The "post-racial" legacy that wasn't.

Tonight we will hear from Clarence B. Jones as our Field Negro education series continues.

"President Obama has less than two years remaining in his presidency. Recent events have caused me to rethink some initial conclusions I had been considering about the future historic legacy of his administration.

The fight against ISIS, the ongoing negotiations with Iran, the U.S. Supreme Court's pending review of a key section of the Affordable Care Act, the events of Ferguson, the National Urban League's Annual Report on "The State of Black America," and numerous racially charged incidents, including the fraternity song at Oklahoma University, the confrontation between police and an African-American student over the validity of his campus ID, the unexplained hanging of an African-American man from a tree in Mississippi, racist police behavior in Fort Lauderdale, and a rising tidal wave of race-based resistance to President Obama mandate a more clinical review of his presidency in the future pantheon of American history.

When he was elected in 2008, there was an outpouring of media commentary from the left, right, and moderates.

Businessweek's  Nov. 11, 2008, issue described Barack Obama as "A Leader for the 'We' Generation":

The sweeping victory of Barack Obama ushers in a new era of leadership that will affect every aspect of American institutions and that sounds a death knell for the top-down, power-oriented leadership prevalent in the 20th century.

  A new style of "bottom-up, empowering" leadership focusing on collaboration will sweep the country. A new wave of 21st century authentic leaders will take oversee U.S. institutions of every type: business, education, health care, religion, and nonprofits. These new leaders recognize that an organization of empowered leaders at every level will outperform "command-and-control" organizations every time.

Recent estimates are that thanks to the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, about 16 million additional persons now have health insurance. Assuming this is so, this is encouraging if not remarkable. However, as I begin to rethink and review the Obama presidency, I think history will judge it based principally on two other matters: his foreign policy and the consequences of his presidency on the unfinished business of race relations in America.

Left with the financial and ideological results of our preemptive attack on and invasion of Iraq and the winding down of our war in Afghanistan, Obama has had to develop and implement a foreign policy limiting Iran's nuclear ambitions and safeguarding America from the maniacal, ideologically driven violence of ISIS. How much he succeeds or fails in this effort will indelibly define his presidential legacy.

However, what is likely to overshadow all other issues defining President Obama's legacy is how successful he was, as America's 44th president and first African-American president, at resolving the issue of race in America.

In writing about the 2012 campaign to reelect President Obama, I wrote:

There is one issue ... notwithstanding the paramount importance of the economy, that continues to be the common denominator of the presidential election in 2012, as it was in 2008: the historic issue of race and race relations in America. 

Not since the Civil War and the failed Congressional Reconstruction thereafter has race been such an explicit or implicit national issue. "Race relations" principally, but not exclusively, between black and white America continues to be the 800-lb. gorilla in most American households.

 Perhaps only surpassed by sex, is any public discussion -- or lack of discussion -- about race in America weighted down with more hypocrisy, ambivalence, fear and misunderstanding.

In the most simplistic sense, use or disuse of the so-called "race card" will cease only when there is a completely new "deck" from which the card is drawn.

Some 600,000 Americans killed one another during our civil war over the issue of the abolition or continuation of slavery. However, as Eric Foner writes in Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Business:

Virtually from the moment the Civil War ended, the search began for legal means of subordinating a volatile black population that regarded economic independence as a corollary of freedom and the old labor discipline as a badge of slavery.

 

The failure of Reconstruction irrevocably hindered the intended outcome of the Civil War: the full restoration of all the rights and privileges of citizenship owed to African-American slaves under our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, as amended with its Bill of Rights
Lest we forget, as James W. Lowen writes in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, "Perhaps the most pervasive theme in our history is the domination of black America by white America. Race is the sharpest and deepest division in American life."
In a speech titled "Mystic Chords of Memory," delivered at the University of Vermont on Sept. 12, 1991, celebrated documentary filmmaker Ken Burns said:

The black-white rift stands at the very center of American history. ... If we forget that -- if we forget the great stain of slavery that stands at the heart of our country, our history, our experiment -- we forget who we are, and we make the great rift deeper and wider.

 

Presenting a more optimistic outlook on race, in a December 2014 interview on BET, President Obama said:

It's important to recognize that as painful as these incidents are, we can't equate what is happening now to what happened 50 years ago. If you talk to your parents, your grandparents, they'll tell you things are better. Not good, in some cases, but better. The reason it's important to understand that progress has been made is that it then gives us hope we can make even more progress.

Regrettably, however, our 2015 existential reality repeatedly confirms that a deep and abiding derivative of the white supremacist racism of slavery is still alive and well under the presidency of Barack Obama. It is more insidious than ever, only today existing in a form commensurate with the ubiquitous and advanced technology of the communication of information in the second decade of the 21st century.  

Perhaps unfairly, but I believe unavoidably, Obama's presidential legacy will be determined by the success or failure of our collective effort to finally resolve the issue of race under his presidency. Historically, this is likely to be more definitive than any other single issue.

