RACE, CLASS, AND CRASS
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
When Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) got an anthrax-spiked letter
delivered to his office, bodies rolled. You would have thought the anthrax
and a head, fire-breathing nostrils, and a spark-laden tail the way you saw
people run out of the Congressional buildings, looking for their testing. No
matter that the anthrax-laden letters had come days before announcements. No
matter that medical experts said the chance of anyone contracting the anthrax
disease was minuscule. Anyone who worked on Capitol Hill who needed to be
tested got tested. And offices were closed.
Some photographer captured the image of fear -- a gaggle of young girls,
short skirts tilted toward the wind, scared eyes flying everywhere. There
were standing in line waiting to be tested because they had been in the same
building with a letter that perhaps hundreds of postal workers had touched.
But while the young girls got testing, the postal workers got exhortations to
go back to work. It was not until someone died at the Brookland postal
facility that testing of postal workers was ordered.
Where did the letters come from? Were they manna from heaven? Or
man-made missives sent through mails that had to be handled by human beings?
Did Allah rain them down miraculously, or did anthrax-enabled terrorists take
to the mails because they could make a point that way? And did America play
into their hands, providing one standard of testing for congressional staff
and another for postal employees.
According to the Bureau of labor Statistics Report, Employment and
Earnings, African Americans are about 11 percent of the labor market, but 28
percent of our nation’s postal clerks. Black folks are disproportionately
represented in those jobs. Did race have anything to do with the
differential concern that was showered on Capitol Hill staff, but withheld
from postal workers? I don't know, but I'm suspicious.
The 9-11 tragedy gives us a special window on our nations occupational
apartheid. Black folks are 11 percent of the population, but a smaller
fraction of the fire force in our nations largest cities. New York lost more
than 200 firefighters, but just 12 were African American, which seems partly
a result of the exclusionary practices that kept African Americans off the
fire force in that city for so long. Similarly, African Americans are
underrepresented in the other protective services – as police and emergency
medical workers – and thus underrepresented among the tragedies. The honor
roll is a reminder of the many ways that some folks have been denied the
opportunity to serve.
Similarly, the value of service can be legitimately questioned when we
look at the different ways postal workers and Capitol Hill staffs were
treated. Postal workers have been disproportionately African American for at
least 3 generations, w hen the adage -- there is always work at the post
office – was coined. I remember leaving high school after the 11th grade,
headed for college, and being told that if all else failed I could find work
tat the post office. In my family, and in many black families, there is the
tradition of highly educated folks who could not find teaching work obtaining
steady employment at the post office. And now, there is the tradition of
service, but no protection, for those who work at the post office, of anthrax
spores colliding with indifference, with thousands of workers witnessing a
government-sanctioned double standard.
This is a case where I wish race didn’t matter. But it does. If the
House Office Building, adjacent to the Senate Building where Dashle’s letter
was received, was evacuated, why not the place where the mail came from, the
post office? Do we place a higher value on the olives of those who work on
the Hill than on the lives of those who handle their mail? Do mail handlers
become the invisible people who make our lives work, but who are undeserving
of consideration?
This philosophy seems to bleed into the ways our Congress is proposing a
stimulus package, offering tax cuts and incentives for industry, but little
or nothing for front-line workers. In other words, if the house is burning,
save the foundation and let the beams fall where they may. But the beams are
our backbone, the postal workers a symbol for all the mop-toting,
floor-scrubbing, people who, behind the scenes, make all of our lives work.
Postal employees and Hill staffers were, at the end of the day, treated
differently. Yet we have leaders who tell us that we need to come together.
Is our togetherness a function of our perceived utility? Will those who work
in the margins ever get the same treatment as those who work in the
mainstream?
When race and class intrude on our supposed patriotism, it’s a crass
statement about our values and priorities. In light of the government’s
positions of the last week, would you rather work on the Hill, or in the post
office?