“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
“When Whites Just Don’t Get It”: After Ferguson, Race Deserves More Attention, Not Less
Many white Americans say they are fed up with the coverage of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. A plurality of whites in a recent Pew survey said that the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves.
Bill O’Reilly of Fox News reflected that weariness, saying: “All you hear is grievance, grievance, grievance, money, money, money.”
Indeed, a 2011 study by scholars at Harvard and Tufts found that whites, on average, believed that anti-white racism was a bigger problem than anti-black racism.
Yes, you read that right!
So let me push back at what I see as smug white delusion. Here are a few reasons race relations deserve more attention, not less:
- The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)
- The black-white income gap is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967.
- A black boy born today in the United States has a life expectancy five years shorter than that of a white boy.
- Black students are significantly less likely to attend schools offering advanced math and science courses than white students. They are three times as likely to be suspended and expelled, setting them up for educational failure.
- Because of the catastrophic experiment in mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are more likely to be incarcerated today than employed, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Nearly 70 percent of middle-aged black men who never graduated from high school have been imprisoned.
All these constitute not a black problem or a white problem, but an American problem. When so much talent is underemployed and overincarcerated, the entire country suffers.
Some straight people have gradually changed their attitudes toward gays after realizing that their friends — or children — were gay. Researchers have found that male judges are more sympathetic to women’s rights when they have daughters. Yet because of the de facto segregation of America, whites are unlikely to have many black friends: A study from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that in a network of 100 friends, a white person, on average, has one black friend.
That’s unfortunate, because friends open our eyes. I was shaken after a well-known black woman told me about looking out her front window and seeing that police officers had her teenage son down on the ground after he had stepped out of their upscale house because they thought he was a prowler. “Thank God he didn’t run,” she said.
One black friend tells me that he freaked out when his white fiancée purchased an item in a store and promptly threw the receipt away. “What are you doing?” he protested to her. He is a highly successful and well-educated professional but would never dream of tossing a receipt for fear of being accused of shoplifting.
Some readers will protest that the stereotype is rooted in reality: Young black men are disproportionately likely to be criminals.
That’s true — and complicated. “There’s nothing more painful to me,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson once said, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
All this should be part of the national conversation on race, as well, and prompt a drive to help young black men end up in jobs and stable families rather than in crime or jail. We have policies with a robust record of creating opportunity: home visitation programs like Nurse-Family Partnership; early education initiatives like Educare and Head Start; programs for troubled adolescents like Youth Villages; anti-gang and anti-crime initiatives like Becoming a Man; efforts to prevent teen pregnancies like the Carrera curriculum; job training like Career Academies; and job incentives like the earned-income tax credit.
The best escalator to opportunity may be education, but that escalator is broken for black boys growing up in neighborhoods with broken schools. We fail those boys before they fail us.
So a starting point is for those of us in white America to wipe away any self-satisfaction about racial progress. Yes, the progress is real, but so are the challenges. The gaps demand a wrenching, soul-searching excavation of our national soul, and the first step is to acknowledge that the central race challenge in America today is not the suffering of whites.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 31, 2014
“Quite The Candidate”: Ben Carson Stands By U.S., Nazi Comparisons
Remember neurosurgeon-turned-conservative-activist Ben Carson? He’s apparently still around, still making needlessly provocative remarks, and still moving forward with his presidential plans.
In fact, Ben Terris reported from Iowa yesterday on a Carson event in Des Moines.
He’s inside this meeting hall, before a sellout crowd of nearly 400 people at the Polk County Republicans’ end-of-summer fundraiser, to discuss bullies of a different order. He wants to talk about the “secular progressives” in the news media, politics and academia who will stop at nothing to change the nation as we know it. He also wants to do this in Iowa, while raising money for local Republicans, coinciding with the start of his new PAC, which will “lay the groundwork” should he decide to run for president. […]
He speaks softly, almost as though he’s reading a child to sleep. But this is a scary story. If Republicans don’t win back the Senate in November, he says, he can’t be sure “there will even be an election in 2016.” Later, his wife, Candy, tells a supporter that they are holding on to their son’s Australian passport just in case the election doesn’t go their way.
