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Rednecks for Obama
I read a fascinating article on Yahoo News yesterday. Two old dudes, Tony Vessman, 74, a retired Missouri state trooper, and Les Spencer, 60, got politically active last year when it occurred to them there must be other lower income, rural, beer-drinking, gun-loving, NASCAR race enthusiasts fed up with business as usual in Washington.
Together, they started a "Rednecks for Obama" movement in Missouri. Obama met them back in July at a campaign stop in Union, Mo. Vessman is quoted as saying "We believe in him. He's the best person for the job."
After the two of them, acting alone, began this improbable journey, they have had over 800,000 online visits to their Web site, Rednecksforobama.com. Spencer said, "We need to build the economy from the bottom up, none of this trickle down business. Just because you're white and southern don't mean you have to vote Republican."
Vessman, who says he owns a dozen guns, says Obama "ain't gonna take your guns away ... There's lots of other rednecks for Obama too, and the ones that ain't, we're trying our best to convince them."
Perhaps there are "lots of others" but polling suggests otherwise. In fact, recent polling indicates that Obama could lose six percentage points on Election Day due only to the color of his skin.
It's amazing, embarrassing and sad that we're still making this distinction as a nation over 145 years after the slaves were freed and over 45 years since the Civil Rights Act was passed.
I've heard enough racial slurs hurled at Obama in conversations over the past few weeks to last me a lifetime. Ugly, hate-filled retorts that as often as not also include a wish for his assassination. So it appears that Vessman and Spencer have a hard row to hoe if they're going to convince a large number of their redneck brothers to see things their way.
Intellectually, racism is a pretty easy thing to understand. Our society is layered economically and socially with the most affluent, the most powerful, and the most influential at the top; the poorest, least powerful and least influential at the bottom and everybody else in between. Throughout history and the social stratification that occurs in every society throughout the world, class warfare is much more likely to occur between members of the lower class groups than between lower class and upper class.
To illustrate this point, we used to have only three social classes in the U.S.; upper, middle and lower. But people in the lower class were there for different reasons. We had the "working poor"; those people who worked hard for a living but because of a lack of education or job training, could only find work at jobs that paid low wages. So even though they didn't have the "good" jobs, they got up and went to work every day, doing the best they could to support themselves and their families. But the lower class also contained deadbeats, the chronically unemployed, drug addicts and alcoholics who had literally given up on the American dream and simply lived from one fix, one meal or one drink to the next.
The working poor didn't want to be classified in the same group as the latter group and objected loudly enough and long enough that a separate class in this country was established just for them. So now we have the upper class, the middle class, the working class, and the lower class.
Racism happens in a very similar way. The lowest class always wants to find someone lower than them and if there's no one lower than them economically, then they search for other reasons to demean and disenfranchise a particular group and that reason historically has been either race or gender.
For example, when people of color and women were added to the work force, competition for jobs increased significantly and many lower class white men were losing their jobs to these two minority groups that had, up until then, been below them. In losing their jobs or not being able to be competitive for those jobs, their livelihood and their families were placed in jeopardy and they reacted by demonizing an entire race and an entire gender because it's far easier to blame someone else for your failings and your inadequacies than it is to take personal responsibility for the situation you put yourself in.
So, for us to understand racism and sexism, we have to understand the economic structure of a capitalist based society and the underlying principle that says everyone should be able to compete equally for the scarce goods and resources we're all fighting for.
Since scarce goods and resources means there's not enough to go around, some people are going to get them and some aren't. Those that don't get them are always going to be angry at those that do. Because of that and because we will always have a lower social class, racism and sexism will be around for a long time to come, as despicable as it is.