“Obligations To Justice”: Eric Holder And Robert F. Kennedy’s Legacy
When he announced his leave-taking last week, Attorney General Eric Holder spoke of Robert F. Kennedy as his inspiration for believing that the Justice Department “can — and must — always be a force for that which is right.”
There are many reasons our nation’s first African American attorney general might see Kennedy as his guide, but this one may be the most important: If ever a public figure was exempt from Holder’s much contested depiction of our country as a “nation of cowards” on race, it was RFK, a man who was in constant struggle with his demons and his conscience.
Few white men were as searing as Kennedy in describing how the world looked to a young black man in the late 1960s. “He is told that the Negro is making progress,” Kennedy wrote, following the racial etiquette of his time. “But what does that mean to him? He cannot experience the progress of others, nor should we seriously expect him to feel grateful because he is no longer a slave, or because he can vote or eat at some lunch counters.”
“How overwhelming must be the frustration of this young man — this young American,” Kennedy continued, “who, desperately wanting to believe and half believing, finds himself locked in the slums, his education second-rate, unable to get a job, confronted by the open prejudice and subtle hostilities of a white world, and seemingly powerless to change his condition or shape his future.”
Yet Kennedy was never one to let individuals escape responsibility for their own fates. So he also spoke of others who would tell this young black man “to work his way up, as other minorities have done; and so he must. For he knows, and we know, that only by his efforts and his own labor will the Negro come to full equality.”
Holder and his friend President Obama have lived both halves of Kennedy’s parable. Like social reformers in every time, they strived to balance their own determination to succeed with their obligations to justice. Doing this is never easy. It can’t be.
Kennedy was not alone among Americans in being tormented by how much racism has scarred our national story. That’s why I was one of many who bristled back in 2009 when Holder called us all cowards. For all our flaws, few nations have faced up to a history of racial subjugation as regularly and comprehensively as we have. And Holder and Obama have both testified to our progress.
Yet rereading Kennedy is to understand why Holder spoke as he did. That the young man Kennedy described is still so present and recognizable tells us that complacency remains a subtle but corrosive sin. One of Holder’s finest hours as attorney general was his visit to Ferguson, Mo., after the killing of Michael Brown. Many young black men still fear they will be shot, a sign that the “open prejudice and subtle hostilities of a white world” have not gone away. We have moved forward, yet we still must overcome.
Holder leaves two big legacies in this area from which his successors must not turn away. In the face of a regressive Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, he has found other ways to press against renewed efforts to disenfranchise minority voters. And it is a beacon of hope that sentencing reform and over-incarceration, central Holder concerns, are matters now engaging conservatives, libertarians and liberals alike.
The New York Times’ Matt Apuzzo captured the irony of Holder’s tenure with the observation that his time as attorney general “is unique in that his biggest supporters are also among his loudest critics.” Many progressives have been troubled by his record on civil liberties in the battle against terrorism, his aggressive pursuit of journalists’ e-mails and phone records in leak investigations, and his reluctance to prosecute individual Wall Street malefactors.
That these issues will long be debated is a reminder that Holder was first a lawyer and public servant, most of whose work had nothing to do with race. That he singled out Kennedy as his hero shows that none of us need be imprisoned by race. That Holder cajoled and provoked us on the need “to confront our racial past, and our racial present” is itself an achievement that transcends the color line.
Kennedy, who spoke of those who braved “the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society,” would understand the risks that Holder ran.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 29, 2014
“Taking Exception To American Exceptionalism”: No One’s Patriotism Should Be Impugned, Certainly Not By The Likes Of Dick Cheney
I didn’t really think it possible for Dick Cheney to lower my opinion of him. But then this happened (per Politico‘s Kendall Breitman):
Dick Cheney says it’s “outrageous” that President Barack Obama mentioned the summer’s unrest in Ferguson, Mo., while speaking about ISIL during a speech at the United Nations.
“I was stunned,” the former vice president said on Wednesday during an interview on Fox News’ “Hannity….”
“In one case, you’ve got a police officer involved in a shooting, there may be questions about it to be sorted out by the legal process, but there’s no comparison to that with what ISIS is doing to thousands of people throughout the Middle East through bloody beheadings of anybody they come in contact with,” Cheney said. “To compare the two as though there’s moral equivalence there, I think, is outrageous.”
Obama, of course, in NO WAY “compared” the two phenomena (sorry to “shout,” but it’s hard to overstate how little support there is for what Cheney is saying). The reference to Ferguson was in the midst of a long litany about America’s view of how it serves as a leader in a global collective security arrangement, and he immediately touted the domestic debate over Ferguson as a sign of our strength and virtue.
Cheney’s assertion is perhaps the most willfully stupid thing I’ve heard in years.
Having said that, I think the real objection on the Right to Obama’s speech is that he treated collective security as something other than an extension of America’s Sovereign and Imperial Will. The secular religion of American Exceptionalism–and I call it a religion because it sweeps aside all the universalism associated with crucial cultural influences from Christianity to the Enlightenment–is so powerful a force among conservatives these days that anything Obama said that wasn’t an arrogant insult to the rest of the world would not have satisfied them.
