If you thought DWB (Driving While Black) was an issue for African Americans, get ready for FWB (Flying While Black) and maybe, even, BMYOBWB (Breathing and Minding Your Own Business While Black).
Why do I say that?
Let’s just start with the fact that, recently, U.S. mainstream media reports have been obsessed, in the main, with three stories – the ongoing military tension between North and South Korea, the impending “Royal Wedding” of Prince William and the overwhelming headline-grabber: the continuing, Transportation Security Administration(TSA) "scanner" and "pat down" saga.
Despite the fact that the North Korea issue may very well be the precursor to World War III, most news reports have not provided the detail and sense of urgency the issue truly deserves, allowing the Obama administration to get away with empty statements about having a "unified" response from "world leaders."
Most astute observers know that the attack by North Korea had very little to do with "the world" and almost everything to do with that country testing U.S. resolve to defend one of its most visible allies in Asia. There will definitely be more to talk about on that issue, but, so far, our news coverage has been consistently skimpy, with no real difference between that offered by left-leaning or right-leaning media outlets. This is one to watch.
Frankly speaking, the "royal wedding" story is absolutely irrelevant – not just to African Americans, but to virtually everyone else in this country. Let’s face it, the U.S. hasn’t been a British Colony for more than 200 years, now, and the ongoing obsession, by American media, with all things British – especially the country's “royal family,” seems more than a bit odd.
So, let’s move on to the "Big Kahuna" – the "pat down" story. Everywhere you looked, over the past few months, there were people being scanned and people complaining about being scanned. There was the guy who coined the now-viral and ubiquitous “Don’t touch my junk” phrase, who threatened to sue the TSA for sexual harassment. Making things things even livelier were the TSA’s own threats to cause travelers to miss their flights, or to be fined, if they didn’t submit to potentially dangerous "x-ray" scans, or intrusive “pat-downs.”
Regrettably, in the midst of all of this frenzy, what was being missed was the ominous and growing discussion about “racial profiling” as the alternative form of airline security, if people continue to insist on being, neither, scanned, nor patted.
A syndicated columnist named Delaney Murdock wrote recently: “The current threat to passengers and airlines comes almost exclusively from one source, and we all know what it is, young males , between 18 and 35… from the Middle East, as well as largely Muslim nations in Africa and south Asia.” Indeed, according to CBS News, in November, a growing number of people across the country are wondering whether "the time has come to consider using racial and other profiling as a security measure."
In the wake of the constant barrage of “Don’t Touch My Junk” stories, including video of toddlers being aggressively and intrusively searched in airports, we're beginning to see a shift in attitudes toward a greater public acceptance of racial profiling at those checkpoints. In fact, in a recent CBS News poll, 37 percent of Americans reported that they now believe that “it would be justified for people of certain racial or ethnic groups to be subjected to additional security checks at airport checkpoints.”
Even scarier were the results of a Washington Post-ABC News poll, wherein 70 percent of respondents agreed with selecting certain passengers for extra security screening at airports. Perhaps the most surprising part of that survey was that 32 percent said a person’s sex should be a factor in deciding whether they should be screened; 39 percent said a person’s religion should be a factor and 40 percent said a person’s race should be a factor, when profiling is actually done. Are Americans more nervous about flying with any type of black person than they are about flying with any type of Muslim? Looks that way.
Perhaps someone should pass that bit of information along to our friend, the African-American journalist Juan Williams, who disclosed in his now-infamous interview on Fox Cable Network that seeing people in Muslim garb on a plane made him nervous. As a result, of course, Mr. Williams was fired from his job as a news analyst at NPR, but received a new, lucrative contract from the conservative-leaning Fox Network.
Do you think it would be a surprise to Juan to learn that his co-workers at Fox are probably more afraid to fly with other Williamses than they are to fly with people with Arabic names and burnooses?
Unlike our good brother Juan, seeing Muslims on planes doesn"t make me especially nervous. What does make me nervous, however, is the prospect of greater levels of racial profiling on airlines in the wake of a growing pattern of black, African terrorists being splashed across our newspaper covers, on broadcast outlets and on the Internet. Have you noticed, or is it just me?
About 11 months ago, there was young Umar Farouk Adbulmutallab, the Nigerian who boarded a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit and allegedly tried to activate an explosive device inside his own underwear. The face of terrorism, I thought, right then and there, was starting to be changed. No more stereotypical, Semitic, Middle Eastern-looking people; now the "bad guys" were people who looked just like people in my own family. That made me nervous.
In that same vein, recently, there was the widely circulated story of the Tanzanian-born, Guantanamo Bay detainee Ahmed Ghailani, who we’re told, was instrumental in attacks in 1998 on the U.S. embassies in both Kenya and in his native country.
The larger issue for African Americans is that the media focus on Ghailani stands as further, visible affirmation that black folks on planes shouldn’t be trusted quite as much as they used to be and, in fact, that they probably need to be treated as significant security risks.
As I implied earlier, that's becoming more and more uncomfortable every day for me and for anyone who looks like me. Things are becoming as unfair for us in the air as they have been, for so long, on the ground. This is all unfolding, and the "racial-profiling mob" is being formed, even as the country is fully aware of the fundamental unfairness of such policies, and that they simply don’t work.
In 2006, for example, the NYC Police Department stopped a half-million pedestrians for suspected criminal involvement; 89 percent of the stops involved non-whites. And right here, in Philadelphia , in 2010, the ACLU recently filed a lawsuit against the City’s "Stop and Frisk" policy of random "pat downs" of “suspicious” individuals, because it’s been found that 72 percent of pedestrians that were stopped were African Americans.
Drug-related and weapons-related crimes are far and away the leading causes for arrests and convictions in this country. This move to racial profiling is happening, however, despite clear evidence that young blacks are significantly less inclined to be drug abusers than whites (3% vs. 10%) and despite the fact that Opinion Research Center has informed us that U.S.gun owners are predominantly “white, Protestant, rural and of middle and upper middle class.”
None of those facts, apparently, prevented black male incarceration rates, in 2007, from standing at 4,618 per 100,000 persons vs. 773 per 100,000 persons, for white males.
Thanks to the growing movement toward legitimization of airline-based racial profiling, we, in the black community, should probably get prepared to experience even more onerous treatment right here on the ground than we've seen in the past.
For black folks, it seems, it’s going to be more and more difficult to find “the friendly skies” ...or the friendly streets.
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Showing posts with label Racial Issues. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Racial Issues. Show all posts
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Monday, January 3, 2011
Blacks Are “Happier." Says Who?
Sometimes, what passes for serious academic research is so insulting to your intelligence that you just want to track down the report writers and snatch them by their rumpled, Ivy League collars. The purpose, of course, would not be to inflict bodily harm of any kind on the good researchers, but rather to ask them, face-to-face, if their entire report hadn’t really been some huge, overly-long, bad joke, like that recent movie, Jackass 3D.
I felt just like that after reading a recent report by two University of Pennsylvania economists – Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. Their study “proved,” they said, that much of (the) “racial gap in happiness” between blacks and whites “has closed over the past 35 years." They went on to say that most of the black gains in "happiness" had actually been “concentrated among women and those living in the South.”
As if that hadn't already been enough, Professor Wolfers was then quoted in a national periodical as saying that the study was “…the largest and most important change in happiness for any population I have ever seen.”
Can you spell “hype,” Professor Wolfers?
The Penn Professor had the courage to say all of that, even though the unemployment gap between blacks and whites continues to grow – to the detriment of black folks, even though the earnings gap between black and white households stands at about 40 cents out of each dollar, and even though huge healthcare disparities between blacks and whites have been well documented.
The first time I read about the survey results, I was dumbfounded. The third, fifth, ninth and tenth times I read it, I felt exactly the same way.
Black "happiness?" Images of minstrels, banjoes and watermelon came immediately to mind.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, "happiness" is defined as “good fortune, prosperity or a state of well-being and contentment.” Having read that, and realizing that most African Americans were experiencing very few of those things, I wondered, more than ever, what was happening across Black America (Can we still say "Black America" without offending the current president?) that was causing black people to be so damned happy.
The second thing I wondered was what, aside from having too much funding and too much time on their hands, had led two Wharton School economists, of decidedly European descent, to express their “expert” opinions on the “happiness of black people in America?” On what grounds do they claim a knowledge of what constitutes "happiness" for African Americans? Sounds like a case wherein they could have used the services of a good, black psychologist, as part of their team.
In any event, journalists at the New York Times deduced, in that paper’s coverage of the story, that the whole report was probably explainable by the direct correlation between "black happiness" and the decrease in “day-to-day racism” in America. In trying to make that case, however, it’s clear that the Times and the two Penn professors haven't kept abreast of situations currently being played out all across the country, such as the throw-back, race-based tensions that have been experienced recently in Macon, Georgia, and that have been especially evident in the town’s City Council meetings.
It’s also fair to say, I would guess, that if they had known about that situation, the researchers would have begun to understand that, outside of the walls of the Wharton School, where this study was done, black folks in this country still don’t seem to have a whole lot to be "happy" about.
Essentially, what happened in Macon, was this: There was an acrimonious political debate being waged between a white City Councilman named John Williams and a black City Councilman named Daron Lee. At one point in the discussion, Lee, protesting what he thought had been unfair and racist treatment by Williams and other City Council colleagues at earlier meetings, told Williams that he was tired of being treated disrespectfully. He, then, reminded Williams that he (Lee) did not work in a “cotton field.” Williams paused just a second before looking Lee straight in the eye and responding, “You should be.”
Do you think that statement contributed to Councilman Lee’s “happiness?" Do you think it made black citizens throughout Macon, Georgia any "happier" than they usually are at this time of year?
In that same regard, I would want to know if the U.of P. researchers had looked up from their computer terminals long enough to take note of radio psychologist Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s insult to a black female caller to her show, recently? That was the time when Dr. Laura essentially told the caller, right in the middle of this wonderful “post-racial” era that we’re all living through, that if the caller wanted to avoid racial insults, she probably shouldn’t have married a white man.
I wonder if that little piece of friendly advice made the black caller “happy?” How about the millions of black folks who saw the story repeated over and over on cable news shows over that following week? Were they also “happy?”
And, how about all the African Americans who had to hear, immediately thereafter, the news about Sarah Palin’s “tweet” to Dr. Laura, supporting her racist commentary? It went like this: “Don’t retreat, reload.”
Many more millions of black Americans were also subjected to that exchange and I’m pretty confident that none of them were made much “happier,” as a result.
But maybe the two good professors at Penn didn’t include the opinions of any of these kinds of black Americans in their survey.
From virtually all of the data I’ve seen about current economic, social, housing and health conditions, “happy” would be one of the last words I would use to describe how black people are feeling, right about now.. With the country turning more and more every day toward right-wing conservatism, with the cries for “smaller government” constituting a virtual guarantee that predominantly poor blacks will be even further shut out of much-needed government services, what in the world do Negroes have to be “happy” about?
I don’t know about you, but when I want to know what credible research has been done on the subject of “happiness,” I tend to rely more on the 2006 report on the topic by the PEW Research Center. For a number of reasons, it seems a great deal more in keeping with the reality I see every day across America.
In summary, here’s what PEW found: Rich people (50 percent) are happier than poor people (23 percent); Republicans (45 percent), who, not coincidentally, tend to be richer, are happier than Democrats (30 percent); married people (43 percent) are happier than unmarried people (24 percent); and people who worship frequently (43 percent) are happier than those who don’t (26 percent).
More specifically, the people at PEW also found that both whites and Hispanics are happier than blacks, which would seem to make sense, given the strong correlation between income and happiness, and the fact that the poverty rate for black children, which stands at about 34 percent, is greater than that of Hispanic, Asian or white children.
But, if the PEW findings are accurate, and it’s very difficult to disagree with them, if you’re wide awake and are familiar at all with the black community, then where did the Wharton School professors come up with their stunning conclusion that blacks are becoming more “happy” every day?
To nobody’s great surprise, the University of Pennsylvania’s “Black Happiness Report” hit with a loud, incredulous thud across the country, and was quickly dismissed, much in the same way that the recent report that informed us that the Great Recession in the United States had actually come to an end, in 2009.
We didn’t believe that one either, for equally good reasons.
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Monday, August 16, 2010
What Happens To Black Folks During A “Second American Revolution?”
Over the past month or so, the genie has clearly been let out of the bottle with regard to the topic of race in America and, along with many other formerly taboo issues, overt racism appears to be firmly back in style. In fact, it’s a rare newscast that doesn’t prominently feature a new, recent, race-based controversy.
Immediately on the heels of the disgraceful treatment of Shirley Sherrod, for example, there was a lazer-like media focus on “ethics violations” by two black U.S. Congresspeople, Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters. Throw in the news about Kwame Kilpatrick’s mom, seven-term Michigan Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, losing her recent re-election bid and you’ve got a negative, media “three-fer” for the Black Caucus.
Still focusing on black-related news out of D.C., we’ve seen the Senate vote against providing the $1.2 billion in government support that has been owed to black farmers since the 1990’s, even as the Obama administration has promised $1.5 billion in farm aid to Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln. (Go figure).
We also hear Democratic U.S. Senators and high-ranking Democratic Congresspeople making noises about eliminating all federally funded diversity programs, and a New York Times columnist charging that, perhaps, the Obama White House is “too white.”
As if all of this hasn’t been “black enough for you,” take the case of former Memphis Tennessee mayor and holder of a doctorate degree from Southern Illinois University, Willie Herenton. Dr. Herenton had been prominently mentioned in national news stories for including as part of his “Just One” campaign theme for the 9th Congressional District seat in Tennessee, the fact that, out of nine Congressional seats in that state, none are held by an African American, even though the state’s population is 16 percent black, even though the City of Memphis, which is included in the district, is 61.4 percent black, and even though the 9th Congressional District is the only African-American-majority district in the state of Tennessee.
Despite all of that, Dr. Herenton was presented in national mainstream media accounts as being somehow irrational and, even, racist, himself, for emphasizing these pieces of information as part of his campaign.
Was Herenton, who is also a former head of the Memphis School District, wrong when he said that the state’s 1,058,000 black residents seemed to lack representation?
By the way, the incumbent U.S. Congressman, Steve Cohen, who happens not to be African American, was endorsed by Barack Obama. Cohen won.
It really does appear that the issue of race relations is being moved back onto mainstream media’s “front burner” once again, right where we need to keep it, until the issue is finally resolved.
I’m all for that.
For far too long, even pre-dating the election of the first black president, it seemed that there had been some curious unwritten agreement between black folks and the national media that if we didn’t bring up our own issues, if we wanted to pretend that race-based inequities had disappeared, then they would function accordingly.
It went like this: A significant percentage of African Americans would all agree that, no matter how desperate the conditions for the mass of black people, no matter how unfair the incarceration and sentencing procedures were for African Americans, no matter how high our poverty and unemployment rates grew, as compared to the mainstream, and no matter how much we were disproportionately abused by financial services companies, we would simply look the other way, and pretend it wasn’t happening, at all.
It was almost as if we thought that, by remaining quiet in the midst of sweeping black adversity, some of us would be able to move more easily into the mainstream. You remember the old lines from the Stepin Fetchit movie era: “Sh-h-h, don’t say nothin’…ya’ll goin’ to get us in trouble.” Regrettably, it seemed a lot like that.
Unfortunately, that approach didn’t work for blacks in the 1930’s, and it hasn’t worked for us now, in the 21st century.
In any event, if you’ve been listening really closely you would have heard far too many trusting, hopeful and, regrettably, naive black folks saying that racism in America was an outdated, "60’s" phenomenon, that all those run-down black communities across the country looked that way simply because the “irresponsible black men and women” who lived there “really didn’t want to work,” and were “choosing to live that way.”
With blinders tightly affixed, and heads firmly planted in the ground, or elsewhere, some black intellectuals even began to publicly criticize African-American activists, offering that black protests were passé, and that demonstrating for economic access had gone out with the “Afro.” They even began to agree with media pundits that any claims of race-based injustice, no matter how valid, were simply cases of “playing the race card.”
Sadly, the “race card” terminology has been no more than a slick, verbal sleight-of-hand created to make African Americans feel guilty about discussing their own issues. Unfortunately, it has worked beyond all reasonable expectations, for the past 15 years or so.
