Structural racism

 

One of the welcome, but unexpected effects of the Black Lives Matter movement is that more White people want to know what it is like to be Black in the United States today. Whites are beginning to listen and some of us are trying to learn the effects of anti-Black racism on Black lives.

The Lancet is one of the most prestigious medical journals in the English-speaking world and beyond. It recently contained a long article that showed that in any state of the US where police shot and killed a young, unarmed black man, large numbers of Black citizens suffered in their mental health. ( The Lancet, Volume 392, July 28 – August 3, 2018,) They were more depressed, anxious, fearful. Their sense of themselves, their self-esteem suffered. They felt more uncertain about their position in their social world.

The article showed the mental health effects of the murders of unarmed, young Black men and women on Black people. The murder of unarmed, young Black men and women, the article showed, did not have the same effects on White people. The murder of unarmed, young Blacks by police had a very specific, deleterious mental health effects on the victims of structural racism. It was felt particularly vividly by Black mothers, and by Black women expecting a child.

The article made use of what is now a familiar concept, the concept of "structural racism." Racism, this term implies, should not be understood primarily as the prejudiced thoughts and feelings and behavior of individual Americans. When we talk about racism in America we are not just talking about this or that person who has mistaken beliefs about Black people – beliefs that ascribe defects to Black people that they have no more than any other group in our nation.

Instead we are supposed to think of racism as consisting of social systems, of structures, instead of as the prejudices of individual persons.

This is an important insight, but it must be understood correctly. Structural racism is often understood as saying "racism does not consist of the beliefs or actions of individual White people. Racism is perpetrated and perpetuated by the system or the social structure."

Many White people like to talk about structural racism because they understand it in that sense that individual White people are not responsible for the existence of racism, for the murder by police of unarmed, young Black persons, for the inequality in opportunities for jobs or education between Whites and Blacks, etc. So I as a White person do not have to feel responsible. I should not feel guilty because it is not what I do or say that injures Blacks. It is the system.

But that is, of course, a complete misinterpretation. Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri was killed by a specific policeman. It was a specific grand jury that decided not to indict that policeman. Police who shot Black persons, if they were indicted, were absolved by specific juries. Racist acts are committed by specific White persons.

Black persons recounting their experiences over and over again experience the same indignities and assaults from different White persons. Talk about structural racism rejects the notion that there are just a few White people who are racist – "a few bad apples" – the startling and destructive fact is that different, totally unconnected White people will denigrate Black persons in the same ways as other White people. ( Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here, Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness [New York: Convergent, 2018] This is a book White people need to read.) More or less all White people will at times act in racist ways towards African-Americans – and of course against other persons of color, against other people who are not really White or whose whiteness is somewhat marginal as for instance Jews or, in Europe, the Roma, or Native Americans in our country.

That is what makes racism structural. It isn't just this or that person being mean or perhaps just ignorant and self-involved. It is all White people, all the time, with very few exceptions. Some of these White people are trying really hard not to be racist but even those of us who try hard, fail much more often than we like to admit.

One of the astonishing facts about structural racism is how it pops up in the most unexpected places. Several years ago A TIME Magazine reporter looked at the calls of umpires in different sports and found that in different sports White umpires tended to make calls against Black athletes more often than against Whites. (Katie Rooney, “Are Baseball Umpires Racist?”TIME August 13, 2007)

Structural racism plays out even in sports and it plays out in two ways. It plays out in the acts of White umpires and it plays out in the silence of the White public that does not protest these injustices.

In part they fail to protest because they don't know what is going on. But more and more White people are learning about the structural – that means ubiquitous, inescapable-- injustices done to members of Black communities but they refuse to do anything. They do not protest.

White people stick together and protect each other even when their racism is illegal or blatantly immoral. That racism is structural not only because it is everywhere but because it consists of an unspoken White solidarity against the suffering of Blacks. White police who killed Blacks can feel pretty safe because of the Whites who will protect them.

It is like Catholic priests who abuse children can feel assured that their bishop will protect them. It is like men in commercial or political organizations who sexually harass women. Until very recently they could be sure that other men would protect them also.

Structural racism means that all of us, Whites, regardless how well we mean, are responsible for the maltreatment for the injustices done daily to African-Americans because we commit overt racist acts, that we may not even recognize, or we refuse to protest those done by others.

Just Open your Eyes

In his latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that the Obama presidency did not substantially alter the condition of African-Americans in America. Yes, the White House was occupied by a Black family and a Black man was in charge of the government and was the Commander-In-Chief of the American military. But the deep misery of the majority of African-Americans in this country remains unchanged. Whites continue to have more power and to have all kinds of privileges compared to their African Americans fellow citizens.

Coates makes a strong case for this pessimistic view of American society today. What he does not give sufficient weight to is one important change. Not too long ago the plight of African Americans was not easily accessible to Whites. Today one must be deliberately blinding oneself to the information readily available if one is not going to see how Whites continue to dominate and deliberately disadvantage African-Americans.

When I was in college, soon after leaving Europe, having survived Nazi persecution, I made friends with one of the few African-American students in my class. He would come over occasionally to have dinner and would tell us what it was like to be Black in the US at the end of World War II. Having escaped the Nazi oppression and feeling free for the first time in many years, we did not believe that the America in which we felt liberated could treat its citizens of color so brutally. We did not believe his stories. The friendship withered.

In the 1960s I spent a summer teaching at a Black college outside Birmingham, Alabama. I am not sure the students profited substantially from listening to me talk about Plato’s Republic, but my understanding of what it meant to be Black in America was turned upside-down. A few years later, the world would learn of four young girls killed by racist bombs in church in Birmingham and could see with their own eyes the television reports of high-pressure hoses and attack dogs turned on peaceful demonstrators. Having lived there, in a Black community, I was not surprised. But you had to travel and expose yourself to Black lives in order to have even a very fragmentary understanding of the regime of terror to which Black Americans were exposed daily.

