Here’s some real news: today the New York Times actually has an article (well, it is called an “essay”) on race that is thoughtful, fair, and balanced. David Chappell, author of A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, which I haven’t yet read but which sounds as though it deserves the excellent reviews it has received, reviews a bunch of recent books on affirmative action, the legacy of Brown, and race in general. His observations, some of them subtly sharp, strike me as shrewd and perceptive.
Along the way he does make one passing observation that deserves more attention — not necessarily from Chappell in this essay, let me hasten to add, but at least from us here. Consider:
Opposition to affirmative action persisted, partly because racists resented black success. But people who were not racists also found it hard to justify violating the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause to serve its deeper purpose.
I think this sentence expresses a widely shared notion — that the commitment to non-discrimination is somehow superficial, procedural, abstract; that the “real” or “deeper” purpose of the 14th Amendment, or of Brown, was to promote something that is seen as more fundamental and significant, such as equality or maybe integration.
But it seems to me that the disputes over affirmative action reflect an underlying disagreement over precisely what equality means or requires. Moreover, the more substantial and far-reaching the “deeper” requirements of the 14th are thought to be, the less likely it is that achieving that goal was its “purpose.” Of course, whether something that was not its purpose can now be its purpose is one of those questions that serves as a full employment policy for law professors.
It is entirely possible that this doesn’t mean anything, but the photo accompanying the story–which did seem to be fair and balanced–showed hate-filled people screaming at a black student in 1957 Little Rock.
Well, just from the establishment of the Freedmens Bureau immediately after the war, it’s obvious that Congress saw nothing inconsistent between the 14th Amendment and special treatment for ex-slaves. Was the Bureau part of a program to implement a “deeper meaning”?
Andrew seems to be saying that conditions for American blacks are no different now than they were in May 1865.
I don’t think Andy says what Joey says he seems to say … but I still think he’s wrong. 40 acres and a mule would not have violated an interp. of the 14 as requiring colorblindness, as, indeed, neither would reparations for descendants of slaves. (I’m sure that sentence isn’t grammatical, but I don’t have time to fiddle with it now.) What those of us who object to racial preference object to is preference based on race, not on “previous condition of servitude” or poverty or other non-protected categories.
John, I beg to differ with you that this was a fair and balanced essay. It is the same claptrap that we constantly hear from the Left. In fact, the arguments he quotes remind me of the thesis of the book the Power Elite by C Write Mills. For example:
As the rich hunker down in gated communities or otherwise remove themselves from the common tax base, they stick the rest of America with the bill for their extended sewer lines and commuting time (increased road maintenance, pollution, accidents).
That is such an asinine comment that one must either question his intelligence or realize that he is blinded by ideology and contempt for the wealthy. The vast majority of gated communities are built in cities or the near suburbs. The purpose of building the gated community is to keep the riffraff out, because they live in the same community as the rich. One does not build gated communities in rural areas (does he envision castles surrounded by stone walls and a moat), so the tax base remains in the community. Also, does he not know that houses built in rural areas do not get sewer lines, they have septic systems.
The Interstate Highway Act (1956), in addition to subsidizing oil barons in Texas and Saudi Arabia, directly displaced 330,000 poor families, mostly black.
Would anyone who was not a Leftwing ideologue believe that the Interstate Highway Act was passed to make oil barons (oil barons?!) rich and to displace mainly poor blacks. Wow, how devious of them. But I do have one question. How did they manage to miss displacing the poor whites that vastly outnumber the poor blacks in the US?
State laws made things worse. A combination of new town charters (which encourage creation of low-tax havens), zoning laws (which artificially concentrate both poverty and wealth) and local building codes (which make housing affordable to a select stratum) have sharply segregated, and to some extent created, social classes.
Who knew that the purpose of building codes was to make houses too expensive for the poor? This man is seriously disturbed.
Too bad the NY Times didn
Richard, Well, everything is relative, and you can’t get in the NYT without someleft-wing claptrap. I thought there was noticeably less of it here than usual.
Actually, freeways are often run through poor neighborhoods because it’s cheaper to condemn property there, and because there’s less likelihood of organized political opposition to it (at least, that would have been the case during the big freeway boom of the 1960s and 70s). And this is true, even when the traffic pattern would suggest otherwise. Freeways ruin urban neighborhoods with noise, pollution, and discontinuous surface streets to support limited access, so if a neighborhood isn’t poor before the freeway, it will be after.
I don’t think that’s why the Interstate highways were built, but I do think it has a lot to do with the alignments chosen for urban freeways. Do I need my tinfoil hat here?
Do I need my tinfoil hat here?
No. And Alex Bensky (9:26am), hate-filled people did scream at black students in 1957 Little Rock.
I read the blog because of its focus, “what should we do now?” Necessarily, that means understanding how we got here. There is good, bad, and ugly to honor, regret, and remember.
AMac, I am well aware that hate-filled people did scream at black students, and that to our shame it was necessary to call out the National Guard to ensure that kids who wanted to go to school could do so.
The question I posed–and I don’t have an answer–is whether there is any reason why of all the photographs available portraying race relations in the last half century, that one was picked.
That is a very famous photograph. The story is told in Warriors Don’t Cry, which is an account written by one of the Little Rock Nine. I know this because my daughter had to read the book for school, and has been confronted by that picture so many times she can recognize it upside down and across the room.
My daughter has the impression, perhaps from other reading on the subject, that the white girl prominently pictured with an ugly, hateful expression, later apologized and the black girl accepted her apology. I wonder what it would be like to have a picture taken at a moment when a teenager gets caught up in the emotion of the moment, through immaturity not questioning what her parents and other adults she trusts are saying and doing, and bitterly regret her actions later; and then to have that photograph follow her the rest of her life. What a purgatory.
Of course, when it comes to forced busing, Boston was not to be outdone by hate-filled whites screaming epithets and hurling stones at buses filled with scared black kids. Read “Common Ground” by Lukas, excellent examination of Boston’s agony as seen through the eyes of three families.
The end result? White flight, majority minority schools, high per-pupil costs, miserable performance in SATs, MCAS, poor high school graduation and college attendance rates, etc.
Do you mean that putting more white kids in the classroom with black kids in Boston is going to somehow miraculously educate the black kids? This has been tried all across the country, and it hasn’t worked yet. Getting an education requires actually LEARNING something, not just sitting in a classroom and expecting someone else to pour information into your head while you spend time ‘bein’ cool’ with your bro’s.
The definition of insanity: repeating the same action over and over, and expecting a different outcome.