The thing that gets me is the lengths we are prepared to go,
and the money we are prepared to spend, to deal with the fallout of our dysfunction,
without actually dealing with the problem directly or really even summoning the
need to be honest about it. The US has spent billions since 9-11 arming local police
with military weaponry, which this week we saw turned on multi-racial
protesters demanding justice for a young black man living in what is “one of
the most racially segregated cities in the United States”.
I have been struck by the response of people from around the
world, particularly a man from Gaza who was photographed holding a sign saying:
“The Palestinian people know what mean to be shot unarmed because of your
ethnicity. #Ferguson#Justice.” Twitter has been alight with comments from
Gazans explaining to protesters in Ferguson proper medical techniques for managing
a tear gas attack. Things really got going from a perspective of media awareness when reporters from the Washington
Post and the Huff Post were arrested and others from al Jazeera were gassed. Nothing
wakes up reporters to injustice quite as much as when an event when one of their tribe is
mishandled.
Pundits will no doubt spend the days ahead parsing the events
that led to this conflagration. We will hear many levels of sober dialogue about
police and community relations. Hearings will be held about the militarization
of police forces across the country. Questions will be asked about why a police
force of 55, working in a community of just over 20,000, needed a military assault
vehicle. I grew up in a town about that size, Streamwood, IL. I was thinking this
week what it would have looked like to see an MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush
Protected) vehicle headed down Parkside Circle towards Monaco’s drugstore. What
was absurd is now real. Yet it seems we are not even capable of having a real dialogue
about where we are and the problems in our communities.
We can start with the lack of a quality education. For all
the talk about the failure of the American education system, the basic differences
in educational opportunities between districts located in poor communities and
those in wealthier ones are clear. It’s hard to listen to the debates between union
types and so called reformer types, without wanting to ask the obvious question:
“How can education ever fill the gap brought on by a home broken by poverty?”
While it is possible for districts and schools to rise above the limitations of
their location, it is so much harder when kids are not getting enough food, or of
they reside in an environment of fear and despair, so that what we see in the
mean is failure. From the jumping off point
of a poor education the most optimistic path leads to a poorly paying job. Too
many do not even get that far.
The great disparity of both income and wealth between
African Americans and whites and the divide in employment opportunities between
the two communities is worse now than in 1960. With the collapse of manufacturing,
income inequality is greater than 1960. While this statistic includes all races
it has had an inordinate impact on communities of color who in the early 70’s were
just starting to climb the economic ladder out of decades of isolation. Soon after America
turned its back on the War on Poverty and programs they felt most
benefited other communities. For a brief moment Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy
and others shamed America into seeing ourselves as connected, then Vietnam,
battles over busing, and targeted racist political appeals growing out of Nixon’s
“Southern Strategy"-- which explicitly attempted to racialize poverty programs-- drove poor Southern whites to vote their racial animus over their economic self-interest. This is a pattern that continues today. How quickly white Americans settled back into our
comfortable calculation of them and us. From
then on America surrendered its efforts to solve its problem with race,
and the poverty that attends it, choosing instead to paper the issue over with fine
speeches and a celebration of Dr. King on his birthday.
While it’s true that millions of people of color rose to capture
some measure of the middle class American Dream, those that remain are poorer
and more isolated in their poverty and neglect than ever. No amount of readings
of the “I Have a Dream” speech has or will change that.
Most people know of the staggering number of young African
American men under control by one means or another of the criminal justice
system. The War on Drugs has turned the increasingly for profit prison system
in America into a warehouse of young black and brown men. Prison populations, which even through Jim
Crow and legal segregation were majority white in 1960, have turned
overwhelmingly Black and Latino. Since
more than half that serve time return after being released for another crime,
the system has become a revolving door of despair, reaffirming a pattern of
petty criminality and incarceration rather than breaking it. White liberals,
like myself, have spent decades arguing with other white liberals about whether
the criminal justice system creates the problem and how to measure the
responsibility of the incarcerated, but no amount of research and debate has
broken the cycle.
While some may have forgotten or simply chosen to ignore how
the problems of poverty exacerbate issues within our communities, there is
little doubt that there are two criminal justice systems, one for white folks
and one for the poor minorities, two educational systems, two community development
systems and so forth. Moreover, willful decisions were made. Robert Moses, the
patron saint of New York City Parks, carved massive section of urbanized
housing with highways and other development projects in such a way as to
totally isolate whole communities. Nicholas Lehman, in his excellent book, The
Promised Land, details the ways Richard Daley did the same in my beloved Chicago.
Our schools and housing communities either never escaped or
are returning to levels of segregation which were identified as totally unacceptable
in 1965. Meanwhile in almost every public sphere a majority of the Supreme
Court has taken the position that the battle is over, and in the case of the
most extreme justices challenged whether it ever ought to have been fought in the
first place. Apparently the good guys won on Voting, in Housing, Affirmative
action. Everywhere. Game over, time to move on. Congress has abandoned any
desire for governance. Politicians with national aspirations, even the
President himself, are afraid to say anything about poverty or race. Every
program is measured by its impact on the middle class. It is as if America has
surrendered its willingness to address or even talk about the stain of our historical
legacy- racism.
Class plays an increasingly important role in some people’s
willingness to see themselves as different or better than their brothers and sisters.
Well off and well-funded Conservative African Americans now roam the land waving
their fingers at those less fortunate than they. We see an increasingly
willingness for those that escaped the desperation of poverty to roll up the
road behind them rather than encouraging a broader and more expansive effort to
pave an even better road, both metaphorically and literally. Infrastructure
spending has become a dirty word. Herman Cain ran an ugly campaign of us and
them, blame game politics, before he imploded amidst a flurry of not ready for prime
time behavior (“Uz-beki-beki-stan”), punctuated by claims of sexually inappropriate
behavior. His 9-9-9 campaign was a naked attempt to exacerbate the transfer of wealth
from the poor and working class to those already obscenely wealthy and absurdly
powerful.
So then we come back to Ferguson, Missouri. Every act by the
police and local officials has been and will continue to be minutely dissected.
The local police are clearly a bunch of jackasses. In action after action they
have shown their contempt for the community. After what we have seen does anyone
really doubt a police officer in that department may have felt that almost any
show of force would be justified, up to and including shooting a young unarmed
man with his hands in the air? After calm is restored, the questions will
remain. For these protests are about so much more than the isolation of the police
from the community? If calm returns tomorrow, for what reason would anyone
abandon their sense of despair? Does St Louis County have some new Fair Housing
Plan in the works? Is some new approach to breaking barriers of race in achieving
access to good schools being considered? Job training? Summer work programs for
young people next year? We see the assault weapons and military equipment. We’ve
heard the lectures about bootstraps. What else you got?
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