Stepping in a can of fire ants ....

Earlier this week on CNN, I watched two very intelligent contributors vie with each other on live TV. One a Republican and the other a Democrat. Both seasoned veterans of the political wars, both seen almost daily on CNN, both professors, both opinionated, both women.  Wolf Blitzer was asking a question, I do not even recall, but the Democrat female, Donna Brazille in a heartbeat when from gentle, poignant and articulate to angry, bitter and attacking in response Madilyn Matlin, a white woman Republican that made some comment, positive, about a documentary Glen Beck had just completed on the history of blacks in America. I mean it conversation went bullistic in two breaths and Mr. Blitzer lost control.

Mr. Blitzer and I and the millions watching were momentarily taken aback at how quickly the arguing escalated. The offensive by Ms Brazille, obvious not a fan of Beck, nor am I, was about how could a white man have any clue about the history of black people.   The bitterness raged on national TV in a most shocking way but in that electric shock I was witnessing, I found myself, a man from Alabama, drilling into my thoughts on racism.

You see, in our family, now a little over a year ago, we welcomed in a precious little girl our son and his family has adopted and brought home from Ethiopia.  Was I fully invested and supportive of this venture as it moved forward from thought to deed; honestly not. I chose to pretty much stay on the sidelines of all the things involved with an international adoption.  However, I realized my whole heart experienced a paradigm shift that hot afternoon at the Cleveland Airport when we saw our son and his wife and this precious, jet black, curly haired, big eyed child that engaged everyone around her. Even after nearly thirty hours in the air, she seems excited to be in the embrace of her new family.  My heart was touched and continues to be with each story of her antics and each time I get to hold her, swim with her, listen to her sing, watch her dance, touch my face with her nose as her Poppy kiss.

At a much deeper, and frankly uglier, perspective, I realize she has cast from me every negative thought I ever had at not only blacks but whites, browns, yellows and all the other colors or descriptors that segregate thoughts toward others not like me.  I must tell you how freeing that is.  And more importantly, it is not about the news or TV or a mother or father, IT IS A CHOICE!

Having grown up in a highly segregated South during the 1960s and remember clearly the police state in Birmingham, the bus burning in Anniston, the march from Selma to Montgomery, seeing MLK lead a march in my home town in 1962 and through all of those now historic events, feeling a sense of corporate frustration about why "they" (the blacks) were causing all this trouble.  Hearing George Wallace, Bull Connor and the other pacesetters of segregation heap more coals in the fires of an inflamed culture was part of my memory that will never fully go away.  Having the first black student bussed into my high school in 1966 to be the first and only black to graduate that year from an all white high school was, now, sickening to me for I became friends with that young black, Leroy Gray and would be angered by what I saw him have to endure from friends of mine. SIMPLY SICKENS me now.  I remember going to Sears as a young boy in Gadsden and sneaking around to drink from the Colored water fountain to see if the water really did taste different than the White water fountain, watching blacks go to the same doctor I did but have to go to his backdoor for access. I questioned it then but very lightly for, well, that was the cultural normal, right?

So why have I chosen to focus on this this day.  The article I will paste in below from today's NY Times focused my mind on really how little progress this nation has made.  I detest racism in any form or magnitude and Ms Hope Williams has been the best medicine I could ever take.  My challenge to you is to do a deep inward assessment of your own deeply ingrained thoughts on this for it, believe me, is a poison that is culturally lethal. Sure, there are still far too many things that trigger that which is buried in each of us from an array of sources.   Today I will sing in a jail service and I know before I get there that well above 70% of those there will be African American. Does that then mean that over 70% of African Americans in the aggregate society are worthless degenerates and deserve all the bad they get. ABSOLUTELY NOT!

My greatest regret is that it took a little African child that hugged me in Cleveland to rip all the cobwebs of racial thoughts from my heart. Bad people are bad not because of their skin color but because they have chosen to be bad; it really is that simple.  Statistics will lead you down paths that are at times wrong.  Such as, a new one, the unemployment in the US is still at 9.1% yet within that 48% of black teens are unemployed.  Think about the implication of that going forward in a world floating in debt. Frightening isn't it but it is a color on the canvas of our portrait in the 21st century.

