So Poor! 'So Black!'

Common Sense
John Maxwell

'So Poor!' he said in wonderment. CNN's Wolf Blitzer was looking at some of the victims of Katrina, rudely uprooted from their Third World existence in New Orleans by the hurricane. They were, of course outside his experience.

For Wolf Blitzer and most other American journalists, American poverty is a whole other country and so, white American journalists are as bemused as the rest of the world, looking on in stupefied disbelief as they are exposed to the reality of the American underclass.

On Thursday, a group of more than a hundred Jamaicans returned to Jamaica from jobs on the US Gulf coast. They were ordinary workers, hotel maids, bellhops and the like, with no particularly rare skills. They've been working in the US because American hotels can't find American workers to do these jobs.

They can't find them because Americans, no matter how poor, refuse to work for the kind of pay Jamaicans will willingly accept. The American workers are, in the words of the globalisers, not competitive.

To make them competitive the United States has for generations relied on imported labour, mainly illegal immigrants and some others who go to the United States with the full knowledge and complicity of the American authorities to work for American capitalists.


Foreign workers, like this Jamaican woman, take low-paying jobs which most Americans won't accept.

How can we compete, the capitalists ask piteously, against the production of peasants in faraway countries, impressed into industrial labour forces by agents of other American capitalists?

Obeying the imperatives of capitalism, Americans have been outsourcing production for a very long time, but the movement has accelerated into a stampede within the last 10 years. These days, only China is competitive.

Originally, the equation was simple. Industrialised countries 'bought' primary products from former colonies and sold them at grossly inflated prices to their own markets and to the people they had bought the stuff from in the first place. But as countries like Jamaica developed on the 'Puerto Rican' model and others developed on the Japanese model, profits began to be shaved and markets began to be overloaded.

In the Far East where colonialism had not managed to do too much damage, people retained their cultures, their language and most of their ancient skills. The Chinese, who invented gunpowder, were producing steel in backyard furnaces in the 1960s.

The Japanese, who had built the world's largest and most advanced battleship, the Yamato, 70 years ago, had to endure the fairly benign occupation of the American military after having been atom-bombed into subjection.

But they got to keep their emperor and they got something infinitely more valuable, enormous amounts of military investment which helped fuel a new growth of industrialisation. The same thing happened in Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and the effect spilled over into other southeast Asian countries. Europeans got the Marshall Plan.

Starting from a different level than Americans, these people soon began to produce and outproduce Americans particularly in electronics and motor vehicles.

In Africa, where whole civilisations and cultures had been uprooted and obliterated, and in the former American colonies of the European powers, life was different.

One major reason was the colour of the skins of the people. For 500 years, in order to justify slavery, the world was told that blacks were shiftless, work-shy and undisciplined. They had to be forced to work 'for their own good, you understand; they needed slavery'.

That excuse allowed King Leopold to enslave the Congo, long after slavery was 'abolished' and the British, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish to enforce similar forms of superprofit-extraction in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. In Latin America there were lots of blacks, but the population majorities there weren't black; they were, as the writer Inga Muscio was once described, simply 'less than white'.

Within the United States itself the promised Reconstruction after slavery swiftly degenerated into white reaction and re-enslavement under another name. The intensely religious Americans emulated the ecclesiastics of the 12th century. Instead of figuring how many angels could dance on the head of a pin they were calculating how many Anglos could dance on the head of a peon.

Blacks in the Americas have always been ambivalent about their prospects on this side of the Atlantic. There were and are those who, like Martin Luther King, figured that their blood and suffering had bought them rights. There were the others, like Marcus Garvey and the 'Black Muslims' who believed that for blacks there was no white man's justice that would ever encompass them.

Being black in America is not quite as dangerous as being openly homosexual in Jamaica, but it is close enough. A black man in the Bronx today has a lower life expectancy than a Bangladeshi of the same age.

Nearly 50 years ago, on my first visit to the United States I was challenged by a black shoemaker in Washington DC, literally within the shadow of the Capitol.

He was puzzled by my accent and wanted to know where I came from.
When I told him he asked me:
"They got anybody like me where you come from?"
I didn't understand him. Yes, they had shoemakers in Jamaica, I said.
No man. "They got any niggers there?"

I was totally flabbergasted. He and I could easily have been blood brothers; our hair was the same, our skin colour was the same. if anything he was a shade or two lighter-skinned than I. We even looked a little bit alike, I thought.

