For me, the three most important books I’ve read in the past few years are The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed. I won’t say they are the best books I’ve read, though the Coates book may qualify. He’s arguably our country’s most influential public intellectual as well as a brilliant stylist, and this short book brought him to the attention of an audience beyond the readers of his magazine articles. I call them the most important books for me because they shook me out of my complacency about racial progress.
I’m an old white guy who lived through the Civil Rights Movement in the 50’s and 60’s and believed I had seen a gradual but significant improvement in the lives of African Americans since then. I mean, look at the increase in the number of prominent black professionals over the past few decades, who are prevalent enough they are thought of more as “professionals who are black” than people for whom “black” is the defining adjective. And Obama? What better proof of how far we’ve come as a country! But the history traced by these three books from the early days of our nation to the Obama presidency — and with Coates’ latest article, The First White President, the early days of the Trump presidency — helped me understand that while it’s increasingly possible for exceptional black men and women to reach the social level of less exceptional whites by working three times as hard, social and economic progress has not made its way to the rest of the black population. There are plenty of explanations ranging from reasonable to racist, but one which deserves more prominence than it receives is, simply, the white power structure stood in the way of black advancement.
As I began reading The New Jim Crow, my initial reaction was to think its basic thesis was overstated. But when the author, a lawyer who is the former director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, admitted in her introduction that she too would have scoffed at the validity of her argument if she had heard it before she began her own research, I decided to give the book a careful read. I’m glad I did. Her basic thesis, which has become more accepted and widespread since she wrote the book, is that after civil rights legislation undermined the foundation of segregationist Jim Crow laws, which were a racist response to the progress made during the post-Civil War Reconstruction, new laws and enforcement practices were put in place which disproportionately target blacks, disrupting communities and disenfranchising thousands of individuals. She refers specifically to the War on Drugs which began a few years after the passage of civil rights legislation, law enforcement which targeted blacks for drug and other legal offenses more forcefully than others, and a legal system with its outsized penalties for minor offenses, all of which led to mass incarceration, affecting black people and communities more negatively than any other group. That is what she refers to as “the new Jim Crow.”
The book, published in 2010, helped form the basis of lots of current thinking on the subject, including mine. I apologize for the weakness of my summary of the book’s argument. It’s not easily condensed into a few words. If you find Alexander’s thesis overstated but don’t dismiss it outright, I recommend you read the book for a more complete discussion. It’s a compelling read.
Obama’s presidency should have been a watershed moment for civil rights in the country. Not just should have been. It was a watershed moment. Just as civil rights legislation was supposed to change everything for the better, so was the election and reelection of a black president. But civil rights legislation was followed by the new Jim Crow as a reaction to what looked like inevitable progress toward greater racial equality, and Obama’s presidency engendered an explosion of racial animus as a response to some people’s fears of a more inclusive America. Call it the new, new Jim Crow. Our current president is arguably a white supremacist. If that term is too strong for some, at the very least he’s an apologist for supremacists. The KKK is back in vogue. Nazis proudly parade down the streets chanting “You won’t replace us,” referring generally to all non-whites they feel threatened by (followed by the modified chant, “Jews won’t replace us,” to bring the marchers back to their Nazi roots). The president joined in the chorus of racist voices which proclaimed that Confederate flags and monuments are not a shameful reminder of the south’s traitorous decision to split off from the union rather than abolish slavery. Instead, they are a reminder of a proud tradition. The list goes on.
Coates’ recent Atlantic article, The First White President, is about the backlash to the Obama presidency which led to Trump’s election. The article’s in-your-face title seems ridiculous — all presidents have been white except Obama — but like The New Jim Crow, the incisiveness of the argument comes clear with the reading.
