From the ArcaMax Publishing, Politics Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/politics/s-361276-889155
Readers: Clarence Page is on vacation and his column will
return.
A few words about white trash.
I've always found that term offensive, its ubiquity notwithstanding. I
have a number of reasons, but the most important is that it is a
gratuitous insult to the white poor. Of course, they are one of the
few groups remaining one can insult with relative impunity.
Granted, Vice President Cheney did not actually use the term "white
trash" in the "joke" he attempted last week at the National Press Club
in Washington. He didn't need to. It was there, understood, without
being spoken.
The remark came in a discussion of the Cheney family tree. "We have
Cheneys on both sides of the family," he said. "And we don't even live
in West Virginia."
Get it? Ha-ha-ha. I mean, you know how it is up there in the hills and
hollers of that state where the population is 95 percent white and the
median family income is $10,000 below the national average: cousins
marry cousins, brothers bed their pipe-smoking sisters. Pardon me
while I slap my knee.
The comedy stylings of Dick Cheney drew bipartisan condemnation from
West Virginia lawmakers and Cheney quickly issued an apology, which is
good enough as far as it goes. Still, it's too bad there does not
exist -- at least, not to my knowledge -- a national organization, an
NAACP for poverty, as it were, that could provide us with context,
help us see Cheney's "joke" not as an isolated episode but as part and
parcel of a national pattern of neglect, if not outright scorn, for
the have-nots among us.
Who speaks for the poor? Who raises a voice for them when their babies
are born smaller and with lead in their blood? Who makes noise on
their behalf when their schools turn out illiterates and their
children are diagnosed with a higher rate of developmental disorders?
Who cries out in their name when violence stalks their streets and
schools and living rooms? Who says, "Wait a minute!" when their lives
are reduced to caricature by media, or else ignored outright, which,
in a very real sense, is the same as saying those lives do not exist.
No one speaks up because we have yet to develop language to encompass
the whole of the issue. Oh, we talk some about black poverty or
Hispanic poverty. Less often do we speak of white poverty and even
less than that do we simply talk about poverty, period.
So that the poor become a scapegoat for budgetary red ink, object of
Barack Obama's clumsy conjecture, punchline of Dick Cheney's joke, but
seldom, John Edwards' candidacy notwithstanding, are they seen as
people with valid concerns and inherent dignity.
If the poor ever recognized this, got mad about it and began to
coalesce irrespective of race, they could realign politics as we know
it, require the nation to grapple with, and construct remedies for,
their suffering. This was Martin Luther King's last dream, the one he
was fighting to redeem when he was killed.
Too bad we have not, since that day, found the imagination, vision, or
courage to go where he led. The poor among us retreat instead into the
easy comfort of tribalism, black with black, brown with brown, white
with white, unable to conceive they might have common concerns that
transcend melanin and ancestry. They divide themselves, and thus
render themselves inconsequential so that those above in aeries of
wealth and power can rest easy, unthreatened by demands for change.
So Dick Cheney's apology is nice and all, and it's good that West
Virginia lawmakers stood up and demanded it. But you know something?
At day's end, all of it is politics and none of it answers the
paramount question of who speaks for the poor.
Or better yet, when do the poor finally speak for themselves?
========
Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza,
Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.