Prometheus 6

One of the reasons I've hesistated to give out rhetoric lessons and such in the past was the fear that people would mistake rhetorical technique to support one's position for reasoning methods to establish one's position. Rhetoric produces a line drawing of the photograph that is our reasoned (or chosen!) position. We can agree the line drawing looks like our photograph but the impact of each image is different; the impact of the line drawing dependsas much on what you leave out as what you include.

Juan Williams' Getting Past Katrina is based on a line drawing of history.

A YEAR ago this week, the entire nation caught a chilling look in the mirror. We watched as the citizens of New Orleans, clutching their essential belongings in plastic trash bags, struggled through fetid flood waters in search of shelter. But even with all that’s been said and written on this painful anniversary, one of the real issues remains unaddressed.

The shock of Hurricane Katrina awoke many of us to the reality that poverty persists, especially among African-Americans. It persists even after the go-go 1990’s, the welfare-to-work reform of the Clinton years and the passage of earned-income tax credits to put more money in the pockets of the working poor.

In fact, poverty in the United States has been on the rise since the start of the new century. The number of Americans in poverty is now 12.6 percent overall, essentially holding steady after having risen for four years. The number of the nation’s children in poverty — also climbing until last year — is even more alarming, at close to 18 percent. But even before the great storm, New Orleans was a city of concentrated poverty: nearly a quarter of the population, about double the national average. And the poverty rate among New Orleans blacks (nearly 70 percent of the city’s population) was a sky-high 35 percent.

I have to say anyone who didn't know poverty persists was living in a cartoon more than a line drawing the last few decades.

And let's be clear: we do have our personal position and our collective position. All the commentary by Mr. Williams and the rest of the Cosby Contingent would be fine if they didn't project it as the solution to the collective issues.

For a brief time our guilt and shame seemed to put America on the political edge of a new try at something like a 1960’s-era Great Society program. But that newfound energy was squandered amid racial and political arguments.

The 1060's-era Great Society programs were also squandered amid racial and political arguments. Those racial and political arguments started as soon as the programs were considered, much less implemented. Read Derrick Bell’s Silent Covenants: Brown V. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (and I cannot believe I didn't specifically review this book). Read Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. Read James Lowen's Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.

You think I'm telling a horror story by now, and maybe I am. In your typical horror story escape is possible but it depends on both luck and extraordinary effort. And you know you can't blame the teenagers for creating the monster on the lake but you still scream at the screen, "Asshole! Why'd you trip on that log?? RUN!"

Poverty in America is like that, to some degree. There's just going to be broke-ass Americans; the nature of the system doesn't so much require them as it creates them as a by-product of creating wealth.

That means you too, broke-ass white folks.

This means as long as we use the current system as we do all you can really do about poverty beyond a certain point is shufffle folks around. Changing the way we use the system is the collective move. Reducing or (perish the thought) eliminating poverty would require a change in the way we use the system, a change so significant that some would see it as an ending of the old system.

Scary shit. 

So you don't want to kick off that challenge. You're comfortable, you like your world as it is. I can actually understand that. What bothers me is that your comfort is supported by your discomforting Black folks both unnecessarily and counterproductively.

Fine, you gotta be twice as good, but don't demonize people for being merely human. Be clear you are not talking about solving the problems of the world. You can improve your thing without improving things by one iota, and this is the approach you suggest.

Be clear about that, I have little beef with The Cosbyites. Continue to confuse the issues and you do no one any favors.