Tuesday’s Star brought a clearer statement on the subject than I’ve been able to put together in this post, in an op ed by E.R. Shipp, Roy Moores of the world are wreaking havoc as their time runs out. Her column isn’t about Moore the sexual predator. It’s about Moore the old school racist who said recently, “They started to create new rights in 1965, and today we’ve got a problem.” He’s referring, of course, to the civil rights laws. Shipp continues,
The arc of history led to the election of President Barack Obama, a black man. We are now well into a post-Obama backlash and purging reminiscent of what followed Reconstruction, that decade after the Civil War when blacks made great strides in civil society, in politics, in business. The earlier backlash gave us Jim Crow laws, separate-but-equal and the Ku Klux Klan — a situation that the activism of the 1950s and 1960s began to reverse.
Mr. Moore wants a return to the 1950s or maybe even the 1850s, when, he might say, women, blacks, Native Americans and Mexicans knew their place.
We live in troubled times. The arc of history may bend toward justice as Martin Luther King said it will, or it could twist and tangle its way toward increasing injustice and inequality. I hope for justice, but I fear for the direction our country may be heading.
A Note about renewed hatred of other minority groups: It would be a mistake of omission to leave Hispanics and Muslims off the list of targeted groups in the Trump era. Shipp included women, Native Americans and Mexicans at the end of the excerpt above, and only left out Muslims because they weren’t considered much of an issue in the 1950s, let alone the 1850s. Trump based much of his campaign on The Wall to keep out Mexicans and The Ban to keep out Muslims. But as a historical phenomenon spanning the time from the pre-Revolution colonies to the present, the treatment of African Americans is the nation’s original sin by which all our other sins against minority groups within our society can be understood and measured.
This article appears in Nov 30 – Dec 6, 2017.
David, two more great reads on the subject: “Stamped from the Beginning” by Ibram X. Kendi, an incredibly well researched and documented (and damning) history of the racist ideas that undergird the country from day one…Warning! if American exceptionalism appeals to you, it probably won’t after reading this book, as it was certainly used in the early days (as today) as a form of white supremacy….and “Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein which traces an insidious history of the US government role in segregation through very careful (and tended) redlining through the use of segregated home (and home building/developers’) loans, VA benefits, neighborhood covenants, etc. These tiny bureaucratic details that were instituted by every federal agency resulted in the creation of white neighborhoods (and, by definition, non-white neighborhoods) that remain today, and that are frequently cited as the reason we cannot desegregate our schools. If you thought neighborhood segregation was just because “people like to live around their own kind” think again. There are serious economic incentives to do so and they go all the way back through our history.
David Safier writes, “It would be a mistake of omission to leave Hispanics and Muslims off the list of targeted groups in the Trump era. […] Trump based much of his campaign on The Wall to keep out Mexicans and The Ban to keep out Muslims.”
What about Mexican immigrants who are Roman Catholic, David? You forgot to mention the discriminatory public policy your party favors that would seek to prevent them from applying the public per-pupil funding their tax dollars supply in the schools many of them would like most like their children to attend. Your party values ethnic traditions as long as they involve colorful clothing, lively music, and good food, but not, it seems, when they involve religious beliefs. Your party teaches that lower-SES populations, Hispanic and otherwise, should have free public schooling in secular public district schools but MAKE THEM PAY OUT OF POCKET!!! if they’d prefer to send their children to a Catholic school. In most cases, especially where families are larger, this makes attending the schools some prefer financially impossible. But this party position isn’t a way to try to use public policy and economic disincentives to secularize a particular immigrant population in a country whose constitution guarantees freedom of religion, is it? Surely not.
Oops, I think we may have tripped over one of the many hypocrisies of Safier’s party’s agenda. Dems froth at the mouth over discrimination against Muslims but are equally prone to frothing at the mouth as they vehemently support public policy that prevents Roman Catholics from using public funds to educate their children in schools with a church affiliation. They “support education,” but would rather that per pupil funding that could be applied to educate children stay in the state’s coffers un-used when a student is pulled out of a public school and enrolled in a Catholic school. Without tax credits, ESAs, etc., that’s what happens when a student transfers from a public school to a Catholic school: the money that could have been applied for their education remains in the state’s bank accounts, for Ducey to give away in corporate tax credits or one of his other corporate welfare programs. The family pays out of pocket, reducing the amount they can save for inflated college tuition by the amount they must pay for K-12. Very humane, Dems. Very “pro-education.” Very supportive of “diversity.” (Of some kinds, but not of other kinds. You have to be diverse in the right (politically correct) way to please the Dems, or to qualify for the public funding they like to dole out to some groups but not to others.)
