Godheval.net

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A little while ago I intuited that the African-Americans in this state had mostly “assimilated”, for their lesser numbers (measured versus the national proportion and especially the east coast), and for the fact that the much larger Mexican minority serves as a greater threat to the white majority.

So my speculation has been that African-Americans in the West, much like Latinos and Asians in the east, for their non-threatening numbers and significantly improved socioeconomic distribution, have been afforded a sort of “hostility waiver”. In other words, they are acceptable so long as they do not grow too large, act too radically, or cost the average taxpayer too much in social programs. A controlled minority is a tolerable minority. Those Hispanics on the other hand…

In plain speech, because there are so many Mexicans in the state, they are the group that white people fear, hate, and resent, rather than African-Americans.  So African-Americans out here decided to throw in their lot with the white people.  And why not?  Because as long as the Mexicans are the focus of white fear and rage, they can slip in under the radar and point the finger, too.  It’s just good politics, right?

What this situation highlighted for me was the overall misconception about so-called “welfare” in the United States.  As this young lady and many others around the country seem to think, people of color gorge from the national bosom, having excessive amounts of children while refusing to work, so that they might benefit from so many “hand outs”.  The contention, especially for white Americans, is that their hard-earned tax money is being spent disproportionately on undeserving minorities.

This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of welfare, in terms of the allocations by ethnicity, and just how much welfare takes away from the overall federal budget.  From 1935 to 1996, that which we call welfare fell under the federal assistance program known as Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).  From 1996 onward, after welfare reform by President Clinton, the program was renamed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), reflecting a new policy of limiting assistance to a maximum of five years.  The statistics of AFDC recipients by race varied from year to year throughout the life of the program, but a brief from the census bureau provides a snapshot:

About 1 in 4 Black mothers of childbearing ages (1.5 million) were AFDC recipients, higher than the 7 percent of corresponding White mothers (2.1 million). Despite these differences in recipiency rates, Black AFDC mothers did not have significantly more children than their White counterparts.¹

I selected African-American families for my comparison for two reasons – first, because the “welfare queen” was portrayed as a black woman, and because the statistics for “Hispanics” are troublesome, in that linguistic classification may apply to families who are also categorized as white for the purposes of the census.  These numbers show that, contrary to popular misconceptions, there were a larger number of white welfare recipients than African-American families.  This goes against any idea that welfare is a particularly “black” problem, or even that African-Americans form the majority of people on welfare.  Now here someone might point out that a higher proportion of African-American families received welfare, which is true, but it is a fact taken without consideration for historical inequality – from hiring to housing, part of the greater socioeconomic legacy of racism throughout this country’s history.

The demographics of AFDC or TANF are hardly the main thrust of my argument, however.  That comes with how we even define “welfare”.  If the issue is the federal government providing funding to people who have not earned it, then our definition of welfare must be expanded to include all of the corporations who received subsidies through the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (otherwise known as the “bailout”).  These corporations together – and lest we forget, corporations are recognized as “people” – were allocated tens of billions of dollars.  So here I ask you, who is more “deserving” of assistance – a poor family, irrespective of ethnicity, or a corporation whose executives directly facilitated our current economic meltdown?

The primary opposition to welfare comes from conservatives.  And at least we can say that they are consistent in their stance, critical of both social welfare provided to families, and the bailout.  Until we consider another major recipient of welfare, who they almost unanimously support: the state of Israel.

According to the Jewish Virtual Library, a site amicable to Israeli interests and continued U.S.-Israeli cooperation, “Israel has received more direct aid from the United States since World War II than any other country…”, nearly $100 billion since 1974.² The point of mentioning this is not to make a political statement against U.S. Aid to Israel, although in the interests of full disclosure I must admit that I am opposed to this financial assistance. The point is to put things in perspective, as it concerns just how much money the U.S. spends on “welfare” as a whole.

Projections for U.S. financial assistance to Israel were $2.55 billion for fiscal year 2009, and $2.7 billion for 2010, totaling $5.25 billion across the two years. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the payout for TANF is capped at $5 billion for the same two years.³ So, it is nothing short of hypocritical for politicians, pundits, and ignorant citizens to condemn poor families – particularly the disenfranchised poor – while directly or implicitly sanctioning U.S. aid to Israel, all of which is used by their military, not for any financial hardship.  Average citizens may be excused for not knowing about these allocations to Israel, but in these cases their hypocrisy revolves around the rigor with which they condemn poor minorities while not investigating the full scope of U.S. “welfare”.

