Author Archive
Fear not Justice
We awoke the morning after the Zimmerman verdict to the same America we went to sleep with.  It is an America that uses its fear of Black people as a justification for murder.  An America that uses its fear of black people as a rationale for convicting and incarcerating black folk. An America that allows its fear of black people to serve as a basis for the operation of its legal system. I have been on a couple of juries in my lifetime and so I understand that court decisions are often made with little concern for justice. A court case usually turns on the simple question of whether the prosecution has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the law was broken.  When court decisions result in travesties of justice like the Trayvon Martin case it is usually the result of inadequacies in the prosecution’s case or the fact that the law does not serve justice.  I will leave it to my legal colleagues to discuss the prosecution’s performance in this case .   I am sure it will be raw meat for the lions, hyenas and vultures of the legal profession in the days to come. I would like to raise the question of the stand your ground law itself. The law itself is a reflection of the propertied class’s (white, brown and black) fear of the less propertied class and the lower class’s (white, brown and black) fear of itself. The result as we have seen is the legalization of the murder of lower class white, brown and black people.  If it hasn’t reached your community yet be assured it is coming. The jury decided that the law was not violated not that justice was served. The real question for the jury of six white women was whether they would empathize with Trayvon’s mother and her loss to supersede the law or empathize with Zimmerman and his fear to uphold it.
The only thing that has changed the morning after is us. For some it is the illusion of racial progress that has been lost. Â For some it is the belief in white liberals who have remained silent. For others it is the belief in Obama whose weaselly statement urging us to to simply accept the legal verdict belies the Obama who stated that Trayvon Martin could have been his child. Many will say that they knew what the verdict would be all the time. Â For some this is just whistling in the dark at their loss of faith that things had gotten better. Â For others it is just a confirmation of their cynicism, hopelessness and despair.
For me and I hope others it is just a goad to work harder to bring about the world we want to live in. Â It is just a reminder of the difficulties we face and the strength of the opposition. Â Trayvon and so many, many others have died suffered and worked to get us as far as we are today although we are far from our goals. But like Lincoln at Gettysburg let us vow that these honored dead shall not have died in vain. Let us rededicate ourselves to continue our work, use our ingenuity to find new means to press on, find our toughness to move past this setback and rely on our hope as a light in this wilderness.
Normally I follow the philosophy if you haven’t done a particular physical thing in X time (the exact period has varied but it has become smaller as I’ve aged) then you shouldn’t do it again. The time needed to get back to my former level of fitness and proficiency has lengthened over the years; it is painful to start up again and and the willpower just isn’t there. So why have I recently begun to work out at the gym again when I haven’t done it for several years? Well for one thing my waistline (never my best feature) has expanded somewhat. As with most things they don’t get better until you take a stand and I refused to buy pants a waist size larger even though my jeans were getting uncomfortable. Secondly as a former senior colleague reminded me as you got older you exercised less to get better and more to just hold on to the health and mobility you have. Time steals them from you and adds a few aches and pains for good measure. Going to the gym becomes more a defensive battle than an offensive one. Finally the five months pregnant look does not work for a man in his sixties so for all these reasons I had to to something about my physical fitness. One thing I have learned however is that you don’t decide to go to the gym while you are in bed in the morning.  The bed not the gym always wins. You have to decide the night before or have a regular schedule so that your rationalizing mind doesn’t have a chance to convince you not to go.
Before I retired and moved away my college’s free fitness center was my chosen site for exercise. The old ones were dark, dingy and smelly but there were several periods when I used them frequently. The latest one is bright, cheery and quite a bit larger. It has more exercise machines, free weights, treadmills and the latest cardio equipment. I hated it. For me to feel myself virtuous in exercising the space itself had to be something to overcome and the new one wasn’t. The other drawback to working out at a college facility is all the buff, athletic and fit young people who are around all the time. All of them were more body conscious than I and some were extreme. The sports team people were bad enough but my college seemed to attract many of the athletic type who had played sports in high school even if they did not in college. They were certainly polite enough not to say anything or look at me in wonder or amusement and I probably earned some street cred when I ran into a student I knew. However I have eyes too and the difference between fit bodies and my own was painfully obvious no matter how much I trained. To parade my imperfections to all of them required the lack the self-consciousness that I had at the beginning but which I was losing as time went on and the discrepancies got larger.
