Racism. Voter Suppression. Why Here? Why Now?

Racism.  Voter suppression.  Why here?  Why now?

We've given this some thought and we've come up with another one of our crack-pot theories. Voter suppression, we propose, isn't simply just another expression of racism any more than racism is a result of voter suppression.  They're both twin symptoms of a deeper disease.  The evils of racism and it's wicked cousin voter suppression - as well as most other forms of intolerance - aren't necessarily endemic to one region or one ideology more than another.  Sure, they may be more widely practiced right now in the American South than in, say, the Bay Area or the more liberal enclaves of New England, but we propose that when the right conditions are present, racism and it's inbred stepchild voter suppression will arise, whatever the locale.  Look what's happening right now with the rise of the far right in formerly ultra-progressive northern European nations like Denmark and the Netherlands.  

Racism, antisemitism, and other forms of xenophobia are the products of economic inequality.  When one group in a society are aware that they have fewer commodities, a diminished lifestyle, a shorter life expectancy, than others in that society, they look for culprits, someone to blame, and usually they don't look toward those who have more than they do as the culprits, but instead look for scapegoats and culprits who have even less than they do, people they think of as freeloaders taking advantage of the system and taking out more than they put back in.  It's only radicals who blame the wealthy for their poverty - most people seem to think there are too many other people around to share what's left over and blame their peer class or those below them on the social ladder for their problems.

"If I'm not succeeding, it's not because those above me are preventing me from rising up, it must be those below me that are dragging me down," some people seem to think.  Wage stagnation, underemployment, the crass indignities of economic inequality - all of these force people to look for culprits, and immigrants, followers of other religions, and people with different skin tones are easy scapegoats.  "I'd have more if I didn't have to share with them," many people think, without even recognizing that the wealthy are thinking the exact same thing about them.

When times are hard, racism, bigotry, and intolerance all come out, and are expressed as hate crimes, segregation, and voter suppression.  So the first point we're trying to make here is that economic inequality isn't the result of racism and bigotry, but racism and bigotry are the result of economic inequality.

To peel back another layer of the onion, we propose that the root cause of economic inequality is egocentricity.  The wealthy hoard the resources - accumulate commodities as Marx puts it - because egocentricity tells them that they are not others, and it's better for them to have wealth than for others to have it.  If we were free of ego, or at least self-identified as "us" instead of "me,"  there would be no egocentric hoarding, and then no economic inequality, and as a result of that, no racism or voter suppression.     

French President Emmanuel Macron, speaking at the Arc de Triomphe to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, said much the same thing last weekend, only holding up me-first nationalism as an example of egotistical folly instead of economic disparity.  

"Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism," he said. "Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. By saying our interests first, who cares about the others, we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what makes it great and what is essential: its moral values."

If you go to a pot-luck dinner, where everybody brings a dish of their choice to a communal feast, there's always one person looking over the smorgasbord on the groaning table and thinking that whoever brought that particular dish contributed less than they did with their dish, and judging all the other attendees by how much or how little they contributed.  I guess what we're trying to say in this post is don't be that person.