#lipsitz

More ominously, after pleading guilty to bombing two homes and one car, to vandalizing a synagogue, and attempting to start a race war by murdering Rodney King and bombing Los Angeles's First African Methodist Episcopal Church, twenty-year-old Christopher David Fisher explained that "sometimes whites were picked on because of the color of their skin.... Maybe we're blamed for slavery." Fisher's actions were certainly extreme, but his justification of them drew knowingly and precisely on a broadly shared narrative about the victimization of innocent whites by irrational and ungrateful minorities.

After Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980, the nation’s business and political leadership expanded on themes developed during the terms of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter to advocate policies cutting federal expenditures on cities in order to ‘return’ money to state and local governments. This ‘new federalism’ emphasized ‘revenue sharing’ and block grants rather than direct federal spending or administration of programs targeting particular needs. Revenue sharing enabled municipalitites to take money originally intended for the sick, the old, the very young, and the poor, and instead use it to cut property taxes for the wealthy, subsidize corporate development projects, and increase security and plice protection in the new zones of wealth surrounded by blocks and blocks of desperately poor people...Proponents of the new federalism proclaimed their intention to return power to the people at the local level. But in reality, these policies were designed to remove local obstacles to capital investment and to break the power of inner-city social movements and political coalitions.

People who do not know who they are need demonized enemies in order to define themselves.