390 Years 100 Days

390 Years Minus 100 Days ... And On, Pt. 5 of 5

Terrance Heath — Fri, 15 May 2009 12:33:06 -0400

Coming to terms with race and resolving racial disparity in America feels like an insurmountable, unfinished task, because it is unfinished. The work was started and abandoned, started and abandoned many times by generations before us. But it’s only insurmountable to the degree that we tell ourselves the work is finished - or "finished enough"- choose to leave the rest of the work to those who will come after us.

But if it seems hard now, it will only be harder then. Yet it’s easy enough to start, once we assess where the previous work stopped.

In his book, Ending Slavery: How Well Free Today’s Slaves, scholar expert Kevin Bales describes the steps he believes are necessary for communities and countries all over the world to end the modern-day slave trade - from sex-trafficing to forced labor in jungles of Brazil to bonded labor passed down through generations in India. Key among those steps is the rehabilitation of freed slaves. Emancipation, Bales says, is insufficient without investment in rehabilitating freed slaves, who require medical care, education, and reorientation of their skills, which he describes in New Slavery: A Reference Handbook, as "restor[ing] the personhood of the person."

The essential condition of bondage is in the minds of the people. ...They have been conditioned to accept that their place is at the periphery of society. The process of release and rehabilitation is to restore the personhood of the person, to restore self-esteem, confidence, and the feeling that they too can win.

He goes on in Ending Slavery to describe how that process stopped short in America, after the Civil War.

After the American Civil War freed slaves also knew what it would take to build a decent life in free dome. Their work experience told them that forty acres and a mule could feed a family and grow enough of a cash crop to make a life and get the children to school. American slaves never got their forty acres and a mule.

Without collective investment in rehabilitation and restoration, Bales writes that many freed slaves return to slavery, either by choice or compelled by circumstances unchanged except for simply having been released.

Bales goes on to note that the gains made by former slaves in the American south were quickly reversed, and they were plunged into what author Douglas Blackmon describes in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Slavery By Another Name, calls a "neo-slavery" that persisted for nearly another century after emancipation.

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Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations-including U.S. Steel Corp.-looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

The neoslavery system exploited legal loopholes and federal policies which discouraged prosecution of whites for continuing to hold black workers against their wills. As it poured millions of dollars into southern government treasuries, the new slavery also became a key instrument in the terrorization of African Americans seeking full participation in the U.S. political system.

Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II.

~~~

I know a bit about that system, for I was born one generation removed from it. My great-great-great-grandfather, Henry Heath, was among those slaves freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and other legislation Blackmon mentions. Like many he he did not head north (some of my mother’s branch of the family did migrate to Pennsylvania), but stayed very near the plantation where he’d been a slave owned by Georgia planter John Burge Heath. He and his descendants were sharecroppers until my father’s generation left the farm as the system Blackmon writes about was in decline. My father’s "emancipation" came in the from of a draft notice, he often joked that he "stepped from behind the plow and started marching."

As near as I could tell, from the research I did back in college, he was born in 1847, and would have been 18 in 1865, when the civil war ended. From that point on, he and his descendants were sharecroppers, in a system that bore a remarkable resemblance to the system they and the nation had supposedly gotten shed of.

Though I was unaware of it then, remnants of that system were still visible during my childhood. Visiting my grandmother in southern Georgia always felt like a trip to another world, because she lived in a home that was very different from the one we lived in. It was an unpainted sharecropper shack, really, that resembled the abandoned shacks we saw along the road on our way down south. It didn’t have running water. Instead, the water came from a pump in the yard. Instead of an indoor bathroom, there was an outhouse. And baths were taken in a metal tub, filled with water that had been heated and drawn from the pump. To my sister and I, it was an adventure. But to my father, I’m sure it was a reminder of what he had escaped.

He was, in fact, one of the first (if not the first) in his family and maybe the first in his generation to leave the farm and the dying system it represented - one that had lasted for nearly a quarter of a century after slavery (which had gone on for more than 240 years by the time of the end of the civil war), and eventually gain a foothold in the American middle class. My mother’s route was to enroll in cosmetology school, and open her own beauty shop in an extension built onto her parents’ home. In 1955 (some 90 years after my great-great-great grandfather was freed) they bought their first home, and were most likely the first in their families to live in a home they owned, on property they owned. Even then, they did it without the help that young couples just starting out might get from their families, like a gift or loan of money to help with the downpayment. Instead, for years, they sent money home to their parents, who relied on them as a partial means of support.

They did all of this, in many ways, for us - their children. I heard them state over and over again that they didn’t want us to grow up as they had, though by that point the system in which they grew up picking cotton and walking behind a mule was long gone. They had both managed to finish high school, which made them even more aware of the importance of education, and they constantly expressed its to us. In 1987, decades after my parents left the farms - the mule, the plow, the cotton fields, etc. - I became the first in my immediate family to go to (and later graduate from) college.

From many perspectives, my parents were a success story; one of climbing into the middle class and sending their children out into the world with educations and opportunities they never had. If it was a success story, it was one delayed and deferred for generations. But I knew even then that our story was more the exception than the rule in many ways. We were not that far removed from the past, nor from its echos in the present, and our perch somewhere in the middle of the economic ladder may even have been more precarious than my parents let us know.

But that’s not usual for any recently-gained foothold. Those who have been climbing for generations may have further to fall, but they have several more rungs to go than those who have only recently started. As much as that was the case for my parents, so it’s the case for many African-Americans today.

~~~

So why, then, even after the end of the "neo-slavery" system, did African-Americans still lag behind whites economically? Well, there’s the reality of persistent segregation and discrimination in the south, that went on for several more decades, and necessitated the modern civil rights movement. But, why, after the civil rights movement, then, did African-Americans still lag behind economically? Addressing this requires debunking what Paul Rosenberg dubbed "theoretical core of color-blind racism."

...an ideology that facilitates continued white dominance in a post-Civil Rights Movement era, while denying that it is doing so. While colorblind racism is the main public face of movement conservatism, which allows it to blend in with the mainstream of white American thinking on race, there is always an element of old-fashioned racism present as well. Indeed, colorblind racism and old-fashioned racism repeatedly interact with one another, as the framework of colorblind racism makes clear.

...Minimization of racism is a frame that suggests discrimination is no longer a central factor affecting minorities’ life chances ("It’s better now than in the past" or "There is discrimination, but there are plenty of jobs out there).

...Naturalization is a frame that allows whites to explain away racial phenomena by suggesting they are natural occurrences.

You hear an echo of the latter in an earlier quote from a conservative blogger, which takes the ideology a little bit further by suggesting that anyone who thinks more needs to be done to address racial disparities, in the context of history’s present day consequences, is actually the "real" racist. (Or, if that individual happens to be black, just "lazy.")’

To his credit, James Clyburn at least acknowledges that the objections of Mark Sanford and the GOP governors are not racially motivated. Still, it is a bit demeaning to suggest that African Americans in particular would be hurt by the decline of stimulus funds. It somehow implies that African Americans are incapable of succeeding unless they are crippled and dependent on government

The intention is to silence anyone who suggests racial disparities require action, because it rules out any cause other than "personal responsibility" for those disparities. Thus effectively reinforcing the unspoken and outwardly projected belief that "African Americans are incapable of succeeding unless they are crippled and dependent on government," while ignoring centuries of history, and absolving the believer of his or her own "personal responsibility in relation to it."

