Several conservative conspiracy theorists are giving journalists a good name. In their attempts to pile on Cruz Bustamante through intimations that he's a closet racist who secretly desires to return California (aka Aztlan) to the 'la raza', they have self-righteously demonized the LATimes and other media for not snowballing their dirty hollow pebble.
Consider this gem from Hewitt:
There is an article on opposition research in today's paper, for example, that begins with two dozen paragraphs on AS and how his past life that might yield negative stories. In paragraph 25 we discover that Cruz Taxalotte was once a member of MEChA, but there is no discussion of the significance of that membership. The paper runs a lengthy story on Cruz that relegates the MEChA angle to the last few paragraphs, and also contains a story by Matea Gold on page A26 that is a magnificent example of terrible journalism --a piece designed to kill the MEChA issue by in effect declaring that membership in the group is hardly worth talking about. Whether MEChA is or is not a radical group, and Cruz's membership in it a quarter century ago any cause for concern, I don't know. But I know I can't trust the Los Angeles Times to report the issue fairly, and I doubt that the three favorable quotes about MEChA in the article or the one negative quote will decide the issue for readers. Clearly if the organization is the equivalent of the KKK, as State Senator Tom McClintock has asserted..
Tagorda warns ever so timidly:
In this light, conservatives may want to be somewhat cautious about pushing the issue. There's potential for backlash, despite the extremism of MEChA.
A cursory overview of the MEChA's philosophy reveals them to be radical nutcases. But it must be noted that these are radical nutcases who exist wholly in undergrad cliques.
The presumption that the only appeal that Bustamante can have to latino voters is one of a shared racist ideology is not only farcical, it legitimizes arguments that Arnold must account for his relationship with Kurt Waldheim - that racist sympathies work like some associative principle. Klansmen like lemonade, klansmen are racist therefore if you like lemonade you are racist.
Let us be clear here. The most important question is not whether MEChA is now or ever has been chockablock with racist radicals. It is more properly whether there is reason to suspect that Bustamante is himself racist or sympathetic to racist aims.
In the first place, the dubious research of ideologues who have certainly never heard of MEChA before demonstrates a clear lack of perspective. Has the any MEChA member been convicted of murder? Has any Republican? So which is more dangerous to the health of the public?
Requiring that Bustamante disown MEChA as a litmus test for his acceptability doesn't help anyone. It begs the question of MEChA's own racist culpability and influence on California politics. It lowers the ethical level of the debate. It offers Bustamante an easy way out - MEChA can instantly become Bustamante's 'Sistah Souljah'. It is a false accusation masquerading as racial concern.
This simpleminded matter differs substantially from questions like that of Trent Lott and Bob Barr and the CCC. In those cases, it was public statements by the individuals in question which were the cause of investigations into racist influence and support. In this case it is just muckraking in an attempt to paint Bustamante as racist in the absence of anything dishonorable he has said or advocated as a legislative agenda.
There are many reasons to object to identity politics, just as there are good reasons to object to demography politics and politics by polling. Primary among these is that it is foolish to assume that one's ethnic identity, or one's religion or zipcode is deterministic of one's political stances or one's intent as a public servant or government official. It is even more foolish to believe that such variables should be. But this is precisely the foolishness our blogger friends are asserting.
Why should Bustamante, a public figure already known to have used a racial epithet in the past (he infamously used the word "nigger" while addressing a Black History Month event two years ago) get a pass? Or, for that matter, former California State Assembly Speaker and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Antonio Villaraigosa, State Assemblyman Gil Cadillo, State Sen. Joe Baca, and Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva -- all unapologetic Mechistas?
As for the infamous use, a little context is in order.
It's only because I am so disgusted at this blatant backhanded bigotry that I've taken this much time. I hope this bogus issue dies quickly. Show me the money or shut up.
UPDATE:
Ted Barlow Debunks
Rudy Acuna's Letter
Orcinus Explains at Length
I wonder what kind of sense it makes to be a total cynic today, because that is what the candidacy of Arnold Schwartzenegger makes me think about.
The Old School, of which I inherit, consists of men such as my father and my uncle. As black men they have startlingly frank reasons to have no trust whatsoever in government. I am starting to believe that a real conservative must have this kind of distrust deep deep down. For to allow oneself be represented in governement by someone of only average intelligence is to suggest, in a nation of brilliant people that a crippled government is best.
