race relations

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

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 13:10:55 -0700

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.

Where's Our Bailout?

Isaiah J. Poole — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 04:39:27 -0700

Dr. Julianne Malveaux, president of Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C., discusses racial disparities in the American economy and questions why a federal government that rushed to bail out large financial institutions has not done the same to hard-hit, long-depressed communities. She agrees with the theme of an advertising campaign by the Institute for America's Future that calls for "a debate worthy of a great nation in trouble." She was a featured speaker Sept. 18, 2008, at the release in Washington of an Economic Policy Institute report on the economic plight of African Americans. (Flip Video courtesy of the Voter Genome Project.)

Sexism, Racism: What Lies Beneath

Isaiah J. Poole — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 07:53:34 -0700

King's Challenge: Racial Equality With Economic Justice

Isaiah J. Poole — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:53:50 -0700

Forty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., our blog team and progressive allies are reminding the nation of the full extent of his vision. King sought to push the limits of the national debate on economic justice as well as race—and, now more than ever, so must we.

Commentary

• Terrance Heath: "Exhausting Race"
• Jeff Cohen: "King's Voice Still Silenced"
• E.J. Dionne: "Forty Years On"
• Isaiah J. Poole: "Still Far from the Mountaintop"

Video

• Rev. Jesse Jackson, Roger Wilkins and Taylor Branch: "Lessons of King and the Civil Rights Movement"

Forty Years Later, Still Far From the Mountaintop

Isaiah J. Poole — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:14:38 -0700

“You know, Jesus reminded us in a magnificent parable one day that a man went to hell because he didn't see the poor. … And I come by here to say that America, too, is going to hell, if we don't use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she, too, will go to hell.”

You might think those words were recently uttered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama's controversial former pastor, hurled in the latest guilt-by-association attack against the presidential candidate. In fact, that was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., addressing sanitation workers in Memphis just a little more than two weeks before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

This is the Dr. King that the nation tends not to commemorate when we honor his birthday in January, the man who 40 years ago this week was at the side of workers fighting for fair wages and preparing to take his case for economic justice to Washington. Since that battle, his message has too often been scrubbed clean of anything that would hold the nation accountable for making racial equality an economic fact of life.

A report released today by the Service Employees International Union seeks to undo that travesty.The economic implications of King’s movement and message are explored in “Beyond the Mountaintop: King’s Prescription for Poverty,” prepared by the University of California at Berkeley Labor Center and the Howard University Department of Economics.

Podcast

Listen to William Spriggs, Howard University economics department chairman, discuss what he calls the illusion of progress for African Americans 40 years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and what a progressive economic policy true to King's vision would look like.

That report concludes that 40 years after King spoke of a promised land of social and economic justice, “we seem to be paralyzed outside the gates of the city.” It is true that African Americans “have made amazing progress to get where we are. Black educational attainment is three times higher than in 1968, for example. Our out-of-wedlock birthrate has fallen in half. And countless positions of authority—from school boards to political offices to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 corporations—are now filled with black women and men.”

And yet, today African Americans still face what the report calls “a two-dimensional job crisis: high unemployment and low wages.” Four out of 10 black people over the age of 16 were jobless in 2006, the report notes, and 31 percent of black full-time workers earned less than $25,000. Thus, even as the education gap between black people and white people has narrowed dramatically in the past 40 years, the racial economic disparities have not.

The unemployment rate among African Americans today, 7.9 percent, is higher than it was in 1969, when it was 5.3 percent, and in 1999, when it was 6.3 percent. The median income for black men actually fell between 2001 and 2006 in inflation-adjusted terms, from $23,673 to $22,609. Childhood poverty, after being cut in half during the Great Society years of the late 1960s, is now at 32.6 percent, only slightly lower than it was in 1969 and higher than it was in 2000.