 I had hoped it would be otherwise." [Source]

Call me crazy, but I am not a bit surprised that race relations got worse and not better under Barack Obama.

Did people really believe that racists all over America were going to say: Oh, we have a black president now;  I don't despise black people anymore. Please!

The problem with this president is that he also bought into the "post-racial" hype. And, unfortunately for him, by the time he realized that there was no such thing, his enemies had already gained the upper hand.

It's a shame that Americans wanted the election of Barack Obama to absolve them from the ugly stain of racism that continues to sully our history. That was never going to happen. There is no  magical mystical Negro with a kumbaya wand to wave away bigotry and ignorance.

That will take generations of education and self-awareness, as well as a willingness for us as a country to acknowledge that the problem still exists.


  

"The state of black America."

More knowledge from the Field Negro education series:

"Last year was a year of great tumult in America. Income, education and equality gaps have remained steady. The voting rights of many Americans were eroded or greatly limited. And the killings of unarmed black men by police and later the lack of indictments in those killings sparked massive unrest, illuminating the trust gap between many communities of color and law enforcement.
Even as 2014 marked a year of momentous job growth, many have not seen their job and income prospects buoyed by the upsurge.

“The dark cloud inside this silver lining is that too many people are still being left behind,” Marc Morial, head of the National Urban League, wrote in the organization’s 2015 State of Black America Report, the annual indexing of black and Latino equity in America.

I’d like to be here reporting to each and every one of you that equality is flourishing. I’d like to be here reporting that equal opportunity is abundant and flowing. I’d like to be able to say that racism is dead and gone forever and ever from American life,” Morial said during an event in Washington. “But the reality is that we cannot. And the reality is we have this obligation. This duty, this essential role to report the facts and the truth and how it is today even if those fact and that truth are extremely painful.”

The report, the “State of Black America – Save our Cities: Education, Jobs + Justice” was released on Thursday morning during the event. This year’s report, The National Urban League’s 39th, is available in an all-digital format featuring reports, graphs and articles.

The facts as stated in the report are mostly dismal and stark, particularly in terms of economic parity for blacks and Hispanics and whites. Despite 12 straight months of private sector job gains above 200,000 and a national unemployment rate of just 5.5%, the unemployment rates for blacks and Hispanics in many of the country’s major metropolitan areas is as much as 3-to-1 or 4-to-1.
The numbers are even more disheartening in terms of the wealth gap. The net worth for African-Americans was $6,000, for Hispanics it was $7,000 and for whites it was $110,500.

The disparities weren’t, as some might intuit, limited to the gritty urban cores of the Northeast or impoverished areas of the South. San Francisco, which Morial described as a picturesque, “bastion of progressive politics,” ranked 70th out of 70 major metropolitan areas in medium income equality.

 

In that city, the average medium income for black households was just $39,000 compared to $95,000 for whites.

According to the report, which uses a formula of quantifiable factors to produce its equality index, African-Americans in 2014 were just 72% equal to whites with full equality between the two groups being 100%. Hispanics were slightly better at 78%.

The equality index included economics (black 55.8%, Hispanic 61.7%), health (black 79.8%, Hispanic 106.9%0, education (black 76.1%, Hispanic 74.6%), social justice (black 60.6%, Hispanic 72.7%) and civic engagement (black 104%, Hispanic 71%).
“Education is not the automatic great equalizer,” Morial said.

Even college educated African-Americans faced drastically higher unemployment rates compared to their white counterparts with the same level of educational attainment, according to the report.
Yet, even with the deep and lingering disparities 2014 was indeed a banner year in some educational aspects. The high school graduation rates for American students are the highest they’ve been in history, dropout rates are at historic lows and there are more students of color in college than ever before.

But in the aggregate of the broader indexing of education, employment and justice, the outlook for black and brown people remains troubling as ever.

“What do we say and how would we frame the state of black America for 2015,” Morial said. “I must use the word crisis.”

On the justice front fewer African-Americans were victims of violent crimes. There are more black lawmakers in Congress than ever before, 48. And the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder has confronted misconduct by law enforcement and worked hard to improve police and community relations, Morial said.

Yet, 2014 was a watershed moment in the collision of violence and law enforcement.

Perhaps no incident of last year exemplified that crisis – in the confluence of income, housing and social justice concerns— as the killing of Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri and the local and national fallout that followed. Long before Brown’s killing by former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson last August, the small city in the suburbs of St. Louis was rife with income inequality and deep residential segregation. While blacks made up the majority of the population there, the city’s leadership was majority white including nearly all of the police force, the city council and school board.

Brown’s killing sparked protests and riots that spilled nationwide that focused on state sanctioned violence against blacks but also the various inequities in the criminal justice system for African-Americans, in particular young black men.

The black community in Ferguson had “no role in their government, with no representation in their police department, so when the incident happened it was as Langston Hughes poems says, it exploded,” Morial said, referencing Hughes’s poem “A Raisin in the Sun.”

The Justice Department recently released a scathing report that outlined a broad pattern and practices of abuses and violations of both federal law and the constitutional rights of African-Americans by police.

