Promises broken, Gordian Knot intact
Imagine two countries, one the richest in the world, the other amongst its most destitute. Then suppose that a global program of foreign aid transferred well over $100 billion dollars, but to the rich nation, not the poor.
When President Obama spoke at Reverend Pinckney's funeral in Charleston last month, he said this:
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For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present. Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career.
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Once the eulogies have been delivered, once the TV cameras move on, to go back to business as usual -- that’s what we so often do to avoid uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society. To settle for symbolic gestures without following up with the hard work of more lasting change -- that’s how we lose our way again.
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Reverend Pinckney once said, “Across the South, we have a deep appreciation of history -- we haven’t always had a deep appreciation of each other’s history.” What is true in the South is true for America. Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other. That my liberty depends on you being free, too. That history can’t be a sword to justify injustice, or a shield against progress, but must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past -- how to break the cycle. A roadway toward a better world.
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Recently I read a book that reinforced and illuminated what the President said about past injustices continuing to shape the present.
When Affirmative Action Was White: an Untold History of Racial Inequality in 20th Century America by Ira Katznelson. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is confounded by racism, worried about racial inequality, and who I almost guarantee doesn't know the many and repeated schemes that enabled our government to fail to keep its promises to its African American citizens.
(With the author's permission by email) I have included two paragraphs below that summarize the topics this book addresses.
Imagine two countries, one the richest in the world, the other amongst its most destitute. Then suppose that a global program of foreign aid transferred well over $100 billion dollars, but to the rich nation, not the poor. This is exactly what happened in the United States as a result of the cumulative impact of the most important domestic policies of the 1930s and 1940s. Social Security began to pay old age pensions in 1939. By the end of the 1940s, its original provisions had been impressively improved. The GI Bill was the largest targeted fully national program of support in American history. The country passed new labor laws that promoted unions and protected people as they worked. The Army was a great engine of skill training and mobility during the Second World War. None of these was a marginal or secondary program. To the contrary, individually and collectively they organized a revolution in the role of government that remade the country's social structure in dramatic, positive ways.
But most blacks were left out. The damage to racial equity caused by each program was immense. Taken together, the effects of these public laws were devastating. Social Security, from which the majority of blacks were excluded until well into the 1950s, quickly became the country's most important social legislation. The labor laws of the New Deal and the Fair Deal created a framework of protection for tens of millions of workers who secured minimum wages, maximum hours, and the right to join industrial as well as craft unions. African Americans who worked on the land or as domestics, the great majority, lacked these protections. When unions made inroads in the South, where most blacks lived, moreover, Congress changed the rules of the game to make organizing much more difficult. Perhaps most surprising and most important, the treatment of veterans after the war, despite the universal eligibility for the benefits offered by the GI Bill, perpetuated the blatant racism that had marked military affairs during the war itself. At no other time in American history have so much money and so many resources been put at the service of the generation completing an education, entering the workforce, and forming families. Yet comparatively little of this largesse was available to black veterans. With these policies, the Gordian knot binding race to class tightened.
-Katznelson, p. 142-3
I wanted to bring this book to the attention of this community because whenever I've heard my fellow white people talking about the black community and its struggles (in my daily life, not really on this site), it never fails that they primarily blame "black culture" for the lack of better progress. Even if they admit that the criminal justice system is racially biased, even if they admit that schools in minority neighborhoods aren't funded as well as those in white neighborhoods, they still come back to the idea that "we've really done all we can do to help the black community," "their failures are theirs alone now," and "if they want to succeed they should follow the example of Asian minorities who are more successful than whites" (which I don't even understand - that's like saying, Don't have the family history that you have). When I've challenged them and reminded them of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, they don't buy it. They say,
What legacy? Nobody's been enslaved for over a hundred years! People think that Jim Crow was just about separate water fountains or restrooms. Katznelson's book provides concrete examples of how whites were lifted up out of poverty while African Americans were held down in it.
After reading this book, now I can see how (a lot of) white people 'think they hit a triple when they were born on third base'. With clarity, I understand exactly how our government exacerbated racial inequality when southern congressmen finagled ways to exclude African Americans from New Deal and Fair Deal programs. All those programs added up to a massive affirmative action program to help white people get ahead. It worked!
I read a lot of books about a lot of issues and I always greatly appreciate when an author does more than spell out a problem, when they also suggest solutions. Dr. Katznelson uses the goals that LBJ spelled out in his landmark speech at Howard University and pairs them with Justice Powell's legal opinion from the affirmative action case Bakke, to suggest that whenever it can be shown how discriminatory institutions, decisions, actions and practices have negatively affected someone's circumstances, that we should correct those injustices. (Observation: the criminal justice system and schools would be two examples of institutions.) On page 171, he lists two strategies for directly addressing these problems including some specific examples of how that could be done.
Dr. Katznelson argues that implementing an affirmative action program that would accomplish its mission within a generation is how we break the cycle. I find his examples and reasoning compelling. I'm not sure if this would essentially be like a GI Bill for people who've attended under-performing schools or over what period of time. Or if it would focus more on the children or grandchildren of people who were excluded from the New Deal/Fair Deal. Or what. But I'd like to see some people in office get ahold of the ideas in this book, armed with its examples, and run with it.
I've like to find that roadway toward a better world.
[Note: I am providing a link to this diary to the author to allow him to reply in case I have made any errors in presenting his ideas, or in case he is simply interested in commenting otherwise. Although, I imagine he's quite busy, so I don't expect him to do so - & hope I have accurately presented this book.]
[And p.s. This author has other titles I intend to check out. One being Fear Itself: the New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, which I believe TomP recently recommended.