The People divided shall always be defeated

Hey Folks -

How long before we wise up?? The People divided shall always be defeated.

The facts of how the vampire ginks at the top of the economic order manipulate us to keep us down is directly below in Leonard Pitts Jr.'s column. Further evidence is provided below the column in my letter to Mr. Pitts and the quotation from Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

- Uke Man


Race alone won't explain the vote in West Virginia
Tuesday, May 27, 2008 2:55 AM
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

I keep thinking I should be mad at West Virginia.


Not because Barack Obama was recently beaten like a red-headed stepchild -- to use my father's expression -- in that state's primary. No, I'm thinking I should be upset about "why" he was beaten. According to exit polls, two out of every 10 voters said race was a major factor in how they cast their ballots.


Jon Stewart of The Daily Show ran a clip of a white woman who explained her refusal to vote for Obama thusly: "I guess because he is another race. I'm sort of scared of the other race 'cause we have so much conflict with 'em." She spoke in the vaguely shamefaced, what're-you-gonna-do? voice of someone who knows she should stick to her diet or stop smoking, but just can't help herself.


You'd think this would have me in a state of high dudgeon, fingers blazing the keyboard in righteous rebuke of attitudes so atavistic and wrong. But I can't. Oh, it's disappointing to see bigotry in Appalachia so vividly displayed. Yet I find it doesn't make me angry.


It just makes me sad.


I feel sorry for them. If that sounds patronizing, I apologize. That's not how it's meant.


It's just that, if the headline here is that Obama was rejected by whites on the basis of race, I submit that's not the whole truth. Pollsters say he was actually rejected on the basis of race by whites who lack college degrees and whose household income is less than $50,000 a year. In other words, he was rejected by the poor and the less educated.


Which is a description that fits many in Appalachia -- and also a vast swath of black America. So for me, the story here isn't simply the old, familiar tale of the nation's stark racial divide, but also another tale, just as old, less often remarked, of how the white poor and the black poor have long been kept at one another's throats as a means of keeping them from looking too closely or clearly at the ways both are manipulated by the forces of money and power.


And here, let me tell you what I am not saying. I'm not saying all bigots are poor or all the poor are bigots. I'm not saying everyone in Appalachia is poor, or less educated, or atavistic about race.


But I am saying this: the white poor have been victims of a con job going back at least as far as the Civil War, when poor white men were used as cannon fodder for the right of rich white men -- I repeat: rich white men -- to keep slaves. They were told they fought for state's rights.


From then till now, the white poor have often been the front line of white supremacy. You think people with college degrees and six-figure salaries are out there marching around under pointy white hoods, burning crosses? Hardly.


My point is that race has often been used as a means of distracting and diverting the white poor. They had little in life, nor any realistic expectation of having more. But the one thing they did have -- or so the con went -- was whiteness itself. Which meant they had someone to be better than. Someone to look down upon.


This, even though they did menial work under menial conditions, earned menial pay, sent their kids to menial schools, were subject to menial indignities, made do with menial health care and lived menial lives hemmed in by want, ignorance and hunger. Exactly like those they had been taught they were better than. Exactly like those they had been taught to look down upon.


There are those in positions of political power who can and should be held to answer for the meanness and narrowness of poor people's lives. But they can't and won't be so long as those who should be standing together to demand those answers are kept busy fighting one another over superficialities of color and culture.


Those are differences that too often obscure commonalities -- of need, of hope and of cause. Over the years, many of us have figured that out.


In West Virginia, at least, two in 10 of us have not.


Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald.
lpitts@miamiherald.com





Dear Mr. Pitts,

Another great column.

You are probably already aware of Mark Twain's views in regard to rich and poor whites in the South around the time of the Civil War. In case not, I have included it below.

You are absolutely right about the "divide and conquer" routine of the wealthy class. For myself, hoping to raise consciousness, I have modified a familiar protest chant to say:

"The people divided shall always be defeated."

Yours - Tom Harker, "Ukulele Man"

Chapter 30 – Note:The Yankee and the King come upon a burning Manor house and a mob of peasants busy chasing down and hanging other peasants suspected of having killed the oppressive lord and burning his manor.



The painful thing observable about all this business was the alacrity with which this oppressed community had turned their cruel hands against their own class in the interest of the common oppressor. This man and woman seemed to feel that in a quarrel between a person of their own class and his lord, it was the natural and proper and rightful thing for that poor devil’s whole caste to side with the master and fight his battle for him, without ever stopping to inquire into the rights or wrongs of the matter. This man had been out helping to hang his neighbors, and had done his work with zeal, and yet was aware that there was nothing against them but a mere suspicion, with nothing back of it describable as evidence; still neither he nor his wife seemed to see anything horrible about it.



This was depressing – to a man with the dream of a republic in his head. It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when the “poor whites” of our South who were always despised, and frequently insulted, by the slave lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution which degraded them.