I think that perhaps I have given a bit too much credence to the idea that African Americans vote for more government. While it makes perfect sense to me that we the black people deserve our equal share of pork as well as government services - those we have always been denied, I have not balanced it with the distrust I know to be present. The overwhelming history of American government has been cruel to and dismissive of African American political ambition. What we have done is to survive without it. We have ganged up against gangs because police could not be trusted. We have had 'mayors' of blocks because the real mayor would never walk our streets. We have managed all sorts of alternative remedies to what has ailed us, some functional, some dysfunctional, all black-owned, inspired and operated. This is what has sustained two societies, separate and unequal for generations.
Crippled government can be reformed, but a wrecked political process is what really concerns me. These days blackfolks are Democrats out of habit, not because the pork or services are being effectively delivered. Black progress has come through the greater acceptance of the sweat we have always put forth in our working lives; our salaries are being equalized, our degrees are being recognized. While it remains the case that the background noise of racism retards our efforts and degrades our results, many of us have grown new ways to work the systems of America and that black middle-class is permanent if apart. But the political aspirations of that black middle-class generate little heat in the hearts of the Democratic or Republican parties. It is no wonder to me that we are sitting out many elections.
There will always be a class of blackfolks who missed out on Affirmative Actions of the 70s and 80s. There have always been too many African Americans for any of the Civil Rights concessions to raise. Many punk pundits enjoy righteous indignation at the failure of blacks in spite of the 'trillions' spent by the liberals they love to hate. We rise on our own steam with a little help from our friends. But there are few friends remaining. If the black middle-class does not heel to the ideological barking of neo-conservatives, they are hounded from the halls of the Republican party. If the black middle-class does not suck up to the radical mau-mauing of longhair liberals, they are called traitors to the Struggle and their race. But those unfortunate blackfolks who suffer the indignities of a polarized economy and hypersegregation always have the attention of the left and right. Single black mothers below the poverty line, young black men in jail, abandoned black elders disabled with disease, desparate struggling black immigrants all serve a useful if symbolic purpose in the schemes of mainstream politics. The left of the Democratic Party will always have their concerns at heart, as they should. But the left of the Democratic Party is in disarray and has been effectively destroyed by the Clinton Era. While most folks take it for granted that sizeable portion of the black electorate will continue to support , they misinterpret that it is the black middle-class that will continually do so.
The sunshine period of racial integration is fading. It may not be called racial or ethnic, but what is labeled 'cultural' is becoming a black and white excuse for political retrenchment. In the wake of the death of the accomodative politics of integration, the parties are falling back on old myths. The myth of black political unity still stands in spite of the fact of black economic difference. The nobility inherent in the selfless determination of race-raising by the talented tenth is seriously challenged by the practicality of political reality. Blacks in the middle-class get very little by voting for the Democratic Left, not only because the Left doesn't deliver (whether or not it's ideas and programs are actually effective), but because the Democratic Left is not in tune with the class interests of non-dysfunctional blackfolks. Blacks in the middle-class get very little by voting for the Republican Right despite their ability to deliver because the Republican Right demonstrates no ability in accurately representing their unique interests or in considering their legitimate criticisms. The only black Americans either party accurately represents are those at the margins of society. This overstates their importance to the nation at large and alienates greater numbers of the black middle-class, the people who actually would vote the most.
So I find myself in the midst of this dilemma beginning to echo the most cynical positions of the prior generation. Yet I have no problem with good government. In fact I am probably a prime Goo Goo candidate myself. Like the Republicans, I have no tolerance for waste, fraud and abuse. Like the Democrats, I believe that a safety net is crucial for the stability of society. But unlike either party, I understand the politics of emergence - of the creation a larger middle-class and what a reformed government should be doing. Where they take the middle-class for granted and promise tax rebates and ideological purity, the black middle-class in particular needs to hear their own tales told. And we are not hearing them, and we are staying away from the polls, cynically.
The biggest joke of all is the assumption by both parties that Hispanics will fall in line with what outdated visions of crossover dreams blacks have already abandoned. They can't even get class distinctions correct for African Americans who have always been more political than Latinos (not counting Chicanos), so what makes them think they can appeal to people they don't even distinguish as anything more than 'spanish speaking'? Aside from a few hundred college students across the nation and the odd persecuted physicist, Asians aren't even in the conversation.
