I heard about the CBC raising money for the victims of Katrina.
Lately I've been hearing that the CBC has yet to give out any of the funds. For example, read this
According to Marc Morano it would appear at the time bodies (the allegations being black bodies) were floating in the waters of Hurricane Katrina, the Congressional Black Caucus was floating tax-free charitable donation dollars. (See: "Bush-Bashing Black Charity Sits on Katrina Cash," CNS News, Marc Morano, Dec. 22, 2005).
Morano's investigation found the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation not only has not distributed any of the estimated $400,000 it raised for the black victims of hurricane Katrina, but as Patty Rice, spokesman for the CBCF told Morano, "The distribution of the money would not begin until January or February at the earliest." My guess is that unless shamed into doing so, they will not have dispersed one dollar toward the stated urgent need this time next year, but I digress.
This is quite a haul for CBCF, and if one were inclined to question the integrity of a group that proudly comport itself as what could be construed as available to the highest bidder, it could also be seen as quite a con game – one that should be looked into.
I was ready to slam them.
But I went to the CBCF website and read this:
On December 9, 2005, CBCF issued a $290,000 grant to the New Orleans-based Community of Faith for Economic Empowerment (COFFEE). COFFEE is right on the front lines providing crisis assistance to supplement rental payments for dislocated families and emergency food and clothing assistance. They also offer construction and rehabilitation assistance and loss mitigation counseling among other vital services such as, insurance claim filing assistance and foreclosure abatement assistance for those who have been unable to meet their mortgage payments. For more information on COFFEE, visit their website at www.coffee-neworleans.org.
Help me out here? Are people talking out of their behind or did they give up the money is response to critics?
Well, read this
Bush-Bashing Black Charity Sits on Katrina Cash
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
December 22, 2005
(CNSNews.com) -The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, which slammed the Bush administration for its allegedly slow and racially insensitive response to Hurricane Katrina, has yet to spend any of the estimated $400,000 that it raised for the victims of the Aug. 29 storm.
"We are collecting all the way up through the very end of the year and then our board has set aside a committee who is going to administer the funds," Patty Rice, spokeswoman for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation (CBCF), told Cybercast News Service on Wednesday. The Foundation is an offshoot of the Congressional Black Caucus and was founded in 1976.
...
Ken Boehm, chairman of the conservative National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a group that monitors charitable giving, was quick to criticize the CBCF.
"It sounds like the CBCF has been stressing the immediacy of the [victims'] needs when they raised the money and yet for some reason when it comes time to dishing it out they can't seem to get organized," Boehm told Cybercast News Service.
:The author wrote an article near Dec. 22 saying the funds haven't been given. Funds were given on the 9th.
Interesting.
This is to the people who write "anti-Kwanzaa" screeds this time of year.
1. Yes, it's made up. Karenga has said that from day one.
2. Other "made up" celebrations include Mardi Gras, Mother's Day, Valentines Day, and St. Patrick's Day.
Karenga never said it was an African celebration. He said he took parts of different African cultures and created a "harvest festival" like celebration.
OH, do you really want to go here?
1. The birth of Christ, Our Savior, did not likely happen on the 25th of December. It was "created" to overtake the pagen rituals that occured during the time.
2. How many Christians celebrate Christmas singing about Santa Claus and Rudoloph?
1. I've been to one Kwanzaa celebration. I attended in Philly and Karenga was a speaker. At this point, I'll mention that there were a fair number of whites in attendence, and it wasn't just news reporters.
2. Many people come from different parts of the country to celebrate Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Did you know that there are actually 2 separate Mardi Gras parades happening at the same time? One done by whites, the other by Blacks? Did you know that until 2004, I think, they never even "greeted" each other?
1. Most American whites have never been to Ireland but does that stop them from celebrating St. Patrick's Day?
2. Most Americans, period, have never left the country.
No, it doesn't. Some "Black churches" even celebrate both.
