People Are Right to Boycott the Oscars

Some Black artists have chosen to boycott the Oscars after the major award categories featured all-White nomination slates. It is not as though there was a deficit of great Black performances this year, and their exclusion from the awards stage is part of a broader decades-long pattern of discrimination. So the decision to boycott the event is entirely appropriate. But talk of a boycott is producing predictable hand-wringing and questions about the supposed threat to the integrity of the Oscars and of film artistry in general.

"What are the Oscars to do?
 Lower standards?
 Set an artificial quota for films featuring people of color?
 Are we to have affirmative action in movie awards now!!??
 Political correctness!!!!"

Implicit in these questions and complaints is the confident but completely unfounded belief that the Oscars reflect meritocratic achievement. The controversy brings into sharp focus the extent to which White success is coded in our society as earned and natural, even if there is little evidence to support these claims. It is hard to imagine that the people loudly insisting race has nothing to do with this would be so sanguine in a world where Oscar Voters were 94% Black. But here in our real world where they are 94% White, it is obviously inconsequential. By the way, there's nothing sinister or mysterious about this kind of discrimination. The notion that your identity will affect how you experience a film and identify with its characters is too obvious to be seriously denied. But this is, in effect, exactly what defenders of the Oscars do deny.

It is telling that so many people see a challenge to White dominance and Black exclusion as an attack on a meritocracy. Instead of appealing for inclusion of people of color using the language of individual achievement and hard-earned merit, we must expose how the fiction of meritocracy hides the reality of unearned White advantage.

Let's zoom out from movies and think about what we know of the broader structures of opportunity in American society: we know that Whites have race-based unearned advantages in getting jobs and promotions and benefit from network effects. We know that people of color, particularly African Americans, are widely discriminated against in the job market. We also know that discrimination and inequality in education, health, policing, and housing leave many young people of color less prepared for the job market in the first place. We know that these dynamics of unearned advantage and discrimination overwhelm the effects of affirmative action policies. Thus we know that, in the aggregate, successful White individuals are more likely to owe their success to their racial identities than are successful Black individuals. We know this. There's nothing mysterious about it. If we allow ourselves to linger on this point, we will see how dramatically the meritocratic screen distorts our perceptions.

Think about it: though successful Whites are the most likely to experience unearned advantaged based on race, their achievements are most associated with merit, hard work, and earned success. In contrast, achievements of people of color are associated with affirmative action and political correctness. The point is not that people of color never benefit from affirmative action; it is that whites continue to gain far more from our racialized society even as their success is coded as raceless. The idea of meritocracy is deployed in defense of the very group that least exemplifies it.

To be clear, I think it is uncharitable to view any person's success in cynical terms of earned or unearned. On an individual level, few people find great success without putting in a lot of hard work. But the suspicion that attaches itself to Black success ("he's only there because of affirmative action"), would, if applied with any consistency, render White success even more suspicious.

Christian Hope In A World of Injustice

In Minneapolis, protests continue over the police killing of Jamar Clark, an unarmed Black man police claim scuffled with officers but some witnesses claim was handcuffed when shot.

In Cleveland, citizens await the near-certain exoneration of Officer Timothy Loehmann, the murderer of Tamir Rice. Having upheld the principle that police officers are entitled to different grand jury proceedings than ordinary citizens, prosecutor Timothy McGinty's sympathies are clear.

In Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, the officer who killed Corey Jones after Jones' car broke down on the highway has been fired. His arrest is far from assured.

In Wilmington, Delaware, there are still few answers for why police shot and killed Jeremy McDole, a wheelchair-bound man in clear distress. The video looks damning. It is not known whether a serious investigation is being conducted.

In Chicago, people are on edge as they prepare for today's release of the video of the shooting of seventeen-year old boy Laquan McDonald. Officer Jesse Van Dyke shot him sixteen times. The city paid out a five million dollar settlement as part of its efforts to keep the video under wraps. Now a judge has ordered the city to release the video. In a remarkable "coincidence", Van Dyke will reportedly be charged with first degree murder today.

I'll stop there.

What are we supposed to do with this information? I'm not sure.

I've been thinking about the popular American notion of "the rule of law." We've all heard this. America is a nation of laws, we're told. We're governed not by the whims of people but by the dictates of law. This ideal is important, and it has made a material difference in the lives of millions of Americans. It has given us a standard to which we can appeal. It is also, in a more basic sense, an obvious fiction. From the founding of the country on stolen land and labor to Prosecutor McGinty's depraved behavior, we've operated by the dictates of cold and cruel power.

And it's worse than that. For injustice often comes not through flouting the law, but enforcing it. What are we to do when the law is not designed to do justice?  Prosecutor McGinty is not doing anything illegal. Nor did officer Loehmann when he shot Tamir, our legal system will soon declare. What are Black Americans to do when the law has never, and does not now, contain the protections necessary for full citizenship in a racist society?

One of the oddest characteristics of much American Christianity is that we don't think of our country as a place where oppression occurs in any serious way. We read in the Bible about oppression and injustice but we don't make the obvious connection. This is in part because so many American Christians are nationalists at heart. Nationalism is not a Christian value, but many have made it an integral part of their faith, bolstered by the false and offensive myth that this country is or ever was a Christian nation. Our failure to apply Christian notions of oppression to an American context also has a lot to do with our Whiteness. But many Christians are so invested in it they don't even know it's important to them. They just think it's "Christianity."

I've been thinking a lot about Tamir. We already know how this is going to go. The grand jury will decline to recommend charges. If by some miracle they do favor a lesser charge, he will not be convicted at trial. This is not fatalism. Remember, America is a place of oppression. I've been wondering what Tamir might have been thinking as he bled out on the ground. Did he wonder why no one was helping him? Was he conscious of his sister's screams as the officers tackled and handcuffed her? Was he hoping he would see his mom again?

