One of the unintended consequences of the mid-century civil rights movement was the destruction of the black community. There used to be a viable black urban culture, even during the depths of the Jim Crow era, a segregated society with strong and vital institutions. The ghetto had the family, school, the church, a rising black middle class and business community. These provided jobs, role models and a leadership class, which in turn inculcated values such as civic responsibility, work ethic, education. The ghetto or urban environment concentrated natural leaders, professionals and entrepreneurs, (and artists of high sophistication!), a critical mass was possible. Even the most revolutionary and radical voices spoke eloquent and articulate English and argued from consistent (if not necessarily valid) ideological and political positions.

The era of civil rights broke this dynamic irreparably. The natural leaders of the urban community moved out to the suburbs, went into business, academia, government, the military. Those who could, left. There even was a word for it, they were co-opted. This diluted and dispersed the leadership pool, and when coupled with the erosion of good-paying industrial union jobs, left the weakest and most helpless elements of the community adrift. Soon, there was no black community, no black culture. And soon, no black family. And that is the most vital institution of all.

It's not just the black community, either. It happened to Native Americans, the proud and noble mystic warriors of the plains were rounded up into reservations, their culture systematically dismantled. It's happening now to the Mexicans in the West, their 400 year old civilization crowded into barrios and serf labor in what used to be their own country. It happened to the Puerto Ricans in the Eastern Seaboard conurbation. It happened to the Irish and Italians, too, but they could pass for white and lost their oppression with their accents. Something similar has happened in the countries of the old Communist block, as those able to leave moved on to greener pastures in the oligarchy or the West, the best of the culture gets siphoned off leaving fewer and fewer cultural strengths for the community to draw on for self improvement. As long as the best get decanted every year, those that remain behind concentrate decay and despair. A culture can survive economic and political repression, look at the Jews; but it cannot survive it's dispersal and dilution unless it is simultaneously accepted into the mainstream.

But now it's starting to happen to rural whites, working class Caucasians. The values and charms of small-town America are being replaced by unemployment, crystal meth, street crime and domestic violence. Perhaps Mayberry never really existed, but every place is starting to look like bloody Harlan County any more. The new oppressed minority will be the Scotch-Irish and their descendants, or at least that's what they'll say if you ask them. They are rapidly developing their own all-purpose version of The Man: he's Liberal and he's not white like them. They are already complaining about how their country has been "taken away from them", and demagogues are quickly mobilizing to exploit their discontents, real and imagined. They have Jesus and guns and the flag. They have NASCAR, Big Trucks, and Country Rock. They just don't have any jobs.

Race and culture are smokescreens, distractions, irrelevant. Burrowed deep down, the real enemy is financial inequality, or more accurately, inequality of opportunity, the concentration of wealth and the ability to accumulate it into a narrower and ever more isolated demographic. The people who really matter, the ones who make things happen, just don't need the rest of us any more, and they don't care what happens to us. And when they survey the destruction and neglect they have caused, they are quick to point out it is the congenital inadequacies and shortcomings of those who are not like them, who do not share their values (or their ethnicity), that are the root causes of their problems. The poor are poor because they are lazy and stupid, because they want to be that way, because they like being that way, because welfare and social services made them that way. They are not only responsible for their misery, they actually deserve it. It is a convenient and self-serving explanation, one that relies heavily on racist and cultural stereotypes. But it can't explain why every year there seem to be more and more of them.