Why I’m still hopeful and optimistic about race relations in America.
Commentary by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
If to your eyes and ears, America seems more racially divided, maybe it’s because we’re all more aware of our racial shortcomings. Many white Americans have a shocked response to claims of white privileged, unfairness and discrimination. Maybe they have this reaction because it’s outside their daily experience. If you ask many white people, “Do you think traffic stops are done unfairly?” the majority of whites probably would say “NO” because it’s not something they experience. It’s not because of racism; it’s just that it’s not something that they see. Unfortunately personal experiences often are the most powerful foundations of belief systems.
The reason I started Black Kos was in the hope that it would allow Daily Kos members, who in their day to day lives, may not have much exposure to the everyday lives of black people. When I write of personal interaction, I don’t mean the professional interactions at work, but what life is like for everyday black people for the majority of their day. See I'm quite aware a majority of our readers at Black Kos are white. If I wanted to only address a black or mostly black audience I could more easily do so elsewhere. Think about it. I'm a member of a half dozen other majority black blogs. So why do I bother to post here?
When I first started Black Kos, I did it because of what the the image of the progressive Net Roots was at that time. I'm writing specifically of 2003-2005. I remember watching endless hours of TV punditry, on how the Net Roots were all “lily white” basically the old "limousine liberal" smear. Now think to yourself, when was the last time you have heard that on a Sunday Morning talk show? Go back and look at the coverage of the first Yearly Kos convention (Net Root’s nations predecessor). The number one question then was “where are the Black (and Brown) folks?” Now we still have a way to go but, I have been too most of the Net Roots convention since and it's improved. I would like to think that a more visible minority presence helped combat those smears, because we were always here just not visible. (By the way, I did enjoy back before anybody knew what race I was, the discussions were often fun and lively, but I decided on my own to step up and out because sometimes you do need visible members).
So in some ways it’s easy to dismiss my personal optimism as a retreat to 2008-style post Obama’s election racial thinking. This may seem especially true given the last few years events in Baltimore, Cleveland, and Ferguson, that lead to the need for the #BlackLivesMatter movement. It’s very easy to get lost both in the stark divides in how black folks and white people see law enforcement, and how law enforcement views both blacks and whites. But when it comes to race relations, America is better than it’s ever been.
The most obvious observation is Obama’s election, and re-election, to the presidency. As a milestone in American life, this goes beyond electoral politics. “The person who occupies that office is not only the head of the executive branch of the federal government,” writes Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy for the American Prospect, “That a black man has been the master of the White House for the past six years does indeed reflect and reinforce a remarkable socio-psychological transformation in the American racial scene.”
When it comes to race relations, America today is better than it’s ever been. As recently as 1990, more than 40 percent of whites supported a homeowner’s right to discriminate on the basis of race; by 2008, that number had dropped to 28 percent (including 25 percent of highly educated Northern whites). The same goes for the percentage of whites who said blacks were “less intelligent” than whites, which dipped from nearly 60 percent in 1990 to less than 30 percent in 2008. And so few whites support school segregation that the General Social Survey has dropped the item from its questionnaire.
Whites are also more tolerant of interracial marriage. When first measured in 1990, fully 65 percent of whites opposed unions between close relatives and black Americans. By 2008, that number had declined to 25 percent, and in a 2013 Gallup survey, 84 percent of whites said they approved of interracial marriages between blacks and whites. Some of the most comprehensive polling, outside of the General Social Survey, comes from the Pew Research Center. According to a 2010 report, 64 percent of whites say they would be “fine with it” if a family member married a black American, while 27 percent say they would be “bothered” but accepting. Only 6 percent say they would reject the marriage. Support is lowest among older whites, and highest among white millennials, who don’t differ in approval from their black and Hispanic peers.
It’s not all flowers and sunshine. As of 2008, according to the General Social Survey, only a quarter of whites would live in a neighborhood that’s half black, and in a 2000 survey, 1 in 5 whites chose an all-white neighborhood as an ideal, while 1 in 4 chose one without any blacks. A plurality of whites still say blacks aren’t hard working, or at least, not as hard working as whites. Pew also notes, most whites say the country has “done enough to give blacks equal rights with whites.”
