“Relations among African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans are fraught with tension and negative stereotypes,” the Washington Post reported recently, referring to the results of a new poll by New America Media (HatTip to Ed Chin).
The Post, following the lead of New America Media, tried hard to put a positive gloss on the glum news, adding “… but the three groups share core values and a desire to get along better.” The article was pretty mum about what those “core values” might be, and I found the evidence for the “desire to get along” less than overwhelming: “…more than 85 percent of responders said they should put aside their differences and work together to help their communities.” In other words, a full 15% of the black, Asian, and Hispanic respondents had no “desire to get along” at all.
Clearly the poll’s major finding, however, as summarized on the New America Media site linked above, is the distrust, dislike, and friction among the three groups surveyed:
The poll found that friction between ethnic and racial groups, which at times has erupted into highly-publicized incidents around the country, is clearly rooted in the mistrust that the groups harbor towards each other, as well as the sentiment that other groups are mistreating them or are detrimental to their own future. For instance, 44% of Hispanics and 47% of Asians are “generally afraid of African Americans because they are responsible for most of the crime.” Meanwhile, 46% of Hispanics and 52% of African Americans believe “most Asian business owners do not treat them with respect.” And half of African Americans feel threatened by Latin American immigrants because “they are taking jobs, housing and political power away from the Black community.”
As dramatic as these findings are, however, in many respects they are what the Clintons always refer to as “old news” whenever some new evidence of scandal or misdeed comes to light. As long ago as 1975, at the dawn of the era of preferences, Nathan Glazer presciently predicted what would happen as a result of the government dispensing favors based on race and ethnicity. As I quoted him here, racial and ethnic preferences predictably lead to
a real Balkanization, in which group after group struggles for the benefits of special treatment…. The demand for special treatment will lead to animus against other groups that already have it, by those who think they should have it and don’t….
The rising emphasis on group difference which government is called upon to correct might mean the destruction of any hope for the larger fraternity of all Americans.
In that post I continued:
that was Nathan Glazer, in AFFIRMATIVE DISCRIMINATION (Basic Books, 1975), and if anything he underestimated the divisiveness of bestowing governmental favors on the basis of race and ethnicity. Now that liberals have abandoned the formerly core value holding that every individual is entitled to be treated without regard to race, creed, or color in favor of multiculturalism and group rights, the very idea of “the larger fraternity of all Americans” is regarded by many as nothing more than right-wing cant.
Glazer wrote in 1975; my post above is from 2002. Two years later I returned to that same point, and Glazer again, here in a post on “Preferences and Group Conflict”:
On Saturday the New York Times ran a long, interesting article about increasing tensions betweent the black and Hispanic communities. The high, or low, point for me was the following quote from Keith Murphy, host of a radio talk show in Milwaukee with a mostly black audience:
“It’s still a matter of distrust,” he said. “It’s a feeling among African-Americans that Latinos are coming in and getting the jobs and are getting preferential treatment.”
I’ve never heard Keith Murphy’s program, and so I don’t know whether he thinks preferences based on race or ethnicity are bad in principle or bad only when they go to Hispanics. His comment, however, exemplifies one of the most corrosive (as well as one of the most predictable) effects of preferences: their unerring ability to turn group against group in a mad scramble for the scraps of favoritism.
Nathan Glazer, back in 1975….
Of course the recognition that racial discrimination and playing racial favorites is corrosive of American unity did not begin with Nathan Glazer in 1975. In what remains perhaps the most persuasive and eloquent statement of that view, Gunnar Myrdal wrote in his classic AN AMERICAN DILEMMA in 1944 (if that link doesn’t work, just go to http://books.google.com and search for it) that
It is difficult to avoid the judgment that this “American Creed” is the cement in the structure of this great and disparate nation. [From p. 3, found by searching “American Creed” on the Google book page cited above]
And from p. 52:
The split of the nation into a dominant “American” group and a larger number of minority groups means that American civilization is permeated by animosities and prejudices attached to ethnic origin or what is popularly recognized as the “race” of a person. These animosities or prejudices are commonly advanced in defense of various discriminations which tend to keep the minority groups in a disadvantaged economic and social status. They are contrary to the American Creed, which is emphatic in denouncing differences made on account of “race, creed or color.” …. [Emphasis Added]
I wonder what Myrdal would say if he could see us now, when our society’s attitude shapers and opinion leaders in the major media, academia, the corporate world, and virtually (actually?) the entire leadership ranks of one of our two great political parties are equally “emphatic” in their rejection of “The American Creed,” having abandoned it in favor of their faddish infatuation with racial and ethnic “difference” … and differential treatment of “groups” (they no longer seem to see individuals) based on race and ethnicity.