This imbalance in focus undoubtedly stems from racism, with the idea of minorities disproportionately leeching from the national coffers just another affirmation of already negative preconceptions.  Such ignorance is common enough amongst white Americans, especially in a conservative state, and bears relatively little impact.  But where a young African-American student can buy into the stereotypes levied against girls much like her -  even the girl herself under slightly different circumstances – the situation becomes grave.  It provides a sobering insight into just how institutionalized and deeply entrenched racism has become.

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Being pro-choice is not the same as being pro-abortion, because I certainly wish that no abortions had to take place, that every pregnancy could come to term and birth a child into a safe, healthy, equitable environment.  The reality, however, is that the world we live in does not often provide such an environment.  The most common argument by pro-lifers it that adoption is always a viable alternative.

Except that it’s not.  At least not for everyone.  For instance, it is practically a given that a Euro-American child of no physical or mental disability has a good chance for adoption – certainly much better than her disabled counterpart of the same ethnicity, or those of other ethnicities.  While there has been a strange almost fetish-like trend of Euro-American families adopting Asian children, no such trend has emerged for African-American children or disabled children.  I do not mean to begrudge those children who were adopted into loving families; I mean to point out all is not equal when it comes to the viability of adoption as an alternative to abortion.

It troubles me when aggressive pro-life propagandists spread messages like “African American children are an endangered species” or suggest that the higher rate of abortions amongst African-American women is reflective of some eugenics agenda by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.  What this does is sensationalize what, for being a very sensitive and complex issue, needs to be analyzed and discussed with discretion and compassion.  Such propaganda glosses over the issue of adoption equity, and attempts to manipulate the emotions of the disenfranchised to serve a political agenda.

Let us make no mistake.  Abortion has become, for many, more a political issue than a personal one.  If you wish to see RVW overturned even when presented with evidence that it will not prevent the “murder of babies” that concerns you so greatly, then arguing for the overturn has less to do with saving children than it does with taking an ideological position.

And for that, you should be ashamed.

It is my opinion that the pro-life and pro-choice positions are not mutually exclusive.  In fact, I would wager that most pro-choice advocates would wish for a world in which all children are able to come into the world safe, secure, and healthy.  None of us rally for more abortions.  All of us want less of them.  But for that, we are not willing to deny a woman her right to choose what is best for her and/or her family, without pressure from pundits and ideologues more concerned with being right, than with doing what’s right.

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For those of us who grow up in religious households, we are taught our parents’ beliefs, go to their church, temple, or mosque if they have one, and are saddled with our parents morals, ethics, and any baggage that might come with it.  We take what we are given at face value, accept it as truth, due to the trust we place in those that have proven themselves by caring for us.  But unlike our natural inevitable journey into adolescence, many people never push beyond the beliefs instilled in them during childhood, they do not dare to venture out on their own, to establish their own personal religious identity.

More often than not, those who do not “progress” beyond this stage are the fundamentalists of any given theology, the hardliners, the literalists.  These are people who retain their childhood stories but never learned to look at it with grown-up eyes, to appreciate things like subtlety, nuance, multiple interpretations – like only appreciating poetry where it rhymes, rather than being able to read between the lines.

For those that do move to the next phase, however,  some rebel violently against their former beliefs and institutions – or at least the most vile version or perception of those institutions.  Perhaps they rebel due to a falling out with a parent or preacher or other authority figure.  Perhaps because of some major discrepancy between what we’ve been told to think and what we’ve reasoned for ourselves or even directly experienced.  This discrepancy usually has some noteworthy psychological impact, forcing a person not just to let go of their beliefs, but to run away from them screaming and yelling.

These are people like the militant atheists and agnostics – those for whom it is not enough to simply disbelieve, but who feel compelled to attack those who do believe. Not all atheists fit this description as I’ll explain in the third phase below. Far from simply establishing themselves as individuals “free” of religion, they feel some pressing need to return to their old beliefs and institutions with venom and fire, to criticize and belittle them.  In this way they are just as tethered to those old institutions as they always were, their identities as atheists dependent upon there being a religion against which to rebel.