As I mentioned above there is still intense disagreements on police treatment. Also troubling nearly one-half of white millennials say discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. And in terms of criminal justice and punitiveness, we know that whites are more likely to support harsher punishment when the convict is black. It would also be hard to not notice how much faster the National Guard is called out against #BLM protesters, versus white militia.
With that said, we shouldn’t confuse optimism about race relations (or, again, how whites view blacks and other groups) with optimism about racial progress, or how groups fare in relation to each other. There, the news isn’t just bad, it’s bleak.
This goes beyond the familiar facts about young black males and police violence. On the environmental front, black communities are exposed to more pollution, and suffer more pollution-related ailments, than of their white counterparts. As German Lopez wrote at Vox, Lead exposure is a race issue. The crisis in Flint, Michigan, shows why:
But an overlooked aspect of the crisis is how it represents a common thread in lead exposure issues: Lead often hits black communities hardest. Flint, for one, is nearly 57 percent black, much higher than the state average of 14 percent, according to US Census Bureau data.
Previous research has found big racial disparities in lead exposure. A 2013 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that although blood lead levels among US children have dramatically dropped since the late 1990s, high blood lead levels among black children (1 to 5 years old) between 2007 and 2010 were still more than twice as high as their white counterparts.
The Flint lead crisis shows how these disparities happen. It's not that there's a grand conspiracy to contaminate black children with lead. Instead, centuries of discriminatory and oppressive policies have pushed black people into poor towns and cities that can't afford the lead abatement programs that wealthier places can.
Black unemployment is still almost double that of whites, even for college graduates. Education the great equalizer, isn’t leading too as much equality as it should, if we made as much progress as we sometimes believe we’ve made. Tragically the median wealth of black families plunged during the Great Recession, all but erasing the gains of the previous three decades, and that still hasn’t largely recovered.
Residential segregation and concentrated poverty are still the reality for too large a percentage of black Americans. The legacy of discriminatory housing policies, especially red-lining persist to this day. Indeed, the typical middle-class black child encounters a level of poverty unknown to the vast majority of white children.
Then there’s the elephant in the room, mass incarceration. The long-term implications of mass incarceration are gigantic and pervasive. First, the mass imprisonment of poor black men casts a long shadow over our collective American belief of economic progression. Because prison is a huge corrosive influence on the course of an individual’s life, a whole cohort of poor black men expect lives with insecure employment, low wages, family disruption, and social isolation. In all likelihood, the stratification in the black community (which has some of the nation’s worse income inequality stats) will only widen. In fact after adjusting for disparities in joblessness and incarceration, researchers have found that young black men have experienced virtually no real economic gains on young whites since 1999!
But we also shouldn’t ignore the fact that racism by whites has an actual blow back affect that hurts white’s communities also. There are poor whites in red states and rural America who need Medicaid expansion. But since Obama is for it….. white fear leads to the preventable loss of white lives. Furthermore because of the GOP’s (and by extension much of racist white America) detests Obama so forcefully, they will block him from doing anything. This includes common sense non-controversial gun control measures. The net affect of this is a white victim will be murdered by a white gun wielder, since 87% of white people are murdered by other white people (the nation suffers from an epidemic of white on white crime didn’t you know?). In other words racism will kill racist.
Working class whites need a $15 and hour the minimum wage, a majority of Republicans even support raising it, but conservatives reflexively see supporting working families as socialism when Obama proposes it. So in a weird irony it is whites racism that has helped to keep wages down for all Americans, including for many of the racist themselves. At some point I have to believe people will stop biting off their nose to spite their face. Voting to hurt yourself because you think it will hurt some other group more isn’t a long term winning political strategy. I’m hopeful eventually this type of political behavior will end.
Still, we've made genuine gains, and our time is an incredible departure from the relatively recent past, when apartheid ruled the South and racist attitudes were prevalent in every other area of life. Even now, with the spike in racial turmoil, we see change. White and black were almost equally outraged by the choking death of Eric Garner in New York City, white and black Americans have united in protests against police brutality.
If the reality of changing white attitudes are grounds for racial optimism, then the fact of black economic stagnation are reasons for pessimism. I’s still unclear if the majority of Americans are willing to devote time and energy to closing our current racial gap, and integrate poor blacks into mainstream America. Because of the present push against equal participation, exemplified by attacks on civic life, using voter ID and the weakening of the Voting Rights Act, it’s hard to imagine this present Congress (and many state governments) spending tax dollars to fix the consequences of past discrimination. Worse, the same optimism around race relations could undermine a push to improve racial inequality. Heck if things seem good, even if deep inequalities still exist, there’s no reason to make them better.