Not so today.

To be sure, it is general knowledge that the idea of separate races has no support in science. As far as their inherited genetic makeup goes, Blacks and Whites, Asians and different indigenous peoples differ minimally. Differences between black and white, for instance, are social creations that have a clear history. That history is now well known and open to anyone who is interested to understand how we have come to the current impasse in the relations between so-called racial groups.

In Virginia in the early 1600s, workers were imported from Europe. Some of them were white; they were so-called indentured servants, bound to work for their employer for seven or more years to pay off the cost of their voyage to the new world. Others were black. For some, their indenture never ended; others were freed to farm or follow a trade. Black and white workers lived and worked side by side, sometimes they married and had children. Around 1670 the State of Maryland passed laws that extended the indenture of white women, who had married Blacks, to their full lifetime. It was an easy way of making more labor power available.

At the end of that century small farmers and workers rose up in an armed rebellion. Black and White fought together against the ruling powers of the colony for greater opportunities to better their condition. The ruling groups responded with a series of laws, sharply differentiating the social and political rights of Blacks and Whites. These laws isolated Blacks. They deprived them of political rights they had had befores. Blacks were no longer allowed to raise their own cattle; they were forbidden to run for public office, to testify against a white persons, they could not be members of the militia or own weapons. A complex set of laws was passed in order to instill contempt for Blacks in the white workers. Racist sentiments were deliberately fostered by legislatures.

The very beginning of white anti-black racism was promoted by state governments in Maryland and Virginia. Ever since white racism has not just been a matter of the feelings of individuals. It has been promoted deliberately by states and the federal government. When slaves were freed during the Civil War, whites resorted to lynchings to keep African Americans intimidated. State governments, legislatures, sheriff's did nothing to stop these murders. They accepted them as legitimate. In the 1930s, the Social Security legislation deliberately excluded farm and domestic workers. In the southern states they were mostly black. Excluding black workers from Social Security was a condition laid down by southern senators.

After World War II, the US government offered low cost housing-- loans to returning soldiers. Black GIs however could not buy houses except in carefully outlined black neighborhoods—usually in decaying neighborhoods in the cities. With the aid of government loans, white veterans flocked to Levittowns. Not so black veterans. However bravely they fought, on their return they were second-class citizens once again. The government did not support or defend them. In many situations government lending agencies collaborated with racist exclusions practiced by the real estate industry.

Today all this is well known. It is easily accessible in many books. White people who are ignorant of these facts and continue to blame Black character flaws or the Black family for their difficulties only display their ignorance. Since the information is easily accessible, we need to recognize that this ignorance is willful and intentional.

Good books to read: the book by Ta-Nehisi Coates mentioned at the beginning of this blog. There are two very informative books by two white women, Debbie Irving, Waking up White and Shelly Tolchuk, Witnessing Whiteness. If you want to know what it is like to be Black in America today, read Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, If They Call you a Terrorist. A powerful novel depicting Black experience is Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing.

In his latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that the Obama presidency did not substantially alter the condition of African-Americans in America. Yes, the White House was occupied by a Black family and a Black man was in charge of the government and was the Commander-In-Chief of the American military. But the deep misery of the majority of African-Americans in this country remains unchanged. Whites continue to have more power and to have all kinds of privileges compared to their African Americans fellow citizens.

Coates makes a strong case for this pessimistic view of American society today. What he does not give sufficient weight to is one important change. Not too long ago the plight of African Americans was not easily accessible to Whites. Today one must be deliberately blinding oneself to the information readily available if one is not going to see how Whites continue to dominate and deliberately disadvantage African-Americans.

When I was in college, soon after leaving Europe, having survived Nazi persecution, I made friends with one of the few African-American students in my class. He would come over occasionally to have dinner and would tell us what it was like to be Black in the US at the end of World War II. Having escaped the Nazi oppression and feeling free for the first time in many years, we did not believe that the America in which we felt liberated could treat its citizens of color so brutally. We did not believe his stories. The friendship withered.

In the 1960s I spent a summer teaching at a Black college outside Birmingham, Alabama. I am not sure the students profited substantially from listening to me talk about Plato’s Republic, but my understanding of what it meant to be Black in America was turned upside-down. A few years later, the world would learn of four young girls killed by racist bombs in church in Birmingham and could see with their own eyes the television reports of high-pressure hoses and attack dogs turned on peaceful demonstrators. Having lived there, in a Black community, I was not surprised. But you had to travel and expose yourself to Black lives in order to have even a very fragmentary understanding of the regime of terror to which Black Americans were exposed daily.

Not so today.

To be sure, it is general knowledge that the idea of separate races has no support in science. As far as their inherited genetic makeup goes, Blacks and Whites, Asians and different indigenous peoples differ minimally. Differences between black and white, for instance, are social creations that have a clear history. That history is now well known and open to anyone who is interested to understand how we have come to the current impasse in the relations between so-called racial groups.

In Virginia in the early 1600s, workers were imported from Europe. Some of them were white; they were so-called indentured servants, bound to work for their employer for seven or more years to pay off the cost of their voyage to the new world. Others were black. For some, their indenture never ended; others were freed to farm or follow a trade. Black and white workers lived and worked side by side, sometimes they married and had children. Around 1670 the State of Maryland passed laws that extended the indenture of white women, who had married Blacks, to their full lifetime. It was an easy way of making more labor power available.