And I've been thinking a lot about my childhood. To put it more precisely, I've been thinking not only about Tamir's murder, but about the likelihood that it was always going to be him and not me.

Tamir had a toy gun. The orange tip was off. From a distance, it looked real. I've been thinking about the toy gun my brother had. It shot little plastic BBs. It didn't have an orange tip in the first place. It was all black. Sleek. Looked like the real thing.

Tamir seemed to point his toy gun at some passersby.  I've been thinking about all the times my brothers and I must have pointed that gun at each other even though we were told not to. It was so cool. Looked so real. It was a fun game to play.

A man called the police about Tamir, but noted that the gun was probably fake. Tamir was in a public park across the street from his house. It was his front yard. I've been thinking about all the crazy stuff we did in our "public park," our expansive yard in rural Western Maryland. There was no one there to see us. No one called 911.

It's not hard to understand why Tamir, a Black boy, played with his toy gun in a public park in a decaying rust belt city with an oppressive police force while I, a White boy, played with mine in a bucolic rural setting where police were unknown. But people don't want to understand.

I know many people will seek to justify Tamir's murder, or at least soften the blow by noting, like the experts' reports, that the shooting was "lawful." As if what is legal has a good track record in American history. For Christians, such reasoning is an abdication of our responsibility. This is another oddity of American Christianity: many of us think we can have conventional White American opinions about racial issues and be faithful to Christ at the same time. We're deluding ourselves.

I've also been thinking back to the day a jury acquitted George Zimmerman. I remember how people defended him. Some of us, a little less entranced by racist tropes and pro-gun mania, had always regarded Zimmerman's poor character with relative certainty, a judgment that has been borne out in his subsequent behavior. Though I had not expected a conviction, the weight of the acquittal hit me with unexpected force. And I remember it very well, because I had what I guess I would describe as a nearly mystical experience. I did not feel self-righteous, looking down my nose in anger at the jury members or the people defending Zimmerman. I just felt an incredible sense of grief, a grief that encompassed not only everything outside me but everything within me as well. In other words, I lamented my own injustice. Yet at the same time, I felt a bizarre sense of closeness to God, as though the sadness I felt was a taste of what he feels in every moment. It was as though God himself pulled up a chair and said, "Here, Jesse, let me show you something."

I know this all sounds incredibly odd to those of you who have different beliefs. But there it is. And it brings me to what I suppose is my final point: Christian hope. What are we to do with the injustices above? One popular answer, masquerading as the Christian answer, is to emphasize the positive. Keep a good attitude! Stay positive! Look at that police officer hugging that cute child! That's often little more than an attempt to change the subject. Christian hope is something else. It allows us to face injustice without looking away. It allows us to fight it without despairing. And it allows us, as I knew for at least one night in my life, to stand against injustice without believing we're really any better than the evil we face.

There's a psalm that says, "I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." That's not an opiate. That's strength to stay in the fight. Because we will see his goodness one day. American lawlessness will not have the last word. No American court will give the last word on the value of Tamir's life. 

Christian hope is the understanding that there is a place for the wrath of God, however archaic that concept sounds in our culture. We can fight injustice without giving in to vengeance and violence because we know that God will repay. I know this sounds naive to many who have different beliefs, and even to many Christians it is just an abstraction. But ask some Black Christians about it. They tend to know more than we do about Christian hope. 

The 59th chapter of Isaiah's prophecy presents an image of Yahweh as a warrior-God preparing for battle against injustice. I've shared it many times in the past few years, but it's worth sharing again.

The Lord looked and was displeased
    that there was no justice.
He saw that there was no one,
    he was appalled that there was no one to intervene;
so his own arm achieved salvation for him,
    and his own righteousness sustained him.
He put on righteousness as his breastplate,
    and the helmet of salvation on his head;
he put on the garments of vengeance
    and wrapped himself in zeal as in a cloak.
According to what they have done,
    so will he repay
wrath to his enemies
    and retribution to his foes;
    he will repay the islands their due.
From the west, people will fear the name of the Lord,
    and from the rising of the sun, they will revere his glory.
For he will come like a pent-up flood
    that the breath of the Lord drives along.

Why You and I Are More Dangerous Than Cliven Bundy

(If you're not familiar with Cliven Bundy, a Google search will quickly give you the back-story.)

As political theater, the spectacular implosion of erstwhile conservative darling and welfare rancher Cliven Bundy was exquisite. But it is important to understand the limitations--indeed, the dangers--of using instances of outrageous racism as cheap entertainment. It is notable that Bundy's words immediately rendered him a toxic laughingstock. He surely remembers a time when this was not the case. Words that used to be deployed to gain power over others now only weaken their author. This is a real achievement, and it ought not be overlooked. But the strength of this taboo--don't say racist stuff--is enforced by giving it an outsized importance. Simply put, the taboo against acting racist is much stronger than the taboo against being racist. And it is the latter that has the greatest effects on the lives of real people.

Let's think about what Bundy represents to liberals and conservatives, and then explore why the media spectacle is so problematic.

The appeal of the Bundy implosion for liberals is obvious enough. He seems to represent the very id of a certain sort of right-wing conservative, and delivers the standard critique of the welfare state in its most concentrated and unvarnished form. The fact is, most conservatives do believe the Great Society and its descendents have wrecked the black family, even if this belief doesn't lead them to embrace Bundy's absurdities about slavery. The chance to tie mainstream conservatives to a blatant racist is too good for liberals to pass up. And, after all, conservatives embraced Bundy aggressively and of their own volition. As political games go, it hasn't been unfair for liberals to have a little fun about it as conservatives disavow their former hero.

