Today’s the day the we celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and I’m damn glad we do.
When we talk about race today, we talk about the scandal at the King/Drew medical center, or about the 19th Century racial politics of Al Sharpton. It’s an annoyance to many and should be an embarrassment to some.
But in my lifetime, young black solders in uniform were denied accommodations and meals. In my lifetime, black families – who had worked, lived and owned land in communities for two generations, were explicitly denied the right to vote.
In my lifetime civil rights workers – whose crime was to seek the same rights for people with black skin – were brutally murdered, with the complicity of the white police who were sworn to protect them.
To understand where we really are, and where we are going, it’s important to have some sense of where we came from.
Rev. King may not have been a perfect man – no one is.
But he and his movement are models we should not forget.
You are older than I am. In my lifetime the single greatest racial atrocity in the US has been affirmative action.
I stood there that hot summer day in August of 63, stepping in and out of the pool to “keep cool” as I (a brand new highschool senior) listened to Dr. King. I, and thousands of others were inspired by the “I have a dream” speech to believe that this country would some day quit racist ideology and that we would all be judged “by the content of (our) character” rather than the color of our skin. Alas, that day has not arrived, but it will my friends, it absolutely will.
Iblis, affirmative action is certainly a problem or an issue. It’s probably an embarassment. But you demean ‘atrocity’ when you use it there…
A.L.
A.L.
Disagree. Racism is atrocious. Affirmative action is racism. That fact is not mitigated by claiming that it is ‘good’ racism.
Iblis, racism is a bad thing. Losing a job or a position in a school to someone because of their (or your) race is a Really bad thing. Tying someone to a tree and beating then to death with a chain as dozens of people, including police officers, stand around is an atrocity.
I need to write on this a bit, because we seem to be in a kind of ‘princess and the pea’ mode now – mostly on the left, but as your comment demonstrates, on the right as well. Any flaw, any defect, any error is a horror, an atrocity, the Holocaust.
No it’s not.
Sorry to hammer you on this; I don’t mean to single you out, but this is (obviously) an issue for me and you pushed the button.
A.L.
Well, it seems we agree on one thing. Words like atrocity, racism, facist, Nazi, etc are overused. As a result they lose their meaning. When some idiot compares Bush to Hitler you have to wonder. Do they mean Hitler wasn’t such a bad guy?
That said, I’m going to stick to my guns. Racism is an atrocity. It’s also something different than what you highlight in your examples. Discrimination (racists or otherwise) is not an atrocity. Murder is also not an atrocity. It’s ugly and awful, but not an atrocity.
Here let me point out that I do not believe in hate crimes. I do not think that killing someone because he was [insert member of some race] is worse than killing him because he owed you money, you had a bad day, or for no reason at all. I believe in capital puishment for murder. I don’t think we should execute someone twice if the state can prove the murderer was motivated by racial hatred, as opposed to any other equally stupid excuse.
Hammer away if you like. I’m here all day…
Dear A. L.:
While we’re on the subject on MLK Day, I have to admit that I’m baffled by people in the crowd booing when GWB placed a wreath on Dr. King’s grave. Only a limited number of inferences can be drawn from this action. Either:
– like him or not GWB is the ceremonial head of the nation. Booing him for honoring a national hero is churlish.
OR
– Dr. King is a hero too holy to be defiled by non-believers. It is inappropriate for him to be honored with a national holiday.
OR
– it doesn’t matter what you do; all that matters is who you are. Wait! What was that “I Have a Dream” speech again?
A.L., Iblis:
Any honest American over the age of 50 knows that affirmative action was necessary to implement the promise of the Civil Rights Act. Without it, employment, education, and hiring practices would have taken generations to change. HOWEVER, AA was the only thing we could come up with at the time; it’s a kludge, a bandaid, a quick fix. AA could only deliver so much, and it seems to be running out of momentum. Blacks are still vastly underrepresented in many technical, academic, and professional fields, and no amount of AA can qualify them for these jobs. Either blacks are inherently less talented in some fields (which I think is preposterous) or we need to be doing something different and better to close the remaining racial gaps. My main gripe with AA is that none of our great thinkers, social engineers, progressive politicians, or civil rights activists have managed to come up anything better in the past 40 years. Is AA really the best they can do?
Slimedog,
It’s not inherent. We DO need to do something better. That thing is simple: improve primary schooling so that it is once again possible for people to leave public high schools with a high level of literacy and education.
This is not currently the case, and the burden falls disproportionately on black people who are trapped in that dysfunctional public system.
One can either instigate a sweeping overhaul of the public system, radically changing its power structure and the rules it operates under, or one can bypass the system via vouchers et. al. that give inner city families who want it and are prepared to work for it a fighting chance.
Like any production process, the output point is the wrong place to complain. The WHOLE SYSTEM is regulated by its weakest point, and that point often found early in the process.
“Either blacks are inherently less talented in some fields (which I think is preposterous) or we need to be doing something different and better to close the remaining racial gaps.”