"The essence of political power," as Rosenberg writes, "is the ability to define. The ability to define ’us’ and ’them.’ ... The ability to define what is and what is not a political problem."

~~~

The truth is that the present disparities in racial disparities in wealth (and thus in the benefits and opportunities it provides) date back far beyond the pre-Civil Rights era. And, despite the successes of the Civil Rights movement, those pre-existing disparities were perpetuated by conservative economic policies that favored the those who were already among the wealthiest. And an economy geared to benefit the wealthiest will, by definition, benefit very few African-Americans, and will threaten and likely reverse the progress some have made.

The period Blackmon writes of was followed by a period long period of legal segregation discrimination, which was followed by what Paul Rosenberg calls "The 30-Years Conservative Nightmare," that perpetuated long-term economic disadvantages.

Traditionally, the American Dream has most often been described in terms of each generation sacrificing to provide a better future for their children. This has come about though two distinct, but connected phenomena. First, each successive generation of a given population is, on average, more educated, more skilled and more productive than the one before it. One can think of this in terms of moving from one income group to another--from the bottom decile (10% of the population) or quintile (20% of the population) to the next, for example. New immigrants come in on the bottom, and each generation climbs up the relative income ladder.

This was not, of course, true of African Americans. During most of our history from colonial times to the present, they were predominantly slaves, and after that they were predominantly locked into a system of sharecropping that kept them tied to the land, and subject to legal and economic restrictions that kept them from advancing, while new immigrants quickly advanced over them.

With the end of legal segregation in the South, and legal discrimination throughout the nation, it was assumed by many that this unique dynamic would end, and blacks would advance similarly to other low-income groups. The following two charts clearly indicate one reason why this did not happen. As can be seen, the very well-balanced economic income growth from 1947 through 1979 was replaced by a pattern of income growth highly concentrated at the top. As a result, even those blacks that did substantially increase their skill levels over that of their parents did not receive the full benefit that others had received before them. They received a skill bonus, but only a very meager generational bonus. The escalator no longer took everyone up at a nearly equal rate. Instead, it virtually stopped for those at or near the bottom, it slowed significantly for those in the middle, and it only really kept working for those at or near the very top.

I’m fortunate that my family made it somewhere near the middle before the escalator slowed down. It enabled me to keep moving upward, even if not at the rate my parents did - leaping from sharecropping to suburbia in one generation. At the very least, I haven’t lost any of the ground gained, nor have my siblings. But the reality is that, for the first or second generations to make that climb, the trip back down is only a few steps, and can be made without being chosen, and before we even know it. After all, we’re only a generation or two removed, if that.

~~~

Sometimes, all it takes is a sudden stop on that escalator, to knock you off your feet and back down a few steps. In some ways’ that’s what’s happening now to the minority auto dealers I mentioned in an earlier post in this series. With the auto industry bailout churning onward, GM and Chrysler to cut up to 3,000 dealers between them, and 180,000 jobs hanging in the balance, minority dealers are worried that they will not only bear the brunt of the bad news, but will also lose ground only recently gained.

General Motors is sending out notices this week to more than 2,000 dealers that it wants to shut down as the company struggles to stay afloat. Minority dealers are especially worried that GM’s restructuring efforts could wipe out years of progress toward building their ranks.

At Michael Chevrolet in Chesterfield, Mich., outside Detroit, a sea of unsold cars sit in the lot, and there are no customers in sight. Michael Johnson, the owner of this dealership, got his start through GM’s Minority Dealer Development Program.

"When I first got into the business, there were probably about 110, 115 African-American General Motors dealers, and today we are down to 40."

Johnson’s office looks out onto the showroom floor. The desks where salespeople used to sit are mostly empty. Johnson has cut his staff by half in the past year. He says while his business problems are shared by others, minority car dealers expect the worst as the company decides which dealerships get the ax.

...Desmond Roberts is a car dealer in the Chicago area who heads the National Association of Minority Automobile Dealers. He says those criteria could doom most minority car dealerships.

"Minority dealers came to the party late. We had the worst opportunities in the worst locations," Roberts says.

Growing up in Augusta, GA, I remember some white-owned car dealerships that had been in business all of my life (and some may still be in business), standing prominently at heavily trafficked intersections, in some of the busiest retail areas, with huge signs bearing the owners’ family name. They were family businesses, handed down from one generation to the next. or launched with the help and capital of family members who were in or had been successful in the same business. As I grew up, and on trips home from college, I could practically track the "line of succession" - the inheritance of the family business or the opening of new branches by the sons and daughters of the sons and daughters of sons and daughters of the first entrepreneurial generation - by the television commercials in which those sons and daughters touted their roots in the business. (Longevity, after all, inspires confidence and loosens up credit.)

Not that these business owners didn’t work hard to make or keep their family ventures successful, and even expand them, but they have an advantage over the first generation, minority entrepreneur with no family history in any business, no investment or "seed money" from the previous generation. And certainly not a childhood spent learning the business practically by osmosis, punctuated with visits or even internships at Daddy’s or Mommy’s dealership. It reminds me of some of the kids I went to school with, some of whom already knew that when they graduated, they would have a job waiting for them at Dad’s law firm, bank, office, etc. Not that they wouldn’t work hard to get whatever and wherever they got.

As with every aspect of the economic crisis, and every sector of the economy, it’s not just the dealers. As Ken Bensinger wrote in the LA Times, it’s going to be "a blood bath," not just for dealers but for the people they employ and the communities where they live. In this economic crisis, job loss is often followed by foreclosure and the loss of a home. This is especially true for minorities facing a wave of foreclosures, as a quarter million black and Hispanic families will probably lose their homes in the next few years.

And research has shown that minorities are at higher risk of foreclosure.

According to the report, "Foreclosure Exposure: A study of racial and income disparities in home mortgage lending in 172 American cities," African-Americans who purchased a home were 2.7 times more likely to get a high-cost loan than white borrowers. In addition, Latino borrowers were 2.3 times more likely to get a high-cost purchase loan than white borrowers.

Minorities also were more likely to get high-cost refinance loans, with African Americans 1.8 times more likely than white borrowers to get a high-cost refinance loan and Latinos 1.4 times more likely.

Further, in 68 of the 172 metropolitan areas reviewed for the Acorn report, at least one out of three loans was high-cost and likely to have its rate reset. More than half of loans were high cost in Detroit, Laredo, Texas; McAllen, Texas; and Jackson, Miss.

"Too many of our neighbors were steered into unaffordable exploding ARMs without being given an option for a fixed rate and now face foreclosure, which harms their families and our communities," said Maude Hurd, national president for Acorn, in a news release. "We have seen a sharp increase in foreclosures in some of the urban and minority communities that most need to build wealth through homeownership."

Instead, wealth is leaving those communities.

A new report says the subprime mortgage crisis will cause African-Americans to experience wealth losses of between $71 billion and $122 billion over its duration. The racial bias of subprime mortgage lenders accounts for a 40 percent difference in losses between whites and people of color.

This will mark the fifth year that United for a Fair Economy (UFE) has published a State of the Dream report on Jan. 15, the actual date of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, which will be officially celebrated on Jan. 21. This year’s report is called " is available at .

...The report details the types of subprime loans developed and offered by the industry since 1995, presents evidence of their effect on minority and low-income communities and outlines potential solutions.

United for a Fair Economy is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that spotlights the growing economic divide and works across races, ethnicities and classes to help shrink it. Visit them at www.faireconomy.org.

And those minority communities are suffering the greatest homeownership losses, wiping out gains only recently made. According to some studies, the racial gap in homeownership was the same in 2000 as it was in 1900 - about 25 percentage points. The gap narrowed somewhat between 1960 and 1980, but began to widen again from there, and is now probably wider than it was even in 2000.