Then again, you could say the same of America in the 1950s. Blacks won major victories, but an end to Jim Crow, seemed out of reach. By the end of the 1960s, however, the Civil Rights movement lead to outlawing segregation, gaining voting rights, and outlawing housing discrimination. Yes, there was a fierce counter reactions from the rightwing, and too many gains have been compromised. But even at the post-civil rights backlash’s peak, in the conservative apex of the Nixon to Reagan years, there was no question that blacks were better off. This isn’t the soft bigotry of low expectations, it’s meaningful change you can believe in.
Finally make no mistake we on the left have work to do on ourselves and our own organizations. Sure almost everyone on the left is in a far more diversity friendly place than those on the right. I've often been struck by something that I've seems to occur far too often in progressive organizations. At some point a revelation strikes someone they look up and realize "this organization doesn't reflect the diversity of progressives in America". There is a long history of this from Labor Unions and first wave feminist nearly a century ago (Google “Ain’t I a woman?), to Yearly Kos (NetRoot Nations precursor) and Occupy Wall St. a few years ago. And yes, it is currently happening again with a certain Presidential campaign that has lead to a great deal of meta wars on Daily Kos today. Over and over progressive organization seem to constantly confront this "what's happening" moment.
So why do movements that grow out of the progressive movement often lack the diversity of actual progressives in America? WHY?
Let's do a thought experiment together. You're invited to two different organizations on the same day and time. The first is run my a fellow who always stops by your house and says "Hi!", he always ask you questions, and he always inquires about the organization you run. You and this fellow have little in common, because he lives across town from you, but he always shows this level of respect. The second invitation comes from a fellow who you've heard about because he has a way of always making his voice heard and you agree with most of what he has to say. But he's never before shown up at anything you've done, or given you a personal invitation. Never the less the organization he has run has similar values to the the ones you share.
So which organization do you think you’d show up at?
As much as ideas, passion, and hard work are important to building a political movement, so are lines of communication and networking. Martin Luther King was able to get Labor Unions and their important white working class members to march to Washington, because he also was a fighter for the right to unionize (the day MLK was shot he was in Memphis to help the Memphis sanitation workers labor union). As much as the battle for civil rights must have consume all his time, he understood the importance of building lines of communication. King worked with both labor and the antiwar movements.
Relationship matter. If you wait until you "need" someone to show up at your organization it's often too late. Even if folks agree with you, people hate to feel used. The conservative activist Grover Norquist founded something called the "Wednesday Group" for conservatives. Even though Grover is consumed with tax policy, he formed a group that covered an entire spectrum of conservatives. The ability of conservatives to quickly all spout the same talking points is a direct consequence of this. Don't think for a second that a hedge fund manager from NYC, a culture warrior from Mississippi, and a libertarian NRA'er from Idaho on their side have anything more or less in common than a professor at a New England school, a union steward in the Midwest, and a young person of color in LA.
By having open lines of communication conservatives have developed a "language" that ropes all these group together more effectively than those on the left. Make no mistake it was long hard work for them and it will be long hard work for us.
The first thing that I can't emphasize enough is the importance of becoming a member of blogs from groups “you’re not a member" of. Make it your duty to read at least two blogs or communities that you don't consider yourself a "part" of each week. If you don't feel comfortable at first joining the discussion, just lurk. Learn the "language" of that group, learn what they are concerned about, learn what "terms" enrages them. But most important make it a long term project. As frustrating or aggravating as some heated discussion may become DO NOT LEAVE. Half of life is showing up, and doing so earns you a level of respect.
The black struggle for equal rights, obviously isn’t over. The proof is everywhere, from an unfair criminal justice system to an economy that discards black potential. If there is a question, it goes back to optimism versus pessimism. Should our steady progression make us optimistic? Or are our short memories (“redlining” means nothing to most Americans), backsliding (“Redemption” followed Reconstruction, mass incarceration followed the end of Jim Crow), and retreat to myth (We made it on our own, why can’t they do it) cause for pessimism?