So in my new retired life I had to go looking for a gym in my new hometown. I chose a Planet Fitness although it offered fewer of the amenities, personal trainers, classes and free weights than the others. Instead it had row upon row of treadmills, stationary bikes and elliptical machines and enough Cybex exercise machines for the little muscle training I planned to do. Moreover the clientele although fitter than I were not the hardcore gym types one saw at the other gyms. At this gym they called such people “lunks” and promised to be a judgment free zone. My first day was hard and I was so sore afterward that I wanted to crawl up into a ball and die. My son reminded me that I still had a lot to live for so I have been going back every other day for the last week or so. I have my Ipod full of R&B and on shuffle so I spend my time on the exercise bike and the Cybex machines simply rocking out to the return of the sixties or Tina Turner or James Brown. I still have to adjust the resistance on the machines down but not nearly as much as when I was at my college facility. There are more people of my fitness level (which is to say none at all) around and many more approaching or surpassing my age.
The human body’s ability to adapt to the physical circumstances you subject it to, is still amazing to me. If you want a lifestyle that just sits around with little activity, it is quite willing to adapt to that.  If however you want to have a lifestyle with a bit more activity than that, it will adjust accordingly.  It is just these periods of transition that are hardest. Though I miss having woods just a short jog away I must admit that I didn’t take full advantage of them when I had them.  As with most things you don’t miss your water until the well runs dry, but as Darwin showed us it is not the strongest or the fastest who survive.  It is those who are most willing to adapt to environmental changes who last the longest. I am going back to the gym to try to adapt and last long.
I attended the funeral of dear relative a few weeks ago. Â It combined her wishes and the needs of the mourners in an interesting way. Â It had sermons, music, and an interpretive dance as well as the standard funeral trappings. It got me thinking about my own funeral. Â Now I have no reason to think that it will be anytime in the near future but it is inevitable so I guess I should be prepared. Some may think the thought morbid but I don’t. I know that there is no guarantee that one’s wishes will be carried out once one no longer has any say in the matter. Â My father always said that he want the $200 GI special funeral with as little cost and fuss as was possible. Â Inflation and my mother made that impossible. She insisted on a “dignified” ceremony. Â When she passed I tried to make sure she had the funeral that she wanted and accepted plenty of help from those who mourned her.
So for what it’s worth here are the things I would want. Â First of all I do not want my corpse to be the centerpiece for any ritual. Â I have always found that ghoulish especially with all those people who say “he looks good.” I don’t think looking dead looks “good.”. Â If I have to be there at all just have my ashes in an urn or better yet just display a nice picture. As the opening music I want Bill Evans playing “My Foolish Heart.”Upload My Foolish Heart Album Version. Â After that I want some honorary pallbearers to come up front and do some of that old Motown choreography like the Temptations or the Pips. Â Okay, okay no dancing pallbearers but could at least some of the people who come up to speak about me do a dance step or at least one of those Monty Python silly walks. Why? Well because the real me will be in that step, the one who looked at life with a twinkle in his eye, who punctured earnestness and solemnity and ceremony. If not at the funeral or memorial service please do so at some other occasion. That is the me I want remembered.
As a eulogy I would want this by Sweet Honey In the Rock:  1-01 Ella’s Song. I went to college during the turbulent sixties from 1967 to 1971.  In those days naive “us” thought the “revolution” in thought, circumstances, morals and values was just around the corner. Once it became clear that the “revolution” not only would not be televised but was actually generations away, I decided my best course of action was to help others learn what I had learned about the world.  So I went into college teaching and history writing. My only hope is that I opened up a few minds along the way and better prepared some to deal with the world we are leaving behind. I hope that they pass that message on to their children and students.
Finally this is the music I want as a recessional. There were many occasions after a particularly difficult day when I was depressed and down that I had to remind myself that humans could create beauty as well as ugliness.  After walking in the shanty towns in South Africa, after watching the twin towers fall, after the MLK and RFK assassinations or just when dealing with assholes all day (and now the Boston Marathon bombings) , I would play John Coltrane’s version of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.” Lush Life abridged_01. Amazingly it was written by Strayhorn as a gay teenager in a small town dreaming of a sophisticated world that he would one day inhabit. It is a song fundamentally of hope.
I remember during my wife’s doctoral training in social work a teacher in a course on end of life issues taught the class to ask “Okay what do you want to do once you are dead?” In other words how do you want your memory to affect those who remember you? Funerals are of course for the living; the dead are beyond caring.  Whatever people want to do is fine with me (including taking little notice of my passing) as it was with the relative whose funeral started my train of thought in this direction. I also think a funeral should present the deceased in the way the want to be remembered. There were of course many versions of me in all the personas one assumes during life. Students may see you in one way, colleagues in another, civilians to the academic world in yet another.  Time also changes those personas and those perceptions. No one ceremony can capture the complexities of a human being and I don’t expect my funeral to be any different.  I am however comfortable with the presentation of this “me”. Think about what “you” you would be comfortable presenting.