Those recently-gained and newly-lost gains in homeownership were, in many cases, made by people who became the first in their families to own a home. This was progress made without help or downpayments from parents or family, and without the benefit of shared generational experience in home buying, and by people who never thought homeownership - and the path to middle class security and stability it’s supposed to represent - would be open to them.

Without the history, support and resources that come from generations of climbing the economic ladder and securing a foothold, they are gains that will not be recovered in most cases, because circumstances will not afford a second chance. Unless some recognition of the link between past and present, between history and her and now, is possible.

~~~

That recognition requires taking of our blindfolds, so that we can finally see all of the elephant in the room, and finally decide what to do about it.

In other words, after the all the progress made since the end of slavery, and in the wake of the civil rights movement, we’re not only still left with an unfinished task. In many ways we are left with the hardest part of the job before us, as it was before all of our forebears, and not just on the issue of race, but equality itself. There are lots more elephants in the room. Recognizing them means taking off our blindsfolds in order to see them, but also to see where we stand in relation to them.

Some of us know of the elephants in the room, and where they are located, because we’ve lifted our blindfolds or someone has lifted them for us. W e keep them on only because we know we must in order to get along.

The BET reporter tugged at Obama’s blindfold, knowing full well that the president knew there were elephants in the room and where they were, but perhaps also knowing that Obama in particular must keep his blindfold on most of the time.

James Clyburn lifted his own blindfold, though he too knew of the elephants in the room, only as a man who has spent a lifetime navigating around them can — especially one who represents a state soaked in the history mentioned above, and still reeling from its consequences. He went so far as to point out not just the elephants in the room, but also to point out to many people that they were wearing blindfolds they appeared not to know they had on.

Eric Holder took his blindfold off, in part because - as a black man working in a criminal justice system in which many other men such as himself are held suspect, and which is implicated in or responsible for cases ranging from the Scottsboro Boys and the Emmet Till murder trial to Tulia, Texas and Jon Burge’s twenty-years of terror in Chicago — knowing where the elephants are is a job requirement, and a blindfold presents an occupational hazard: the possibility of forgetting that there are elephants in the room.

Some of us cannot afford to live with blindfolds, and some of us believe we cannot afford to live without them. And as we walk the path in and out of history, we bump into each other at times, such as a story I blogged about a year ago. It caught my eye because it came from my home state, and it occurs to me now because it illustrates how we continue confront and refuse to confront the consequences of our shared history, when the injustice of the past yields the disparities of the present.

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A "whites only" sign was still hanging on the precinct house water fountain in 1964 when James Booker joined the suburban College Park police force. He soon learned it wasn’t the only thing off limits to Georgia’s new black recruits.

Until 1976, black officers were blocked from joining a state-supported supplemental police retirement fund. Today, white officers who entered the fund before that year are taking home hundreds of dollars more every month in retirement benefits than their black counterparts.

The now-retired black officers have been lobbying hard to change that, but eight years after they began an effort to amend the state constitution and give them credit for those lost years is stalled in the Legislature. The Georgia Constitution prohibits the state from extending new benefits to public employees after they have retired.

Booker, who was 76-years-old at the time, worked 30 years for the police force during a time when black officers couldn’t arrest a white offender without a white officer present, couldn’t change uniforms at the station house, and couldn’t wear their uniforms to work. He would be getting about $770 more a month in pension if he had been allowed to join the pension fund at the beginning of his service, as his white counter parts were. Last year, he was working part-time directing traffic to make ends meet.

If James Booker is one who can’t — and never could — afford to live with a blindfold on, the Georgia state legislature is populated by many who can’t afford to live without their blindfolds.

Ronald Hampton, executive director of the National Black Police Association, said he knows of no other state with a similar pension situation. "Only Georgia is shameless enough to still have this out there," Hampton said.

The Georgia House has twice passed an amendment resolution but it has gone nowhere in the state Senate. An amendment requires a vote of two-thirds of each chamber as well as approval by voters.

"We can’t fix everything for everybody," said state Sen. Bill Heath, chairman of the Senate Retirement Committee.

Heath, a Republican, argued that making retroactive changes to retirement benefits "opens up a can of worms and could destroy the pension system."

In Georgia, and in other places, it seems the time for justice is not always right now. In fact, some injustices are so old that and affect so few that we hope they can be forgotten. Booker asked of the legislature, "[A]re they just waiting for us all to die?" And in a sense, they are, though not so much as for Booker and his fellow officers to die as for an opportunity to finally and forever forget. They want to keep their blindfolds on, and not be reminded that they have them or that there’s an elephant in the room.

That’s because there is a price for taking our blindfolds off.

CEO and CNN guest columnist Al Vivian is one who has accepted that price, because the price of keeping our blindfolds on is higher, as he explained in a column adressing the response to Holder’s "nation of cowards" comment.

Privilege can be a dangerous thing. It releases you from the task of thinking about things that others must. I am an African-American male and I am privileged. Not on race; but on gender, education, religion, income and many other areas.

As a man, my authority and intellect are not second-guessed. As a Christian, my moral code is not questioned, nor am I subject to post-September 11 profiling. I have privilege in these areas, and I realize that this privilege creates blind spots. An advantage to any group creates a corresponding disadvantage to all others.

...Elaborating on history, we must acknowledge that whites have been the benefactors of centuries of history that included half-truths that socially affirmed them to the detriment of all others. Addressing this privilege will take extreme courage, for there will be many loud dissenting voices.

For example, there has never been a discussion in America about whether we should or should not celebrate a White History Month. That would be an irrelevant waste of time, because white history has been the basis of practically all that we have been taught. Being able to sit in a classroom and open history books that positively portray a plethora of people that resemble you has been, and continues to be, the exclusive historical privilege of whites.

This privilege psychologically and economically benefits every member at every level of the advantaged category so profoundly that its members never have to question their place in society. And that place is on top: the expected and accepted norm.

There are many types of privilege, some of it earned and some of it unearned. Unearned privilege may be based on anything from race, to gender, religion, social class, to inherited wealth. With the exceptions of religion and sexual orientation, I can claim many of the privileges that Vivian does. But, in an America still wedded to a mythology of "self-made" "rugged individualism," pointing out privilege punctures that balloon of exceptionalism, causing a lot of anxiety and even fear. Fear, because the recognition of privilege carries the price of responsibility.

A year ago, I attempted to adress the above in a post following not only Obama’s speech on race, but remarks by African-Americans as diverse as Jeremy Wright, Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell, that all echoed the same themes as Obama’s speech.

But we don’t want to hear it. We are a nation of "rugged individualists," whose national mythology "self-made" ideal, utterly detatched from and unaffected by the past. It’s a mythology that, as Gonsalves points out, allows many middle and working class white Americans to believe that they’ve enjoyed little to no privilege based on their race. Yet, Booker’s story — and others — like it illustrate precisely that kind of historical advantage and privilege, and how it impacts the present.

It’s the same mythology that allows George W. Bush — who once referred to himself as "a Republican white guy who doesn’t get it " — to evoke the air of a "self-made man," and quietly deny the advantages he’s enjoyed due to his family’s wealth and connections. It’s the same mythology that makes it impolitic to ask whether George W. Bush would be where he is without the Bush family’s wealth and political power, with just his own talents, abilities, and intelligence to rely on.

Ann Richards once said that George H. W. Bush was "born with a silver foot in his mouth." Another Texas politician joked that the elder Bush was a man "born on third base, [who] thought he hit a triple." Most middle and working class white Americans weren’t born on third base. But the reality of race and economics is that some white Americans were born on second, first, the batter’s box, or at least "on deck," and some born in the dugout are still waiting for a spot on the batting list. Race, the uniform we’re each issued at birth, is a deciding factor in our starting positions.