With all of that as backdrop, our challenge, now, is to mount a political, economic and communications strategy that will allow us to deal effectively with the return of the harsh new, race-driven reality before it consumes all of us – blacks, white, red, brown and yellow. While still demanding the respect our ethnicity has always deserved, we need to work to finally eliminate the "artificial heirarchy of race," which has been concocted to keep whites at the top of the pyramid, Hispanics and Asians in the middle and blacks solidly at the bottom. Pretending that this is no longer an issue is not only non-productive, it's self-defeating.
As I see it, everything is “on the political table” in the months leading to the mid-term elections and in the two years leading to the presidential elections. There are even political factions that are ready to further amend or eliminate, entirely, the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. In addition, the U.S. government is embroiled in an immigration-related lawsuit against the state of Arizona that has attracted a growing number of other states to join forces against a sitting U.S. president in a fashion that has not been seen since the Civil War.
Perhaps, as a direct result of all of this, the president’s approval rating dropped to 41 percent, recently, the lowest at any time since he took office.
Even worse, CNN pundit Jack Cafferty, two weeks ago, raised the question of whether “the time is ripe for the second American Revolution?” In making his case, Cafferty quoted an editorial in “Investor’s Business Daily” that offered that, perhaps, the government is, now, under Obama, doing “more harm than good.” The commentary went on to accuse him of conducting an “imperial presidency” and made the point that he is “diminishing America from within.”
Wow!
On top of all that, a number of states around the country, most notably Missouri, two weeks ago, are challenging the federal government’s right to impose the Healthcare Reform Bill that was, by all accounts, legally passed by both houses of the U.S. Legislature and signed by the president of the United States.
In my opinion, we’re living now through one of the most volatile political periods in this young nation’s history. Racial animosity and scape-goating are growing phenomena, people are broke, a significant number of them have lost their homes and jobs, along with their hopes for a better future…and thanks to the National Rifle Association, an overwhelming number of them – black and white – are heavily armed.
In the midst of all of this uncertainly, it is of the utmost importance that we in the black community remain vigilant and engaged. When overt racism has raised its ugly head, again, and there is a growing willingness among media pundits to “go negative” on racial topics, when there is talk about fundamental changes in the U.S. Constitution, discussions about the feasibility of a “Second American Revolution,” and outright, direct challenges to the power of the Presidency, we need to ensure that we remain focused and not be reluctant to speak forthrightly on behalf of our own issues.
Everyone else already seems to be doing so.
#####
Immediately on the heels of the disgraceful treatment of Shirley Sherrod, for example, there was a lazer-like media focus on “ethics violations” by two black U.S. Congresspeople, Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters. Throw in the news about Kwame Kilpatrick’s mom, seven-term Michigan Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, losing her recent re-election bid and you’ve got a negative, media “three-fer” for the Black Caucus.
Still focusing on black-related news out of D.C., we’ve seen the Senate vote against providing the $1.2 billion in government support that has been owed to black farmers since the 1990’s, even as the Obama administration has promised $1.5 billion in farm aid to Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln. (Go figure).
We also hear Democratic U.S. Senators and high-ranking Democratic Congresspeople making noises about eliminating all federally funded diversity programs, and a New York Times columnist charging that, perhaps, the Obama White House is “too white.”
As if all of this hasn’t been “black enough for you,” take the case of former Memphis Tennessee mayor and holder of a doctorate degree from Southern Illinois University, Willie Herenton. Dr. Herenton had been prominently mentioned in national news stories for including as part of his “Just One” campaign theme for the 9th Congressional District seat in Tennessee, the fact that, out of nine Congressional seats in that state, none are held by an African American, even though the state’s population is 16 percent black, even though the City of Memphis, which is included in the district, is 61.4 percent black, and even though the 9th Congressional District is the only African-American-majority district in the state of Tennessee.
Despite all of that, Dr. Herenton was presented in national mainstream media accounts as being somehow irrational and, even, racist, himself, for emphasizing these pieces of information as part of his campaign.
Was Herenton, who is also a former head of the Memphis School District, wrong when he said that the state’s 1,058,000 black residents seemed to lack representation?
By the way, the incumbent U.S. Congressman, Steve Cohen, who happens not to be African American, was endorsed by Barack Obama. Cohen won.
It really does appear that the issue of race relations is being moved back onto mainstream media’s “front burner” once again, right where we need to keep it, until the issue is finally resolved.
I’m all for that.
For far too long, even pre-dating the election of the first black president, it seemed that there had been some curious unwritten agreement between black folks and the national media that if we didn’t bring up our own issues, if we wanted to pretend that race-based inequities had disappeared, then they would function accordingly.
It went like this: A significant percentage of African Americans would all agree that, no matter how desperate the conditions for the mass of black people, no matter how unfair the incarceration and sentencing procedures were for African Americans, no matter how high our poverty and unemployment rates grew, as compared to the mainstream, and no matter how much we were disproportionately abused by financial services companies, we would simply look the other way, and pretend it wasn’t happening, at all.
It was almost as if we thought that, by remaining quiet in the midst of sweeping black adversity, some of us would be able to move more easily into the mainstream. You remember the old lines from the Stepin Fetchit movie era: “Sh-h-h, don’t say nothin’…ya’ll goin’ to get us in trouble.” Regrettably, it seemed a lot like that.
Unfortunately, that approach didn’t work for blacks in the 1930’s, and it hasn’t worked for us now, in the 21st century.
In any event, if you’ve been listening really closely you would have heard far too many trusting, hopeful and, regrettably, naive black folks saying that racism in America was an outdated, "60’s" phenomenon, that all those run-down black communities across the country looked that way simply because the “irresponsible black men and women” who lived there “really didn’t want to work,” and were “choosing to live that way.”
With blinders tightly affixed, and heads firmly planted in the ground, or elsewhere, some black intellectuals even began to publicly criticize African-American activists, offering that black protests were passé, and that demonstrating for economic access had gone out with the “Afro.” They even began to agree with media pundits that any claims of race-based injustice, no matter how valid, were simply cases of “playing the race card.”
Sadly, the “race card” terminology has been no more than a slick, verbal sleight-of-hand created to make African Americans feel guilty about discussing their own issues. Unfortunately, it has worked beyond all reasonable expectations, for the past 15 years or so.
With all of that as backdrop, our challenge, now, is to mount a political, economic and communications strategy that will allow us to deal effectively with the return of the harsh new, race-driven reality before it consumes all of us – blacks, white, red, brown and yellow. While still demanding the respect our ethnicity has always deserved, we need to work to finally eliminate the "artificial heirarchy of race," which has been concocted to keep whites at the top of the pyramid, Hispanics and Asians in the middle and blacks solidly at the bottom. Pretending that this is no longer an issue is not only non-productive, it's self-defeating.
As I see it, everything is “on the political table” in the months leading to the mid-term elections and in the two years leading to the presidential elections. There are even political factions that are ready to further amend or eliminate, entirely, the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment. In addition, the U.S. government is embroiled in an immigration-related lawsuit against the state of Arizona that has attracted a growing number of other states to join forces against a sitting U.S. president in a fashion that has not been seen since the Civil War.
Perhaps, as a direct result of all of this, the president’s approval rating dropped to 41 percent, recently, the lowest at any time since he took office.
Even worse, CNN pundit Jack Cafferty, two weeks ago, raised the question of whether “the time is ripe for the second American Revolution?” In making his case, Cafferty quoted an editorial in “Investor’s Business Daily” that offered that, perhaps, the government is, now, under Obama, doing “more harm than good.” The commentary went on to accuse him of conducting an “imperial presidency” and made the point that he is “diminishing America from within.”
Wow!
On top of all that, a number of states around the country, most notably Missouri, two weeks ago, are challenging the federal government’s right to impose the Healthcare Reform Bill that was, by all accounts, legally passed by both houses of the U.S. Legislature and signed by the president of the United States.
In my opinion, we’re living now through one of the most volatile political periods in this young nation’s history. Racial animosity and scape-goating are growing phenomena, people are broke, a significant number of them have lost their homes and jobs, along with their hopes for a better future…and thanks to the National Rifle Association, an overwhelming number of them – black and white – are heavily armed.
In the midst of all of this uncertainly, it is of the utmost importance that we in the black community remain vigilant and engaged. When overt racism has raised its ugly head, again, and there is a growing willingness among media pundits to “go negative” on racial topics, when there is talk about fundamental changes in the U.S. Constitution, discussions about the feasibility of a “Second American Revolution,” and outright, direct challenges to the power of the Presidency, we need to ensure that we remain focused and not be reluctant to speak forthrightly on behalf of our own issues.
Everyone else already seems to be doing so.
#####
Friday, July 9, 2010
Whites Are "Tanning," Blacks and Others Are Using Skin-Whiteners. What's Up?
What is it with people?
Why, please tell me, do we still suffer so much race-based antagonism, here in the U.S. and around the world, when, apparently, what many of us really want is to look exactly like our so-called “enemies” in those other races? Is confusion about, and lack of comfort with, our own skin color and racial identity “hard-wired” into our psychological makeup as human beings?
The other day I read in the Wall Street Journal that the federal government, as part of the recently passed health care reform legislation, will now begin to tax tanning salons, at 10 percent per customer usage. The government estimates that, at that rate, the country’s 20,000 tanning salons will generate an additional $2.7 billion for the IRS, over the next ten years.
This is clearly historical.
We have long complained in our community about the subtle ways in which African Americans are subjected to the “black tax,” i.e., higher insurance rates, higher neighborhood food costs, higher interest rates for loans, lower wages, etc. But, as I see it, this is the first time in the 223-year history of our great country that any of its citizens ever had to bear an additional financial burden simply because they were pale-skinned or white.
I have to admit that my first reaction was that the "tanning tax" was a clear case of things that “go around” finally “coming around.” But that was petty, and I stopped thinking like that, immediately.
On a more serious note, however, this development did make me curious about why whites in America – given this nation’s longstanding discomfort with people of darker skin – ever wanted to be “tanned," themselves, in the first place. Why, indeed, do they expose themselves to dangerous ultra-violent lamps in tanning beds and booths, even though such behavior has been proved to contribute to a 74 percent greater incidence of skin cancer?
A National Health Interview Survey, in 2005, disclosed that 20.4 percent of whites aged 18-29 and 13.6 percent of whites aged 30-49 were frequent users of indoor tanning facilities. The heaviest users were those who were younger, living in the Northeast or Midwest, who were female or Caucasian, and who had a higher level of education.
A more recent study by Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, found that, among tanning salon users, the average number of annual visits was 23.
According to the survey, there is more pressure for women and whites to tan for “appearance enhancement...while darker-skinned individuals do not perceive tanning as culturally appropriate.”
It's not just American whites who are interested in darkening their complexions, from time to time. A survey by the German Federal Office of Radiation Protection found that more than one fourth (28 percent) of the German population had used tanning beds at least once, and that 11 percent of the population can be defined as high-frequency users of tanning services (more than 10 times a year).
The German researchers found that, in their country, also, “tanned skin is considered socially desirable and attractive.” In fact, they discovered that survey respondents who felt that “tanning was attractive” were 75 percent more likely to use tanning beds.
Hm-m-m-m.
Back in the U.S., those who are concerned about the dangers of tanning salons have begun to explore other options for skin-darkening, including tanning sprays. According to one report, however, to be safe, tanning spray users are advised to prevent the “chemical mist from entering (their) blood stream, to wear goggles, to avoid getting any of the mist in (their) mouth and to be careful not to inhale the fumes.”
Wow!
Seems a lot of trouble to go through to look more like people you have long said were your cultural, intellectual and biological inferiors.
Another study by Cynthia Frisby at University of Missouri – Columbia revealed that people perceive a light brown skin tone to be more physically attractive than a pale or dark skin tone. An associate professor of advertising at the University, Frisby found that “without regard to physical features, people prefer light brown skin over dark brown skin or pale skin.”
Who knew?
Certainly not the late, great Michael Jackson... and, clearly, no one ever mentioned any of this to Sammy Sosa, the Dominican baseball legend of African descent, who recently subjected himself to a highly embarrassing round of media coverage because of his use of a skin-whitening product. According to a Chicago dermatologist, the "whitening cream" that Sosa used resulted in changing his original skin color by “at least six shades."
Surprisingly, at this late date, even in Africa, itself, people have been engaged in this curious behavior. Indeed, a study conducted in Pretoria, South Africa, found that 35.5 percent of the participants had used topical steroids to lighten their skin.
In Asia, four out of ten women, in places such as Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan, are also now using skin- lighteners. In Thailand, that government’s Food and Drug Administration recently published a list of 70 dangerous skin-lightening creams sold illegally, there. Similarly, 50 such products are banned in Indonesia, but are still briskly sold.
Most observers believe that the interest in skin-whitening on the part of Asians can be traced back to the long history of Asian countries being dominated and occupied by European and American invaders. Subjecting themselves to cancer-causing, skin-lightening chemicals is part of a lingering belief that the more they can look like those powerful invaders, the higher they will move up the social ladder in their own Asian countries, and the easier their lives will be.
Regrettably, even in the 21st century, in Thailand, most celebrities and movie stars are white-skinned, and the average citizen strives to look as much like them as possible.
In Japan, a country long known for its disdain of all things “foreign” and for foreigners, themselves, the international fashion coordinator at Vogue Nippon, the Japanese edition of the iconic American fashion magazine, has been quoted as saying:” Everybody (with few exceptions) basically wants white skin.”
It’s going to be interesting to see, with so much of the desire to have lighter, whiter skin traceable directly back to the perception of American/European military and economic invincibility, how the sale of skin whiteners will hold up here and abroad, given the emergence of the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians and Middle Easterners as the new, world economic and military powers.
Will Indonesians, Taiwanese, Thais, and South Koreans still want so readily to assimilate into the old power structure, if the new big kid on the international block is actually Chinese?
Will black people here in our own country still be interested in being "less dark" when they begin to realize just how much potential, global economic clout Nigerians and Ghanaians now have?
Will people who are "mixed race" increasingly feel more comfortable in claiming the Latin American, Asian or black parts of their identities--not because society has forced them to do so as part of a Census count--but because, in this changing global environment, they believe it conveys increasing levels of cultural pride and a long-overdue recognition of their own self-worth?
I hope this all works out.
I hope whites in this country begin to feel more free to express a growing respect for darker skinned peoples, one that they can demonstrate by taking down the barriers to greater economic access for blacks and other people of color, throughout the society, at every level.
After all, the research informs us that Europeans and Americans believe that being tanned makes people more attractive. Now it’s time to move beyond that superficiality and to start doing serious work together, building an economy that will include, finally, severely underutilized black Americans, and others.
Hey, maybe the "tanning tax" will be just enough of an irritant to get our collective attention and become the first step in the world moving beyond the lingering effects of the "artificial hierarchy of race."
I can dream, can't I?
########
#######
Why, please tell me, do we still suffer so much race-based antagonism, here in the U.S. and around the world, when, apparently, what many of us really want is to look exactly like our so-called “enemies” in those other races? Is confusion about, and lack of comfort with, our own skin color and racial identity “hard-wired” into our psychological makeup as human beings?
The other day I read in the Wall Street Journal that the federal government, as part of the recently passed health care reform legislation, will now begin to tax tanning salons, at 10 percent per customer usage. The government estimates that, at that rate, the country’s 20,000 tanning salons will generate an additional $2.7 billion for the IRS, over the next ten years.
This is clearly historical.
We have long complained in our community about the subtle ways in which African Americans are subjected to the “black tax,” i.e., higher insurance rates, higher neighborhood food costs, higher interest rates for loans, lower wages, etc. But, as I see it, this is the first time in the 223-year history of our great country that any of its citizens ever had to bear an additional financial burden simply because they were pale-skinned or white.
I have to admit that my first reaction was that the "tanning tax" was a clear case of things that “go around” finally “coming around.” But that was petty, and I stopped thinking like that, immediately.
On a more serious note, however, this development did make me curious about why whites in America – given this nation’s longstanding discomfort with people of darker skin – ever wanted to be “tanned," themselves, in the first place. Why, indeed, do they expose themselves to dangerous ultra-violent lamps in tanning beds and booths, even though such behavior has been proved to contribute to a 74 percent greater incidence of skin cancer?
A National Health Interview Survey, in 2005, disclosed that 20.4 percent of whites aged 18-29 and 13.6 percent of whites aged 30-49 were frequent users of indoor tanning facilities. The heaviest users were those who were younger, living in the Northeast or Midwest, who were female or Caucasian, and who had a higher level of education.
A more recent study by Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, found that, among tanning salon users, the average number of annual visits was 23.