Well even as we approach the last year of the Obama presidency, I still like to believe in a simple phrase...
YES WE CAN!
I’m not sure if gay shaming is the right term. But it’s the closest term I can come up with. Slate: Odell Beckham Jr. vs. Toxic Black Masculinity.
I hope Odell Beckham Jr. never comes out. Actually, I hope the New York Giants wide receiver isn’t even gay. I hope he ends up with the flyest chick on the block, and they give joint interviews where she says she enjoys a man who’s fun and lives his life and doesn’t feel the need to scowl 24/7, hunched over like a Neanderthal trying to protect his manhood.
In case you missed it, there’s an outing campaign in progress against Beckham, because over the weekend someone posted a video to Instagram of him dancing with a friend. (Well, the same people calling his video “suspect” already said he was gay due to similar videos, but now I guess he’s even gayer.) This sort of witch hunt is the reason why black men and athletes still don’t like coming out of the closet, and black masculinity continues to make life more difficult for all of us, regardless of our sexuality.
The response to this video is the difference between black masculinity and white masculinity in a nutshell. White men are allowed a greater range of expression before they are automatically considered gay. The boys in Marvel movies are always flirtingand nobody cares. Matt McGorry can say his male co-star has a pretty mouth and nobody cares. Channing Tatum “vogued” and nobody cares.
But a black football player dances a little with a male friend and it’s proof-positive. In my own experience, a lot of my gay white friends are damn near distraught when someone calls them a “faggot.” I’m not good at consoling them since I hear it at least once a month—as a black man, if a white guy and I are going out in the same exact outfit, strangers will read him as “artistic” while I’m just “gay.”
After decades of spotty acquisitions and token exhibitions, American
museums are rewriting the history of 20th-century art to include black artists. New York Times: Black Artists and the March Into the Museum.
The painter Norman Lewis rarely complained in public about the singular struggles of being a black artist in America. But in 1979, dying of cancer, he made a prediction to his family. “He said to us, ‘I think it’s going to take about 30 years, maybe 40, before people stop caring whether I’m black and just pay attention to the work,’ ” Lewis’s daughter, Tarin Fuller, recalled recently.
Lewis was just about right. In the last few years alone, his work has been acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and theMuseum of Modern Art in Manhattan. This month thePennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts opened the first extensive survey of Lewis, an important but overlooked figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement — and a man who might well have been predicting history’s arc for several generations of African-American artists in overcoming institutional neglect.
After decades of spotty acquisitions, undernourished scholarship and token exhibitions, American museums are rewriting the history of 20th-century art to include black artists in a more visible and meaningful way than ever before, playing historical catch-up at full tilt, followed by collectors who are rushing to find the most significant works before they are out of reach.
“There was a joke for a long time that if you went into a museum, you’d think America had only two black artists — Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden — and even then, you wouldn’t see very much,” said Lowery Stokes Sims, the first African-American curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later the president of the Studio Museum in Harlem. “I think there is a sea change finally happening. It’s not happening everywhere, and there’s still a long way to go, but there’s momentum.”
Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari announced that the government was prepared to negotiate without preconditions to secure the release of the 209 KIDNAPPED school girls if credible leadership could be identified. The Root: Nigeria's Government Could Negotiate with Boko Haram to Free Kidnapped Schoolgirls
President Muhammadu Buhari announced on Wednesday that the government was ready to negotiate without preconditions if credible leadership could be identified. Other attempts made by the previous administration failed because officers were reportedly speaking to the wrong people.
Buhari acknowedged in a nationally televised press conference that there is "no firm intelligence on where those girls are physically located and what condition they are in."
"I assure you that the cause of the Chibok girls is on our minds," he added.
Victim talk is back. According to two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, our moral culture recently underwent a seismic shift. Rather than upholding appropriate standards of honor and dignity, we now inflate trifling slights into allegations of victimization. Minor grievances of all sorts are showcased in cyberspace in an effort to garner sympathy and support. This “new species of social control,” they maintain, threatens an America where weakness suddenly rules.
Their and similar allegations about this novel insidious “victimhood culture” are being applauded and proselytized in major newspapers, journals and talk shows – from theNew York Times and the Washington Post to the Leonard Lopate Show and Timemagazine. Even President Obama entered the fray by speaking out against the reported refusal of American students to grapple with controversial subjects under the pretext that it might distress them. He emphatically rejected the premise that students should be “coddled and protected from different points of views.”