Shame on them.
John, could you please point out where respondants discussed preference and affirmative action? I didn’t read closely, but I did not see mention of preferences, affirmative action, or animosity resulting from these practices.
what is going on in the US is common to the entire world. We are not used to it in the same way, because the “minorities” really were minor, that is, their numbers were small, and because the the values that make the lives of minorities better, infinitely better, than the lives of disadvantaged groups elsewhere. The more diversity there is, the more we see people wanting to benefit their own and not others, and people being less able to even pretend that we are all in this together. When the nation is at the point, where half is “minority” the american dream will be at an end. The chances of the nation being able to reproduce what made people come here in the first place becomes slimmer. the more diverse people come the less they can cooperate. also the culture of the “minorities” as you can see from where they came from is not conducive to creating the kind of culture we call american or liberal. This does not matter when they really are minority but it will matter when they are half or more. And all this is not due to white racism, it is due to human racism.
This post omits my animosities. I’m white, hetero and male.
Believe me, I’ve got plenty of animosities toward the quota crowd. Throughout my life, I’ve been shoved down one tier in hiring and promotion to make room for the black quota hire, who has always and inevitably been incompetent, and subsequently failed.
It makes little difference that the job the black quota hire failed at must ultimately be given to me. How about I get the job from the get go? Over the course of my lifetime, kowtowing to the quota system has cost me tens of thousands of dollars.
Apparently, my animosities (along with my credentials) don’t really count in the same way as black and Hispanic animosities. Believe me, I’m just as pissed off. If not more…
I won’t ever be voting for a Democrat again. Can’t say I’m that thrilled with the Republicans either. I’m stuck with them by default.
john, i’m not seeing where the article says or implies that “a full 15% of the black, Asian, and Hispanic respondents had no ‘desire to get along’ at all.”
Excerpts from:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/753041/posts
Posted on 09/18/2002 11:50:34 AM PDT
The hate that dare not speak its name
Black Racism By Ying Ma
In what passes for discussions on race these days, small problems are often blown up large, while real traumas are completely ignored. For instance, despite what President Clinton’s “Race Initiative” panel has said, the very rawest racial conflicts in present-day America don’t even fit into the tidy mold of white-majority-oppressing-colored-minority that activists constantly promote. Though civil rights groups and most of the media studiously ignore this fact, the nation’s most fractious racial battles are now conflicts between minority populations. Particularly horrific is the animosity directed at Asian Americans by blacks in low-income areas of urban America.
At age ten, I immigrated from China to Oakland, California, a city filled with crime, poverty, and racial tension. In elementary school, I didn’t wear name-brand clothing or speak English. My name soon became “Ching Chong,” “Chinagirl,” and “Chow Mein.” Other children laughed at my language, my culture, my ethnicity, and my race. I said nothing.
After a few years, I began to speak English, but not well enough to trade racial insults. On rides home from school I avoided the back of the bus so as not to be beaten up. But even when I sat in the front, fire crackers, paper balls, small rocks, and profanity were thrown at me and the other “stupid Chinamen.” The label “Chinamen” was dished out indiscriminately to Vietnamese, Koreans, and other Asians. When I looked around, I saw that the other “Chinamen” tuned out the insults by eagerly discussing movies, friends, and school.
