There is a specter haunting the U.S, alienation. That is detachment from social institutions. Three of these are the family, school and work.

Longer and more intense working days have helped to make family life for many more precarious in the U.S. This trend has increasingly dehumanized people. You don’t have to be a sociologist to see it happening.

People being pushed and pulled on the job can react irrationally to these pressures. Some snap. Others do a slow burn, harming themselves and their families in various ways (using alcohol, illegal drugs, etc.).

In the meantime, public schools can be a breeding ground for alienation. Consider the official hype around standardized testing. Proponents claim that it is a valid measurement of student learning.

Many parents, students and teachers think otherwise. Yet their voices are rarely heard versus those who officially support standardized testing. Moreover, imagine the disillusionment among students who score poorly on the tests.

Expressions of alienation surface at many levels in the U.S. A century ago author Thorstein Veblen understood this. Today’s popular culture also offers a glimpse of how and why U.S. social conditions are anti-human.

Take African-American rappers. There are those who have voiced an alienation born of resistance to social conditions. I mean the actual living conditions of some black people in the U.S.

A report in the New England Journal of Medicine 12 years ago noted that “black men in Harlem were less likely to reach the age of 65 than men in Bangladesh.” Meanwhile, skin-color profiling has led to a boom in the incarceration of people, disproportionately black and brown, in the U.S. The world’s lone superpower has been feverishly locking down its people of color, whose labor-power is not much needed in the job market.

Significantly, a white rapper such as Eminem in part draws on some blacks’ dissatisfaction with their lack of freedom in the U.S. Consider his criticism of white-skin privilege. In “White America,” Eminem credits his commercial success to his skin color “Let’s do the math/If I was black/I would’ve sold half.”

Eminem’s criticism of the nation’s color line can weaken this dehumanizing trend by helping to place the issue before the public. More progressive talk (which can lead to progressive action) about the harmful effects of color and class in the U.S. could help to break down people’s withdrawal from public life, now dominated by big business interests. Today as before, those who are the least free (people of color) define what the term means for them, with far-reaching effects.

Meanwhile, mythology of a colorblind society panders to some alienated members of the working-class in the U.S. and Europe. Take Ward Connerly’s Racial Privacy Initiative in California, where a fiscal crisis has followed a dot-com bust, placing many working-class people in harm’s way. The RPI is an attempt to re-define skin-color differences by officially removing them, while leaving intact basic economic inequality between the rulers and the ruled.

In Denmark and the Netherlands, dissatisfaction with income inequality resulting from market-friendly government policies has partly led to a political backlash against immigrants, people of color. There and in the U.S., the economics of racism can alienate some whites from non-whites. This trend helps to disunite the working-class as a political force for progress, hardly incidental in a market economy.

One thing seems clear. The concept of alienation is complex, with many causes, all of which must be taken very seriously. People’s constructive and destructive responses are proof of that.

Seth Sandronsky is an editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento's progressive newspaper. Email: ssandron@hotmail.com

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