Perhaps that’s one thing at the heart of the subject of race that makes it difficult to address on all sides. On both sides of the race discussion, fears and insecurities make people want to run for cover.

What we are running from is, on one, hand recognition of how our reality is connected to that of others’, and on the other responsibility.

Sometimes being part of a maligned minority means that in some far, dark corner of the soul absorbs all that has been said about you as — in my experience, as a black man and as a gay man. It absorbs every implication of inferiority — and some part wonders if it might be true, or even believes it. But you don’t want it confirmed, because it means you are not who you were taught you are. You may respond to it with anger or activism. You might laugh about it. (Some of the most cynical jokes about minorities are, after all, sometimes told by and laughed at hardest by those same minorities. But those same jokes take on a different tenor when told someone outside of that minority.) But you cannot afford to have it confirmed.

That’s the experience on at least one side of the discussion. (There are many.) I can only imagine what white Americans have to contend with on their end. I think I got an inkling when I saw, Born Rich, Jamie Johnson’s documentary about young people with immense, inherited wealth. I expected to see a certain degree of swagger and confidence in the participants. After all, they’re young and rich (and, all of them, white). I was surprised at the degree of insecurity among some of them, who know that what they have they didn’t earn, except by being born into their families. Perhaps that’s the other side of the coin. I can only guess — I can’t know — that maybe some white Americans would rather not wonder how much of what they have, they have in part because of the color of their skin, and because of the socio-economic advantages and privilege that come with it.

Until we recognize the reality that Obama, Clyburn, Holder, Rice, Powell, Wright, Vivian and others have pointed out to us, the work of resolving our racial past with the reality of our present will remain undone, because we will continue to refuse to accept responsibility for the present, in the context of its relationship to the past.

On one side, there’s a responsibility that comes with the recognition of privelege. We become responsible either for perpetuating it, and the injustice and inequity it relies upon to exist, or we become responsible for undermining it and — in the course of becoming the America we’ve always hoped, claimed, pushed and plodded towards becoming. — risk losing that privilege.

On the other, light is finally shed on the elephant in the room. And once seen, we become responsible for our part in doing something about it.

But, it’s the only way forward, if not for the elephant, for us — finally, out that suffocating room, and its presence.

390 Years Minus 100 Days, Pt. 4 of 5

Terrance Heath — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:07:02 -0400

Now, what did he do that for? That was my first thought when our newly-minted attorney general reached for his own rhetorical handful of elephant, as in the previous examples. Not because I thought he was wrong, but because he was saying what was virtually unsayable to a country still basking in, and congratulating itself for, the election of its first African-American president.

He was not only lifting his blindfold, but taking it off entirely while tugging at ours, and telling us, "There's still an elephant in the room. Take off your blindfold and just look."

In a blunt assessment of race relations in the United States, Attorney General Eric Holder Wednesday called the American people "essentially a nation of cowards" in failing to openly discuss the issue of race.

In his first major speech since being confirmed, the nation's first black attorney general told an overflow crowd celebrating Black History Month at the Justice Department the nation remains "voluntarily socially segregated."

"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards," Holder declared.

Holder urged Americans of all races to use Black History Month as a time to have a forthright national conversation between blacks and whites to discuss aspects of race which are ignored because they are uncomfortable.

Hard words to hear from our first African-American attorney general? Sure. But harsh words?

Granted, they were words few Americans wanted to hear barely a month after witnessing and celebrating a historic inauguration. Holder was raining on a couple of very different parades, and threatening to throw a wet blanket on everyone's extended good feeling. Some of the reaction was nearly as harsh as some felt Holder's statement had been. There were a few demands for an apology from Holder, and even President Obama felt the need to retreat from Holder's comments.

But Holder was right. Despite the election of Barack Obama, Americans are still afraid of an honest discussion about race. And some of the reactions to his comments tend to confirm that.

It's evident in the desire of many to take the occasion of Obama do declare the country into a "post-civil right" or "post-racial era." Under their breath, after such declarations, you can almost hear them sigh with relief, "Thank goodness we don't have to talk about THAT anymore."

Holder's first offense may be that he refused to take his confirmation, as some have with Obama's presidency, as an occasion to unfurl a "Mission Accomplished" banner across the subject of race and declare the matter closed. That burning desire is evident in the comments of those blasting Holder's remarks.

"Holder doesn't want an honest dialogue about race. In the Age of [President] Obama, 'talking enough with each other about race' means the rest of us shutting up while being subjected to lectures about our insensitivity and insufficient integration on the weekends," conservative blogger Michelle Malkin wrote.

Stephan Tawney, writing on the American Pundit blog, said a glimpse at the national political landscape -- namely the country's first black president -- suggests otherwise.

"Our attorney general is black, both major parties are led by black men, the president is black," he wrote. "Last month, the nation officially honored Martin Luther King Jr. as it does every year, and Holder is speaking during Black History Month. And yet we're apparently a 'nation of cowards' on race."

Ron Christie, a one-time domestic policy adviser to former President George W. Bush, said that for the nation's chief law enforcement officer to raise race issues "was wrong and it was very insulting to the American people."

The preferred honest dialogue about race apparently now consists of a single statement: "You got Obama. What now?" This was Glenn Beck's reaction to Joseph Lowrey's inaugural benediction, which not only failed to declare "Mission Accomplished," but had the temerity to point out that the race was still not yet run, instead of just taking a victory lap little more than an hour after the oath of office — or 390 years out of the starting gate.

He and Holder were only supposed to celebrate how far we've come, and not remind us of how far we've yet to go. But the election and swearing in of Barack Obama did not erase the the evidence of how far we've yet to go, just based on what was seen during the campaign. It doesn't erase the racial ugliness that was on full display during the campaign and after the election. It doesn't erase the disparities that existed the minute before and the minute after Obama took the oath of office.

Plainly put, a black president does not mean the end of racism in America, for the same realties, the same inequalities and disparities — higher rates of poverty, unemployment, and incarceration among people of color — persist after more than 100 days into the first black president's term of office. Nor does the reality of our first African-American president mean that make us post-racial, at least not in the sense that most people who believe in the sudden advent of a post-racial society so enthusiastically use the term.

The candidacy and now the presidency of Barack Obama makes it inevitable that Americans will reflect upon and discuss race. In a sense, it provides us with a great opportunity to do so. But it's not necessarily easier and discussion than it was before, and the reality of our first president of African descent (whose name ends in a vowel, as well) actually offers cover that our national anxiety about discussing race makes us desire and drives us to seek.

The presidential campaign, and even the past 100 days or so have been rife with examples of just how post-racial we are and just how post-racial we're not.

Obama won the 2008 election because he was able to mobilize 95 percent of African-Americans, two-thirds of all Latinos and a large proportion of young people under the age of 30. At the same time, what is generally forgotten in the exuberance of this assessment is that the majority of white Americans voted for the John McCain-Sarah Palin ticket. While "post-racial" may mean less overt racism, the idea that we have moved into a post-racial period in American history is not merely premature - it is an act of willful denial and ignorance.

Hurricane Katrina. The US Supreme Court's dismantling of Brown vs. Board of Education and the resegregation of American schools. The Clash of Civilizations thesis that promotes the idea of a War against Islam. The backlash facing immigrant workers. A grotesque prison industrial complex. [Moreover] ... [w]hile Americans were being robbed blind and primed for yet another bailout of the banks and investment sectors, they were treated to new evidence from Fox News and poverty experts that the great moral threats facing the nation were greedy union workers, black single mothers, Latino gang bangers and illegal immigrants.

Missing from the exuberant claims that Americans are now living in a post-racial society is the historical legacy of a neoconservative revolution, officially launched in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, and its ensuing racialist attacks on the welfare "Queens"; Bill Clinton's cheerful compliance in signing bills that expanded the punishing industries; and George W. Bush's "willingness to make punishment his preferred response to social problems."[4] In the last 30 years, we have witnessed the emergence of policies that have amplified the power of the racial state and expanded its mechanisms of punishment and mass incarceration, the consequences of which are deeply racist - even as the state and its legal apparatuses insist on their own race neutrality.

