BlackatMichigan Supplements

No on 2 Posters by Mollie Bates

2008-08-13T08:01:00.000-07:00

The Last Race Problem

2007-01-05T07:09:00.001-08:00

The Last Race Problem
New York Times, The (NY)
December 30, 2006
Author: ORLANDO PATTERSON
Estimated printed pages: 3

When W. E. B. DuBois, the patrician black leader, predicted in 1903 that the problem of the 20th century would be the color line, he had in mind an ethno-racial problem with a dual character. One side was the near complete exclusion of African-Americans and other minorities from the upper echelons and leadership of American society, public life and national identity. The other was the segregation of blacks from the social, communal and intimate cultural life of white Americans.

America's resolution of the public side of the color line would have amazed DuBois. The nation stands today as a global model in the sophistication and enforcement of its civil rights laws, the diversity of its elite, the participation of blacks and other minorities in its great corporations and its public cultural life, and in the embrace of blacks as an integral part of the nation and what it means to be an American.
A black man has led the world's most powerful military machine and stood a good chance of winning the presidency on the Republican ticket had he run; another is now a leading challenger for the Democratic nomination. A black woman, Oprah Winfrey, is perhaps the nation's most powerful cultural force; another, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is one of the world's most powerful people and is the nation's public face before the world. The recent decisive gubernatorial victory of Deval Patrick in Massachusetts is yet another instance of full public integration. And in popular culture, blacks' presence is out of all proportion to their numbers.

But when we turn to the other side of DuBois's color line, we find a stunning paradox: accompanying this public integration has been the near complete isolation of blacks from the private life of the white majority. Recent modest improvements notwithstanding, blacks, including the middle class, are nearly as segregated today as they were in DuBois's day. The typical black child now goes to a school that is more segregated than in the late '60s. Segregation is the last major race problem because poverty, per se, is no longer mainly the result of discrimination but part of a broader national crisis that includes whites. Poverty's greater incidence among blacks is largely due to segregation.

Compounding the paradox is the fact that the highest metropolitan segregation rates are now in the "liberal" regions of the Northeast and the Midwest, including New York. The paradox deepens when we learn from repeated polls that whites say they are comfortable living in neighborhoods that are approximately 25 percent black.

The celebrated tipping-point theory of Thomas Schelling, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, has long appeared to offer a pessimistic answer to the puzzle. It holds that even where a majority of whites favor having black neighbors, the all-white preference of just a few will always rapidly escalate into total segregation.

However, the economist William Easterly, after examining data on segregation over the past three decades, has demonstrated conclusively that Schelling's theory is groundless in regard to race. In the vast majority of neighborhoods studied, Easterly found no pattern of acceleration of white decline, no evidence of a sudden, extreme exodus at the fabled tipping point, but instead a steady, almost constant decline in the proportion of whites from one decade to the next. Moreover, the typical neighborhoods that did change from being predominantly white to predominantly black in this period still had a significant proportion of whites living in them.

So why does segregation persist? The evidence seems clear that, in sharp contrast with the past, the major cause is that blacks generally prefer to live in neighborhoods that are at least 40 percent black. Blacks mention ethnic pride and white hostility as their main reasons for not moving to white neighborhoods. But studies like Mary Pattillo-McCoy's ethnography of middle-class black ghettos show that the disadvantages, especially for youth, far outweigh the psychic gains.

It would be naive to discount persisting white racism, but other minorities, like Jews, have faced a similar dilemma and opted, with good reasons, for integration. The Jewish-American experience also shows that identity and integration are not incompatible, and that when the middle class moves, others follow. If America is ever to solve the second part of DuBois's color problem, it will be on the shoulders of the black middle class.
Edition: Late Edition - Final
Section: Editorial Desk
Page: 19
Index Terms: Op-Ed
Authors Note: Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, is a guest columnist.; Maureen Dowd is off today.
Copyright (c) 2006 The New York Times Company
Record Number: 2006-12-30-901075

The Covenant Book Review

2006-06-11T20:23:00.000-07:00

I think we’ve all heard of it, we’ve all had our opinions about it, but I’m not sure we’ve all read it. This weekend I took the time to sit down and read Tavis Smiley’s The Covenant. In fact, let me correct that, I took the time to read The Covenant. Many people that I have discussed the book with have expressed apprehension as well as interest in reading the book entirely based upon Tavis Smiley’s production of it. I would say, neither of these sentiments are actually warranted because the Covenant is a collection of essays and facts compiled by some of today’s leading scholars and activists. Tavis in this sense was a conduit but seems to leave himself out of it pretty well.

For a couple of years I have watched Tavis’ State of the Black Union gatherings on C-Span and my allegiance to them have shifted from year to year. I can’t front, they are really appealing. To me the State of Black America gatherings were like going to church, hearing a great preacher without having to give an offering or being guilted when “the doors of the church are open”. My main critique of Smiley’s gatherings was/is that they featured great speakers but there was a lack of substance that could be drawn from them. The Covenant is supposed to ground the oral acrobats of past gathering and till the soil of an action plan.

