Jeremy Logan
sfcc.jeremy.logan@gmail.com
I took my first steps in the adult world through the coffee scented rooms of twelve step recovery. I played in a hardcore punk band, and lived in a carpet-lined storage locker, where I slept between a drum kit and a guitar amp, surrounded by empty cans of budget beer.
At 18 years of life I had already experience an abundance of the types of discrimination I had always been told was reserved for black youth, and other minority groups.
I had been frequently harassed, and physically assaulted by police. I had been dragged by my hair through the halls of my middle school by the vice principal. I was kicked out of the mall with the explanation that I was there too often, with total disregard for the fact that the only reason I was at the mall very often at all was so I could catch the city transit bus.
As I grew older I watched the injustices suffered to me and my friends pile up. Poverty, poor health, jail sentences, addiction, and social expulsion.
I had tried to toe the line and, “pick myself up by my bootstraps.” I worked hard all day only to come home too tired to do anything else.
When you are poor it seems nearly impossible to get out of. Wealthy, and even middle class Americans like to use the anecdotal evidence of a select few rags to riches stories to shame the poor and call them lazy, or criminal.
The bourgeois blame minorities for the problems of the white proletariat. It’s been a common practice in the US since the days of indentured servitude. The separation of the working poor goes as far back as the days of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, which lead to the uprising of the mostly white indentured servants, and black slaves.
The two groups came together to gain recognition of their shared interests. The wealthy colonizers responded by enacted the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705, which created legal regulations on the interaction between poor whites and blacks, and further denied freed slaves their civil rights.
Trump’s campaign is a sign that this type of practice is still effective today. Poor whites are lining up in droves to support a rich white candidate who blames immigration for the problems of the working class. It’s a destructive practice, that separates the working class from their own best interest.
Poor whites and and poor blacks, have more in common culturally with each other than they do the wealthy, and middle class, of the same race.
Candace McCoy, a criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, told politifact, “The felony rates for poor whites are similar to those of poor blacks.”
To anyone who has experienced the judicial system, we know that it is essentially illegal to be poor in the United States.
The reason these laws are in place is to garner submission from the proletariat. Ever since the labor movement, the working class of this country have organized to get what they want. Improvements on the lives of the working class has never come from voting the right person into the white house. It has come from the people organizing and fighting for their own rights.
The people cannot organize if they are uninformed.
This is why journalism is so important to me. For a true democracy to function, the people must be informed. I see the importance of fighting back against the for profit model of disinformation portrayed by the mainstream media.
Journalism is meant to be a public service not a business. The more people who enter this field with that mindset, the better. This is my final issue as Editor-in-Chief, and I can only hope that I will continue to learn so that I can make a difference in a media saturated with PC policing, word shaming, and celebrity tweets.
If you believe like I believe, I encourage you to choose journalism as well. We are the Watchdogs, and without us, the people who write the rules will run amok.
“Any Intelligent fool can make things bigger more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.” – Albert Einstein