Response to McNeal

McNeal, your point about freedom of choice is the tension in the set of essays Alice Walker published around that post-civil rights movement time (see In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens). She praises the both the hard-won freedom of blacks to live where they want to and do what they want to do and then she laments their lack of continued radicalism. Of course, the choice to be complacent after you get yours is part of the prize of the CRM. I think Walker was concerned and disappointed that so many chose extreme short-term self-interest over sustained group action. Part of the consequence of that choice in the late Sixties and Seventies is what led to this culture of abdication (I’ll post more on that later) that we see today. Recently however, blacks who really don’t have to get involved, middle and upper-class scholars and businesspeople, are deciding to get back into the fray for black people they don’t know and don’t share living space with. The idea of collectivity has returned. In my view, that’s a good thing.

I Don’t Even Know What A Macaca Is….

When I read the news that Republican Virginia Senator George Allen labeled a campaign worker from his rival’s camp a “macaca,” I didn’t quite know what to make of it. The insulted man, named Siddarth, is an American of Indian descent. Siddarth was videotaping Allen’s campaign appearance at a private campaign event. When Allen realized that Siddarth was an infiltrator, he told the crowd to say hello to “macaca” and told him, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.” Of course, Siddarth was born and bred in Virginia. *Sigh*

I never thought I would see Allen’s name mentioned in relation to racial epithets. George Allen is the same US Senator who co-sponsored the Senate Resolution with Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) apologizing for the Senate’s eighty-year refusal to pass federal anti-lynching laws.

Allen’s response to the backlash is that he didn’t know that “macaca” had negative racial overtones. He claimed that he just made up the name. Allen’s spokespeople maintained that “macaca” was just a bastardization of the word “mohawk,” in reference to Siddhartha’s hairstyle. We will never know what was in Allen’s heart, but we do know what was in his sight: a dark-skinned, Indian-looking man. In an adrenaline-filled, flustered moment, Allen called that man a derogatory term for dark-skinned non-black people. He didn’t say “yahoo,” or “flibbidy flook”, he said “macaca.”

For those of you who, like me, had not heard the term “macaca” before, it refers to a small monkey. The term is used to denigrate people from North Africa and South Asia. I find it hard to believe that someone who had never heard the term before and has no idea what it means would pick it out of thin air and use it so (in)appropriately.

Making matters worse, the President is backing Allen all the way, attending a fundraiser for him in the aftermath of the incident. When asked why the President of the United States is attending fundraisers for politicians who shout racial slurs at other citizens, the President’s response is that Allen apologized and he accepts that apology. Well, the apology wasn’t Bush’s to accept, and while I do not expect for Bush to be so bold as to chastise Allen in public, I do expect for him to at least distance himself from Allen. Don’t show up all shiny-faced at his fundraiser. Make believe you have some respect for Mr. Siddarth. But, Siddarth is a Democrat, so how much respect can Bush possibly have for him? I should not expect for him to behave as though he represents the entire country, just Republicans. This is, after all, the same President who, in the midst of the Katrina disaster, while people were still holed up in the Superdome and others were still stranded on rooftops, congratulated his incompetent dolt of a FEMA director, “Brownie,” for doing such a great job and then mused about how he could not wait to be sipping tea on the porch of Trent Lott’s rebuilt mansion. I disagree with Kanye West’s statement that “Bush doesn’t care about black people”; Bush doesn’t care about anyone who is not like him and does not agree with him. He should be president of a social club, not of a diverse nation.

A video of Allen’s speech can be found on youtube here.

Good News: Key Provisions of the Voting Rights Act Extended Twenty-Five Years

Apparently this happened on July 27, 2006 and I spaced on it, but in case you had too, the news is in and the news is good. After prolonged hemming and hawing the President and Congress have extended provisions in the Voting Rights Act that were set to expire.

Let us not confuse the very important provisions of the Voting Rights Act with the more basic and unassailable constitutional right to vote. There is a chain email that circulates every six months that breathlessly warns black people that their right to vote is about to be revoked because the Voting Rights Act is set to expire. The mail is feverishly forwarded far and wide exhorting its readers IN ALL CAPS that they must contact their Congressional representative and urge him or her to support black citizens’ continued access to the ballot. Fear not, it is the Fifteenth Amendment, not the Voting Rights Act, that gives black men the constitutional right to vote. The Nineteenth Amendment confers that right on all women. As Amendments, the right to vote for black men and women will not expire.