Take the Kwanzaa hating and step. Ya'll are just spouting nonsense.
For the record: I don't celebrate it. I'm just sick of the silliness the haters go through on trying to shut it down.
P6 is throwing down on the false hype of "acting white".
He quotes someone else:
Whites aren't quitting the schools because the schools are failing academically. Quite the contrary: Many white parents say they're leaving because the schools are too academically driven and too narrowly invested in subjects such as math and science at the expense of liberal arts and extracurriculars like sports and other personal interests.The two schools, put another way that parents rarely articulate so bluntly, are too Asian.
Ya'll go visit now. Ya here?
The rioting in Paris and other French cities has led to a lot of interpretations and comments, most of them irrelevant. Many see the violence as religiously motivated, the inevitable result of unchecked immigration from Muslim countries; for others the rioters are simply acting out of vengeance at being denied their cultural heritage or a fair share in French society. But the reality is that there is nothing particularly Muslim, or even French, about the violence. Rather, we are witnessing the temporary rising up of one small part of a Western underclass culture that reaches from Paris to London to Los Angeles and beyond.
P6 tipped me off to Times Select perpetration with the Brooks piece, interestingly, Olivier Roy had a stronger version of the same in the proletarian section, as well.
To understand why this is so, consider two solid facts we do have on the riots. First, this is a youth (and male) uprising. The rioters are generally 12 to 25 years old, and roughly half of those arrested are under 18. The adults keep away from the demonstrations: in fact, they are the first victims (it is their cars, after all, that are burning) and they want security and social services to be restored.
Yet older residents also resent what they see as the unnecessary brutality of the police toward the rioters, the merry-go-round of officials making promises that they know will be quickly forgotten, and the demonization of their communities by the news media. Second, the riots are geographically and socially very circumscribed: all are occurring in about 100 suburbs, or more precisely destitute neighborhoods known here as "cités," "quartiers" or "banlieues." There has long been a strong sense of territorial identity among the young people in these neighborhoods, who have tended to coalesce in loose gangs. The different gangs, often involved in petty delinquency, have typically been reluctant to stroll outside their territories and have vigilantly kept strangers away, be they rival gangs, police officers, firefighters or journalists.
Now, these gangs are for the most part burning their own neighborhoods and seem little interested in extending the rampage to more fashionable areas. They express simmering anger fueled by unemployment and racism. The lesson, then, is that while these riots originate in areas largely populated by immigrants of Islamic heritage, they have little to do with the wrath of a Muslim community.
France has a huge Muslim population living outside these neighborhoods - many of them, people who left them as soon as they could afford it - and they don't identify with the rioters at all. Even within the violent areas, one's local identity (sense of belonging to a particular neighborhood) prevails over larger ethnic and religious affiliation. Most of the rioters are from the second generation of immigrants, they have French citizenship, and they see themselves more as part of a modern Western urban subculture than of any Arab or African heritage.
Just look at the newspaper photographs: the young men wear the same hooded sweatshirts, listen to similar music and use slang in the same way as their counterparts in Los Angeles or Washington. (It is no accident that in French-dubbed versions of Hollywood films, African-American characters usually speak with the accent heard in the Paris banlieues).
Nobody should be surprised that efforts by the government to find "community leaders" have had little success. There are no leaders in these areas for a very simple reason: there is no community in the neighborhoods. Traditional parental control has disappeared and many Muslim families are headed by a single parent. Elders, imams and social workers have lost control. Paradoxically, the youths themselves are often the providers of local social rules, based on aggressive manhood, control of the streets, defense of a territory. Americans (and critics of America in Europe) may see in these riots echoes of the black separatism that fueled the violence in Harlem and Watts in the 1960's. But the French youths are not fighting to be recognized as a minority group, either ethnic or religious; they want to be accepted as full citizens. They have believed in the French model (individual integration through citizenship) but feel cheated because of their social and economic exclusion. Hence they destroy what they see as the tools of failed social promotion: schools, social welfare offices, gymnasiums. Disappointment leads to nihilism. For many, fighting the police is some sort of a game, and a rite of passage.
