By Amy L. Alexander

Lost amidst the ear-splitting rhetoric, racist vitriol, and theatrical acting out that has defined the public debate on President Barack Obama’s proposed health care reform bill is a chilling possibility:  The ticking time-bomb that could explode America’s promise once and for all is not trillion dollar deficits or seething white racists or shrinking ice caps, it is overwhelmed people of color in the U.S.

The health care debate, such as it is, ignores this eventuality, even as it came to be defined by free-floating white fear that clearly is the subtext of the anti-reform movement. The disrespectful outburst by Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) during President Obama’s health care address on Capitol Hill Wednesday night is merely the latest spray of gunpowder to be flung atop the simmering barrel of anger, dismay, and outrage that is growing among historically disenfranchised people in America.

Problem is, while people of color and the poor in America have plenty of reason to be outraged, their deep sense of existential frustration rarely registers a blip in the widening pool of media that threatens to drown reasoned and rational analysis.  Much of the media chatter brings more heat than light to this very complicated issue.  While the rise of the Internet has empowered a certain segment of minorities – most apparent at activist websites such as Color of Change and Latina Lista – there remain large swaths of low-income people of color who simply can’t afford to imbibe of the Great Internet media revolution: They are too busy scraping to feed themselves, pay the rent, and keep their children in crumbling schools.

If you take an honest assessment of the core indicators of how people of color are faring in 2009 America — education, employment, criminal justice, and, yes, health care — you’d have to be willfully blind to not see that things have reached crisis proportions.

Consider:

• The U.S. Sentencing Commission this year found that African-American youth with no prior criminal charges were six times more likely to be incarcerated than white youths with similar backgrounds and charged with similar crimes.
• Nearly half of all black and Latino students do not complete high school on time, according to a report last April by the Education Research Center.
• Based on a 2007 study by the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at 3.5 times the rate of their white counterparts, despite rates of drug use that are comparable.
• Black unemployment  remains twice that of whites, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And according to researchers at the Center for American Progress, the unemployment rate for black males reached 15.9 percent earlier this year, more than twice the rate of unemployment for white males.
• Black borrowers paid, on average, 128 basis points more for loans than did their white counterparts with equal incomes and credit ratings, according to a 2005 report by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

Moreover, if you look at health and wellness exclusively, the list of categories where gaps and disparities abound are long indeed, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities.

• Blacks, American Indians, and Puerto Rican infants have higher death rates than white infants. In 2000, the black to white ratio in infant mortality was 2.5, up from 2.4 in 1998.  This trend has persisted over two decades.
• Black women are more than twice as likely to die of cervical cancer than are white women and are more likely to die of breast cancer than are women of any other racial or ethnic group.
• Heart diseases and stroke are the leading causes of death for all racial and ethnic groups in the U.S.
• While blacks and Latinos represented 26 percent of the U.S. population in 2001, they represented 66 percent of adult AIDS cases, and 82 percent of pediatric AIDS cases, reported in the first half of 2001.

And less easy to quantify but no less potentially incendiary are the intangibles, the daily stresses, slights, and atmospheric pressures that combine to create a big heap of pent up frustration, dismay and anger in too many people of color each and every day.

Some minority health care experts believe that the growing disconnect between the attention paid to white’s fears – which spring primarily from ignorance and out dated historical myths – and the very real worsening conditions of millions of minorities and people of color in the US is cause for alarm.

“I’m not sure if I’d say it is a ‘powder keg,’ but it is true that when the U.S. economy or other systems catches a cold, people of color have the flu,” said Brian Smedley, Ph.D., Vice President and Director of the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, in Washington, D.C.

“Right now, people are desperate, and it really is a volatile mix, with whites showing up at town hall meetings carrying guns, and generally acting out,” Smedley said.

“But I think it was pretty obvious that those town hall ‘protests” were not really about health care, it was mostly about white privilege gone awry…or at least the perception that some seem to have that they are losing power. They used those town hall gatherings as opportunities to say, ‘I’m angry, I’m scared, I don’t know what to do.’  It is volatile, and I’m sure there is no shortage of white supremacists who are interested in fanning the flames,” Smedley said.

