Wednesday, October 16, 2024

Racism


The origin of racism is economic. Disenfranchising a minority leads to subserviance. In many instances the employer/ employee relationship is thinly veiled master/slave. Scrooge legendarily paying Crachit a pittance is a robber baron in microcosm--the factory owner paying his worker the smallest amount possible to guarantee ever larger profits which in turn will increase stock price. Lo, have things really changed? Has some genie magically humanized the profit motive? Racism takes on all kinds of cultural guises one of which is a nefarious invisibility aka Ellison's The Invisible Man and Percival Everett's Erasure (the book on which the film American Fiction is based). For instance, a benevolent despot like Frederick II or Tito is a pater familias providing the anodyne of liberalism to the wound. Still dominance and submission define any system in which there is an underclass who lack the same benefits rights and privileges as the manager or "boss." Even after the Russian Revolution in which there was ostensibly a "dictatorship of the proletariat," you had a relatively small but privileged Nomenklatura, de facto aristocrats who exploited their serfs.

read "Frankel" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

and "Ultimate Rejection" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star


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