According to the survey, there is more pressure for women and whites to tan for “appearance enhancement...while darker-skinned individuals do not perceive tanning as culturally appropriate.”
It's not just American whites who are interested in darkening their complexions, from time to time. A survey by the German Federal Office of Radiation Protection found that more than one fourth (28 percent) of the German population had used tanning beds at least once, and that 11 percent of the population can be defined as high-frequency users of tanning services (more than 10 times a year).
The German researchers found that, in their country, also, “tanned skin is considered socially desirable and attractive.” In fact, they discovered that survey respondents who felt that “tanning was attractive” were 75 percent more likely to use tanning beds.
Hm-m-m-m.
Back in the U.S., those who are concerned about the dangers of tanning salons have begun to explore other options for skin-darkening, including tanning sprays. According to one report, however, to be safe, tanning spray users are advised to prevent the “chemical mist from entering (their) blood stream, to wear goggles, to avoid getting any of the mist in (their) mouth and to be careful not to inhale the fumes.”
Wow!
Seems a lot of trouble to go through to look more like people you have long said were your cultural, intellectual and biological inferiors.
Another study by Cynthia Frisby at University of Missouri – Columbia revealed that people perceive a light brown skin tone to be more physically attractive than a pale or dark skin tone. An associate professor of advertising at the University, Frisby found that “without regard to physical features, people prefer light brown skin over dark brown skin or pale skin.”
Who knew?
Certainly not the late, great Michael Jackson... and, clearly, no one ever mentioned any of this to Sammy Sosa, the Dominican baseball legend of African descent, who recently subjected himself to a highly embarrassing round of media coverage because of his use of a skin-whitening product. According to a Chicago dermatologist, the "whitening cream" that Sosa used resulted in changing his original skin color by “at least six shades."
Surprisingly, at this late date, even in Africa, itself, people have been engaged in this curious behavior. Indeed, a study conducted in Pretoria, South Africa, found that 35.5 percent of the participants had used topical steroids to lighten their skin.
In Asia, four out of ten women, in places such as Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan, are also now using skin- lighteners. In Thailand, that government’s Food and Drug Administration recently published a list of 70 dangerous skin-lightening creams sold illegally, there. Similarly, 50 such products are banned in Indonesia, but are still briskly sold.
Most observers believe that the interest in skin-whitening on the part of Asians can be traced back to the long history of Asian countries being dominated and occupied by European and American invaders. Subjecting themselves to cancer-causing, skin-lightening chemicals is part of a lingering belief that the more they can look like those powerful invaders, the higher they will move up the social ladder in their own Asian countries, and the easier their lives will be.
Regrettably, even in the 21st century, in Thailand, most celebrities and movie stars are white-skinned, and the average citizen strives to look as much like them as possible.
In Japan, a country long known for its disdain of all things “foreign” and for foreigners, themselves, the international fashion coordinator at Vogue Nippon, the Japanese edition of the iconic American fashion magazine, has been quoted as saying:” Everybody (with few exceptions) basically wants white skin.”
It’s going to be interesting to see, with so much of the desire to have lighter, whiter skin traceable directly back to the perception of American/European military and economic invincibility, how the sale of skin whiteners will hold up here and abroad, given the emergence of the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians and Middle Easterners as the new, world economic and military powers.
Will Indonesians, Taiwanese, Thais, and South Koreans still want so readily to assimilate into the old power structure, if the new big kid on the international block is actually Chinese?
Will black people here in our own country still be interested in being "less dark" when they begin to realize just how much potential, global economic clout Nigerians and Ghanaians now have?
Will people who are "mixed race" increasingly feel more comfortable in claiming the Latin American, Asian or black parts of their identities--not because society has forced them to do so as part of a Census count--but because, in this changing global environment, they believe it conveys increasing levels of cultural pride and a long-overdue recognition of their own self-worth?
I hope this all works out.
I hope whites in this country begin to feel more free to express a growing respect for darker skinned peoples, one that they can demonstrate by taking down the barriers to greater economic access for blacks and other people of color, throughout the society, at every level.
After all, the research informs us that Europeans and Americans believe that being tanned makes people more attractive. Now it’s time to move beyond that superficiality and to start doing serious work together, building an economy that will include, finally, severely underutilized black Americans, and others.
Hey, maybe the "tanning tax" will be just enough of an irritant to get our collective attention and become the first step in the world moving beyond the lingering effects of the "artificial hierarchy of race."
I can dream, can't I?
########
#######
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Being in Denial about Race Sometimes Extends to Religious Matters.
Here they go, again!
What must they be drinking or smoking in Arizona?
That’s what people across the country and around the world surely must be thinking.
All of a sudden, a state that was formerly known for having clean air, warm weather and the Phoenix Suns, is now better known for harsh anti-immigration laws, angry street demonstrations, the threat of racial profiling, “border wars,” and “white-only” curriculums in its public schools.
As bad as all of that has been, two weeks ago, Arizona tried to shoot itself in its other foot.
It happened in Prescott Arizona, a town of 42,000 people, of whom about 200 are black and 8.2 percent are Hispanic. A local elementary school wanted to teach its students about ecology and energy conservation and commissioned the painting of a huge mural on one of its exterior walls. The design of the artwork was approved by the students and the faculty, and it featured the faces of young people who actually attend the school, including some from ethnically and racially diverse backgrounds.
For some reason, that didn’t sit well with a guy named Steve Blair, a resident of Prescott, who also happens to be a member of its City Council and the host of a Fox-affiliated daily radio show, there.
How much didn’t Blair like the mural?
Well, first, he called for its immediate removal, because it was an attempt, he said, to “indoctrinate” young children and to promote “a specific diversity agenda that was unnecessary in (his) city.”
“I’m not a racist by any stretch of the imagination,” said Blair, “but whenever people start talking about diversity, it’s a word I can’t stand…What these people (in Prescott) don’t like is somebody forcing diversity down their throats.”
Blair went on to say, “To depict the biggest picture on the building as a black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?”
It turns out that like many racists, Mr. Blair began his assault by being largely uninformed about his topic. In fact, the “biggest picture” Blair was ranting about wasn’t actually a “black person,” at all, but a young Mexican-American student, named Mario, whom, I imagine, was still too “dark” for Blair’s tastes.
No matter that Blair was dead wrong, he was also loud, and had access to an official audience in City Council and a broadcast audience through the radio station.
The next thing you know, residents of Prescott, were driving past the still-developing mural project, honking their car horns and shouting racially insensitive comments. All of this led to the school’s “backbone-challenged” principal, a guy named Jeff Lane, deciding to advise the mural painters that the darker-skinned students depicted on the mural had to have their faces “lightened.”
Seriously...lightened.
With that input, the painters went back to that part of the wall that included young Mario's face to make it lighter, closer to white, and more acceptable to certain Prescott residents.
I wonder how the students themselves felt about that.
I wonder how I would have felt, back when I was in the fifth grade at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament School, at Broad and Parrish Street, in North Central Philadelphia, if some of my teachers had offered to post my face on the school’s wall–but only if they could paint me as a white person.
What would that have done to my 11-year-old mind? It’s scary to imagine.
At the same time, if we want to be absolutely honest with ourselves, we have to admit that this kind of behavior is not limited to Arizona. It’s still way too prevalent in our society, as a whole.
If you’ll recall, a tremendous controversy erupted immediately after the “9/11 tragedy,” when the artist commissioned to create a sculpture as a memorial to three “Ground Zero” firefighters wanted to make one of the firefighters black, one Hispanic and one white.
Shockingly, even though about 24 black and Hispanic firefighters lost their lives in the line of duty that day, the members of the New York Fire Department vehemently objected to having “firemen of color” in their memorial depiction and demanded that all three of the firefighters be “white.”
Sounds a bit like “Arizona Syndrome” to me. What do you think?
And, finally, let’s move to a substantially more sensitive area of artistic expression. Unfortunately, it seems, the need for some people to “lighten up” images, paintings, and statues also extends to religious representations.
For example, even though they are virtually unknown here in the United States, some of the most venerated religious images in all of Christianity and Catholicism are the so-called “Black Madonnas,” found in Spain, Germany, Poland, France, Switzerland and other countries, some of which date back more than 1600 years.
According to University of Detroit Mercy, Spain’s best-known Black Madonna, Our Lady of Montserrat, is thought to have been carved by St. Luke in Jerusalem and subsequently taken to Barcelona, where it was discovered in 880 A.D.
There is also the Fedorovo Virgin, a Black Madonna of 18th Century Russia, Poland’s Black Madonna of Czestochowa and more than 300 various black Madonnas in France ―even today. All in all, according to one expert on the subject, there are countless numbers of Madonna sculptures and paintings that scholars suspect were once black, but are now white, “most likely from being lightened or repainted.”
Very simplistically, there seems to be more than sufficient evidence that a direct connection can be made to Christian history and a heritage related to African people.
This is known from the people and places described in much of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and, certainly, from Moses asking Pharaoh to “Let my people go.” (His “people” must have, obviously, been in Africa at the time); and from the Egyptian-based statuettes of Black Isis holding the black infant Horus on her lap, which were the precursor images of the Black Madonnas and, originally, all Madonnas.
But, even with all of that information available to us, here, in the United States, it is still extremely rare to find an image of a Black Madonna and her black infant son, Jesus.
Perhaps it’s possible, in scattered, progressive black churches, but certainly not in predominantly mainstream denominations or congregations.
It’s as if the entire country has been in racial denial on this issue, too. What difference should it make to true believers, if the man-made image of their God is not Caucasian? Nevertheless, it does, somehow, seem to make a difference, here in North America.
Clearly, this kind of thinking has, over the years, given encouragement to people such as the New York firefighters who insist on having only white images in their memorials to their fallen comrades and to people in Arizona who insist on having only white children depicted as part of their elementary school murals.
As we try to sort all of this out, the only encouraging sign is that Steve Blair, the councilman and talk show host, who launched all of the insanity in Prescott, in the first place, has been fired by his radio station. In addition, the school’s principal and the school district superintendent have publicly admitted that asking the painters to “lighten” the faces of the students, in retrospect, was a “mistake”.
Maybe there is hope for Arizona―and for all of us, after all.
I guess there really is a God – regardless of the narrow racial boxes in which we in America want to confine him/her.
###
What must they be drinking or smoking in Arizona?
That’s what people across the country and around the world surely must be thinking.
All of a sudden, a state that was formerly known for having clean air, warm weather and the Phoenix Suns, is now better known for harsh anti-immigration laws, angry street demonstrations, the threat of racial profiling, “border wars,” and “white-only” curriculums in its public schools.
As bad as all of that has been, two weeks ago, Arizona tried to shoot itself in its other foot.
It happened in Prescott Arizona, a town of 42,000 people, of whom about 200 are black and 8.2 percent are Hispanic. A local elementary school wanted to teach its students about ecology and energy conservation and commissioned the painting of a huge mural on one of its exterior walls. The design of the artwork was approved by the students and the faculty, and it featured the faces of young people who actually attend the school, including some from ethnically and racially diverse backgrounds.
For some reason, that didn’t sit well with a guy named Steve Blair, a resident of Prescott, who also happens to be a member of its City Council and the host of a Fox-affiliated daily radio show, there.
How much didn’t Blair like the mural?
Well, first, he called for its immediate removal, because it was an attempt, he said, to “indoctrinate” young children and to promote “a specific diversity agenda that was unnecessary in (his) city.”
“I’m not a racist by any stretch of the imagination,” said Blair, “but whenever people start talking about diversity, it’s a word I can’t stand…What these people (in Prescott) don’t like is somebody forcing diversity down their throats.”
Blair went on to say, “To depict the biggest picture on the building as a black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?”
It turns out that like many racists, Mr. Blair began his assault by being largely uninformed about his topic. In fact, the “biggest picture” Blair was ranting about wasn’t actually a “black person,” at all, but a young Mexican-American student, named Mario, whom, I imagine, was still too “dark” for Blair’s tastes.
No matter that Blair was dead wrong, he was also loud, and had access to an official audience in City Council and a broadcast audience through the radio station.
The next thing you know, residents of Prescott, were driving past the still-developing mural project, honking their car horns and shouting racially insensitive comments. All of this led to the school’s “backbone-challenged” principal, a guy named Jeff Lane, deciding to advise the mural painters that the darker-skinned students depicted on the mural had to have their faces “lightened.”
Seriously...lightened.
With that input, the painters went back to that part of the wall that included young Mario's face to make it lighter, closer to white, and more acceptable to certain Prescott residents.
I wonder how the students themselves felt about that.
I wonder how I would have felt, back when I was in the fifth grade at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament School, at Broad and Parrish Street, in North Central Philadelphia, if some of my teachers had offered to post my face on the school’s wall–but only if they could paint me as a white person.
What would that have done to my 11-year-old mind? It’s scary to imagine.
At the same time, if we want to be absolutely honest with ourselves, we have to admit that this kind of behavior is not limited to Arizona. It’s still way too prevalent in our society, as a whole.
If you’ll recall, a tremendous controversy erupted immediately after the “9/11 tragedy,” when the artist commissioned to create a sculpture as a memorial to three “Ground Zero” firefighters wanted to make one of the firefighters black, one Hispanic and one white.
Shockingly, even though about 24 black and Hispanic firefighters lost their lives in the line of duty that day, the members of the New York Fire Department vehemently objected to having “firemen of color” in their memorial depiction and demanded that all three of the firefighters be “white.”
Sounds a bit like “Arizona Syndrome” to me. What do you think?
And, finally, let’s move to a substantially more sensitive area of artistic expression. Unfortunately, it seems, the need for some people to “lighten up” images, paintings, and statues also extends to religious representations.
For example, even though they are virtually unknown here in the United States, some of the most venerated religious images in all of Christianity and Catholicism are the so-called “Black Madonnas,” found in Spain, Germany, Poland, France, Switzerland and other countries, some of which date back more than 1600 years.
According to University of Detroit Mercy, Spain’s best-known Black Madonna, Our Lady of Montserrat, is thought to have been carved by St. Luke in Jerusalem and subsequently taken to Barcelona, where it was discovered in 880 A.D.
There is also the Fedorovo Virgin, a Black Madonna of 18th Century Russia, Poland’s Black Madonna of Czestochowa and more than 300 various black Madonnas in France ―even today. All in all, according to one expert on the subject, there are countless numbers of Madonna sculptures and paintings that scholars suspect were once black, but are now white, “most likely from being lightened or repainted.”
Very simplistically, there seems to be more than sufficient evidence that a direct connection can be made to Christian history and a heritage related to African people.
This is known from the people and places described in much of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and, certainly, from Moses asking Pharaoh to “Let my people go.” (His “people” must have, obviously, been in Africa at the time); and from the Egyptian-based statuettes of Black Isis holding the black infant Horus on her lap, which were the precursor images of the Black Madonnas and, originally, all Madonnas.
But, even with all of that information available to us, here, in the United States, it is still extremely rare to find an image of a Black Madonna and her black infant son, Jesus.
Perhaps it’s possible, in scattered, progressive black churches, but certainly not in predominantly mainstream denominations or congregations.
It’s as if the entire country has been in racial denial on this issue, too. What difference should it make to true believers, if the man-made image of their God is not Caucasian? Nevertheless, it does, somehow, seem to make a difference, here in North America.
Clearly, this kind of thinking has, over the years, given encouragement to people such as the New York firefighters who insist on having only white images in their memorials to their fallen comrades and to people in Arizona who insist on having only white children depicted as part of their elementary school murals.
As we try to sort all of this out, the only encouraging sign is that Steve Blair, the councilman and talk show host, who launched all of the insanity in Prescott, in the first place, has been fired by his radio station. In addition, the school’s principal and the school district superintendent have publicly admitted that asking the painters to “lighten” the faces of the students, in retrospect, was a “mistake”.
Maybe there is hope for Arizona―and for all of us, after all.
I guess there really is a God – regardless of the narrow racial boxes in which we in America want to confine him/her.
###
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
It's Time for the Black Community to Get John Stossel's Attention.
Where are my post-racial friends when I need them?
Recently, Rand Paul, the son of congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul, said that, while he supported the portion of the Civil Rights Act that banned discrimination in public places and institutions, he also thought that private businesses should be permitted to discriminate, by race.
Even before most of us could fully digest Paul’s misguided, Tea Party-pandering comments, along came John Stossel. Stossel, the former ABC News correspondent and current Fox News Channel contributor, rushed to Paul’s defense and went a huge, racially backward step further when he said it was “time to repeal” that part of the Civil Rights Act that mandates that all citizens – regardless of race – should have access to public accommodations, even in privately owned businesses.