In March this year we took a vacation to St. Croix during what would have been spring break at my old teaching institution.  It was my first “spring break” vacation to a warm weather climate after thirty years of being stuck in the Northeast while I was teaching.  Every year I watched students take their well deserved break, many to warmer climes, while I stayed in often cold or snowbound Maine. I usually had to grade papers, to recover from the first two thirds of the semester, to prepare for the next third (which always flew by) and try to squeeze a little scholarship out before students returned, many looking tanned and impossibly healthy. This year however I got to go away for my first ever  trip to the Caribbean.
The choice of St. Croix was not arbitrary but the result of a genealogical puzzle I was trying to figure out. Families are intricate webs of secrets. Â Information is withheld, lies are told, feelings are suppressed and secrets are kept, all so people can play the roles actor and audience have agreed upon. My family certainly was. My father did not share the same surname with his siblings and indeed no one else in my family. Â He passed away long ago but his birth certificate was among the papers I had come into when my mother passed away some twenty years ago. The certificate listed a biological grandfather with a surname he had passed down to my father and me. Â This biological grandfather was different from the man my father’s mother had married a few years later and the only grandfather I had known when I was a child. As I was an adult when I learned this I understood about teen unwed parenthood, you know baby mama’s and daddy’s. My grandmother had a youthful indiscretion that resulted in my father before marrying a man with whom she spent the rest of his life.
My grandmother passed away fifteen years ago at the ripe old age of 94 and my cousin in going through her papers found my grandmother’s baptismal certificate. This contained a shock. The surname of my biological grandfather listed on my father’s birth certificate was the same as my grandmother’s birth surname on her baptismal certificate. This raised all sorts of questions. Was my father the product of some incest between my grandmother and perhaps a cousin?  According to the birth dates on my father’s birth certificate both my grandmother and my biological grandfather were just teenagers at the time of my father’s birth. The only other record I subsequently found about my biological grandfather was the 1920 census which listed him at a hospital in New York City. All of the principals in this drama had passed on and so I was at a dead end in learning more about my biological grandfather. While they were alive they had never mentioned anything about it and in fact kept all information secret from the grandchildren. Perhaps they thought it a family scandal that should be hushed up.  In any event it was in the distant past and not a thing you told your grandchildren about.
My grandmother’s baptismal certificate opened a new path of inquiry however. It showed that she was born in St. Thomas in what were at the time the Danish Virgin Islands. Â Her father’s first name was Louis and her mother was Lucy. Â Further complicating matters my great grandmother had done the same thing as my grandmother. Â She had had a child by a different man than she subsequently married. My grandmother was born in 1902 and my great grandmother had married a different man in 1909. Â They migrated to New York City and my grandmother took her stepfather’s surname. I can trace my step great grandfather’s household through the 1920, 1930 and 1940 censuses. When my grandmother as a teenager gave birth to my father her parents stood by them and raised my father in their household when my grandmother married a couple of years later and started her own household. My father of course knew his mother and in fact they had a rather warm relationship the rest of their lives.
Okay I knew something of my father, my father’s mother, my father’s mother’s mother and my father’s mother’s stepfather from the U.S. census.  However I knew nothing about my grandmother’s biological father Louis because there was no evidence about him in the U.S. records or anywhere else outside of St. Thomas. So my vacation in St. Croix was partly to allow me to find out more about Louis and indeed my surname in the Virgin Islands. On St. Croix the library that contains genealogical information is located on a former sugar plantation that has been converted to a museum about thirty minutes outside the capital Christiansted. At the library I found nothing about the Louis I was looking for but I found a mention of another Louis with my surname except spelled with two n’s instead of the one with which I spell my name. Unfortunately according to his birth date he is about 25 years younger than the Louis I seek. I also find that there is only one prominent family with the two n’s version of my surname and they seem to be white. The patriarch of that family was a wealthy merchant and a prominent colonial official who even served as governor of the colony for a month or two. I don’t know if there is any relation between that family and mine.  Given what race mixing occurred during such situations there is no telling if a Sally Hemmings-like situation developed at some point.