The report authors point to three factors: the erosion of civil rights enforcement under the Bush administrations, the decline in the value of the federal minimum wage as it was held to $5.15 an hour through the 1990s until it was finally increased last year (in effect, imposing a one-third cut in the bottom rung of the wage ladder from its value in 1969), and the decline in union representation from 28 percent of the workforce in 1969 to just 12 percent today.

“With weak anti-discrimination enforcement, a declining real minimum wage and falling unionization rates, Dr. King would not find it surprising that poverty rates are stubbornly high even in the face of a growing economy,” the report said.

An economic justice agenda that would address the continued economic crisis in African-American communities and would be true to the spirit of King, the report concludes, would generate full employment, fight discrimination, protect workers’ freedom of association and right to join a union, and raise the minimum wage so that it keeps pace with prices.

William E. Spriggs, chairman of the economics department at Howard University, said that the focus on pathologies in the African-American community, while it has its place, must not be allowed to distract from structural problems in the economy, such as the fact that minimum wage workers today, who make $5.85 an hour, earn a wage that would have been illegal in 1968, when it was, in 2006 dollars, $7.71.

The parable that King referenced in his speech in Memphis was of a beggar named Lazarus who did not receive help from a rich man who passed him every day. The point of the parable, in King’s mind, goes beyond the superficial message that the rich man should have shown kindness to his fellow man in need. “We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace,” King said in a 1967 speech. “But one day we must come to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring."

When the current economic policy debate is placed under the light of that statement, it is clearly found wanting. What we are getting from the major parties is constrained financially by the war in Iraq, which presents the same diversion of resources to an unjust war that Vietnam was for King in 1968, and constrained ideologically by fear of the conservative political machine, which has in many cases worsened America’s race and class disparities but has succeeded in deflecting blame.

Echoing King, Spriggs said that the nation needs an economic plan that doesn’t just give a few coins to beggars along the side of the road but addresses “our responsibility to build a society that would not create beggars along the side of the road.”

An America that commits itself to that ideal is an America worthy of blessing.

Read The Speech

Bill Scher — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:11:50 -0700

Pat Buchanan's latest rantings, put in their place by Isaiah, are merely the starkest evidence of a conservative effort to undermine the objective of Sen. Barack Obama's historic "A More Perfect Union" address, the objective of unity.

Not all conservatives are trying to maintain racial division in the wake of the speech -- Charles Murray, Peggy Noonan and Michael Smerconish have notably praised the address.

But many other conservatives have not just criticized the speech, but willfully ignored key sections of the speech -- apparently in hopes of having white Americans perceive the speech as affixing blame on them.

Of course, the speech does nothing of the sort.

Buchanan whines: "Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America?"

Buchanan doesn't mention that Obama explicitly rejects the chastising of whites for their concerns about crime:

So when [working- and middle-class white Americans are] told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time ... to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns - this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

Several conservative commentators and bloggers have accused Obama for "throwing his grandmother under the bus." Fox News even chopped up that part of the speech, leaving out his expressions of love for his grandmother, to make it appear, according to Time's Joe Klein, that he was accusing his grandmother of being a racist. That's been repeated by conservatives as well.

But the full speech makes it clear. Obama was explaining that having deeply ingrained racial stereotypes bred into you does not make someone an incorrigible racist. That you don't "disown" humans for human flaws that we all have. That we all can change, and America has changed.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer pretends Obama did not answer the question, "why didn't he leave that church?" Or, "If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness?" But the speech addressed that specific question:

Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety - the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity's services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

Which, again, is the part of the point. There's good and bad that has resulted from the black community experience throughout American history, as well as the white community experience. To knee-jerk "disown" and sow further division every time the bad surfaces will not move us toward a more perfect union.

The genius of Obama's speech was the rejection of accusation and and affixing blame, the understanding found in his personal experience in both white and black communities, and emphasis on our common bonds and needs.

But sowing division is what these conservatives are interested in. They don't want you to read the speech. They want you to have a distorted view of the speech. There's no other way to explain the widespread dishonest reaction.