It is less understood that Bundy would, were it not for the now embarrassed embrace of many mainstream conservatives, serve as a perfect embodiment of what conservatives believe racism in the United States looks like. He's old. He's eccentric. He even said "Negro" just like Harry Reid. And if Harry Reid said it...

By attempting to tie Republican politicians to the outlandish racism of an elderly rancher, liberals win a tactical victory but unwittingly play into the larger conservative narrative about what racism is in the modern United States. Rather than a set of deeply embedded and largely impersonal social and economic forces, racism becomes the product a few isolated and backward individuals. After all, we rarely seem to see racism, do we? If racism is as rampant as people like me say it is, then why do the irrelevant ramblings of an old man become a cause celebre? That's the best we've got? If Cliven Bundy is in any sense important, then racism really is essentially gone.

But of course it's not gone. The racism that permeates our lives and devastates so many Americans is too amorphous to fit in a sexy news story. When another minority student embarks on an inferior primary school education, it's not news; it's just the way things are. When a black couple with excellent credit gets turned down for a housing loan, they can't even know for sure they've been discriminated against. It only emerges years later when you glance over an obscure headline at the bottom of the business page saying that Bank ABC paid out 100 million dollars in a discrimination settlement. When the HR professional glances past that resume with the foreign-sounding name, she makes a split-second decision without becoming aware of her unconscious bias. When black children grow up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty at 20-30x the rate of white children, it is a fact too astonishing and diffused to be reported on the evening news. These and other issues are clearly revealed in rarely-read academic books and journals and depressing newspaper pieces that no one wants to wade through. It's a lot easier to talk about Cliven Bundy.

The fact is, I am dramatically more invested in securing the best for my own children than I am for the children of others. This is only natural. But when the incumbent power brokers and holders of wealth are overwhelmingly white, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out what this only natural behavior accomplishes on a collective scale. It is easy to talk about trying to expand opportunity, but it is more than a semantic quibble to point out that expanding opportunity necessarily involves redistributing opportunity. There are a finite number of selective enrollment high schools, elite college openings, graduate fellowships, CEO's, and senators. In a society in which the wealthy and white possess pervasive unearned privileges, expanding opportunity for others implies trade-offs that we're reluctant to admit.

We must move away from obsessing over the racist things people say, and call ourselves to account for the actions we take. Cliven Bundy is suddenly beyond the pale by virtue of his words, but I can purposely take advantage of my white skin by securing for myself and my family a good neighborhood and good schools, and yet I remain fully respectable. We must move past the day when we who have done little or nothing to try to tear down our privileges are granted the presumption of innocence. The majority of white Americans are invested in racism. And if we're going to give it up, we want a pay-out, thank you very much.

You see this in our politics if you look closely enough. The apparently large divide between the two major parties on the national level is in some respects superficial. On the local level, there is a deep and abiding bipartisan consensus in favor of a politics that favors the wealthy and white over the poor and brown. It goes without saying that conservatism opposes efforts to achieve racial equality. But show me the wealthy liberal community that voluntarily rezoned to allow low-income housing into the neighborhood. Show me the wealthy liberal community that voluntarily redrew school district lines so it could share its resources with a poorer neighboring community. Liberalism in the United States is not just hypocritical; it is itself a defender of racial inequality.

If Americans in any broad and tangible way valued racial justice these ideas would be common-sense. Back here in the real world, they sound hopelessly utopian.

It's easy enough to see why these things don't happen. It's because of people like you and me. We just want the best for our kids. We've worked hard for what we have. These feelings are as natural as they are anti-Christian. And for me, as a Christian, the real scandal is not that we find it hard to live up to our faith. It is that we often embrace a false faith that baptizes our selfishness and encourages us to indulge in our privilege.

The Best Reactions to the Verdict

There has been some really superb writing on the Zimmerman verdict in the last 24 hours. I thought Ta-Nehisi Coates' first post after the verdict was detached-- right on its merits, but surely not all he was thinking and feeling. He came back with a second post early yesterday morning that deserves to be read in full far and wide. Read it here. A sampling of his tour de force:

We have spent much of this year outlining the ways in which American policy has placed black people outside of the law. We are now being told that after having pursued such policies for 200 years...there are no ill effects, that we are pure, that we are just, that we are clean. Our sense of self is incredible. We believe ourselves to have inherited all of Jefferson's love of freedom, but none of his affection for white supremacy. 

That last line is an incredibly brilliant distillation of the issue. Meanwhile Jamelle Bouie destroyed the popular complaint about "black on black" crime:

The idea that “black-on-black” crime is the real story in Martin’s killing isn’t a novel one...But there’s a huge problem with attempt to shift the conversation: There’s no such thing as “black-on-black” crime. Yes, from 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of black victims were killed by black offenders, but that racial exclusivity was also true for white victims of violent crime—86 percent were killed by white offenders. Indeed, for the large majority of crimes, you’ll find that victims and offenders share a racial identity, or have some prior relationship to each other. 

[That's because crime is] driven by opportunism and proximity; If African-Americans are more likely to be robbed, or injured, or killed by other African-Americans, it’s because they tend to live in the same neighborhoods as each other. Residential statistics bear this out (PDF); blacks are still more likely to live near each other or other minority groups than they are to whites. And of course, the reverse holds as well—whites are much more likely to live near other whites than they are to minorities and African-Americans in particular.

