How Has Ferguson Changed You?

One year ago, Michael Brown was killed. I believe we have yet to see the most profound consequences of that day, but the past twelve months have brought other wrenching events, new discussions, and policy shifts. For better or worse, Americans have changed. The polling tells us that Americans of all backgrounds have significantly different views on racism and inequality than we did one year ago.

How have your views changed?

It's worth thinking about. Whatever knowledge and assumptions you carried on August 9, 2014, the 365 days since then have provided a lot of new information. Only the most foolish or inattentive among us would not have been changed in some way. Here's how Ferguson and the past year changed me.*


1) Ferguson gave me permission to protest. 

Like many Americans, on August 8, 2014, I knew something was horribly wrong. Indeed, I had learned about it and tried to live it for over six years. But to be honest, I was quiescent. I had settled into a relative silence. I had given a paper about the roots of racial inequality and segregation at a conference in Milwaukee earlier that year. During the Q and A someone asked me what was to be done about it now. I forlornly said that the only hope I could see was a mass social movement to shift the boundaries of what was politically possible. It seemed a small hope indeed.

By August of 2014, I had spent three years in a suburb of Akron, Ohio. I felt disconnected, and as so often happens, my deep-seated racism continued to resurface. I would question my beliefs. Maybe I was making too big a deal about this racial inequality stuff? Maybe I was blowing it out of proportion? Maybe all the people who indicated to me that I had gone off the rails were right?

Michael Brown was shot 9 days after we moved to Philadelphia. I would have experienced that moment differently had I still been living in that White suburb in Ohio. But my new surroundings and the emergence of street protest in the face of militarized police fortified me. It told me that I wasn't crazy. It dramatized what I had learned to be true but sometimes found hard to believe. It gave me permission to protest. It made it ok for even a mild-mannered guy like me to be on the street in a supporting role.

2) Ferguson taught me the importance of street protest.

Before August 9, I thought that street protest was for the 1960s and we had entered a new era in which other tactics were necessary. There is a common belief among both White and Black Americans that racial discrimination or police behavior has grown worse in recent years. I'm quite sure that's not true. Instead, the demands Black Americans have been making for decades are finally drawing the attention of the nation. Street protest did that.

As with all these lessons, this insight was inseparable from my academic work during the past year. In William Chafe's classic study of Greensboro, North Carolina, Civilities and Civil Rights, he masterfully explores the power dynamics of White and Black Greensboro and the relation between them. He writes that the White elite operated with a powerful ideology, the "progressive mystique." This sensibility combined unfailing civility, faith in dialogue and reasoned discussion, paternal care for those less fortunate, and a respectable boosterism for a city that was invariably described as a place where "race relations" were good and everyone was making progress. For the White power structure of Greensboro, civility was more important than substantive action. Process was more important than outcome.

Black activists in Greensboro kept pushing against this progressive mystique, but were unheard. The rules of communication in Greensboro were such that Black complaints were invariably snuffed out. After all, they couldn't possibly be true: "race relations" were good, Whites were civil, and White elites supported Black institutions. What could be wrong?

Greensboro was of course where the sit-ins began in 1960 before spreading across the South. In Greensboro, massive street protest followed. Only the arrival of these street protests awakened White residents of Greensboro to the reality of Black dissatisfaction. No amount of civil dialogue did that. No amount of polite pleading. Only militant street protest, with the threat of outright violence and chaos, forced the White power structure to move.

3) Ferguson showed me the limits of moral persuasion. 

What was true in Greensboro remains too true today. Don't like the tactics of Black protesters? Don't like all the shouting and cursing and militancy? Maybe we should have listened years ago when Black leaders politely pointed out the scale of institutional racism and calmly proposed solutions. Militant protest is a form of communication. One of the only forms of Black communication most White Americans can hear.

Remember, most White Americans opposed the civil rights movement. Many celebrated when Dr. King was assassinated. The civil rights movement won its victories not only by moral persuasion, but by raising the cost of inaction so high that the White power structure was forced to act. Dr. King lived his final years as a reviled and unpopular figure. We're not trying to win a popularity contest. We're trying to win justice and freedom. And that means forcing a racist society to do what it doesn't want to do. 

4) Ferguson showed me the depths of White denial. 

Though the polls have moved in encouraging directions, we have also witnessed outright denial of reality from influential media figures, politicians, and the White public. One recent poll showed that a majority of Whites do not believe the justice system is biased. We've seen the denial expressed in more concrete form. In Cleveland, hundreds of White rallied to support the police after the murder of Tamir Rice. In Ferguson, millions of Whites believed the police behaved reasonably during protests. In Baltimore, the police alleged that gang members had called a truce to join together to target cops. Many of us knew intuitively right away that the charge was baseless. It didn't make sense. But it was widely reported by the media, raising tensions and White fears. It turned out to be a lie. Untold numbers of Americans have supported the Confederate flag. The ignorance our education system and racist culture impose make that position ordinary, but no less indefensible. In ways broader than the Confederate flag, Ferguson revealed the extent to which Americans do not want to know their history. From housing segregation to police brutality, we have an accessible history that tells us why things are the way they are. Yet the amnesia on offer from figures like O'Reilly and Limbaugh seems to be more popular.