Karl Rove has warned them that the Republican party cannot survive as an all-white party, trying to get conservatives to bend on immigration and to quit bigoted attacks on Obama.

Yet old habits die hard.

NOTE: You may be interested in my bloggingheads.tv discussion with Conn Carroll of the Heritage Foundation, which covers some of the above ground.

Pat Buchanan's Racist Rant

Isaiah J. Poole — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:07:55 -0700

MSNBC has another Imus problem, and his name is Pat Buchanan.

In fact, the racist drivel that Buchanan has recently penned (posted on Human Events, among other places) is arguably more offensive than the insult Don Imus thoughtlessly tossed at the Rutgers University women's basketball team, which eventually led to the simulcast of his syndicated radio show being pulled from MSNBC. Imus, after all, conceded his off-the-cuff comment about "nappy-headed 'hos" was a tasteless joke and profusely apologized. Buchanan's comments are not the fruit of rapid-fire talk show banter but are deliberately chosen written words that read as if they were copied from a white supremacist polemic.

While it is not breaking news that Buchanan is trafficking in KKK talking points, his latest column ought to have rational people on both the left and the right saying enough is enough.

Buchanan writes in response to Sen. Barack Obama's speech on race last week that in the conversation about race, "White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to."

And what does "white America" have to say? According to Buchanan:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

... Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.

He wraps up his column with a set of jaw-droppingly misleading statements about black-on-white crime and "hoaxes" perpetrated by a "Rev. Al" — presumably the Rev. Al Sharpton, who apparently no more merits the courtesy of having his full name published than Sen. Barack Obama, who Buchanan referred to as "Barack."

In Buchanan's world, being an elected United States senator and a presidential candidate does not entitle you the basic courtesy of being called by your first and last name if you fall under the one-drop rule.

AgentX on the African American Opinion blog wrote that "I don't have all night to debunk this entire sack of crap" but his blog has made a start at it. But, more importantly, he publishes the e-mail address of the president of NBC News, State Capus: steve.capus@nbc.com.

"Here's hoping this dinosaur gets put out to pasture," Agent X writes.

In fact, we need to do more than hope for it. We need to insist on it.

Hat tip to Monroe Anderson for his alert on this.

Obama Drama: One Wright Makes a Big Wrong — Obama Needs Counter-Rhetoric

A.F. Cook — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 06:11:10 -0700

From www.redzonepolitics.com/blogitics, Weekly Wrap

Barack Obama took a big perceptual hit this week, as videotape came to light showing his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in full inflammatory, “fire and brimstone” mode. Obama has catapulted himself to the front of the Democratic presidential primary race on his strength as a black candidate who transcends race. As one white male voter told me at an Obama rally in New Hampshire, in contrast to personalities such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Obama “doesn’t shove the race issue down your throat.”

But the rantings of Wright, now retired, present the voting majority — especially whites — with a particular brand of black America that does not translate well beyond the black “choir:” the rageful indignation of cultural victimhood. As I discuss in my book, “Democrats in the Red Zone,” that attitude is politically counterproductive for both blacks and the Democratic Party.

In the videotape, Wright is a poster child for that rageful indignation that comes across to many mainstream voters — white, black and everything in between — as over-the-top and even critical of the American government to the point of seeming unpatriotic.

Addressing one churchgoing audience (which Obama apparently was not part of that day), Wright blasted an American government he paints as dominated by privileged white people whose mission is to keep blacks down: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God bless America’?” Wright rages in the video. “No, no, no. Not God bless America. God damn America.”

It doesn’t matter whether Wright’s words may have spoken to painful truths more Americans should consider. The fact is that his vehement tone — which is apparently standard in black churches, another cultural perception issue that Democrats must deal with — is understood by many people beyond those congregations and communities as incendiary, and therefore threatening.

The airing of this tape, which right-wing talk radio and talk cable are having a field day with — and will no doubt carry on about as long as Obama is a viable candidate — comes on the heels of Michelle Obama’s clumsy statements that she has only recently become “proud” of her country and that America is “downright mean,” among other defects.

