“Common Victims”: Movements For Racial Justice And Economic Justice Could Converge To Form A Powerhouse For Change
What happens to a dream deferred?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
That was the poet Langston Hughes, in 1951. In that year, more than half a century ago, the most basic dreams of African Americans were deferred. Segregation was mandatory in the old South. Discrimination was legal everywhere in America, whether in housing, education, or employment. Blacks were not just separated, but isolated, marginalized, restricted to the worst jobs and most dilapidated neighborhoods, the most dismal schools.
For many, the racism just sagged, like a heavy load. It destroyed hope that hard work would be rewarded. The deferred dreams of that era seldom produced explosions, because the state had a very efficient system of terror. Blacks who resisted were likely to be lynched, jailed, or otherwise destroyed.
It is a testament to sheer grit, tenacity and courage that large numbers of blacks managed to get educations, raise families, start businesses, and enter professions at all—and demand inclusion in civic life.
The next 20 years were almost miraculous. From the small beginnings of local bus boycotts and sit-ins came the transformation of civil rights laws, finally giving African Americans full civic and legal equality, a hundred years after Lincoln.
The progress of the 1960s reflected a combination of the courage of the civil rights movements, the alliance with decent whites, and the leadership of an accidental president. Lyndon Johnson was able to prick the conscience of just enough of white America, to cajole and pressure just enough legislators, and to make a startling alliance between the White House and the radicals in the streets.
If you have never read or watched LBJ’s “We Shall Overcome” speech, you have missed a key moment in American history.
It helped that the economy was booming, so that economic progress for blacks did not equate to explicit sacrifices for whites (though whites did have to give up their role as a privileged caste). It helped that there were still liberal Republicans in that era, without whom none of the great civil rights laws could have passed.
So here we are, approaching Christmas 2014. Racism still taints the American dream. And unlike, say, in 1964 when there was a sense of a movement on the march with history on its side, it is hard to summon up optimism.
It is one thing when the government decrees that blacks can’t vote, can’t patronize restaurants, can’t apply for good jobs. That sort of racism shames everyone.
But when cops brutalize young black men, and prosecutors wink, and grand juries refuse to indict, that sort of racism is deeper in the social fabric and much harder to explicitly root out. It is encouraging to see outraged citizens on the march again, heartening that the marches includes whites as well as blacks and other groups.
Yet what sort of movement, what sort of policies, what sort of majority support in the country can we imagine that will fix what is broken?
New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio, whose bi-racial son Dante sports an Afro, has spoken of the need to “literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.” That comment provoked outrage from the police.
Sunday, speaking on the ABC News program This Week DeBlasio threaded his way between outrage and support for law enforcement, declaring:
We have to retrain police forces in how to work with communities differently. We have to work on things like body cameras that would provide different level of transparency and accountability. This is something systemic. And we bluntly have to talk about the historic racial dynamics underlie this.
There have, in fact, been moments when thoroughly racist local police departments have been made over to discard their worst racist practices. The Los Angeles Police Department, after decades of strife and civic reform, is better than it once was. But it took a consent agreement with the Justice Department and five years of direct federal supervision.
President Obama, who did manage to summon up some outrage in the Trayvon Martin murder (“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”), has been relatively circumspect, appealing both for reform and for order. He is not close to calling for federal supervision of local police.
Obama is no LBJ. And in fairness to Obama, in the absence of stronger public demands, the federal government is not well-positioned to remake local grand juries and police departments.
We have gone utterly backwards since the 1960s, a time when the Justice Department and the courts vigorously interceded to protect the right to vote. Now, the right to vote is being taken away and rightwing courts are tying the Justice Department’s hands.
We need a broad movement once again, to force government’s hand. As Dr. King appreciated in the last year of his life, it needs to be a movement for economic justice as well as civil rights, a multi-racial movement. Only when there is common appreciation that whites and blacks are common victims of an economic system that delivers all the gains to the top do we have a prayer of mobilizing the whole nation to demand action.