I don't expect a compartmentalized message for each ethnic group in the rainbow from the parties, but I do expect more than 'outreach'. I expect that the middle-classes that have been formed in the past 30 years be respected according to the ways and means of their achievement, and that they not be subsumed into minority politics as usual and their votes and support taken for granted.
What we are getting instead is a political circus which believes we will vote for any idiot the party's wealthy benefactors decide fund and put behind a podium. We may be becoming cynical but that is precisely because we are not stupid.
Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he'll live for ever.
More later if i have some time.
Checked out this article by Raspberry. Though I wouldn't call Raspberry an Old School black conservative, he is OLD.
This piece is deceptive. Check it.
What's the causal mechanism? Lack of vocabulary--->poverty
But isn't the real argument this? poverty--->lack of vocabulary
Instead of "if your kid doesn't talk that much he's going to be poor" it's more like "if you're poor you aren't going to have the resources to talk much and neither will your kid."
This type of slight of hand is a neat jedi mind trick. But while I applaud Raspberry's decision to go into Mississippi to try to give some kids some big words, I'm thinking it's important to keep the big picture in mind. While small scale projects are necessary given the fact that Bush isn't likely to be channeling Lyndon B. anytime soon (except when it comes to stealing elections), we still must recognize that a War on Poverty is (and was) worth waging.
My cousin is a lobbyist in Washington DC, but he has not yet earned his Gucci shoes. he's working for adult education, part of my family's fine tradition in education. When I met him for the second or third time at this weekend's family reunion, he told me that I should check out Project 21. I have. The reviews are mixed.
It is at this point that I speculate about several different things. The first is why the writers at Project 21 are not as good as I am. The second is how much traffic do they get vis a vis recognition as a website & as a real project. The third is how do people get hooked up into this racket and who approaches whom.
My first instinct is to copy the lot of the writers into my notifications. Spamming is rather crude, and so is telemarketing. But how else are people going to find out certain things? Should we all wait for our family reunions and find out which of our cousins are inside the beltway so that we can hear about more black republicans? I'm not sure of the answers to any of these questions, but that's the advantage of being an individual free of the kind of sponsorship I imagine one gets from Project 21. I get to think independently and admit when I don't know the answer to complicated questions. I also get to ask real questions rather than idiotic rhetorical ones putatively attributable to 'liberals'.
On the way into the site's editorials, I noticed some nice bold fonts about how participants in the Project have been interviewed by Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. I'm not sure how anyone of significant intellect can consider these a plus. It sounds almost like a deal with the devil. While many of us may lament the passing of Fred Friendly and still be sick to death of the self-importance of Cokie Roberts, is there anyone left in the media who have as much sense as Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers or Brian Lamb? Maybe I'm just a snob, but I would at least expect that there were some conservative snobs of my ilk remaining in the national mainstream press. Instead we have these belligerent oafs whose very comportment in an interview marks you ideologically. It's enough to frighten sensible and thoughtful people out of the game.
Perhaps the trick is to simply remain aloof, dignified and articulate on camera and leave the real mental and ethical wras'ling to the blogosphere. We are supposed to be disintermediating anyway. This brings us back to Project 21's website. Way behind the technical times in internet publication, they are. Is it moribund? Hard to say. It's probably not fair to judge the Project based upon its ability to get people onto the air with individuals I find somewhat ridiculous, but I am so tired of and accustomed to the likes of the Freepers, that I have become a bit cynical.
In the meantime, I will try to gather people unto me through this joint publication which serves the purposes and priorities of the Old School, and to my more uninhibited diatribes over at Cobb. I can only hope my cousin tells two friends.
I have to say, however, that I like what I see of the Project so far. It looks as if it definitely has a future. I'm going to try to entangle myself into it.
Forty years ago this week, over 250,000 men and women descended upon Washington as if from Heaven and transformed DC into a light so bright it could be seen from Alpha Centauri. I'm certain that if the first radio waves intelligent lifeforms receive from the planet Earth contain the phrase "I have a Dream..." then we will be blessed indeed for we will be recognized not only as intelligent, but as CIVILIZED.
I think it was Langston Hughes though who asked what happens to a dream deferred?