Quite frankly, (picture me wagging my finger now) if we had a better grasp on our very recent history, emails like this one would never have legs because we would all remember that the Voting Rights Act, passed in the wake of the Selma-to-Montgomery March in 1965 was about removing barriers to minority enfranchisement. That was the point of Mississippi Freedom Summer and all of the voter registration protests. The right to vote had been conferred on black men in the wake of the Civil War, yet one hundred years later very few blacks were able to vote because of intimidation and other repressive tactics.

We have all heard the stories about white registrars who would make potential black registrants read a passage in Chinese or guess how many bubbles are in a bar of soap in order to register to vote. I have been reading about illiterate black workers in South Carolina who memorized the entire Constitution in order to pass the voter registration tests. Poll taxes and violence were also potent weapons used to deter black voters. The purpose of the Voting Rights Act is to put an end to these and other voter-suppression shenanigans, securing the constitutional rights of all eligible voters.

According to the legislation, some provisions of the Act sunset, or expire, after a period of time. This recent renewal extended expiring provisions of the Act over another twenty-five years. Check out the article on the LDF’s website here.

Hip hip hooray for more good news. With the debacle unfolding in Ohio, we must celebrate where we can.

Response to Anonymous

Monday afternoon Anonymous posted this comment on the site:

“How can you believe that any of the civil rights leaders today ae doing anything for cause. I was in Atlanta two weeks ago and saw the film American Blackout.
This is a tragedy. Slowly but surely we have regressed back to pre-intergration. When are we going to wake up. We have now gotten middle-class, rich and arrogant. We have forgotten our cause. Soon we will be picking cotton in fields again. I would suggest every black person to see American Blackout and then tell me whether or not the Civil Rights leaders of today is fihting for our cause.
Link to trailer on you tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8_3Lk3x8fA”

Dear Anonymous,

It looks like “American Blackout” is mostly about voter suppression and may be well worth the price of admission. However, I am interpreting your comments to be even broader than just voter registration. It seems to me that you are questioning the state of the on-going struggle for justice in all areas and that you want to know what our leaders are doing about it. The twin issues – Where are we and where do we go from here – are important ones that we need to address; thanks for bringing them up.

Don’t feel you are alone in your sentiments. Alice Walker, writing just ten years after the March on Washington voiced the same frustrations you are now. She wrote:

“I think Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr. would be dismayed by the lack of radicalism in the new black middle class, and discouraged to know that majority of the black people helped most by the Movement of the sixties has abandoned itself to the pursuit of cars, expensive furniture, large houses, and the finest scotch.”

If we are to accept that your and her sentiments are true, I want to know, what do we do now?

I think we need to identify who are our leaders and then identify what they have not done that we wish they had done. Most black politicians are not civil rights leaders at all and would not like to be categorized as such. They are politicians who represent broad constituencies on a wide swath of topics. We cannot look to Barak Obama, Jesse Jackson, Jr. or Harold Ford, Jr. to do or say the sort of things we might expect from a civil rights leader. To be sure, Congresswoman Maxine Waters does often operate more like a civil rights leader, but she also represents a much more homogenous (and safe) district. Waters also does not have higher political aspirations. Her decision to act as a rabble-rouser is refreshing, but will likely not be imitated by the younger crop of politicians who want to climb the rungs of political power.

Maxine Waters aside, politicians are generally not the right focal point for civil rights leadership. The leaders of the Movement did not operate from State Houses or from Congress. Those who did, such as Adam Clayton Powell in New York City, were constrained in the amount of rabble-rousing they could support or even allow. When civil rights groups were planning to protest the 1960 Democratic National Convention Powell worked hard to convince the activists to stay away. Roy Wilkins (NAACP), Whitney Young (Urban League), James Farmer (CORE) and Martin Luther King (SCLC) were leaders of organizations dedicated to the advancement of civil rights so they were freer to operate without considering their re-election prospects, their ability to make deals on unrelated issues, or their standing in a political party.

