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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Someone Else's Problem
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It’s not exactly racist. Our country, and hell, all people, have a long history of looking for someone to blame in times of crisis. Arizona wants to keep its jobs and its services for its citizens. Now, as city police, neither my job nor my pay are all that affected since they aren’t competing for my job, but I work in a community that does see the effects.
Now, I won’t deny that illegal workers drive down wages for legal ones, sometimes take the jobs from under natural-born Arizonans, but this law the Governor signed doesn’t really address that, because to do that, the only real sane option is to enforce and maybe strengthen labor laws. This law, instead, points a finger at immigrants as if they created the situation, as if years of lax enforcement and the laws of demand and supply don’t exist. The premise is simple enough. Rather than take on responsibility for what our society has wrought, we find someone else, and make it their deficiency, their problem. In a nutshell, that the more unlike us that someone else is, the less of the blame can be applied to you and me. I think psychologists call it the “other.” But the real problem is that this takes away from the momentum to fix things, to make changes that actually matter and might address the issue in hand. To look at a recent example, immigrants were demonized in the early 90s during the economic turmoil that saw George H. W. Bush lose reelection; this anger was focused and tempered, and used to change the nature of welfare into workfare. Since then, welfare’s become one of those don’t pay attention to the man behind the curtain issues, where politicians grandstand with a lot of lights and fireworks, while the reality is nothing close to all the rhetoric. In a way, a lot of this goes back to the American dream. See, the compact our country has with its citizens is that long list of freedoms, and the idea you can grow up smart, healthy, and prosperous, can support a family, and own a home. That in a nutshell is what the most of us want, and even feel as Americans that we deserve. But even as the dream’s become more of an entitlement, it’s become more elusive; in the last decade we seem to have hit a plateau, hovering around but never passing 69% of home ownership. But home ownership is just a measure of economic prosperity and security- which is dictated mostly off how much someone makes. 51% of men in the lower half of income distribution surpass their parents’ income by 20%, but the numbers are less favorable for women and minorities. In certain areas, both tend to make gains similarly- and both trailing the white male pace horse. I’m not saying it’s outright racism or sexism- though I think the argument that women or minorities are “in their place” is- there are just inequalities inherent in the system, in or society and in our culture. Some of these are subtle, like who gets promotions, I think this is the flipped side of that “other” coin; see, we blame people who aren’t like us, but then we promote people who are. I don’t think it’s bigotry, but that don’t mean it ain’t a problem. And there’s a stickiness to upward mobility. Poor folks’ kids are more likely to be poor, rich folks’ kids are more likely to be rich, about one third stay in the same level of relative wealth. About a quarter rise or fall one quintile; that means you have slightly better than 50/50 odds you’re going to be within 20 percentage points of your parents’ income. Some of that falls to education, where a rich kid will go to good schools and a name brand college, have access to the contacts and resources of the previous generation. But these factors are too big. No one of us can change the society, the culture, or the economic system. And none of us want to feel powerless, or out of control of our own lives. So we blame that “other,” because if we could just get them to stop being a problem, we could have control of our lives, our destinies, and have our world back. But that aint’ the way of the world. I have a work friend named Tony, shortened from Antonio; we might have been outside of work friends, too, but Tony can be kind of a prick sometimes. We came up through the Academy together. He helped me with my shooting, and I helped him train for the physical stuff. One time I got a call for an assist, and when I arrived it was Tony. There’d been some kind of an altercation, and Tony thought the kid had seen something (hell, I thought he had, too). He was in the kid’s face, you know. I don’t want to seem like I’m defending the kid too much, I mean, we’ve pulled him for selling crack off that corner maybe a half-dozen times. But Tony slams the kid against the wall, and I think if the kid’s coat hadn’t got in the way it would have opened his head up, so I stepped in, pulled Tony back. We weren’t running a scam on the kid, but seeing Tony that pissed, and me being the safe alternative, he told me what he knew. Which was that one of the other yos got into it with a store owner who didn’t like his corner being a drug corner, and the owner got beat up pretty bad. And these kids put up a front of being hard, but somewhere in there they’re still kids, and while we were driving the kid back home he started crying. He kept talking, too, and well, we came to find out the reason this kid ever got