Slimedog:
Although I agree with you about the rationale for affirmative action, the problem now is that to its proponents it has become a sacrament.
Joe:
Unfortunately, your education prescription has some serious flaws. Take our case here in Illinois. We are 48th out of 50 states in the state contribution to education. Although non-binding referenda have overwhelmingly supported increasing this contribution there is little hope of such an increase passing the legislature. Illinois is possibly the least populist state in the Union lacking the initiative, binding referenda, recall, term limits, etc. The legislature ain’t gonna change any time soon.
Nor can we look to the Federal government for help: Illinois is 46th out of 50 states in ROI for federal tax money. Something like 80 cents comes back to Illinois for every tax dollar. So Texas, Florida, and New York (all tax beneficiaries) might get help from the Feds but never Illinois.
Minority housing is highly concentrated here. And the folks living in the lily-white suburbs don’t want to pay to educate THEIR children.
“Rev. King may not have been a perfect man – no one is.”
It seems as if you bring up any of Rev. King’s shortcomings (or whatever you want to call them) you are branded as racist. However, he was human. And for this man, with failings like the rest of us, to achieve what he did is remarkable to me.
Dave,
Just a quick point–education spending is not necessarily correlated with outocmes. Seattle dramatically illustrates this point by spending $3,800 per child at the “best” high school in town, which all the parents fight to get their children into, and over $5,000 at the “worst” school, where students staged a protest a couple of years ago because there literally weren’t enough textbooks to go around.
BTW, all of Seattle’s schools are light-years ahead of the D.C. system, which spends something like $12,000 per high-school student and produces large numbers of illiterate graduates.
So spending is a pretty poor metric for quality.
Rob:
You are absolutely right that spending is a poor metric. I couldn’t agree more. But it IS a metric that we can vary. While factors like parental involvement, stable two-parent families, respect for education, etc. may be significantly more important they are cultural values which may be difficult or impossible to alter. So how do you improve things?
Back to King…by the time of his death he was a radical figure. In his last speech (the great “Mountaintop” speech) he posed the choice as between “non-violence or non-existence”. He strongly opposed the Vietnam war. I don’t think he would have come along quietly for the Bush administration’s “war on terror”. Something to think about.
It’s easy to ridicule his positions as impractical, but in the age of nuclear weapons they may turn out in the long run to be the more practical and pragmatic ones. As I said, something to think about.
“Any honest American over the age of 50 knows that affirmative action was necessary to implement the promise of the Civil Rights Act. Without it, employment, education, and hiring practices would have taken generations to change.”
Nonsense. What we needed was “equal protection of the laws”; i.e., the cops don’t just stand by and let you lynch black people, or lynch white people for hiring black people, and so on. Pure free-market economics does the rest – if you pass on a qualified black applicant and let your competitor hire him, it will cost you serious money and maybe your business. As long as terrorist organizations don’t get to enforce unofficial Jim Crow laws, and the police don’t get to enforce official Jim Crow laws, people’s greed will overcome their dislike of other races and lead them to deal profitably with people they don’t much like.
Perhaps you’ve noticed the complete absence of “No Irish Need Apply” signs? They didn’t get affirmative action. All that had to happen was defectors making money off of their competitors’ prejudices without getting lynched.
You’re not from the South, are you Ken? I’m from Southern Louisiana and I live in the panhandle of Florida, which is essentially Baja Alabama. I’m proud to be a Southerner, and in my experience, race relations down here are generally good and have been for years. However, while I’m not really old enough to remember segregation (I was born in 1961) I’m old enough to have known many people who were around then. Ideology, especially an ideology with as much history and emotion attached to it as Southern racism, can and often does trump self-interest. In Mississippi during the depression, you wouldn’t have caught a white person dead picking up garbage even though they desperately needed work. The reason: that was “nigger work.” My own father in the late ’50s once rose from a lunch counter and left the store in disgust without ordering a meal because a black person sat down at the counter. I’m not necessarily arguing for AA. If it was ever a good idea, it certainly isn’t now. But let’s face it, it’s a bit naive to believe that profit is always the strongest motivator of human beings or that free markets can eliminate centuries of ingrained hatred.
Iblis, AL…
Perhaps a connection between your views is possible when we think of atrocity as ‘an act’ or ‘an outcome’…
An act can be clearly atrocious, as AL points out. Iblis seems, to me, to be saying the institutionalized, habitual, legal imposition of racist Affirmative Action, day after day, STILL atrociously brings about crushing, demeaning and dysfunctional lives, moreso by having become ‘sacrament’ and untoucheable and good and right and true… while being racist.
Investigators reported that the black Baha’i had been killed instantly by shotgun blasts, and his white, Baha’i friend, had only been cut in half by a blast, and he’d crawled 4 meters to the edge of the road, perhaps to signal for help, before dying… late ’60s…
I know atrocity. I also recognize chronic, long-term atrocity in diseases and diseased, dysfunctional dynamics… Affirmative Action has become such.