Nowadays people who don’t identify as or with the victims of inequality, discrimination, classism, and racism frequently seem to buy into the na?ve-making myths that there’s no such thing as “class” in our splendid society, that serious and systemic racial discrimination is a thing of the past, and that we live in a land of equal opportunity and a meritocracy where anyone of any socio-economic or ethnic background can get ahead by working hard. Supposedly everyone who’s failing in our system has only himself to blame, and when people criticize the system they’re just trying to shift blame away from themselves, and/or being whiny.
Why do so many people delude themselves into thinking all of the above, into believing such a crock of propaganda, into not realizing their own victimization in our society’s unjust status quo? In other words, why are many of us in denial about realities such as economic inequality and racism? When a black person complains that racism is still alive and making the soul of our society sick why is the reflexive response of so many whites to balk at or pooh-pooh the very idea? Etc.
Of course there are various answers to this question, and they aren’t mutually exclusive, rather they all dovetail together. Firstly, there are psychological reasons. We don’t really feel good about being victims, it doesn’t exactly make us feel competent or empowered to view ourselves as victims of anything, including our system, so we prefer to deny that we are and we deny that any fundamental inequality is inherent in our system.
What’s more, we disidentify with even the most obvious victims of the economy, with the unemployed, the working poor, the uninsured, the homeless. We refuse to see ourselves as being in the same pathetic boat as such people, we tell ourselves that under our system everyone is the captain of his own ship and has no one else to blame for being a loser. This gives us the feel-good sense of not being a loser ourselves, even if we’re not exactly raving success stories.
All our denial and disidentification places our system up on a pedestal above criticism and reproach, we come to think of it as an ideal system (or as as close to being ideal as humanly possible), all of its evils we attribute to individuals. This is rather like the little dodge that Christians pull when confronted with the evils in the history of Christianity, they maintain that “real” Christianity is an ideal faith, it was just individuals who weren’t “real” Christians who perpetrated atrocities in its name. Yes, we resort to the same cop-out when we claim that our system is just fine, that it’s just individuals who don’t want to work who end up filling out the ranks of the welfare dependent and homeless.
Then of course there’s also the psychological payoff that not only does disidentifying with the system’s victims prevent us from feeling bad about our own less than stellar lot, it also allows us to feel a little superior to the less fortunate. That is, we obtain a nice ego boost from opining that blacks and poor people are just malcontents and complainers who need to get up off their duffs and get to work. We raise our own self-esteem by holding those people who bear the brunt of society’s injustices in low regard. And we take this to the extreme of denying that there even are any inherent injustices in our form of society.
Of course in addition to psychological factors there are also sociological reasons why we unconsciously choose to live in self-defeating denial about the existence of inequality and other blemishes on our system. In a word, our sense of patriotism is exploited and manipulated by the system to discourage us from being too harshly critical of it.
If you’re a fellow dissident you know what I’m talking about. Anyone who feels strongly that the system is deeply flawed from a social justice point of view and comes on strong with criticism of it has had the experience of being personally attacked and accused by a patriotic partner in conversation of not loving his country. We’ve been programmed to think that being patriotic is a matter of loving our country’s socio-economic power structure, and so out of a misguided notion of patriotism we support and defend a system that victimizes the majority of its population, and when we encounter a critic of the system we try to silence him/her with a “love it or leave it” response.
I could go on here about how the public school system and the mass media collude to condition our thinking, to condition us to believe that our system is just hunky-dory, I could make my case that we’re all the subjects of societal brainwashing on a scale so large that we don’t recognize it as brainwashing (when it’s mainstream society that’s brainwashing you and you have nothing to compare with then it’s kind of hard to recognize that you’ve been brainwashed!), but I’ve spent enough time on why we swallow the whopper of a big lie that inequality and racism don’t exist in any significant way under our system, I’ll move on now to some obvious examples of the fact that they do.
To start with how about the ghetto, unless you’re one of those whites who think that blacks have it made these days because of affirmative action (which has actually largely been abolished), the existence of communities in the urban centers of our big cities where a dark-skinned underclass is locked into conditions of poverty, forsaken from educational and employment opportunities, and reduced to making ends meet with drug dealing and food stamps should have you at least thinking twice about the justness of our system.
Of course the conservative defenders of the capitalist system have their cop-out that turns the tables on the left, they blame welfare programs for perpetuating black people in poverty. According to the cynical thinking of conservatives blacks and even human beings in general are naturally inclined to be lazy bums and if you provide them with welfare they’re never going to pull themselves up out of poverty to become productive citizens. And with this facile argument conservatives gloss over the reality of unemployment and discrimination that makes it difficult for many minorities and poor whites to choose being gainfully employed over being on the welfare rolls.