5) Ferguson taught me to believe my experience and the experience of others pertaining to police forces.

In Chicago I had seen blatant racism from police officers first hand. I took it with a grain of salt. I certainly had a negative view of the police, but I couldn't imagine the scale of incompetence and institutional violence and racism that would be revealed in the year after Ferguson. I've become far more skeptical of public sector unions. Yet I also came to see the police not as particularly bad actors, but as the logical outgrowth of public wishes.

6) Ferguson showed me that asserting the full humanity of Black people is controversial in America.

This is the kind of claim that seems either obvious or absurd, depending on the reader. But to be around real Black people as neighbors and church members and friends is to realize that much of the White American imagination is dealing in abstractions. We substitute an inherited racist wisdom for real human contact. You see it in moments of high tension like Ferguson and Baltimore. Absurd rumors and fears fill the air, and White Americans find them plausible. But we don't want to know the truth. For if Black people are just people, then their oppressed state implicates the entire American social order. The White American imagination is malleable, insidious, and a source of deep comfort to millions of Americans.

______________________
*This post is about me. How Ferguson changed young Black people is much more important. I am writing about what I know, and I hope many others will reflect on their own experience. 

American Slavery Shapes Life Chances in 2015

The New York Times has a great visualization of some new research on economic mobility from some Harvard researchers. Here's the map. Red is bad, blue is good:

The language the Times uses here is clunky, but basically here's what's being measured: the average yearly income of a 26-year-old who grew up poor. If you grew up poor in a red county, your average income as an adult is much lower; if you grew up poor in a blue county, your average income is much higher. One of the main takeaways, of course, is that place matters a great deal to life opportunities. (It also matters at the neighborhood level). The South and Southwest, and many urban centers, are not very good places to grow up poor. But if place matters, it is important to remember that history conditions space. There's nothing natural about poor kids in one county having less chance of success than poor kids in another. It's a historically contingent outcome. With that in mind, let's look at another map:

This map shows the percentage of the population that was enslaved according to the last census before the Civil War.  Look familiar? It turns out there is a strong correlation between enslavement 150 years ago and economic mobility now. It's important to understand that the lack of mobility in the South is not mysterious. For centuries White southern elites have pursued cheap labor as their foremost economic priority. They have succeeded! It just doesn't work very well for the poor.

This gets at a frequent misunderstanding people have about racism. They think of it as fundamentally irrational and bigoted, and therefore assume that they are free from its pull. Moreover, they often don't recognize something as racism unless it is very obviously and essentially racist, with no other factors at play. But of course, nearly nothing works like that. As with any other force, racism does not exist in a vacuum. It interacts with other variables in complex ways. And so, after the Civil War, White southerners did not try to institute Black Codes out of an irrational hatred for Black skin. They did so with the very rational desire to make a profit. Racism is profitable, and it is almost always tied economics. As one southern elite wrote after the Civil War, "You will find that this question of the control of labor underlies every other question of state interest." The fact that White southern elites were ultimately able to impose an oppressive system of sharecropping through the first half of the twentieth century goes a long way toward explaining the research the Times published today.

There's a broader point to be made here about structural racism as well. Notice that the areas of highest mobility tend to be in the upper Midwest and plains states where the population is almost entirely White. The White poor are simply not as stigmatized, segregated, policed, and isolated as are poor people of color. White children almost never grow up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, while poor children of color frequently do. Because the White poor are more likely to have social and economic connections to the middle class, they have higher mobility.

As we continue to learn more about the structures of opportunity in our society, moralistic appeals to culture as the cause of poverty are increasingly becoming intellectually lazy and morally troubling. Yet such appeals are likely to remain popular, because they absolve the powerful and blame the weak.

America's Invisible Economic Crisis

Though police brutality was the precipitating cause of the events in Baltimore, an important background is economic. Conditions that would be described as an economic depression, crisis, and emergency if they existed in the White mainstream are the norm for poor people of color. If White Americans faced these conditions all the levers of government and society would be activated to try to fix the crisis. (Just look at the massive spending packages passed by the Bush and Obama administrations in 2008-2009, when the White unemployment rate began to creep toward what the Black unemployment rate always is.) America glances at the same conditions for African Americans and says, "I guess you'll deal."

And African Americans have battled this economic crisis not for six months or a year or a decade, but for generations. Globalization, deindustrialization, automation, mass incarceration, White flight, and racial discrimination in housing and employment have squeezed poor people of color from both ends, hollowing out job opportunities and making them less employable for the few jobs that remain.

The economic injury to African Americans is compounded by the insult the rest of the country's indifference implies. In fact, it's more than indifference, if social media is any guide. It's contempt. When African Americans dare to treat the American state's immiseration of its citizens as a crisis rather than the accepted norm, many Americans are indignant. How dare we invade their bubble with news of oppressed people in America? Don't we know that patriotism is more important than Black lives? Don't we know that our investment in Whiteness is not to be named out loud?