Contrary to the calls of many liberals, increased emphasis on multiculturalism and respect for other cultures in France is not the answer: this angry young population is highly deculturalized and individualized. There is no reference to Palestine or Iraq in these riots. Although these suburbs have been a recruiting field for jihadists, the fundamentalists are conspicuously absent from the violence. Muslim extremists don't share the youth agenda (from drug dealing to nightclub partying), and the youngsters reject any kind of leadership.
So what is to be done? The politicians have offered the predictable: curfews, platitudes about respect, vague promises of economic aid. But with France having entered its presidential election cycle, any hope for long-term rethinking is misplaced. In the end, we are dealing here with problems found by any culture in which inequities and cultural differences come in conflict with high ideals. Americans, for their part, should take little pleasure in France's agony - the struggle to integrate an angry underclass is one shared across the Western world.
Olivier Roy, a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, is the author of "Globalized Islam."
I got this story from one of my students. A subscription may be required. A few months ago I got into a discussion with science fiction author Steven Barnes on his blog about "race relations." Steve's thing was that blacks had special problems they needed to overcome from discrimination (no disagreement) that led to them having severe cultural and psychological deficits (big disagreement).
Reading this story it is clear that the son has some issues to deal with. But for me the mother's story is even more tragic.
So, while in the hotel room, I decided to give a look at the Black conservative shing ding on CSPAN being moderated by Jesse Lee Peterson.
Here are some thoughts as I watch..
If "white guilt" is a "bad thing", then why is "Black inferiority" not a bad thing?
Listening to CSPAN, I've heard Shelby Steele and LaShawn(?) mention feeling "inferiority" when they saw the images out of New Orleans.
Hmmm....
-----
1:30:00 Seems like Joseph C. Phillips is out of the Glenn Loury mode of "Black conservatives" if there really is such a thing. And he's taking the tact that I take, one where I get labeled as being in denial because I'm accussed of "they do it too!" syndrome.
----
1:55:00 Joseph C. Phillips mentions Old School. His comments about ignoring "Black leadership" and putting out your message is ignored on purpose(?) -- by Jesse Lee Peterson. Shelby Steele keeps hammering "Black leadership" and points the finger at "white guilt". Interesting.
---
2:02:00 "They are going to screw you". "Black people have been screwed by Black leadership". Would you believe a preacher said this?
----
2:38:00 A Black student, 22, just made Jesse Lee Peterson look like a fool. Joseph C. Phillips recovered for Peterson very well.
The student asked about "looking back to the morals of the past" but the history of the U.S. doesn't show morals because of slavery, Jim Crow laws, etc. Joseph C. Phillips said the "moral foundation" is based on the principles of equality of the government. For example, equality. He's pretty animated.
Looking back...
Joseph C. Phillips is the face of Black conservatives that will get Blacks to consider what is being said by being REASONABLE. Jesse Lee Peterson is not reasonable. He is a race hustler and poverty pimp. I found it interesting that Phillips spoke up and disagreed with what was being said at the same times I thought something should be said.
I also found it interesting that Phillips pointed out the hypercritical nature of Black conservatives and how that is perceived in the Black community.
I also found it interesting that Phillips said that Black conservatives make too much of media appointed "Black leaders" when people in the Black community don't give the "Black leaders" the weight and credibility that Black conservatives give those media appointed "Black leaders".
Phillips said MANY of the same things I have said, and have been criticized by internet conservatives for saying.
A few times I've written that I thought that Blacks were brain damaged as bourne out by the hypercritical nature of Blacks, left and right, towards the Black community.
Shelby Steele's continuing reference to "Black inferiority" has strengthened that belief.