Enough about Hillary needing to reign in Bill and Geraldine. Now it’s Obama who needs to reign in his cultural allies — including his wife. By “reigning in,” this is what I mean: Get them behind closed doors and explaining to them the perceptual impact of their words and actions. In any case, many of us might wonder why Obama didn’t switch churches long ago, as soon as he realized that fraternizing with the black victimhood brigade would place his political aspirations at risk. If he underestimated the perceptual liability that association would present, then, much as I hate to admit it, he was being naive.

What a lot of white Obama supporters are telling me is that they don’t understand why he was so close to Wright in the first place. I mean, the guy married the Obamas and baptized their kids, so it’s not like they didn’t know what he was about. Maybe they just got too comfortable in their congregation and, as many of us have done in our personal and professional lives, stayed too long in a counterproductive relationship. The worst part of this issue for Obama is that it goes right to the heart of his biggest selling point: the soundness of his judgment. (OMG — Just as I finished typing that, I heard Juan Willaims say exactly the same thing on Fox News Sunday!)

As a result, Obama now finds himself with a setback on his hands. Not only are whites who support him questioning the wisdom of his personal associations, but whites less inclined to rise above their own prejudices — such as those in Ohio and Pennsylvania who are supporting Clinton in the primaries but who may also plan to support Republican John McCain in the fall — could give Obama even less of a window in which to make his case.

Obama has distanced himself from Wright. He told Keith Olbermann recently that he hadn’t been aware of Wright’s comments in that particular videotape and that he rejected Wright’s sentiments. But the biggest challenge now for the candidate will be to craft rhetoric that openly denounces the kind of black victim mentality that has placed blacks in a perception box against their own, and the Democratic Party’s, broader political interests.

Apart from individuals who are potential political Kryptonite for Obama, those who actually presume to speak for him on the campaign trail need to be given a script and instructed to stick to it under penalty of being yanked from the stage. Michelle Obama, sophisticated as she may be, has shown she’s got some things to learn about the underlying cultural perceptions within the greater American electorate.

This is where the rubber meets the road for the Obamas: individually, as a couple and as a family, they are well aware of the adverse experience that life in America has represented for many black people. Yet they cannot afford to carry the banner of that dissatisfaction with them on the broader American highway.

Obama needs whites to believe he represents a new paradigm — a paradigm that combines optimism, shared responsibility and fairness. This will mean holding blacks equally accountable to whites for their own racism and cultural failings — IN PUBLIC.

It is imperative for the values divide between black and white to be addressed so that the Democratic Party will cease to be hamstrung by those divisions. At the same time, the shared values between blacks and whites must be highlighted. If Obama has the courage to confront blacks on their need not just to demand equal treatment but to behave as equals — with all of the respect for their white fellows that implies — then he can turn the lemon of the Rev. Wright issue into (relative) lemonade.

For more on what drives racial perceptions and how candidates like Obama can help move the country beyond the counterproductive racial status quo, check out my next posting, “Getting’ Real: the Racial Reality Dems Must Face to Change the Political Tide.” This posting features excerpts on race from my book, “Democrats in the Red Zone: an Independent voter’s take on the game of political perception.”

One in Nine: Conservatism's Strange Fruit

Isaiah J. Poole — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 08:54:45 -0800

One in 100 is bad enough. One in nine is a full-blown national tragedy — one aided and abetted by conservative ideology.

You know, if you've read today's headlines, that the "one in 100" figure represents the percentage of American adults now serving time in prison, according to a study by the Pew Center on the States. That figure confirms America's position as the world's No. 1 jailer.

But set aside that figure for a moment. The real number that should shock and appall us is the one in nine figure, as in one in every nine African-American men between the ages of 18 and 34 are in prison.

Let that sink in. Perhaps think of where you live, and think of the young men who are working everywhere from fast-food restaurants to law offices, or who are crowding college campuses. Think of the men working out in the gym or playing on the football field or basketball court. Then imagine what would happen if you snapped your fingers and, suddenly, one in every nine of them disappeared. Think of the disruption to families and communities that would result. Think of the lost talent and the missed opportunities that would inevitably follow.