Just so we’re clear, the implication here is that Carson believes President Obama, tyrant that he is, may not allow elections in 2016. It’s why Carson’s family is preparing to flee the United States, just in case.
As for Carson arguing earlier this year that contemporary American life as “very much like Nazi Germany,” the right-wing doctor told Terris, “You can’t dance around it…. If people look at what I said and were not political about it, they’d have to agree. Most people in Germany didn’t agree with what Hitler was doing…. Exactly the same thing can happen in this country if we are not willing to stand up for what we believe in.”
I guess that means he’s not sorry?
Fox News’ Chris Wallace said yesterday that Carson, himself a Fox contributor, probably doesn’t have a “serious chance” to actually be elected president, but Wallace added he’d “love” to see Carson run anyway.
It’s not clear why.
For those who’ve forgotten Carson’s rise to Tea Party notoriety, Carson last year equated homosexuality with pedophilia and bestiality. He soon after started comparing the Affordable Care Act to slavery, before comparing Americans to Nazis.
I swung by the page Right Wing Watch set up to document Carson’s more notable remarks and I was amazed at some of the recent entries. Carson said political correctness contributed to Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, and those who protested the shooting reminded him of Hamas.
Last month, Carson characterized the debate over marijuana legalization as a distraction from Benghazi. Seriously.
He’ll be quite a candidate.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 29, 2014
“The Power Of The Franchise”: Voting Still Matters When It Comes To Political Clout
More than a half-century after brave protesters marched and bled and died to demand the right to vote for black citizens, the ballot box remains a potent weapon for civic and political change — a radical undertaking that can shake up social systems and correct inequities and injustices. If there is any good news in the untimely death of Michael Brown, it’s that the black residents of Ferguson, Missouri, have been reminded of the power of the franchise.
As protests have ebbed and activists have sought solutions to police brutality, they’ve started to register Ferguson’s underrepresented black citizens to vote. That won’t solve every problem, nor will it produce instant results, but it’s certainly one obvious avenue toward social change.
It took tragedy and weeks of unrest — the unarmed Brown, a black teenager, was killed by a white police officer on August 9 — to awaken a sense of urgency. Even as the two elections of President Obama proved, once again, the persuasiveness of the ballot, many Americans, especially those in historically oppressed ethnic groups, failed to appreciate its power in state and local affairs.
As the demographics of Ferguson have changed over the last 10 to 20 years, its newer residents have not exercised their political clout. The city was about 80 percent white in 1980, but its white population was down to less than 33 percent by 2010, according to the U.S. Census. You wouldn’t know that from looking at its local leaders.
The city council of six has just one black member; the school board comprises six whites and one Latino. Of the 53 sworn police officers on the force, just three are black. That helps explain a law enforcement agency that shows disrespect and hostility toward its black citizens.
There is a danger, of course, in exaggerating the power of politicians to change the habits formed from centuries of racial injustice or to correct systemic inequities that remain stubbornly entrenched. Obama, indeed, is a case in point. He has attracted a noisy, if tiny, group of black detractors who regularly denounce him for failing to appreciably roll back the racism that has haunted black America for generations.
He has been criticized for failing to adopt a “black agenda” that would employ black Americans and close the gap between white and black earning power. He has been excoriated for occasionally reminding black audiences that hard work and responsible conduct engender success, even as racism remains a cultural force. He has even been castigated for failing to speak out more forcefully against police misconduct in Ferguson.
It’s understandable that there’s a degree of frustration and disappointment that Obama’s election hasn’t done more to mitigate historic forces. After his election in 2008, it seemed that barriers to black success would fall rapidly. Instead, there remains a significant gap in most measures of economic well-being, starting with the unemployment rate. While about 6.6 percent of whites are currently unemployed, about 12.6 percent of blacks are jobless.
That gap hasn’t changed in 50 years, and educational attainment doesn’t alter it appreciably. While the unemployment rate is lower for black college grads than for blacks with high school diplomas, there is still more joblessness among blacks with college degrees than among whites with similar educations.