By: Robert Kuttner, Co-Editor, The American Prospect, December 10, 2014
“Racism Is As American As The Fourth Of July”: Despite Progress On Racism, The Uncomfortable Truth Is That Work Remains
President Obama’s observation that racism is “deeply rooted” in U.S. society is an understatement. Racism is as American as the Fourth of July, and ignoring this fact doesn’t make it go away.
These truths, to quote a familiar document, are self-evident. Obama made the remark in an interview with Black Entertainment Television, telling the network’s largely African American audience something it already knew. The president’s prediction that racism “isn’t going to be solved overnight” also came as no surprise.
Right-wing media outlets feigned shock and outrage. But their hearts didn’t seem to be in it. Not after Ferguson and Staten Island. Not after the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland. These recent atrocities prompted Obama’s comments.
“This is something that is deeply rooted in our society. It’s deeply rooted in our history,” the president said, in excerpts of the interview that were released Sunday. “You know, when you’re dealing with something that’s as deeply rooted as racism or bias in any society, you’ve got to have vigilance but you have to recognize that it’s going to take some time, and you just have to be steady so that you don’t give up when we don’t get all the way there.”
Patience and persistence are virtues. As Obama well knows, however, we’ve already been at this for nearly 400 years.
The election in 2008 of the first black president was an enormous milestone, something I never dreamed would happen in my lifetime. Obama’s reelection four years later was no less significant — a stinging rebuke to those who labored so hard to limit this aberration to one term.
But no one should have expected Obama to magically eliminate the racial bias that has been baked into this society since the first Africans were brought to Jamestown in 1619. The stirring words of the Declaration of Independence — “all men are created equal” — were not meant to apply to people who look like me. The Constitution specified that each slave would count as three-fifths of a person. African Americans were systematically robbed of their labor — not just before the Civil War but for a century afterward, through Jim Crow laws and other racist arrangements. Blacks were deliberately denied opportunities to obtain education and accumulate wealth.
You knew all of this, of course. I recite it here because there are those who would prefer to forget.
A Bloomberg poll released Sunday found that 53 percent of those surveyed believe race relations have worsened “under the first black president,” while only 9 percent believe they have improved. A 2012 Associated Press poll found that 51 percent of Americans had “explicit anti-black attitudes” — up from 48 percent four years earlier, before Obama took office. All this makes me wonder whether, for many people, Obama’s presidency may be serving as an uncomfortable reminder of the nation’s shameful racial history.
Then again, it may be that having a black family in the White House just drives some people around the bend. Why else would a congressional aide viciously attack the president’s daughters, ages 16 and 13, by telling them via Facebook to “dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at a bar”? The scold apologized and resigned, perhaps without fully knowing why she felt compelled to go there in the first place. For some people, it doesn’t matter what the Obamas do or don’t do. Their very presence is inexcusable. There’s something alien about them; their teenage girls can’t just be seen as teenage girls.
We already know, from painful experience, how our society looks upon black teenage boys.
After reminding the nation that racism exists, Obama went on to express optimism. “As painful as these incidents are, we can’t equate what is happening now to what was happening 50 years ago,” he said. “And if you talk to your parents, grandparents, uncles, they’ll tell you that things are better — not good, in some cases, but better.”
Of course, that’s true. But it would be a betrayal of the brave men and women who fought and died during the civil rights movement to lose our sense of urgency when so much remains to be done.
U.S. neighborhoods and schools remain shockingly segregated. Jobs have abandoned many inner-city communities. The enormous wealth gap between whites and blacks has increased since the onset of the “Great Recession.” Black boys and men wear bull’s-eyes on their backs.
Whatever Obama says about race, or doesn’t say about race, somebody’s going to be angry. He should just speak from the heart — and tell the uncomfortable truth.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 9, 2014
“The Color Blind Lie”: The Same Lie White Racists Have Been Telling Themselves For Centuries
I grew up mostly in East Texas. To give you an idea of the politics of the area, I lived in the district that is currently represented by Louie Gohmert. During that time, I knew all of two black people – my grandmothers’ maids.