By continuing to celebrate dreaming and a mass spectacle that occurred over forty years ago, aren't we deferring that dream even further?
Some historical perspective is in order. Many of us who are familiar with the history of the original March on Washington recognize that there was a great deal of conflict over the minutiae of the March. Who would speak first, how long would people speak, would King speak longer than anyone else? On one level these conflicts were utterly unimportant. I'm sure that your average elderly couple from Detroit didn't care at all whether the NAACP representative or someone from CORE hit the mic first. But on another level this was life and death, because the "black leadership kitty" was at stake. If King spoke longer (and more eloquently) than the others it would signal that HE was the black leader that people had to negotiate with, and by fiat the SCLC would be the organization that would have the requisite legitimacy needed to garner resources from fat cat donors.
What? You didn't KNOW?
There was also a conflict between the kids from SNCC (those damn kids again!) and the old heads. John Lewis, now Congressman Lewis thank you very much, had a speech already to go that was so hot geiger counters went off. No We Shall Overcome...nope. More like We Shall OverTHROW. As soon as some of the liberal whites heard it they were like..."listen. He says THAT right THERE? I'm OUT."
So they toned the speech down.
But there was another conflict that superseded all of this.
Michael Thelwell, one of the founders of SNCC wrote a piece called THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON--THE CASTRATED GIANT. You can still find it in vol. 2 of Gerald Early's SPEECH AND POWER. According to Thelwell, the original plan for the March was as follows--people would go to Washington, but rather than congregate at the Mall they would instead go to Congress and sit-in. Sitting on the floor of Congress was of course illegal. So as waves were sent to the joint, new waves would replace them, to the point that the jails were full.
And the seat of the free world would be rendered impotent.
As soon as word filtered out of THIS plan, folks stepped in to head it off at the pass. Instead of a protest and a sit-in, we'd have...some nice speeches. Organizing for THIS event rather than for the protest basically hamstrung local efforts. Folks were dragged away from boring tasks like say, registering people in Mississippi to VOTE, and instead placed on DC detail.
According to Thelwell the March basically sapped the spirit of the movement.
So here we are, forty years later, and that story has pretty much been expunged from the record. Malcolm X alludes to it in one of his speeches (real quick...isn't it strange that the NOI dogs the March, then has one of its own some 30 years later?) but that's about it. Because we don't really know the history, we're doomed to repeat it. Celebrating false victories, and engaging in the politics of mass spectacle instead of organizing folks around the here and now.
(thanks to the Nightstalker for the "Looking for Moses" angle...)
One of the things I haven't seen much written about re: the Cali recall is Prop. 54...the Racial Privacy Initiative. It's going to be on the same ballot as the recall, and I can't call the result at all.
One of my boys thinks it's going to go down in flames, largely because of the number of people and institutions that recognize the value of "diversity" and because people really DO know where they come from and don't want that heritage ignored. I don't buy that. I think the only way it loses is if those 135 candidates take people's minds off of 54, leaving those most negatively impacted by it (black, latino, and some asians) to vote it down. Otherwise? The majority of "liberals" are liberal on a number of issues. Race isn't one of them.
My boy also thinks that if it does win, there's no way it'll be enforced. Here I agree. Bottom line is that there has to be SOME way to enforce the Civil Rights Act. You can't do that if you don't collect racial data of SOME sort.
It looks like the Republican Governor of Alabama has got Jesus. How else to describe his desire to raise taxes by almost a couple of billion dollars?
Most people think about taxes as if they were...well, TAXES.
Me? I don't like paying taxes anymore than the rest of you do. But on the other hand I understand that taxes pay for the roads I drive on. They pay for the schools my children attend. They pay for the police that pull me over. (only slightly joking here.) The fewer taxes we pay, the fewer services we receive in return. The consequences of this can be seen most notably in places like Alabama and Mississippi.
The governor of Alabama realized this somehow...I say "somehow" because he used to be a Gingrich Republican. Received a number of awards from Grover Norquist (who wants government to be small enough to drown in the bathtub) for his tax cut policies. But when he got to the Governor's mansion, he changed his tune.
He's going to have a tough road to hoe. The Republican Party basically thinks he's a white man's version of Uncle Tom. The Democratic Party supports him, but their base (black voters) don't know if they can quite trust him yet. Can't say I necessarily blame them, as most republicans in Alabama have a checkered history when it comes to black citizens.