After leaders, there is the question of strategy. The Civil Rights Movement relied heavily on the bastions of white supremacy to create a crisis that would shock the nation into action on behalf of aggrieved blacks. But keep in mind that even Martin Luther King came to realize that the broad coalition that supported him after the atrocities in Birmingham, Selma and Mississippi were only in favor of a cessation of violence, not equality. That is to say that most Americans only wanted an end to racial terrorism, they did not support radical action to bring about racial equality.

I think that it is really up to us, you and me in this generation, to take action. It would be greedy to ask more of Andy Young and his generation. They are in and entering their 70s. The politicians can only focus on staying in office and making the cover of magazines. We must become our own leaders. Our real quandary is, what can we do that will improve the lives of our people and how do we convince anyone to care? You saw the movie “American Blackout,” what did it suggest? What do you suggest? My current small contribution is writing this blog. I would love to do more, but I haven’t yet come across an organization that I find compelling and I don’t have a clear idea about what an effective organization would do. Does anyone out there have any suggestions? Let’s get this ball rolling, stop complaining and start acting.

Not My Andy!

Like any aficionado of the Civil Rights Movement, I feel a spiritual kinship with people I have never met and likely never will. I feel that way about Andrew Young. Andy Young began his career as Martin Luther King’s right-hand man and aide. After he left the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he climbed the political ladder, becoming the mayor of Atlanta and a US representative to the United Nations. Andy’s latest incarnation was as an image-builder for Wal-Mart. He had been hired to work on their public relations in urban areas where Wal-Mart had been rebuffed such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Reflecting on Andy Young and his work makes me feel warm and hopeful, so when I came across the New York Times Article entitled “Wal-Mart Image-Builder Resigns,” my immediate reaction was “Not my Andy!”

Unfortunately, it was my Andy. In an interview, Andy was encouraging the entry of Wal-Mart into urban areas because smaller “corner” stores often offer inferior merchandise (he complained of “stale bread, bad meat and wilted vegetables”) and charge exorbitant prices. So far, Andy’s right. If you usually shop for groceries in a bodega, your wallet and your digestive track will take a pummeling.

Andy went on to complain that the owners of the stores don’t stay in the community for generations. They try to make a living and they move on. True again. Here comes the hum-dinger. Andy then identified the owners of these stores by ethnicity: Jews, Asians and Arabs. What? Why, Andy? What’s the point? Sure, these convenience stores have changed hands over the generations. And sure, the owners do tend toward certain ethnicities. You made accurate statements in every regard, but Andy, that’s not the way we express our frustration with expensive low-quality corner stores! The owners of these establishments stock substandard merchandise and charge too much for it because of the margin-wrecking economics of running a small business (particularly a food business) in an economically-depressed setting. I might even go so far as to say most one-off city food stores offer a poor selection of products for inflated prices, even in middle class neighborhoods. Sourcing fresh food at low enough prices to compete with a large grocery chain or say, a Wal-Mart, is impossible for these mom-and-pop stores. They don’t gouge because of their ethnicity, they gouge because it’s the only way they can stay open.

Andy is also correct in noting that the owners of these stores often move out of the area when they retire. Who doesn’t want to retire to Florida after thirty years of working six or seven days a week trying to eek out a living as a convenience store owner? These people aren’t rich. Usually their children work in the stores and the parents are doing their best to make enough to provide for their children and send them to college. When these families “move up” as Andy put it, it’s generally not the parents, but the children who are able to capitalize on their superior educations to make better lives. Once the children make good, the parents close up shop and move to an area with better amenities or to be closer to their children. It’s the circle of life and it’s not race-dependent. Besides, Wal-Mart does not move to neighborhoods for altruistic reasons. The stores are there to turn a profit and they will turn the neighborhoods back over to the corner stores as soon as there is no more money left to be made.

Andy could have made the same point about the bodega-style (in)convenience stores that dot urban blocks without mentioning the ethnicities of their owners. I think that Andy mentioned the ethnicity of the stores’ owners for another reason. Frustration. Andy and many other civil rights leaders are becoming incredibly disgruntled. Please take another look at Andy’s explanation for his comments. He said, “Almost everyone who has come into my community has moved in, made money and moved out and moved up.” Now read it again. What Andy is thinking, but has not said is this, “….everyone…has made money and moved out and moved up….(here are his silent thoughts) but we are still there. My friends and I were beaten up, threatened and killed. We marched until our feet bled, but black people are still there. I know that the strides that other ethnic minorities have made toward being accepted as full Americans are partly due to the sacrifices we made over the last fifty years and yet, black people are still there. What is happening? Bring on the Wal-Mart!”