When I was about 10 years old, a group of black men in Jonesboro, LA (less than 150 miles from where I lived) organized Deacons for Defense and Justice – eventually sparking a showdown with the KKK that resulted in federal intervention on behalf of local African Americans. I never heard a word about it until I watched the movie – Deacons for Defense – a few years ago.
That’s how I was trained to literally be color blind.
I thought of that when I read this interaction Molly Ball had with former Louisiana Governor Mike Foster about why southern whites are leaving the Democratic Party.
“I don’t think it’s racial,” Mike Foster, the Republican former two-term governor of Louisiana, now 84 and retired, tells me, without my having asked…”You know, the races have gotten along down here for years. Look at what’s happening in Ferguson right now. We don’t have a bunch of people running out in the street hollering about that.”
“I think what has changed it is that this is a hardworking state. People work hard, and they really don’t take to people who are on the dole,” he continued. “You’d better not be supporting people who are sitting on their front porch while I’m trying to work! You drive around these small communities, you see a lot of able-bodied people sitting around, when you know there’s work to be had …. That’s the only thing I can figure. This part of the country, people have been raised by families who worked very, very hard. But now we’ve got a president who loves to sit down every day and see how much he can give away of what they make.”
Those sentiments aren’t new. We heard pretty much the same thing from Duck Dynasty’s Phil Roberts about the Jim Crow era in Louisiana.
I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field …. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word! … Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.
If I had the patience to do the research, I’m sure I could find quotes from plantation master’s who also claimed their slaves were “happy slaves.” Its all part of the same lie white racists have been telling themselves for centuries.
And it leads right into the lie that – while those black people were happy when they were slaves/terrorized by Jim Crow – now they’re all just sitting on their porches collecting goodies from the black guy in the White House while the rest of us white folks work hard (could Lee Atwater have summed up the Southern Strategy any better?)
Nope, nothing racial about that at all.
Pundits all over the spectrum are suggesting that Democrats need to reach out to people like this. Until they can identify their self-interests in a form other than these racist lies, I’m not sure that’s going to be possible.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, December 7, 2014
“The Good Ol’ Boys Roundup”: It’s Not Just The Cops—Racism Is A Problem For The Secret Service, Too
The track record of the U.S. Secret Service in protecting President Barack Obama has come under intense scrutiny in recent months due to several major security lapses, the most recent of which prompted the resignation in October of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson.
A recently released Department of Homeland Security report about that incident determined that a number of “performance, organizational, technical and other” factors contributed to the security breach.
What is not mentioned in that DHS report is another long-running issue within the Secret Service—one which, according to several experts, creates the conditions for a breakdown in agency morale that could ultimately compromise the security of President Obama. That threat is embodied in a long-running lawsuit filed by a group of African-American Secret Service agents who allege the agency’s culture is replete with racism.
In September, a man with a knife scaled a fence and ran into the White House, making it as far as the East Room—it was this incident that prompted the report by DHS, which oversees the Secret Service. That same month, however, in Atlanta, the media reported that an armed security contractor with an arrest record was somehow allowed to ride in the same elevator as President Obama.
Those incidents echo an even more serious security breach that played out in 2011, when a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle managed to fire some seven bullets into the White House while one of the president’s daughters was home and the other expected to return that same evening—yet it allegedly took the Secret Service four days to determine the shots had been unleashed on the president’s home.
“If the black Secret Service agents’ legal claims related to racism in the agency are true, then there is a threat to the president’s security because he is a black man,” says Matthew Fogg, a retired chief deputy U.S. Marshal who in 1998 won a multimillion-dollar jury verdict in a racial discrimination lawsuit filed against his agency. “If they are treating black people differently, then how can that not affect the president?”
