Bart Busker – bartbusker@yahoo.com |
Okay, the Trayvon Martin killing is not, technically, a racial issue. It is a consequence of class conflict. Said concession quickly leads one who doesn’t already know to analyze the racial makeup of our lowest class.
In statistical context, the lowest class almost everywhere in America is disproportionately black. "Disproportionate" refers to the fact that Blacks make up 12.3% of our population, but 23% of our lowest economic class. By the way, it is happily true that some percentage of blacks are doing financially great in America! But that happy percentage too is much smaller than that of whites and Hispanics.
In Sanford, Florida, an Orlando suburb, a housing community some amount above the lowest economic class had a "neighborhood watch" to "watch out" for bad actions by someone, anyone of a lower economic class than theirs. A member of the watch went beyond his "right of watching" and shot to death a lower class boy who was walking, legally, through the more affluent neighborhood.
What followed was a brief, ugly and telling lifting of the truth-veil in Sanford, thence in America, and especially in the South. It was a conscience-searing glimpse of the actual lives being lived by the many blacks who are still slogging along the multi-generations-long trek from direct slavery, then peonage, then through the decades of policies -continuing today – always designed to hinder blacks’ ascendance to truly equal treatment and opportunity.
Trayvon’s killing and the reactions to it by local Florida authorities are a stark reminder of a usually carefully covered reality of which an American need not be black to be aware. White American Herman Melville wrote in 1850 of the "joint stock world" in which we all live. To see this shooting as "random," as unrelated to government policies which absolutely limit the ideals of democracy, thus hurting most those who are hurting most, is willful denial of the reality in which our government’s actions "live!"
First, U. S. Government sanctioned policies that deserve the title "slavery" then "peonage" only became illegal in the mid 1940’s! So, after almost 300 years of legality, 65 years ago slavery was officially outlawed – but decades after that the habits of those in power have been clearly purposefully grudging in their "accommodation of that federal mandate." Look-the-other-way policies like the Sanford temptation to "let Trayvon’s killing slide," are like tips of the voting discrimination, job discrimination, and education denial iceberg which are still in use – clearly in Texas – and will continue to be tried.
The devastating damage to families ravaged by generations of actual slavery’s sanctioned murders, rapes, lynchings and daily humiliations are like bleeding internal wounds "inherited" by hundreds of thousands of black "would be" families over the whole history of America. The crippling results of those families’ debilitating ordeal is still clear today!
That veil was barely lifted in Sanford. The powers that be in the Orlando suburbs thought about it; they wanted to let the Trayvon shooting go unpunished! They absolutely would have if they just could have!
They started in that direction…but they were stopped by light shone on the incident there, locally, then by the needed attention brought to bear by "national personalities" like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. That spotlight and angry attention are, sadly, still essential to getting brief moments of "justice for all," especially in the South.
The enraging truth is that organized efforts to keep the lower classes low must still be fought against every day! For example; voting limitations, neighborhood red-lining, employment discrimination, underfunding of public schools – these generations-old ploys of institutional class discrimination are absolutely being applied here in Texas today.
Look at our state’s majority rejecting over sixteen thousand voter registration applications in Harris County alone due chiefly to "incomplete or illegible information." And this while their officeholders rage against "voter fraud," of which effectively no cases – fewer than ten over three years! – have ever been proved in the whole state!
Just look at our state’s legislative majority daring to sit on reserves of cash readily available to end the ruling party’s own, irresponsible overcrowding of public school classrooms at every grade level in Texas. Look at their continuing, brazen audacity in saying "we have decided not to ‘revisit’ the underfunding of public schools" – for two more years, until 2014!
This is willful denial of the fact that our public schools, through their teachers, are the true "first responders" in the "life triangle" formed by the imagined lives of our citizens, the actual lives of our citizens, and government responsibility to mediate and balance those two.
What recourse is available to persuade the powers that be from Sanford, Florida to Austin, Texas to stop blocking the intended evolution of democratic rights? Individual appeals to appointed authorities will suffice sometimes. Group appeals to appointed authorities will suffice sometimes. Public demonstrations will suffice sometimes. Public disobedience is helpful and required sometimes. More drastic "demonstrations and actions to stop the undemocratic exercise of power" have been and may again be required too.
In these matters of individual rights, all officeholders must be held down hard to the principle that they represent all citizens, not just those who voted for them. We all know and must be willing to embrace the lessons of our history. Those lessons teach that without a push back up, the push down will not diminish, it will grow heavier and heavier.