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  • From: "Robert Waldrop" <bwaldrop@cox.net>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] anti-semitism or naivete
  • Date: Mon, 28 May 2007 11:15:11 -0500

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?

--





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