Stossel’s outrageous position was that businesses should have “the right to be racist.” In fact, in a follow-up interview on his new network, he added that, “It’s time now to repeal the (Civil Rights Act's) Public Accommodations section because private businesses ought to get to discriminate."
It’s not just unsettling that a person running for one of the very highest political offices in the United States(Paul), and a person who happens to work for the most-watched cable news channel(Stossel) have, in the same week, become comfortable with publicly espousing their racial insensitivity. No, the most unsettling part of all of this is that the issues have been dispassionately discussed on the nation’s broadcast media outlets, if at all, as if they were merely a topic in a high school debating class.
This was two extraordinarily high-profile Americans talking casually about bringing back “Jim Crow,” and no one seemed to be very much concerned about it – especially not black people.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have expected much better from Stossel. This, after all, is the same guy who wrote a column a year-and-a-half ago, in which he liberally quoted noted black apologist Shelby Steele in saying that white “preoccupation with guilt and compensation, such as Affirmative Action, is actually a subtle form of racism.” Indeed, Stossel latched right onto Steele’s premise that, in this country, there is such a thing as “black privilege” that facilitates even the meager levels of black political and economic success, far beyond the levels to which our talent and hard work entitle us.
That’s the same John Stossel who just, two months ago, criticized black professional baseball players who took a public stand against the disproportionately low percentage of African Americans in major league baseball and their inability to receive contracts commensurate with those given to their white peers.
Stossel, one of the world’s most visible non-athletes, went on to say about black professional ballplayers who were dumped from major league baseball rosters this year, “They’re unemployed because they asked for more money than their skills warrant.” He offered no opinion, curiously, on the dramatic and systematic decline in the percentage of African-American players in major league baseball over the past 30 years, money notwithstanding.
The saddest part of all this is that because Stossel works in a highly competitive broadcast news industry, non-Fox television and cable news coverage of his negative, race-baiting message will be far more difficult to find than "Rand Paul" stories.
Even though Stossel’s comments were much more harmful and mean-spirited than Paul’s, a Google search shows 206 million results for “Rand Paul, Civil Rights Act,” and just 31,500 for a search of the topic “John Stossel, Civil Rights Act."
It has also been interesting to measure, online, what the response from our “national black Civil Rights” leaders has been. Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, has moved right into the fray, launching an online campaign to invite Rand Paul to participate in a public debate with him on the history and significance of the Civil Rights Act. Google showed 504,000 results for “Rand Paul/NAACP” topics, but again, only 14,400 for “John Stossel/NAACP.” The National Urban League, by comparison, has been decidedly late out of the gate on this issue, with only 54,000 results for its interaction with Rand Paul, and only 3,920 for Urban League/Stossel-related news.
I’d like to believe that Rand Paul will break down and agree to debate the NAACP President, but I’m getting the feeling that his “handlers” have already lost confidence in his ability to defend himself, publicly, on this and other issues. The first clue in that regard was hearing that, over the past week, Paul had cancelled a previously scheduled appearance on "Meet the Press," becoming only the third person to have cancelled a "Meet the Press" interview in the show’s 62-year history.
Getting back to Stossel, there’s a movement to have FOX fire him for his remarks. Chances of that happening, in my opinion, are probably "slim" and "none." Stossel, who seemed to be floundering at FOX since his move from ABC has, for the first time, actually said something in his "anti-Civil Rights" statement that seems to resonate with the network’s primarily conservative, predominantly white, audience. It appears that the more he attacks the rights of blacks and other minorities, the more he says publicly what so many in the FOX audience wish they had the courage to say, the more job security he creates for himself.
The most curious part in all of this is how Stossel, who was born into a prominent Jewish family in Illinois, could have arrived in such a contentious position with regard to the Civil Rights Act. Even if he has absolutely no respect for black history or sensitivity to contemporary black-white disparities, I would think that Stossel would be keenly aware of the role that the Jewish community played in the Civil Rights movement and the drafting of the Civil Rights Act, itself.
Maybe Stossel, so caught up now in living the life of a high-profile, "mainstream," media personality, wants to forget that the Ku Klux Klan, historically, targeted not only blacks, but also Catholics and Jews.
Maybe now that he’s at FOX and integrally involved in "Tea Party world," Mr. Stossel has also conveniently forgotten that of the three men murdered by the Klan, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, one, James Chaney was black, and two, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were Jewish.
Stossel, no doubt, is trying really hard to forget that an estimated one-half of all white Freedom Riders were Jewish and that Jewish people were instrumental in drafting not only the 1964 Civil Rights Act but, also, the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
To be honest, the last time I paid any serious attention to John Stossel was during his now-infamous and very brief interview with World Wrestling Federation personality “Dr. D” David Schultz. Like it was yesterday, I recall Stossel making yet another ill-advised comment, this time saying to Schultz that many people in America believed that “professional wrestling is fake.”
Immediately after the words left Stossel’s mouth, Schultz hit him with an open-handed slap with his left, dropping the newsman to the ground. When Stossel popped back up, holding his head, and asked Schultz what he was trying to do, the wrestler popped him “upside the head” again, this time with a right-handed slap. Stossel dropped to the ground, once more, and, first, crawled, then ran, down the hallway, away from the wrestler. (If you don’t believe me, go on up to YouTube and view the video, yourself. It’s called “Wrestling is Fake”).
Now, I’m not generally a person who supports physical confrontation, but have you noticed that John Stossel hasn’t had very much to say about professional wrestlers since that incident?
Clearly, he needs at least a figurative slap from us on this Civil Rights issue--to get his attention, at least and, hopefully, to change his mind.
##########
Recently, Rand Paul, the son of congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul, said that, while he supported the portion of the Civil Rights Act that banned discrimination in public places and institutions, he also thought that private businesses should be permitted to discriminate, by race.
Even before most of us could fully digest Paul’s misguided, Tea Party-pandering comments, along came John Stossel. Stossel, the former ABC News correspondent and current Fox News Channel contributor, rushed to Paul’s defense and went a huge, racially backward step further when he said it was “time to repeal” that part of the Civil Rights Act that mandates that all citizens – regardless of race – should have access to public accommodations, even in privately owned businesses.
Stossel’s outrageous position was that businesses should have “the right to be racist.” In fact, in a follow-up interview on his new network, he added that, “It’s time now to repeal the (Civil Rights Act's) Public Accommodations section because private businesses ought to get to discriminate."
It’s not just unsettling that a person running for one of the very highest political offices in the United States(Paul), and a person who happens to work for the most-watched cable news channel(Stossel) have, in the same week, become comfortable with publicly espousing their racial insensitivity. No, the most unsettling part of all of this is that the issues have been dispassionately discussed on the nation’s broadcast media outlets, if at all, as if they were merely a topic in a high school debating class.
This was two extraordinarily high-profile Americans talking casually about bringing back “Jim Crow,” and no one seemed to be very much concerned about it – especially not black people.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have expected much better from Stossel. This, after all, is the same guy who wrote a column a year-and-a-half ago, in which he liberally quoted noted black apologist Shelby Steele in saying that white “preoccupation with guilt and compensation, such as Affirmative Action, is actually a subtle form of racism.” Indeed, Stossel latched right onto Steele’s premise that, in this country, there is such a thing as “black privilege” that facilitates even the meager levels of black political and economic success, far beyond the levels to which our talent and hard work entitle us.
That’s the same John Stossel who just, two months ago, criticized black professional baseball players who took a public stand against the disproportionately low percentage of African Americans in major league baseball and their inability to receive contracts commensurate with those given to their white peers.
Stossel, one of the world’s most visible non-athletes, went on to say about black professional ballplayers who were dumped from major league baseball rosters this year, “They’re unemployed because they asked for more money than their skills warrant.” He offered no opinion, curiously, on the dramatic and systematic decline in the percentage of African-American players in major league baseball over the past 30 years, money notwithstanding.
The saddest part of all this is that because Stossel works in a highly competitive broadcast news industry, non-Fox television and cable news coverage of his negative, race-baiting message will be far more difficult to find than "Rand Paul" stories.
Even though Stossel’s comments were much more harmful and mean-spirited than Paul’s, a Google search shows 206 million results for “Rand Paul, Civil Rights Act,” and just 31,500 for a search of the topic “John Stossel, Civil Rights Act."
It has also been interesting to measure, online, what the response from our “national black Civil Rights” leaders has been. Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, has moved right into the fray, launching an online campaign to invite Rand Paul to participate in a public debate with him on the history and significance of the Civil Rights Act. Google showed 504,000 results for “Rand Paul/NAACP” topics, but again, only 14,400 for “John Stossel/NAACP.” The National Urban League, by comparison, has been decidedly late out of the gate on this issue, with only 54,000 results for its interaction with Rand Paul, and only 3,920 for Urban League/Stossel-related news.
I’d like to believe that Rand Paul will break down and agree to debate the NAACP President, but I’m getting the feeling that his “handlers” have already lost confidence in his ability to defend himself, publicly, on this and other issues. The first clue in that regard was hearing that, over the past week, Paul had cancelled a previously scheduled appearance on "Meet the Press," becoming only the third person to have cancelled a "Meet the Press" interview in the show’s 62-year history.
Getting back to Stossel, there’s a movement to have FOX fire him for his remarks. Chances of that happening, in my opinion, are probably "slim" and "none." Stossel, who seemed to be floundering at FOX since his move from ABC has, for the first time, actually said something in his "anti-Civil Rights" statement that seems to resonate with the network’s primarily conservative, predominantly white, audience. It appears that the more he attacks the rights of blacks and other minorities, the more he says publicly what so many in the FOX audience wish they had the courage to say, the more job security he creates for himself.
The most curious part in all of this is how Stossel, who was born into a prominent Jewish family in Illinois, could have arrived in such a contentious position with regard to the Civil Rights Act. Even if he has absolutely no respect for black history or sensitivity to contemporary black-white disparities, I would think that Stossel would be keenly aware of the role that the Jewish community played in the Civil Rights movement and the drafting of the Civil Rights Act, itself.
Maybe Stossel, so caught up now in living the life of a high-profile, "mainstream," media personality, wants to forget that the Ku Klux Klan, historically, targeted not only blacks, but also Catholics and Jews.
Maybe now that he’s at FOX and integrally involved in "Tea Party world," Mr. Stossel has also conveniently forgotten that of the three men murdered by the Klan, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, one, James Chaney was black, and two, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, were Jewish.
Stossel, no doubt, is trying really hard to forget that an estimated one-half of all white Freedom Riders were Jewish and that Jewish people were instrumental in drafting not only the 1964 Civil Rights Act but, also, the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
To be honest, the last time I paid any serious attention to John Stossel was during his now-infamous and very brief interview with World Wrestling Federation personality “Dr. D” David Schultz. Like it was yesterday, I recall Stossel making yet another ill-advised comment, this time saying to Schultz that many people in America believed that “professional wrestling is fake.”
Immediately after the words left Stossel’s mouth, Schultz hit him with an open-handed slap with his left, dropping the newsman to the ground. When Stossel popped back up, holding his head, and asked Schultz what he was trying to do, the wrestler popped him “upside the head” again, this time with a right-handed slap. Stossel dropped to the ground, once more, and, first, crawled, then ran, down the hallway, away from the wrestler. (If you don’t believe me, go on up to YouTube and view the video, yourself. It’s called “Wrestling is Fake”).
Now, I’m not generally a person who supports physical confrontation, but have you noticed that John Stossel hasn’t had very much to say about professional wrestlers since that incident?
Clearly, he needs at least a figurative slap from us on this Civil Rights issue--to get his attention, at least and, hopefully, to change his mind.
##########
Monday, May 24, 2010
The Theory of Reparations, By a Formerly Black Harvard Professor
O.K., O.K., let's get started. Let's all agree that today is, officially, "African-American Question Day."
And here's the very first question for your consideration: What is it with our so-called “prominent” blacks, lately?
Are they engaging in self-hating, racially destructive public discourse because they really believe what they’re saying, or do they have some other, more base, more blatantly self-serving agenda?
The phenomenon seems to be occurring with greater and greater frequency, afflicting our most visible black elected officials, academics, media personalities and, even, regrettably, our national civil rights leaders.
Take, for example, the case of Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, who’s been commonly referred to as a “prominent black intellectual.”
The other day, in a column he submitted to the New York Times, Gates, the highly acclaimed author and professor at Harvard University, produced one of the single most misleadingly revisionist and mealy-mouthed cases against reparations I’ve seen in a very long time.
The worst part of it was that he based his position on a premise that those most responsible for the global slave trade were not the Europeans and Americans, who owned the slave ships, the chains and shackles, the plantations and the slave quarters, and who forced blacks to work on an entirely uncompensated basis for more than 250 years in North America, alone. Instead, says Gates, it was the indigenous Africans, themselves, who caused the creation of the slave trade.
Gates' article is especially dangerous because it virtually absolves Europeans from any fundamental responsibility, whatsoever, for the existence of the heinous institution.
Unfortunately, the article will be seen as credible, in some circles, simply because Mr. Gates, like President Obama and Law Professor Charles Ogletree, claims an affiliation with a major Ivy League University.
In contemporary American culture, somehow, an affiliation with Harvard (or any of the other “Ivy League Universities"), or having studied in Europe (preferably at Cambridge University or Oxford University), and being able to emulate speakers of the “King’s English,” as closely as humanly possible, have bestowed instant credibility, somehow, on Americans – even on some African Americans.
By comparison, in this country, you get absolutely no credit or prestige for speaking any of the venerable and sophisticated African dialects that predate all of European culture by thousands of years, or having earned a degree at even the most important Asian or African university.
On the other hand, saying that one is a “Rhodes Scholar” instantly conveys an aura of authority, dignity and respect. I guess it doesn’t matter at all that the Rhodes Scholarship, at Oxford University, was created by, and is still funded by, the estate of Cecil Rhodes, who killed, maimed and comprehensively oppressed millions of indigenous people in Southern Africa on his way to controlling their land and, thereby, controlling the sale of 90 percent of all the diamonds in the world, through the de Beers Company, which he founded.
This was the same Cecil Rhodes, by the way, who caused the Southern African land mass that is now Zimbabwe to be named Rhodesia, in 1895.
So, when people read that the "prominent" Mr. Gates, who received his Ph.D from Cambridge University, has reduced the concept of reparations for black slavery to a “judicious (if symbolic) gesture,” they might be understandably confused.
Contrary, I guess, to the reparations that have already been paid by the American government to wrongly imprisoned Japanese Americans after World War II; or those paid by the German government to Jewish World War II Holocaust survivors; or by the same U.S. government to Native Americans, Mr. Gates seems to believe, now, that reparations is an inappropriate concept and, even worse, that Africans, themselves, created the global slave trade, which was a “business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.”
Lucrative for the Africans?
Where is the evidence for that statement, Mr. Gates? There is ample evidence that slavery was the foundation for building tremendous fortunes throughout the Western Hemisphere and for launching the fledgling U.S. economy, itself, into a global power. But where is the proof that indigenous African economies were able to grow and prosper as result of the slavery “business?”
Relying, among other things, on an obscure quote from Frederick Douglass (I guess he did mean THAT Frederick Douglass), Gates alleges that Douglass referred to the Continent's indigenous people as “the savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa.”
But old "Skip" was just warming up.
He, apparently, fully intended that, by the time Americans had finished reading his column, they would cease, finally, to “wrongly” blame whites, at all, for the institution of slavery.
In his thirteenth paragraph, Gates offers that the “conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time.” Earlier on, he contrasted that with "the romanticisized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in "Roots."
"Romanticisized?" Is that what you think slavery was, Professor Gates?
“Given this remarkably messy history,” he shamelessly continued, “the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.”
By the way, here are some things I wasn’t surprised about after reading the column: One, that Gates would, and did, find a way to excuse his good friend and fellow Ivy Leaguer, Barack Obama, from the need to address the issue of reparations, again, especially with the mid-term elections breathing down the President's neck. He does that by quoting, conveniently, the author of the latest book on Obama, David Remnick, who wrote: “He(Obama) told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations, but in practice he didn’t really know if it was workable."
In his own shoddy, convoluted logic, I guess, Gates is publicly trying to divert black America’s focus away from the U.S. and Western European governments on this issue, and to have us, now, fix our attention on gaining reparations for slavery from Africa.