At the end of that century small farmers and workers rose up in an armed rebellion. Black and White fought together against the ruling powers of the colony for greater opportunities to better their condition. The ruling groups responded with a series of laws, sharply differentiating the social and political rights of Blacks and Whites. These laws isolated Blacks. They deprived them of political rights they had had befores. Blacks were no longer allowed to raise their own cattle; they were forbidden to run for public office, to testify against a white persons, they could not be members of the militia or own weapons. A complex set of laws was passed in order to instill contempt for Blacks in the white workers. Racist sentiments were deliberately fostered by legislatures.

The very beginning of white anti-black racism was promoted by state governments in Maryland and Virginia. Ever since white racism has not just been a matter of the feelings of individuals. It has been promoted deliberately by states and the federal government. When slaves were freed during the Civil War, whites resorted to lynchings to keep African Americans intimidated. State governments, legislatures, sheriff's did nothing to stop these murders. They accepted them as legitimate. In the 1930s, the Social Security legislation deliberately excluded farm and domestic workers. In the southern states they were mostly black. Excluding black workers from Social Security was a condition laid down by southern senators.

After World War II, the US government offered low cost housing-- loans to returning soldiers. Black GIs however could not buy houses except in carefully outlined black neighborhoods—usually in decaying neighborhoods in the cities. With the aid of government loans, white veterans flocked to Levittowns. Not so black veterans. However bravely they fought, on their return they were second-class citizens once again. The government did not support or defend them. In many situations government lending agencies collaborated with racist exclusions practiced by the real estate industry.

Today all this is well known. It is easily accessible in many books. White people who are ignorant of these facts and continue to blame Black character flaws or the Black family for their difficulties only display their ignorance. Since the information is easily accessible, we need to recognize that this ignorance is willful and intentional.

Good books to read: the book by Ta-Nehisi Coates mentioned at the beginning of this blog. There are two very informative books by two white women, Debbie Irving, Waking up White and Shelly Tolchuk, Witnessing Whiteness. If you want to know what it is like to be Black in America today, read Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandele, If They Call you a Terrorist. A powerful novel depicting Black experience is Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing.

How to recognize racism when you see it

 After they got into a tiff with the president about demonstrations while the national anthem was being sung, the three large sports clubs in Boston got together to plan a series of actions against racism. There are plans for a some advertisements and other actions. So far the plans are pretty vague and that is an important part of my story today.

Interestingly enough, as they announced these plans with some fanfare they had an opportunity to act very concretely against racism.

Within the same fortnight Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico unbelievably. Communications are down; there is no power. Many roads are destroyed. People have no water and little food. Medicines are scare; the healthcare system not really functioning. The US government, the President, the military, FEMA, and other government agencies did not pay a whole lot of attention to the immense suffering of people on the island for about a week. It took them that long to send a general there to see what sort of military assistance would be needed.

When hurricanes had hit Texas and Florida help was on the way immediately. We might say that hurricane Maria was the third hurricane in a very short period and people were simply tired. But when Mexico City was hit by two major earthquakes we did not seem to show any interest. (Perhaps the President is still miffed by the Mexicans refusal to pay for the border wall.) It is hard to believe that if a catastrophic natural disaster hit Toronto or Montréal we would simply ignore that. Surely military planes and trucks and machinery would be on the way in no time at all.

But the people on the island of Puerto Rico are not Canadians. They are not white. Neither are Mexicans. The neglect of the tremendous suffering of Puerto Rico is not a result of battle fatigue; it is a clear manifestation of racism.

Here was a splendid opportunity for the athletes in Boston to show their opposition to racism by getting on the phone and calling the White House – President Trump is a personal friend of some of them – to urge immediate action. But nobody noticed the crisis.

There is a lot to be learned from this story. Puerto Rico was not neglected and left to suffer without help because the government “hates” Puerto Ricans. The Boston athletes did not overlook what was happening – or rather not happening-- in Puerto Rico because they hate Puerto Ricans. But white people don't pay as much attention to people of color as they do to their own kind (Unless they rape or murder). We take ourselves terribly seriously. We think we are terribly important and do not see people of color as quite as important. So what happened in Puerto Rico did not ring any loud alarm bells, it did not get the ambulances and fire trucks out, bells ringing and sirens blaring. Everybody deplored the suffering and then paid attention to something else – most likely something concerning white people.

You don't have to beat up on people of color to be a racist. You just need to not take them quite as seriously as we take ourselves.

But there is a second lesson. Racism is not a general thing which we can combat – well-meaning white folks that we are – any day in any way by showing videos and going to sensitivity workshops. Racism is like a chronic disease that flares up here and it flares up there perhaps with different symptoms. One way of being racist is not to notice what is happening. A more serious way of being racist is not noticing what you are doing.

If some persons of color in your nation are suffering grievously and you are not moved to action, if only to call your friend the president of the United States and tell him to go and do his job now, today, then you are being racist because you are not noticing what is happening and, if truth be told, you don't care.

The third lesson is this: what you can do to fight racism may not be the same thing that I can do. Each of us, as white people, are involved in the perpetuation of racism in different ways. Each of us has to find the places where he or she are contributing to maintaining present racist abuses and must then work hard to withdraw their complicity. There is no general prescription of what you can do. Advertising against racism has been tried for 50 years with little effect. Holding dialogues about race between city officials and leaders of the community is not only a waste of time but it does positive damage because it persuades white people that they are doing all they can to fight racism while, in fact, they're doing zilch.

Racism has little to do with hate. It has to do with not paying attention, with not being able to be bothered, with not taking seriously the misery of others just because their skin is darker than ours. Racism is systematic. White people work to maintain that system most often without explicitly meaning to. But not paying attention to how the system works (and doesn't), and what you and I do to promote it, is itself being racist however good your intentions might be.