I worked hard, had some success and moved to an upper income foothills home. Upon arriving I found two black families and a green card alien from Mexico. All are now friends and all voted for Trump.
Blaming others for non existent racism does not help you understand why you lost the election. It may be that you are simply to afraid to face the truth. But that kind of thinking is partially to blame.
Oh, whatever. As a recovering Catholic, I can say with a clear conscience that if you choose to let religion warp and poison your child’s education, then YOU can pay for it. But NOT WITH MY MONEY, and especially not when it flies in the face of one of the key principles upon which this nation was founded: separation of church and state.
And, anyway, what the heck does your selfish “critique” have to do with David’s excellent post on institutional racism? Nothing, so why are you even wasting the space? Is your sole animating purpose to prove David Safier wrong about everything? Pretty pathetic.
The constitution guarantees freedom of religion. Separation of church and state is a principle put in place to try to defend freedom of religion, to prevent the state from requiring membership in a state sponsored religion and / or discriminating economically or otherwise against people who refuse to practice a state sponsored religion, which is what the English government and Church of England had been doing in the country from which many of our original settlers in New England came. It is deeply ironic that what we have going on in this country now is economic discrimination against those who elect to enroll in religious schools of their own choosing. In many ways it looks as though we’ve just switched the previous bias for the Church of England to a bias for secularism. “Recovering Catholics” should not be using public policy to punish the church they have left and / or to economically discriminate against fellow citizens who choose to continue affiliating with it.
What does my critique have to do with David’s post? Easy to answer: David mentioned discrimination against Hispanics and Muslims. I was extending the argument that we should not discriminate against ethnic and religious minorities (a position with which I agree) further than David took it to say that public policy should not discriminate against Hispanic Roman Catholics who want to use their per-pupil funding in Catholic schools. How is my argument “selfish”? I am not a Mexican immigrant, nor am I a low-income Hispanic Roman Catholic. In making the argument, I am advocating for fairer treatment of a group to which I do not belong.
Making reasoned, fact-based arguments against ideas with which you disagree is not, in my opinion, “pathetic.” What is “pathetic”? People who use these comment streams to engage in ad hominem attacks. If you disagree with the ideas, say so and give reasons. Name calling (“selfish”; “pathetic”) demonstrates nothing about the validity of the arguments with which you would like to disagree.
Every time one of these ugly comments is posted and remains up, it tells us something about what Tucson Weekly is, and something about what kinds of behaviors are probably taught in the form of schooling name-callers and bullies prefer. And that only strengthens the validity of the position my camp argues from. So thanks for that.
…and the choir sang AMEN!
Thank you for your insights and the good fight for equality and fair treatment of all humankind. And most of all for your continuing patience with those who refuse to see their own bigotry and the narrowness of their own experiences as a gauge of what is happening right outside their own very safe little neighborhoods.
What is happening right outside the “very safe little neighborhoods” surrounding TUSD enclave schools like Sam Hughes, Fruchthendler, and Sabino is this:
http://tucson.com/news/local/tusd-pours-resources-into-east-side-school-in-effort-to/article_d3d0b851-48ac-5b35-8de9-1d7d3e0c6776.html
and this:
http://tucson.com/news/local/tusd-pours-resources-into-east-side-school-in-effort-to/article_d3d0b851-48ac-5b35-8de9-1d7d3e0c6776.html
and this:
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/six-tucson-unified-schools-to-lose-their-magnet-status/article_d19f0d4b-8043-5ae3-8acf-0abef0651fea.html
and this:
http://tucson.com/news/local/of-tusd-playgrounds-are-unsafe-audit-finds/article_0ec0e889-2187-5224-b25c-2348c914df1a.html
The bigots are those who want to lock poor minority students into low functioning, dangerous schools and insist that the only place public funds can be applied to educate these populations is in schools like Booth-Fickett, Secrist, and Utterback. Southern Arizona Democrats need to wake up and smell the stench of their own hypocrisy and their own willingness to sacrifice other people’s children on the altar of their beautiful theories of PUBLIC EDUCATION, theories that have NOTHING to do with what is happening to real students in real schools in Tucson. There are open seats in a number of excellent private schools, all non-profit, both secular and church affiliated, that would serve students much better than TUSD’s mismanaged, dangerous institutions serve the students who have the misfortune to be locked into them. And the only barriers to students taking those seats is Democratic party policy and the SOS campaign. Congrats, Southern Arizona Dems. What great, big-hearted humanitarians you all are.