There’s not much Obama, or any president, can do to change that. Still, elections matter because politicians can encourage progress in any number of ways, large and small. The Affordable Care Act — or Obamacare — is just one example of that. While its provisions apply to all Americans, it affects blacks disproportionately because they are less likely to be able to afford policies without it.
If the vote didn’t matter, Republicans would not have worked so hard over the last decade to block the franchise. They’ve pushed through voter ID laws, cut back early voting and purged voter rolls — all in an effort to block a few voters of color, a cohort that tends to vote for Democrats. That’s testimony to the enduring power of the vote, a power that Ferguson’s black citizens should put to good use.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, August 30, 2014
“Shameful And Historically Illiterate”: Dear Fox News; Please Stop Using Asian Americans To Attack Black People
“Talking Points does not—does not—believe in white privilege.”
That was Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s big, brave pitch during his third-person “talking points” segment on Tuesday’s edition of The O’Reilly Factor. The peg for the segment was the uproar and race issues surrounding the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, this month. O’Reilly was blasting the idea of people citing “white privilege” to help explain anger or inequality in a predominantly black community. He railed against a perceived failure of black leaders to spark a “cultural revolution” in their “precincts,” and the lack of personal responsibility instilled in young African Americans.
Of course Bill O’Reilly doesn’t believe that the concept of white privilege exists. (Neither does much of the rest of Fox News.) He has denied the existence of such a privilege for white Americans in previous segments, including one in which he falsely claimed that Harvard Kennedy School was requiring freshmen to take a class on the subject.
O’Reilly’s latest salvo of white-privilege denialism has already been mocked and (rightly) criticized enough. But one aspect of his crotchety monologue that was particularly unappealing was how he invoked the general economic and academic successes of Asian Americans in order to highlight the supposed failings of African Americans.
“So, do we have Asian privilege in America?” the Fox host asked rhetorically. “Because the truth is that Asian-American households earn far more money than anyone else.”
O’Reilly also compares the statistic on Asian-American children raised in single-parent households (13 percent) to that of African Americans (a “whopping” 55 percent) to make the point that Asian families in this country are stronger. This is a favorite bugaboo of O’Reilly’s, and in the past he’s even said that First Lady Michelle Obama should come on his show and tell black teens, “You stop having sex; you stop getting pregnant.”
O’Reilly has made the Asian-privilege point before. He’s also praised Asian folks by asserting that, “Asian people are not liberal, you know, by nature” because “they’re usually more industrious and hard-working.” (It’s worth noting that not all Asian demographics fit neatly into this positive stereotype that colors the way O’Reilly talks about Asian citizens.)
First, let’s be consistent and call this phenomenon “yellow privilege.” So, sure, you could reasonably argue that there is a general yellow privilege that people who look like me enjoy in the United States. For instance, Asian-American men under the age of 35 have a far lower chance of being wrongly accosted by a police officer than a young black man would. The difference is that, unlike white people, we don’t have a bitter, well-paid armada of commentators to go on TV and complain about black people every time someone brings said privilege up.
But the real reason O’Reilly’s black-yellow comparison is so annoying and intellectually dishonest is because it is patently bizarre to compare the Asian-American experience to the African-American one. Such a crass talking point—one that uses the favorable stats of one minority group to attack the culture of another—overlooks, or at least glosses over, some of the most obvious facts and tragedies in our nation’s history. Generations of Asian Americans did not endure the traumas, legacies, and residual effects of slavery, Jim Crow, and decades of racist housing policy. These are factors that O’Reilly mentions only as an aside, preferring to talk more about the importance of getting black kids to “speak properly” and behave themselves in public.
Asian Americans and African Americans have had very different experiences in America, a complicated reality that O’Reilly and many of his colleagues do not seem eager to tackle. But at least his commentary in the wake of the Michael Brown tragedy has been more refined than some of his co-workers—a thought that is less a compliment to Bill, and far more indicative of the kind of organism that Fox News has become.
By: Asawin Suebsaeg, The Daily Beast,August 27, 2014
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