Elsewhere, Bouie questioned whether justice in a larger sense is even possible in the country we have now:

There’s a reason George Zimmerman felt confident enough to confront Trayvon Martin and tell police that he feared for his life. In the America we’ve constructed, blacks are like the minions in a bad action movie. They’re both disposable and dangerous. 

If this sounds hyperbolic, the consider the following. In the United States, implicit association tests find that white participants are more likely to register a threatening affect when presented with black faces. Likewise, a wide range of surveys find widespread anti-black prejudice. All white juries are more likely to convict black defendants, than white ones, and in states with “Stand Your Ground” laws, white defendants are more likely to find acquittal when the victims are black. African Americans are arrested and convicted for drug crimes at far greater rates than their white counterparts—despite lower rates of drug use—and blacks are more likely to have encounters with law enforcement, due to patterns of policing (see: stop and frisk in New York City). More than a third of all people affected by felony disenfranchisement laws are black. 

If you can look at all of this and conclude that the system doesn’t have an embedded bias against blacks, I don’t know what to say. Because what’s clear to me is that, for all the real progress we’ve made, this country has yet to relinquish its long-standing hostility to blackness.

Finally, Eugene Robinson offers a devastating critique of the "ho-hum" approach of the local authorities and its implications:

The assumption underlying their ho-hum approach to the case was that Zimmerman had the right to self-defense but Martin -- young, male, black -- did not. The assumption was that Zimmerman would fear for his life in a hand-to-hand struggle but Martin -- young, male, black -- would not. 

If anyone wonders why African-Americans feel so passionately about this case, it's because we know that our 17-year-old sons are boys, not men. It's because we know their adolescent bravura is just that -- an imitation of manhood, not the real thing. We know how frightened our sons would be, walking home alone on a rainy night and realizing they were being followed. We know how torn they would be between a child's fear and a child's immature idea of manly behavior. We know how they would struggle to decide the right course of action, flight or fight.

And we know that a skinny boy armed only with candy, no matter how big and bad he tries to seem, does not pose a mortal threat to a healthy adult man who outweighs him by 50 pounds and has had martial arts training (even if the lessons were mostly a waste of money). We know that the boy may well have threatened the man's pride, but likely not his life. How many murders-by-sidewalk have you heard of recently? Or ever?

The conversation we need to have is about how black men, even black boys, are denied the right to be young, to be vulnerable, to make mistakes. We need to talk about why, for example, black men are no more likely than white men to smoke marijuana but nearly four times as likely to be arrested for it -- and condemned to a dead-end cycle of incarceration and unemployment. I call this racism. What do you call it?

Racist Justice System Becoming a Topic for Mainstream Discussion

It's encouraging to see Newsweek's investment in a long and deeply reported piece on how our society treats black men. It's worth your time. It is appropriately passionate and hopeful in its tone. This is a good example of why affirmative action is right. Read about the pervasiveness of these injustices against black men set in their historical context, and then try to tell me that affirmative action is some kind of great wrong against whites. It is absurd, and that's why campaigning against it is so offensive. It's not that you have to agree with it. It's just that if you're going to try to make something better, why not try to work on something that is actually causing human suffering?

So I should make clear, after my strongly worded post below, that I don't mind at all when people take a long look at it and say, "No, I don't support affirmative action. Here's what I think we should do..." That really doesn't bother me. The problem is that affirmative action is viscerally upsetting to many whites. That is nearly always proof positive of their racism. You don't get upset about something like affirmative action unless you devalue black life. You just don't. These are people who can't be bothered about our mass incarceration policies, but giving a black kid a leg up is offensive to them.

The author quotes Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has a way of getting to the root of things:

“If there’s one thing that’s missing in our country, it’s an acknowledgment of the broad humanity of black folks. Racism—and anti-black racism in particular—is the belief that there’s something wrong with black people … and I mean something in our bones.” He continued, “In our own community, we’ve internalized this. We wonder if we lack moral courage.”

“I want the country to understand that there’s nothing wrong with us,” Coates says, with urgency in his voice. “Things have happened in this country, but there’s nothing wrong with us. My job is to help close the gap between what they see in us and who we actually are.”

Why Affirmative Action is Morally Right

[While writing this post the Supreme Court released its ruling on the case. It looks as though they did a narrow ruling that dodged most of the issues involved. A much better outcome than what I feared.]

For some background on the Supreme Court's likely ruling on affirmative action this week, I encourage you to read Propublica's insightful reporting. The plaintiff at the center of the case, Abigail Fisher, has alleged that she was denied admission to the University of Texas because she is white:

"There were people in my class with lower grades who weren't in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skin," she says. "I was taught from the time I was a little girl that any kind of discrimination was wrong. And for an institution of higher learning to act this way makes no sense to me. What kind of example does it set for others?"
It's a deeply emotional argument delivered by an earnest young woman, one that's been quoted over and over again.
Except there's a problem. The claim that race cost Fisher her spot at the University of Texas isn't really true.
In the hundreds of pages of legal filings, Fisher's lawyers spend almost no time arguing that Fisher would have gotten into the university but for her race.
If you're confused, it is no doubt in part because of how Blum, Fisher and others have shaped the dialogue as the case worked its way to the country's top court.
Journalists and bloggers have written dozens of articles on the case, including profiles of Fisher and Blum. News networks have aired panel after panel about the future of affirmative action. Yet for all the front-page attention, angry debate and exchanges before the justices, some of the more fundamental elements of the case have been little reported.
Race probably had nothing to do with the University of Texas's decision to deny admission to Abigail Fisher. 