In an Atlantic Monthly cover story, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt contend that universities across the nation have become breeding grounds for “pathological thinking,” targeting “trigger warnings” in addition to microaggressions. In case it missed your radar, “microaggression” designates subtle, often unintentional, forms of denigrating individuals based on their group membership. Over the last few years, students at colleges such as Oberlin, Swarthmore and Brown created sites to document and share the microaggressing they endured. Imported from trauma studies, “triggering” alludes to the practice whereby students request that professors provide forewarning that curricular content might be emotionally challenging, such as images and narratives of rape, abortion, lynching and genocide.
To be sure, some of the postings on microaggression blogs may be overblown, and many professors, myself included, are reluctant to include content warnings on our syllabi. For their part, the “diversity managers” in university administration are sometimes too quick to jump into action, codifying and implementing cumbersome and overreaching protections. Nevertheless, these missteps, even in the aggregate, do not constitute evidence of a pervasive “victim mentality,” widespread moral decay, and an assault on free speech. Typically, Campbell and Manning’s evidence is anecdotal and relies on conflating substantively different forms of dissent. They lump together hunger strikes, hate crime hoaxes, protest suicides and microaggressions as comparable illustrations of this cultural turn. More importantly, microaggressions, trigger warnings and even the controversy over Woodrow Wilson’s legacy are not the ultimate target of this critique.
What politics underlies these clarion calls about victim culture and why have these fears surfaced now? After all, concerns that the United States has become a “nation of victims” have been around for the last quarter of a century. Indeed, that was the title of Charles Skyes’s 1993 book. His text was part of an avalanche of similarly constructed dire observations, such as Robert Hughes’s “Culture of Complaint” (1993), Alan Dershowitz’s “Abuse Excuse” (1994), and Dinesh D’Souza’s “Illiberal Education” (1991), to name just a few. Like Campbell, Manning, Lukianoff and Haidt, these previous authors also associated victimhood with weakness, dependency, pathology and moral decline. Their campaign to reshame victims was so successful that “victim” became a term of disdain cynically deployed to call into question the character of those who claim to be injured, irrespective of their condition or the content of their grievance.
The effect on its primary victims should be reason enough to want to destroy racism. The negative consequences of racism toward black Americans, whether it’s Tamir Rice or Barack Obama, is something felt squarely by them, not us white folks. But it’s worth considering how racism against a representative affects the represented, how none of us are left untouched by the racism against Obama. Writing in the Nation in 2011, Melissa Harris-Perry asked if “we are all black Americans now,” borrowing from Cornel West’s concept of the “niggerization” of America. Harris-Perry posited that in various contemporary circumstances white Americans feel “the stinging humiliation that routinely accompanies black life,” a “blackening of America.” But while Harris-Perry wrote more generally about how ”social, economic and political conditions that have long defined African-American life have descended onto a broader population,” we should, in beginning our appraisals of the Obama presidency, look at how a black president made us a black nation.
To the extent that Obama, because he’s Obama, will be kept from achieving widely agreed-upon gun control is the extent to which a white gun-violence victim in a white-on-white attack down the road will be killed, indirectly, by racism. There are white Southerners who need Medicaid to be expanded, for Obamacare to be fully opted into by their leaders — but it’s called Obamacare, so that won’t happen. White fear and hatred, and the incipient Tea Party backlash in 2009 abused the Affordable Care Act in utero, despite a Democratic majority in Congress. We are, each of us, affected by that, despite the direct object of the racism being Barack Obama. White people, like people of color, need the minimum wage to be increased to a livable level, and Obama’s proposal for a wage hike sees overwhelming support in polling; but conservatives reflexively see pro-middle-class policies as creeping totalitarian socialism when proposed by Obama. It is racism that has helped to keep wages down for all Americans. These phenomena can be seen at work on much of Obama’s otherwise popular policy aims during the last seven years, from being stymied on more economic stimulus (and having to rely on quantitative easing at the Fed) to the series of manufactured debt-ceiling crises and government shutdowns, which led to the nation’s credit being downgraded for the first time in history. We are poorer, more precarious and less physically safe, each of us, because of racism.