We take the short flight over to St. Thomas where there is a Caribbean Genealogical Library that has access to many databases about Virgin Islands genealogy. The library is about 10 minutes outside of the capital Charlotte Amelie  in a small strip mall on a hill. The director there is very helpful and we look at several St. Thomas databases including local censuses in Danish, church records,  property records, baptismal records and finally cemetery records. My wife, the director and I divide up the search with census records checked by the director, property records checked by my wife and church baptismal and death records falling to me.  We confirm the baptismal records of which I already have copies and then proceed to search for my surname in the others.  While we turn up some scattered records with my surname in the property records they are few and far between. By chance I get my ‘AHA” moment in the cemetary records.  There amidst a few other mentions of my surname I find Louis, spelled Lewis.  He is the right age and has died in 1917 at age 40. He died in the same year my father (his grandson) was born in New York City, likely never knowing about him. There is something “circle of life-ish” about that.
So, I returned from vacation not only rested, tanned and relaxed but with several other pieces of the puzzle that is my genealogy. I still do not know how all the pieces fit but I will keep trying to find out. I urge you to find out about yours while the people who you could ask are still alive. Â It is much harder to piece it all together when they are gone. Unfortunately we usually don’t get interested in this stuff until we get older and they are gone. And families are well, families.
Many of the the progressive and liberal responses to the gun violence atrocities we have seen lately are directed at violent video games, movies or even hip hop music. Humbly  I would like to suggest that they are the wrong target. For this stand you can pick your own metaphor: swimming against the tide, marching to one’s own drummer, going against the grain, walking in the wrong direction. First I would like to admit that when it comes to violence I am something of a wimp.  I do not own any first person shooter video games; I am not a fan of horror or zombie movies; I have a limited tolerance for violence in movies (although I did see Django Unchained and my son claims that Tarentino’s cartoon hyper-violence is to sate you and then overload you with violence until it becomes intolerable); and I deplore and worry about what the violence and misogyny in hip hop indicate about our African American communities. Yet, I see no problem to which censorship is the answer.
I must admit that this is partly because of my knee-jerk reaction that grows out of the knowledge that African Americans were  (and given the school systems in minority areas) are being subjugated by withholding the ability to read  books and ideas. The common occurrence of linking censorship to subjugation throughout history should give all of us pause before we advocate it. Feeling that we are are pure and righteous while doing it is no excuse. Totalitarian regimes everywhere also claim such righteousness. There is also an air of sympathetic magic to it.  If we censor something the censors believe the problem associated with it will also disappear.  Arizona believes that if we stop ethnic studies programs from talking about America’s history then the ethnic struggles in their state will somehow be eliminated.  If we stop students from reading the n-word in Huckleberry Finn, race relations will be better.  If we stop teaching youngsters about their bodies and feelings during puberty, teen sex and pregnancy will disappear. Finally censorship concentrates on stopping an idea in a certain kind of media rather than the idea itself.  It leads to a whack-a-mole strategy in which one tries to whack it when the idea rears its head.  The problem is that even if you subdued it, it will pop up again in another place, among another group or in a different media.  If people were not able to do it when the highest evolved media producer was the printing press, how on earth are we to do it in an era of cell phone cameras, cheap and small video/audio recorders, blogs, Instagram and You Tube? The current call to limit the availability of violent media is another one of these futile, self righteous, sympathetic magic, whack-a-mole endeavors.
Lest one fear that I have become a libertarian in my old age. let me add that I am in favor of an assault weapons ban, expanded gun licensing checks and limits on clip sizes.  Assault weapons are designed to shoot at armed bands of humans not unarmed herds of deer.  There is nothing “sporting” about them. Obese males may get their “jollies” from annihilating targets with them but the positives do not outweigh the negatives when they are used for more nefarious activities.  I do not see how allowing private ownership of them benefits our society.  For any who argue that they protect against the government, history shows that there has not been a successful American armed insurrection against the government since the South won a few battles in the Civil War.  Spoiler alert, they lost the war. I support most of the gun control measures mentioned by the President in his speech today. With so many guns already in circulation it is going to take years for these measures to produce tangible effects. It is therefore better to start now than later.
These gun control measures however are really nothing more than a band-aid on the cancer that is eating up our society from the inside. The atrocities occur when the easy acquisition of these means of destruction meet individuals consumed by the fear, anger or alienation created in our society. To be fair we are talking about a tiny minority in our society who have turned such feelings into public actions.  The determined loners, political fanatics, gang members and others who feel they have been wronged, are those who have been driven to perpetrate these atrocities. For them other people have stopped being human beings with families and people who love them to become nothing more than the collateral damage of an individual’s outpouring of rage.  There are no shortage of candidates for causes of this fear, anger and alienation: late stage capitalism, the breakdown of family and community, the decline of religion, the rise of religion, racism, materialism, the lack of spirituality, individualism, liberalism, conservatism, isolationism, world domination.  Take your pick or create your own. I know only that until we solve this real crisis in our society we will remain the most violent society on the face of the planet.
