right on the head.  

We live in a competitive society where certain people get to outright cheat.   This class of people, some born to it, others determined to enter it, makes the rules to maximize their advantage in the rigged game.   I long to spend some time in a room with people doing what they love where nobody needs to dominate or be in charge.   There is an intelligence in a group of people that needs no firm hand telling it how to think, what the best way is.   You don’t see it in action often, which is very sad, but you can see it once in a while.  A group of old friends sitting around where nobody needs to be the boss.

Ah, but listen to me go on…

[1]  With our usual caveat:  the theory of evolution is universally accepted by educated people except among Republican presidential candidates who are obliged to challenge it for political reasons as they cater to a vast group of American Christian fundamentalist voters who resist anything about Creation that contradicts the word of God, as they are taught it.

No American should be overly upset by this, one would have to reluctantly agree, particularly since there’s nothing anyone you or I know who can do anything about it.    The old prayer about having the serenity to accept the rape and murder of children if you can’t do anything about it comes to mind.  

In war civilians die, we now call it ‘collateral damage’ instead of murdered children, old people, regular law-abiding citizens.  ‘Collateral damage’ is so much more comfortable than ‘slaughtered civilians’, it’s just one of those inevitable, collateral things, right?

The current president, a man-child whose entire philosophy of life is “winning”, whatever that means and whatever means must be taken to achieve that ephemeral goal,  dropped the “mother of all bombs” on a section of Afghanistan the other day.  The GBU-43 Massive Ordance Air Blast, the largest non-nuclear bomb in the American arsenal, a giant weighing 21,600 pounds, the equivalent of  eleven tons of good old fashioned TNT, has a blast radius of one mile.  It creates a fire storm that sucks the oxygen out of the air in the blast zone.

The coverage of the bombing in the mainstream media, like the media’s reaction to the recent telegenic night-time cruise missile strike on the Syrian air field, has been one of almost unanimous praise.   We are asked by wealthy talking heads to see such violence as bold, decisive and ‘presidential’.   Here is a wonderfully modest quote from the man himself, “very, very proud” of the military might he manfully unleashed against America’s godless enemies:

One tremendous difference is the dramatically increased number of dead civilians since this decisive new leader has taken over.  The dropping of the “mother of all bombs” follows the worst month for collateral damage in Syria and Iraq.  In March 2017 more than a thousand collateral damage losers were inadvertently taken off the books by the good guys due to the increased ferocity of a military unleashed by the candidate who won applause for vowing to “bomb the shit” out of those murderous fuckers who hate our freedom.  

Of course, you’re right, this is all very depressing and there’s not much any of us can do about it.   In a more decent world, we would be shouting, and marching, and calling our representatives in Congress (not that most of them are in a position to do anything, unless they’re members of the Grand Old Party that repudiated this current president, before his historic victory).  This is not a more decent world.  

At a time when this new administration is furiously turning the clock back to the good old days of segregation, women knowing their place, coal mining, no questioning of authority, no regulation of the environment, no government interference with employment, health, education or welfare, the open rule of the wealthiest citizens and our most powerful corporations, well, who could blame us for not getting worked up about a thousand more or a thousand less anonymous foreign dead in an area where a million or more have become collateral damage since our leaders launched their endless, heroic wars in the Middle East fifteen years ago?   The ingrates don’t even seem to appreciate the freedom we have brought them.  SAD!