Man, this guy is good...illogical, intellectually dishonest, a transparent seeker of broader mainstream academic acceptance and a greater degree of personal assimilation into Eurocentric social circles, but good at all of that, nonetheless.
Wow! How could we have all been so wrong about all that slavery stuff for all those years?
Since I started out by reminding you that today was “African-American Question Day,” here’s another one for you: Do you think the highly esteemed Mr. Gates, who for years “struggled” with the challenges of being a black scholar in a predominantly white U.S. academic environment, has been influenced, at all, in his recent thinking, by his DNA test-related discovery that he has a high percentage of European ancestry and that, more specifically, he may be a descendent of the fourth century Irish King, Niall?
It appears that Mr. Gates has found out that he’s really not as “black” as he originally thought he was, and that he's decided to begin working overtime, on his new, less-black philosophical approaches.
Hey, I can understand him wanting to come to the public defense of his new-found relatives here and in Europe, but did the Yale and Cambridge-educated, Harvard professor have to throw all black Americans and the entire indigenous population of the African continent under the historical bus, to do so?
Methinks he went too far.
And, by the way, here's the last question: Now that he’s Irish, does Mr. Gates still qualify to be called a "prominent black intellectual?"
What do you think?
###########
And here's the very first question for your consideration: What is it with our so-called “prominent” blacks, lately?
Are they engaging in self-hating, racially destructive public discourse because they really believe what they’re saying, or do they have some other, more base, more blatantly self-serving agenda?
The phenomenon seems to be occurring with greater and greater frequency, afflicting our most visible black elected officials, academics, media personalities and, even, regrettably, our national civil rights leaders.
Take, for example, the case of Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, who’s been commonly referred to as a “prominent black intellectual.”
The other day, in a column he submitted to the New York Times, Gates, the highly acclaimed author and professor at Harvard University, produced one of the single most misleadingly revisionist and mealy-mouthed cases against reparations I’ve seen in a very long time.
The worst part of it was that he based his position on a premise that those most responsible for the global slave trade were not the Europeans and Americans, who owned the slave ships, the chains and shackles, the plantations and the slave quarters, and who forced blacks to work on an entirely uncompensated basis for more than 250 years in North America, alone. Instead, says Gates, it was the indigenous Africans, themselves, who caused the creation of the slave trade.
Gates' article is especially dangerous because it virtually absolves Europeans from any fundamental responsibility, whatsoever, for the existence of the heinous institution.
Unfortunately, the article will be seen as credible, in some circles, simply because Mr. Gates, like President Obama and Law Professor Charles Ogletree, claims an affiliation with a major Ivy League University.
In contemporary American culture, somehow, an affiliation with Harvard (or any of the other “Ivy League Universities"), or having studied in Europe (preferably at Cambridge University or Oxford University), and being able to emulate speakers of the “King’s English,” as closely as humanly possible, have bestowed instant credibility, somehow, on Americans – even on some African Americans.
By comparison, in this country, you get absolutely no credit or prestige for speaking any of the venerable and sophisticated African dialects that predate all of European culture by thousands of years, or having earned a degree at even the most important Asian or African university.
On the other hand, saying that one is a “Rhodes Scholar” instantly conveys an aura of authority, dignity and respect. I guess it doesn’t matter at all that the Rhodes Scholarship, at Oxford University, was created by, and is still funded by, the estate of Cecil Rhodes, who killed, maimed and comprehensively oppressed millions of indigenous people in Southern Africa on his way to controlling their land and, thereby, controlling the sale of 90 percent of all the diamonds in the world, through the de Beers Company, which he founded.
This was the same Cecil Rhodes, by the way, who caused the Southern African land mass that is now Zimbabwe to be named Rhodesia, in 1895.
So, when people read that the "prominent" Mr. Gates, who received his Ph.D from Cambridge University, has reduced the concept of reparations for black slavery to a “judicious (if symbolic) gesture,” they might be understandably confused.
Contrary, I guess, to the reparations that have already been paid by the American government to wrongly imprisoned Japanese Americans after World War II; or those paid by the German government to Jewish World War II Holocaust survivors; or by the same U.S. government to Native Americans, Mr. Gates seems to believe, now, that reparations is an inappropriate concept and, even worse, that Africans, themselves, created the global slave trade, which was a “business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.”
Lucrative for the Africans?
Where is the evidence for that statement, Mr. Gates? There is ample evidence that slavery was the foundation for building tremendous fortunes throughout the Western Hemisphere and for launching the fledgling U.S. economy, itself, into a global power. But where is the proof that indigenous African economies were able to grow and prosper as result of the slavery “business?”
Relying, among other things, on an obscure quote from Frederick Douglass (I guess he did mean THAT Frederick Douglass), Gates alleges that Douglass referred to the Continent's indigenous people as “the savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa.”
But old "Skip" was just warming up.
He, apparently, fully intended that, by the time Americans had finished reading his column, they would cease, finally, to “wrongly” blame whites, at all, for the institution of slavery.
In his thirteenth paragraph, Gates offers that the “conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time.” Earlier on, he contrasted that with "the romanticisized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in "Roots."
"Romanticisized?" Is that what you think slavery was, Professor Gates?
“Given this remarkably messy history,” he shamelessly continued, “the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.”
By the way, here are some things I wasn’t surprised about after reading the column: One, that Gates would, and did, find a way to excuse his good friend and fellow Ivy Leaguer, Barack Obama, from the need to address the issue of reparations, again, especially with the mid-term elections breathing down the President's neck. He does that by quoting, conveniently, the author of the latest book on Obama, David Remnick, who wrote: “He(Obama) told us what he thought about reparations. He agreed entirely with the theory of reparations, but in practice he didn’t really know if it was workable."
In his own shoddy, convoluted logic, I guess, Gates is publicly trying to divert black America’s focus away from the U.S. and Western European governments on this issue, and to have us, now, fix our attention on gaining reparations for slavery from Africa.
Man, this guy is good...illogical, intellectually dishonest, a transparent seeker of broader mainstream academic acceptance and a greater degree of personal assimilation into Eurocentric social circles, but good at all of that, nonetheless.
Wow! How could we have all been so wrong about all that slavery stuff for all those years?
Since I started out by reminding you that today was “African-American Question Day,” here’s another one for you: Do you think the highly esteemed Mr. Gates, who for years “struggled” with the challenges of being a black scholar in a predominantly white U.S. academic environment, has been influenced, at all, in his recent thinking, by his DNA test-related discovery that he has a high percentage of European ancestry and that, more specifically, he may be a descendent of the fourth century Irish King, Niall?
It appears that Mr. Gates has found out that he’s really not as “black” as he originally thought he was, and that he's decided to begin working overtime, on his new, less-black philosophical approaches.
Hey, I can understand him wanting to come to the public defense of his new-found relatives here and in Europe, but did the Yale and Cambridge-educated, Harvard professor have to throw all black Americans and the entire indigenous population of the African continent under the historical bus, to do so?
Methinks he went too far.
And, by the way, here's the last question: Now that he’s Irish, does Mr. Gates still qualify to be called a "prominent black intellectual?"
What do you think?
###########
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
If It's No Longer "About Race," Are Civil Rights Groups Still Needed?
When I saw what resulted from the meeting that Ben Jealous, Marc Morial and Rev. Al Sharpton had on Wednesday with the “first black president,” it reminded me that today was Valentine’s Day.
No, not because I "loved," or even liked, what they had to say about black-specific issues during their meeting (i.e., nothing), but rather because the outcome made me think about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which took place on February 14, 1929. That's when seven Chicago organized crime figures were lined up against a wall and shot in the back, in a garage, on Chicago’s North Side, by a group of gangsters working for the notorious Al Capone.
Unfortunately, the poor victims didn’t suspect until the very last minute that they were in trouble, because two of the “shooters” were dressed as Chicago policemen. The way the shooters carried themselves had given the victims a false sense that they would, somehow, be alright. In the same way, we believed that the "black leaders" were actually going to the White House to represent our interests. It turns out that we were wrong. What actually happened wasn't a literal "murder," but it did, arguably, signal the figurative “death” of three major civil rights organizations, and the total discreditation of their national leaders.
While it didn’t actually happen on St. Valentine’s Day, it did take place during Black History Month and that made what transpired especially hard to take.
In short, here’s what occurred in DC: The “first black president” had finally agreed to "give a meeting" to Jealous of the NAACP, Morial of the National Urban League and Sharpton of the National Action Network. Dorothy Height, of the National Council of Negro Women, had also been invited, but she, understandably, just couldn’t “handle” the snowstorm, and didn’t participate. For those of us who had always believed that it would be a "cold day" before the president actually held a meeting to discuss black issues, there was little surprise that this event took place during a blizzard.
After all, in a period wherein the national unemployment rate is 9.7 percent, the black unemployment rate has grown to an astounding 16.2 percent, 18.2 percent for black men and 43.8 percent for black teens, as compared to 23.5 percent for white teens.
It was the NAACP, wasn’t it, that sued two major banks last March, citing systematic “institutionalized racism?" Has racism been eliminated in America since then? I must have missed it.
While we're on the subject, it is still true that black businesses participate in only about .4 percent of all gross receipts generated by U.S. businesses. In that regard, the Transportation Equity Network recently disclosed that out of $163.8 million allocated to date in direct contracts to companies for street, highway and bridge construction under the Stimulus Program, $4.7 million, or 3 percent, has been distributed to Hispanic-owned firms, but not a single dollar has been won by African-American-owned businesses.
It’s also true that the Congressional Black Caucus has become increasingly outspoken against the way in which the President’s policies consistently ignore the ongoing economic crisis across the national black community.
Disappointingly, however, a little more than an hour after the meeting commenced, the three “black leaders” emerged, stood out on the front steps of the White House in the driving snowstorm – without the president, I must point out – and lamely explained that, somehow, they had traveled all the way to Washington, in a blizzard, to NOT talk about black-specific issues. It was a pitiful sight-- the three "national leaders," standing in the snow, under just one, way-too-small umbrella held by Rev. Al Sharpton, saying, with straight faces, that their conversation with the President hadn’t really been about race, at all. Even worse, the Associated Press pointed out that the meeting also didn’t “yield immediate announcements or initiatives.”
How disappointing – no black-specific topics, nothing immediate, no initiatives.
Would Hispanic, Jewish, gay, labor or Asian advocates have come out of the White House in that storm and admitted to their followers that they hadn’t even brought up their own topics?
I don’t think so.
How, then, do you explain Jealous's announcement that they had all agreed to focus on “geographic areas, urban and rural, where assistance should be located?” How do we accept the embarrassingly transparent effort to provide even more “cover” for the President, when Jealous blurted out something about the President’s non-black-specific program being a viable one “…if Congress lets it work?”
Then, reminding us all that it probably has been a very long time since he’s actually been "on the ground “in the black community,” the president of the NAACP curiously said: “When you’re on the ground, the poor black community is the same as the poor white community.”
That’s absolutely absurd and totally untrue. There is ample evidence, in fact, that poor black people are substantially "more poor" than poor white people. As an example, only 11.2 percent of whites live below the poverty level, as compared to 24.7 percent of blacks, and the average black household earns only about 60 percent of that earned by the average white household. Does that look "the same," Mr. Jealous?
Finally, remembering that he probably should say something that might resonate with a national black audience, Jealous began to channel Jesse Jackson or Jay-Z, and said: “This is about place. It’s not about race.”
How condescending. How embarrassing.
Even more curious, neither Sharpton nor Morial were able to say anything more constructive. Sticking very closely to the White House "talking points" that must have been given out along with the Kool-Aid, Sharpton made a commitment to try to get Republican Congressional leaders to pass the President's generic, mainstream “jobs legislation."
The three "black leaders" surely must know that the “rising tide lifting all boats thing" is just the President’s entirely inaccurate and shamefully weak excuse for not focusing directly on black issues, and that the “rising tide” does not, and never has, lifted “black boats” during previous economic cycles. In 2005, for example, when the U.S. economy still appeared to be robust, when real estate values were still rising, when the equities markets were still setting records, the overall unemployment rate in America was 5.3 percent, but the black unemployment rate was exactly twice as high, at 10.6 percent.
The "tide" had clearly risen, exactly how high had the"boat" risen for black folks, then?
How can our "black leaders" say that the African-American community’s economic problems have nothing at all to do with race, and then go right back to their offices, where they get paid handsomely for advocating and creating programs to reduce racial disparities? Don’t they realize that when they say those things, they also send a message that there is no longer a need to have a NAACP or a National Urban League or a National Action Network?
Maybe the three of them have simply grown tired of being "on the outside" and have increasingly come to enjoy receiving even an empty White House invitation. Maybe it’s no more complicated than that. But if that’s true, then I have a suggestion: Maybe it’s time for the three "national black leaders" to quit – today – and to make room for new people who have the energy and the commitment to hold the government and the private sector accountable, finally, for providing a level playing field for 40 million still-largely-marginalized black people in this country.
The three "black leaders" just demonstrated that they are no longer interested in doing the job. Without question, however, someone else has to seriously accept the responsibility. This is real, and it needs to be discussed.
Oh, and before I forget … Happy Valentine's Day!
###############
No, not because I "loved," or even liked, what they had to say about black-specific issues during their meeting (i.e., nothing), but rather because the outcome made me think about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which took place on February 14, 1929. That's when seven Chicago organized crime figures were lined up against a wall and shot in the back, in a garage, on Chicago’s North Side, by a group of gangsters working for the notorious Al Capone.
Unfortunately, the poor victims didn’t suspect until the very last minute that they were in trouble, because two of the “shooters” were dressed as Chicago policemen. The way the shooters carried themselves had given the victims a false sense that they would, somehow, be alright. In the same way, we believed that the "black leaders" were actually going to the White House to represent our interests. It turns out that we were wrong. What actually happened wasn't a literal "murder," but it did, arguably, signal the figurative “death” of three major civil rights organizations, and the total discreditation of their national leaders.
While it didn’t actually happen on St. Valentine’s Day, it did take place during Black History Month and that made what transpired especially hard to take.
In short, here’s what occurred in DC: The “first black president” had finally agreed to "give a meeting" to Jealous of the NAACP, Morial of the National Urban League and Sharpton of the National Action Network. Dorothy Height, of the National Council of Negro Women, had also been invited, but she, understandably, just couldn’t “handle” the snowstorm, and didn’t participate. For those of us who had always believed that it would be a "cold day" before the president actually held a meeting to discuss black issues, there was little surprise that this event took place during a blizzard.
After all, in a period wherein the national unemployment rate is 9.7 percent, the black unemployment rate has grown to an astounding 16.2 percent, 18.2 percent for black men and 43.8 percent for black teens, as compared to 23.5 percent for white teens.
It was the NAACP, wasn’t it, that sued two major banks last March, citing systematic “institutionalized racism?" Has racism been eliminated in America since then? I must have missed it.
While we're on the subject, it is still true that black businesses participate in only about .4 percent of all gross receipts generated by U.S. businesses. In that regard, the Transportation Equity Network recently disclosed that out of $163.8 million allocated to date in direct contracts to companies for street, highway and bridge construction under the Stimulus Program, $4.7 million, or 3 percent, has been distributed to Hispanic-owned firms, but not a single dollar has been won by African-American-owned businesses.
It’s also true that the Congressional Black Caucus has become increasingly outspoken against the way in which the President’s policies consistently ignore the ongoing economic crisis across the national black community.
Disappointingly, however, a little more than an hour after the meeting commenced, the three “black leaders” emerged, stood out on the front steps of the White House in the driving snowstorm – without the president, I must point out – and lamely explained that, somehow, they had traveled all the way to Washington, in a blizzard, to NOT talk about black-specific issues. It was a pitiful sight-- the three "national leaders," standing in the snow, under just one, way-too-small umbrella held by Rev. Al Sharpton, saying, with straight faces, that their conversation with the President hadn’t really been about race, at all. Even worse, the Associated Press pointed out that the meeting also didn’t “yield immediate announcements or initiatives.”
How disappointing – no black-specific topics, nothing immediate, no initiatives.
Would Hispanic, Jewish, gay, labor or Asian advocates have come out of the White House in that storm and admitted to their followers that they hadn’t even brought up their own topics?
I don’t think so.
How, then, do you explain Jealous's announcement that they had all agreed to focus on “geographic areas, urban and rural, where assistance should be located?” How do we accept the embarrassingly transparent effort to provide even more “cover” for the President, when Jealous blurted out something about the President’s non-black-specific program being a viable one “…if Congress lets it work?”