But let's go deeper. What if it it had? Would that be a problem? Doesn't the entire premise of affirmative action imply that, even if Abigail Fisher in this specific incident is incorrect in her allegation, there will inevitably be many Abigail Fisher's? Are we okay with that? Many Americans, especially whites, are not. Perhaps you oppose affirmative action too.

I would like to convince you that you're wrong.

Your view of affirmative action is heavily influenced by your understanding of what American society is like. As soon as you acknowledge the exhaustively documented extent of inequality and discrimination that favors whites and disadvantages minorities, affirmative action looks fairly reasonable even if you disagree with it. If you're in denial about the way our society systemically privileges white skins, there's little left to argue about. You need something like a spiritual conversion.

Twenty years ago Cheryl Harris wrote a classic article in the Harvard Law Review called "Whiteness as Property." She argued that whiteness itself has taken on the characteristics of property and many whites and social and governmental systems unconsciously expect privileges to accrue to them because of their whiteness.

In questions of affirmative action, the baseline is thereby distorted beyond any reasonable standard of justice. When considering whether affirmative action cost them a specific job, whites claim to ask, "Would I have got the job if race was not a factor?" In asking this question, they elide the fact that the society of which they are a part is discriminatory and unequal in ways that favor them. Had they been born with a different skin color they would have been statistically less likely to have the opportunity to apply for the job in the first place. Having arrived at the specific circumstance of the job or college application on the strength of an uneven playing field, they now insist that the playing field be equal. In this way they enshrine their white privilege as normative.

It is a bit mind-numbing if you've never thought about it this way before, and probably more so due to the inadequacies of my explanation. But this gets at the deeper changes the lawyers working on Fisher's behalf are trying to bring about:

So while the Fisher case has been billed as a referendum on affirmative action, its backers have significantly grander ambitions: They seek to make the case a referendum on the 14th Amendment itself. At issue is whether the Constitution's equal protection clause, drafted by Congress during Reconstruction to ensure the rights of black Americans, also prohibits the use of race to help them overcome the nation's legacy of racism.

The Supreme Court has never ruled that the Constitution bars any and all laws and government programs that consider race. But Blum and his supporters, seeing an opening with the current Court, seek to overturn more than a century of precedent.

The true crux of the suit is not Fisher's failed application, but that government officials violate the constitutional rights of white Americans when they consider race in a way that might help African-Americans and Latinos.

"An argument can be made that it is simply impossible to tease out down to the last student who would have been admitted, and who would have not been admitted, had they been a different skin color," Blum said. "What we know is skin color is weighed and ethnicity is weighed by the University of Texas in their admissions process, and that alone is enough to strike down the plan."

Blum and his supporters say the reasoning is simple. The Constitution is colorblind and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment prohibits the government from treating people differently because of race. 

It is difficult to immerse myself in the strategies and rhetoric of segregationists defending Jim Crow, and then when I come up for a breather I find their spiritual descendants are respectable figures arguing cases before the Supreme Court. I have a rather unlimited degree of contempt for Mr. Blum and his ilk. They're using the same old playbook. As soon as the Supreme Court essentially told whites they weren't allowed to officially write white supremacy in law, whites turned around and said, "oh okay, well you know, the constitution is colorblind. We can't acknowledge race in government policy." The motivation is clear. In a society that is systemically discriminatory against blacks, a strictly neutral government validates such racial inequality as a baseline status quo. The culture acts affirmatively against blacks, while conservatives seek to prevent the government and other socially responsible institutions from stepping in to act affirmatively in blacks' favor.

Take a step back and realize that there are respectable people in the United States today who are fighting for the rights and privileges of white people, as such, even if they do not admit it in precisely those words. As a Christian who believes in the words of Jesus and the reality of a final judgment, that is a truly scary place for a person to be in. At the end of our lives when we tell Jesus what we were all about, I don't think fighting on behalf of the most privileged group in our society will have done us any favors.

Equality, Rights, Privileges

Ta-Nehisi Coates continues his critique of President Obama's way of speaking to black audiences:

I would argue that the current black predicament did not arise because black people lacked sufficient moral will. I would argue that we recognize this in other communities and their own predicaments. It would not be productive for the president to go before a white working-class Appalachian audience and say, "We know that economic unfairness exists, and has long existed, but government programs won't keep your kids off meth and painkillers." The fact that meth and painkiller addiction is higher in those communities, that one in ten kids born in Appalachia was born addicted to drugs, would not be seen as relevant to, say, a jobs program.

Nor would it be productive or wise for the president to go before a primarily Hispanic audience and say "We know that the DREAM Act is the right thing to do, but what you really need to do is keep your babies from having more babies." The fact that the Hispanic community has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country would not be seen as relevant to, say, immigration reform.

And it would not be productive or wise for the president to go before an audience of Native Americans and say, "Yes, this country stole your land and prosecuted a ruthless war against you, but what would really help now is if you stopped your kids from drinking so much." The high rate of alcoholism among Native Americans would not be seen as relevant. And as I've said, it would not be wise for the president to go to Newtown and point to the absence of active fatherhood in the life of Adam Lanza.

But for some reason all of these kinds of statements are appropriate in the black community. Not because of higher rates of anything, and it not even because the president is black. They're seen as appropriate because there a deep belief -- even among black people -- that morality lies at the seat of our troubles...

I can (and have) marshaled numerous statistics to show that morality is not the real issue here, but the trouble is that statistics are subject to varying interpretations. Whether you believe the problems of black Americans are rooted primarily within or without, in black culture or in external discrimination, is less a question of evidence than of a priori assumptions.

Part of examining those basic assumptions involves stepping back, as Coates does here, and asking why this discussion so often seems particular to black people. All groups have unique problems, but in the case of African Americans there is a tendency to say that external conditions reveal the essential nature of a supposed black "morality" or "culture."

