With all my emphasis on what I call "level-two" – covert and institutional or societal and "state-of-being" – racism (see this for just one recent example), I occasionally forget how many full-blown, flat-out bigoted "state-of-mind" ("level one") racists there still are in the United States.
Sometimes people like "Helen Hall" write to remind me of full-blown racism's continuing existence in the United States.
What follows below is an actual e-mail exchange that took place between "Helen" and I after ZNet published my somewhat widely read (I've gotten a lot of messages and that's my main measure) essay on United State mass black hyper-iincarceration (so great that one third of black male adults in the U.S. now possess the lifelong mark of a felony record) as a form of "racial reparations in reverse." The essay was supposed to be a book chapter but there were some communication and focus problems between and among some well-intentioned book editors and a publication editor at The New Press, a remarkable publishing house)
To understand the exchange that follows, which show the somewhat bemused minds of a hard leftist and a far rightist (an American Fascist to be honest) coming in strange conflict, it's probably best to look first at the last article linked above.
Here goes:
Helen Hall 1:
Oh, boo hoo hoo for black people! You know they committed all those crimes they were locked up for, and that's not even counting the ones who were never caught and the ones who got off easy. Let's think outside of the box -maybe what the country needs is fewer black people!
Helen Hall
Street 1:
Dear Helen Hall:
It's not often that I get contacted by such an openly racist person. No, I take that back: I've never been contacted by anyone so openly racist as you. Not once.
You are entitled to your views of course but I'm curious about four things:
(i) how you came to this perspective. What do you think happened to make you hate blacks so much?
(ii) how you would propose to reduce the number of black people in the U.S. Sterilization? Banishment from the country? Extermination? Some combination of these? Something else?
(iii): how would you expect me to react to this note if I was black (as it happens, I'm not, but you would have had no reason to know that before you wrote is my guess)? Would you be surprised in that case if I concluded that America very much needed fewer Helen Halls and her ilk? Wouldn't you be concerned that I might want to find out who you are and where you live?
(iv): from one technically white person to another; are you concerned at all about the historical and ongoing role of racial division and hatred as a tool for very rich (and generally white) people — I'm talking about the top 1 percent that owns more than a third of the wealth in this country — to keep ordinary folks diverted from thinking about the crimes of the "elite"? Remember that these crimes are very considerable and probably go far beyond anything that's being or been done to you by some black person (and please consider that most black crime is black on black crime, reflecting among other things the fact that blacks continue to be heavily segregated/ghettoized in the United States). With all due respect for Condaleeza Rice (do you hate her too by the way?), it's mainly rich white guys like Bush and Cheney et al., not some poor black over in the ghetto, who do stuff like:
* send mostly working-class kids off to die (without enough equipment and with under-fundeded and inferior health services when they return) in illegal and unjust wars.
* slash taxes for the mostly white rich, making it harder and harder for government to pay for anything decent anymore.
* pollute the environment and change the climate in dangerous ways.
* close down factories and take jobs away form the U.S. and set them in places where people have no choice but to work for nothing..
etc (I could go on).
I think some of my fellow "white Americans" spend so much time hating blacks and/or Latinos and/or Arabs that they take their eyes off the real and greatest culprits that are actually doing the most to screw up our lives.
These are serious questions, meant with perhaps less hostility than you might think.
Street
Hellen Hall 2:
Who said anything about hate? Don't be so excitable. I think the same as George Washington, and all the rest of the founding fathers. They knew what they were about.
I agree with you, now the country is run by gangsters, but these gangsters are children of the same tribe that pushed desegregation and welfare and all the rest of the Great Society communist crap on this country.
When I was in college in the 70s, professors were flapping their gums about poor black people and racism and too many people locked up in prison, and I'm sure in decades to come it will be the same. You know why? Because the more we change from a white, Christian country, the worse everything gets. The same thing happens in every white nation. It's very sad.