Sometimes I chafe at Obama’s efforts to propitiate the idol of American Exceptionalism rhetorically, even as he is explicitly treating America as subject to the same standards as any other people. Sometimes I wish my fellow-citizens in the country I love would wake up and acknowledge that the only “freedom” we enjoy that is denied to our global peers is the right to easily acquire lethal weapons. America largely invented the system of collective security that Obama is so avid to vindicate in his actions–wise or foolish–in the Middle East. His patriotism should not be impugned for taking it, and America’s claim to represent values beyond self-interest, seriously. And certainly not by the likes of Dick Cheney.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 25, 2014
“Ferguson, Watts And A Dream Deferred”: Things Have Gone Off Track And Unlikely To Be Reversed In The Foreseeable Future
When rioting broke out in the Watts section of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965, African-Americans didn’t — couldn’t — know it yet, but the next three decades would turn out to be a period of sustained gains in terms of income, jobs, education and the status of blacks relative to whites.
The rioting this past week in Ferguson, Mo., by contrast, follows more than a decade of economic stagnation and worse for many black Americans, a trend that appears unlikely to be reversed in the foreseeable future.
The Watts riots – set off by the traffic arrest of a 21-year-old black driver by a white police officer — left 34 dead, 1,032 people injured, and 600 buildings damaged or destroyed.
The week of violence in L.A. began just five days after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and 13 months after he had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – the impact of which had not yet been felt in the daily lives of African-Americans.
During the decades following this landmark legislation, African-Americans made immense progress. The percentage of blacks over the age 25 with a high school degree more than tripled, going from just under 20 percent, or less than half the white rate, to more than 70 percent, nearly matching the white rate. The percentage of blacks over 25 with a college degree quadrupled from 3 to 12 percent over the same period.
Similarly, black median household income grew, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $22,974 in 1967 to $30,439 in 2000, a 32.5 percent increase, more than double the 14.2 percent increase for whites. Although black household income remained well below white levels in 2000 – 66.3 percent of the white median – it was significantly better than it had been in 1967, when it was 57.1 percent of white median income.
Things went off track, however, as the 21st century approached. The riots in Ferguson follow a period of setback for African-Americans, despite the fact that we have a sitting black president in the White House.
While the economic downturns of the last decade-and-a-half have taken their toll on the median income of all races and ethnic groups, blacks have been the hardest hit. By 2012, black median household income had fallen to 58.4 percent of white income, almost back to where it was in 1967 — 7.9 points below its level in 1999. (This Census Bureau chart shows the long-term income trends for major demographic groups in America.)
Income is a powerful measure of well-being, but equally important is the chance a person has of improving his or her position in life — of whether expectations are rising or falling.
Inequality in America is not news, and there have been a number of studies published recently that challenge the old notion that the United States is the land of opportunity for all, but for African Americans, the findings are particularly bleak.
From 1965 to 2000, the poverty rate among blacks fell from 41.8 percent to 22.5 percent. Since then, it has risen to 27.2 percent. The white poverty rate also rose during this period, but by a more modest 3.2 points.
Blacks suffered more than whites as a result of the 2008-9 financial meltdown and its aftermath, but the negative trends for African-Americans began before then.
A 2007 pre-recession Brookings Institution study by Julia Isaacs, “Economic Mobility of Black and White Families,” found that “a majority of blacks born to middle-income parents grow up to have less income than their parents. Only 31 percent of black children born to parents in the middle of the income distribution have family income greater than their parents, compared to 68 percent of white children from the same income bracket.”
White children, Isaacs reports, “are more likely to move up the ladder while black children are more likely to fall down.” Thirty-seven percent of white children born to families in the middle quintile of the income distribution move up to the top two quintiles, compared with only 17 percent of black children. Forty-five percent of black children from solidly middle class families “end up falling to the bottom of the income distribution, compared with only 16 percent of white children,” Isaacs found.
A more recent April 2014 study of black and white mobility by Bhashkar Mazumder, a senior economist at the Chicago Federal Reserve, showed similar results. That report is even more explicitly pessimistic.
The Chicago Fed study found that among black children born between the late 1950s and the early 1980s into families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, half remained there as adults, compared with 26 percent of whites born in the bottom quintile.
Of black children born to families in the top half of the income distribution, 60 percent fell into the bottom half as working age adults, compared with 36 percent of similarly situated whites.
Mazumder concluded that if future generations of white and black Americans continued to experience the same rates of intergenerational mobility, “we should expect to see that blacks on average would not make any relative progress.” He noted that this recent time period stood “in direct contrast to other epochs in which blacks have made steady progress reducing racial differentials.”
One optimistic note is that the white reaction to events in Ferguson, including the commentary of some outspoken white conservatives, has been sympathetic to the anger and outrage over the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager. This stands in sharp distinction to the aftermath of the violence in Los Angeles in 1965.