I must admit that the thought of somebody learning their history from movies makes me despair for the future of the human race. Imagine learning about World War 2 (or even just about spelling) from “Inglorious Basterds,” about U.S. Reconstruction from “Birth of a Nation,” or the American revolution from Mel Gibson’s “The Patriot,” just to take American history.  When it comes to world history United States produced films are even worse.  I am sure that there are people who learn history that way and please excuse me but I am not talking to you. The simple truth is that movies, whatever their historical setting, are about contemporary concerns and not the historical one they portray. This is not necessarily a bad thing.  If history is (as the ancient Greek father of history Thucydides told us long ago) about teaching moral lessons, the cinematic use of history to teach contemporary “lessons” is not too far out of bounds. If historians want to call the filmmakers out for distorting history they are certainly doing a public service and being true to their profession. They are also being beside the point. Movies doubtless distort history but so does historians’ history. The historians are supposedly kept in check by their colleagues who not only fact check and revise history they subscribe to an orthodoxy of method as well as a code of ethics.  Yet the best selling histories on the New York Times list are written by Bill O’Reilly. To be fair Mr. O’Reilly doesn’t have the opportunity to teach in college classrooms but only a minority of people learn their history there. The majority of people learn history from ideologues like Mr. O’Reilly or popular culture including the movies. These usually get the history wrong intentionally or unintentionally, in the interests of simplifying it or making a point.
All of this brings us to two current movies that purport to deal with race in the United States: Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.” Both historians and African American scholars of the historical or other persuasions have weighed in on the merits or shortcomings of each of these movies. As an example one of my colleagues has done so (http://www.bowdoin.edu/faculty/p/prael/django-unchained) and although he probably couldn’t go toe to toe with a film historian (or even Tarantino,) his nineteenth century African American history chops are excellent.  His take on these films is measured, well researched and interesting. I on the other hand am now retired and so I don’t have to be any of those things in my public writing. I can just write about my thoughts and  feelings after having seen both movies.
I would put “Lincoln” in the category of “my, wasn’t slavery hard on white people” as was Spielberg’s earlier movie about slavery “Amistad.” In fact his Schindler’s List was as much about a guilty accomplice to the Nazi atrocities as it was about the Jews or victims of those atrocities. Applying our principle of contemporaneous real themes, “Lincoln” was a message to elected officials to hold firm to principle while doing whatever it takes to get the job done. If that is change, publicly lying about your principles,  making political deals, buying votes etc, so be it. Are you listening President Obama? I must add that Spielberg is an accomplished film maker (so was D.W. Griffith the director of birth of a Nation) and “Lincoln” is a well made movie.  I was especially impressed by the art direction which made mid-nineteenth century Washington and surrounding areas look sufficiently raw and primitive. The acting by Daniel Day-Lewis was superb and the rest of the acting ensemble was adequate to good. Many have complained that it could have told us more about history by taking a wider swath both in time and by including more actors or having more for them to do. That’s a fair criticism but not my major objection to the movie.  The movie is built to appeal to the liberal white viewer and only has a role for blacks as noble victims in it.  By now Hollywood should be beyond this underestimation of its audience. The movie’s thrust therefore seems to me outdated.  Yes these are the people who vote for the Academy Awards and such, but they are not the real America that is coming into being. The movie and at least the audience I saw it with therefore skews old.
“Django Unchained” however doesn’t have that problem. Although it uses the form of the “spaghetti western” from the sixties and seventies it has just as much kinship with the first person shooter video games of the last few years.  The progression of the musical score from spaghetti western music to Tupac provides some evidence for this. Tarantino movies have a commonality (he’s really a one trick pony when it comes to themes):  righteous anger which explodes into violence e.g. Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds. This is the contemporary theme in Django. Its naturalistic (not necessarily realistic)  portrayals of the atrocities inherent in slavery (when something gives absolute legal power over others for as long as slavery did, there are few atrocities that did not occur) make the violence which Django perpetrates completely righteous and justified. The cheers and the verbal approval given these acts of violence (oh and I must say that Django is very, very violent) by my audience, testify to the acceptance of this theme. Its climactic, over the top bloodbath was hard for an old fuddy duddy like myself to watch.