Many Americans seem to take economic crisis in Black communities as evidence of racial or cultural failure. The same conditions in White communities would only signal the urgent need for reform. The conditions in Black communities are constituent parts of an economic system in which tens of millions of Americans are invested. Millions of Americans attend some of the best schools in the world. Millions of Americans have amazing jobs. But there are not decent schools for everyone who wants to learn. There are not decent jobs for everyone who wants to work. We've been on this neo-liberal turn for decades. It is time to admit that it's not working.

The Folly of Transcending Race In A Society of Racial Inequality

The historian David Roediger wrote a book back in 2008 called How Race Survived US History. At the end he discussed the excitement, confusion, and varied reactions elicited by Barack Obama's 2008 candidacy for president. (That seems like a long time ago now, doesn't it?) On the one hand, the possibilities of a post-racial America were everywhere bandied about. On the other hand, the media endlessly reported on and speculated about how this or that racial group responded to Obama. Surveying the scene, Roediger offered this gem of a sentence:

Such careening representations of the Obama campaign reflect an overwhelming desire to transcend race without transcending racial inequality, as well as the impossibility of doing so.

This might fairly be said not only of the Obama campaign, but of the entire ideological project of colorblindness. It promises to put an end to race without any sacrifice or broader change required. But the promise it seems to hold is ultimately illusory. How can we be colorblind when the inequities that reproduce race remain with us? This is too troubling for American society to face, so we get people performing their racial progressivism by voting for a Black man rather than supporting more substantial changes. Barack Obama may be a two-term president, but something as obvious, moral, and practical as reparations is still not to be mentioned in most polite company. As much as we may want to move beyond race, we're quite attached to racial inequality.

In America, White Supremacy Hides in Plain Sight

As we protest the systemic racism of the American criminal justice system, we must be conscious of the ideologies that sustain it. We must attack them at their roots. And we must have a positive vision for the changes that need to occur in the systems that shape life opportunities--education, housing, employment, healthcare--long before encounters with the police and justice system occur. Otherwise, I fear, the American state will never gain the capacity to respond to new circumstances and challenges in justice-producing ways. Mass incarceration and the war on drugs have not been, in my view, deliberately racist policies designed to replace the old Jim Crow with the new. They are, rather, a function of the United States' inability to develop policy solutions to pressing challenges without reinscribing White supremacy through those solutions.

As protests continue and, we pray, grow larger, we must come to understand that there is no carceral solution to the consequences of White supremacy. Punitive policies and "law and order" rhetoric will not get us any closer to justice and healing. I fear that many Americans don't realize this.

The sick  brilliance of White supremacy is in its ability to hide in plain sight. We see its shape-shifting work, for example, in the way its most devastating consequences are held up as evidence that it does not exist. You know the drill, the tired litany of complaints: Black illegitimacy, Black family breakdown, Black crime. All of these are framed as functions of Blackness itself, even if presented now in the more respectable  guise of cultural traits rather biological essence. As often as I've heard these complaints, I've yet to find a serious explanation for the certainty with which they're delivered. The basic claim that Black failure produces Black disadvantage is an ideological leap of faith with nothing to support it beyond the a priori assumption that the world works just so. 

This is rooted deep folks. In the decades after the Civil War, White scientists and intellectuals were eagerly speculating about when African Americans would literally die out. Now that they were no longer under the tutelage of slavery, they would obviously revert to a state of savagery. It followed that crime committed by African Americans was not an American social problem; it was just Blackness expressing itself. Meanwhile, sociologists took it for granted that White crime was not White as such, and could readily be alleviated by education and social programs. When we talk about "black on black" crime without any sense of irony or absurdity, we place ourselves in this intellectual tradition.

In the United States of White supremacy, White problems are social, Black problems are racial. It is considered unnecessary to explain or quantify how, precisely, a group that has been systematically plundered and oppressed for hundreds of years could possibly be expected to have the same amount of wealth and educational attainment as the plunderers. As this question is silenced, the fervent faith that there is somehow something wrong with Black people that is not wrong with America rushes in to fill the void.

The family breakdown thesis, in particular, is important for White Americans because it explains Black disadvantage without reference to the larger society, and does so in a way that upholds conservative religious value about the importance of the family. Americans are not wrong to stress the importance of strong families; they are wrong, however, in the application they think it has to this discussion. The family breakdown thesis locates disadvantage and cause alike within the Black community. For it to have any explanatory power at all, then, this view necessarily contrasts the contemporary Black family with a prior era in which the Black family was strong and stable, illegitimacy rates were low, and the norms of the White middle class prevailed. There was no such period. 

