Racial Profiling
by Alan Bisbort

"The contempt with which American leaders treat American blacks is very obvious; what is not so obvious is that they treat the bulk of the American people with the very same contempt."
-- James Baldwin, 1972

Nov. 11. 2002 - Hartford (APJP) -- For black people in America, the electoral system-if not the entire configuration of society-must feel like a damned if you do/damned if you don't proposition. When it comes to voting, as we just witnessed, American politicians pay only a tiny price for ignoring black people. Rather, they pay no price for ignoring black people and only a tiny price for holding them in abject contempt, as James Baldwin presciently noted 30 years ago. Not to get too philosophical here, but by my calculations there is only a scintilla of difference between ignoring a large bloc of voters (such as black people, environmental activists, women, union members, etc.) and holding them in contempt.

Which leads me to an epiphany: black people, were they to show up at the polls and vote en masse, would hold the keys to all of the elective offices in the land. Sure, the impulse must be to blow it off-which they did in this election, despite the NAACP's vow to get out the black vote after the debacle of Florida 2000-because the deck seems stacked, the con game fixed, the dice loaded. But the deck is stacked against everyone, regardless of race, and white people, of whom there are 6 or 7 times more of than black people in America, are increasingly deciding to opt out of the entire charade.

This suits all the Republican and "moderate" (read: corporate-owned) Democratic candidates fine. (Let's not even mention the insufferable, gloating Greens, shall we?). The less people who vote, the more solid the "victors" can pretend their "mandate" is.

But do the math: If 11 percent of the voters, as blacks statistically comprise, suddenly flocked to the polls and voted as one (generally Democratic; 9 of 10 black voters in 2000 voted for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman), they would hold much more power than that great nebulous blob of disinterested white voters, who are so whipped down as to prefer eating themselves into obesity or obsessing over Winona Ryder's shoplifting to even paying attention long enough to realize their rights have been rescinded in the past two years (National voter turnout for the 2002 election was around 35%).

That's the paradox: while the blacks may feel their vote doesn't count, it in fact may count far more than white voters. If looked at in a certain way, black voters may have much greater power than white voters to affect change: if, again, they voted en masse (this is not racial profiling; this is statistically what has happened, at least in the past).

That's why it was wise for the NAACP to make voter registration and turnout the highest priority of their nationwide focus this year. But, for whatever reasons, they did not get the job done. Black voters simply ignored Election 2002, at their continuing peril. To borrow Johnnie Cochran's rhyming scheme, if you don't vote, you don't get to gloat.

How can this be when the Bush Administration holds black people in such contempt? Harry Belafonte, as incendiary as his remarks about Colin Powell and Condi Rice were some weeks back, got it essentially right. They are window dressing, and everyone in the black community knows this. To be black and vote Republican is the equivalent of Jews voting for Pat Buchanan. There are now no elected black Republicans in Washington, D.C. Zero. Furthermore, relations between the White House and black American leaders have never been lower than they are right now.

And yet it does not translate in black voter anger.

Bush skipped the NAACP's annual convention and paid no political price for this snubbing, even after the debacle of November 2000, when he and his brother disenfranchised tens of thousands of legal black voters in Florida.

When he was asked about this slight, Bush smugly said, "Let's see. There I was sitting around the table with foreign leaders looking at Colin Powell and Condi Rice." End of subject. This was tantamount to saying, "Look, I got two blacks sitting at the master's table, so who cares what the rest of 'em out in the cotton fields think."

NAACP chairman Julian Bond responded, "During the campaign, Bush said he would enforce the civil rights laws. We knew he was in the oil business...we just didn't know it was snake oil."

Now, after the 2002 election brought One Party Rule to America, we all know how black Americans have felt since the Emancipation Proclamation...That the deck is stacked and that our civil rights are meaningless. Now, however, this contempt for voters is not just based on skin color; it's based on money. The truth is most voters have no financial stake in the outcome of elections; all candidates are chosen by the corporate money that funds the campaigns. Thus, politicians can ignore the bulk of all voters in America and pay little price for it, since 65% have opted out of the system.

America's democracy is, thus, dying right before our eyes. In its place is an imperial presidency, backed by the other two branches of government, that now has the power to pursue world domination. Before this time, we were probably already tacitly imperialistic, thanks to the grubby tentacles of America's transnational corporations. But now we are going to put our military where our money is; we are going to sacrifice American lives to improve the bottom line of the oil business. In that sense, we will be no different than the British Empire or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (It's instructive to note that between the assassination of Prince Franz Ferdinand, heir to the empire's throne, in 1914, and the end of World War I, in 1919, one of the largest empires ever assembled on earth was dissolved -- poof -- just like that).

Regardless of one's political views, everyone with a brain would agree that something has to be done to fix this mess. So far, not even a fake attempt has been made. I personally like the proposal that Keith Olbermann suggested on Salon: mandatory voting. But he wouldn't make it a punishment, as they do in Australia (where you pay a $15 fine is you don't vote); rather, Olbermann asks, why not give people who vote a $25 deduction on their tax returns? Olbermann notes that "If we have not already reached it, we are nearing, inevitably, the point at which everyone who votes has a personal stake in the outcome." Eventually, he says, those going to the polls will be "just the candidate's friends, families, and people from their secret other lives."

That is the definition of, well, I don't know what that is. A cult of personality? A monarchy? A bad joke? And if it's the latter, where's the punch line and why aren't we laughing?

Whatever it is, it is not a healthy democracy.

Alan Bisbort is a columnist for the Hartford Advocate. His more recent book is "Famous Last Words" (Pomegranate). He is co-author (with Parke Puterbaugh) of "California Beaches", the 3rd edition of which will be published in February 2003.