But at some point in time if Christians as individual citizens don't live up to the creed of Jesus, the state is going to have to kick in.
"I'm not a diner until you let me dine. Then I become a diner." -- Malcolm X
Let us begin with the ghetto.
Glenn Loury accurately characterizes our race problem today as fundamentally the problem of the aliented black communities across our nation, how to think about them and what to do about their conditions.
Nevertheless, as anyone even vaguely aware of the social conditions in contemporary America knows, we still face a "problem of the color line." The dream that race might some day become an insignificant category in our civic life now seems naively utopian. In cities across the country, and in rural areas of the Old South, the situation of the black underclass and, increasingly, of the black lower working classes is bad and getting worse. No well-informed person denies this, though there is debate over what can and should be done about it. Nor do serious people deny that the crime, drug addiction, family breakdown, unemployment, poor school performance, welfare dependency, and general decay in these communities constitute a blight on our society virtually unrivaled in scale and severity by anything to be found elsewhere in the industrial West.What is sometimes denied, but what must be recognized is that this is, indeed, a race problem. The plight of the underclass is not rightly seen as another (albeit severe) instance of economic inequality, American style. These black ghetto dwellers are a people apart, susceptible to stereotyping, stigmatized for their cultural styles, isolated socially, experiencing an internalized sense of helplessness and despair, with limited access to communal networks of mutual assistance. Their purported criminality, sexual profligacy, and intellectual inadequacy are the frequent objects of public derision. In a word, they suffer a pariah status. It should not require enormous powers of perception to see how this degradation relates to the shameful history of black-white race relations in this country.
One of the reasons I like David Brooks is because he is a student of demographics. Call it political / social geography, but there is an art and science of thinking about facts about where people live and why. One of the reasons I dislike David Brooks is because he is so focused on the chatting classes. In his latest piece, 'People Like Us', he suggests that our problems with racial and cultural segregation are largely ones of personal choice and human nature manifested into neighborhoods. No way.
Edge Cities, Upscale Demography & Social Mobility
My first interest in the subject of demography was piqued by the book, 'The Nine Nations of North America' by Joel Garreau. He later wrote an update to his treatise entitled 'Edge City'. I found that volume to be truly remarkable. But within it are some deep clues that will help us understand some structural reasons why what Brooks is talking about doesn't ring true for me.
Garreau uncovers a great deal in his book about edge cities, those new and densely populated areas that seem to have sprung from nowhere in the 70s to become the key areas in America's largest cities. They are places like Tyson's Corners VA and The Perimeter just north of Atlanta. These became the hubs when downtowns were emptying out. Why? The primary reason is economic. The collected push and pull of interests between real estate developers, midsized business lessees, shopping mall tenants, urban planners, zoning laws, large relocating corporations and their relocating employees came together to create those office parks and their surrounding subdivisions at the freeway interchanges all over America.
Along with Garreau, I also paid special interest to the marketing angle of all this which is zipcode demography. Michael J. Weiss wrote 'The Clustering of America'. You want a demographic profile of your community? It's all right here at Claritas' website.
(Disclosure: Except for the accumulated wealth, my family demographic profile is almost exactly like this. In that, I presume that I am typical of such upper middle class whitefolk except for the astounding lack of wealth I have inherited, typical of most blackfolk of all classes.)
One of the salient facts that remain in my head from reading Garreau and Weiss is that a good 60% of Americans are live, work and die within a 50 mile radius of their birthplace. In Southern California, notably Orange County and the San Fernando Valley, there are no houses that are older than 60 years. Here we have entire cities built after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. But most of America was not, and most of America doesn't move. One of the secrets of American success is mobility. The contrast between the Mobile People to those who live and die in locked down communities is the divide that makes all the diffence in evaluating Brooks' conclusions. When you go beyond talking about consumer preferences and begin to talk about race, the subject begins to outweigh Brooks' light touch.
Brooks' liberal use of the word 'we' suggests that most American's share Bobo values and are, or ought to rightly be Mobile People. He begins about as far away from the ghetto as possible.