Frederick Douglass on the 4th July

In 1852, 10 years before the outbreak of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass then living in Rochester, New York, was asked by The Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society to address them on the 5th of July. In his speech he praised the Americans who 76 years earlier had declared their independence from England and had fought the Revolutionary War to make that independence a reality. They earned the gratitude of future generations of Americans for asserting that "all men are created equal" and making that principle the basis of their new government.
Douglass, was born a slave. While traveling in England in 1846, his British supporters bought his freedom from his owner in Maryland. Now free, self educated, he spent much of his life traveling through the United States, as well as England and Ireland, to speak in the cause of Abolitionism.
In his 4th of July speech, he reminds his audience that universal human equality did not extend to the slaves. They continued to be grievously oppressed. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which allowed Southern slave owners who kidnap runaway slaves anywhere in the United States, had only deepened the suffering of African-Americans.
In his speech Douglass does not mince words: "There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour… For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."
In recent years, many cities and towns have held public meetings to read this speech by Frederick Douglass. One such meeting was held where I live. It was a hot, sunny day, the sky blue with hardly a cloud, where a long line of volunteers, African-Americans, Whites, people of other origins lined up to each read one paragraph of this heart rending speech.
The audience was small but the readers conveyed their intense sorrow at the continuing injustices suffered by people of color in the United States.
Then the meeting was over. The organizer of the event, a local Black business man, ended the event with the words "God bless America."
God bless America, the nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than those of any other nation? The final invocation of God's mercy seemed at odds with the uncompromising condemnation of America's racial practices we had just read in Frederick Douglass’ speech..
To be sure, even Douglass himself, as he comes to the end of his condemnation of slavery, ends on a hopeful note. He is confident that slavery will come to an end. Most comments on the Douglass speech draw attention to this final expression of confidence that America will finally live up to its own principles and extend equal rights to everyone, black or white.
And is that confidence not justified? We just had a black president. Slavery has come to an end. So has Jim Crow. Black Americans vote and run for office and sometimes get elected.
But wait. Slavery still exists. Our government holds more than 2 million persons in prison. Many must work in prison industries where workers get paid somewhere between $.23 to two dollars an hour. Prison workers have no benefits. They are not allowed to organize. They will be punished if they refuse to work for a pittance. Their condition is not unlike that of their slave ancestors.
The number of Black prison inmates is quite disproportionate to the number of black Americans in the population as a whole. One in three Black men are in prison or live under the supervision of parole officers. They come from black communities where the unemployment rate is close to 50%, where schools fail to teach elementary reading and arithmetic skills to children, and their parents, the working poor, have no time to supervise their children because they are too busy trying to earn a meager living.
The Black Lives Matter movement arose in response to unarmed black men and women being killed by police officers. To date very few of these police officers have had to face court and those that did, were most often acquitted. In the United States in 2017 all men and women are still not created equal.
    We should not invoke divine blessings for America. We should ask for blessings for the small Black children who braved angry mobs of white, racist adults to claim their right to an equal education--a right they still have not won. We should ask blessings for the generations of African-Americans who patiently demanded equality at great danger to themselves.
    We should see our present turmoils as troubles we brought on ourselves for what Douglass called our “revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy.”

Why don't they want join us?

I have belonged to a number of all-white organizations. These were different kinds of groups. Some were progressive political groups whose commitment to opposing all racist distinctions was an important plank in their platform. Others were groups of retired people trying to continue their education, or they were neighborhood groups trying to maintain their neighborhood and in the process having occasional social events. From time to time these group would notice and deplore the absence of members of color. There would be some discussion of ways of recruiting African-Americans and other persons of color. Some members of the group would make recruitment efforts but the group remained as white as before. We would end up disappointed, shaking our heads, not knowing what to think.

Why did African-Americans not want to join our group? Because we could ask the question and be at a loss for an answer. Because we had no clue about life for African-Americans in these United States.

Let me explain this in three steps.

1. Whites do not understand the reluctance of African-Americans to join white organizations because they are oblivious to the history of African-Americans on this continent. The first black people came to this continent in 1609. For the first few years they were treated no differently from other servants. But when at the end of the 16 hundreds white and black servants together joined an uprising of farmers oppressed by their debts, the white people in power decided to sow enmity between white servants and Blacks by turning the Blacks into slaves. For the next 200 years Blacks in America, with very few exceptions, were slaves. The Civil War put an end to slavery but very soon afterwards black Americans found themselves in pretty much the same condition. They worked for very little. They had no citizen’s rights. They were in no rrespect equal to whites. When a white man or woman came down the sidewalk they had to step into the gutter to make way for them. It was not worth a black man's life to look at a white woman in any way. They were pariahs.

Significant change occurred in the 1960s. There are now some African-Americans who are wealthy, who have positions of power and respect in our society. Many earlier forms of segregation – separate restrooms and water fountains – are a thing of the past. African-Americans attend and graduate from the best white schools. White patients are attended to by black physicians; white clients have black lawyers.

A second reason why black people, most of the time, refuse to join white organizations is that whites, seeing the changes that undoubtedly have taken place, believe that racism is a thing of the past. "We even had a black president" they say. But it does not take much to see that viewpoint to be a major error.

Yes, slavery where some human beings own other human beings is dead. Gone are the slave markets. Gone are the families broken up when some members were sold off to other owners. But unpaid or unusually low paid work still remains. Forced work, work that one cannot refuse to do, continues to exist. In one way or another significant numbers of incarcerated African-Americans (and whites) work in prisons for no pay at all or for somewhere between $.93 to $2.40 an hour. This forced labor is not that different from slavery. Prisoners are forced to work; refusers end up in solitary confinement for long periods. The work is unpaid or barely paid.