We settled the historical and ethnic questions over a pitcher of beer in a nearby bar. Why, I asked him, didn't he think I was a nigger? "Because you don't talk like a nigger, man, and you don't walk like a nigger."

New Orleans was in one way, a swinging, cosmopolitan city, world city, multicultural, multi-ethnic, in which 'black culture' was the defining flavour. But New Orleans was cross-dressing.

It was also an archetypical Southern US city, a kind of human zoo or theme park in which the majority of the population were allowed to flourish as long as they were of good behaviour. Beneath the export-only black culture there was another layer of black poverty and misery, largely invisible to the Blitzers and the kibitzers.

Apart from being so poor and so black, the Afro American minority is also dismissed as criminal and diseased. In the name of law and order, about half a million blacks are currently warehoused in prisons which are real universities of crime. The American black prison population is larger than the total prison population of any country, other than perhaps China.

Almost one-third of young black American men are either in jail or under some sort of custodial supervision, because the laws of the United States, as exemplified by persons such as Rehnquist, Jesse Helms, and the media, believe that blacks prefer a life of crime to fulfilling the American dream.

As Herrnstein and Murray say in The Bell Curve: "Clearly something about getting seriously involved in crime competes with staying in school."

The Bell Curve, accepted as making sense by an overwhelming cross section of the US media, postulates a "Custodial state", a high tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservations for some substantial minority of the nation's population, while the rest of America tries to go about its busines.

Herrnstein and Murray say that such a state "will not only be tolerated but actively supported by a consensus of the cognitive elite" and they claim that they are not really theorising but reporting.

Instead of a custodial state, Herrnstein and Murray suggest "cognitive partitioning", supported by a return to Individualism. That is, the cognitive elite will formally continue to select out its Colin Powells, Condoleezza Rices and Clarence Thomases (but definitely not Serena Williams) to serve them, as Harry Belafonte described Powell, as house slaves.

The problem is not ethnic, although ethnicity is involved. The Central Europeans, who are the largest ethnic group in the United States outside of Hispanics, have always had their Serbs, Slavs and Gypsies (Egyptians) to hew wood and draw water. To that perhaps we should add the Irish, until they were all supplanted by the blacks.

The ethnic discrimination is not simply ethnic, but a convenient way to classify an economic underclass because so many wear an instantly recognisable uniform.

It tends to be forgotten that blacks are only a part of the American underclass. Their white compatriots are usually ignored, as if they are simply passing through a phase.

But since many become visible because of their homelessness, or joblessness or some dysfunctionality which makes them stand out, all of these characteristics are passed on to other poor people, particularly to blacks.

Black is black and white is white and never shall the twain mate. That, at least, is the theory of Hollywood and of much of the media so that it is now part of the Hollywood myth-complex.

The rest of the world looks strangely at an America in which "Guess who's coming to dinner", after 40 years, is still as far as Hollywood is prepared to go with the idea of 'inter-racial' sex, as if the mating of white and black were as experimental as the mating of gorillas and chimpanzees.

The result is someone like O J Simpson who, having been acquitted of murder, was still found guilty, essentially of marrying a white woman. While no one can explain how Simpson could have sanitised himself and his house in the hour or so between the murders and his journey to Chicago, most white Americans thought he should pay damages to the families of his murdered wife and her friend. Newsweek made the point: O J tried to live like a white man. "He even played golf."

TIME magazine confessed to painting him blacker than he was, just as they did to Hugo Chavez, no doubt for good and sufficient reason.

When, 40 years ago, the actress Kim Novak was rumoured to be having an affair with Sammy Davis Jr, it more or less meant the end of her career. 'Inter-racial' mating is seen by the media as terminally dangerous not just to the morals of their audiences, but more dangerously, to the economics of the US.

There can be no miscegenation without representation, and where would that leave the working class? Barbara Bush had it right. Refugees in Texas MUST be better off than at home in New Orleans. And more sanitary to boot.

Meanwhile, if one examines the real USA, away from the ersatz gentility of the media, one discovers that not only are the really poor getting poorer, but the middle class is going nowhere at all. The middle classes are almost exactly where they were thirty years ago, in real economic terms.

The rich have become immeasurably wealthier and the poor destitute and hopeless. If social peace is to be maintained, globalisation must provide the answer: that means providing cheaper and cheaper goods to disguise the static economic position of the majority of Americans.

That requires not only a real Third World outside the boundaries of the United States; it also requires one within as well.