Human beings are capable of drawing amazingly subtle social distinctions and then shaping their lives around them. In the Washington, D.C., area Democratic lawyers tend to live in suburban Maryland, and Republican lawyers tend to live in suburban Virginia. If you asked a Democratic lawyer to move from her $750,000 house in Bethesda, Maryland, to a $750,000 house in Great Falls, Virginia, she'd look at you as if you had just asked her to buy a pickup truck with a gun rack and to shove chewing tobacco in her kid's mouth. In Manhattan the owner of a $3 million SoHo loft would feel out of place moving into a $3 million Fifth Avenue apartment. A West Hollywood interior decorator would feel dislocated if you asked him to move to Orange County. In Georgia a barista from Athens would probably not fit in serving coffee in Americus.
There aren't so many Americans, as Brooks would have us believe, that can get up and move anytime we like. Everyone doesn't have equity enough to trade up houses in the old tradition. Even in these days when mortgage rates are at their lowest in a generation, most Americans don't move around much and certainly African American mobility is much more limited. African Americans own fewer homes, have less fungible equity and are incrementally more hobbled my mortgages that whites in the mainstream. I think it goes without saying that home ownership is a fundamental building bloock of healthy communities.
Remarkably, not until 1970 did the black home ownership rate reach the level of the white rate at the turn of the century (46 percent). The slight declines in both the black and white rates between 1920 and 1940 were followed by sharp rises from 1940 to 1960 (24.2 points for whites and 18.6 for blacks) and continuing increases until 1980 when the rates leveled off. Although the white level of ownership was always higher than the black level, the size of the gap varied over time. The gap jumped by 5.5 points between 1940 and 1960 and then collapsed from 1960 to 1980, falling 7.8 points.
Black Money, Black Housing
So when Brooks begins to talk about the top third of African American society he completely ignores their economic handicap of accumulated wealth. All he sees are income distributions. It might be pleasant to talk about one third of black America and suggest racism is not determining where they live:
When we use the word "diversity" today we usually mean racial integration. But even here our good intentions seem to have run into the brick wall of human nature. Over the past generation reformers have tried heroically, and in many cases successfully, to end housing discrimination. But recent patterns aren't encouraging: according to an analysis of the 2000 census data, the 1990s saw only a slight increase in the racial integration of neighborhoods in the United States. The number of middle-class and upper-middle-class African-American families is rising, but for whatever reasons—racism, psychological comfort—these families tend to congregate in predominantly black neighborhoods.
These predominantly black neighborhoods are precisely those which are not the new Edge Cities. The black middle class and the upper middle class are not on par in equity, so despite the fact that they may earn as much as their mainstream counterparts, that's only half the equation when it comes to homebuying.
Brooks ignores the most stunning fact of America itself, that it was built on the dreams of migrants and strangers seeking liberty and economic advantage. The Great Migration of 20s was not about blackfolks looking to self-segregate themselves into the Southside of Chicago and in Harlem. They went where the jobs and money was hoping against the odds that they would have the liberty to pursue them. The impulse remains the same, people go where they can find enough economic advantage to be stable. Nobody wants to live in a ghetto. It defies all logic to suggest that people who must suffer those deprivations do so willingly. Major supermarket chains have only come to the conclusion in the wake of grandiose political promises (and tax abatements) post-LA Riots that relatively poor black and latino would support them. It had to be proven!
The question of integration remains before us, but in order to deal with that issue, you have to face several things which are difficult. The first is that race is at the heart of the reasons blacks remain separate. Whether it is the racism inherent in the top third of black America's lack of assets, or that which contributes to the social pariah status of the bottom two thirds. There isn't much to inherit from the ghetto except the drive to want to get out and obtain what Americans have. You simply must accept that blackfolks are economically motivated just like anyone else, their failure is not a failure of desire.
I'm convinced that it will be many a season before anything approaching residential integration will survive mainstream political debate. Affirmative Action remains propped up by the twisted logic of Diversity and California is set to pass a law that would blind that state to such black & white distinctions as we have described here. Proponents would presumeably have us all identify ourselves by the zodiacs marketers like Claritas dream up for the benefit of the industries of consumption and disposable income. Yet the fact of our society's racial segregation is real for the majority of Americas who lack mobility and choice in housing. Whether they are white and live in Southy or black and live in Roxbury, the immobile are trapped where they live - separate and unequal.