The main victims of the system of quasi-slavery are African-Americans. Lynching has ceased to be a regular occurrence. But African-Americans are still not safe. The murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson brought to national attention the fact that African-Americans, both men and women, are in danger of being killed by police and that local district attorneys and grand juries ignore these as crimes of murder and fail to seek appropriate punishment. Killing African-Americans remains unpunished. Slavery and lynching have not disappeared. They have been transmuted into more modern kinds of maltreatment.

There is a third reason why African-Americans stay away from white organizations. Most white people are willing to acknowledge that racism persists in the United States. It would be hard to deny that when the President appoints an avowed racist as one of his closest advisers. But many whites draw a sharp line between themselves who oppose racism, who seek to build mixed organizations, and who profess to oppose racism wherever they encounter it and avowed white supremacists. We think of ourselves as well meaning whites opposed to whites who remain racist and full of hate. We are good whites; they are bad.

But in drawing that distinction, we good whites are being much too easy on ourselves and take credit for an opposition to racism which we do not deserve. Most whites, however well intentioned, harbor often not quite consciously white supremacist attitudes. I myself again and again catch myself in those attitudes. As a Jew who suffered serious losses during the Holocaust, I have good reason to be dead set against any kind of racist beliefs or behaviors. But very recently when I attended a convention of philosophers, I met a man whose books I had read and admired and discovered that he is African-American, which I had not known. I was just about to say "I did not know that you are a black" but fortunately caught myself at the last moment. Since he did very good work which I admired, I had of course assumed that he was white because deep down I believe that black philosophers were not good philosophers. I obviously know better because there are a number of black philosophers whose work is clearly superior to anything I myself have written. I admire their work tremendously and so does almost everybody else. I know for a fact that there are black philosophers whose work excels. But the deeply ingrained distrust remains untouched by actual experience, untouched by fact.

It was this distrust I was about to express to this man whom I admired. Did he notice my hesitation? Did he think to himself "here it comes again”?

I don't think that I am that different from many other "well-meaning" whites. We harbor serious anti-black prejudices so deeply ingrained that we don't always notice them. That allows us to deny their existence and think of ourselves as good white people. But they make black people unwilling to be around us because these prejudices are extremely hurtful.

To sum up: why don't African-Americans want to join organizations of well-meaning whites?

For three centuries African-Americans were treated with exemplary cruelty by whites. While those forms of oppression have disappeared they have been transmuted into other equally hurtful and inhumane forms. Racism is not dead it has just changed how it manifests itself. Even those of us who oppose racism sincerely cannot always stop ourselves from being seriously offensive, from giving voice to prejudices we abhor but nonetheless are host to.

And finally we are so inattentive that we do not know any of this. We do not understand significant facts about African American lives in the US. How can we say that we really care?

It is no wonder that African-Americans are very hesitant to join white organizations.

 A Moment of Truth for America

Racially motivated attacks have increased significantly since Donald Trump became a serious contender for the presidency and was then elected and installed as our 45th president. He has widely been blamed for this increase in racial attacks. There is no question that he bears some responsibility for encouraging white supremacist racism, blatant anti-Semitism, attacks on Muslims and recently on immigrants from India. By appointing arch racists like Jeff Sessions and Steve Bannon to important policy making positions in his government, Trump has let it be known that he is not troubled by white racism. Similarly other forms of divisiveness have recently become normal and acceptable.

But, of course, the blame does not rest only with him. We may blame Trump for creating a climate in which it is acceptable to be very openly racist or anti-Semitic. It is now allowed to express racist emotions, attitudes and beliefs which before one needed to hide. Trump is in part to blame for that change. We may not hold him responsible, however, for the emotions, attitudes, and beliefs that are being expressed so openly now.

Trump is not to blame for this huge, until now underground, reservoir of racial hatred, of drawing passionate lines between "them" and "us." Many people have thought that the turmoil of the 1960s was resolved when Congress passed the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts. The official story has since been that we have taken major steps to overcome our history of racial divides. While the struggle against racism and sexism has not been completed, there is progress being made every day and things are getting better as we speak.

This cheery story, we can now see, was mere self deception and ever since white people finally learned that young black men are ready targets for police shootings, that optimistic story has lost persuasiveness. The Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s made certain racial actions illegal but it did not change the mindset of the people who thought that their white skin made them superior and allowed them to oppress persons of colour by any means necessary, including lynchings.

We need to remember that racial differences, particularly in the form of slavery, have been an unmet challenge of our American Republic from its inception. When they wrote the Constitution, the Founders disagreed sharply about slavery. They never resolved the issue.

The outcome of the Civil War was to force the South to give up its slave way of life. But very soon whites in the South and North came to various understandings which always meant increased suffering for the former slaves. Slavery was replaced by the Jim Crow system. The passage of the civil war amendments to the Constitution put an end to slavery but it did not put an end to the anti-black racism of many Americans both in the South and the North. To give just one example: the Social Security legislation that was passed during the New Deal was made acceptable to Southern senators by excluding agricultural and domestic workers – occupations largely staffed by African-Americans. No social security for them. The secret agreement remained that it was perfectly alright to exploit African Americans.

But it is futile to believe that you can force people not to be prejudiced, not to feel victimized, or under attack. Once it becomes illegal to be racist in one particular form, white supremacy and anti-Semitism and all its other variants simply take less obvious forms. The "Whites Only” signs are taken down but deeply ingrained attitudes change little.

America has never been willing to take on the divides between white and black, between native born and immigrant. Neither has it been willing to confront other basic divisions such as between classes, between professional elites and the common people. The "One Nation Indivisible" slogan we make our children repeat every morning they are in school only serves to conceal our unwillingness to confront boldly the many divisions that exist in our nation.

It is clearly important to address the more egregious manifestations of pervasive racism – discrimination in the job market, redlining in real estate, and the continued war on young black men by various police forces. But these ways of forcing various groups not to act out their racist view of the world, does not change those views. It only forces a different expression of those views.