One of the reasons I'm so skeptical of these moralizing and cultural arguments is that the pattern we see across civilizations and throughout time is of dominant social groups attributing the behavior of disadvantaged groups to their essential nature. Thus Aristotle looked at slaves and instead of concluding that their degradation resulted from being enslaved, he got it backwards and said that some people are natural slaves. Thus the English poor of the 17th century were not desperate landless peasants amid rising demographic pressures and unjust economic systems, they were natural thieves.

The American context ought to make this all the more clear. For most of our history, to put it in blunt and simple terms, the white elite has been carrying on this conversation around the question, "What is wrong with black people?" The basic contours of the answer to that query have remained remarkably stable, because the question mostly answers itself. To ask it is to implicitly absolve the dominant society of any wrongdoing or responsibility.

During the height of slavery, the question was answered with the assumption that blacks were biologically inferior. By the middle of the twentieth century, even among many segregationists this scientific racism shaded into arguments that were more cultural and civilizational. Someone like John Stennis might be agnostic on the question of biological inferiority, while claiming that black culture was degraded.

This is part of the reason why the civil rights laws were so offensive to many whites. Civil rights inscribed equality in law that, in the view of segregationists, had not been earned. Black civilization was not equal, they said, and to treat it as such invited harm to white civilization. By relentlessly focusing on the state of black behavior, whites obscured their complicity in the creation of an oppressed class.

Much of segregationist rhetoric took on an Orwellian double-speak character because it started from these presuppositions of black cultural inferiority. Many whites could say with a straight face that blacks were not being discriminated against when their schools were funded at a fourth of white funding levels, because they were being provided with education adequate to their level of cultural development. Equal treatment is wasted on groups that are not equal. This was the segregationist mind, but it also bleeds into the broader white American mindset both then and now.

By merely asking what is wrong with black people, we play into a narrative that elides what is wrong with America. This is a country in which black people have had to earn what whites possess as a right. And when they do set out to claim those rights, they're seen as seeking after special privileges. As TNC sums it up:

The neighborhoods where black people shoot at each other are the work of racist social engineering. We know this. But we do not say it, because there is almost no political upside. Instead we hand-wave at racism and pretend that individual black morality might overcome many centuries of wrong.

Racism is a Normal Feature of American Life. Right Now. In 2013.

The ACLU came out with a study on Monday showing the huge nationwide racial disparity in marijuana arrests. It was duly reported on in the media yesterday and will quickly be forgotten. I'm not going to rehash the contents of the study, so if you're unfamiliar with these disparities check out the report or Wonkblog's helpful summary. The key point to keep in mind is that there are not significant differences in marijuana use across racial groups.

The depressing predictability and regularity of these studies raise a few larger points.

1) We live in a society that is basically unfair in ways that completely contradict everything we claim to stand for. These are not problems as defined by radical liberals. These are basic moral and constitutional violations that ought to unite people across the political spectrum in outrage. Because black people bear the brunt of it, indifference is the more common reaction.

2) As Michelle Alexander has shown in The New Jim Crow, the Supreme Court has effectively institutionalized racial discrimination in law. Racial profiling is legal, and many police forces are racist in their practices (in the sense that they apply the law and their policing power in disparate ways based on race rather than solely on concrete factors like crime rates).

3) The purveyors of these racist practices are bipartisan, and not necessarily white. From reactionary bigots like Sherriff Joe Arpaio, to big city Democratic mayors like Rahm Emmanuel, racist policing is either actively encouraged, or silently accepted. The prime example is New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose paternalistic liberalism finds no fault with invading the privacy of citizens in systematically racist ways.

4) Yet our political culture does not allow these facts to be plainly stated. At the national level, both parties pretend that America is a place where everybody gets a fair shot. On the Republican side, any politician who dares to admit that minorities are discriminated against because of their race immediately dooms their chances for higher office. And really, it's not that much different for Democrats. Barack Obama has spent more time telling black Americans to turn off the TV and pull their pants up than he has acknowledging the systemic discrimination they face. There is grassroots activism in the Democratic Party on the left, but if you want to be a big-time national politician you don't make a big deal out of it. You might vaguely allude to ongoing problems, but you certainly don't call out America's racism or propose any specific means of dealing with it.

5) At the state level, the trend is clearly toward less punitive drug laws. This is positive in that as it reduces the overall severity of punishment those who have been the target will feel some relief. But it doesn't directly address the core problem of racial discrimination. Without proactive action, a less punitive drug war will reduce the absolute number arrests, but will do nothing about the underlying disparity. Unfortunately, there is little evidence the trend toward leniency is driven by an acknowledgment of racism. It rather seems to be fueled by the growing acceptance of marijuana among middle class whites.

6) I'm not sure history will look kindly on Barack Obama's cowardice on racism. I am sure he is aware of the issues involved. But he has done nothing to bring these matters to the nation's attention. I know what the political scientists tell us, that by mentioning the issue he immediately polarizes it. But we're talking about something the right-wing could hardly be more retrograde and polarized on already. What's the harm in mentioning it?

The Purposes of Forgetting

Quick! Name a segregationist from the civil rights era.

Anybody come to mind?

Don't feel bad if you couldn't think of one. This is a social critique, not an individual criticism. Now, let's say you did name one. Was it Bull Connor? George Wallace? Strom Thurmond? Ross Barnett? I imagine those names pretty much cover it, if you came up with a name.