In short, the discourse of the post-racial state ignores how political and economic institutions, with their circuits of repression and disposability and their technologies of punishment, connect and condemn the fate of many impoverished youth of color in the inner cities to persisting structures of racism that "serve to keep [them] in a state of inferiority and oppression."[7] Not surprisingly, under such circumstances, individual suffering no longer registers a social concern as all notions of injustice are assumed to be the outcome of personal failings or deficits. Signs of the pathologizing of both marginalized youth and the crucial safety nets that have provided them some hope of justice in the past can be found everywhere from the racist screeds coming out of right-wing talk radio to the mainstream media that seems to believe that the culture of black and brown youth is synonymous with the culture of crime. Poverty is now imagined to be a problem of individual character. Racism is now understood as merely an act of individual discrimination (if not discretion), and homelessness is reduced to a choice made by lazy people.

The desire to enter a new "post-racial" age is also, to some degree, a desire for absolution, not for past injustices, but for present inequities and the responsibility to correct them. It's a desire that crosses partisan lines, as Adam Serwer noted while addressing the latest assault on the voting rights act.

As a presidential candidate trying to rescue his candidacy from the fires of the Jeremiah Wright scandal, Barack Obama delivered a widely praised speech on race. He acknowledged criticism that his candidacy was "based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap." Immediately after Obama won the election, Shelby Steele argued in a column for the Los Angeles Times that whites didn't "want change from Obama as much as they want documentation of change that has already occurred. They want him in the White House first of all as evidence, certification and recognition."

But conservatives also use Obama's election as "documentation" of the end of racism, most recently in an attempt to roll back long-standing protections for minority voters. In a closely watched Supreme Court case, the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act -- which forces constituencies with a history of discriminating against minority voters to "pre-clear" their election-law changes with the Department of Justice -- is at risk. The Department of Justice rejects the changes if they find the changes have the purpose or effect of discriminating against minority voters. The plaintiff, a small municipal utility district in Austin, Texas, argues in its filing that, in part because of Obama's election, Section 5 presents an "illegitimate" intrusion on states' rights. In other words, it is unfair to assume that states and localities with a history of discriminating against minority voters will continue to do so, because, after all, we have a black president.

On the one hand, the new "post-racial" age is a an opportunity to declare that nothing more needs to be done about racial disparities — at least not by society at large. On the other it's an opportunity to declare that what has been done to address racial inequality can now be undone. Both desires stem from either ignoring those disparities, or declaring them solely the "problem" and responsibility of African Americans. (After all, "You got Obama/Oprah/Condoleeza Rice/Colin Powell/fill-in-the-blank-with-any-accomplished-African-American. Now what?")

It is ultimately a desire to escape the inescapable: history. Not that anything can be done to change the past, or that anyone responsible for past injustices is around to be held accountable today. But Faulkner was right, "The past is never dead. It's not even past," and Obama even quoted him in his famous speech on race (made once it was clear that race would be an unavoidable issue in the campaign).

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past." We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments - meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today's urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

Race and racial disparity have haunted America and Americans like an unfinished task that — the longer it is neglected — grows so large that it's impossible to know where to start, and it seems unlikely well ever be finished with it, and finally able to move on. And, truly, we won't. That is, if we don't start somewhere and commit to finishing the work.

390 Years Minus 100 Days ... And Counting

Terrance Heath — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:27:52 -0400

In many ways, the discussion of race in America, particularly as it relates to today's issues (the economy, health care, education), brings to mind the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Different people have a firm grasp on part of the truth in the middle of the room — be it the tail, the trunk, an ear, or a leg — but no one seems able to look at the thing itself. Three examples of a similar phenomenon reveal some of the difficulties in our national discussion on race.

During the press conference concerning his first 100 days in office, BET reporter Andre Showell asked Obama about African American unemployment.

As the entire nation tries to climb out of this deep recession, in communities of color, the circumstances are far worse, the black unemployment rate, as you know, is in the double digits. And in New York City, for example, the black unemployment rate for men is near 50 percent. My question to you tonight is: given this unique and desperate circumstance, what specific policies can you point to that will target these communities and what’s the timetable for us to see tangible results?

And in his answer, Obama reached out and firmly grabbed hold of one part of the elephant in the room.

When we put in place additional dollars for community health centers to ensure that people are still getting the help that they need, or we expand health insurance to millions more children through the Children’s Health Insurance Program, again, those probably disproportionately impact African-American and Latino families simply because they’re the ones who are most vulnerable. They have got higher rates of uninsured in their communities.

So my general approach is that if the economy is strong, that will lift all boats as long as it is also supported by, for example, strategies around college affordability and job training, tax cuts for working families as opposed to the wealthiest that level the playing field and ensure bottom-up economic growth.

And I’m confident that that will help the African-American community live out the American dream at the same time that it’s helping communities all across the country.”

His answer echoed and expanded upon his video-taped message to the State of Black America forum a month earlier. He's not entirely wrong, though it depends on what one means by a strong economy. As pointed out in the State of Black America report, the "rising tide" of the so-called recovery during the Bush years did not lift all boats.

Most yachts, yes. But all boats? Not by a long shot. But an economic program focused on improving the circumstances of all Americans is likely to improve the lives of many African-Americans, because we live with the same overall economic realities. (A fact missed during the campaign, when it seemed working class whites lived in a completely different economic universe, where rising prices, stagnant wages, job loss, foreclosure, etc., weren't happening to anyone else, or anyone else that mattered.)

There is hope, however that stimulus funds, though not specifically targeted to African-American communities, will help. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, in response to an inquiry by the editor of The St. Louis American, outlined how portions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

General: The majority of the provisions in this recovery and reinvestment plan will assist African-Americans, who have been dramatically impacted during these tough times, in making it through this period with tax cuts for 95 percent of families, programs including extension of unemployment benefits, COBRA healthcare benefits, and food stamps and temporary assistance for needy families (TANF), while also preparing them for new opportunities with training for new jobs in existing and emerging industries.

Tax Cuts: This plan seeks to put money in the hands of consumers as quickly as possible through tax cuts for 95 percent of families. This is especially important for African- Americans who have experienced a reversal of fortune in the gains in wages and salary reached during the 1990s compared to others in the workforce. This immediate infusion of resources will not only allow them to purchase the items they need for their families, but also help rebuild our economy.

Job Creation: The unemployment rate for African-Americans was 12.1 percent and had risen to 12.6 percent when new job numbers were announced Feb. 6. This plan will create jobs with its investments in rebuilding roads and bridges and retrofitting government buildings while also working to help prepare job seekers for the 21st century economy with training for new “green jobs” and other emerging industries. The key is ensuring that African-Americans have access to information about all of these opportunities.

Education: Right now 95 percent of African-American children rely on public schools in America, yet a great number of these systems lack the funding they need to deliver the education that our children deserve and the facilities themselves are generally inadequate. This plan makes a historic investment in school modernization sufficient to renovate and modernize 10,000 schools, which also saves or creates jobs.