Critics have pointed to the violence in movies like Django and video games as a cause of the violence we see in America.  They blame the tragedies in Colorado and Connecticut on the glorification of violence in our popular culture.  I wonder whether the causal arrow actually  goes the other way.  These games and movies are popular because of the violence in some ways inherent in our culture. I would much rather see that violence expressed virtually in video games or subliminally in movies than acted out in elementary or other schools and theaters. How many real atrocities have been averted rather than caused because of these outlets. Tarantino is not as accomplished a film maker as Spielberg and the films show that.  I also must admit that there was more levity in Django than Lincoln which drowns in its own earnestness. At the same time there is a generational difference between the two directors, the audiences they aim at and consequently the movies they have produced. Tarantino’s movie is directed at the underdog while Spielberg’s is directed at those in power. Spielberg’s movie ignores black agency and Tarentino’s reduces it to a revenge fantasy. Neither tells the real story of slavery but each is in its own way a contemporary fable with a moral to make. Hollywood will probably never make a movie that tells the truth about slavery and its abolition.  That won’t be its goal and probably not its job.  It can however tell better moral fables than these. I just won’t hold my breath.
One of my Facebook friends posted an old video from Sesame Street showing Big Bird and Snufffalufagus explain to kids what disco was. It got me to thinking about how you explain complicated concepts to children without talking down to them or oversimplifying the concepts. Sesame Street is pretty good at this though far from perfect. How should one explain race for example? It does no good to say that race doesn’t exist because they can visibly see that it does. Similarly it does no good to say that race exists but it doesn’t matter because we live in a world where it indeed matters.  One’s chances in life, the opinion one has about you, and the actions others take toward you are all conditioned upon racial beliefs. Rather than write some cutesy dialogue (l’ll leave that to others more talented at that sort of thing), I thought I would think of the things such a dialogue should contain.  It should make three points: race exists as a physical category, everybody has a race, race is not just one thing it is a collection of physical traits. The problems come when you try to use race to explain anything. e.g. a certain race acts this way or a certain person acts this way because he is a member of a particular race.  The first problem is that “race” is actually a collection of physical traits none of which determine behavior.  Brown skin, flat noses and kinky hair do not impel complex things like behavior any more than white skin, blue eyes and straight hair.  Furthermore those we consign to racial categories based on “race” rarely have an unmixed collection of those physical characteristics.
It is also true that not all of the people we put in a racial category behave the same way. My investigations of  twentieth century African American history have shown that the seemingly preferred tactic of most civil rights leaders was to show that there were blacks who behaved in decent, moral and otherwise proper ways that were not those of the racial stereotype attributed to blacks. Apparently television hasn’t gotten that memo particularly about other races. With the rare exceptions like “The Cosby Show” few media productions show other races without resort to racial stereotypes. As America has become more diverse the media has simply included more racial steroetypes in their productions.
The major problem however is that the concept of race as become part of the web of power relations in our world. I recall a review of a John Coltrane Quartet album that states the drummer (Elvin Jones) sets the rhythm so well in the first few bars that he doesn’t have to continue to do it, it is always implied.  So it is with race and power. Race is so embedded in American power relationships that whether one consciously mentions it or not it is always there. It still determines who holds power (yes I know a black man is president but look at the attacks upon him), the way those who seek power campaign ( look at how ethnic pandering and ethnic voting blocs are as categories are taken for granted) , and how police relationships with their communities are structured for example. By historically limiting residential, economic and educational opportunities, ghettoes and cultures have been created that perpetuate inequalities even when the initial restrictions are no longer legal. In both the oppressors and the oppressed race has created behaviors that will ensure that the same dance of of racialized power relations will go on and on.
That is why race still “matters.” Statistically and actuarially one can predict life expectancy, educational attainment, and economic achievement based on race. To counter the power relationships, racial “explanations”, and behaviors among and between oppressers and the oppressed, we have an uphill battle that is going to last way beyond my lifetime and even the next few generations.  I have done what I usually do when faced with a seemingly unwinnable battle; I have gone for help. I have looked to younger generations and tried to teach them about race.  We should all be Elvin Jones and state the drumbeat of freedom as MLK Jr. called it or the truth about race as I called it,  so strongly in the beginning that it will be there in all future generations do. They need to recognize racial concepts in others and eliminate them in themselves. Let’s talk to kids about race.