Then, reminding us all that it probably has been a very long time since he’s actually been "on the ground “in the black community,” the president of the NAACP curiously said: “When you’re on the ground, the poor black community is the same as the poor white community.”
That’s absolutely absurd and totally untrue. There is ample evidence, in fact, that poor black people are substantially "more poor" than poor white people. As an example, only 11.2 percent of whites live below the poverty level, as compared to 24.7 percent of blacks, and the average black household earns only about 60 percent of that earned by the average white household. Does that look "the same," Mr. Jealous?
Finally, remembering that he probably should say something that might resonate with a national black audience, Jealous began to channel Jesse Jackson or Jay-Z, and said: “This is about place. It’s not about race.”
How condescending. How embarrassing.
Even more curious, neither Sharpton nor Morial were able to say anything more constructive. Sticking very closely to the White House "talking points" that must have been given out along with the Kool-Aid, Sharpton made a commitment to try to get Republican Congressional leaders to pass the President's generic, mainstream “jobs legislation."
The three "black leaders" surely must know that the “rising tide lifting all boats thing" is just the President’s entirely inaccurate and shamefully weak excuse for not focusing directly on black issues, and that the “rising tide” does not, and never has, lifted “black boats” during previous economic cycles. In 2005, for example, when the U.S. economy still appeared to be robust, when real estate values were still rising, when the equities markets were still setting records, the overall unemployment rate in America was 5.3 percent, but the black unemployment rate was exactly twice as high, at 10.6 percent.
The "tide" had clearly risen, exactly how high had the"boat" risen for black folks, then?
How can our "black leaders" say that the African-American community’s economic problems have nothing at all to do with race, and then go right back to their offices, where they get paid handsomely for advocating and creating programs to reduce racial disparities? Don’t they realize that when they say those things, they also send a message that there is no longer a need to have a NAACP or a National Urban League or a National Action Network?
Maybe the three of them have simply grown tired of being "on the outside" and have increasingly come to enjoy receiving even an empty White House invitation. Maybe it’s no more complicated than that. But if that’s true, then I have a suggestion: Maybe it’s time for the three "national black leaders" to quit – today – and to make room for new people who have the energy and the commitment to hold the government and the private sector accountable, finally, for providing a level playing field for 40 million still-largely-marginalized black people in this country.
The three "black leaders" just demonstrated that they are no longer interested in doing the job. Without question, however, someone else has to seriously accept the responsibility. This is real, and it needs to be discussed.
Oh, and before I forget … Happy Valentine's Day!
###############
Monday, March 1, 2010
Does "Mixed Race" Emergence Mean the End of Black Momentum?
I used to wonder how people really felt after they had lived through great social upheavals.
I imagine, for example, that the advent of air travel must have been starkly unsettling to people at the turn of the 20th century, who had lived their entire lives, up to that point, knowing only travel by land and sea.
All of a sudden, the whole transportational paradigm had changed for them and they were forced to move away from that which had always been familiar and taken for granted, and toward that which was suddenly the inescapable new reality.
I’m beginning to feel that way about the emergence of the "mixed race" phenomenon, here, in the U.S. I’m not concerned, at all, that there are, now, more and more people who proudly self-identify as "mixed race." I’ve always believed that people should be proud of whoever they are.
What I am concerned about, however, is whether the “mixed race” movement carries the potential, over time, to reduce black people, the racial identity I have always known, to statistical and cultural irrelevance, in the U.S. For example, February was Black History Month. How many more years, if this trend continues, will blacks have the demographic significance to qualify for such an annual cultural recognition?
I never thought I’d ever have to think about that.
But, according to 2008 U.S. Census estimates, 5.2 million people in the U.S. identified themselves as belonging to "more than one race," an increase of 3.4 percent over the previous year, marking “mixed race” as one of the fastest-growing demographic categories in the country.
The election of the first “mixed race” president, Barack Obama, just four months after the 2008 Census data were released, is expected to encourage even more people to self-identify as “mixed race,” in future Census counts.
There are caution signs to note, however. First of all, it seems, those whose "mix" includes African genes are still finding that they are a distinct minority, in America, even as compared to their "mixed race" peers. Among those classified, now, as "mixed race," only 10.9 percent are black/white mixes. That group is outnumbered by white/Asian persons at 11.9 percent and by white/Native Americans, the highest, at 17.3 percent.
Now, I’m going to start a little trouble.
Before there can be “mixed race” children, of course, there must clearly be inter-racial parents. And, here, a PEW Research Center report points out that, in 73 percent of all black/white mixed race couples, the husband is black. That must be indicative of something, but I’ll refrain. I’m sure the “sisters” will have a great deal more to say on that topic.
For me, the issue, as always, must be reduced to a political calculation and whether "mixed race" people will, eventually, become their own separate, voting bloc. While it’s now still too early to tell, I have read that “mixed race” Americans have begun to express some dissatisfaction with President Obama, because they consider him “one of their own,” yet “he does not champion the ideas of 'mixed race' identity,” as a local woman in an inter-racial marriage was quoted.
The noise from that particular debate, I’m sure, will grow louder as we approach future election cycles.
Even at this early stage, I can’t help noticing, however, that "mixed race" self-identifiers only voted 74 percent for the new, "mixed race" president, as compared to 92 percent for the black race-only self-identifiers.
Is that where we’re heading? Will "mixed race" voters line up, more and more, to vote for "mixed race" candidates, or will they tend to vote as they did in 2008, more for the white candidate than black voters did? Even further, will they, having grown more secure in their own mixed identity, begin to move out of predominantly black and predominantly white neighborhoods and into predominantly "mixed race" communities? Will they establish "mixed race" schools and universities?
Hey, wait a minute. I’ve already seen this movie.
We’ve already had an uncomfortable history of what were, then, predominantly mulatto and light-complexioned communities, schools, churches, universities and social clubs, in the U.S. Even some of our most prominent HBCU’s were known, in years past, as being predominantly populated by mulatto or light-complexioned students. In fact, some of those institutions and organizations are still functioning today.
Hey, I remember leaving North Philadelphia one night to go to a party in what I thought was just another black community along Lincoln Drive, when I was in college. I will never forget, after approaching one of the young ladies, there, and asking her to dance, being told by her that I was "too dark," and that she just couldn’t bring herself to dance with me (I probably don't need to mention that I actually hadn’t been INVITED to that party, but that some friends and I had heard about it, on the street).
Most of that kind of complexion-based class consciousness, thank God, has begun to dissipate in our community, over recent decades. But, now, with the emergence of an otherwise sincere "mixed race" movement, I’m not so sure what to expect.
Aside from Black History Month, the question now is whether black businesses will lose customers who were previously black; and whether we will need, or support, black radio stations or newspapers, once all of those in our community, who might possibly claim "mixed race" status have done so. Will advertisers start focusing more and more on reaching "mixed race" consumers, at the expense of the black market? And, how long will it take them to determine the "annual buying power" of "mixed race" people?
Not long, I would guess.
Once those of us who are not only part-white, but also part-Asian, part-Cherokee, part-Apache, and part-Comanche, are finished self-identifying, will there be enough black Americans left to form a critical mass? How far below the current black national population count of 40 million people will the future black Census count drop?
In South Africa, during the Apartheid era, in an effort to create divisiveness among non-whites, the ruling Afrikaner population established its own racial classifications. They consisted of blacks, whites, Indians, and Coloureds (their version of people who were of "mixed race").
As part of the bargain, Coloureds were permitted to live and worship separately from black South Africans and were also permitted to vote for white candidates. In addition, they didn’t have to carry the demeaning “pass cards” that were mandatory for black South Africans. Coloureds also spoke Afrikaans, rather that the indigenous Zulu or Xhosa dialects of the dominant, black population group.
It’s interesting to note that the Coloureds who, thereby, were classified as "not quite white," but "at least not black,” in South Africa, wound up voting in significant numbers against Nelson Mandela’s presidency in 1994, in the country’s first, all-race elections. The Coloureds were reportedly concerned that a Mandela victory and a winning ANC party would take away the “privileges” they had enjoyed under Apartheid.
But that was there.
So far, there’s no reason to expect a return of the old “light, bright, damn-near white” phenomenon that existed years ago in black communities, here, or the highly separatist profile of the South African Coloureds, but.... you never know.
I used to take for granted the fact that I was part of a proud and growing community of people who would always find common ground and mutual support in their shared black experience. I took for granted that, over time, 40 million black Americans would grow to 45, 50 or 55 million. Now, I’m not so sure.
As I said, I’m beginning to feel that we’re on the verge of a very traumatic time in black history.
We’ll see.
#######
I imagine, for example, that the advent of air travel must have been starkly unsettling to people at the turn of the 20th century, who had lived their entire lives, up to that point, knowing only travel by land and sea.
All of a sudden, the whole transportational paradigm had changed for them and they were forced to move away from that which had always been familiar and taken for granted, and toward that which was suddenly the inescapable new reality.
I’m beginning to feel that way about the emergence of the "mixed race" phenomenon, here, in the U.S. I’m not concerned, at all, that there are, now, more and more people who proudly self-identify as "mixed race." I’ve always believed that people should be proud of whoever they are.
What I am concerned about, however, is whether the “mixed race” movement carries the potential, over time, to reduce black people, the racial identity I have always known, to statistical and cultural irrelevance, in the U.S. For example, February was Black History Month. How many more years, if this trend continues, will blacks have the demographic significance to qualify for such an annual cultural recognition?
I never thought I’d ever have to think about that.
But, according to 2008 U.S. Census estimates, 5.2 million people in the U.S. identified themselves as belonging to "more than one race," an increase of 3.4 percent over the previous year, marking “mixed race” as one of the fastest-growing demographic categories in the country.
The election of the first “mixed race” president, Barack Obama, just four months after the 2008 Census data were released, is expected to encourage even more people to self-identify as “mixed race,” in future Census counts.
There are caution signs to note, however. First of all, it seems, those whose "mix" includes African genes are still finding that they are a distinct minority, in America, even as compared to their "mixed race" peers. Among those classified, now, as "mixed race," only 10.9 percent are black/white mixes. That group is outnumbered by white/Asian persons at 11.9 percent and by white/Native Americans, the highest, at 17.3 percent.
Now, I’m going to start a little trouble.
Before there can be “mixed race” children, of course, there must clearly be inter-racial parents. And, here, a PEW Research Center report points out that, in 73 percent of all black/white mixed race couples, the husband is black. That must be indicative of something, but I’ll refrain. I’m sure the “sisters” will have a great deal more to say on that topic.
For me, the issue, as always, must be reduced to a political calculation and whether "mixed race" people will, eventually, become their own separate, voting bloc. While it’s now still too early to tell, I have read that “mixed race” Americans have begun to express some dissatisfaction with President Obama, because they consider him “one of their own,” yet “he does not champion the ideas of 'mixed race' identity,” as a local woman in an inter-racial marriage was quoted.
The noise from that particular debate, I’m sure, will grow louder as we approach future election cycles.
Even at this early stage, I can’t help noticing, however, that "mixed race" self-identifiers only voted 74 percent for the new, "mixed race" president, as compared to 92 percent for the black race-only self-identifiers.
Is that where we’re heading? Will "mixed race" voters line up, more and more, to vote for "mixed race" candidates, or will they tend to vote as they did in 2008, more for the white candidate than black voters did? Even further, will they, having grown more secure in their own mixed identity, begin to move out of predominantly black and predominantly white neighborhoods and into predominantly "mixed race" communities? Will they establish "mixed race" schools and universities?
Hey, wait a minute. I’ve already seen this movie.
We’ve already had an uncomfortable history of what were, then, predominantly mulatto and light-complexioned communities, schools, churches, universities and social clubs, in the U.S. Even some of our most prominent HBCU’s were known, in years past, as being predominantly populated by mulatto or light-complexioned students. In fact, some of those institutions and organizations are still functioning today.
Hey, I remember leaving North Philadelphia one night to go to a party in what I thought was just another black community along Lincoln Drive, when I was in college. I will never forget, after approaching one of the young ladies, there, and asking her to dance, being told by her that I was "too dark," and that she just couldn’t bring herself to dance with me (I probably don't need to mention that I actually hadn’t been INVITED to that party, but that some friends and I had heard about it, on the street).
Most of that kind of complexion-based class consciousness, thank God, has begun to dissipate in our community, over recent decades. But, now, with the emergence of an otherwise sincere "mixed race" movement, I’m not so sure what to expect.
Aside from Black History Month, the question now is whether black businesses will lose customers who were previously black; and whether we will need, or support, black radio stations or newspapers, once all of those in our community, who might possibly claim "mixed race" status have done so. Will advertisers start focusing more and more on reaching "mixed race" consumers, at the expense of the black market? And, how long will it take them to determine the "annual buying power" of "mixed race" people?
Not long, I would guess.
Once those of us who are not only part-white, but also part-Asian, part-Cherokee, part-Apache, and part-Comanche, are finished self-identifying, will there be enough black Americans left to form a critical mass? How far below the current black national population count of 40 million people will the future black Census count drop?
In South Africa, during the Apartheid era, in an effort to create divisiveness among non-whites, the ruling Afrikaner population established its own racial classifications. They consisted of blacks, whites, Indians, and Coloureds (their version of people who were of "mixed race").
As part of the bargain, Coloureds were permitted to live and worship separately from black South Africans and were also permitted to vote for white candidates. In addition, they didn’t have to carry the demeaning “pass cards” that were mandatory for black South Africans. Coloureds also spoke Afrikaans, rather that the indigenous Zulu or Xhosa dialects of the dominant, black population group.
It’s interesting to note that the Coloureds who, thereby, were classified as "not quite white," but "at least not black,” in South Africa, wound up voting in significant numbers against Nelson Mandela’s presidency in 1994, in the country’s first, all-race elections. The Coloureds were reportedly concerned that a Mandela victory and a winning ANC party would take away the “privileges” they had enjoyed under Apartheid.
But that was there.
So far, there’s no reason to expect a return of the old “light, bright, damn-near white” phenomenon that existed years ago in black communities, here, or the highly separatist profile of the South African Coloureds, but.... you never know.
I used to take for granted the fact that I was part of a proud and growing community of people who would always find common ground and mutual support in their shared black experience. I took for granted that, over time, 40 million black Americans would grow to 45, 50 or 55 million. Now, I’m not so sure.
As I said, I’m beginning to feel that we’re on the verge of a very traumatic time in black history.
We’ll see.
#######
Monday, February 8, 2010
The U.S. Census: A Tradition of Black Undercounts Since 1787
There's a long history of blacks being undercounted in U.S. Census-related activities. Remember the shameful “three-fifths of a person” section of the U.S. Constitution, and how it was used to hold down the number of Congressional representatives in the southern states? While it pre-dated the first, formal, national census, it certainly was the first black Census issue, and things have gotten only marginally better, over the years.
In December, several black leaders met with U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, whose department is ultimately responsible for conducting the Census. As part of that meeting, they warned African Americans, as they seem to do every ten years, about how important it is “to be counted,” that approximately 3 million blacks were actually undercounted in the 2000 Census and that whites, on the other hand, were overcounted, by one percent.
Then, as they always do, they strongly recommended that the whole “undercount thing” could be quickly rectified, if the Census Bureau simply increased that part of its advertising budget that focuses on black communities. That’s what Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the NAACP and National Urban League all said in their meeting, and afterwards, in comments to the assembled media.
The more I listened, the more I thought that I had heard all of that before. It sounded exactly like what they said prior to the 2000 Census, prior to the 1990 Census and just before the 1980 Census.
I wasn’t impressed.
I just don’t think the meeting, the press conference or the well-worn cry for more advertising dollars, carried enough impact to “bust a grape” on this critically important issue. In fact, I think the Census Bureau is paying scant attention to "our official black spokespeople" on this issue, and has apparently decided to throw in some blatant disrespect along with its normal disregard and ambivalence on Census matters related to African Americans.
How else do you explain the Census Bureau’s recent announcement that it would return-- in 2010-- to including the word “Negro” as an option for people of African descent who want to describe themselves on their questionnaires?
Somewhere in Washington, D.C., men and women wearing expensive suits, in very well-furnished offices, are probably “cracking up” laughing and “high-fiving” each other, right now. I don’t even think they, themselves, expected to get away with that one. But, so far, they have.
Negro?
Where did that come from--Harry Reid?
The truth is that the U.S. Census, according to the Constitution, was conceived to produce an “actual enumeration” of the nation’s population every ten years and to establish a basis for determining the number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives from each state. For me, however, the numbers just never seem to "add up."