Now here's the dirty little secret. None of those guys, with the possible exception of Wallace, were particularly good at defending segregation. Most of them proved to be useful foils, and had they never existed the battle for white supremacy would have played out in much the same way. But to the extent we remember any segregationists, we like to remember those who were incompetent, or buffoonish, or violent, or some combination of the three. Why is that?

As I hinted at in my review of Sweet Land of Liberty, our remembrance and forgetfulness of the civil rights movement carries a purpose of its own. That purpose is to congratulate ourselves on how far we've come. Are our schools as segregated as they were 40 years ago? "Doesn't matter; tell us about Birmingham again." Are isolated enclaves of poverty just as cut off from hope and opportunity as they were? "It's okay, remind us of Selma." Has the wealth gap grown larger? "Don't worry, just tell us again about dogs and fire hoses and freedom riders and the man standing in the schoolhouse door. Then we'll know how far we've come."

We remember the dumb segregationists because we want to believe they were the problem. We don't want to know that defeating them, by itself, solved almost nothing. We don't remember the white racists who were actually good at defending their interests. Men like Richard Russell in the senate, Mayor Daley in Chicago or, for that matter, our presidents. More than that, we don't want to know that the problem went beyond the capacity of individual heart change to fix.

By the middle of the twentieth century, injustice based on race was built into the fabric of our neighborhoods, our economy, and our government. Built. Pretending that it could be uprooted by a change of heart and newfound intention to be nice is like assuming a skyscraper will disappear because we regret building it.

Unfortunately, there is little evidence that a majority of white Americans have ever actually cared about doing the work of unbuilding what they had built. We made it through the entire civil rights era without this basic selfishness being challenged. That is why we remember the beatings on the bridge at Selma, and the bombing of a church in Birmingham, and it's why those events galvanized public opinion at the time. The majority of white Americans did not care, and by all appearances still do not, about the quiet, fundamentally unequal share of opportunity that slowly strangled black Americans and silently killed them by the thousands.

A dramatic beating, a bomb. Why, there is something to get upset about! On the other hand, the fact that because of your skin color you have less housing options, poorer education, less fairness from police, less money, less life expectancy, less, less, less -- well, that's just the way things are and haven't you heard it has nothing to do with race?

Because of the indifference of whites, civil rights activists were forced to build their movement on showcase events -- the beatings and mass jailings. But that was a thin reed to build a just society on. It's why the movement faltered every time it encountered smart white authorities who avoided public outrages while quietly protecting the life-killing privileges their white constituents demanded.

I've come to realize that we're still doing the same thing. We're trying to get the majority of white Americans to care, and instead of unapologetically informing them about the basic justice of the cause and seeking to sensitize their social conscience, we are still going out on those thin reeds, seeking a showcase to dramatize an unequal America.

That was what Trayvon Martin was all about. I admit now that I was misguided on that, not because of the case itself but because of what I wanted to use it for. If people are not already outraged and morally stricken by the daily life experience of many of America's poor, a killing in murky circumstances is certainly not going to move them.

Book Review: Sweet Land of Liberty

Thomas Sugrue. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008.

For many Americans the civil rights movement remains a southern-rooted morality play providing reassuring testament to how far the nation has come. Thomas Sugrue argues that including the North in the story of the black freedom struggle upends this soothing narrative and fundamentally reshapes our understanding of both the movement and America’s present progress toward racial equality. Traditional histories that focus on the South in the 1950s and 1960s are, Sugrue says, “as much the product of forgetting as remembering." This is forgetfulness with a purpose, as simplistic tales of past victories produce complacency in the present. By broadening the geographic and temporal scope of civil rights history, Sugrue challenges this forgetfulness.

Sugrue employs a blend of topical and chronological approaches to show the importance of the North in the black freedom struggle. He begins his narrative in the 1920s and 1930s with chapters on topics ranging from the fight to desegregate public accommodations in the North to school integration, open housing, and fair employment efforts. Sugrue reveals a northern landscape of broad-based activism, much of it led by grassroots groups operating under the radar of the white press. It becomes clear that the North was anything but a sideshow. Indeed, while the South still appeared relatively tranquil the movement was already well underway in the North. Like other recent civil rights scholars such as Glenda Gilmore, Sugrue explores the radical roots of much of this protest. Activists achieved significant – if frequently symbolic – gains, as many northern states passed laws banning de jure segregation in the 1930s and 1940s.

Sugrue sees 1963 as a turning point. In that year alone, the justice department tallied 1,412 civil rights protests, the result of an unprecedented surge of activism driven by an increasingly militant and impatient grassroots. Yet Sugrue’s book differs in important respects from classic texts such as Taylor Branch’s epic trilogy. In Sugrue’s hands, the splintering of the civil rights movement and the rise of black power in the latter part of the 1960s is not a false turn or unprecedented change. Rather, it appears as an organic development that is markedly familiar, rising out of the wide-ranging radicalism of the interwar years. Here Sugrue’s difficult blending of topical and chronological approaches works well as he comes around to the same topics covered earlier – housing, schools, work – but explores the struggle over them in the different context of the 1960s and 1970s as everyone from radical nationalists to moderate integrationists drew on decades-old currents of protest.

Sweet Land of Liberty is as comprehensive an account of the civil rights struggle in the North as we are likely to have for quite some time. Sugrue deftly covers subjects as diverse as the violent uprisings of the urban North to issues of gender and the politics of welfare. Crucially, Sugrue carries his narrative through the 1990s. Though this final section of the book is less developed, it bolsters Sugrue’s thesis that examining the northern civil rights struggle forces a reappraisal of the movement and America’s present condition. He points out that in education, housing, employment, and wealth inequality, the conditions that produced the black freedom struggle remain astonishingly similar. Seen from the North and in the broad sweep of the twentieth century, it becomes clear that the civil rights movement ended not merely because it achieved its goals, but because it was defeated.