I decided to read the Covenant in its entirety after I heard from an old friend of mine who called me and wanted to know my views on the book. Before responding, I swallowed my pride and forthrightly admitted that I had not purchased the book and was considering purchasing it in the near future. In a non-indicting way, he said, “Wow, I figured you already had a copy, had read it, and had started some things around it.” I’m not sure if he invoked my ego or he humbled me, but I realized that I too had transformed into my own worst nightmare, someone who was 80 percent talk and 20 percent walk. So I pulled together my 12 dollars and picked up my copy. Many folks may not know that all proceeds from the purchase of the Covenant go directly to Third World Press. I didn’t realize this until I read Cornel West’s commentary at the close of the book. In this way Tavis ensured that a Black Press received his business, a great action in my view.

My purchase of the book also was interesting, since I was in a rush, I asked the Borders clerk, a white male in his twenties, if he had heard of the Covenant. He said, “Yeah, it’s back here… We have like a million of them.” At that moment I’m not sure if I was glad to know that the book has been so widely distributed (it’s a New York Times Bestseller) or mortified that so many copies had been purchased but no one was buying it anymore. I think I still feel a little of both.

So as I waited in the airport for a trip this Friday I began reading. I was surprised at the lack of hyperbole in the opening of the book. I won’t front, I was expecting a long Westian or Dysonian diatribe on the plight of Black people, you know… “a blues people” or “ because the streets is a shortstop cuz you’re slangin crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot”, but instead I was immediately taken straight to the meat.(On a side note, Dyson is conspicuously absent from the book, while West does sneak in small essay at it’s close.) The book, in my estimation, is a continuation of the lineage that Du Bois sought to establish with the Atlanta Conferences. While many have attempted systematic analyses of the conditions of African-Americans across a broad spectrum, few have successfully conducted these analyses and provided prescription for change that could be understood at the individual, family, community, and policy levels. The Covenant does this. Now of course the book is not perfect, one could desired deeper analysis from some of the contributors, but I ask you to suspend your “academic hat” of deconstruction and “critique for the sake of critique” and take the time to see how each essay fits into the whole. I consider myself decently well read, but the range of the topics covered here, the statistics presented, and the suggestions for change were enough to have me satiated as well as hungry for more insight and actions. The language is accessible, the range is pretty comprehensive, and the diversity in voice is powerful.

The Covenant tackles:
Health,
Education,
the Criminal Justice System,
Policing,
Community Development,
Voting Rights,
Rural Needs,
Economics Well-Being,
Environmental Justice,
and the Digital Divide.

This is all done in about 230 pages, this is no small feat!!!! Each covenant (or chapter) opens with an introductory essay on the subject matter. This essay is followed by bulleted facts on the conditions of African-Americans. Next prescriptions of what “the community” can do follow. They are followed by what elected officials can do. Then brief case studies of successful examples of grassroots efforts around these issues are described. Lastly each covenant closes with the endnotes from the essay which provide nice supplementary reading lists. At the end of each covenant, I found myself not only feeling more versed in the topic but also aware that many of us have been successful at affecting our conditions with small actions that yield big results. All in all, I was very impressed with this book. I think this book could provide everyone with some new insight and ideas for social change.