During my secondary school years, racism, and then the combination of outrage and bitterness that it fosters, accompanied me home on the bus every day. My English was by now more fluent than that of those who insulted me, but most of the time I still said nothing to avoid being beaten up. In addition to everything else thrown at me, a few times a week I was the target of sexual remarks vulgar enough to make Howard Stern blush. When I did respond to the insults, I immediately faced physical threats or attacks, along with the embarrassing fact that the other “Chinamen” around me simply continued their quiet personal conversations without intervening. The reality was that those who cursed my race and ethnicity were far bigger in size than most of the Asian children who sat silently.
The racial harassment wasn’t limited to bus rides. It surfaced in my high school cafeteria, where a middle-aged Chinese vendor who spoke broken English was told by rowdy students each day at lunch time to “Hurry up, you dumb Ching!” On the sidewalks, black teenagers and adults would creep up behind 80-year-old Asians and frighten them with sing-song nonsense: “Yee-ya, Ching-chong, ah-ee, un-yahhh!” At markets and in the streets of poor black neighborhoods, Asians would be told, “Why the hell don’t you just go back to where you came from!”
When it came time for college, I left this ugly world for a beautiful school far away. Finally, it was possible to pursue a life without racial harassment backed by the threat of violence. I chose not to return to my old neighborhood after college, but I am often reminded of the racial discrimination I endured there. On a bus not too long ago I saw a black woman curse at a Korean man, “You f—ing Chinese person! Didn’t you hear that I asked you to move yo’ ass? You too stupid to understand English or something?”
In poor neighborhoods across this country Asians endure daily racial hatred just as I did. Because of their language deficiencies, their small size, their fear of violent confrontations, they endure in silence. Unlike me, many of them will never depart for a new life in a beautiful place far, far away. So each day they grow more bitter against a group that much of America refuses to acknowledge to be capable of racism: African Americans.
In a fair and peaceful world, racial harassment will be decried without regard to its source. The problem today is that prominent black leaders rule out even the possibility of black racism. Activists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson intone that racism equals “prejudice plus power,” and that since blacks in America lack power, they are simply not capable of practicing racism against anyone. John Hope Franklin, chair of President Clinton’s race panel, angrily insists that racism is something suffered, not dished out, by blacks. Many black professors, writers, polemicists, and politicians repeat the same mantra. What might appear to be black racism, writes syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, actually boils down not to racism but to acts of crime and rudeness from the perpetrators, and tough luck for the recipients.
Rationalizers of black racism ignore the fact that identical actions inflicted by whites would be universally decried as intolerable. Ultimately, their arguments simply grease the skids for further traumatizing of “unlucky” victims. And to real-life casualties of racial animosity, motivation is not especially relevant. Loss is loss. Pain is pain.
Unfortunately, Asian Americans—and especially their leaders—have failed to speak out on this matter. Complaints from wounded individuals regularly boil into public view, however. In mid-August, I attended a crowded press conference held in New York’s Chinatown to discuss Indonesia’s history of discrimination against ethnic Chinese (which peaked this May in a wave of bloody anti-Chinese riots). One woman at the event began to hysterically scream out her frustrations over black American racism against Asians. The woman, Mee Ying Lin, shouted, “Chinese suffer from racial discrimination by blacks every day. We should help persecuted Chinese overseas, but why is no one dealing with our own troubles in America?”
Please read the entire essay on:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/753041/posts
Anita writes:
>>>” The more diversity there is, the more we see people wanting to benefit their own and not others, and people being less able to even pretend that we are all in this together.”
Where do you see examples of this in American History? Any talk of diversity is relatively within the last generation or so. Do you think ALL Americans really thought “we are all in this together” before 1964?
Anita writes:
>>>”When the nation is at the point, where half is “minority” the american dream will be at an end.”
Do you consider the “American Dream” to only apply to the CURRENT majority group?
What’s your definition of the American Dream and is it related to Gunnar Mydral’s “American Creed?”
–Cobra
Cobra,
Healthy assimilation in America means accepting and honoring American values.
