Vent:
I wish White conservatives and libertarians could understand that African-Americans are perhaps most skeptical to this constant tug of war between federal and state governments.
We don’t really see state governments as the arbiter of liberty against the federal monster that they’re made out to be by White conservatives and White libertarians.
People like us have never been in the position of a majority clinging jealously, desperately to their corner of regional power against federal will.
I wish they could explain to us why state government autonomy should be as important and obsessive to us as it is to them, even at the expense of healthcare and other human services which are taken for granted elsewhere but which horrify the sensibilities of federalist ideologues in this country.
We can understand the role of cities, counties and federal governments. You have Black mayors, aldermen/councilmembers and county execs and commissioners all over the country within the limit of your typical majority-Black municipality. We have Black congressmembers from numerous regions of mostly-urban and some rural import.
But states? Governors? States usually do their damnedest to screw us over. States have never been the friend of Black people in this country. States don’t have much of a purpose to us except as a double-enforcer of government violence, as an expression of suburban and rural anxiety about the “crime-infested” urban locales, as a burdensome middleman between us and the federal government. States lease the majority of prisons in this country to the highest bidder and execute the vast majority of death row inmates.
If all states were abolished tomorrow and this country became a centralized, unitary republic, Black Americans wouldn’t miss the states nor their power over our lives. Not Georgia, not Alabama, not California, not Illinois. No more Electoral College to placate the rural areas.
We’d have to deal with a much closer relationship between the federal government and cities, between feds and counties. Mayors wouldn’t have to go through the state to receive federal help, nor would feds have to go through states to intervene in municipal affairs.
this may yield some unintended consequences, but I think I can live with those better than this terrible system we have now.
But in the meantime, I simply can’t sympathize with, nor understand, this constant need for distance between state and federal government when it comes to the governance of individual citizens. It’s harming the American working class as a whole, and minority suspect classes (like those of us who did not “immigrate” to this country) in greater intensity. It is harming the accountability of this federal government to the citizenry while hiding the hand of state-level fiefdoms in depriving the citizenry of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