Truth is always a casualty of political campaigns. Politicians lie, exaggerate and bend the truth to get elected.  That’s not news and in that regard this year’s election is no different from others.  As always let the voter beware especially of television ads. To find out the truth of what’s happening the populace has to dig a little deeper.  The problem is that fewer and fewer of the voters are willing to do that.  They judge politicians on whether their lives have improved or not and their own ideologies.  People feel that they cannot actively judge whether a politican’s platform is going to be good for them or not so they vote based on other things. I was reminded of this while watching a political commercial featuring people who claim that they voted for Obama in 2008 but that he has not improved their lives so they should elect the Republicans.
Okay so let me get this straight.  The deregulation that Republicans advocated led to the greed of Wall Street bringing our economy to the brink of depression, the loss of jobs and the destruction of lives. The tax cuts that they advocated have benefited the rich rather than the middle class so much that they have created the greatest income inequality the country has ever seen. The Republicans and especially the Tea Party have prevented the implementation of policies (even those they proposed or advocated) that would have improved the country because they did not want Obama to get credit for it. They advocate economic policies that have never worked e.g. tax cuts for the rich who are supposedly “job creators.” They have denied well established scientific theories like global warming and evolution in favor of Bible stories.  They want to reestablish male control over women’s bodies. They criticize the stimulus package when in reality it was one third the tax cuts that they advocated and restricted by the limitations that they placed upon it. They would not lessen the tax burden on the middle class unless tax cuts on the wealthy were included. These are the people the RNC want me to vote for?
“Swiftboating” is drawn from the 2002 presidential campaign when the Republicans wanted you to believe that John Kerry, a decorated war veteran, actually did not deserve your vote while George W. Bush who stayed at home and served in the reserves only when he felt like it, did deserve your vote.  While it was eventually proved that the allegations against Kerry were lies the damage was done.  What was one of his biggest strengths had been negated while one of Bush’s greatest weaknesses was also negated.  They did this by lying to convince voters that black was actually white and white was actually black.  The debate over Medicare is the same thing.  The Republicans criticized Obama for cutting Medicare when in reality his cuts don’t affect benefits paid to individuals but payments made to providers in order to become more efficient.  At a less political time these would have been cuts applauded by the Republicans. At the same time they are trying to portray themselves as the protectors of Medicare when the budget cuts espoused by Romney and especially Ryan would cut the number of people receiving benefits and the amount they received even more. This is classic swiftboating; trying to convince you through distortions and outright lies that things are the opposite of what they are.
The problem in believing the lies and ignoring the reality is that the reality eventually comes home to roost. The Republican economic plans will not work and will plunge the economy further into recession just as recovery is occurring. Just look at what the austerity plans have done to Europe. The social agenda of the Tea Party dominated Republicans will shred the social net, curtail women’s reproductive rights, and impose an “American Taliban” as Aaron Sorkin has called it. The middle class will fall further behind the rich and the reserve army of the unemployed will continue to grow.
The recession has shaken the middle class tremendously. The American dream of livelong employment, home ownership and a better life for one’s children, has never seemed so far away. The Republicans are using scare tactics, lies and a shell game to get you to vote for them. They are trying to convince you that the deficit (one that they helped create) is the most serious problem we face when it is actually a lack of confidence in consumers that is preventing business from hiring and the economy from expanding. Their plan will indeed help the rich get richer but it will not help the middle class.  If the middle class votes for them they need to ask, “What cha gonna do when they come for you?”
Over the last few years I have been preparing a multimedia project on Walter White, the leader of the NAACP from 1929 until his death in 1955. I am almost finished. Here is my closing statement:
Walter White was an unarmed David who fought against an entrenched Goliath whose belief in the inferiority of African Americans was unquestioned. The actions of most white Americans ran from benign indifference to the maintenance of a racial caste system which ensured white superiority. Walter White changed that. Between Booker T. Washington’s death and Martin Luther King Jr.’s rise he came to be the personification of hope for those millions of African Americans trapped behind the color line. As his sister wrote him, “the little people in the alleys and slums might not know who the President is or even who Abraham Lincoln was, but they all know and worship Walter White.” Compared to his contemporaries W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey or A. Phillip Randolph his actions and deeds rather than their words improved the lives of more African Americans than anyone else did between the First World War and his death in 1955. As his biographer summed up:
He was opinionated, vain and impulsive, can could engage in chicanery with the best. [Lester Granger of the National Urban League wrote] “His cocky aggressiveness stayed with him as long as he lived – as did his boyhood vanity – but it was these very qualities that helped to make him the best lobbyist our race has ever produced, and one of the best of any race.”…White was “restless, energetic cocky,'” or in the words of his friend Louis Wright, “that damned little pony, always prancing around.”
