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Let that sink in for a moment. Here you have a certain
segment of white males in America who have ruled the roost
since the founding of this country, having a hissy fit that
with all of this alarming talk of they becoming a minority
in the year 2050 and the privileges and perks that they have
grown accustomed to enjoying may be whittled away by the
growing numbers of non white minorities.
In other words, black and brown people are starting to
edge closer and closer to white folks and such a closeness
is simply too close for many white people to enjoy.
Sure, it was all fun and games when the invisible
Mexican illegal cleaned motel toilets for a few bucks a day
or when a Demarcus flipped your burgers at the local diner,
but when they begin to procreate and started having larger
and larger families, an internal clock went off in a lot of
white middle-aged males.
A clock that ticked: You are losing it buddy and losing
it fast! A clock that said, watch out, they are coming for
your jobs! A clock that intimated that your new neighbors
could celebrate their birthday parties with a Pinata in the
backyard or rap music playing over the common fence between
your yards.
The economic muscle of white America, particularly the
middle class, is in freefall due to the acts of certain
ultra-rich white Americans who own the means of production
and who have shipped off those once lucrative jobs that
established the middle class to Taiwan, China, India,
Pakistan and Vietnam.
So much for some rich white Americans loving this country
that they are willing to cause such economic grief to so
many millions of fellow Americans who, because of such
severe job losses, are now experiencing home foreclosures,
alcoholism, suicides, illicit drug usage, depression,
domestic discord...all partly or wholly related to not being
able to being the breadwinners for their families.
What calculus did the barons of Wall Street take into
consideration when they consciously and deliberately plotted
this game of avarice and duplicity?
Answer: Money...money and more money! Any
considerations for the dire results their policies would
affect hourly workers was secondary at best.
It was and is all about profit...and then they wonder why
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are getting huge voter
turnouts for their message of righting this listing ship
called American capitalism.
Sadly, the Obama Administration, including former
Attorney General Eric Holder, have not issued ONE criminal
indictment against the robber barons who used esoteric and
complex tax dodges and worthless financial products to bilk
and milk billions out of the working class and middle class
to the point that these robber barons have been able to ship
hundred of billions of dollars (some estimates are in the
trillions) overseas to safe tax havens far from the reach of
the under-manned IRS.
In one sense, it is difficult to cry any crocodile tears
about the newly-found poverty of so many white middle-aged
Americans who for hundreds of years have allowed their white
skin privileges to lord it over the former slaves who
enabled this new America to gain a critical mass of economic
wealth off of their free labor. Such free labor allowed
America to become a world-wide colossus powerhouse.
Now, those chickens are coming home to roost in the
sense that the tensions and fears and losses that the former
slaves and now black Americans face as a daily part of their
struggle in America are now, in some degree, being faced by
working class and middle class white middle aged male
Americans.
As white America turned a deaf ear and blind eye to the
paper thin economic security of slave America and current
black America, so has the "ruling" white American ruling
class turned a similar deaf ear and blind eye to the plight
of the white working class and middle class families.
The Republicans would have you believe that their
message of unity includes you and me and the working stiff
at the local sweat plant making minimum wage. Not so.
The Republican Party is not aggressively reaching out to
boost up the downcast and outcast. They ostensibly view
poor people as weak and of no consequence and hence of no
value.
Bernie Sanders message that the economic system is
rigged and Wall Street is corrupted by massive wealth and
power is hitting a nerve with those who have felt the whip
of losing their homes and jobs and pensions to the policies
of fat cats who seemingly begrudge even giving crumbs to the
poor who sit under their over laden tables of wealth and
privilege.
One would think that the oppressed lower-class white
worker and the depressed and dispossessed middle class white
male would realize that they are being played in a Three
Card Monte game and that their enemies, real or perceived,
are not black or brown people but a structured system that
is designed and maintained by an army of
legislators, a decrepit tax code and lobbyists to maintain
things as they are.
Unless you keep in focus that the god in America is the
unabashed worship of money and its offspring of perks,
powers and privileges, you will lose sight and be taken
captive by side issues of race baiting and stories of
welfare queens and false tales of voter fraud.
You will not understand how a fair minimum wage is
being held hostage by those who do not want to see the gross
and obscene income inequality gap being bridged.
Could this become a "class warfare" between the haves (rich
white folks) and the have nots (poor and middle class white
folks)?
SIDE ISSUE: What's up with this clamor about
black movie makers, actors, actresses, writers and producers
not being given their professional due by Hollywood?
Are you kidding me? Again, we have black folks running
round carping and complaining that white folks are not
respecting their arts and crafts.
Message to black folks!: Hollywood and The Oscars do
not care about you and your abilities; and to gloss over
their obvious inherent racial biases, they will, now and
then, throw a golden statute our way as a sin offering.
Hollywood (and that environment) was not designed to be
user friendly to black people. We are a second or third
thought. A minor player. An irritant, if you please.
Hollywood has had decades of chances to reform its
procedures and drop its bad habits, but it hasn't and why
would it?
The big buck movies and attendant ticket sales are
geared to the majority culture who want to see "their
faces", victories, musicals, love lives, dramas and comedies
played out to them on the big silver screen.
Seriously, is every undertaking that white folks do, is
it worth it for us to yell and scream to get into it so we
can say that we got black folks in it? Should Hollywood even
count?
Why do we make Hollywood even important to us?
Solution? Simple. Hollywood responds only to one
thing: ticket sales baby...ticket sales!
Don't like what you see on the silver screen? Boycott
the theatres. Send letters to Hollywood studios telling them
that you are on a fast of their products until they take off
their thick ivory covered glasses and acknowledge that your
history and stories are worthy of getting Oscar nods.
For me...I do not affirm my self worth via the lens of
a Hollywood movie made with or without black characters.
Contact Lafe Tolliver at
Tolliver@Juno.com
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