Fogg also is party to one of two pending class-action discrimination cases filed by black federal agents against the U.S. Marshals Service. The mere fact that the most qualified agents are not getting promoted within an agency due to racial factors—as is alleged in both the the Secret Service and U.S. Marshals litigation—indicates, Fogg says, that race is an issue in the quality of protection being provided to individuals, including the president.
Attorney Ronald Tonkin, a former federal prosecutor who now represents federal agents in whistleblower and employment-discrimination cases, says regardless of which side prevails in the Secret Service litigation, both the accused and accusers “are affected” by the resulting tension and polarization.
“These agents are all professionals, but the question is whether their professionalism is dissipated by a perception that they are being treated badly,” said Tonkin, who also serves as associate counsel for the National Association of Federal Agents. “It does, in my experience, have an effect on agency morale, and that affects performance at some level.”
The black Secret Service agents’ litigation, certified as a class-action lawsuit last year, has been pending in federal court since 2000 due to numerous procedural delays. It alleges that black agents, as a group, have been systematically discriminated against in hiring, assignments, transfer, awards, promotions and discipline.
“The Secret Service has failed to protect its African-American special agents from racial discrimination in virtually every aspect of their employment,” the black agents’ pleadings in the case allege. “Discrimination against African-American agents in the Secret Service has become part of the fabric of the agency and has spanned several decades.”
A complaint filed by the 10 black agents who are named plaintiffs in the class-action suit points to an event held in southeastern Tennessee called the “Good Ol’ Boys Roundup,” which was made public in the mid-1990s via media reports but had been staged annually since 1980.
“The racist conduct that occurred at the Roundup included the posting of racist signs like ‘Nigger checkpoint,’ a simulated lynching of a black man from a tree, and a host of racist skits and songs,” the complaint alleges. “Officials at the Secret Service knew about this event, and at least 30 Secret Service agents were documented attending the event. … Many of the white special agents who attended the Roundup were promoted to high-ranking positions in the Secret Service, including three agents who became SAICs [special agents in charge] of field offices … and two agents who were promoted to the Senior Executive Service level.”
Reginald Moore, special agent in charge of the Secret Service’s Atlanta field office, and a party to the black agents’ class-action lawsuit, declined to comment on the case or any potential threat to the president due to the alleged racism within the agency. Likewise, Angela Burns-Ramirez, a former Secret Service special agent who has an individual racial-discrimination complaint pending in federal court against the agency, declined to comment on the advice of her attorney. A primary allegation in her lawsuit, which mirrors claims raised in the Secret Service class-action litigation, is that she “has been treated differently and subjected to different terms and conditions of her employment due to her race (African American).
“Despite being established in 1865, the first African-American female was not promoted to a GS-14 [supervisory] position until 2001,” Burns-Ramirez’ court pleadings state. “Only five African-American females hold a rank higher than GS-14 within the Secret Service.”
Brian Leary, a spokesman for the Secret Service, declined to discuss the black agents’ class-action lawsuit or the impact their allegations might be having on the agency. “We aren’t commenting due to the ongoing nature of the lawsuit,” he said.
Professor Richard Delgado, the John J. Sparkman Chair of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law, warns that it would be a mistake to discount the effect that racism can have on an institution and its ability to function effectively. Delgado is a leading scholar in the field of Critical Race Theory, which focuses on the ways in which racism is embedded historically in the nation’s laws and legal system.
When racist activity is claimed, “it creates a terrible environment for both sides of the color line,” Delgado explained.
“For the minority agents who feel discriminated against, they feel unappreciated and develop a defensive attitude at best,” Delgado added. “Many of their white colleagues see the minority agents as troublemakers scheming to get ahead, talking to lawyers.
“Both sides are certain they are right, and it’s a recipe for morale problems or worse. It can lead to inattention on the job or even small acts of sabotage designed to make someone look bad.”
Delgado said he would not want to be “a federal official with an agency in that state charged with looking after my back.”
