Introduction
As an American, I have born witness to many changes since my youth in Southern California. I spent my childhood growing up in two worlds, with a foot in each. I spent my summers up in the Central Valley on my Grandpa's and Uncle's ranches, in the small agricultural town in which I had been born, in fact I was the first baby to have been born in its new hospital. I spent the academic year mostly in school trying to impress my teachers and other students in sunny suburban southern California, and mostly just making myself miserable in the process.
Several sets of changes are most apparent in Southern California since that time. The first has been the dramatic influx of foreign born people here, especially Hispanics, to the point of constituting close to 90% of the total population, and the consequent displacement of middle-class whites from the overall area to enclaves, peripheral areas or completely beyond the bounds of the region. As a child in a working class neighborhood during the mid-60's, I was in an elementary school that was 26% Hispanic and that was considered to be a heavy ratio for the time. Now, in the same area, it is more than 98% Hispanic. The second major trend has been the over-development of all remaining open areas, and the concomitant congestion and overcrowding. Much of this new "redevelopment" has been fairly spurious and superficial, as well as being overpriced, and reflects the overall devaluation of the region in spite of increasing real estate prices. The third has been the trashing of the educational system in California at all levels. I've seen it at the elementary level, in colleges and in universities. School systems shrank to half their size in the 1970's, and their Administrative overhead multiplied by as much as 50 times their previous costs and size. With a loss of money, due to poor and corrupt improvements that threw a lot of tax money at greedy contractors, schools then slashed music and art programs, selling off their instruments and retiring early their senior teachers with the most experience. They cut out summer camps and school buses. They hired "bi-lingual" teachers, which was a catchword for Mexican and Spanish only, and pushed overcrowded classrooms. Now, 25 years later, it is the average American and their children who is paying the price. The teachers are being blamed for low scores and poor performance. It is easy for the leadership to lay the blame at other people's doorstep. It constitutes implicitly a refusal to take responsibility for one's own affairs and for the consequences of one's own history.
To say that these basic issues are all interrelated in a Southern California context is to understate the entire affair. California is the future of the rest of the nation--it stands at the cutting edge of American history. Leaders and citizens from other states would do well now to look at California closely and to pay heed to the lessons being played out there on a daily basis.
To see things any other way is to deny the actual history that has transpired. I know I am not being a racist in this regard when I see blacks out protesting the same issues. I know that as an American, I no longer need to feel so alone. Charity should start at home. Jobs and resources from the system, always by definition finite, should be given to Americans first and foremost, and not to either disadvantaged or advantaged foreigners who enter the system, often illegally and without great interference. The sad part about these changes are that those groups that affirmative action was designed to help the most, namely poor black communities and the Native Americans, are those who will be the most hurt in the long run by these new developments as they will be excluded in the long run from whatever system emerges from the mess.
What has happened in this process, under the rhetorical hype of multiculturalism, has been a selling out of America, and Americans, largely to foreign and private interests. Our own governmental leaders have prostituted the public's interests behind closed doors, and continues to do so largely unchecked.
As an Anthropologist who has been focused upon comparative research, I couldn't but help over the years to draw comparisons and conclusions from my fieldwork that led me back to patterns and institutional forms as they exist in the contemporary US. Capitalism and Democracy are the two major dialectical chords of American social structure and cultural patterning, and these two chords not only make uneasy bed-fellows, but are even contraposed to one another in many complicated contexts. In some ways, under the best of circumstances, this dialectic can be extremely constructive and productive, especially when in an open class system new money arises from the working and middle class background to compete with old-money interests. Under the worst of times, this dialectic can be very destructive, leading to problems of gross inequality and injustice, stagflation and a crippling of the overall economic prowess of the nation.
As an anthropologist, I must say that I find the multiculturalism ideology as this has been promulgated officially through schools and government to be both anthropologically naive and so much "false consciousness" that disguises a form of intellectual conformism and intolerance of genuine difference occurring between people. It constitutes a variant of the old assimilationist melting pot theme, and in this sense denies some of the fundamental realities of ethno-cultures and ethnocultural differences that occur in the world. American society, especially the average American consumer and tax payer, has paid a very dear price for this form of naive sociologism.
From a systems standpoint, especially with a theory of very large and complex systems as is represented by contemporary American society, with increasing chaos and complexity, there is a complementary requirement to introduce increasing dynamic constraint and coherence, which entails superimposing on a higher level integration mechanisms and standards that serve the sense of overall order in the system.
Our system has moved now beyond simple mechanical or even organic solidarity, as this was defined by Durkheim. We are in an age, I believe, in which solidarity must be defined as post-conventional and global in scope. New ethno-nationalisms and new ethno-class divisions are emergent that cross-cut traditional boundaries of class and status identity in American social life. Working and business classes are inherently complex categorizations within a larger continuum of social change and stratification.
In these essays, I wish to focus primarily upon domestic issues and patterns affecting American society today. But to pay attention to global and international issues cannot be helped, both because the US is a major game player in the Global Capitalist system, and because American society is becoming increasingly globalized in orientation. We cannot but help frame domestic issues within an international frame of reference.
Most Americans have a naive believe that their country and their government is somehow immune and relatively free of corruption. I was taught this myself in my 7th grade social studies class. Thus, most Americans would find incredible the claim that corruption in the US has not only grown worse over the years, but even supercedes the petty kind of corruption found in many poorer societies.