My south park alterego

2006-05-22T18:57:00.000-07:00

MLK Day Poem 2005

2006-01-18T10:58:00.000-08:00

I have a confession
I’ve gone back and forth
Forth and back
About this cat called Martin
I’d be lying if I told you if I said,
“His dream was my dream”
You’d be lying to me if you said,
“His dream was your dream”
You’d be lying if you said
you know Martin, you know Malcolm,
you know Shirley, you know Fannie Lou,
because I know,
you know,
what I know
and we know…. What they told to us!!!
See I’m sick of paper cuts
That I developed as I turned thru the pages of history
Trying to solve the eternal mystery of … his dream
I remember being the dream
I remember being the dreamer,
The smart black boy,
the most likely to succeed,
the articulate one,
the one who was making something out of himself while his peers chiefed blunts and swallowed crooked I coolers
congratulated by old black folks,
smiled at by young whites,
a foreigner in my own hood
I was the living set aside program,
so was that his dream???
Probably not, But today I have a dream
That’s right nearly 40 years later, I have a dream
I have a dream that we gathered on that Washington mall
I have a dream that he walked up on that stage
I have a dream that he grabbed that microphone and bellowed out from the bottom of his soul….
Shit, I don’t think ya’ll ain’t even ready for that yet
Let’s just talk about dreams
As a child I dreamed… I dreamed simple dreams, ice cream dreams
You know it, say it with me
I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream
But even today’s children’s dreams and screams for ice cream aren’t the same
No more running to the ice cream truck to get bomb pops, cookie sandwiches and sticky fingers
The damage of a dream deferred has already occurred
WAKE YOU ASS UP PEOPLE
Because when today’s kids go to the ice cream truck
They get philly blunts or better yet loosey cigarettes
Simply put, life’s simple pleasures are no longer simple
When I marinate on that, I begin to think I didn’t get his dream
Now don’t get me wrong
Martin was a visionary, a giant among dwarfs
But what I realized form my worm’s eye view is that when a man is head and shoulders about his peers
To those of trapped on the ground floor, his vision will never become clear
So I’m gonna ask for your patience,
I believe the only way to deal with a giant is to bring him down to our size
So as I collide with an icon whatever I get right is the will of God
And what ever I get wrong is all my own
With all necessary disclaimers, and words of caution for the weak minded and weak stomachs out of the way, I can ignore the historical revisionists and blamers
So we can talk about Martin and dreams, his dream, your dream, my dream, our dream
At its core, Martin’s dream was simple
He fought against three things: racism, poverty, and violence
A three headed monster that, today, is as pervasive as conservatives talking about self-reliance
It was the fuel to the fire of King’s defiance…
Now that we are getting on the same page about him, let me tell you about my dream
I have a dream that we gathered on that Washington mall
I have a dream that he walked up on that stage
I have a dream that he grabbed that microphone and bellowed out from the bottom of his soul…. You know, you ain’t right!
Yeah, that’s right, because nearly overnight it transformed from a dream to a nightmare
When city streets named for the man are the most violent of all places,
I remember, we didn’t get the dream
When Martin is spoken of without mention of Malcolm,
I realize, we didn’t get the dream
When Martin is spoken of as a religious leader rather than a leader of all,
I realize, we didn’t get the dream
Somewhere between hallmark holidays and black history month,
we created a mountain out of a man who wanted us to get to the mountain top
even if it wasn’t with him
we grabbed our best and brightest and prepared them to get us there
he’d tell us that was error number one
error number two would be changing his words to suit you
so when we hear gay rights aren’t civil rights from the like of Jesse,
Martin would bark from the podium, Damn right, in fact they are human rights
Civil rights went out with boycotts in Montgomery,
When Martin left us he had grown, he was concerned with the acknowledgement of global humanity
He was taught non-violence by a queer black man not Ghandi
See Martin saw beyond the obvious while we seek the obvious
Maybe that is why from the stage to Condoleeza and Colin Powell he would say this
There is no crime in progress for the black race,
But sitting silently and allowing others to control you
Is worse than being in blackface
Face the facts, times have changed
But our struggle has not
After September 11th the US began a conquest-slash-war in Iraq
Nearly the same stuff was happening when Martin got shot
On that hotel balcony we watched our dreams drip, dry and evaporate
Before our own eyes,
Martin would tell us he watched our confusion as we rioted from DC to every inner-city
But in my dream Martin would put us back on track
He’d make sure that we never moved to the suburbs
That we never gave up on unions, never turned our back on the rest of the globe
and continued the fights against racism, poverty, and violence
but now we commemorate his life with moments of silence
silence is the last thing Martin would have called for
In my dream Martin would give us the words of Audre Lorde,
“Your silence will not protect you.”
He’d remind us that violence against women is still violence,
He’d remind us that self hate is still violence
And that waiting for someone else to do it
Is both suicide and homicide in the same violent breath…
Martin from that podium would tell us his truths
So that we would struggle with ours more noblely
He’d tell us about the infidelity, the plagiarism, and his struggles with God
He’d tell us what it feels like to have the world turn their back on you
He’d tell us that we were just like him, just with more opportunity
See I’ve walked the clay hills of Georgia where Martin learned
I’ve walked the Edmond Pettus bridge where Martin marched
The difference between him and me is that I walked and forgot to bring others with me
That’s right, I have a confession, I struggle with Martin
Not because of his ideology, not because of integration, not because of his voice
But because of the work he never stopped doing
The work that we have yet to fully begin
From that podium I know Martin would open his mouth to smile at the appointment of Obama Barack
And remind him that he is still Black, and that whether he’s ready for the history books or not, the world is watching with a target on his back
See Martin saw color, don’t be confused
He advocated for affirmative action, fair housing, peace demonstrations
And all those “liberal” lunancies that happen on the Diag
You know the ones you shuffle by quickly gripping your bookbags
Yeah, Martin saw you and me do it and he would call us out,
Correction, he would call us to task
Martin didn’t indict,
he indicated we need to do more with what we have
see if we are waiting for the next civil rights movement
we’ll be in this same place next year, well dressed, educated
and I guarantee he would shed a tear
at the joy of our progress and the failings of our regress
I’m damn sick of Martin being the Negro lochness
talked about, but never known
larger than life…
not in my dream, not in his dream, and no longer in your dreams
because Martin is here
the time has arrived
there will be no more dress rehearsals
because I heard the end of his speech that they forgot to broadcast
the one that wasn’t mentioned in grade school history class
the one that slipped by historians and black intellectuals
In my dream, this is how he closed the evening
when the alarms of poverty, violence, and racism awake us in 2005
it is time for doing
there will be no more time for dreaming.