Just as angry teenagers do not listen to their parents’ reasoning, their attempts to defend their choices, militant atheists do not listen to the more rational believers, the liberal theologians.  They are too busy screaming and yelling.  They need to cast religion and religious people as villains against whom they must stand in opposition.  The ironic thing is that they become the very thing that they are trying to rebel against, like the worst nightmare of any rebellious teenager – to become just like their parents.

The new atheists, who attack a repugnant version of religion, use it to condemn all religion. They use it to deny the reality and importance of the religious impulse. They are curiously unable to comprehend those who found through their religious convictions the strength to stand up against injustice…The new atheists, like all fundamentalists, flee from complexity. They can cope with religion in its most primitive and abusive form. They are helpless when confronted by a faith that challenges their caricatures.

America’s New Fundamentalists pp. 33-34

My experience with this involved some evangelicals and their implication that my mother, for her experimenting with Buddhism and other religions, would be condemned to Hell.  Another example can be seen in the movie The God Who Wasn’t There, which presented itself as a critique of religion and the Jesus myth, but by the end revealed itself to be one man’s personal vendetta against his religious upbringing and parochial school.  Much like a teenager finally getting to tell her parents all the things they did wrong in raising her.

Finally, though, the incendiary passions of militant atheism, like adolescence, are tempered through a sort of rational – rather than physical – maturity.  We learn to read religion like poetry – to understand subtlety, nuance, interpretation.  We learn that no one interpretation is necessarily right or wrong, but that they simply are.  This is not to say that we become believers again, but we no longer categorically deny the possibility – or legitimacy – of believing again.  And should we choose not to believe, we are able to make peace with religion, to reconcile our disbelief with others’ belief, to accept that disbelief is merely another interpretation of our experience.

To clarify, I do not mean to imply any qualitative difference between people at the different stages of belief or disbelief.  I do not think that people at any given stage are better than any other, no more than adults are better people than teenagers, or teenagers better people than young children.  They all simply have different ways of viewing and interpreting the world and their experiences within it.  I do contend, however, that just as adults tend to be better educated, better adjusted, and to possess greater wisdom for their length of experience, those who have progressed to the “third phase” are also wiser and better adjusted.  They are more capable of higher order thinking, more rational, more objective, and more established and comfortable within their identities.

They are independent enough to think for themselves, to make their own choices, and wise enough to look deeper into things rather than taking them at face value.  They are secure enough that they no longer need to prove themselves against the standards or norms of another.  They are grounded enough to no longer need to fly to the attack on others’ beliefs, or the defense of their own.

In short, they have grown up.

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Then there’s the matter of which movies are offered to either side.  If I’m the romantic type, I must want to watch some trite garbage like The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past or the insufferably pointless and overrated Paranormal Activity.  But if I’m not – if I’m the skull-crunching manly-man type, or the lonely lurker type – then I must want something involving drunken stupidity like The Hangover, the pulp sensationalism of Inglorious Basterds, gangsters in Public Enemies, explosions like G.I. Joe, or a healthy dose of racism like we find in The Goods - you know, because the target market probably isn’t Asian or anyone else who might be offended by Asian stereotypes.

Because all real chest-pounding manly men enjoy that kind of stuff.

As a guy in a successful heterosexual relationship, his ad was tailor made for me, right?  Except that I hate most romance movies no matter who I’m watching them with, because of their hackneyed storylines and characters who are either unrealistically beautiful or exaggeratedly hideous only to – by way of magic or hard work – become unrealistically beautiful.  Except that I don’t buy into the idea that ideals like love or tenderness or sensitivity or – you know, generally not being some chest pounding machismo asshole – are mutually exclusive from my identity as a man.

Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill, but the shit just annoyed me.  Maybe me and my girlfriend, instead of exchanging frilly pink hearts, like to share a cocktail inside of a flaming skull right before we headbutt each other.  With love.   You don’t know.  It’s just more evidence of how the consumer culture is so oblivious or indifferent to the many different types of ways that people can choose to interact with one another – and not just on Valentine’s Day.

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