The solution in such a case, he said, isn’t simply to ask people to set aside their animosities, because “that doesn’t work.”
“The best course is to arrange a lot of contact early in life, so that blacks, whites and Latinos get to know each other and see we’re all humans with a range of behaviors and character, some good and some bad,” Delgado stressed.
“And these agencies should be screening people early, before they are hired, to determine if they, regardless of color, have the right attitudes and ability to work well in diverse groups.”
By: Bill Conroy, The Daily Beast, December 6, 2014
“Two Grand Juries, The Same Disappointing Result”: The Criminal Justice System Is One Of The Last Bastions Of Blatant Racism
No expressions of sympathy or regret can resurrect Eric Garner, the New York City man killed by police in July. Garner died after an officer placed him in what appears to be a chokehold during an arrest for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes, an offense not usually regarded as a capital crime.
But, at the very least, officer Daniel Pantaleo (or his representatives) showed a spark of decency after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict him for any crime. “I feel very bad about the death of Mr. Garner,” he said in a statement. “My family and I include him and his family in our prayers and I hope that they will accept my personal condolences for their loss.”
That’s just one contrast to events in Ferguson, Missouri, where Officer Darren Wilson showed no hint of sympathy for teenager Michael Brown or his family. “I don’t think it’s haunting. It’s always going to be something that happened,” Wilson said in a televised interview.
There were other equally stark contrasts. While Brown’s response to Wilson will always be the subject of dispute, bystanders recorded video of Garner’s arrest and posted it on the Internet, where it went viral. There is no disputing Garner’s tragic last words as Pantaleo’s arm lingers around his neck: “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” Even Fox News’ bellicose Bill O’Reilly was moved to observe that Garner “didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
But the greatest contrast between the deaths of Garner and Brown may have been in the reactions of elected and civic leaders. Backed by its politicians, Ferguson’s police force responded to criticism of Brown’s death with excuses, equivocation and armored personnel carriers.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio took to the podium to express sympathy for Garner’s loved ones, and equally important, a simple shared humanity. Compassion. Understanding. Empathy. “This is now a national moment of grief, a national moment of pain,” he said. Members of Congress — liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats — joined to criticize the grand jury’s decision.
That matters. All citizens, regardless of color or creed or religion, want to believe that the people who govern them share their fears, their hopes, their aspirations. Or, at the very least, that their leaders can understand their frustrations.
Even now, that’s not always the case in the United States, especially when it comes to law and order. The criminal justice system is one of the last bastions of blatant racism, a tangled net of explicit prejudices and implicit biases, of rank stereotypes and unfair perceptions, a web that ensnares black men disproportionately. Countless studies conducted by experts have borne out the view held by so many black Americans: We do not stand equally before the bar of justice.
Black motorists are subjected to more traffic stops than white drivers. Black men and women are arrested more often for drug offenses, even though we are no more likely to be drug users than whites. And the use of the death penalty tilts against black defendants and devalues black lives: It is more likely to be meted out if the victim is not white.
Has there been progress? Of course there has. The nation’s top law enforcement official, the attorney general, is a black man. But the nation’s criminal justice system started out in a hellishly low place — where officials were complicit in lynchings, where the wealthy extracted unpaid labor from black men by having them arrested, where black crime victims were ignored. De Blasio referred to that unfortunate history: “We’re not dealing with years of racism leading up to it, or decades of racism — we are dealing with centuries of racism that have brought us to this day.”
For all the striking contrasts between the reactions to the deaths of Brown and Garner, there was one stunning consistency: Grand juries saw no evidence of wrongdoing by a white police officer who killed an unarmed black man. Bear in mind that a New York City medical examiner, citing “compression of his chest and prone position,” ruled Garner’s death a homicide. Still, a Staten Island grand jury found nothing to suggest that Pantaleo committed any criminal offense.
Some things haven’t changed at all.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor, The University of Georgia, School of Journalism; The National Memo, December 6, 2014
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