to the street corner is his mom’s an addict, slathered on her sofa all day shouting insults at the TV, or him if he’s there, useless and cruel unless she’s had her fix, in which case she’s only useless. She ain’t earning anymore. Arizona’s EMPOWER program limits the amount of adult assistance to two years out of every five, and her two years were up for another sixteen months. He even got put in a foster home once for a few days, but he broke out, because he knew his mom couldn’t make it on her own; “She was gonna die. I couldn’t let my mom die.” I’m not excusing him- I’m not. But it ain’t his place, it shouldn’t come down to a fourteen year old boy to decide between selling drugs and letting his mother starve out. But the kid, eventually, told us the reason he thought he was on the street: because the government wouldn’t let him get a job. I didn’t even know what to say to that. But rather than blame his mom for being a crackhead, rather than being pissed about the way welfare worked, rather than being pissed at us for being pigs, he had decided to be angry at the Department of Labor. He just wanted a scapegoat, somebody to blame, dark forces on his horizon he couldn’t understand leave alone change. Tony and I got a beer after our shift was over. I didn’t have to say anything, because he was already kicking himself pretty good. But he turned to me and said, “I just don’t understand these kids. I came from the ghetto- I know that world. But if they don’t go to school, if they don’t stay away from drugs- they’ll never make it out. Man, one of my friends, growing up, we were going to be partners together. He wanted to be a cop, too. And he was smarter than me- I don’t know if I’d have made it through chem class without him. One day he got caught with drugs- not a lot, but enough, you know? And good luck getting into college with a drugs offense, or student loans- let alone the Academy. I see that shit, again and again, kids making stupid choices that will haunt the rest of their days. But they’re kids- how the fuck are they supposed to understand that?” We sat the rest of the night in silence, except to order more beers. I don’t know what the answer to all this is. If you want to curb illegal workers, market economics say you got to deal with the demand, not the supply. I think the same can be applied to the drugs war- though the problem there is cutting demand may be impossible- so legalization and regulation might be the key- certainly the flood gates ain’t busted down in Argentina. But all the legislature’s done is punt the ball down the field; cops, most cops, are going to ignore the law. Because honestly they have more important things to do- unless they give us quotas. And if they give us quotas, then we’ll have to do less of our “real” job, you know, that whole serve and protect thing. Unless they want to hire more cops, which means raised taxes. And in Arizona, where we might just end up with the nation’s first Tea Party Senator, no, we’re not raising taxes. So it’s theater, pure and simple. Honest, intelligent cops will ignore it. That’s actually where I see the biggest problem. I’m not saying all cops are racist- far from it. But cops see, day in and out, the ravages of poverty on people- and poverty isn’t color-blind. Minorities are more likely to be poor, and the poor are more like to commit crime, so we spend the majority of our time with minorities. And for some cops, they look into that sea of darker skin tones and wonder if maybe- just maybe- there’s some genetic basis for all of this crime. And I’m not saying it’s tantamount to donning a white hood and burning an effigy, and it’s quite a ways off from a lynching, but that’s where racial attitudes get twisted, where profiling starts up. But see, that prejudice ironically is color-blind. I remember a study where blacks were more susceptible to stereotypes about other black people than whites. Like Tony. You know, except him and the kid are both Latino- and native born. And it’s the same reason people who used to be poor look down on the poor for not bettering themselves, but the sad truth is not everybody makes it out of the ghetto. Perhaps the only amusing bit to come out of this was from the Governor herself. She claimed that this law would not be used to profile, and that suspicion of illegal immigration status would not be based on race or accents. I wonder, then, what criteria she expects us to apply for suspicion of illegal immigration status. Are we only going to suspect people wearing panchos, or should we just stick to those doing Mexican hat dances? But more like than not, Henderson v. Mayor of New York invalidated the law on Constitutional ground before it was even signed by the governor- and I think if I can find it on Google in ten minute’s time the state attorney general had to know about it, too. So I suspect, like every other time immigration gets puffed up like this, that it’s just a distraction, a straw man they can burn in effigy while they continue to do what the hell they like. And every time we do that, every time we try to shirk and make it someone else’s problem, each time it just comes back to us, sometimes worse. Full text of the law Budget Chart (Warning: Tea Party slant) A href=“ http://www.flowoory.org/themes/movement_settlement/uspolicytimeline.php”>Immigration Timeline Pew Charitable Trusts Study on Upward Intergenerational Economic Mobility |
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