Watts – and the string of urban riots in African-American neighborhoods from 1964 to 1968 — was crucial to the expansion of the conservative coalition that dominated most federal elections from 1966 to 2004. Fear of violence helped elect Ronald Reagan governor of California in 1966 and Richard Nixon to the presidency in 1968. Law and order, white backlash, the silent majority, and racial integration became core political preoccupations for once loyal Democratic whites as they converted to the Republican Party.
Just two years after the Democratic landslide of 1964, in the 1966 midterm election, Republicans picked up 47 seats in the House. “How long are we going to abdicate law and order favor of a soft social theory that the man who heaves a brick through your window or tosses a firebomb into your car is simply the misunderstood and underprivileged product of a broken home?” Gerald Ford, then the House minority leader, asked, with the answer assumed by the question.
Nearly half a century later, however, conservatives have voiced ambivalent responses to the Ferguson rioting. On Aug. 15, Erick Erickson, a popular conservative blogger at Red State, wrote a widely circulated posting titled “Must We Have a Dead White Kid?”
“Given what happened in Ferguson, the community had every right to be angry,” Erickson wrote. “The police bungled their handling of the matter, became very defensive and behaved more like a paramilitary unit than a police force. Property damage and violence by the citizenry cannot be excused, but is also the result of a community seeing those who are supposed to protect and serve instead suiting up and playing soldier.”
Erickson was by no means alone among conservatives. Sharing his views were Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a prospective Republican presidential candidate, and Charles C. W. Cooke, a National Review columnist, who argued that conservatives should “acknowledge that — even when our understanding of the facts is limited — incidents such as this open old and real wounds.”
The fatal shooting of Michael Brown has produced a rare right-left convergence, a shared recognition that the overwhelmingly white police department of Ferguson has become a hostile occupying force for much of the town’s majority black population.
There is, however, no left-right consensus about how to turn back the grim economic trends for African-Americans, much less what caused them.
Competing explanations for the difficulties that continue to plague African-Americans are a central element in the contemporary polarization between left and right; in fact, they help define it.
Liberals and conservatives disagree vehemently over the role of such factors as the decline of manufacturing jobs, the rise of single parenthood, racial discrimination, the poor quality of public schools, residential segregation, high incarceration rates, test score differentials, parental investment, crime rates, welfare incentives, the lack of engaged fathers – the list goes on.
Democrats in the main are convinced that impediments to black advancement are structural, amenable to government intervention: a strong and better-funded safety net; public investment in manufacturing and infrastructure employment; more rigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws.
Many Republicans focus instead on what they see as moral collapse and the erosion of such values as hard work and traditional family formation among the poor. Government spending on social programs, according to this view, creates disincentives to work and more trouble.
The urban riots of the second half of the 1960s prompted Washington to pump out money, legislation, judicial decisions and regulatory change to outlaw de jure discrimination, to bring African-Americans to the ballot box, to create jobs and to vastly expand the scope of anti-poverty programs.
Civil unrest also drew attention to the necessity of addressing police brutality.
Today, however, political and policy-making stasis driven by gridlock — despite a momentary concordance between left and right on this particular shooting — insures that we will undertake no comparable initiatives to reverse or even stem the trends that have put black Americans at an increasing disadvantage in relation to whites — a situation that plays no small part in fueling the rage currently on display in Ferguson.
By: Thomas B. Edsall, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, August 19, 2014
“Non-Journalistic Instincts”: Joe Scarborough, Mike Allen Form Journalistic Axis of Evil
One of the more fascinating sidelights of the crisis in Ferguson is the way it has revealed the complacent, obedient, and fundamentally non-journalistic instincts of certain leading centrist establishmentarian journalists. The precipitating event was the arrest of Wesley Lowery, a young Washington Post reporter who was illegally ordered to leave a McDonalds near the demonstrations and, correctly, refused, leading to his arrest.
This angered Joe Scarborough. And by “angered,” we should be clear, we mean angered at the presumption of Lowery for refusing. The avuncular host of Morning Joe instructed him, “Next time a police officer tells you that you’ve got to move along because you’ve got riots outside, well, you probably should move along.” (Because nothing says “journalism” like following orders from authorities, however questionable, self-interested, or illegal they may be.) Scarborough attributed Lowery’s refusal not to any commitment to continue doing his job but to his desire to “get on TV and have people talk about me the next day,” because the desire to get on television in any way possible is the only motivation that makes sense to Joe Scarborough.
Lowery replied sharply. Riding to Scarborough’s side today, forming a kind of journalistic Axis of Evil, is Mike Allen. In Allen’s world, which is defined by overlapping and possibly coterminous circles of sources, friends, and paid advertisers, the sort of effrontery displayed by Lowery first toward the police and then toward an esteemed television commentator was thoroughly intolerable. Sniffs Allen, in today’s Playbook:
YA CAN’T MAKE IT UP – Wesley Lowrey, 23-year-old Congress/politics reporter for the WashPost, responding on CNN to suggestions that he should have obeyed police amid a riot: “[L]et me be clear about this: I have LITTLE PATIENCE for talking heads.”
FYI, his name is spelled Lowery, and his age is 24. But if Lowery wants more favorable coverage from Allen, maybe he should think about sponsoring some ads in Playbook.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencier, New York Magazine, August 15, 2014
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