I have waxed long enough but will close with, please, self exam the real WHY you feel as you about those that do not look like you, sound like you, smell like, eat like you and I would say the common denominator to your assessment is, well, YOU!  So my title, Stepping in a can of fire ants is pretty appropriate for this topic stings, hurts, admonishes and challenges us to be better. We MUST!

CANNOT wait to hold Ms Hope Tesfanesh tomorrow and love her unceasingly.

September 2, 2011

On Race, the Silence Is Bipartisan

By DESMOND S. KING and ROGERS M. SMITH

THE economic crisis in the United States is also a racial crisis. White Americans are hurting, but nonwhite Americans are hurting even more. Yet leaders in both political parties — for different reasons — continue to act as though race were anachronistic and irrelevant in a country where an African-American is the president.

In July, the unemployment rate was 8.2 percent for whites, but 16.8 percent for blacks and 11.3 percent for Latinos. The Pew Research Center estimates that in 2009, the median household net worth was $5,677 for blacks, $6,325 for Hispanics and $113,149 for whites — down from $12,124, $18,539 and $134,992, respectively, in 2005.

All groups have suffered from high unemployment, the mortgage meltdown and soaring health care costs, but African-Americans and Hispanics started far behind and continue to fall behind. In 2009, 35 percent of black households and 31 percent of Latino households had zero or negative wealth, compared with 15 percent of white households.

Since the end of legal segregation in the 1960s, there have been two approaches to ameliorating racial inequality. Conservatives and most Republican politicians insist that laws be colorblind and that race-conscious measures like affirmative action should be ended. Liberals and most Democratic politicians favor such measures, mindful of the burdens of past and present discrimination.

For most of the nation’s history, the two major parties were internally divided over racial issues. But today, racial policy positions align almost perfectly with the party system. The two parties, which openly clashed over race from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, have for the last decade pretty much agreed not to talk about race — a silence that impedes progress toward racial equality.

Democrats mention race as little as possible, even though minority voters are crucial constituents, because colorblind positions are far more politically popular. Affirmative action has been supported in every Democratic presidential platform since 1972, but since the Reagan era, Democrats speak of it less and less.

President Obama, for example, does not openly renounce affirmative action, but he pragmatically stresses universal social programs like health care. He manages to avoid appearing especially concerned about African-Americans.

This tack leaves modern Republicans with little to criticize, lest they appear to be race-baiting, so they too keep quiet.

Advocates of both colorblind and race-conscious approaches to public policy now claim the mantle of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights agenda and his call for people to be judged by their character, not their skin. Though Republicans claim that free-market policies will lift all boats and Democrats hope that “universal” measures to combat economic inequality will benefit all groups, racial inequality has endured.

As studies of employment and real estate practices begun during the Reagan era have consistently shown, racial discrimination persists. And “race neutral” economic measures backed by Democrats, like the Earned Income Tax Credit and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, have proved too limited to aid many poorer blacks and Hispanics.

Political leaders must openly recognize that we cannot progress either by ignoring race or focusing exclusively on it. It is not only legitimate, but also essential, to evaluate policy options partly on the basis of whether they are likely to reduce or increase racial inequalities.

Compromise policies — measures that are not explicitly race-targeted but are chosen partly because they will benefit nonwhites especially — should become the basis for policy debates.
For example, without using explicit racial classifications, we can devise districts and situate homes in ways that are more likely to produce integrated schools and neighborhoods.

We can adopt employment tests that are fair and inclusive and do a better job at predicting job performance than many Civil Service exams now do.

And we can do more to ensure that our criminal laws do not target crimes more typical of urban Hispanics and blacks, like crack cocaine use, more strongly than crimes typical of suburban whites, like powder cocaine use.

Both parties should accept that the question of whether policies help narrow the racial divide must be part of the discussion. After all, it was the Republican-led search for racial progress in the 1860s and the Democratic-led fight for civil rights in the 1960s — buttressed, of course, by African-Americans’ own freedom struggle — that allowed the election of a black president in 2008.

Desmond S. King, a professor of American government at Oxford University, and Rogers M. Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, are the authors of “Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America.”