A Template for Greed

[DemocratsForProgress]

Walter Rhett: A Template for Greed

I.

In a statement for a case the Supreme Court declined last year, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “prejudice should not be substituted for reason.” That’s a tall order, from the streets or the bench.

Having institutionalized its attitudes of bias into law, and into employment patterns, housing, education, wages, voting and social behavior for more than a century, the US is still struggling to dismantle racism, despite loud proclamations that it is gone, and blaming its victims for recognizing its problems.

Racism is in slow retreat, but its legacy remains; intact. Not always as a barrier, as limits on opportunity or as carrier of stereotypes and hate—racism’s legacy is a template of action, tied to wealth. An empty jar is a template. It can hold water or nitroglycerin. A basket can hold fruit or be filled with vipers. Racism’s biggest impact on America’s political economy is its template, an interconnected, elaborate methodology of laws, beliefs, behaviors and networks, a series of conjectures and omens that can be abstracted and applied to issues far outside race. Surprisingly, its manifest destiny has attached to international finance.

Substitute wealth into the language of race, and you can see the labels, the special privileges, the denials, the demagoguery, the legal justifications for its concentration and expansion of power that once accompanied race. America’s political economy is in a battle royal for wealth and power, seeking their absolute convergence...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2014/05/14/a-template-for-greed/