Healthcare: African-Americans suffer from higher percentages of chronic diseases such as heart disease, kidney disease and diabetes while also suffering from a lack of access to quality care. Therefore during a time when many who rely on receiving healthcare through their employers are losing jobs, access to quality healthcare is an even greater concern. This plan offers a new tax credit to help families keep their health insurance through COBRA as well as a new option in Medicaid for low-income people who lack access to COBRA. Adjustments will also be made in funding formulas for state Medicaid programs so that Medicaid and SCHIP are not impacted by state budget shortfalls, protecting 20 million people whose eligibility might be at risk.

Public Services: Local governments are threatened with budget cuts that could impair services, including support from police and fire departments. No community that relies on these services to protect them should have to endure cuts in these areas. This plan invests $4 billion for state and local law enforcement funding.

In addition, the stimulus would provide help to historically black colleges and universities hit hard by the economic downturn, in the form of funding for infrastructure projects on HBCU campuses, technology improvements, and increased federal grants for students from low income families.

Yet, even as the stimulus funds begin to flow into communities across the country, the governors of several southern states are rejecting or attempting to reject stimulus funds funds.

Governors across the country are clamoring for a piece of the stimulus, eager to avoid laying off state employees, hoping to put their unemployed citizens back to work and trying to avoid widespread furloughs as budgets bleed red ink. They know that their citizens want to keep libraries open, teachers in the classroom, cops on the beat and firefighters ready to protect people and property.

Except in the South. Southern governors—Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Haley Barbour of Mississippi—have been pressing the case that the federal stimulus bill is a mistake; they argue the emerging Republican orthodoxy that tax cuts are the only effective way to pull the country out of an economic black hole.

With 11 percent unemployment, South Carolina trails only hard-hit Michigan. Nonetheless, Governor Sanford plans to reject funds that would extend unemployment insurance, not to mention federal fiscal stabilization monies slated for schools and public safety, unless he receives assurance that he may use it instead to pay down the state's debt. As ProPublica reports, the state is about to lay off teachers in large numbers as a consequence.

This hardhearted pattern is not new. It is a replay of the Southern rejection of Roosevelt's New Deal. During the bleak years of the Depression, politicians below the Mason-Dixon line refused to provide relief to the poor and rebelled against federal intrusion into social policy. When most state governments were hemorrhaging, local and state governments across the South actually ran surpluses. How? They fired government workers and slashed funds for education and healthcare.

Their reasons, stemming from political philosophies and/or fiscal priorities, are perhaps not specifically related to race (at least not publicly). But according to census data, these states are among those with the largest African American populations. Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi and Georgia (where the governor has considered rejecting some stimulus funds, though his state would gain 106,000 jobs in the bargain) are all among the states with an estimated African-American population of 1 million or more. They also make the lists of states with the highest percentage of African-Americans in the population, and where blacks are the largest minority group.

In terms of joblessness, among the states in question, South Carolina had the highest unemployment rate in November 2008 at 8.9%, followed by Georgia (7.5%), and Mississippi (7.2%). All three were among the 20 states with the highest unemployment rates, with only Louisiana (5.3%) failing to make the cut. As of March 2009, South Carolina still held the lead with an unemployment rate of 11.4%, followed by Mississippi (9.4%), Georgia (9.2%) and Louisiana (5.8%).

Census data on poverty, reunites all four states in the top twenty, with Mississippi in the number one position with the largest percentage of people living below the poverty level (20.5), followed by Louisiana (18.6) in the number two spot, South Carolina (15.0) at no. 12, and Georgia (14.3) at no. 13. Breaking state poverty data down by ethnicity, reveals higher poverty rates among blacks than among whites in all four states. In Mississippi, the rate of poverty among African-Americans is 43.6%, compared to 16.1 % for whites. In Louisiana it's 42.1%, compared with 13.1% for whites. In Georgia it's 31.3%, compared with 10.7% for whites. In South Carolina it's 30.6%, compare with 12.5% for whites.

Taken together, the data suggests not only that southern Republican governors' refusal of stimulus funds (not to mention Republicans' opposition to and efforts to kill the stimulus) would have a devastating impact on the growing ranks of the unemployed and those living in poverty, but that African-Americans are likely to be disproportionately represented among in both categories, and therefore disproportionately impacted.

And African-Americans in these states know it, and experience a lot of anxiety as a result.

Almost two of every three black Southerners are worried they could lose their jobs this year in what they see as a deteriorating economy, according to a Winthrop University/ETV poll.

Just under 62 percent of black Southerners polled Feb. 6-22 in South Carolina and 10 other Southern states said they were very or somewhat concerned about the possibility of losing their job in the next year.

That concern is far higher than in the U.S. population as a whole.

...South Carolina’s unemployment rate was 9.5 percent in December, the most recent month for which figures are available.

The state’s unemployment rate is the third-highest in the country.

In 2008, South Carolina’s monthly unemployment rate averaged 6.7 percent. The black unemployment rate was higher, averaging 10.1 percent.

In each of the 11 states polled, the black jobless rate was significantly higher than the unemployment rate of the state as a whole.

From their communities, they hear America's economy coughing and sneezing, and know that whatever is ailing the overall economy, they're likely to catch it too — only much worse.

Despite all of the above, when Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) grabbed a handful of elephant, people were somewhat shocked when he announced that the huge, unseen/unrecognized creature in the room might be an elephant.

The highest-ranking black congressman said Thursday that opposition to the federal stimulus package by southern GOP governors is "a slap in the face of African-Americans." U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said he was insulted when the governors of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and his home state, which have large black populations, said they might not accept some of the money from the $787 billion stimulus package.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Wednesday he would accept the money, and none of the others has rejected it outright. The Republican governors of Idaho and Alaska also said they had reservations about whether the money would come with too many strings attached, but Clyburn said he was particularly taken aback by southern governors who said they might decline it.

"These four governors represent states that are in the proverbial black belt," Clyburn said.

The response, predictably, was swift. A spokesperson for South Carolina's Republican governor accused Clyburn of "playing the race card," which was followed similar responses from the governors of Mississippi and Louisiana (the latter, Bobby Jindall, is the son of Indian immigrants), that their opposition to the stimulus was not racially motivated. Other conservatives pointed out that Idaho governor Butch Otter and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, both states with very small African-American populations, refuted Clyburn's "black belt" statement.

Finally, Clyburn himself found it necessary to walk back from his earlier statements, telling the media (through a spokesperson) that he didn't mean that the governors' decisions were racially motivated, but that their opposition to the stimulus would hurt African-Americans in their states.

But Clyburn wasn't wrong. African American residents in those southern states are likely to be among those most in need of the services and opportunities stimulus funds might provide. The governors' decisions to refuse stimulus funds is to abandon both poor and African-American residents of their states in the face of an economic downturn that hits them harder than the general population, in the same way that victims of Katrina were abandoned in the hurricane's aftermath.

The decisions of those southern governors, may not have been directly motivated by race, but it's doubtful that those governors are completely ignorant of the data on race, joblessness, and poverty in their states, or the impact of their decisions on poor and African-American residents in their states. (Though a now-former Republican governor of Texas managed to remain unaware of, and to even deny the reality of hunger statistics in his state.) And their decisions are in keeping with a history of southern state governments' policy-making in matters just like the economic downturn and the stimulus, that — due to the demographics of their states — would have negative impacts on many African-Americans residents.

Not just that, but their decisions extend and perpetuate conditions that have deep, but too often unacknowledged, roots in the history of race in their states and in this country. And that's what Clyburn came dangerously close to addressing too openly.

Someone has been lifting their blindfold. You see, in some versions of the parable above, the men are not truly blind, but blinded, or blindfolded by their teacher before encountering the elephant. They need only remove their blindfolds to see it clearly.

But when the elephant in the room is race, our blindfolds usually stay pretty firmly in place. They had better, as another public figure found out when he grabbed a handful of elephant himself, and attempted to lift not just his blindfold, but everyone else's too.