This brings us back to all those urban planners, zoning laws, real estate developers and corporate relocations. Brooks would have us believe that there should be no political considerations brought to bear on the free market economies of housing. It should be all about how people vote with their feet, not with their minds, and hey if it's human nature to cluster into our own little cliques what's the problem? The problem is that the ghetto is not quite America, and those people trapped there are not quite Americans. The Mobile People are clustering according to their interests, everybody else is moving the only places they can afford most of which are just about as racially segregated as they ever were.
The fate of integration as a question of social policy, zoning laws and quality of life issues does lie in the hands of Bobos and Mobiles. We're the ones, after all, that write the public opinion pieces. Our conversations drive the political agenda. But Brooks lets us off the hook with typical libertarian irresponsibility. Racial integration whose benefits are so clear requires us to be more than simply personally unselfish. It is not a question of personal choice, but of political responsibility which means we need to employ political pressure to change neighborhoods.
If you live in a coastal, socially liberal neighborhood, maybe you should take out a subscription to The Door, the evangelical humor magazine; or maybe you should visit Branson, Missouri. Maybe you should stop in at a megachurch. Sure, it would be superficial familiarity, but it beats the iron curtains that now separate the nation's various cultural zones.
I have written that one of the fundamental reasons that African Americans are so passionate about their culture and politics is because we have been forced to forge brotherhood with each other. We didn't ask to be herded into neighborhoods because of the color of our skin, but we made them work, and we grew to understand each other in ways too numerous and complex to mention. We began as negroes stuck in same ghettoes with other negroes, but we came to understand our duty to each other as human beings and emerged with black pride, and in so doing changed America for the better. Isn't that what America is all about, or is it all about the Benjamins, and maximized personal choice?
Most of us didn't volunteer to be Americans, but we are stuck in this national community. We need to recognize and implement our duty to each other by developing particular solutions to particular problems. The American mainstream works, let's get everybody in to it. Racial integration is what our nation needs because we still have ghettos.
A cat called me up the other day from the Columbia Missourian. Asked me about the legitimacy of ebonics. It's been six or seven years since the Oakland school board passed its resolution on the issue, and I think the reporter wanted to write an update.
The question didn't really seem right to me. "Is ebonics a legitimate language?" How do you define "language" as separated from "dialect" for example? And what does it mean to be "legitimate" in this case? I know the reporter wasn't thinking of it in the "Hammerian" sense. As far as I'm concerned black culture is the standard-bearer of American culture...it represents the best of what America has to offer. Someone asking me if ebonics is a legitimate language in that context is just like someone asking Phil Jackson if Shaq is a "legitimate" center.
The answer I ended up giving him probably won't make it in the story. Not because the reporter is shaky, or anything. But because it wasn't neat or clean...it wasn't a tight enough soundbite. What I told him was that in a very important sense what we think of as "ebonics" is ALREADY legitimate. Anytime you've got a computer chip maker selling computers on the phrase "play that funky music white boy" you've got a context in which ebonics is legitimate. Anytime you've got a major sports association using "We got next" as their marketing slogan, you've got a context where ebonics is legitimate.
Now here is where you have to put Ralph Ellison in the mix.
Where it is ILLEGITIMATE is straightforward. Ask blacks and whites whether they should teach ebonics in school, and I'm certain the answer would be a resounding NO. With blacks...a resounding HELL NO! Ask them whether ebonics should be thought of as a "legitimate language" you'll get the same answer.
When you NAME ebonics you get one answer. But when you ask them instead "what do you think about that Intel ad campaign?" or "What do you think about the WNBA marketing slogan?" or even better "How does MLK's 'I Have a Dream Speech' make you feel when you hear it?" you get another answer totally.
"Oh I love it!"
"I think King is a communist...but that speech sends chills down my spine."
"I think it's cool. That intel ad is the reason I bought my first Dell!"
Black language is the language of modernity, the language of the sophisticate, the language of cool. Always has been. Now it is the language of commerce. We should start telling little Dontay and Latisha that they might not be able to get a job with ebonics, but they CAN get paid.
In a newsbit I only heard today on the Diane Rehm Show, Task 11, a task force specifically created to capture Osama Bin Laden was disbanded a little over five weeks ago. Obviously Osama Bin Laden is still alive and dangerous. The word is that the US simply does not have the resources to both hunt for Bin Laden and rebuild Iraq.