When Daisy Bates and I were in Selma for the 40th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday we happened into a panel discussion where luminaries of the Movement were discussing their lives and their visions for the future. One leader, whose name I will not divulge, because I do not want you all to think badly about her; she is an incredible freedom fighter and is simply disillusioned now that she sees tangible evidence of all her hard work slipping down the drain. This unnamed leader was listening to Ted Shaw, Director-Counsel and President of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), give a short speech on the importance of convincing Congress to extend the life of expiring provisions of the Voting Rights Act. One of the provisions Shaw spoke about was a provision that required voting materials to be printed in languages other than English.

The leader was visibly disgusted. Why, she wanted to know, was the LDF spending resources on bilingual voting materials, when “those people” were just piggy-backing on all the efforts they had made in the Sixties and why don’t they just learn English anyway? Daisy Bates and I were flabbergasted. As we drove away that evening we discussed the anger of the Old Guard who, as they age are not only losing all desire to self-censor, but are also appearing to be more and more irritated by the state of Black America. They worked exceedingly hard not just for the middle classes who were well-positioned to take advantage of increased employment opportunities, but also for the urban and rural poor who today seem to be falling further and further behind. I believe this is the reason behind their harsh tongue-lashings (Bill Cosby) and their disquieting slips of the tongue (Andy Young).

I want our Movement leaders to feel reassured. I don’t want them to think that we are going to slip into a morass of our own making. Progress is never linear and we are seeking our footing in an environment that is far more difficult and nuanced than what we have faced before. But we will make progress. In the meantime, we don’t soothe our leaders’ discontent by allowing them to scapegoat other ethnicities for our problems. We thank our leaders for their work by doing our work. We try to ensure that poverty is not intergenerational damnation. We work to improve housing and employment opportunities. We work to encourage inner-city residents to vote and to wield more power in their political lives. We work to get our kids to stay in school and to have schools worth going to. We work to restore the most precious legacy of the Civil Rights Movement: hope.

Cause for Hope

If any of you are like me, you get discouraged sometimes by the daily rush of bad news in the media. Sometimes it feels like we are going backwards in the struggle for social justice. But humanity is making progress. To shore up your battered hopes, I have decided to share some of the section of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) Newsletter called “Apologies/Reparations” which offers “a compendium of recent reports dealing with apologies and reparations around the world.” May the good news of reconciliation be a salve to your soul.

“The Church of England, two centuries after profiting from the venture, has apologized to the descendants of its victims for its role in the global slave trade, which involved running a Caribbean island (Barbados) sugar plantation and branding the blacks who worked on it. A further instance cited in the apology was a $23,000 payment made to the Bishop of Exeter in compensation for the loss of 665 slaves after Barbados emancipated them in 1833. (Wash. Post, 2/11/06)”

“South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford signed a bill to add the name of former Senator Strom Thurmond’s biracial daughter – Essie Mae Washington-Williams – to the list of his children engraved on his monument. (NY Times, 6/29/04)”

“The Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, a Roman Catholic religious order in Ireland, apologized unconditionally for the ‘physical and emotional trauma’ its nuns inflicted on children raised in its orphanages and schools. A 1966 television documentary that exposed the extent of abuse at one of the Dublin orphanages in the 1950s and 1960s prompted an earlier public apology, but the most recent statement went further, noting that abuse survivors had dismissed the earlier apology as conditional and incomplete. (NY Times, 5/6/04)”

There are more, but if you refuse to sign up for the PRRAC newsletter, you'll simply have to put up with my slow meting out of good news. I'd hate to run out.

Here Comes the Neighborhood!

The Washington Post is to be commended for consistently publishing articles that confront the evolving realities of race in America.