390 Years Minus 100 Days, Pt. 2

Terrance Heath — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:02:10 -0400

National Urban League head Mark Morial recently described the state of black America today as "the best of times and the worst of times." He's right.

The inauguration of the first African-American president was a moment worth celebrating as an undeniable example of the progress we've made regarding race. Many African-Americans from communities across the county traveled to D.C. to witness the moment. Even more of us gathered around radios, television screens and computer monitors.

It was a brief respite, savored for as long as the day lasted, and then we all returned home, or turned off the television and returned to reality. For reality the day before and the day after was, and remains, an indicator of how far we are from "the Dream" so often referenced on that day. For just as much as "everything changed" for African Americans on that day, at the same time nothing changed, as one article noted days before Obama's inauguration.

Nothing will change for black Americans on Tuesday, when the first black president takes office. They will wake up in the same homes, go to work at the same jobs, face the same obstacles.

Just a month after Barack Obama's inauguration, the State of the Dream 2009 report revealed that Black Americans are, in this economy, experiencing a "Silent Depression," based on the following findings:

Almost 12% of Blacks are unemployed; this is expected to increase to nearly 20% by 2010. Among young Black males aged 16-19, the unemployment rate is 32.8%, while their white counterparts are at 18.3%.
Overall, 24% of Blacks and 21% of Latinos are in poverty, versus 8% of whites.
The median household incomes of Blacks and Latinos are $38,269 and $40,000, respectively, while the median household income of whites is $61,280.
Nearly 30% of Blacks have zero or negative worth, versus 15% of whites.
On the median, for every dollar of white wealth, people of color have 15 cents. On average, people of color have 8 cents for every dollar of white wealth.

Click the logo for more views on President Obama's first 100 days and the road ahead.

As the Obama administration neared its 100-day mark, the National Urban League published its State of Black America report, examining black progress in education, home ownership, entrepreneurship, health, other areas, and including a message to the president. The report features an Equality Index, a statistical measurement of the status of blacks compared with whites, and while the change in the index — from71.5% in 2008 to 71.1% in 2009 — reflects a continuation of the status quo, it is a status quo defined by disparity, as Morial mentioned in his remarks on the report.

Obama's historic election is a "story of accomplishment, prosperity and increased political power," Morial writes in the forward to the annual study. Yet the "other story is very different," and statistics bear that out.

Morial said the state of black America "is the best of times and the worst of times."

Fewer than 50 percent of African-Americans graduate from high school, prisons are disproportionately populated by black men and there are wide educational achievement gaps along racial lines.

"Taken together, these facts underscore the reality that the election of the first black president does not mean we can now all close up shop and go home," Morial writes.

The report also points that, ironically, that even as an African-American holds the highest office in the country, African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed, and three times more likely to live in poverty.

There are other disparities and signs that, as far as we've come, we've a ways yet to go, such as:

heavier jobs loses for black men, and employment rate has dropped 7.8% since November 2007;
the rise in school segregation, as black and Hispanic students are more separate from white students than at any point since the civil rights moment;
tougher economic times for black colleges , where many students require some form of financial aid continue their education, and
health issues such as racial disparities in cancer treatment, and higher rate of heart disease in young African-African Americans, both related in part to a lack of health insurance, less access to quality health care, and socioeconomic factors.

It's long been said that when the U.S. economy catches a cold, Black America gets pneumonia, and in the current economic downturn the diagnosis is more severe than the common cold, and the symptoms are hitting African Americans just a bit harder. Job loss is taking a greater toll among African Americans, causing many to lose ground only recently gained.

Nationally, the picture for blacks is even worse. The overall unemployment rate for blacks in February climbed to 13.4%, while the rate for black men reached 16.3%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"Last hired, first fired" is an old adage in the African American community. Factory hands and the unskilled have long been whipsawed by the economy's downturns. Now layoffs are beginning to reach a once fast-growing cohort of black professionals, managers and government workers, including many who overcame discrimination and limited economic and educational opportunities to win quality jobs.

While the recession has touched virtually every industry, it has battered traditional strongholds of black employment and is threatening such secure bastions as public education and government services.

Nationally, the troubled auto industry, which has been particularly welcoming to African Americans, has slashed tens of thousands of high-paying, unionized positions. Retail, services and manufacturing, which disproportionately hire blacks, have slumped.

The growing layoffs among higher-paid African Americans and steep foreclosure rates in their neighborhoods are dealing a crippling blow to the nation's black middle class, community leaders say.

And this is in an economy where the first generation to achieve middle class status is having trouble passing the benefits on to their children.

Nearly half of African Americans born to middle-income parents in the late 1960s plunged into poverty or near-poverty as adults, according to a new study — a perplexing finding that analysts say highlights the fragile nature of middle-class life for many African Americans.

Overall, family incomes have risen for both blacks and whites over the past three decades. But in a society where the privileges of class and income most often perpetuate themselves from generation to generation, black Americans have had more difficulty than whites in transmitting those benefits to their children.

This troubling picture of black economic evolution is contained in a package of three reports being released today by the Pew Charitable Trusts that test the vitality of the American dream. Using a nationally representative data source that for nearly four decades has tracked people who were children in 1968, researchers attempted to answer two questions: Do Americans generally advance beyond their parents in terms of income? How much is that affected by race and gender?

The crisis in the auto industry, and the plight of African American dealers in particular illustrates the circumstances many African Americans are facing in this economy, as their first foothold in the American Middle class crumbles away.

Since the 1970s, General Motors has led the way in providing opportunities for minorities to own car dealerships. The automaker pioneered special training programs and put money behind candidates for new dealerships.

Now, after almost four decades of slow but steady progress, minority dealers are increasingly worried that the latest wave of GM cuts could erode any gains. As part of its latest restructuring, GM yesterday said it planned to slash about 2,600, or 40 percent, of its 6,200 dealerships. GM currently has about 240 minority dealers.

...Even during good times, minority dealers struggled. Their problems have centered around insufficient capital and being placed in poor locations by the companies. The recession has brought on plummeting sales and tight credit markets, exacerbating the dealers' troubles.

Peggy Cockerham, the African American owner of Franklin Pontiac-Buick-GMC outside Nashville, said minorities are having increasing difficulty finding capital to keep their businesses afloat through rocky economic periods.

"Minority dealers don't have the second-generation and third-generation dollars they can pull from," Cockerham said. "After all this is done, the opportunities will remain with the same group of old-line wealthy dealers. Unless we are very careful — unless we get manufacture support — we will eliminate our minority dealers."

So, what's to be done? How much can be done? How much should be done? And by whom? How these questions are answered depends upon everything from political philosophy to historical perspective, both of which collide at the present point, where the gains made by African-Americans since landing on this continent just shy of 400 years ago — from "boy" to Mr. President, from "girl" to "First Lady," and from owned assets to finally owning assets — are at once reflected in White House, and being reversed in African-American homes, neighborhoods and communities.

It's at that collision of politics, history and present reality that we'll have to answer these questions and create solutions to all of the above (and more), if we are to make it the rest of the way to the America that many have believed and many of us still do believe can be.

But first, we have to have a more honest discussion about race in America. And, if we are only part of the way towards being the kind of country that Martin Luther King and so many others dreamed of — believed in with an intensity that propelled towards being the kind of country that would elect a Barack Obama to the presidency — we are still clearly only part of the way towards having that most necessary discussion.

We're are further along than we were, but we haven't yet gone far enough. The question is: Why?

390 Years Minus 100 Days, Pt. 1

Terrance Heath — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:04:57 -0400