One can argue about the exact definitions of these “values,” but for the most part, Americans would agree that they mean hard work, reward for taking risks, innovating, obeying laws, raising children well, opportunity to move amongst social classes, etc.
The vast majority of whites in America hold a common set of these values, whether they were from Poland, Italy, Russia, England, etc.
Many blacks hold these values.
Unfortunately, a very large (and disproportionate fraction) of blacks born in America do not hold these values. They are lazy, use/sell drugs, and kill each other (go look up the statistics).
Foreign-born blacks seem to be far more “American.”
The reason that American-born blacks often fail so miserably has nothing to do with slavery. It has to do with people like you who have told them for the last 30 years that they don’t need to work. They can simply be “diverse” and still get a job. Or, they can pull people out of trucks and beat them to death with a brick, and they still won’t go to jail. Or, they can gang beat a white teen in Jenna senseless, and the greatest black heroes in America (Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) will save them. Or, they can axe-murder their white wife and a black lawyer and black jurors will set them free, upon which they can search for the “real” killer on golf courses. Or, that they can impregnate their bitches and ho’s and then leave their teenage wives. Or, that they can pursue the “thug life,” as glamorized by one of the most accomplished black heroes ever to have lived – Tupac Shakur.
What these people need to hear is that all this is NOT good, and that this behavior will not cut it if they expect to be respected in “America.”
You can spin your oppression rap any way you want, but I guarantee you that blacks will never be respected until they actually earn what they have in this country, just as did the devastatingly poor white immigrants who clawed their way up American society over the past three or four generations.
Cobra,
american dream means you a black person and me being able to get computers and write whatever we want on them. it means that I have a house that I worked for and purchased and it can’t be taken away because of my religion or class or color. It means that my cousin who was in jail for felonies came out and opened a business and is not buying a second house that he is going to sell. It means my other cousin who has never worked just had two knee operations that she did not pay for and got the best of care. It means that my african neighbors came here, got education, jobs, and everything else that there is to get. there is no other place, except maybe england, where strangers just pop up, here I am, I want a job, a place to live, food to eat, free school for my kids, and they get it. The fact that you feel that america is so bad is pitiful. If you think america is a hellhole, what do you think when you consider the rest of humanity, where slavery and racism and contempt for women are not even questioned. you are the problem that I described. Not even a little appreciative, not even able to admit there is a difference between this place and others, when it is gone, when liberal democracy is gone, it is not coming back. that will not leave us in any good place, I mean by us blacks.
ACF said,
The vast majority of whites in America hold a common set of these values, whether they were from Poland, Italy, Russia, England, etc.
Many blacks hold these values.
===========================
The constant role of perpetual “victim” played by Cobra as a result of racism simply does not fly today. He should read the article posted previously.
Most Asian immigrants and Asian Americans hold these same American values (hard work, family values, respect for education, etc,) since they came onto these shores almost 200 years ago, many as indentured servants (a condition akin to slavery).
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/753041/posts
Posted on 09/18/2002 11:50:34 AM PDT
The hate that dare not speak its name
Black Racism
By Ying Ma
Anita writes:
>>>”american dream means you a black person and me being able to get computers and write whatever we want on them.”
You’re saying that blacks in Canada can’t do this also? What about England? South Africa? I can’t go to Australia or New Zealand and buy a computer and type something?
Anita writes:
>>>”it means that I have a house that I worked for and purchased and it can’t be taken away because of my religion or class or color.”
Oh really?
>>>”Eminent domain refers to the power possessed by the state over all property within the state, specifically its power to appropriate property for a public use.”
http://www.expertlaw.com/library/real_estate/eminent_domain.html
We’re all at the mercy of the State, Anita–and God help you if the developer/contractor/corporation/team owner made any major monetary contributions to whomever is currently in State office.
Anita writes:
>>>”It means that my cousin who was in jail for felonies came out and opened a business and is not buying a second house that he is going to sell. It means my other cousin who has never worked just had two knee operations that she did not pay for and got the best of care. It means that my african neighbors came here, got education, jobs, and everything else that there is to get. there is no other place, except maybe england, where strangers just pop up, here I am, I want a job, a place to live, food to eat, free school for my kids, and they get it. The fact that you feel that america is so bad is pitiful.”