In the face of this unhelpful heat, Smedley is leading an effort to provide cool-headed analysis of the President’s health care reform bill.  His team of researchers has posted in-depth assessments of the thicket of interlocking policies, formulas, and proposals that make up the proposed bill, including the public option which has become so controversial.  The challenge, though, is to push this kind of hard science and academic evidence into the public arena, to bring reason and rationality to millions of Americans – whites and people of color – who appear to have become increasingly unmoored since the inauguration of Barack Obama in January.  The go-to information providers for most Americans are not likely to be the well-stocked website of the Joint Center or other authoritative resources, but the high-volume news organizations that air instances of conflict as entertainment.

Within that context, the legitimate grievances of ethnic minorities and poor Americans – who have long been disadvantaged in key areas but who now are acutely struggling to stay afloat — do not get equal airtime compared with those of “outraged” whites.  This continuing oversight merely reinforces the psychic malaise and general agita among many people of color. For some, it appears that not even the election of a “black President” can positively change their conditions.  The recent flap this week over President Obama’s address to school children struck many minorities as yet another blatant affront to themselves, and to their prospects for ever attaining equality.

“Well, more people are engaged but it seems that if you’re not on TV, you don’t seem to matter,” said Makani Themba-Nixon, Executive Director of the Praxis Project, a D.C.-based nonprofit focusing on improving minority health and wellness.

“It’s almost as if the prevailing position is, ‘Well, I don’t see you on TV, so how important can you possibly be?’ Its like Fox Television talk shows sets the agenda, that they will say this is what is important, and that’s just the way it is,” Themba-Nixon said. “And you know, that is the definition of fascism.”  Even the ascendance of the Internet, with its widening array of black and minority-run blogs and websites, fails to provide Americans with the kind of comprehensive, unbiased information that might help their anxieties.

Indeed, the presumption that “everyone” has access to the Internet is another piece of the larger cognitive dissonance that some minorities find disconcerting.  A new study by Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., estimated that 63 percent of American households have a broadband internet connection, which means that 37 percent of households do not.  Themba-Nixon says that poor people in the U.S., the disproportionate majority of who are people of color, remain “left out” of many aspects of the nation’s cultural, social, and economic venues that so many others take for granted, including having a computer with internet access in the home.

And given the deepening economic crisis, it is then not surprising that increasing numbers of people of color appear to be experiencing heightened levels of daily frustration. The ongoing rancor surrounding the health care debate is just more evidence that their hopes, dreams, and their newfound interest in participating in the political process – interest spurred by Obama’s remarkable campaign and election – are largely futile.

At the same time, as the U.S. Census Bureau gears up to take its next national survey, ethnic minorities are on track to become the numerical majority in America, likely by the year 2042.  In some regions, including the Southwest and California, blacks, Latinos, and Asians already outnumber white residents by significant margins.

So what is to become of the unaddressed anger and frustrations of the looming majority of Americans?  Historically, Themba-Nixon points out, blacks and other marginalized groups in the U.S. have expressed despair by “taking it out on those who are closest to them,” usually manifested in high rates of homicides, assaults, and, in recent decades, suicides.

But things feel different now. The stakes are higher, in no small part because the election of a black man to the Presidency for the first time has tapped into deep veins of expectations (among people of color) and fears, among whites and people of color.  Yet so far, it is the rise in white supremacist activity since the election of President Obama that has gained any media traction, not the potential powderkeg of pent up anger among people of color.

Last year, the FBI issued a report called, “White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel since 9/11.” It described a recent development in which, “military experience is found throughout the white supremacist extremist movement” and that these groups “have attempted to increase their recruitment of current and former U.S. military personnel.”  And in recent months, according to New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow, “…there have been 1.2 million more requests for background checks of potential gun buyers from November to February than there were in the same four months last year. That’s 5.5 million requests altogether over that period.”

For all President Obama’s stalwart insistence on maintaining bi-partisan civility as he goes about the hard work of forging more equitable policies, it seems to me that someone in his Administration might want to be keeping tabs on the psychic distress that is boiling up among minorities in the U.S.  As a recent commenter at a popular black political website, Jack and Jill Politics.com put it following Republican Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s health care address before Congress yesterday:

“The PERSONAL, RACIAL SLURS, attacks, and BLATANT DISRESPECT for President Barack Obama is an attack on his family, black people and America,” wrote ‘spirit_55z’, at Jack and Jill Politics.com.  “And it should not be tolerated by any of us!”

Amy L. Alexander is a writer.  Her next book, Minority Opinion: A Story of Race, Media and Reinvention, will be released in 2010 by Beacon Press.  Her website is www.amyalexanderink.com.