The family breakdown thesis gazes at the problems racism has produced, and flippantly turns consequence into cause. The Black family in the United States has always been under tremendous pressure. Emancipation was a boon, and many African Americans desperately searched around the country for their spouses and children that had been separated by enslavers.  But sharecropping in the shadow of Jim Crow, lynching, and convict leasing was a precarious existence for any family. In the twentieth century, as mechanization of agriculture proceeded, the traditional occupation of the vast majority of African Americans was rendered obsolete. They responded as human people do: they moved en masse, eagerly looking for work. For a brief moment they found it in the nation’s burgeoning industrial cities. Yet even as mechanization foreclosed traditional Black agricultural occupations, by the 1960s and 1970s globalization and deindustrialization began to cause a sustained hemorrhaging of industrial jobs, beginning with those at the bottom of the ladder: African Americans.

Dr. King recognized how devastating these changing economic conditions were. In "A Testament of Hope," published posthumously, he wrote:

Before 1964, things were getting better economically for the Negro; but after that year, things began to take a turn for the worse. In particular, automation began to cut into our jobs very badly, and this snuffed out the few sparks of hope the black people had begun to nurture.

The people who stress the importance of strong families should not need much convincing that being shut out of gainful employment makes it hard to sustain stable families.

Whites responded to the influx of Black migrants looking for work and housing with their own mass migration—out of city centers to new, federally subsidized White suburbs. Business and government investment followed the movement of the White population, leaving little to no work for African Americans. Concurrently, federal housing and education programs that excluded African Americans began to build the modern White middle class. Buffeted by discrimination in housing and employment, unequal education, globalization and deindustrialization, discriminatory government programs and poorly designed federal assistance programs, many Black families splintered. Rather than addressing the problem, federal and state governments launched massive punitive operations, building a mass incarceration state that ripped men from their families for petty offenses and exacerbated the persecution of the Black family. By the end of the twentieth century, the Black family had passed through what was, in some ways, the most sustained and multi-pronged assault on it since enslavers had broken up a third of their families by sale the century before. 

This is an extraordinarily brief overview of the story that complainers from afar want to reduce to a tale of Black irresponsibility, with a little "big government welfare" thrown in for good measure.  As we continue to protest, we must fight these simplistic morality tales. We must fight the pervasive assumption that the message Americans of all backgrounds convey to their children in the quiet of their homes--work hard, take responsibility--is somehow an answer to the problem of white supremacy. The moral instruction we instill in our children is no substitute for reform of systems, laws, and institutions.

White supremacy is continually rendered invisible as we glance at the devastation it creates and then resolutely turn away. We change the subject from causes and solutions to scapegoating. American problems become racial problems. Social sins become individual sins. In a lot of ways, Americans hate our own history. We really do. We can't stand it. If we're ever going to become a country that works for all of us, we must gain the courage to look at our history, and this time, not turn away.

Ferguson Is The Civil Rights Movement

My son was up at 2:45 this morning and decided that going back to sleep was an unnecessary extravagance, so here we are.

I'm sick in my heart over Ferguson and all that it represents. There are a great many things I wish I could tell my fellow White Americans if I had them as a captive audience. For now, I'll just mention one:

Never use disorder as an excuse to avoid dealing with injustice. 

The fixation of so many people on the tiny amount of looting that occurred months ago is extremely revealing. What would it take for them to be on the side of the protestors? I bet they think the civil rights movement consisted of a bunch of middle class Black people in suits refusing to make a ruckus. I bet they don't know that there was lots of violence in and around civil rights movement demonstrations. Or they do know, but somehow they assume that back then it was all so clear and those mean southern sheriffs were obviously at fault. Don't they know that the civil rights movement seemed murky and confusing to White Americans and most of them eventually opposed it?

Ferguson is not so different. We must expose people and make them uncomfortable. If Ferguson comes up in conversation, go ahead and tell your White friends that the civil rights movement isn't over. Tell them to stop paying lip service to the gains of the past while refusing to get on the side of justice in the present. Consider the gross perversion of this world where truth and justice are constantly on the defensive. Find a perfect example of racial injustice, they tell us! One where it is so obvious that the victim is an angel and completely innocent and the perpetrator is a monster! Then we will join with you! Then we might be willing to support Black humanity!

People can't find any evidence that Black people are treated equally in this country, but we who point this out are deemed to be radical or unreasonable. Sure, there's racial discrimination and inequality in education, employment, housing, health care, and life in general, but it doesn't matter because looting. Because baggy pants. Because ebonics. Because scary Black male.

The sins of the powerful produce oppression. The sins of the powerless produce disorder. Which sins we're quickest to judge says a lot about the state of our hearts.

Move Along, Nothing To See Here...

Source.
UPDATE: It turns out that this chart is very misleading. Though it doesn't say so, the incarceration rate for "Black America" is actually for Black American men, while those of other countries are for total population. Once women are added in, the black bar on the far right would be much shorter. Yet it would still be dramatically higher than any other country. One way of looking at it is that even if the incarceration rate of Black women was zero, the total rate would still average out to above 2,000, which is 4x that of the nearest country (Cuba). So the chart is factually wrong, but the point it's making stands.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Explains Why We Must Talk About Reparations

Update: It's now online. Read it here. 

