At War With Ourselves
Published in Grand Junction Daily Sentinel
By Wayne Hare
America has always been an experiment — a country that is constantly zigzagging towards that elusive “perfect union.” But at times we’ve had national leaders more interested in obtaining power than in what’s perfect for the union. And nothing brings more votes, more power, than encouraging the division of fear and hate.
Divide…conquer…reap the rewards. In America, nothing divides us more than race. In the late ’60s, presidential candidate Richard Nixon strategized with senior advisor Lee Atwater about the most efficient way to divide us. Atwater explained his approach: “You start out by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ So you say stuff like…’states rights’ (which is) a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ ”
After Nixon’s disgraced vice president, Spiro Agnew, left office to avoid prosecution for fraud, reporters accused him of deliberately dividing the American people. His response was, “Dividing the American people has been my main contribution to national politics. I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am flattered by it.” Hell, Agnew first came to Nixon’s attention when, as governor of Maryland, he used race-baiting to create fear, hate, mistrust, and division among the residents of Baltimore.
Reflecting years later on the so-called war on drugs, Nixon’s presidential advisor, John Ehrlichman, admitted: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be… (African American), but by getting the public to associate…blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing (it) heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
When Ronald Reagan first ran for the presidency, he campaigned from Philadelphia, Mississippi. Why go to such a small town for such a big announcement? It wasn’t for the good acoustics. Philadelphia was the site where three civil rights activists were murdered and buried in a dam 16 years earlier. Coincidence? Or was Reagan intentionally stoking racial fears and resentment?
In 2005, Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Convention, went before the NAACP and apologized for his party’s decades-long Southern Strategy, which deliberately exploited white fears and resentment. "Some Republicans (were) looking … to benefit politically from racial polarization … we were wrong." That might have been fine, or at least less horrible, if the strategy had actually ended there. But you hear echoes of that strategy still being used today in “Send them back!”
In July, 2019, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee declared June 8 a day of remembrance for Nathan Bedford Forrest — a Confederate general, slave owner, slave trader, first Grand Wizard of the KKK, and an unindicted war criminal who slaughtered black union troops who were trying to surrender at the Battle of Fort Pillow. That can’t possibly be a day that the full, diverse citizenry of Tennessee will honor! Divide and conquer? After a public outcry, the designation has since been rescinded.
And just a few weeks ago, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell angrily declared that he’d place the first order for a pair of shoes if Nike would just put the so-called “Betsy Ross” flag back on them — even though that symbol has been co-opted by white supremacist as their own. How is that acceptable for an American politician in 2019?
I’ve long wondered: If politicians stopped pitting us against each other, mightn’t we solve our long-simmering issues with race? Wouldn’t that make us a better country?
And creating racial parity would benefit everyone. In their book The Spirit Level, researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett show that residents of equitable communities enjoy better health care, longer life expectancies, less violence, less incarceration, less obesity, fewer teen pregnancies, better mental health, and better opportunities for financial gain. Isn’t that precisely what everyone wants?
A 2009 study conducted by the Altarum Institute found that if racial equality — whatever that means — were somehow achieved, the country would enjoy an annual influx of well over a trillion and a half dollars, accompanied by lower taxes and increased corporate profits, owing to the greater spending power and increased productivity that equality would bring.
We’re all Americans! We want the same things, but we seem to be at war with ourselves. Lincoln was right when he said that a house divided against itself cannot stand. We can do better. We used to be proud of our ideals and brag about being a melting pot. What happened? This writer doesn’t know how to achieve racial harmony, but I suspect that if our “leaders” quit dividing us, we’d have a much better chance of figuring it out.