Racism and economic brutality: cruelty has a cause in common

A head teacher from Morecambe (UK) recently said in a national TV interview that she's been seeing numerous children coming to school so hungry that they search through bins to try to find thrown-away apple cores. Racism and economic brutality have much in common. 

Morecambe head teacher Siobhan Collingwood

There is only one way that anyone in a position of power could allow this to happen - and I learned this from Aesthetic Realism.  You have to be willfully oblivious to the reality of those other people; see them as two-dimensional, as not having feelings or insides of the kind you have yourself. It's the only way. This is contempt, the desire to build oneself up by making less of other things and people. Eli Siegel wrote, in his masterful consideration of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw:

As soon as you have contempt, as soon as you don't want to see another person as having the fulness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person. (James and the Children, p 55)  

Contempt is ordinary. It's in a conversation when you fail to listen. It's behind every sneering look and every petulant outburst. And it makes a person cruel. Other people are cardboard cutouts and we are deep and sensitive. Contempt is easy to see in other people but it takes courage and real thought to see it in oneself. Meanwhile, looking at contempt in oneself is a personal and national emergency. When we have contempt we sunder our relation to the world that, according to Aesthetic Realism, we were born to like, to be moved by, excited by, even saddened by. We're born to have it do something to us, not to be stony replicas of sentient beings! 
We do not know how contempt works in us unless we ask, really ask.  

I'm sure that the people who created the austerity policies that have children so desperate that they go through bins for food, do not see themselves as brutes. They simply aren't asking, "Do I see other people, including those of a "lower" socio-economic class or a different race as having the depths I have? If I don't what does that mean?" They see the world as against themselves, and most other people as hostile representatives of that world, to be managed, fooled, used.  

Aesthetic Realism says that every person, of whatever race, background, religion, nationality, represents the world and has the world's opposites in him or her - surface and depth, thought and feeling; is one individual with so many aspects, relations, hopes and fears. See Eli Siegel's definitive work on the subject, "Aesthetic Realism: or, Is a Person an Aesthetic Situation?" part of an interview with Lewis Nichols of the New York Times Book Review.