Many people — including the president himself — have mentioned the absurdity of judging Obama's success at cleaning up messes that were decades in the making, based on his first 100 days in office. It's equally absurd to expect the first 100 days in the administration of our first African American president to change 390 years of racial history in this country. But it's at least an opportunity to assess where we really are, where we're headed, and how far we've yet to go.

Racism and the social construct of race itself are much older than the United States, with deep roots European colonialism. But its beginnings in this continent can be traced back to August of 1619, when the first Africans in America — 20 or so, stolen from a Spanish ship — were traded for food by a ship's captain, upon arrival at the Jamestown colony, in Virginia. Categorized as "indentured servants," but without vital dates indicating the end of their bondage, some were almost certainly slaves. By 1640, as least one African was listed as a slave, and slavery was underway.

The space between here and there is covered by enough history books to fill entire libraries. Suffice it to say that the election of a person such as Barack Obama reflects much that has changed for the better since then. The spectacle of our first African-American president, though not a descendant of slaves himself, being sworn in on the Lincoln bible — held by his wife, who is a descendant of slaves — was a "pinch me" moment for many of us. Reality, on that day, took on a dreamlike quality.

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As I watched the inauguration from home, sitting on the carpet in our family room with our two sons — both African-American — I looked up at my bookshelf. There, pictures of my father and grandfather seemed be to looking down at the scene. I sensed a division in time was born at that moment. On one side was the America they'd known all their lives. On the other, my family and I — along with the everyone else — were carried along by history into an America forever changed by what was unfolding before our eyes.

The past 100 days in this new America revealed how much has changed. There have been a surprising number of moments, days, and even weeks — many of them consecutive — during which Obama was not "the black president" but just the president, whose policies don't necessarily satisfy everyone, and irritate some, but whose missteps or debatable decisions are not attributed to on his race.

Not even three months have passed since President Obama's historic inauguration, and already it tends to slip the nation's collective mind that the first black president of the United States is, in fact, black. There may be hope for us after all.

In the cacophonous commentary about the president — he's a breath of fresh air, he's too liberal, he's too moderate, he's being far too generous to the banks, he's some kind of closet socialist, he's restoring the nation to greatness, he's leading us to perdition — it's striking how seldom race is mentioned as an issue or even an attribute. That's only natural, since race could hardly be more irrelevant to the multitude of urgent problems Obama wrestles with every day. Watching him in action, as he shoves out the chief executive of General Motors or exchanges small talk with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, we witness a daily demonstration of the irrelevance of race. And that, potentially, is nothing short of transformative.

There's evidence that the transformation continues. Despite criticism that he hasn't engaged enough in or attempted to lead the "national discussion on race," Barack Obama has altered the course of that discussion, and altering the public perception of race relations — with nearly two thirds of Americans, and twice as many blacks saying race relations are good, according to a recent poll — simply by being the president. First Lady Michelle Obama has made an impression as well. Pegged as a potential "loose cannon," race-baited, and stereotyped as an "angry black woman" during the campaign, Michelle Obama proved one of the campaign's best assets and most popular surrogates. She now enjoys a higher approval rating (79%) than her husband (65%).

I get the sense that the Obamas know more will be conveyed by the way in which they carry out their new roles, than any amount of discussion. As Obama's campaign could not be about race neither can his presidency. At some point, he decided he was running to be president, not "the black president." What's most significant is that, finally, a candidate such as Obama could run for president, and not just to be "the black president."

Obama's candidacy and electoral victory both raised the bar for African Americans, and placed it within reach. My six-year-old son was excited about Obama's campaign from the moment I told him what it would mean if Obama won. The best I could do was to say that it would be the first time "someone who looks like you or like Daddy"" would be president. Fortunately, he didn't ask why it would be first time or what took so long, sparing me the task of having to explain racism to my child. For now. But Obama has changed that conversation already, because I can say to my son "You could be the president, if you want be," and point to Obama as an example.

For the record, Parker has no plans on a political career right now. He doesn't like being in the spotlight and having all eyes on him. He says he doesn't want to be president, because "the president has to give too many speeches in front of people." But then he considers his 15-month-old little brother and says "Dylan could be the president!" And maybe he could, now. The ceiling on my sons' aspirations was raised on January 20th, as it was for many African-Americans.

Nothing will change for black Americans on Tuesday, when the first black president takes office. They will wake up in the same homes, go to work at the same jobs, face the same obstacles.

And yet, some Triangle residents say, everything will be different. Many say that Obama's success has prompted them to re-examine what is possible in their own lives, or given them a nudge to pursue ambitious goals.

Many also say they have hopes that their children and grandchildren — whose history books will forever be changed — will see their horizons differently. They will never look at a black candidate for president and think that the color of his skin will assure loss.

Much changed for the better on day one of Obama's "first 100 days" as president. It was a brief respite. For reality the day before and the day after was, and remains, an indicator of how far we are from "The Dream" so often referenced on that day.

In the journey from the America that was to the America that will be, 390 years minus 100 days, is a good start. But only just a start.

What The Right, And The Left, Doesn't Get About Race

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:10:55 -0400

A New York Times/CBS News poll this week suggests the nation's racial climate has been dramatically changed by the election of America's first biracial president, with an apparently record high 66 percent of Americans saying race relations are good. But don't think that because people are feeling more positive about race relations that we are entering an era where we can begin to treat race is irrelevant.

Quite the contrary, says john a powell, the director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, who warns in an interview with me that progressives as well as conservatives are badly misreading the racial landscape that the country has entered in the age of President Obama.

powell is leading a new organization, Americans for American Values, that will look at the nation's continuing racial disparities from a different angle from how it has been frequently addressed. While much of the debate around race has focused on conscious attitudes (which is what was being measured by the Times/CBS poll) and behavior, Americans for American Values will focus on unconscious bias and how that bias affects our educational, economic and social institutions.

"The research shows that unconscious bias is actually fairly high throughout the whole population. And it can be manipulated, or influenced, by the showing of images, telling of stories, hearing certain buzzwords," powell says in the interview. This bias affects individual behavior and, from a public policy perspective, leads us to embrace and adopt policies and programs that end up having a racially disparate effect, even if that effect was unintended. "We need to be aware that we can be biased and that can affect our behavior even when we don't want to be," powell says.

powell calls the "practices, cultural norms, and institutional arrangements" that grow out of this bias "racialization," and wrote about its implications in detail in an article published in the Denver University Law Review. He uses the term, he wrote in the article, because "the language of race and racism is understood in a way that is too limited and specific to help us acquire greater insight into the important questions posed" by today's racial realities in America.

Progressives, powell says, are as susceptible to accepting racialization as conservatives. "The failure to actually embrace race in a constructive, much more sophisticated way is one of the great failures of the progressive movement," he says.

It is not enough to pursue "race-neutral" policies or to use proxies for race, such as poverty, powell says. For example, in the absence of structural changes in patterns and practices that leave African Americans and women underrepresented in construction trades, the money in the economic recovery bill that is now being poured into infrastructure projects will invariably end up benefiting whites and males more than African Americans and females, powell says.

Americans for American Values will operate under the auspices of the Institute for America's Future and will conduct research into how racialization influences policy and how policies can be changed so that they are more fair and address continuing racial inequities. The project is supported by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

powell will be a speaker at the America's Future Now! conference in Washington June 1-3.

"What we want to do is help America to understand how race continues to operate—in interesting ways and in measurable ways—and undermine our values" of "a racially fair and racially inclusive society," powell says.