Most Americans have a naive believe that their own government does not spy upon its people or attempt to manipulate information and the minds of the people. Thus, they would argue against any conspiratorial perspective suggesting that in fact secret governmental agencies are regularly keeping a careful eye and record of the dealings of their own people, even more than that of foreign people who come to live in the US, and that the government is regularly involved in information control through the mass communications media to persuade and manipulate the collective mind of the American people.
Most Americans would in all their hypocritical modern enlightenment, accept the notion that we are indeed a "multicultural" society and would resist fundamentally the notion that we are in fact more culturally homogeneous, mono-lingual and mono-cultural than we realize, and that we are, compared to other nations, relatively closed culturally.
The United States has had certain fundamental social weaknesses, and these wounds are opening up and festering upon a scale unprecedented in its history. At the same time, the US has a set of fundamental strengths that have been historically unprecedented in the history of humankind. It strikes me as a somewhat tragic note on the recent history of changes in the US that we have been sacrificing our long term stability as a nation and a democracy, for the somewhat shortsighted and selfish sense of profit. To a great extent, these kinds of sacrifices and transitions have been mostly unnecessary and uncalled for in the larger scheme of things.
There are six main problem sets that I believe confronts the US today and will be critical to its future:
1. Race
2. Class
3. Capitalism versus Democracy
4. Over population
5. Administrative Authoritarianism & Corruption
6. Environment & Development
Unfortunately, the United States has hung itself up on the notion and ideology of race. It was hung up on this problem at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and it was hung up upon it at the time of the battle of Gettysburg on July 4th, 1863, and it is hung up upon it today, in the year 2001, as we usher in a new Millennium. The problem of race was connected to the issue of slavery, which had been part and parcel of the plantation economy of the south, and, less advertised, the shipping economy of the north, during the colonial and revolutionary era of the formation of American character.
The problem with racial ideologies and consciousness is that race, from an anthropological standpoint, is largely discredited as a pseudo-scientific approach to the categorization of humankind. Trait variation is continuous and isoclinal across almost all but the most isolated groupings. Thus racial ascriptions were abandoned by forward looking anthropologists in early sixties, largely as a useless taxonomic system. But race as an ideology has been carried forward, and has become even structurally entrenched in the ethos of American society.
Affirmative action has been promulgated as a reaction to the form of racial segregation that existed before that time. But as a reaction, it has embodied the same ideology and spirit of what it was designed to fight. Basically, it embodies the concept of the "White man's burden" that it is the god-given duty of white people, who are superior to all other races of people, to try to up lift their "honorary brown brothers" through enlightenment and spiritual salvation. This implicit concept of the White man's burden remains as true today as it was when it was used to justify extreme colonial and imperialistic policies of the Nineteenth Century.
The functional consequence of this ideology is the institutionalization of a set of double, and even triple standards, that are applied differentially across the spectrum of American society. To use an example borrowed clearly from another society, in Malaysia a similar affirmative action program was set up with the purpose giving blanket advantage to the Malays and systematically excluding Chinese and Indians from participation. Mahathir's argument, which was very explicit, was that the Malays were genetically inferior to the Chinese, who were natural businessmen, and therefore had to be given privileged, front-of the line status.
One consequence of such double standards in society as represented now by an aggressive affirmative action policy, is what is known in Malaysia as the promotion of "Ali-Baba" style relationships that serve to undercut the effects of such programs. White minorities, being systematically excluded from participation within the system on any but the most minimal levels, find their own means of circumventing the restrictions imposed upon them. White owned business will hire token minorities in order to meet arbitrary quota systems foisted upon them by the Federal government, but these will be mostly and only a form of tokenism.
Genuine equality cannot be served, either politically, socially or in terms of opportunity and resource structures, if a society depends upon quota systems and sets of double standards applied differentially across different groups of people. This is especially true if such systems are based upon racial ascriptions that are scientifically spurious at best and ideologically extreme at worst. To be fair, any nation must have a single set of standards applied equally to all people.
For the most part, White Americans are not arguing for the same incentive structures that are doled out to all minorities under the aegis of affirmative action. They are arguing for an end to a system of double standards that breeds hypocrisy and mediocrity in high places. They want equal measure under the law for all people.
If white people today are angry at affirmative action, it is not because they are racists or because they hate blacks or other minority groups. It is because they have seen the great damage that blind affirmative action policies have done both to their own kind and to the Nation as a whole.
I must say that the US has grown economically more powerful over the years, and it continues to dominate the world both economically and militarily. Thus, it should strike some true-believing Americans as odd to assert that indeed we have established our own Pax Americana upon the rest of the world. Fortunately, though our capitalist agencies, which are a powerful force of acculturative change in the world, have been engaged in the domination of foreign market places, with mixed success, to some extent American politics has remained at least overtly independent of involvement in the political struggles of the rest of the world. The only area where this has not been clearly the case is when the CIA, as the central intelligence agency of the US involved in foreign affairs, gets mixed up in foreign politics, more frequently than not on the wrong side.
In closing, in reference to foreign policy, Americans must understand that they have set the standards, not to be emulated by foreign governments, but in how foreign governments, and their people's should not proceed. No other country in the world would let down its border or jeopardize citizenship in the name of private profit. In other words, if Americans want to straighten out affairs of the world, then they should begin first in their own homes. Most foreign people's resent being told what to do and how to live by arrogant, and fairly gullible, Americans.