“While America may have seen the reaction, the Justice Department report put a spotlight on a long system of practices in Ferguson, Missouri, there are Fergusons here and there are Fergusons there and there are Fergusons everywhere,” Morial said. “America today is a tale of two nations. It is a tale of two Americas. It is a tale of some who have achieved a great modicum of success, economic success, upward mobility, home ownership, a strong quality of life.

“It’s the product of their hard work, it’s a product of opportunity, a product of many factors,” Morial said. “But there is that America that is too black and too brown, not all black and all brown, but too black and too brown, which seems to be stuck on the other side, stuck on the other side of this great American divide.”' [Source]

Thank you for your contribution Mr. Lee.

David Honig pushes back against the "digital activists".

I posted an article Monday from Salon that was also featured in The Nation and various other left wing publications about civil rights groups selling out to major telecom corporations on the issue of "net neutrality". (Check out the comments after the article that is linked here.) 


In my article, I wrote about my admiration for David Honig, who happens to lead one of the organizations that has been accused of "selling out". I got a few nasty e-mails which accused me of selling out as well and having blinders when it comes to this subject because of my admiration for the aforementioned Mr. Honig.


Today I exchanged e-mails with David, and needless to say he was not too pleased with the characterization of his group from by Lee Fang and others. He also gave me permission to publish what he wrote, so here goes:

"Field -

No one disagrees about the desirability of an open Internet; the disagreement is over methods – whether to regulate under Section 706 of the Communications Act, as the courts have suggested and as the Chairman of the FCC prefers, or whether to reclassify broadband as a public utility and regulate it as a common carrier under Title II of the Act.

MMTC and nearly 50 other national organizations have studied this issue for years and have concluded that it would be much safer to use Section 706, which would not restrict investment, innovation, or the potential for affirmative action.  We think it would be irresponsible to take a competitive one sixth of the nation's economy and put into a box designed for monopoly regulation.

A handful of other organizations take the opposing view – which is their right.  But rather than argue the merits, they have chosen to attack all of the nation's leading civil rights groups – saying we're "sellouts" because we don't agree with their preferred method of regulation.  They have elevated net neutrality into a religious cult.

Who are they calling "sellouts"?  The NAACP.  National Urban League.  Rainbow PUSH.  LULAC.  National Action Network.  National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.  MMTC.  And dozens more!

"We know what's best for you," some of the "netroots" groups say.  If we're not with them, we must be either too dense to understand these "complicated" telecom policy issues, or we must be on the take.

They're accusing virtually the entire civil rights movement of being stupid and corrupt.

It shouldn't be necessary to say this, but I will in case there's any doubt:

All of the major civil rights organizations receive support from companies that support Title II reclassification and those that oppose it.

The position we've taken on the open Internet is considerably more aggressive on consumer protection than the carriers' position.  Most of us fight the carriers on a host of other issues.

Obviously, none of us sells policy support for contributions.

And all of do our own thinking.

The civil rights organizations are glad that some companies that agree with us – and some that disagree – are willing to support our work fighting job discrimination, police misconduct, redlining and voter suppression.

I have seen this sheer arrogance and paternalism before.  Forty years ago, I worked with major civil rights organizations in my hometown (Rochester NY) who opposed wholesale "urban renewal" and preferred home and environmental improvement initiatives, like weatherization and new roofs that would enable Black homeowners to keep their older homes.  Our opponents were ostensibly liberal organizations – mostly white Americans – who insisted that they knew better than the SCLC, Urban League and the antipoverty agency what was best for our members and constituents.  The ostensibly liberal groups' solution to poverty?  Plow it all under with bulldozers, and call it "slum clearance." 

Eventually, or so they promised, new low income housing would be built, and those displaced by "urban renewal" would be able to move back to their old neighborhoods.  They had their "experts" like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who thought poverty was primarily caused by the Black family rather than by years of segregation and discrimination.

Well, we lost.  And you can guess what happened:  gentrification, with very little new low income housing.  Thousands of Black families displaced permanently.  Communities destroyed.  Urban renewal earned a new name:  "Negro removal." And sure enough, it turned out that big developers had been behind the ostensibly liberal "slum clearance" groups all the time.

And here we go again.  The paternalism and arrogance of 40 years ago resonates today with what some of the "netroots" groups are trying to achieve with their smear campaign directed at nearly all of the national civil rights organizations.  They've deployed a host of media outlets to lie and lie repeatedly.  But a lie repeated a thousand times is still a lie.

And even worse:  these digital activists, with just one exception (Public Knowledge), have failed to join us civil rights groups in going after the real #1 threat to the digital divide:  straight up redlining by one of the netroots' groups' largest sponsors.  Deafening silence.

So NO, we will not be moved.  We will not allow the nation's civil rights groups to be smeared and straight up lied about.  Not this time.  Not anymore.

Field you always speak truth to power.  THANK YOU for giving me this opportunity to vent.

David Honig, President, Minority Media and Telecommunications Council"

Thank you David for venting.