I wrote about this problem in a recent blog. There is no question that overcoming these divisions is increasingly difficult, if not impossible. Little is to be gained by having Whites and Blacks discuss their different views of the world. But it would be important for opposing groups to find common projects. We may not be able to agree on fundamental positions. But we could learn to work together and thereby create unity in action where unity in beliefs is unattainable.

We we face two tasks, not only one. We need to resist all injustices perpetrated by private individuals and the government. But we must also be aware that victories in those efforts only displace racist attitudes. We must, therefore, also try to create a climate where there is more willingness to cooperate, more willingness to seek projects that unify and allow the different fragments of our nation, if not to agree and unify around beliefs, at least to try to work together for the common good.

One method that has a venerable history is for white people to take the side of African-Americans, to support them in what ever way they believe they need to be supported. This was the practice – not always perfect – of the abolitionists, it was the practice of the young men and women who went into the South in 1963 and 1964 to show solidarity with African-American struggles for equality. It is the goal today of groups like SURJ (“Show up for Racial Justice”) to support movements like "Black Lives Matter."

Another way is to support Muslims and immigrants and to make sure that they are safe. Speak out quietly and calmly where persons are openly racist. Support all women in their struggle for equality. Support the victims of random arrests by ICE. ( US Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

There are ways of working towards unity in America. Making shows of disunity illegal is important but will not, by itself, create unity.

Lethal Police Practices

Police killings of Black men continue to be in the news. Nevertheless it came as a shock and surprise to me when I learned that so far this year police have killed 708 persons. If they continue at this rate there will be close to 1000 victims this year.

Something is seriously the matter when the police kills so many citizens. The first surprise is that these numbers are compiled by private organizations. The Washington Post  began keeping track of reports of police killings after the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO after they found out that the government does not record these events. The FBI has some statistics but they are admittedly very incomplete.

Different organizations come up with slightly different numbers. All of them are much too high. A government that does not even track police killings, clearly is not terribly interested in the safety of its citizens. 

There is widespread agreement that white citizens are killed at a much smaller rate than citizens of color. In some reports the number of deaths of African-American and Hispanic citizens together is about the same number of white citizens killed. 

Police officers are thought to be frequent victims of lethal attacks. But in 2015, 46 police officers were killed on duty in the United States. That is roughly 5% of the number of citizens killed by police officers.

Americans take these numbers for granted. But comparisons with police killings in other developed countries should make us sit up and demand an explanation. England and Wales with roughly 1/6 of the population of the US had 55 police shooting in the last 24--yes you read that right, twenty-four-- years while we had 59 fatal police shootings in the first 24 days of 2015. Comparisons with other European countries are equally startling. Iceland--a very small country--had 1 police shooting in the last 71 years. Germany with 1/4 the population of the US had 15 police shootings in the 2 years 2010/2011. We may well have 1000 police shootings in the present year.

I have written in past blogs that the high rates of violence are to be seen as results of the violent history of our country in which we fought a war with Native Americans every ten years and have been a warlike country in the world since the middle of the 19th century. That opinion has widespread support. But when we look at police shootings, in countries that have similar histories of taking their land away from previous occupants, Australia and Canada, we see that our numbers are still extraordinary. We have fifteen times the population of Australia. Our police kills 1000 citizens a year. If Australian police killed their citizens at the same rate that our police kills us, they would kill about 70 citizens each year. Instead Australian police has killed 94 citizens in the 20 years between 1992 and 2011. Canada, with a population of 35 million as compared to our 316 million has 25 police killings a year as contrasted to 1000 in the US. Compared to these and other developed countries, our police is spectacularly indifferent to killing civilians. 

Thanks to Back Lives Matter and similar organizations, the huge disproportion between Blacks and whites killed by police has finally received public attention. But that phenomenon cannot be fully understood unless we also understand the context of police forces that are extraordinarily lethal for all citizens compared to those in many other countries. The public has so far accepted these numbers of 1000 civilians killed every year and hence there are exist few careful studies of this phenomenon.

How can we explain this discrepancy between numbers of citizens killed by police in the US and elsewhere?

Comparisons with Australia and Canada show that the history of killing indigenous people is not a cause. But some people have argued plausibly that, compared to other developed countries, police in our extraordinarily violent society,  have reason to expect violence on the part of people they are questioning. They may therefore be more trigger-happy than their colleagues in other countries.

In some European countries (Netherlands, Norway and Finland) police officers spend three full years at the Police Academy before they hit the streets. Many American police officers are trained for five months; many for shorter periods. European officers receive much more elaborate training in how to deal with people who are seriously distressed, who suffer from mental illness, or are under the influence of drugs. Many American officers have little or no comparable training.

Many European police receive very elaborate instructions in how to deal with potentially lethal situations. They must first give verbal warnings. Before shooting at a person they must make warning shots in the air. They must shoot to disable an aggressive person before they shoot to kill. Not all US police officers are subject to such rules.

These differences between US and European police officers are interesting and suggestive. But we have no satisfactory explanation of the much higher numbers of civilians killed by American police.

Many of the killings perpetrated by US police are called "justified" by police and criminal justice officials. The comparisons with killings by police in other countries suggests very strongly that, on the contrary, many of these American killings are not justified.
American citizens have the right to be safe from their police. Local and national government must make a major effort to understand why the police in our country are such a threat to civilians. They must immediately take steps to study, explain, and remedy this situation.

“It is not my Responsibility”: 

White Americans refuse to take Racism Seriously

The Boston Globe reports that Mayor Marty Walsh has begun a series of discussions on race in the city. The meetings are private and by invitation only. Little information is available. But one Black participant reports that she has attended a number of “conversations about race” but that this is the first one where Whites participated as well as Blacks.