Street 2:
Well, I said "hate," HH, not you…correct, and I stand by it. Nothing all that "excited" or "excitable" about that elementary observation. If you don't think there's rich racial (and indeed racist) hatred behind your note, you are simply fooling yourself in my opinion. The rest is pure nonsense and totally vile in my opinion, except for the observation that "the country is run by gangsters" – on that we agree. Your use of the phrase "white nation" tells me you are some kind of a fascist, not simply an ordinary run-ofthe-mill racist. You must be very proud of your whiteness.
Paul Street
Helen Hall 3:
Okay, Mr. Scientist, where is the formerly white, Christian nation or neighborhood where "diversity" and "civil rights" brought the crime rate down? Hmmm?
Street 3:
Helen Hall:
Don't follow the question to be honest but the crime rate is basically tied most strongly of all correlations to the business cycle with particular reference to job creation and to the availability of decent paying work for lesser skilled workers. Strong economy with good job creation means crime rate goes down; weak economy with bad job creation means crine rate goes up. In the 1990s, you had a "strong economy" (within real limits) but incarceration rate went up even as the crime rate went down. This had to do with the war on drugs which was was executed in very racially disparate ways. We whites use "illegal" drugs like crazy but are much much less likely to get arrested and sentenced to prison. People from other industrialized democracies are just amazed that we incarcerate so many people for non-violent and especially for drug offenses — nowhere else in the world do public authorities resort to the very expensive ($35 K a year to incarcerate young inner city offender versus $8-9 K a year to educate him [meanwhile Jody and Buffy in Lake Forest and Gross Pointe etc, are being "publicly" educated at 20 K a year or much more in private schools]) and counter-productive and indeed criminogenic (crime-causing and crime-exacerbating) strategy of mass imprisonment. Basically incarceration and felony marking just deepen the disadvantage and the propensity for cirminality so you just start a big game of inmate recycling which prisons towns like and which you and I both (whatever our very different racial attitudes andpolitical orientations) both pay for. It's quite expensive and it's a scam: prison guards and prison wardens and the corporations that supply and invest in prisons like it alot; so do legislators in prison districts (they get more money and voting power). You (coming from the far right) and I (coming from the left) both pay. But you don't have to worry all that much about the criminogenic consequences of racially disdparate mass incarceration: segregation (which you certainly support) makes certain that most black crime is black-on- black crime.
Here's a movie I recommend renting: "American History X." Its about a white supremacist who gets incarcerated and realizes he's wrong on race. It's very well done. I was somewhat racist myself for a short time (though not on anything like your scale, which appears to be part of organized white nationalism/fascism) in high school and had certain experiences that fundamentally changed my racial attitudes and helped me realize that race and racism were techniques of divide and rule serving the rich and powerful gangster class, which is mostly white but certainly includes some blacks (eg. Condi Rice and Obama). As for the "Christian" talk, my strong and fairly educated sense is that Jesus was anti-racist (and militantly opposed to economic inequality) and probably has many more true followers in the black community than in your "white nation."
Regards,
Paul Street
Helen Hall 4:
I recommend you don't rent any more Hollywood movies as they are all propaganda for the New World Order and you seem like you have imbibed more than enough propaganda already.
Whether one gets arrested depends a lot on whether one is stupid or smart. This probably explains the disparity in rates, right there. The idea that blacks just want a crack at economic opportunity and everything will be peachy has been exploded for decades. Blacks have a thieving nature and poor common sense or self control and this gets them in trouble all the time. Blacks are always a criminal problem, everywhere, and their sort of "religion" which has to do with putting funny hats on their heads and jumping up and down and screaming has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity.
Helen Hall
Street 4:
Well, there was some tiny progress…not much but a little I thought but no none at all really: you end on vicious racist absurdity ("blacks have a thieving nature") so we are done. I really wouldn't write further if I were you. Farewell, Helen Hall, I have the distinct impression that you are an American Fascist, which is an interesting if (in my opinion) totally vile thing to be. There is simply no peaceful resolution between myself and someone who thinks and write as you do.
Paul Street
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