permaculture

["Robert Waldrop" <bwaldrop@cox.net>]

I think it is naive to think that the invisible 
structures that support racism in the United 
States and elsewhere have somehow shriveled up and 
gone away never to bother us any more.

For example, here in Oklahoma City, over the last 
20 years, thousands of units of housing, mostly 
occupied by African Americans and Hispanics, have 
been destroyed by various government urban renewal 
and road building schemes.  Somehow these projects 
are never sited in neighborhoods populated mostly 
by white people.  The property owners are 
typically paid less than the actual value of the 
property.  I spoke recently with an elderly woman 
who was forced to move three times in the last 20 
years by Oklahoma City.  Each time she had to go 
deeper into debt, and she ended up losing property 
ownership entirely when she lost her job.  Her 
original home was owned without a mortgage.

This process also has the effect of raising the 
price of rents for the lowest tier of housing --  
less supply meets growing demand yields higher 
prices.  This constitutes a non-market, 
politicized transfer of wealth from the have-nots 
to the haves.  Increasing the financial problems 
of low income people drives a host of urban 
problems.

I don't personally wallow in shame and guilt about 
this, because I have always vigorously opposed 
these land grabs.  But I think a lot of white 
people in Oklahoma City could use an increase in 
their personal shame and guilt quotas on this 
issue, in the hopes that it would induce a change 
in their tawdry behavior.  These events are 
essentially "due process pogroms", by which urban 
areas are taken by coercion from the poor and 
given to the non-poor and politically well 
connected.  The fact that money changes hands is 
best compared to the scene in one of Victor Hugo's 
novels where an aristocrat's carriage runs over 
and kills a peasant's child, and the aristocrat 
leans out of the window and throws a few coins 
back at the grieving parents.

Racism is alive and well in the United States.  We 
just don't call it by that name anymore.

Bob Waldrop, OKC

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lfl@intrex.net>

> it's been 141 years since the end of slavery and 
> 40 years since the end of segregation
> and we're to continue wallowing in a burden of 
> guilt and shame?
>
> --