Perhaps if you all started showing up at TUSD Board meetings en masse and actually advocating for better management of the district (difficult, unpleasant, exhausting, frustrating work that it is) the district might be salvageable. But as long as you continue to sit on your asses in the comfort of your homes and pontificate and theorize, congratulating yourselves on what great souls you are while a district serving forty-something thousand ROTS, your proposed policy solutions and your Betsy De Vos and New, New Jim Crow distractions from what is going on locally will not be acceptable.
The second link in the above post should be:
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/discipline-problems-at-secrist-trigger-special-tusd-task-force/article_2c7cfee0-2dec-5e6c-8298-743298b3abf2.html
“Tired of self congratulation…etc. etc. etc.” some of us DO show up at TUSD Board meetings, and have been for a long time. I don’t buy arguments that seek to undo the separation of church and state, and I never have. I don’t think tax money in a country that constitutionally IS supposed to separate those things should go for religious instruction. Period. Not Catholic, not Muslim, not Protestant, not any of it. Such draining of tax monies is among the things that have caused the public schools to decline. Recall that I said SOME. Mismanagement at TUSD is PART of the story, and it happens to be the part that we can work on locally, so its important. But its not ALL of the story, no matter how articulate the argument against the district is. AND it doesn’t hold for all public school districts. Your “stretching” of the concept of freedom of religion is befitting the owners of Hobby Lobby and the cake maker who swears that to make a cake for a same sex wedding doesn’t allow him his freedom of religion (oh, or speech). I don’t buy it there, and I won’t buy it here. As happens with other rights held dear by the reigning powers in the country, the right to religion (which is really a misnomer, because the only one that counts is the right to Christianity, of course) is beginning to trample all over other rights. Here, you would have it trample over the rights to public education as they are having it trample over women’s rights to make decisions about their/our bodies. Its not even a slippery slope, its a damned cliff.
Im not going to address everything youve referenced here, Betts Putnam-Hidalgo, except to say that when a few token voices crying in the wilderness do the advocacy work with the district that needs to be done, it is easy for the powers that be to isolate and dismiss them. Advocacy work like the important work you do needs to be backed by the party at large. Has your party backed you as you call attention to problems in the district that need to be addressed? No. They have ignored you or opposed you or they have written checks to other, less worthy candidates as they sat on their asses and pontificated about the beauty of public education while they do none of the citizen advocacy tasks that keep local schools from descending into dysfunction. Much easier to do than attending Board meetings or demonstrating outside of 1010, which is often what really needs to be done.
I am sorry about the things you have written that try to lump every freedom of religion argument in with the worst of them. They are not all the same, and the tone deafness of your faction when it comes to hearing what people of faith have to say or understanding what their institutions have to contribute to the common good is unfortunate. It weakens the movement for economic justice in this country, as I have written elsewhere.
I wish you well but in my assessment, your reform-TUSD cause is a lost one. So, more broadly, is the district school monopoly on the use of public funds for education. Those of you who still favor it can get together in forums like this and reinforce one anothers ideas and anti-religious biases, but the monopoly has been broken and it wont be returning. And that is all for the best for the cause of JUSTICE, as far as Im concerned.