He was all that and so much more. He was a Negro by moral choice as well as ancestry. Once having made that moral choice he literally dedicated his life to the service of civil rights. He never doubted what side he was on. The long hours, constant stress, and continual travel undoubtedly contributed to the brevity of his life. No matter how many times he lost he persevered in his struggle against racism. He understood full well the difference between power (the ability to make policy decisions) and influence (the ability to sway those who did). At a time when a black man had to content himself with hoping to influence those in power rather than holding power himself, White became a master at it. He led the campaign to bring federal power to bear when local legal and governmental structures were designed to keep African Americans as second class citizens. The NAACP’s legal battles were to move individual discrimination cases all the way to the Supreme Court so that federal power would be brought to bear to end discrimination. The Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court decision was just one example of such cases. They challenged everything from graduate and professional school discrimination to housing discrimination to voting rights.
By the time of his death his brand of elite politics had perhaps run its course and further progress needed the mass politics he always avoided for fear that he could not control it. The civil rights movement was about to move into a new phase of mass direct action which would raise up a new leader, Martin Luther King Jr. However it is worth noting that Rosa Parks whose refusal to give up her bus seat sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, had been a member of the NAACP since 1943 and was volunteer secretary for the Montgomery NAACP branch when she took her action. She was in a sense the child of the struggle that Walter White had led. The modern civil rights movement grew upon the legacy and organization that White had built into a force potent enough to change America.
Finally Walter wanted to make it possible for black people to marry anyone they wanted. His own happiness to be with his soul mate took courage to act in the face of what he knew would be outrage from his own NAACP colleagues as well as those racists who opposed interracial marriage. His marriage to whomever he wanted transcended the racial mores, political realities and expectations of others. When he transcended his “Negro” status for personal happiness he tragically lost his place in history. His “tragedy” was our failure.
Two things happened recently that have led to this post. First I received my first payment from Social Security and secondly I was doing some research for that project on Walter White and the NAACP which I have been working on. Receiving my first Social security payment made me wonder about the Social Security Act and since I was researching race and the New Deal programs anyway I decided to look at what has been written about America’s first welfare program Social Security. The last time I had looked at the New Deal was awhile ago but the accepted wisdom was that it was discriminatory mostly because the white liberal New Dealers had to make concessions to the racist southern Congressmen in order to get things passed into law. FDR and the rest of the New Dealers were willing to sacrifice the rights of African Americans in order to do what they thought was best for the country. This was the view that liberal historians like William Chace and Harvard Sitkoff expounded in their books on the New Deal.
This was especially true of the Social Security Act which intentionally excluded those occupations of most African American workers like domestic service, farmer workers and professional work (together almost two thirds of African American workers, 85% of African American women workers) from the Act’s coverage. It was true of other New Deal Acts as well. In my research however I ran into this little book by Mary Poole called The Segregated Origins of Social Security, University of North Carolina Press, 2006. She did research into the papers of the originators of the act, the congressional papers and debates among the New Deal staff. She concludes:
…African Americans were not denied the benefits of Social Security because of the machinations of southern congressional leadership as is assumed. The Act was made discriminatory through a shifting web of alliances of white policy makers that crossed regions and political parties. The members of the group that wielded the greatest influence on these developments were not southerners in Congress, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own …who genuinely sought to build a fairer and better world…but whose vision was steeped in racial privilege.
She concludes that the policymakers “shared an interest in protecting the political and economic value of whiteness.”
The most interesting thing about her analysis however are the long term effects she sees. It channeled most African Americans away from the programs created for workers and into public assistance if at all. In a society that assigns economic and social value to all things considered “white’ and “self made” it assigned a stigma to those who received public assistance. They had failed as individuals and are a burden on society. Even though later changes in the 1960’s would change some aspects of this discrimination the stigma attached continues to this day in the “American cultural imagination.” Welfare and black underclass have become synonymous in that imagination even though the numbers prove that welfare recipients are a diverse group and whites are the leading recipients. Secondly generations of African American families and communities “lost out on the baseline of economic security…offered to covered workers.”
The first effect continues to affect politics today as white conservatives appeal to poor and middle class whites, even those receiving government benefits through social security or medicare, about big government “wasting” the taxpayers’ hard earned money on charity for the poor. This distinction between earned benefits for whites and charity for blacks was however established by the government itself at the dawn of the American welfare state.