One of the most confusing aspects of the entire Census process is how illegal immigrants--people who are not even U.S. citizens-- are routinely included in the Census count and how their numbers contribute substantially to the exploding numbers of Congressional members in certain states. Is it a coincidence that the three states in the country with the greatest number of illegal immigrants--California, Texas and New York -- are also the same three states with the greatest number of members in the U.S. House of Representatives?
No.
In addition, do you ever wonder why the southern states, wherein black slaves significantly out-numbered white families, now have so few black residents, according to the Census counts? For example, South Carolina, whose population was about 75 percent black, immediately following the Civil War, is listed , according to the Census, at 28.5 percent black. North Carolina is officially 21.6 percent black; Georgia, 30 percent; Alabama, 26.4 percent; Mississippi, 37.2 percent, and so on, and so on…
If the numbers in those former slave states were anywhere close to being accurate, there would have been no logical reason for the white majority in those states to try to intimidate black voters at southern polling places, over so many years. There would have been no need to threaten lynchings or to invent the Ku Klux Klan.
In a related vein, in the 1930 Census, the “counters” were advised that a person who had both white and “Negro” blood was to be listed on the Census form as a "Negro," no matter how small the percentage of black blood. On the other hand, and inconsistently, Census “counters” in 1940 were instructed that Mexican Americans should be listed on the Census forms as “white,” regardless of their percentage of Mexican blood. That may be the primary reason why an actor born in Chihuahua, Mexico, as Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca was able to rise so easily to mainstream Hollywood stardom, when he arrived in the United States. Simply by changing his name to Anthony Quinn, Mr. Oaxaca was accepted by the movie industry, and by most movie-goers, as a "white" actor.
By 1980, the Census Bureau, which never has had an incentive to produce an accurate count of the black population, or to contribute to black political and economic empowerment through its numbers, admitted that low-income, minority groups were definitely being undercounted, by about 3.2 million persons. By the year 2000, the Census Bureau announced it planned to use statistical sampling to more accurately count historically underserved black and minority communities.
Curiously, that announcement was met with a lawsuit by Congressional Republicans, which led to the Supreme Court prohibiting the use of statistical sampling in the production of Census counts.
For the 2010 exercise, the Census Bureau has already warned us that the people most likely to be undercounted are those who are economically disadvantaged, unattached/single, and those living in high density ethnic enclaves, i.e., the “hood.”
Here we go, again.
As hard as it is for me to admit, given my own marketing and communications background, what’s keeping the Census Bureau from, finally, producing fair and accurate counts of blacks in this country has very little to do with its communications budget.
There are two, major complicating factors: Dating back to 1790, there are entrenched special interests in Washington, DC who, for blatantly political reasons, are absolutely opposed to having an honest tally of black Americans; and secondly, the Census Bureau's plan to hire 1.2 million people to go door-to-door to conduct its research is an outmoded concept.
That approach may be good for stimulating temporary job growth, but a computer-assisted review of birth certificates, death certificates, legal immigration records, and other database information should be sufficient to provide the true count needed for determining political representation and government funding levels. Other optional questions can be addressed a lot more cost-effectively through low-margin-of-error sampling techniques.
Somehow, I believe the Census Bureau, the Commerce Department, the U.S. Congress and the President of the United States all know this. They apparently just don’t feel the need to tell us precisely how many African Americans there really are in this country.
Reminds me of William “Boss” Tweed. He was the guy who famously led Tammany Hall, New York City’s all-powerful, Democratic Party political machine in the mid-to-late1800’s. Once he was featured in a political cartoon, responding to a question about whether people in New York City would turn out to vote in an upcoming election.
Tweed was depicted as saying: “As long as I count the ballots, what are you going to do about it?”
That’s pretty much where black folks find themselves with regard to the consistently inaccurate Census data that have limited their full political and economic participation in this country, since the days of George Washington.
Trust me, it’s not the advertising, or the people who go door-to-door, or whether people in black communities fill out their questionnaires. The problem is the lingering, racial biases and political agendas of the people who are actually doing the counting.
Someone in high office needs to change that, once and for all, sooner than later.
##########
In December, several black leaders met with U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, whose department is ultimately responsible for conducting the Census. As part of that meeting, they warned African Americans, as they seem to do every ten years, about how important it is “to be counted,” that approximately 3 million blacks were actually undercounted in the 2000 Census and that whites, on the other hand, were overcounted, by one percent.
Then, as they always do, they strongly recommended that the whole “undercount thing” could be quickly rectified, if the Census Bureau simply increased that part of its advertising budget that focuses on black communities. That’s what Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the NAACP and National Urban League all said in their meeting, and afterwards, in comments to the assembled media.
The more I listened, the more I thought that I had heard all of that before. It sounded exactly like what they said prior to the 2000 Census, prior to the 1990 Census and just before the 1980 Census.
I wasn’t impressed.
I just don’t think the meeting, the press conference or the well-worn cry for more advertising dollars, carried enough impact to “bust a grape” on this critically important issue. In fact, I think the Census Bureau is paying scant attention to "our official black spokespeople" on this issue, and has apparently decided to throw in some blatant disrespect along with its normal disregard and ambivalence on Census matters related to African Americans.
How else do you explain the Census Bureau’s recent announcement that it would return-- in 2010-- to including the word “Negro” as an option for people of African descent who want to describe themselves on their questionnaires?
Somewhere in Washington, D.C., men and women wearing expensive suits, in very well-furnished offices, are probably “cracking up” laughing and “high-fiving” each other, right now. I don’t even think they, themselves, expected to get away with that one. But, so far, they have.
Negro?
Where did that come from--Harry Reid?
The truth is that the U.S. Census, according to the Constitution, was conceived to produce an “actual enumeration” of the nation’s population every ten years and to establish a basis for determining the number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives from each state. For me, however, the numbers just never seem to "add up."
One of the most confusing aspects of the entire Census process is how illegal immigrants--people who are not even U.S. citizens-- are routinely included in the Census count and how their numbers contribute substantially to the exploding numbers of Congressional members in certain states. Is it a coincidence that the three states in the country with the greatest number of illegal immigrants--California, Texas and New York -- are also the same three states with the greatest number of members in the U.S. House of Representatives?
No.
In addition, do you ever wonder why the southern states, wherein black slaves significantly out-numbered white families, now have so few black residents, according to the Census counts? For example, South Carolina, whose population was about 75 percent black, immediately following the Civil War, is listed , according to the Census, at 28.5 percent black. North Carolina is officially 21.6 percent black; Georgia, 30 percent; Alabama, 26.4 percent; Mississippi, 37.2 percent, and so on, and so on…
If the numbers in those former slave states were anywhere close to being accurate, there would have been no logical reason for the white majority in those states to try to intimidate black voters at southern polling places, over so many years. There would have been no need to threaten lynchings or to invent the Ku Klux Klan.
In a related vein, in the 1930 Census, the “counters” were advised that a person who had both white and “Negro” blood was to be listed on the Census form as a "Negro," no matter how small the percentage of black blood. On the other hand, and inconsistently, Census “counters” in 1940 were instructed that Mexican Americans should be listed on the Census forms as “white,” regardless of their percentage of Mexican blood. That may be the primary reason why an actor born in Chihuahua, Mexico, as Antonio Rudolfo Oaxaca was able to rise so easily to mainstream Hollywood stardom, when he arrived in the United States. Simply by changing his name to Anthony Quinn, Mr. Oaxaca was accepted by the movie industry, and by most movie-goers, as a "white" actor.
By 1980, the Census Bureau, which never has had an incentive to produce an accurate count of the black population, or to contribute to black political and economic empowerment through its numbers, admitted that low-income, minority groups were definitely being undercounted, by about 3.2 million persons. By the year 2000, the Census Bureau announced it planned to use statistical sampling to more accurately count historically underserved black and minority communities.
Curiously, that announcement was met with a lawsuit by Congressional Republicans, which led to the Supreme Court prohibiting the use of statistical sampling in the production of Census counts.
For the 2010 exercise, the Census Bureau has already warned us that the people most likely to be undercounted are those who are economically disadvantaged, unattached/single, and those living in high density ethnic enclaves, i.e., the “hood.”
Here we go, again.
As hard as it is for me to admit, given my own marketing and communications background, what’s keeping the Census Bureau from, finally, producing fair and accurate counts of blacks in this country has very little to do with its communications budget.
There are two, major complicating factors: Dating back to 1790, there are entrenched special interests in Washington, DC who, for blatantly political reasons, are absolutely opposed to having an honest tally of black Americans; and secondly, the Census Bureau's plan to hire 1.2 million people to go door-to-door to conduct its research is an outmoded concept.
That approach may be good for stimulating temporary job growth, but a computer-assisted review of birth certificates, death certificates, legal immigration records, and other database information should be sufficient to provide the true count needed for determining political representation and government funding levels. Other optional questions can be addressed a lot more cost-effectively through low-margin-of-error sampling techniques.
Somehow, I believe the Census Bureau, the Commerce Department, the U.S. Congress and the President of the United States all know this. They apparently just don’t feel the need to tell us precisely how many African Americans there really are in this country.
Reminds me of William “Boss” Tweed. He was the guy who famously led Tammany Hall, New York City’s all-powerful, Democratic Party political machine in the mid-to-late1800’s. Once he was featured in a political cartoon, responding to a question about whether people in New York City would turn out to vote in an upcoming election.
Tweed was depicted as saying: “As long as I count the ballots, what are you going to do about it?”
That’s pretty much where black folks find themselves with regard to the consistently inaccurate Census data that have limited their full political and economic participation in this country, since the days of George Washington.
Trust me, it’s not the advertising, or the people who go door-to-door, or whether people in black communities fill out their questionnaires. The problem is the lingering, racial biases and political agendas of the people who are actually doing the counting.
Someone in high office needs to change that, once and for all, sooner than later.
##########
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
When Blacks Become Lawyers, Does Discrimination Finally Stop?
To paraphrase an old saying: “Despair is seeing your lawyer being discriminated against.”
Seriously, in a society wherein we've been taught to rely on advice from our attorneys when we've encountered discrimination, it's very disconcerting to realize that they, themselves, aren't being treated fairly.
Race-based economic, housing, professional and educational disparities are wide and growing wider. We're finding, now, that not even highly educated, well-trained lawyers have been spared.
Up to now, we’ve been programmed to believe that blacks who are having the most difficult time being fairly included in this economy are those who are less educated, those who “haven’t applied themselves” or those who may have fallen into conflict with the criminal justice system.
That’s what they tell us.
The fact is, however, that some of the very best and brightest, most well-educated, most law-abiding and career-focused black people in this country are still “catching a bad break" – right now – simply because of their race.
The most glaring and surprising example of that phenomenon, I guess, is how African Americans are being treated in the legal profession – not the defendants, but the black lawyers, themselves.
It almost makes you want to take up a collection for all of the well-dressed lawyers in town...almost.
To get a handle on all of this, let’s start with a story you may have seen in last week’s New York Times, the one that pointed out that, over a 15- year period ending in 2008, the percentage of black law students has declined from 7.9 percent to 7.3 percent of all law school students. This happened, said the Times, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had ruled in 2003 (Grutter v. Bollinger) that race absolutely can be taken into account in law school admissions because there is a compelling state interest in having diverse student bodies in law schools.
Despite the fact that black law school applicants have actually improved their scores on law school admissions tests, and their grade point averages, over the period, fewer are being admitted and a smaller percentage is currently enrolled than were attending law school in 1993.
If that looks to you as if the so-called "best and brightest” black students are actually moving backwards rather than forward in their career pursuits, regardless of hard work, clean records and higher test scores, then you, my friend, are very, very observant.
In fact, the Times also pointed out, data captured in a study by a Columbia University professor named Conrad Johnson disclosed that, from 2003 to 2008, 61 percent of black applicants were denied acceptance at law schools to which they applied. By comparison only 34 percent of white applicants' applications were rejected.
As bad as this all seems to be for black law students, it may be even even worse for you, if you believe legally trained blacks will bring greater levels of awareness and sensitivity to a justice system that sorely needs it.
For example, another report last week revealed that although whites in New York City, as a group, are the heaviest users of marijuana, they are least likely to be incarcerated for it. The same report indicated that blacks in New York are seven times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. In fact, during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s first eight years in office, marijuana arrests increased by 50 percent, as compared to the experience during Rudolph Guiliani’s term as mayor, and 87 percent of those arrested for those crimes were black or Latino.
Interviewed by a Times reporter, John Nussbaumer, from the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Auburn Hills, Michigan, couldn’t have said it better: “…as the American population becomes more diverse … the lawyer corps and judges are remaining predominantly white.”
Now, if we had evidence that racial bias is no longer factored into critical everyday decisions, such as black admittance to law schools, then the race of our lawyers and judges wouldn’t matter. But, clearly, it still does.
For Philadelphia, the nationwide reduction in black law school admissions simply projects that an already shameful record of black inclusion at major law firms will probably get worse.
It appears that most black law school grads have just a slim prospect of landing a job at a credible local law firm or an opportunity to be invited to serve as a partner or shareholder. According to the Association for Legal Career Professionals (NALP), Philadelphia law firms have done an unquestionably sub-standard job of attracting talented black attorneys and moving them up to partner/shareholder level.
In fact, according to NALP’s 2008 survey of law firms in 46 cities, there were 61,572 total partners practicing law in those places, of which 5.92 percent were “minority” and just 1.68 percent were black.
Because Philadelphia is one of the five largest cities in the U.S., because it's home to some of the country’s most prestigious law schools and because the city’s population is about 45 percent black, you’d expect the number and percentage of black partners, here, to be substantially greater than the national average and greater than that in most cities.
If you expected that, you’d be wrong.
The percentage of black partners at Philadelphia mainstream law firms, according to NALP stands at 1.75 percent, which translates to about 22 persons.
Let's think this through: We’ve got about 626,000 black people in Philadelphia and just 22 of them are partners in mainstream law firms, making them members of one of the most exclusive "clubs" in America. That's embarrassing.
As bad as that sounds, you don’t actually begin to realize how much work needs to be done to correct the problem, here, until you understand that Philadelphia’s percentage of black partners ranks behind 19 other cities in this category. Philadelphia has a lower percentage of black law partners than Atlanta (4.1 %), Baltimore (3.18 %), New Orleans (3.16%), Washington D.C. (2.92%) and the Detroit area (2.87%). Even worse, law firms in cities and towns such as Birmingham, Alabama; Charlotte, N.C.; Miami; Columbus, Ohio; Cleveland; Richmond, V.A. (the former seat of the Confederacy), and even Wilmington, Delaware, have a higher percentage of black partners.
In a recent conversation with one of the city's black law firm partners, I learned that, in 1976, there were actually 26 black partners in major Philadelphia law firms, as compared to the 22 who hold those positions today, 34 years later. In addition, according to the same partner, there is a direct correlation between Philadelphia's relatively small African-American business community and the lower propensity of large law firms to create black partners. The belief is that if the firms were seriously interested in attracting the business of substantial black-owned companies, they would feel compelled to create more black partners to lead those efforts.
Sounds like one more good, synergistic, reason to nurture black entrepreneurship and business growth in our City.
Black partners also firmly believe that the City government, itself, could play a much more impactful role in encouraging the creation of additional black partners. It appears that the City has in recent years made significant outside legal expenditures, without communicating any desire that qualified firms that do work for Philadelphia should also employ black and minority associates and partners.
Apparently, a business practice modification as simple as that would incentivize black-, Hispanic- and Asian-focused recruiting practices at the large firms.
O.K., here’s the question: "Now that we all have a better understanding of the problem, what are we going to do about it?"
Or, don't we really care?
#########
Seriously, in a society wherein we've been taught to rely on advice from our attorneys when we've encountered discrimination, it's very disconcerting to realize that they, themselves, aren't being treated fairly.
Race-based economic, housing, professional and educational disparities are wide and growing wider. We're finding, now, that not even highly educated, well-trained lawyers have been spared.
Up to now, we’ve been programmed to believe that blacks who are having the most difficult time being fairly included in this economy are those who are less educated, those who “haven’t applied themselves” or those who may have fallen into conflict with the criminal justice system.
That’s what they tell us.
The fact is, however, that some of the very best and brightest, most well-educated, most law-abiding and career-focused black people in this country are still “catching a bad break" – right now – simply because of their race.