Betts, ASU used government money to accomplish this:
Arizona State University is undergoing a $10 million upgrade to its Memorial Union in Tempe. Other renovations include new pool tables, dining areas and better accessibility. (Photo by Michelle Minahen/Cronkite News)
The additions were part of a $10 million upgrade to the facilities. Other renovations included new pool tables, dining areas and better accessibility.
ASU is a very inclusive university, and so weve got a lot of faiths represented across the student body, Nevel said. Its important to recognize that and to be sensitive to that and appreciate their desires.
—————————————————————————————————————
$10 million to appreciate their desires? That makes me wonder if your whole agenda is anti faith and pro public schools. Did you oppose this action by ASU?
Wayne Olson, I can’t imagine what you are talking about here, what relevance it has to either the article (oh forget talking about that!!!) or the conversation? Have you left out some reference to religion in your story that I don’t know about? How does upgrading a Memorial Union (is that not a student union, like at the UA? What does it have to do with religion?) I don’t concern myself with ASU, and I don’t consider myself anti-faith. On pro public schools, you have it right. And, incidentally, I don’t think that I even have “a whole agenda”.
BPH: when they upgraded the Memorial Union at ASU, they added an interfaith prayer center and an ablution room where Muslim students can do ritual purification before prayer.
https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2017/12/06/asu-interfaith-ablution-rooms-memorial-union-religious-practices/
Wayne Olson seems to be pointing out an inconsistency: if public funds can be used in a pubic institution to accommodate the needs of one faith group and this does not violate the separation of church and state, why can they not be used in other contexts to accommodate the needs of other groups?
Safier’s post is about fair treatment of minorities, mainly African Americans, but also Hispanics and Muslims. The question of why some groups don’t fall within the circle of Democratic policy concern is a valid one and it is directly related to Safier’s post. Is the agenda defending only groups being targeted by Trump? Or is the agenda more consistent and whole cloth, one that assures fair treatment of all groups?
From the above-linked article:
“[A muslim student] said the fact that ASU recognizes Muslims on campus makes her feel valued. ‘ASU is recognizing that theres Muslim students on campus, and they need a place like this, and that makes you feel important. That makes you feel like, Oh, they care, [the student] said. ‘They actually notice that we need a place to pray and a place to make [ritual purification].'”
To include facilities like this for students in their schools is a form of compassion and affirmation. Religious belief is as much a part of who a student is as their native language and their customs. Too bad the Democratic Party recognizes the importance affirmation for some groups, but not for others. Their public policy actively blocks the ability of lower income Hispanic Roman Catholic students to access schools that accommodate and affirm their faith, and that is a fact.
Thank you What, and well said I might add. I forgot to include the link. Let us also be mindful that they have banned Christian displays on campus. It appears to many that it is more than just an inconsistency.
We have watched the last four years or so where the IRS and FBI have targeted opponents of their agenda party, so all motives of the government must now be questioned.
Much of it is simply about buying votes with our money. That’s why our roads are falling apart. Politics.
Two points regarding Prof. Alexander’s book, which is a must-have tool to signal your liberal virtue from your coffee table, by the way. First, mandatory minimums for crack offenses where enacted at the urging of urban black community leaders, whose neighborhoods were turned into crack fueled war zones in the 1980s. Second, Prof. Alexander focuses on drug sentencing, while largely ignoring violent crime, which puts a huge number of black people behind bars. Here is UCLA’s Prof Forman’s critique of Prof. Alexander’s book, if anyone’s interested. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/vi…
The backlash against Obama had nothing to do with his race, it was completely about his policies:
13% growth as compared to Reagan at 32%
Combined math and reading scores down for the first time in history after “Race to the Top”.
Spending another trillion on health care and death rates up.
It was all about race. Someone as racist as you knows it, you just refuse to admit it
Wait, did I get the downvote because I forgot to include the period at the end of my sentence? I am sorry for my lack of punctuation. Everything I said was true though, so for that alone I should not receive downvotes. Unless of course that downvote was from Huppenthal. Now there’s a guy that hates truth.