The Price of Liberty

Class warfare is historically been denied as part of the fabric of our country. This is due partially to the proliferation of a multitude of mythologies surrounding the general American Character. The Wild West has been portrayed in cinema and television (think High Noon-type serials in the 1950s and 60s) as a place where rugged individualism could triumph over the bad guys and city-dweller elites. Good triumphed over evil and danger lurked at every corner; and you could beat it… if ‘ya’d just work haaaad enuf. Indians were portrayed as rapacious savages who murdered poor white folk at the drop of a hat. In reality it was usually the other way around. We rarely saw any Blacks in these movies, despite the fact that one in four cowboys were African American. This faux, almost dogmatized ideology-as-imagery is what today’s politicians grew up watching. Is it any wonder they ascribe to a vision of reality that discounts cultural diversity and socio-economic equality?

I am currently working on a thesis for graduate school. It revolves around the ways human beings oppress one another, a ‘web of oppression’ if you will. There are eight main parts, each cross-pollinating the next: culture, history, time, truth, the market, science (the acquisition of knowledge), and politics. In this entry, I am examining the market.

While overt discrimination is less likely to exist in the forms that it once did, new systems of oppression are conspicuously at work. These systems do not use the language we traditionally associate with racism, sexism, and the like. Instead, domesticators of women and men rely on the grafting of social Darwinism to an unchecked and bastardized version of “free-market” capitalism. Those who employ these new systems constantly reframe their inhumane rhetoric to make it sound “compassionately conservative.” A prime example of this language is seen in the proliferation of ‘quality’ over ‘equality’ in our schools. Another can be seen in how ‘excellence’ and ‘high standards’ are promoted over humane, critically aware, and liberating educational pedagogy. And while it remains unfortunate that people still use blatantly derogatory words and engage in violence against those they perceive as different, a great deal of legislation has been enacted that punishes this type of behavior. As the racist names of old become socially unacceptable, new words and concepts are used. New types of action are used to hold people down and kick them while they’re there.

Indeed, we have a new system of “Racism Without Racists,” as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva puts it in a book by the same name. In it, he reminds us that systems of overt racism have evolved into a more subtle state and continue to persist in new, more covert ways. For more on this (and a good laugh) check out Bonilla-Silva’s book.

A great deal of this neo-racism comes from the re-framing and re-cognizing of language. The expansion or contraction of language, whether written or spoken, dictates the development and evolution of society. There are those who desire to domesticate words through the contraction or redefinition of their meanings and in the process domesticate women and men. Karl Rove and his minions are a classic example of this behavior. They make their own weaknesses strengths by reframing issues and redefining reality in terms beneficial to eliminating said weakness, no matter how ridiculous and intolerant those terms might be. This method of living contains hate and malice as vehicles on the road to power held absolutely. This hatred of old reverberates through time and is capable of transcending the teachings of our greatest preachers of peace. Therefore, we must always remember that systems of oppression will always attempt to subvert our humanity, no matter what form they take. This is why we must be eternally vigilant. It is a price worth paying for liberty.