The most glaring and surprising example of that phenomenon, I guess, is how African Americans are being treated in the legal profession – not the defendants, but the black lawyers, themselves.
It almost makes you want to take up a collection for all of the well-dressed lawyers in town...almost.
To get a handle on all of this, let’s start with a story you may have seen in last week’s New York Times, the one that pointed out that, over a 15- year period ending in 2008, the percentage of black law students has declined from 7.9 percent to 7.3 percent of all law school students. This happened, said the Times, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had ruled in 2003 (Grutter v. Bollinger) that race absolutely can be taken into account in law school admissions because there is a compelling state interest in having diverse student bodies in law schools.
Despite the fact that black law school applicants have actually improved their scores on law school admissions tests, and their grade point averages, over the period, fewer are being admitted and a smaller percentage is currently enrolled than were attending law school in 1993.
If that looks to you as if the so-called "best and brightest” black students are actually moving backwards rather than forward in their career pursuits, regardless of hard work, clean records and higher test scores, then you, my friend, are very, very observant.
In fact, the Times also pointed out, data captured in a study by a Columbia University professor named Conrad Johnson disclosed that, from 2003 to 2008, 61 percent of black applicants were denied acceptance at law schools to which they applied. By comparison only 34 percent of white applicants' applications were rejected.
As bad as this all seems to be for black law students, it may be even even worse for you, if you believe legally trained blacks will bring greater levels of awareness and sensitivity to a justice system that sorely needs it.
For example, another report last week revealed that although whites in New York City, as a group, are the heaviest users of marijuana, they are least likely to be incarcerated for it. The same report indicated that blacks in New York are seven times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. In fact, during Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s first eight years in office, marijuana arrests increased by 50 percent, as compared to the experience during Rudolph Guiliani’s term as mayor, and 87 percent of those arrested for those crimes were black or Latino.
Interviewed by a Times reporter, John Nussbaumer, from the Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Auburn Hills, Michigan, couldn’t have said it better: “…as the American population becomes more diverse … the lawyer corps and judges are remaining predominantly white.”
Now, if we had evidence that racial bias is no longer factored into critical everyday decisions, such as black admittance to law schools, then the race of our lawyers and judges wouldn’t matter. But, clearly, it still does.
For Philadelphia, the nationwide reduction in black law school admissions simply projects that an already shameful record of black inclusion at major law firms will probably get worse.
It appears that most black law school grads have just a slim prospect of landing a job at a credible local law firm or an opportunity to be invited to serve as a partner or shareholder. According to the Association for Legal Career Professionals (NALP), Philadelphia law firms have done an unquestionably sub-standard job of attracting talented black attorneys and moving them up to partner/shareholder level.
In fact, according to NALP’s 2008 survey of law firms in 46 cities, there were 61,572 total partners practicing law in those places, of which 5.92 percent were “minority” and just 1.68 percent were black.
Because Philadelphia is one of the five largest cities in the U.S., because it's home to some of the country’s most prestigious law schools and because the city’s population is about 45 percent black, you’d expect the number and percentage of black partners, here, to be substantially greater than the national average and greater than that in most cities.
If you expected that, you’d be wrong.
The percentage of black partners at Philadelphia mainstream law firms, according to NALP stands at 1.75 percent, which translates to about 22 persons.
Let's think this through: We’ve got about 626,000 black people in Philadelphia and just 22 of them are partners in mainstream law firms, making them members of one of the most exclusive "clubs" in America. That's embarrassing.
As bad as that sounds, you don’t actually begin to realize how much work needs to be done to correct the problem, here, until you understand that Philadelphia’s percentage of black partners ranks behind 19 other cities in this category. Philadelphia has a lower percentage of black law partners than Atlanta (4.1 %), Baltimore (3.18 %), New Orleans (3.16%), Washington D.C. (2.92%) and the Detroit area (2.87%). Even worse, law firms in cities and towns such as Birmingham, Alabama; Charlotte, N.C.; Miami; Columbus, Ohio; Cleveland; Richmond, V.A. (the former seat of the Confederacy), and even Wilmington, Delaware, have a higher percentage of black partners.
In a recent conversation with one of the city's black law firm partners, I learned that, in 1976, there were actually 26 black partners in major Philadelphia law firms, as compared to the 22 who hold those positions today, 34 years later. In addition, according to the same partner, there is a direct correlation between Philadelphia's relatively small African-American business community and the lower propensity of large law firms to create black partners. The belief is that if the firms were seriously interested in attracting the business of substantial black-owned companies, they would feel compelled to create more black partners to lead those efforts.
Sounds like one more good, synergistic, reason to nurture black entrepreneurship and business growth in our City.
Black partners also firmly believe that the City government, itself, could play a much more impactful role in encouraging the creation of additional black partners. It appears that the City has in recent years made significant outside legal expenditures, without communicating any desire that qualified firms that do work for Philadelphia should also employ black and minority associates and partners.
Apparently, a business practice modification as simple as that would incentivize black-, Hispanic- and Asian-focused recruiting practices at the large firms.
O.K., here’s the question: "Now that we all have a better understanding of the problem, what are we going to do about it?"
Or, don't we really care?
#########
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Knowing Ourselves and our History: A Source of Strength
In the middle of several wars being waged across the globe, while we’re dealing with what is, most likely, the onset of the second “Great Depression,” here, in this country, and while some African Americans are all-too-slowly coming to grips with the cold realization that the much-publicized “post-racial” society is no more than the latest cruel hoax on black people, I’ve begun to realize, more than ever, the importance of knowing our own history.
Yeah, yeah, yeah…I know we’ve all heard that line about history a hundred times before. But, you know, it really is true. Knowing precisely who you are, through a knowledge of family origins, experiences and achievements, can be a critical source of strength – especially during difficult times.
What do I mean by that?
Well, if you were Caucasian and born in the United Kingdom and your surname happened to be "Windsor," you would know that you are a member of the British Royal family. Automatically, you would tend to carry yourself in a certain, self-important way, you would grow to maturity with built-in expectations that you would do significant things, that you would literally “walk with kings” and that people would take note of what you say and would even be anxious to do your bidding.
If you were born in Kenya, into the Maasai tribe, you would know from being exposed to the lessons of thousands of years of your people’s history that females have responsibility for building the family’s house, for managing the family’s herbal and medicinal needs and creating the elaborately beautiful Maasai beadwork and clothing. You'd also know that young Maasai men have responsibility for safeguarding the tribe’s cattle and that they are expected to defend the herd against lion attacks, single-handedly, if necessary.
As, arguably, the most fierce warriors on the African continent, the Maasai also made it clear that they didn’t condone or participate in the slave trade. Consequently, the parts of Kenya and Tanzania that they called home were scrupulously avoided by Europeans who had slavery-related intentions.
So, if you were born a Maasai, and knew your history, you carried yourself accordingly, from a very early age. That was a source of strength.
A retired Japanese engineer named Jobu Suzuki once told me that he could trace his family’s history back for 500 uninterrupted years. His wife, who was Ainu, the original, indigenous Japanese people, could trace her own family history back for 3,000 years. Mr. and Mrs. Suzuki both knew precisely who they were and what was expected of members of their respective families.
One evening, as he was giving me my thrice-weekly Japanese language class, Mr. Suzuki asked me, once again, where I came from and who I really was. When I told him I was a descendent of African people, he pulled out a map of the Continent and asked me to show him exactly where my family came from.
I told him that I couldn’t, and reminded him that we had had a thing called slavery, here, in the United States, and that most ancestral records of African Americans had been lost. Mr. Suzuki was not impressed. He looked me straight in the eye and said he could not believe that I had not made a more concerted effort to find out who my ancestors were and exactly where they came from--slavery or not. In his opinion, I could never achieve my full potential without such knowledge and there was no acceptable excuse for not having it.
It was probably my single most important “Japanese lesson.”
Mr. Suzuki’s lesson finally came home to me last year when I decided to conduct more detailed research about who the Crawley’s actually were. I found that it was very difficult to get much past 1831 in Winston Salem, North Carolina, on my grandmother’s side of the family, or past the late 1800’s, in Smithfield, Virginia, in my grandfather’s family.
In my research, however, I was especially fascinated to “discover” a great uncle (my grandmother’s brother-in-law), who was born in Smithfield, in 1900. His name was Wilton Crawley and he, much to my surprise, turned out to be one of the most important early jazz clarinetists in American history. In fact, Uncle Wilton, whose band included his soprano saxophone-playing brother Jimmy, was a well-known performer on the old “Chitlin’ Circuit” (black vaudeville). He made numerous recordings as a band leader on the Okeh and Victor record labels and his CD, “Wilton Crawley, Showman, Composer, and Clarinetist” is available online on Jazz Oracle. Included on the CD were songs composed, sung and played by Uncle Wilton, such as “Crawley Blues,” “She’s Nothing But Nice,” “Crawley Clarinet Moan” and “Old Broke Up Shoes.”
Perhaps most astounding about my great uncle’s recordings and career was that on many of those songs, Wilton's sidemen included trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen, Jazz guitarist Eddie Lang and legendary pianist Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, who was famous, among other things, for claiming that he actually "invented" jazz music.
Having "Jelly Roll" as a sideman, of course, presented its own set of unique problems. Not surprisingly, jazz historians recount that both Jelly Roll and Wilton “had strong ideas of their own importance” and argued on numerous occasions about how recording sessions should be done.
Uncle Wilton, who wrote hundreds of songs and toured the United Kingdom with his band from 1930 to 1932, died in 1967.
While my siblings and I didn’t know very much about Wilton, we knew, and stayed in fairly close contact with his brother Jim, because he lived in South Jersey up until his death in the 70’s. My brother, “Booby” (given name: Morris) still has one of Uncle Jim’s original Conn 1920’s-era, vintage, soprano saxophones, which he still plays, to this day.
How, you might ask, did that family history impact my own, personal expectations? Well, equipped with all of that information, late last year, I went out and bought my own soprano saxophone and began taking one-on-one lessons every Saturday and jazz improvisation and ensemble classes, on Fridays, at the Settlement Music school.
Having been inspired by that history, I’ve discovered that I actually do have a strong attraction and, perhaps, a genetic predisposition, to playing the saxophone. I now practice on the instrument three hours a day, seven days a week.
But, here’s the "other shoe."
My brother, Mike, who has been singing professionally for more than 30 years, now, even as he excelled in his own business career, is now in the process of working with the great Bill Jolley to produce a new CD. To my great surprise, Mike has invited me and “Boop” to join in on our horns and to have our musical contributions included in the final "mix."
Hey, don’t be shocked; I might still make something of myself, musically.
Somewhere, Uncle Wilton and Uncle Jim are probably really proud, or laughing out loud.
The great shame is that it took me so long to learn of my family’s musical heritage. Many good years, in that regard, were unnecessarily wasted.
I hope there’s a lesson in there somewhere. In my opinion, finding out who we actually are, and knowing our own family histories is the most direct path to success for us as, individuals, and as an entire community.
Please go out, if you haven’t done so already, and discover your own.
######
Yeah, yeah, yeah…I know we’ve all heard that line about history a hundred times before. But, you know, it really is true. Knowing precisely who you are, through a knowledge of family origins, experiences and achievements, can be a critical source of strength – especially during difficult times.
What do I mean by that?
Well, if you were Caucasian and born in the United Kingdom and your surname happened to be "Windsor," you would know that you are a member of the British Royal family. Automatically, you would tend to carry yourself in a certain, self-important way, you would grow to maturity with built-in expectations that you would do significant things, that you would literally “walk with kings” and that people would take note of what you say and would even be anxious to do your bidding.
If you were born in Kenya, into the Maasai tribe, you would know from being exposed to the lessons of thousands of years of your people’s history that females have responsibility for building the family’s house, for managing the family’s herbal and medicinal needs and creating the elaborately beautiful Maasai beadwork and clothing. You'd also know that young Maasai men have responsibility for safeguarding the tribe’s cattle and that they are expected to defend the herd against lion attacks, single-handedly, if necessary.
As, arguably, the most fierce warriors on the African continent, the Maasai also made it clear that they didn’t condone or participate in the slave trade. Consequently, the parts of Kenya and Tanzania that they called home were scrupulously avoided by Europeans who had slavery-related intentions.
So, if you were born a Maasai, and knew your history, you carried yourself accordingly, from a very early age. That was a source of strength.
A retired Japanese engineer named Jobu Suzuki once told me that he could trace his family’s history back for 500 uninterrupted years. His wife, who was Ainu, the original, indigenous Japanese people, could trace her own family history back for 3,000 years. Mr. and Mrs. Suzuki both knew precisely who they were and what was expected of members of their respective families.
One evening, as he was giving me my thrice-weekly Japanese language class, Mr. Suzuki asked me, once again, where I came from and who I really was. When I told him I was a descendent of African people, he pulled out a map of the Continent and asked me to show him exactly where my family came from.
I told him that I couldn’t, and reminded him that we had had a thing called slavery, here, in the United States, and that most ancestral records of African Americans had been lost. Mr. Suzuki was not impressed. He looked me straight in the eye and said he could not believe that I had not made a more concerted effort to find out who my ancestors were and exactly where they came from--slavery or not. In his opinion, I could never achieve my full potential without such knowledge and there was no acceptable excuse for not having it.
It was probably my single most important “Japanese lesson.”
Mr. Suzuki’s lesson finally came home to me last year when I decided to conduct more detailed research about who the Crawley’s actually were. I found that it was very difficult to get much past 1831 in Winston Salem, North Carolina, on my grandmother’s side of the family, or past the late 1800’s, in Smithfield, Virginia, in my grandfather’s family.
In my research, however, I was especially fascinated to “discover” a great uncle (my grandmother’s brother-in-law), who was born in Smithfield, in 1900. His name was Wilton Crawley and he, much to my surprise, turned out to be one of the most important early jazz clarinetists in American history. In fact, Uncle Wilton, whose band included his soprano saxophone-playing brother Jimmy, was a well-known performer on the old “Chitlin’ Circuit” (black vaudeville). He made numerous recordings as a band leader on the Okeh and Victor record labels and his CD, “Wilton Crawley, Showman, Composer, and Clarinetist” is available online on Jazz Oracle. Included on the CD were songs composed, sung and played by Uncle Wilton, such as “Crawley Blues,” “She’s Nothing But Nice,” “Crawley Clarinet Moan” and “Old Broke Up Shoes.”
Perhaps most astounding about my great uncle’s recordings and career was that on many of those songs, Wilton's sidemen included trumpeter Henry “Red” Allen, Jazz guitarist Eddie Lang and legendary pianist Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, who was famous, among other things, for claiming that he actually "invented" jazz music.
Having "Jelly Roll" as a sideman, of course, presented its own set of unique problems. Not surprisingly, jazz historians recount that both Jelly Roll and Wilton “had strong ideas of their own importance” and argued on numerous occasions about how recording sessions should be done.
Uncle Wilton, who wrote hundreds of songs and toured the United Kingdom with his band from 1930 to 1932, died in 1967.
While my siblings and I didn’t know very much about Wilton, we knew, and stayed in fairly close contact with his brother Jim, because he lived in South Jersey up until his death in the 70’s. My brother, “Booby” (given name: Morris) still has one of Uncle Jim’s original Conn 1920’s-era, vintage, soprano saxophones, which he still plays, to this day.
How, you might ask, did that family history impact my own, personal expectations? Well, equipped with all of that information, late last year, I went out and bought my own soprano saxophone and began taking one-on-one lessons every Saturday and jazz improvisation and ensemble classes, on Fridays, at the Settlement Music school.
Having been inspired by that history, I’ve discovered that I actually do have a strong attraction and, perhaps, a genetic predisposition, to playing the saxophone. I now practice on the instrument three hours a day, seven days a week.
But, here’s the "other shoe."
My brother, Mike, who has been singing professionally for more than 30 years, now, even as he excelled in his own business career, is now in the process of working with the great Bill Jolley to produce a new CD. To my great surprise, Mike has invited me and “Boop” to join in on our horns and to have our musical contributions included in the final "mix."
Hey, don’t be shocked; I might still make something of myself, musically.
Somewhere, Uncle Wilton and Uncle Jim are probably really proud, or laughing out loud.
The great shame is that it took me so long to learn of my family’s musical heritage. Many good years, in that regard, were unnecessarily wasted.
I hope there’s a lesson in there somewhere. In my opinion, finding out who we actually are, and knowing our own family histories is the most direct path to success for us as, individuals, and as an entire community.
Please go out, if you haven’t done so already, and discover your own.
######
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