As an Atlantic subscriber, I've got my hands on Ta-Nehisi Coates's cover story a day early, so I will quote some key parts but I can't link to it yet. I will put the link up once its posted online.

Reading this article is a strange experience for me, because Coates uses North Lawndale, Chicago, as his narrative arc providing the emotional thread of the story. North Lawndale is where Alicia and I used to live. I want to impress upon readers that if you haven't lived in a neighborhood like that, it is very difficult to grasp what Coates is writing about. For most Americans, history tends to be an abstraction that is selectively picked up and applied when it is useful. In North Lawndale, history slaps you in the face and overwhelms you with its fierce present urgency. Coates clearly understands this, and its a signal virtue of his piece. To talk about reparations is to challenge the invisibility of the North Lawndales of the country and the lies America tells itself about them.

As a middle class White man, I would not have seen the extent of my arrogance and ignorance (remarkable, isn't it, that those two vices would go together?) apart from my personal experiences in Garfield Park and North Lawndale. In short, I got lucky. The vast majority of White Americans have not had the opportunity to have similar experiences, and many of them are caught in a web of ignorance that is not really of their own making. Those of goodwill, those who want to learn and understand, can start by reading this story when it comes out tomorrow. One of the great virtues of it is that it will expose people to some of the best sociological and historical work on these subjects. People who would never pick up an academic book will get, in very small and digestible doses, an accessible and riveting synthesis in Ta-Nehisi Coates's article. This is crucial, because much that is common knowledge about our history among professionals remains revelatory to average Americans.

Now, on to the content of the article. I was extremely interested to see what exactly Coates meant by reparations. It turns out he doesn't have a specific idea in mind at all. This is not a fault. He has in mind something much bigger than any specific policy. He proposes that we simply begin by studying reparations in an official capacity for the first time, using Congressman John Conyers' long-proposed bill, now HR 40, the "Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act." The bill would not set reparations in motion or create any binding process. It would simply set up a commission that would study the issue and make, as I understand it, non-binding recommendations. Coates writes:

That HR 40 has never--under either Democrats or Republicans--made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you'd expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America's crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world's oldest democracy?...

Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate--the kind that HR 40 proposes--we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion--and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper--America's heritage, history, and standing in the world...

Exactly. Why are reparations so threatening that we are unable even to study the issue? Something Coates does not mention but is quite relevant is that the Federal Government has already given reparations to classes of citizens it discriminated against in the past, most notably Japanese-Americans affected by internment during World War Two. It is telling that we have made payments for these far less severe crimes, while dismissing out of hand the prospect of similar payments for greater crimes. At issue is not the justice of the respective claims, but the costs--psychic as well as financial--of meeting them.

Coates also addresses what is sure to be one of the principle objections: bringing up reparations is inherently divisive. It will only raise racial tensions. I implore readers to try to understand how provincial this objection is. The violence our country is visiting upon North Lawndale on this nice Spring day of May 21, 2014, makes me dramatically unconcerned for the niceties of polite opinion. Millions of Americans who have failed to lift a finger against racial injustice are deeply troubled by any raising of "racial tension" in the form of public conversations that make us uncomfortable. We value tranquility and mistake it for peace. This shallow sentiment is met with an old rallying cry: no justice, no peace. Tranquility is often the gloss atop worlds of subjugation and oppression. It is not the flowering of true justice. Those who value peace do not accept the cheap shortcuts and false labeling of a country that calls the submission of the oppressed to their fate "peace" and calls their cry for justice "divisive." Coates writes:

Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say--that American prosperity was ill gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing pf the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I'm talking about is more than recompense for past injustices--more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I'm talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling "patriotism" while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

John Conyer's HR 40 is a the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can't be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as--if not more than--the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the futures. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America's maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

A reckoning, honesty, an accounting. These things would go further than a check, because a reparations settlement superficially arrived at would merely be appropriated  as a salve for White guilt and a means of clearing ourselves of any future obligations. It would be the election of Barack Obama times 100. Precisely because it seems so out of reach and nearly utopian, mobilizing around the goal of reparations is an excellent way to shift the conversation and refuse to accede to America's deadly myths. We are not going to win over those who are willfully and deeply invested in racial injustice. But we can win over those who simply don't know much yet, who haven't benefited from personal experiences that might have opened their eyes. I think we can do this not by watering down our message or shrinking from the justice of our demands, but by patiently engaging in discussion with the assumption that people of goodwill are always within earshot. Let's not insult them. Let's not pontificate about all the scholarship on racial injustice to people who are just looking for an argument. But let's be ready with stories, books, statistics and our own testimony for those who are open to learning. Ignore the media figures and the circus surrounding them. That is not where the important discussion will take place. The call for reparations is radical enough to heighten the distinction between those who are open to justice and those who are more comfortable with myth. It will compel people of goodwill to ask questions of themselves they may not have asked before, while exposing those who, like me, all too often look out on the world in arrogance and ignorance rather than love and understanding.