At this meeting, someone else reported, the conversation began with Black attendees speaking until someone asked whether the Whites in the room had nothing to contribute. One white man spoke up complaining that he was tired of conversations about race. “I did not own slaves, I did not participate in a lynching, or refused to hire African-Americans for jobs they were qualified to perform. It is not my responsibility.” In short, “It is not my problem. I am not interested. I do not want to talk about this.”

We do not know anything more about this speaker. Let us imagine that he is a solid citizen. He has to be to be invited to the Mayor’s private conversations about race. Let’s assume that he has been teaching history in High School for more than thirty years. He is also a successful soccer coach for the girls’ team. He is well respected by his colleagues and many of his students love him. Alumni remember him fondly and gratefully.

Our man is a practicing Catholic. He understands that his religion commits him to opposing injustice and to help where help is needed and deserved. He condemns overt racism and opposes politicians who seem to exploit the racist sentiments of voters. He is not a bad person. You would like him if he were your neighbor, the teacher of your children.

His complaint needs to be taken seriously.

We ask him about his home. He owns his free and clear. He bought it when he was fist married and had just embarked on his career as a High School teacher.

Teaching did not pay well then. It still is not a way of becoming rich. How could he afford the down payment? His in-laws helped out with the down payment, he admits. His wife’s grandfather, on his return from World War II, got a cheap government guaranteed mortgage through the GI Bill. Ever since the family had had a small but solid financial cushion through home ownership and their savings.

We ask him: “You are a history teacher. Did you know that the GI bill did not work the same way for Black veterans after World War II as it did for Whites? Banks refused to give mortgages to Blacks, regardless of the fact that they too had just returned from fighting in Europe and in the Pacific and were entitled by law to government backed mortgages? Did he know that?” No, he says, he did not know that.

He therefore also does not know that the median net worth of white families is about $265,000, while it is just $28,500 for Blacks. The average nest egg of White families is about 10 times that owned by Black families.

He admits that that is unjust but continues to insist that he did not run any banks after World War II--he was not even born--and therefore is not responsible for this discrepancy in White and Black ownership of assets.

We remind him that the Black families who were treated unjustly are Americans just as he and his family. They belong to the same nation, they work, pay taxes, and when necessary go to war. Can a good citizen, as he tries to be, ignore injustices done to other citizens? Do we not owe solidarity to other citizens?

We may well be right about this, he thinks.

We ask him another question: How did he choose where to buy his home? It happens to be in a lily white suburb. The school where he has been teaching for years has about 5% Black students.

He answers: his house is a few blocks away from that of his in-laws. His wife wanted to be close to her parents.

We ask: Why not live in a neighborhood of White and Black families? Our man is a decent person. He hesitates. He realizes that it would have been difficult for him to persuade his wife and his in-laws, who provided the down payment, to accept that choice. He admits, embarrassed, that he himself would have had to think very hard about that choice.

We tell him that social science research confirms that housing segregation is widespread in the US and that White preferences not to live with Black neighbors is one of the major causes of this continued racial segregation. When it comes to Black families being confined to Black ghettos, Whites cannot shrug off any responsibility.

He admits that he is no longer quite as sure that he has no responsibility at all for the plight of African-Americans. He leaves us, saying ” I need to think about what you said.”

And so do other White Americans who protest that racial inequities have nothing to do with them.

And Liberty and Justice for All

It is the first week of July and once again time to congratulate ourselves on our love of freedom, on our democracy and dedication to equality. Reminding ourselves of our wealth and power, our preeminent position in the world, we can fill all our hearts with genuine satisfaction.

It is also a good time to reread Ta-Nehisi Coates' article in the Atlantic Magazine of June 2014, "A Case for Reparations." (You can easily find it on the Internet.) By telling the stories of a few African-Americans who succeeded in buying and holding on to their houses in spite of being all their lives exposed to fraud and robbery by whites, Coates reminds us that American dedication to liberty and equality has some large exceptions. It only very intermittently applies to African Americans.

Coates stresses the pain caused African-Americans, especially young ones, when they themselves are insulted and denigrated or when they see others treated without respect. It is extremely difficult to grow up with a healthy sense of your own capabilities and merit, if you find yourself, your family, your friends consistently treated shabbily and the society as a whole refusing to acknowledge that.

This psychological damage of racism reminds those of us whites who are trying genuinely not to participate or support anti-black racism, that the damages will continue to be done regardless of our resistance to our own racism. As long as American society accepts the denigration of African-Americans by some of its members and by its government, the best and most well-meaning efforts of some of us will not be enough to achieve genuine justice and equality.

You may point to the passage of civil rights legislation, you may point to a black president, but the second class status of African-Americans has not changed. If you have any doubt about that, read the stories told by Coates. 

If you have any doubt consider the consistent denial by white people that there is any problem for African-Americans, which is not of their own making. The diagnoses change over time: African-Americans suffer because they do not manage to form families in the same way as white middle-class Americans. They do not do well in school. They get involved with drugs. Black Americans are disproportionately imprisoned or under the supervision of the parole system. None of that, many whites insist, is our fault.

In his article, Coates documents impressively how housing segregation is the result of government regulations of the home mortgage market and the work of white real estate speculators. White home buyers cooperate, for instance, by buying repossessed houses cheap in this process of segregating where people live by race. Lanie Guinier offers example after example of municipalities, counties and states manipulating the rules governing elections so as to make quite sure that black voters will never elect a black representative. Amy Goffman and  Michelle Alexander demonstrate how the criminal justice system is set up to catch and absorb young black men, often when they are barely in their teens.  But whites keep denying their complicity. What else do lawsuits over affirmative action say but "the second-class status of African-Americans is not my responsibility. I have nothing to do with that." 

But we should know better.