In fact it’s the economic realities of our system, and for black & Hispanics the reality of racism to boot, that place people in a position where they resort to welfare. In a system truly geared to employ everyone welfare would be an option that few would fall back on. I know this is hard to believe for staunch and skeptical conservatives but then when it comes to the truth of life under capitalism conservatives are about as realistic as Holocaust deniers!
No, the existence and conditions of the ghetto do not indict the people who live there as failures in life, they indict our society as a failure in terms of our highest values. They indict and help convict our society on the charge of harboring unfair class and race-based disparities.
Then of course there are the places we, as a society, transfer a sizable portion of the pesky population of the ghetto to, prison. The strikingly disproportionate representation of minorities in penal facilities speaks volumes about racial justice in our society.
Sadly it’s not hyperbole to say that prisons are the dehumanizing warehouses of the underclass and underdogs bred by our society’s deeply unjust socio-economic status quo. Our society’s prisons are how its haves who get something out of the capitalist system manage the have-nots who just receive the crumbs of capitalist prosperity. I.e., prisons are our concentration camps for those members of society who’ve been socialized to violence and crime by the negative environment in their communities that’s generated by the poverty imposed by the system. Capitalism subjects people to conditions that make them more likely to steal, deal drugs, or whatnot, and then it whisks them off to prison where they’re out of sight and mind, allowing us to continue in the pleasant illusion that ours is a socially functional society with just a few bad apples here and there.
Prisons allow our society to carry on without really addressing the underlying causes of crime and social dysfunction. Instead of taking a hard and honest look at factors such as inequality and racism we just lock up those who find that they can’t make it by “playing by the rules”, those people who are walking symptoms of the built-in unfairness of our system. In the 1800s we had reservations where aboriginal people were confined to languish (actually such places still exist, not all Indians are getting rich from casino money), today we use prisons as reservations for our black and economically distressed citizens when we can find an excuse.
If prisons are any indication at all of how progressive we are on issues of race and justice then we have a heck of a long way to go before we’re actually living in the kind of racially rosy society that some of us believe we already have.
Capitalism is unjust to its morally and spiritually rotten core, just as American society is still racist to its socially decaying bone. You can optimistically deny this if it makes you feel better about your society and about your own life, but when it comes to social justice those who choose to remain in denial choose to be a part of the problem, by default, rather than a heroic part of the solution.
Why do so many people delude themselves into thinking all of the above, into believing such a crock of propaganda, into not realizing their own victimization in our society’s unjust status quo? In other words, why are many of us in denial about realities such as economic inequality and racism? When a black person complains that racism is still alive and making the soul of our society sick why is the reflexive response of so many whites to balk at or pooh-pooh the very idea? Etc.
Of course there are various answers to this question, and they aren’t mutually exclusive, rather they all dovetail together. Firstly, there are psychological reasons. We don’t really feel good about being victims, it doesn’t exactly make us feel competent or empowered to view ourselves as victims of anything, including our system, so we prefer to deny that we are and we deny that any fundamental inequality is inherent in our system.
What’s more, we disidentify with even the most obvious victims of the economy, with the unemployed, the working poor, the uninsured, the homeless. We refuse to see ourselves as being in the same pathetic boat as such people, we tell ourselves that under our system everyone is the captain of his own ship and has no one else to blame for being a loser. This gives us the feel-good sense of not being a loser ourselves, even if we’re not exactly raving success stories.
All our denial and disidentification places our system up on a pedestal above criticism and reproach, we come to think of it as an ideal system (or as as close to being ideal as humanly possible), all of its evils we attribute to individuals. This is rather like the little dodge that Christians pull when confronted with the evils in the history of Christianity, they maintain that “real” Christianity is an ideal faith, it was just individuals who weren’t “real” Christians who perpetrated atrocities in its name. Yes, we resort to the same cop-out when we claim that our system is just fine, that it’s just individuals who don’t want to work who end up filling out the ranks of the welfare dependent and homeless.
Then of course there’s also the psychological payoff that not only does disidentifying with the system’s victims prevent us from feeling bad about our own less than stellar lot, it also allows us to feel a little superior to the less fortunate. That is, we obtain a nice ego boost from opining that blacks and poor people are just malcontents and complainers who need to get up off their duffs and get to work. We raise our own self-esteem by holding those people who bear the brunt of society’s injustices in low regard. And we take this to the extreme of denying that there even are any inherent injustices in our form of society.
