As it turns out, racism may be even more psychologically damaging for the social class that "enjoys" its benefits, than for the class victimized by it. Fromm and his colleagues argued that authoritarianism, the soil of racism, makes dominant white culture in the United States an easy pawn of fascism. Post Modernists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida fully agree. They perceive a citizenry rendered passive and ineffectual, incapable of effectively interacting with much less restraining a power elite grown less democratic and more corrupt in direct proportion to its immunity from real criticism. Jurgen Habermas, the least pessimistic of the Frankfurt School scholars, finds the situation to be less hopeless. With resolve and proper knowledge, people may be able to free themselves of debilitating mind-sets and beliefs systematically inculcated by the powerful, exactly as predicted by Antonio Gramsci more than a century ago.
In general, social scientists and historians are not optimistic about America's chances of avoiding fascism. We live at a time when it seems reasonable, in fact, to assume that it might well engulf the world. Some feel this has already occurred. Now more than ever might ordinary citizens find it prudent to seek full participation in deciding how their future shall unfold. In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki reminds us that humans are enormously adaptive as a species when we operate as groups of independent individuals, rather than as manipulated hordes. Surowiecki's work suggests that A self-actualized citizenry, where many people operate at the higher end of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, could have great potential to meet terrifying survival challenges quite visible on our horizon: water and food shortages as global warming creates vast ecological changes on the planet; the shift of Earth's magnetic poles, with similar effects; great meteoric strikes upon the planet. None of these threats would seem to be un-manageable if people can find the courage and the resolve to reject theories, such as Samuel Huntington's popular thesis in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, that sell racism on both a local and a global scale.
People skeptical of their ability to create life-and-liberty affirming organization spontaneously and effectively need only read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States to perceive how often people have done this in the past; and James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me to understand how systematically they have been deprived of such information; and Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point to understand how spontaneous organizing is happening constantly all around them. If not yet generating the kind of tipping point needed, if not yet the kind that rendered Gandhi's movement capable of removing the British from India, history supports Habermas as well as Foucault: there is as good reason to predict that social connectedness and humanism can prevail, as that they cannot. But only, it seems clear, if the illness of racism, and all that it implies, is addressed in our nation seriously and without delay.
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