Are the mass protests breaking out across the country due to historic racism, or is there something else at play? For Italy’s La Stampa, columnist Gianni Riotta writes that with the middle class shrinking and resentment seething over the ease with which undocumented immigrants are able to find employment, the problem has far more to do with the desperation of average people over paying the bills and getting ahead as citizens of the United States.
For La Stampa, Gianni Riotta swims against the mainstream media tide, writing in part:
African-American victims and White police officers divide the two Americas, right and left, and the world is watching. In Putin’s Russia, the network RT depicts the United States as a racist land.
Is this really the case? No. The United States has twice elected an African-American president; it has senior officials, joint chiefs of staff, university deans and media chiefs belonging to various minorities, including Blacks. When will we see a Turkish chancellor in Germany, a Jamaican on Downing Street, an Algerian in the Élysée Palace and an Albanian in the Palazzo Chigi? Don’t hold your breath waiting. But even if this isn’t the discrimination that the propaganda promotes, the crisis in the United States is serious. The loss of status among the middle class, the decline in well-paid jobs for workers without a degree and the ease of employing illegal immigrants sets Whites and Blacks against one another. The former recall that over 90 percent of all crimes are committed by Blacks or Hispanics; the latter argue that police kill Black or Hispanic suspects almost every day. Obama wanted to reconcile hearts and minds, but he couldn’t. The majority of White Americans (according to The Washington Post) now believe that Blacks have more social protections: in colleges there is great resentment over “quotas” that allow minorities with lower grades than Whites (Asians excluded, since for them, a “quota” is nothing to overcome, particularly on science faculties) to study at prestigious Ivy League institutions. The story of Ferguson elicits opposing responses: for 63 percent of Whites it wasn’t about racism but only a legal matter; for 80 percent of Blacks it was racism (according to ABC News).
However, as confirmed by the differing reactions to the death of poor Garner, this is not a Manichean crisis of White against Black. On Twitter hashtag crimingwhilewhite, many Whites are confessing to crimes more serious than selling cigarettes on the street – and without the police objecting. And if Ferguson has divided Blacks and Whites (Whites for the accused policeman: 58 percent; Blacks for the victim: 81 percent) and Democrats and Republicans (Republicans for the policeman: 78 percent; Democrats for the victim: 68 percent) now Garner is being paid homage by conservatives and liberals – and this in a nation where only 30 percent say they “have confidence in the police” and 70 percent declare themselves “skeptical” about the forces of law and order. The Website Hotair.com gathers statements by conservative commentators and citizens: “I’m not a liberal. On Ferguson I am with the police, but to kill a person selling cigarettes on the street is deplorable.” Many people on the right and left are demanding that the Department of Justice open a federal investigation on Garner for “violations of civil rights.”
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