Reparations. An Old Idea, But Still A Good One

Ta-Nehisi Coates is about to open up a giant can of worms, and it looks like the full weight of the Atlantic's power to shape elite discussion is behind him.

I am extremely excited about this story. The moral case for reparations has always been obvious and overwhelming. The practical implementation of a reparations program would undoubtedly be difficult, but that is a secondary concern at this time. The great virtue of resurrecting this discussion is that it forces Whites to confront the lies that we live by. If we are to have reparations, we must have them for the evil that is being done here and now, in our lifetimes. All the old canards about how long ago the civil war was and how we had nothing to do with slavery are not just false; they are irrelevant. We're not talking about the deep past. We're talking about the lives of our fellow Americans here and now who are systematically disadvantaged because of their skin color.

The call for reparations will be received in many quarters as a radical exercise, in others it will be mocked as little more than a pipe dream. But we need radicals. We need people pushing for what is politically impossible. Even if reparations are out of reach, perhaps we can move the poles of the conversation toward justice. The inevitable divisiveness of the ensuing discussion will also expose those of us who value tranquility more than peace.

The Graph You Must See Before You Can Understand America

Is the United States a place of opportunity for all? Is social mobility high or low? Is class now a more important dividing line than color? Do Whites continue to experience privilege based on their skin color? Has the legacy of state-sponsored racial discrimination been overcome? What causes poverty in the United States? Are there different kinds of poverty? What are the solutions? What is my responsibility? What is the government's responsibility? What do the places we live have to do with these questions? Before you can hope to answer any of these questions, before having much of any opinion about anything in American society, this is the graph you must meditate on:

It shows the characteristics of the communities Black and White children grow up in. Communities in which 30% or more of the residents are poor are almost never experienced by White children, but they are routine experiences for Black children. The takeaway: Black kids are 30x more likely to grow up in communities of concentrated poverty. The graph is from Patrick Sharkey's recent book, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality. The graph is even more powerful in the context of his broader argument. More commentary to come as I work through the book.

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.

Awakening the Nation

I spent the weekend in Milwaukee giving a paper at UWM's Racial Formation : Racial Blindness Conference. I have some thoughts.

It was a painful disjuncture to spend such a stimulating time among a community of scholars and activists who are exploring how to bring their scholarship to the people to affect change, only to find out yesterday evening that jurors could not agree on a murder charge in the trial of Michael Dunn.

It is painful to spend so many grueling hours researching, meditating, writing, uncovering the roots of our contemporary racial order, only to have people declare that I'm wrong and there's nothing that a little hard work and personal responsibility won't fix. In America, you see, everyone is a racial expert. I move that we extend this principle to a wider field; let's be consistent after all. I'll start tomorrow. I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to install plumbing in a house or go to a hospital and perform a knee surgery. No, I don't know anything about these things, but how hard could it be?

My tone of bitter sarcasm feels warranted in this moment, but I can't help but feel it is unchristian. If motivated by grief over the deleterious influence of Americans' ignorant pride, my current sensibility is probably warranted. But if motivated by my own professional pride and annoyance that my limited expertise is not recognized, then I am far from Jesus indeed. But this, too, is covered by his grace.
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The paper I gave is titled "Awakening the Nation: John C. Stennis, Brown v. Board, and the Strategic Defense of White Supremacy." Mississippi senator John C. Stennis is a fascinating figure because in important respects he did not accept the premises of either massive resistance or southern exceptionalism. He brought to the debate over Brown three key assumptions that not only guided his actions but proved to be prophetic. The assumptions were these:

1) White Americans, of whatever region, were much the same. When the stakes became personal and concrete they would value the traditional wages of whiteness more than racial equality.
2) This essential sameness implied that White southerners could actually win in the court of public opinion, if not in the Supreme Court, if they framed their resistance in an appealing way.
3) White supremacy in the United States was sustainable if rendered increasingly localized and unofficial.

My basic argument is that Stennis was right. On all three of these assumptions, he was correct. He faced many setbacks, but in the long-term his assumptions were vindicated. The paper traces his strategies and actions in the years immediately before and after Brown, including his efforts to improve Black schools to shape public opinion and push the enforcement mechanisms of White supremacy down to the county level or lower so they would be less visible and harder to fight. His newfound opposition to federal funding for public schools also dates to these years. Once funding became linked to integration, Stennis shifted to new rhetoric about the sanctity of local control and the primacy of local school boards. I also show how his three core assumptions shaped his delicate balancing act with the Citizens Councils and his work on the Southern Manifesto.

When you look at the mid-1950s through the lens of figures like Stennis, the shift toward nationwide opposition to school desegregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s begins to look quite a bit different. Invariably framed in a narrative of "backlash," the emergence of overwhelming White opposition to efforts to promote racial equality in American education was a shock to some elite pundits. It was no surprise to John C. Stennis. It was his vindication. Framing it as a backlash erases the influence of Stennis and the forces he embodied, leaving us only with caricatures of segregationist monsters we can safely consign as relics of the Deep South with no influence on the contemporary United States.