Of course in addition to psychological factors there are also sociological reasons why we unconsciously choose to live in self-defeating denial about the existence of inequality and other blemishes on our system. In a word, our sense of patriotism is exploited and manipulated by the system to discourage us from being too harshly critical of it.
If you’re a fellow dissident you know what I’m talking about. Anyone who feels strongly that the system is deeply flawed from a social justice point of view and comes on strong with criticism of it has had the experience of being personally attacked and accused by a patriotic partner in conversation of not loving his country. We’ve been programmed to think that being patriotic is a matter of loving our country’s socio-economic power structure, and so out of a misguided notion of patriotism we support and defend a system that victimizes the majority of its population, and when we encounter a critic of the system we try to silence him/her with a “love it or leave it” response.
I could go on here about how the public school system and the mass media collude to condition our thinking, to condition us to believe that our system is just hunky-dory, I could make my case that we’re all the subjects of societal brainwashing on a scale so large that we don’t recognize it as brainwashing (when it’s mainstream society that’s brainwashing you and you have nothing to compare with then it’s kind of hard to recognize that you’ve been brainwashed!), but I’ve spent enough time on why we swallow the whopper of a big lie that inequality and racism don’t exist in any significant way under our system, I’ll move on now to some obvious examples of the fact that they do.
To start with how about the ghetto, unless you’re one of those whites who think that blacks have it made these days because of affirmative action (which has actually largely been abolished), the existence of communities in the urban centers of our big cities where a dark-skinned underclass is locked into conditions of poverty, forsaken from educational and employment opportunities, and reduced to making ends meet with drug dealing and food stamps should have you at least thinking twice about the justness of our system.
Of course the conservative defenders of the capitalist system have their cop-out that turns the tables on the left, they blame welfare programs for perpetuating black people in poverty. According to the cynical thinking of conservatives blacks and even human beings in general are naturally inclined to be lazy bums and if you provide them with welfare they’re never going to pull themselves up out of poverty to become productive citizens. And with this facile argument conservatives gloss over the reality of unemployment and discrimination that makes it difficult for many minorities and poor whites to choose being gainfully employed over being on the welfare rolls.
In fact it’s the economic realities of our system, and for black & Hispanics the reality of racism to boot, that place people in a position where they resort to welfare. In a system truly geared to employ everyone welfare would be an option that few would fall back on. I know this is hard to believe for staunch and skeptical conservatives but then when it comes to the truth of life under capitalism conservatives are about as realistic as Holocaust deniers!
No, the existence and conditions of the ghetto do not indict the people who live there as failures in life, they indict our society as a failure in terms of our highest values. They indict and help convict our society on the charge of harboring unfair class and race-based disparities.
Then of course there are the places we, as a society, transfer a sizable portion of the pesky population of the ghetto to, prison. The strikingly disproportionate representation of minorities in penal facilities speaks volumes about racial justice in our society.
Sadly it’s not hyperbole to say that prisons are the dehumanizing warehouses of the underclass and underdogs bred by our society’s deeply unjust socio-economic status quo. Our society’s prisons are how its haves who get something out of the capitalist system manage the have-nots who just receive the crumbs of capitalist prosperity. I.e., prisons are our concentration camps for those members of society who’ve been socialized to violence and crime by the negative environment in their communities that’s generated by the poverty imposed by the system. Capitalism subjects people to conditions that make them more likely to steal, deal drugs, or whatnot, and then it whisks them off to prison where they’re out of sight and mind, allowing us to continue in the pleasant illusion that ours is a socially functional society with just a few bad apples here and there.
Prisons allow our society to carry on without really addressing the underlying causes of crime and social dysfunction. Instead of taking a hard and honest look at factors such as inequality and racism we just lock up those who find that they can’t make it by “playing by the rules”, those people who are walking symptoms of the built-in unfairness of our system. In the 1800s we had reservations where aboriginal people were confined to languish (actually such places still exist, not all Indians are getting rich from casino money), today we use prisons as reservations for our black and economically distressed citizens when we can find an excuse.
If prisons are any indication at all of how progressive we are on issues of race and justice then we have a heck of a long way to go before we’re actually living in the kind of racially rosy society that some of us believe we already have.
Capitalism is unjust to its morally and spiritually rotten core, just as American society is still racist to its socially decaying bone. You can optimistically deny this if it makes you feel better about your society and about your own life, but when it comes to social justice those who choose to remain in denial choose to be a part of the problem, by default, rather than a heroic part of the solution.
Last edited:
