By Al Giordano
From the February 4, 2008 issue | Posted in National |
LAS VEGAS—The chairs in the Concorde Ballroom of the Paris Casino were arranged as if for a wedding, but were more a prelude to an ugly divorce.
On one side of the at-large caucus room were supporters, mostly Mexican American, of Sen. Hillary Clinton, led by an organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) .
On the other side of the aisle were supporters, overwhelmingly African American, of Sen. Barack Obama, led by a shop steward for the Culinary Workers Local 226. Both groups participating in the Jan. 19 Nevada caucus were made up predominantly of women. They shouted at each other, booed, hissed and hurled thumbs down in open, sneering contempt for the opposition. The hostility toward their sister workers on each side had more to do with each other than with the candidates they supported.
Capitalism and its politicians have long played divide and conquer to divide immigrants from other economically suppressed demographic groups. A generation or two ago, Irish, Italians and Jews were bunched by those in power into the same congressional, legislative and city council districts to compete for the same scraps of political representation while White Anglo-Saxon Protestants took the rest of the pie. The same has occurred in recent years as Blacks and Latinos — the two most solid Democratic Party voting demographic groups — have been shoehorned into increasing conflict.
As census trends explode to bring, just two or so decades from now, the Caucasian population of the United States into minority status, entire industries have been launched to prevent a majority alliance from forming along class-solidarity lines. There are book contracts aplenty waiting for divisive pundits like Earl Ofari Hutchison, author of The Emerging Black GOP Majority (2006) and Latino Challenge to Black America (2007).
Black-Latino tensions bubble up from high school brawls in Los Angeles to City Council antics in Buffalo to the prison system where gangs often choose up sides along ethnic and racial lines.
But now it’s exploded out into the open in the Democratic presidential nomination battle, with the Clinton campaign leading the charge.
Remarkably, the race baiting has had little effect on white voters who would be expected to bite, particularly those in rural areas — considered by white urban and suburban liberals to be the racist ones — who in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada delivered bigger percentages for Obama than urban and suburban voters. But perhaps white folks were never the intended target of such divisive politics. No, it led, instead, to the Black-Latino divide on display in Las Vegas, one that could cause lasting harm to all progressive efforts — electoral or not — in the near future of the United States of America.