Anita, the things you celebrate here are the LEAST I should expect from a nation with the history America has in regards to minorities.
Do I expect MORE?
Darn straight.
I have a problem with a government that has law enforcement policies that PROFILE and TARGET minorities to the point where they’re being warehoused in prisons, and shackled with non-violent felonies that in many cases strip them of their constitutional voting rights.
This is in lieu of the fact that NON-FELON African-Americans are targetted for voter disenfranchisement via:
False Felon Purges:
http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1
Vote Caging:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/330/video.html
I have a problem with the richest nation on earth 1) not having universal health care for its citizens and 2) having a second-class health care system for African-Americans.
Oh? You didn’t know?
>>>”Background:
In the United States, black patients generally receive lower-quality health care than white patients. Black patients may receive their care from a subgroup of physicians whose qualifications or resources are inferior to those of the physicians who treat white patients.
Methods:
We performed a cross-sectional analysis of 150,391 visits by black Medicare beneficiaries and white Medicare beneficiaries 65 years of age or older for medical “evaluation and management” who were seen by 4355 primary care physicians who participated in a biannual telephone survey, the 2000–2001 Community Tracking Study Physician Survey.”
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/351/6/575
You KNOW I could rattle off the list of hiring discrimination, housing discrimination, school resegregation, etc.
But you KNOW all of this already, right?
Anita writes:
>>>”you are the problem that I described. Not even a little appreciative, not even able to admit there is a difference between this place and others, when it is gone, when liberal democracy is gone, it is not coming back. that will not leave us in any good place, I mean by us blacks.”
I suppose you would have me subscribe to some sort of “Stockholm Syndrome”…where over the course of time, I’m supposed feel sympathetic towards those doing me harm?
I get the theory, Anita. I really do. There are people out there who seem to put up with a whole lot of heinous acts. They often make deals with themselves.
Some battered, or cheated on wives keep their mouths shut because the husband’s a good provider. They may have kids involved, and they don’t want to break up the home for their sakes.
Is this the advice you’re giving us, Anita? That we should IGNORE racism? That we should silently suffer whatever abuses, oppressions and indignities of the WMPS waylays us with for…what?
So the boat doesn’t get rocked? So the anti-affirmative action types feel better about themselves? We should take one (or a couple dozen) for the “team” because there’s some country in Africa where the citizens might have it worse?
Come on, Anita. It’s almost 2008.
ACF writes:
>>>”Healthy assimilation in America means accepting and honoring American values.”
Really? If you were to ask somebody living outside of America what they think of “American Values”…
>>>”In much of the world there is broad and deepening dislike of American values and a global backlash against the spread of American ideas and customs.”
http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=256
Not even Canadians really cut us a break:
>>>”Canadian attitudes are also somewhat similar to European attitudes in their perception of American values, American justice and the American system of government. They are divided on American values (36% positive, 35% negative), marginally negative (by 35% to 31%) on the American system of government, and somewhat more negative (by 40% to 28%) on American courts and system of justice.”
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/news/allnewsbydate.asp?NewsID=786
ACF writes:
>>>”Unfortunately, a very large (and disproportionate fraction) of blacks born in America do not hold these values. They are lazy, use/sell drugs, and kill each other (go look up the statistics).”
Stereotypes are fun, aren’t they ACF? I bet if you took the time here you could post negative stereotypes on EVERY racial, ethnic and religeous group in America. Doesn’t change the fact that assimilation is a two-way street, and was paved CENTURIES ago as far as Black/White Relations go in this country.
But I forget, you’re the guy who “doesn’t care about anything that happened more than 15 years ago”, so how can you make any LEGITIMATE argument about generational assimilation patterns among the races in America?
–Cobra
Cobra,
You should read http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/753041/posts
The hate that dare not speak its name
Black Racism
By Ying Ma