Let me preface what I am about to write by saying that the purpose of politics should be policy: what we do in our political activity and how we choose whom to support should have as its end the policies we wish to see brought into being and/or continued or changed.
I would argue that an ideology that is too rigid to to address issues of critical importance is an ideology that is wrong and inhumane.
I would also argue that an ideology that is so so fixed that it is willing to sacrifice the well-being of people in the name of purity is perverse.
There are issues of current urgency.
There are issues of long-standing need.
in his column in today’s New York Times, Blow addresses matters that meet both of those sets of conditions that need to be addressed through policy.
That is why I am trying to persuade you to read and consider his column today, which is titled Black Men, Violence and ‘Fierce Urgency’.
Blow writes in the context of a meeting in Birmingham Alabama, the third annual gathering of
Cities United, the group President Obama praised in the 2014 announcement of his My Brother’s Keeper initiative as “a bipartisan group of mayors” who have made improving the lives and outcomes of young black men a “priority in communities across the country.”
When he announced the initiative (the text of the announcement in the hot link above), President Obama noted
But the plain fact is there are some Americans who, in the aggregate, are consistently doing worse in our society -- groups that have had the odds stacked against them in unique ways that require unique solutions; groups who’ve seen fewer opportunities that have spanned generations. And by almost every measure, the group that is facing some of the most severe challenges in the 21st century in this country are boys and young men of color.
As the title of Blow’s column makes clear, the words of Dr. King are the mantra of the initiative, the notion of The Fierce Urgency of Now.
Blow insists that we remember that the issue of violence is not an either-or proposition. It is not merely the issue of violence upon usually young Black men by Police and others, nor is the reality of that violence outweighed by the need to address what is often thrown back at those who insist that Black Lives Matter that if they really believed that then they should address Black on Black violence. As Blow writes
The implication being that there is something pathologically broken about blackness that makes black people prone to self-destruction, and that attention to anything else is a minor diversion from a larger truth.
But in fact, this argument is the diversion.
These problems are not, as Blow notes, mutually exclusive, and are often the result of historical and continuing factors that have shaped the communities in which so much of this violence occurs. While there will be elements of personal choice, there is also a context a history that continues,
how every level of government, and by extension society itself, used every possible lever of power for centuries to create the conditions in black communities that now make fertile ground for violence.
As I read those words what immediately flashed into my mind were two things. Linda Brown could not attend her neighborhood school in Topeka because she was black and therefore had to travel some distance to an acceptable school, and when as a result of Supreme Court decisions and later decisions in lower federal courts we saw schools becoming integrated we saw massive white flight from public schools and a consequential underfunding of schools that were now predominantly or exclusively black. This problem continues today, illustrated in places like Philadelphia and Michigan where predominantly black districts have been taken over by the state then turned over to people who seek to make profits from them, in some cases in communities that lack a sufficient tax base to maintain their schools and other public services that states deny funds to in order to give tax cuts to wealthy people, almost all of whom are white.
What also came into my mind is remembering how often Black communities were destroyed by the placement of highways through them, or the location of noxious public and private institutions, be these incinerators, or auto body junkyards, or other similar things. Often these would be food deserts, with no supermarkets, and public transportation did not enable the residents to get either to decent places to shop or to places of employment without trips involving several transfers and perhaps several hours each way.
Blow notes, in the words just after those I last quoted, that humans
make choices within an environmental context, which at its base level is affected by state and federal policy.
Our society treated black bodies as disposable, if not bound for eradication. Generations of educational, employment, housing, lending and criminal justice policies form the substrata roots of this problem, and they are deeper and more complex than the visible weed of community violence that is so tall and tangled.
He quotes Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx on the impact of highway infrastructure, then writes
The roads to America’s prosperity either plowed through black and poor communities or were literally designed to pass them by.
The issues we face are the result of policies and attitudes that run over several centuries, and Blow acknowledges the lack of instantaneous solutions, but want us to consider what we do in the meantime:
In the space between where we are and where we must arrive, how do we stop filling the cemeteries with the bodies of ever more young black men?
I am already pushing the limits of fair use.
I have done so to give you a sense of the power and the importance of this column, and as a means of encouraging you to read it, reflect upon it, and perhaps think of how you will respond.
The concluding section hit me like a punch in the gut, knocking the air out, making it difficult to breath. But that difficulty pales when placed against the difficulty that still exists in the ordinary lives, the communities, in which so many of our young people of color live. Blow writes specifically of inner cities and young Black men, because that was the focus of the meeting that is the occasion of this column. I think one could argue that similar issues exist in communities heavily populated by Latinos in some parts of the country. We had a President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose first adult job was teaching in such communities in the Rio Grande Valley. And certainly America’s track record towards those already in the country when Europeans began to arrive is one that still contains more shameful than honorable, and which continues today in the poverty and related issues on many Native American reservations.
I will not quote from the final three paragraphs from Blow, because I want you to read them in context, as a result of reading the ENTIRE piece.
We have many issues facing our nation. We have policies we should address, that should be an essential part of the discussion about politics as we decided who we want to lead, but of even greater importance, what commitments we want our leaders to address. Those leaders must set an example for the rest of us — that is, the commitment must be one beyond governmental policy, but also of societal urgency.
We are dangerously dividing — as a nation, as a society.
We will not survive as a liberal democracy if the path we follow excludes some, or pits one group against another.
We must address the needs of those who rightly can demand we address the long-standing issues that create the toxic environments in which they live.
We must also recognize that as we embrace policies necessary for us to go forward that we do not repeat the destruction of the past: our planet needs us to move forward on environmental issues, quickly. In doing so we must ensure that we not devastate communities that have been devoted to and are dependent upon their role in supplying our energy needs through fossil fuels.
We are, or should be, in this together.
We should never be thinking of us versus them — on race, on gender, on sexual orientation, on geography, on national origin, even on political ideology.
We can address what we think is destructive, we can challenge the attitudes and the policies.
We should insist that all of us be included.
Might I suggest that if we fail to do so, we will have no grounds to complain when policies of government ignore or actively and negatively target and impact the communities of which we are a part?
We are here for politics.
Our politics should be about policy.
Policy should be more about people than about ideology.
Blow’s column brought that home again for me this morning.
That is why I took the time to put up this post.
Now, if you have not done so already, PLEASE go read his column.
Thanks.