Though I'm not surprised (nor am I surprised by the lack of news coverage of this item), it is still troubling to me. Wasn't it just yesterday that we were told that Bin Laden would be captured by any means necessary? That his infrastructure of terror would be dismantled?
Whatever the case, this appears to be part and parcel of an administration wide problem of attention to detail. Whether because of a presidential inability to focus, or because of our OWN attention deficit disorder (or even a combination of both) I'm not sure.
All I know is that I've been doing research on political attitudes in public schools and of the fifty classrooms I've been able to talk to only a couple correctly noted that NONE of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqi. Go figure.
If you recall the Dilbert series on television, you may remember the chicken man episode. The pointy haired boss has gathered together a dreaded committee to launch a new product, and one of the office dweebs is nominated to name the committee. This is considered the most difficult job of all as it causes the person assigned no end of confusion. He stood to give a name and nothing but clucks came out of his mouth.
I encountered the same kind of dyslexia a few moments ago in trying to describe what manner of black conservative I am. So I know better. Don't ask.
But having given it the old college try, I could say what kind of black conservative I am not. These things seem to fly right off my lips, despite the fact that there are certain qualifications. Exactly what those qualifications are become a bit more difficult to specify when one of the people mentioned is Clarence Pendleton. You remember Clarence:
As chairman of the Civil Rights Commission, Pendleton provoked criticism by taking stands against several established tenets of civil rights reformers. He opposed school desegregation through busing and believed that affirmative action programs detracted from the achievments of those who could have succeeded without them. During his time as chairman, congressional funding for the Commission was greatly reduced and many top staff members either lost their jobs or left in disillusionment over the direction of the agency. Pendleton was known to respond sharply to his critics and was unwavering in his approach. William Bradford Reynolds, Assistant Attorney for Civil Rights and a close friend of Pendleton's, characterized him in the New York Times as a man of candor who "felt very deeply that the individuals in America should deal with one another as brothers and sisters totally without regard to race and background."
Scouring the net (for 10 minutes) I found very little on Pendleton other than a half dozen copies of the above paragraph which was excerpted from his 1988 NYT obituary. The only thing of substance seems to be this paper on Affirmative Action, which is available for $5 from the William Monroe Trotter Institute in Boston.
It's certainly a remarkable thing that the intense feelings people (who remember) have or had about Pendleton have remained far longer than any concrete example of what he did or said. Once things get beyond the grasp of Google, and become the province of Lexis and Nexis, those of us in the general public are left simply with vague memories and emotions. We are left to the mercies of vituperous spin-dogs like Ann Coulter and other disingenuous ideological fanatics. We depend on the deadpan aloofness of librarians and the pedantic obfuscations of scholar-squirrels. Do you get the feeling I'm unsatisfied with this situation? I am.
It's easy enough to say that I find a number of reasons to support Affirmative Action, but I too am against bussing of children. The devil is in the details of course, and Pendleton's details cost a five spot. Is it worth five bucks to get the damned paper and make a judgement? I'd say so, but apparently the Institute doesn't take Visa. Please enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope and allow six to eight weeks for delivery. I thought we got beyond all that.
The larger issue involves the parsing out of policy positions which is a crafty business. Is it useful to bother with what Clarence said way back when. Absolutely. But whether or not I research this particular issue, I am always interested in seeing this kind of work happen 'open source' on the internet. If I could be so bold as to suggest that I want the be the Linus Torvalds of open source political deliberation, you might get an idea of where I'm headed. I don't want to pay some hidebound institution to remember for me, I want people who think it's important for everyone to know to come to my site (or some site I could link to) and tell us materially what Pendleton was all about, not just that his father was a swim coach. Furthermore I want to host discussion so that Joe Doaks can determine whether or not Pendleton matters today for reasons other than my needs for an intellectual pedigree in shorthand.
There may be no easy way around disintermediating academia's stranglehold on research materials. Some people are trying to fix that problem. DSpace and PLoS are leading examples. It's really a trip because my original concept of the internet project which has become VisionCircle and mdcbowen.org was called 'bSpace'.
Everything I do here will continue to be free via Creative Commons. If I spend the five bucks, I'll let you know the deal.