A powerful hatred.

• Author: Jordan, June
• Position: White male politicians' animosity towards blacks as evidenced by welfare reform

What a sunny day! Plum trees in pastael bloom. Jasmine in fragrant flowering display. What I'd like to do is fall asleep listening to Prince, or wake myself up, completely, with the energies of Pearl Jam, or walk my dog for three miles in every direction under that very blue sky above me. But other things are happening.

There is a powerful hatred loose in the world. And everything and everyone we cherish is endangered. And so I would have to be some kind of really nearsighted fool to wallow in what's left of the world that's gorgeous and freely given and natural and sweet and hot and unpredictable and delicate and good for growing things. I'd be a wallowing fool unless I also tried to eliminate, or reduce, that hatred that can take all that we have away from us.

But how should I stage my fight? Who will listen to what I have to say?

Except for those occasions when the media smell a possible chance to pit black folks against other black folks, when do I get calls asking for my thoughts and opinions about anything whatsoever? If the media wanted to know what mainstream black folks think and feel about white folks, for example, they would regularly interview the head of the A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) Church and chairs of African-American Studies Departments and a representative sampling of black students at your nearest high school, and black writers and thinkers such as Adolph Reed and Angela Davis and Manning Marable and Cornel West and Bell Hooks.

And what the media would discover is that whether they're looking at somebody separatist or not, most black folks are very clear about one thing: who endangers their lives. Most black folks know he is a powerful white man, such as the President or the Governor or the distinguished U.S. Senator from almost anywhere. And that's how most of us feel most of the time about white men: that they are powerful and dangerous.

And we are not racist. We simply do not have power; white men do. And they--and the few black men invited in, such as Ron Brown, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, and Shelby Steele--use that power in ways that cause us enormous harm.

For two decades, Federal and state policies have combined to ensure a statistical tragedy of huge magnitude now unfolding in the national black community. Whether we use indices of unemployment or homelessness or drug addiction or domestic violence or levels of education never attained or official designation as a family on or below the poverty line, our people face a future deformed by boastful government neglect and by hysterical moves to further criminalize and further incarcerate greater and greater numbers of our young men and women. And our people face an uninhibited scapegoat campaign to stigmatize and invalidate the neediest among us: welfare families dependent on AFDC support that amounts to an average of $370 a month for a mother and her two children.

Is it not hateful to equate "crime" and "welfare" with "black"? That is the equation promoted by Bill Clinton and Pete Wilson, both of them white men who never tire of...