8-25-06, 11:00a.m.
The incident involved nine African-American elementary school children who allegedly were forced to move to the back of the bus by the driver who, reports say, was reserving the front seats for white children.
Relatives of the children filed a complaint with the school district, and the local NAACP is considering filing a complaint with the Justice Department, according to an article on the incident written by Vickie Welborn in the Shreveport Times. The School Superintendent Kay Easley would not comment on any action it would take involving the bus driver, who reports say is a white woman. She has reportedly apologized for the incident.
The incident comes less than one year after the death of Rosa Parks, who made history fifty years ago by refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.
While it may be tempting to regard the story emerging from Red River Parish, Louisiana as an anomaly or unfortunate throwback to days which all people of good will felt were behind us, the reality is that the policies of the Bush administration and the ideology of the ultra-right have emboldened openly racist trends in US politics.
For this reason, the incident in Louisiana cannot be dismissed as a regional aberration in a part of the nation that has struggled to eliminate vestiges of its Jim Crow past. Racism continues to be, as the late CPUSA leader Gus Hall once put it, our nation's most dangerous pollutant.
Consider, for instance, the racism that has come to the fore in the issue of immigration. While ultra-right political pundits have been quick to argue that protecting the US from further terrorist incidents requires secure borders, this has led to any number of openly racist proposals, such as making English the official language of the United States. And a number of towns have gone as far as to push for local ordinances that would ban 'illegal immigrants' from being working or being housed in their communities, along with financial penalties for those individuals or businesses which violate the proposed ban. One town recently had to re-think elements of their proposed ordinance when it became clear that the language was so uncompromising it would have prevented a Wal-Mart from opening a store in the town.
And if that wasn't sufficient, consider the increasing number of reports that neo-Nazi extremists are being inducted into the US armed forces. 'How serious is this problem? According to the Defense Department…there are 'thousands' of soldiers in the Army alone who are involved in extremist or gang activity. If that sounds high, it's worth remembering that a 1996 study found that 0.52% of soldiers interviewed by military officials admitted to being members of a neo-Nazi or white supremacist group -- a far higher percentage than in the general population,' writes Mark Potok in the current edition of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report.
Why are neo-Nazi extremists being inducted into the military? In part, they are attracted to the military because of the skills taught there and their ideological perspective on a race war. And the Defense Department has had to relax their criteria in order to meet their need for more military personnel to further their disastrous military adventures in Iraq.
While Karl Rove and company are busy trying to paint progressives as soft on national security and naïve about the threat posed by terrorists, Bush administration and Defense Department policies could well be incubating a future Timothy McVeigh.
What has reportedly taken place in Red River Parish, Louisiana is but the fruition of an ultra-right policy promoted by the Bush administration that is both systemic and endemic. There is no disconnect between corporate corruption and greed; the Bush administration's arrogance in the extreme use of 'signing statements' and its efforts to establish an imperial presidency in contravention of constitutional safeguards between branches of government; the ultra-right ideological litmus test for Supreme Court justices and other political appointees -- all these actions are designed to erode the rule of law at the expense of power and, like racism, are used to polarize and divide the people of our country.
The mid-term elections in November offer an opportunity to start curbing the ultra-right's virulent strain of reaction with a strong antibiotic of rejection at the polls.