A perusal of the present-day educational landscape puts Stennis’s success in stark relief. In his home county of Kemper, the public schools have become synonymous with Black schools, while Whites embrace private education. Though Whites constitute 35% of the population of Kemper County, they make up only 2% of public school enrollment in the county (Census Bureau; Federal Education Budget Project, New America Foundation). Nationwide, schools are now more segregated than at any time since the late 1960s, a dynamic that appears to have only grown worse since the Supreme Court ruled against local, limited, and voluntary efforts to achieve racial integration in Parents Involved in Community Schools et al. v. Seattle School District No. 1 et al (Dorsey). Three-quarters of Black and Hispanic students now attend schools in which less than half the students are White, and 15% of Black students attend schools that have essentially no White enrollment (Orfield et al). The effects, in the form of inadequate resources and concentrated poverty, are severe. These White supremacist outcomes are often seen as benign features of the landscape, standard facts of American life that are all but invisible to many Whites. Others see school segregation as a troubling but almost mysterious problem that all people of goodwill deplore. In reality, modern-day segregation is a logical outcome of the assumptions John C. Stennis brought to the fight over Brown sixty years ago.

Celebration of segregation’s demise has been incorporated into the nation’s political culture and Americans’ sense of themselves as a freedom loving people. This is made easier by emphasizing the pathetic end of vanquished demagogues. But figures like Stennis upset these simple narratives. The esteem in which he was held by his Senate colleagues, the power he accumulated, the astonishing breadth of his career—all these factors defy facile attempts to brush Stennis aside as a fringe figure of the Deep South. Just as surely as the worst excesses of massive resistance were overcome, the influence of White supremacist politics in more moderate and malleable forms lingered on.
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Dana N. Thompson Dorsey, "Segregation 2.0: The New Generation of School Segregation in the 21st Century," Education and Urban Policy 45 (2013): 533-547 

Gary Orfield, John Kucsera, and Genevieve Siegel Hawley, “E Pluribus…Separation: Deepening Double Segregation for More Students,” September 2012, The Civil Rights Project, The University of California. http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu.

Conservatives Hail Progress, Ignore Context

It is important to be precise about what the Supreme Court did to the Voting Rights Act yesterday. There has been some overwrought commentary from the left, to the effect that we're going back to Jim Crow, or that the Voting Rights Act is gone. None of those things are true, and crying wolf hurts the cause of racial equality. Witness National Review's gleeful singling out of the most excessive statements from liberals.

That said, yes, of course it was a bad decision. It's not going to take us back to Jim Crow, but what it does mean is that the new racists and vote suppressors, represented by groups such as True the Vote, will be empowered. Officials in Texas, North Carolina, and Mississippi have already expressed their satisfaction with the fact that they can now move forward with voting laws that section 5 was standing in the way of until yesterday. Voter ID laws with racially disparate effects can now move ahead. Less visible but perhaps more important are the developments likely to take place in small jurisdictions such as counties and cities. Instead of needing to clear the requirements of section 5 in advance, they can now implement a law and are only constrained by the ability of local people to bring a suit after the fact.

The net effect of these changes will be to make it harder for people to vote. It won't bring back "literacy" tests and poll taxes. But it is likely to only exacerbate the subtle discrimination in voting procedures that caused blacks to wait in line to vote, on average, about twice as long as whites in the last election. So, we're not in danger of going back to Jim Crow. If, somehow, the court were to eventually strike down section 2, then yes, we can appropriately talk about Jim Crow. But that's not going to happen. We're simply forging ahead into the latest iteration of American racism. It's not Jim Crow, but that doesn't make it acceptable.

I'm actually more disturbed by the conservative reaction to the ruling than by the decision itself. I have not yet seen a single conservative criticize the decision. They are making it abundantly clear that they oppose proactive federal efforts to protect Americans' rights. Indeed, the predominant line of argument conservatives are taking implies that they envision the eventual repeal of all civil rights laws. They are treating yesterday's decision as almost self-evident progress. The idea seems to be that since we've made so much progress against racism, civil rights laws are now ugly distortions in our otherwise colorblind corpus of law. Removing protections is thus not a step back, but a ratification of the progress we've made.

As always, context is the terrifying enemy of racial conservatives. So let's introduce them to some context. In the United States of 2013, minorities are racially profiled with impunity, arrested for drug crimes out of all proportion to their use of drugs, receive harsher average sentences for identical crimes, attend unequally funded schools, frequently attend segregated schools that are, according to the Brown decision, inherently unequal, live in neighborhoods of much higher average poverty than almost any whites are exposed to, bear the brunt of environmental pollution, face pervasive discrimination in hiring even when their qualifications are identical, are discriminated against by realtors and banks, and, you get the idea. We're not going to have a debate about these things; if you do not accept them you are not ready to have an honest discussion. The point is, given this state of affairs, the urgent priority is to identify what more we can do to tear down this racist edifice. Worrying about repealing old civil rights laws, even if they were no longer needed, would be pretty low on our list of priorities.