To confront that consistent denial, Coates asks for reparations. By that he does not primarily mean that someone, most likely the government, should pay money to African-Americans, or support them in buying houses, or help them get a college education, or in other ways distribute money to them they have not earned by working. Instead the demand for reparations is intended primarily as an opportunity for all Americans to reconsider the history of African-Americans on this continent from their first arrival in 1609 to today. Asking for reparations is asking for white people to consider seriously whether they are in fact as innocent as they claim to be of the second-rate status of African-Americans.

Next year, on 4 July, we could perhaps dedicate the day to considering seriously whether white people, who deny that the condition of African-Americans has anything to do with them, are speaking the truth or are not rather implicitly admitting their guilt by protesting their innocence too much.

It is high time that we reconsider what it means to be generally dedicated to equality and what we need to do if we are to take equality really seriously.

Reasonable concern about domestic security? Islamophobia?

The comment by a presidential candidate that he would not allow a Muslim to run for president, has raised an interesting controversy. Shall we say that this candidate has reasonable concerns about our domestic security and the maintenance of our Constitution and political system? Or shall we say that his statement was a clear example of  Islamophobia? Or, to speak plainly, a clear example of racism?

Those who agree with the presidential candidate point to what they see as the unwillingness of Muslims in the US to assimilate. Many Muslims maintain their native language, many Muslim women cover their heads, among Muslims gender roles are different from what they are in other parts of America.

But none of those differentiates Muslims in America from other groups. Most immigrants hold on to their native languages, sometimes because their English is not so good and sometimes because their language of origin is dear and beloved. Religious Jews will cover their heads but are not, for that reason, accused of unwillingness to assimilate. Women hailing from India often wear saris but no one thinks that politicians, whose families immigrated from India, are therefore not qualified for holding public office. Bobby Jindal, governor of Lousiana, is actually at the moment running for president.

Distrust of Muslims is also often justified by saying that they want to impose sharia law on everyone in the United States. But again, think of all the others groups, that we regard as good Americans, whose religion imposes on them specific rules that are quite different from those of mainstream America. Think, for instance, of the dietary laws followed by orthodox Jews. Think about the rules promulgated by the Catholic Church about families, divorce, reproduction, the role of women in the family.

Here we have two examples of reasons given to justify special treatment of Muslims. But these reasons would also demand that other religious groups such as Jews and Catholics should be excluded from being candidates for political office. But the same reasons are not used to exclude Jews and Catholics.

It is currently customary to call these prejudiced attitudes “Islamophobia.” That has a clean, clinical sound to it like “acrophobia” (fear of heights) or “agoraphobia” (fear of open spaces). Such fears may be irrational but should be treated more like a disease than a moral failure.

But it is clear that excluding Muslims from our democracy is not merely irrational, but is utterly reprehensible like any other example of racism.

             The Drug War Is a Drug

   
A fellow worker I met a social occasion recently told me about his childhood. His family regularly took in and cared for cousins whose family members were in jail. Why were they in jail? I asked. They were using or selling drugs.
   
I knew that his family had been poor. Was there a connection between drug use and poverty?
   
Many so-called experts believe that. There is the old narrative of the "culture of poverty," of families in which generations are poor, often addicted, and permanent wards of the state, dependent on what ever welfare and social service programs exist at the time. Poverty is a set of bad habits and disabilities which parents hand down to children and then to grandchildren.
   
In the background of the story always lingers the assumption that these poor people were or are persons of color.
   
There is a limited amount of truth to that in so far in the early years after World War II when hard drugs first became a problem in the United States, the majority of users were black ghetto inhabitants.
   
Today the majority of illegal drug users are white. A significant percentage of them are middle-class suburbanites. The common narrative about them is that they sustained a serious physical injury and their doctor prescribed large quantities of opioid painkillers. The patient is soon addicted but since the illegal painkillers are very expensive, and heroin cheaper, they end up injecting heroin, smoking, or snorting it.
   
The story about drug abuse as a disease of the black ghetto is false and most likely one element of the pervasive racist narratives circulating in white America.
   
But the government is actively perpetuating that myth. The war on drugs, fought primarily by police, is focusing on drug abuse that is visible. It is much harder to find people who get quietly high in their suburban home than to find the people who are "being a public nuisance" on the street or who are selling drugs openly. The war on drugs still focuses on poor neighborhoods, by no means only inhabited by African-Americans. ( My co-worker’s family is white). As far as the chiefs of staff of the war on drugs are concerned the battlefield is in the poorer parts of town. It calls for the biggest guns you have.
  
In recent years, efforts have begun to persuade doctors to prescribe opioid painkillers much more cautiously. Considerable pressure is being brought to bear on drug manufacturers to develop alternative pain medications that are not as seriously addictive as the painkillers the  drug companies are currently producing.
   
This is one approach to solving the growing crisis of drug abuse and with it of drug overdoses that by now are killing a significant number of Americans, most of them young.
   
Improving drug treatment, improving access to drug treatment is another approach.
   
But as far as the drug warriors are concerned descending an apartment in the ghetto with a SWAT team in their body armor and huge weapons is the only way. The violent war on drugs is it self addictive and our government agencies are hooked. They cannot conceive a world in which they cannot batter down doors, guns blazing and emerging with someone in handcuffs on his or her way to jail.
   
Being high feels good. That is why addiction is a threat. Being high feels good whether your addiction is chemical or ideological. As long as we perpetuate the myth that drug addiction is at home among the poor, we can blame them for their plight. By continuing the war on drugs in the ghetto the government is trying to demonstrate that it is not responsible for the suffering of the poor, that it is doing all it can to alleviate their pain. Pretending to be without guilt feels great.
  
But that is, of course, the delusion of an addict. We need a war-on-drugs-detox campaign.