On July 27, 2006, an article by Lonnae O’Neal Parker called “For Whites in Prince George’s, a Mirror on Race”, examined an interesting racial role reversal in Prince George’s County, Maryland (PG County). In PG County, white suburbanites are moving into an affluent area that is majority black (the article states the area is 63% black). The integrating pioneers cite the low cost of PG County real estate versus what is available in comparable areas as the main reason driving their influx.

Blacks who have made PG County their home for years are not threatened by their new neighbors; relocating whites are not greeted with cross-burnings, threats or destruction of property. To be sure, there have been racist incidents in PG County. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, PG County cities College Park, Washington, and Bowie, the city that is the focus of the article, have all seen racist incidents such as a cross-burning, racial vandalism and the distribution of Neo-Nazi propaganda throughout a neighborhood in the last two years. One black resident pointedly noted that she welcomed white neighbors, hoping their presence would draw entertainment and retail outlets that black middle class residents’ dollars did not have the magnetism to attract.

The article highlighted typical growing pains. New white neighbors report being concerned about fitting in. They have never been in the minority before and they want to be liked and accepted by their neighbors. Each time Parker related a tale about some apprehensive white resident afraid of not being accepted, I felt like had had a big piece of gooey cake. It was like walking around in uncomfortable clown shoes your entire life then seeing someone else in them and finally getting the joke.

The discomfort is positive. Real racial progress on an interpersonal level cannot start until we can try to empathize with one another’s life experiences. Living close to each other will further humanize people of different races to each other. Residential proximity is even more important than employment integration in that regard because it excludes the drama of office politics that can become more strained when race is added to the mix. Perhaps if a white PG County resident can remember a little of his discomfort at the community pool or golf course, he can identify more easily with the person of color who is in the minority at his workplace.

Parker’s article did annoy me at one point. The author seemed to derive too much glee from pointing out that a black resident threw a party that was supposed to start at 2pm but the only person there for 45 minutes was the new white neighbor. The author then asserts that most functions don’t happen on time in Negroville-uh, PG County. Ha, ha, let’s all laugh at C.P. time and meanwhile share some jokes about how the white people also had to learn to cut watermelon and fry chicken so they would have something to take to neighborhood barbeques. Not funny. I mean, no one shows up to parties on time, right? I never show up at the appointed time. And I’m black….Oh, you win this time, Parker.

Finally, I am curious to find out what will happen to prices in PG County after the whites become, say 50% of the area. Will they drive up property values, pricing themselves out of the bargains they sought? Because most of the black residents are financially well-off they won’t be run out by higher property taxes and home values like in poorer neighborhoods that well-to-do whites gentrify. However, higher property valuations lead to higher property taxes. New Pottery Barns and movie theaters aside, some black residents might be wishing their white neighbors would just go back where they came from on tax day.

Of course, I hope that everyone stays put. Racial integration, particularly where it happens organically and among people of similar financial means, is almost an unmitigated good. So get out your checkbooks and your clown shoes, PG County, there are adventurous and rewarding days ahead.

42nd Anniversary of the Discovery of the Three Civil Rights Workers

Forty-two years ago yesterday, August 4, the remains of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were dragged out of a partially-constructed dam outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi. They would become famous as “The Three Civil Rights Workers” who were jailed, and released in the middle of the night by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price who, working with the Klan, arranged for them to be waylaid and killed. Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were in Mississippi investigating the burning of a black church as part of their work with black Mississippians during 1964’s Freedom Summer. Their story and the trial of their killers was portrayed in the movie “Mississippi Burning”. You can read more about their story on the BBC or in my post on Edgar Ray Killen's trial for their murder here.

Miss Daisy Bates and I traveled through Meridian and Philadelphia, MS on our civil rights road trip. Blasting Mississippi for its civil rights past and present is just so easy that on this occasion I will refrain. Anyway, I have some good news that evinces a change of heart in Mississippi. I just read this in my Poverty & Race Research Action Council newsletter (which I highly recommend).

“Under a bill approved by the state’s Senate, stretches of Mississippi Highways in three counties are being renamed for James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the three civil rights workers murdered by Klan members in Philadelphia, MS in 1964. The bill also will name a portion of another highway the Emmett Till Memorial Highway. (Wash. Post, 2/11/05)"

Congratulations on the progress, Mississippi.