Good People, Racist Country

TNC's guest editorial in the New York Times yesterday covered well-trod ideas but it is worth revisiting them. Riffing off a recent indignity the black actor Forest Whitaker suffered at a deli in TNC's neighborhood, he challenges us to think about "The good, racist people."

In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: “As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.” 

A half-century later little had changed. The comedian Michael Richards (Kramer on “Seinfeld”) once yelled at a black heckler from the stage: “He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger! He’s a nigger!” Confronted about this, Richards apologized and then said, “I’m not a racist,” and called the claim “insane.” 

The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.  

But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such.

Coates is challenging here not only the notion that good people cannot be racists, but the very meaning of American society. It reminds me of the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal who came to the United States at the behest of the Carnegie Corporation to study the "Negro problem." (Around the same time, the black author Richard Wright was asked what could be done about the "Negro problem." He informed the interviewer that there was no Negro problem, only a white racism problem. Seventy years later, many whites still don't get that, even if we don't call it the Negro problem anymore). The result of Myrdal's study was the classic and extremely influential book, An American Dilemma, published in 1944.

The point is, though Myrdal was anti-racist in his orientation, he accepted many common frames of the time and was extravagant in his praise of American ideals. He argued that all Americans shared a belief in an American Creed defined by freedom, equality, justice and opportunity, and that any deviations from this creed were tragic exceptions rather than contested expressions of American identity. When you actually look at the history of the United States, this optimistic take becomes extremely dubious. And that's part of what Coates is getting at: racism lives in "the heart of a democratic society," but Myrdal wanted to believe, and we do as well, that it merely lives in "the heart of particularly evil individuals."

The line that we trace from the Declaration of Independence to the Emancipation Proclamation to the civil rights movement is useful, and was used by people at those times to advance justice, but it is only one expression of contested American identities. The line from Jefferson and Madison to Calhoun and colonization and Plessy and modern colorblind conservatism is just as true an expression of America's real identity, and it's one in which black people are excluded.

TNC followed up his column with a brilliant summary of the stakes involved:

If we accept that racism is a creation, then we must then accept that it can be destroyed. And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by policy.  

That is hard to take. If Forrest Whitaker sticks out in that deli for reasons of individual mortal sin, we can castigate the guy who frisked him and move on. But if he -- and others like him -- stick out for reasons of policy, for decisions that we, as a state, have made, then we have a problem. Then we have to do something beyond being nice to each other.

This is the crux of my grief. Basically, if you don't think the United States is a racist country in some fundamental way -- or if you think that to the extent racism lingers your job is to be nice to people -- then in my view you don't actually care about racism.

Book Review: Slow Fade to Black

Thomas Cripps. Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

The American film industry offered little relief for African Americans amid an oppressive society in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet Thomas Cripps argues that African Americans subtly swayed American film during this period and gradually gained influence despite their marginalization. He traces the work of African Americans from the earliest moving pictures to the 1942 agreement between studio heads and the NAACP in which the major studios promised to enhance the roles of African Americans and diminish the use of old stereotypes. Though much more remained to be done, Cripps contends that this achievement was the culmination of a period in which a casually racist Hollywood was increasingly unable to ignore the demands of black audiences and black performers.

Cripps begins his narrative in the earliest days of filmmaking, a time that was more favorable for African Americans than subsequent decades. In their primitive state without editing technology, early films sometimes allowed the humanity of black Americans to come through, perhaps in spite of directorial intentions. As filmmaking became more sophisticated, white-owned studios asserted more control, consigning blacks to stereotyped roles informed by the southern literary tradition. By 1915 D.W. Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation decisively asserted the worst racist tropes of white Americans and, partly for that reason, became enormously popular. Black Americans picketed the film and in several cities succeeded in getting some of the worst scenes censored, but these were tactical victories in a strategic rout.

The Birth of a Nation epitomized the tensions African Americans faced as they sought to influence American films. Should blacks accommodate the racist film industry, protecting the meager roles they had in the hope of gradual improvement, or should they build their own film industry? There was no easy answer. Disunity and lack of capital meant that African American films made by and starring black performers remained largely marginalized and inferior products. Yet by the depression years, old-style racism was increasingly hard for the white studios to sell. Black Americans boycotted films and the black press angrily denounced retrograde propaganda, while many white liberals also began to share their concerns. The studios began to make films that dropped the hard-edged racism of earlier fare.

Cripps provides an exhaustive and at times exhausting overview of African Americans in film. The narrative frequently devolves into a series of plot summaries and a catalogue of often demeaning roles at the margins of white movies. Yet Cripps sees his book as a hopeful portrayal of black progress in the face of significant odds. 1939’s blockbuster Gone with the Wind epitomized the gains African Americans had made since The Birth of a Nation. Yet it also revealed the limitations of progress. Though Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for her role as a “mammy” figure, the film embraced the Lost Cause ethos, trivialized slavery, and portrayed white southerners as victims. Cripps is remarkably sanguine about these problems, contenting himself with the film’s sympathetic portrayal of McDaniel’s character.

It is here that the book's publication date most clearly comes into view. Racism was certainly frowned upon in 1977, but it seems that the overall white southern perspective on the civil war era was not as thoroughly discredited, as a factual matter, as it is now. So though the author is anti-racist in his orientation, he seems relatively unconcerned about what appears to us as racist historical propaganda. Nevertheless, Cripps is right in noting that as a more equal black presence on screen fitfully emerged in subsequent decades, it owed a debt to this earlier generation of actors and activists for whom the barest humanization in film represented a step forward.