Born Free? Not Here, For Those in Chains

Class consciousness is not Americans’ strong suit. In a country founded by overthrowing royal rule, we like to subscribe to the myth that most of us are middle class.

George Washington and the others did succeed in casting off King George. But of course the country was not born fully free; the slaves remained in bondage, despite the Constitution.

Today, there is another sense in which, to paraphrase Rousseau, people are often born in chains in the self-styled Land of the Free. The mass incarceration of the past thirty years has especially impacted those at the bottom of the economic order and kept them behind bars.

Bruce Western and Becky Pettit discuss this phenomenon in their essay in Daedalus on “Incarceration and Social Inequality.” Mass incarceration, they point out, “deepens disadvantage and forecloses mobility for the most marginal in society.”

In that sense, I would argue, mass incarceration is profoundly anti-Christian. Jesus came to proclaim a preferential option for the poor. But we have come to accept deep, entrenched poverty that tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation.

To be sure, crime does involve personal choices, not merely social structures. But those choices are exercised in a culture in which the odds are against those from the lower economic depths.

American Apartheid Denied?

The last time I saw Anna Quindlen interviewed by Charlie Rose, it was 2006, and she was urging every American to read Out of Iraq by George McGovern and William Polk.

I did as Anna urged, and even got my copy of the book signed by McGovern through the good graces of my friends Mary and Jack in Mitchell, S.D.

Tonight, as Quindlen talked with Rose about her new novel, Rose alluded to a remark about race and class in America, from a commencement speach Quindlen gave at Wesleyan in 2009. She asserted there that, for too long, America has had "apartheid denied."

I quickly went online to check the quotation and found Quindlen's entire speech on the Wesleyan website. Here's the quotation in question:

"We need you to make this a fairer place, a more unified nation, a country that wipes out the bright lines of class and race that have created an apartheid, an apartheid too long denied."

"Apartheid" is of course a word fraught with history, inevitably associated with the white seperatist regime in South Africa that imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Former President Jimmy Carter can testify to that, after his provocative use of the word in a book on Israel and the Palestinians prompted a fusilade of criticism a few years ago.

Though Charlie Rose did not ask her why she used the word "apartheid," Anna Quindlen's motive may have been akin to Carter's: to get Americans to pay attention to hard realities that are all too easy to ignore.

How about this one? In the wake of the Great Recession, there six million people, disproportionately members of racial minorities, who must get by on food stamps alone, with no cash income.