So what are conservatives thinking? One of the most common fallacies is to set the 1950s and 60s as a baseline. Conservatives are astonishingly indifferent to the question of what a society with no racial privilege might look like. They are content to merely ask if we have advanced from the baseline of murderous police state. And we have! With that proved, they rest their case. Don't believe me? Look at the National Review piece I referenced above. The title, and I'm not kidding, is: "Yes, Race Relations Have Improved Since 1965." You can see how that title is born of the kind of thinking I just described. Because otherwise you quickly realize that whether race relations have improved since 1965 is neither here nor there. Imagine a conservative saying we don't need the NRA anymore because crime is down and second amendment rights have been expanded. That's basically what they're saying here. And really, "race relations"? This is not about people getting along; this is about severing a 400 year old link between race, money, and power. The editors at National Review conclude like this:

Instead of gnashing our teeth and reliving old battles, we Americans should consider it a source of great pride that legal provisions contrived to ensure that the Jim Crow era was brought to a welcome close have finally outlived their necessity.

By what and who's standard? As I've found in my thesis research, conservatives assured us that the VRA had outlived its usefulness when it came up for renewal in 1970! There really wasn't a gap between fighting against the law's passage and then turning around saying, "look, all better now!" Today, no one, not even Justice Roberts, has claimed that there is no discrimination in the covered jurisdictions. The idea is that it is much better than it used to be. And so it is! But that is an absurd basis for repealing a law. Imagine if we went around striking down everything that governs abuses that are no longer as egregious as they once were. Clean water act, gone. Child labor laws, gone.

The difference is that this section of the VRA only applied to part of the country. And the court simply decided that the disparate treatment of states was more grievous than the racial discrimination those states continue to practice. (Again, because Jim Crow is the baseline. We've made so much progress that current discrimination doesn't really count). The idea was that we're perpetually punishing these states for past sins. This misses a crucial fact. Before yesterday's ruling, areas that were subject to preclearance were allowed to get out from under that requirement and join the rest of the nation. All they had to do was demonstrate 10 years of compliance with the law. Thus the whole conservative narrative about how we're treating these states unfairly for eternity completely collapses. They were free to get out from under preclearance but they couldn't do it, precisely because of their ongoing discrimination. They couldn't demonstrate 10 years of compliance!

The Wall Street Journal editorial page provided another example of leading conservative opinion, and framed the ruling much as National Review did:

The U.S. has a long and difficult history with racial discrimination, but on Tuesday the Supreme Court marked a milestone worth celebrating when it ruled that a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act has outlived its usefulness. The political left is reacting as if this means a return to Jim Crow, but the ruling is best understood as a sign of the racial progress that progressives claim to believe in...

Far from a civil-rights defeat, Tuesday's ruling is a triumph of racial progress and corrective politics. The Voting Rights Act was designed to eliminate barriers to minority voting, and it succeeded as well as any modern law. You'd think that liberals who claim to believe in human progress would recognize progress when it occurs, rather than assume that whatever is is right.

It's the same framing. Because we've made so much progress (and we have) current context is irrelevant. For the record, I've always thought section 5 should apply nationwide. The north and west are and always have been extremely racist, and have added hypocrisy on top of it. But that's a story for another time. If there is a push to replace the coverage formula with a simple nationwide application you can bet many liberals will oppose it. Northern liberals have nearly always turned into defenders of white privilege when the issues hit home.

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 Shortfalls of Colorblind Policy

Sometimes I just need to shamelessly share another person's work without adding any value at all. This is one of the those times. Commenting on the shortfalls of "colorblind" public policy in the Affordable Care Act, Ta-Nehisi Coates is marvelously succinct:

This is one reason why color-blind -- "lift all boats" -- policy so often falls short. When you have a country grappling with the deep vestiges of bigoted policy, you do not need "colored only" signs to get "colored mostly" effects.

Yes. A thousand times yes. I heard a conservative on the Diane Rehm show this morning literally refuse to answer a question about how Republican policies help women because he wanted to focus on what helps all Americans rather than dividing us into groups. The problem is that we are, as a factual matter, divided into groups! We do not all have the same interests, and the fact is that group identities such as race and gender provide rough approximation for very real differences in needs and life circumstances.

Refusing to acknowledge that when crafting public policy is not the noble gesture conservatives think it is.  Colorblind policy purports to be for all, but it is actually a front for policies that disproportionally help the white, rich, and male. The main reason people are uncomfortable with being "divided into groups" is because of all that it implies in terms of privilege and redistributive economic policies.

As we saw in the last election campaign, when Mitt Romney ran on a platform obviously tilted to most benefit the wealthy, retirees, whites, and business owners, he and his supporters denied he was doing any such thing. Yet when the Obama campaign did its own outreach to certain groups of voters, it was accused of dividing Americans. Colorblindness is not about trying to unite Americans. It is about denying the divisions that exist so that those on the privileged side of those divisions can go on profiting from them.

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.