Join the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Roger Wilkins and Taylor Branch at Take Back America 2008 as they discuss how to bridge the civil rights movement of the 1960s to the challenges of today.

That is what has been happening in the African-American community for years, and the conservative movement has only had three responses: ever-more punitive and racist sentencing practices, cuts in programs that would help change the social and economic climate in African-American communities, and sanctimonious finger-wagging.

It is time the conservative movement was called to account for this.

The nation today faces a situation in which, as the National Urban League stated in a report last year, "African-American men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white males and make only 75 percent as much a year." Further, one on three young African-American males grows up in poverty; only one in 10 young white males do.

This is essentially no different than was the case 35 years ago, when the Nixon administration was implementing the "benign neglect" theory of addressing racial disparities: ignore them and they will go away, at least in the "out-of-sight-out-of-mind" sort of way.

After all, it was conservative ideology, going back to the Nixon years, that reacted against the movement toward racial justice and equality that peaked during the Johnson years by pushing a combination of harsh anti-crime measures and by trying to put the brakes on some of the "Great Society" initiatives born during that period. That effort came to full fruition in the Reagan years, when a burgeoning crack cocaine epidemic in poor communities coincided with an assault on public spending on the underlying social conditions that helped breed the addiction and crime.

Conservatives say now what they've been saying for decades: that spending money on the kinds of programs that will steer young people away from the vortex that will suck them into prison — from after-school education programs to recreation centers to inner-city economic development — "doesn't work." Budget hawks in every conservative White House for the past 30 years have put social programs targeted at inner-city communities under unforgiving magnifying glasses, but applauded every ever-growing dollar spent on imposing harsher sentences and building bigger prisons, no matter how ill-thought-out.

Meanwhile, we hear from conservative leaders the refrain that if African-American families weren't so dysfunctional, and in particular if men stayed home and raised their kids, there would be less crime. When the issue of economic disparities in the African-American community and the percentage of African-American men in jails came up at a Republican presidential debate several months ago, the answer that every candidate immediately jumped to was, as they put it, the broken family structure in African-American communities.

Yet families and communities don't break in a vacuum. And any breakage in the fabric of African-American families and communities is deeply tied only only to America's racist past but to to a continuing series of policies that have resulted in inadequate educational opportunities, a lack of public resources and a continuing drought of economic opportunity.

A real discussion of these issues as they directly relate to the African-American community and their impact on the rest of the country has never been more than lightly touched in the presidential debate this year, even with the presence of an American-American presidential candidate who knows these problems first-hand. Perhaps it is because politicians are being schooled to "move beyond race," as if all of the aftereffects of slavery, segregation, lynchings and massive resistance have finally been erased. Of course, they have not, and our attempts to "move beyond" them only allow these aftereffects to create the kind of waste of both public dollars on "corrections" systems (that ultimately "correct" nothing) and human potential that we are experiencing.

The Take Back America conference this year is an opportunity to change the debate about racial justice in this country, to make it something that we face head-on, not with the folded arms and blame-the-victim rhetoric of conservatism but with a bold agenda for revitalizing communities and creating environments where children and families can see themselves prospering.

Barbara Svedberg

barbsved — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 23:05:51 -0800

Born in Washington DC. Went to grade school and highschool near Pennsylvania Avenue. Worked for USNew and World Report then drama department at University of Virginia. Changed majors at the University of New Mexico to Human relations and studied through drama, literature, psychology, sociology and antropology. SSOC member at UVa. Worked in alternative youth services and learned family counselling. Worked with sexual assault and race relations. Studied for social work exam at WV Wesleyan and worked in child support and custody investigations.
Had an organic farm in WV growing trees. Built a underground shelter with solar electric and own water supply. Moved to Sweden and worked in advocasy for people with psychiatric diagnosis.