If whites shouldn't feel white guilt why should Blacks feel "shame" at seeing Black victims of Katrina?
in reading cnu's response to an earlier post on bennett's comments, i had a thought. it seems that perspective is everything...and the comedy of america are the historical myths of liberty, freedom, obectivity and justice. in any case, i have felt, for the past two decades, that these differences are irreconciliable (at the collective level) and came up with the following:
the point, nulan (that you correctly - to me and mines'' - identify), is the notion of raising genocide. in point of fact, i would wager that i could find a similar quote from some leading white official/public figure/scholar concerning some so-called non-white group in EVERY single nation on the planet in which whites and "non-whites" share space. in fact, i would wager that i could find a similar quote in EVERY ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE and FIELD OF WORK in EVERY COUNTRY - without exception. the comments would be directed at black, brown, red, yellow - etc. and I could find a similar expression in EVERY CENTURY - backed by a continued institutional practice to affirm this sentiment. these folks would not isolated, but rather LEADERS and ARCHITECTS...but what would that prove - after all, if this were about information and logic, you'd have wrapped this baby up, long ago.
moreover, contemplation of genocide is fundamental to white identity. it's the cauc version of 'waiting to exhale.' similarly, the conflation of blacks and crime is the epicenter of white identity. these fools still believe they live in a democracy and that the founding fathers were on some liberty shit. straight crack smokin'. these are the same folks who raise the spectre of black rapists in a world where white women go OUT of their way to get some rhythm, to put it mildly. it's all about the overcompensation in the face of a debilitating deficiency.
so, when i come across a negro apologist - i wonder what they're defending and compensating for...in other words, are they coming up SHORT or simply in it for the green. if the green is easy to get, they should have no problem articulating an authentic defense of their collective. the rubber hits the road when cats like connerly, armstrong and others need SPECIAL TREATMENT in a competitive BUSINESS environment. it's not fair and it discrimination of the worst order...pimps paying hoes to talk down the competition - that's simply no way to win the playas ball.
I don't like doing this, but:
in·fer·ence
1 a the act of passing from one proposition, statement, or judgment
considered as true to another whose truth is believed to follow from
that of the former
im·ply
2 : to involve or indicate by inference, association, or necessary
consequence rather than by direct statement
When I heard Bill Bennet's comments, I heard them in full context.
My take on the matter was to think that if all Black babies were
aborted, some fraction of those Black babies would turn to crime. I
never assumed the statement meant ALL Black babies would become
criminals. And, statistically speaking, I'm right. In fact, most won't be criminals. But for those that would turn to crime, since they wouldn't be around, the crime rate would have to go down.
The same applies if Bennett used whites instead of Blacks or if he said male babies only or if he said if we somehow removed all males between the age of 15-30.
In looking at the responses to Bennett's remarks, there seems to be a
strong thought that states Bennett meant all Black babies aborted
would have been criminals. No where do I see that in Bennett's remarks.
However, going further, it seems to me that Bennett's comments are not what's making the racists feel comfort, it's the replies that confirm the idea that most Blacks are criminals.
Maybe I've missed it, but the fact that most Blacks are NOT criminals, is being lost, to me, with the knee jerk reactions.
That's what is giving comfort to the racists.
Watch who gets dogged.
Will it be the functionally illiterate single mother, whose family has a high incidence of illiteracy, who was raped when she was 15 and then became wild, she says, because of a loss of self esteem because she was raped?
Or, will it be the drug addict mother, whose family took her child away from her because she was an addict, who, when placed in a dire situation, offered meth to a criminal?
Who? Me a cynic?
Right now, one of the things being discussed in the aftermath of Katrina is race.
Well, as usual, it's infantile if you ask me.
But, THIS is what should be watched. This is race in America, 2005: Old-line families plot the future. Note the class issues that are also involved.
The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."
...
Black politicians have controlled City Hall here since the late 1970s, but the wealthy white families of New Orleans have never been fully eclipsed. Stuffing campaign coffers with donations, these families dominate the city's professional and executive classes, including the white-shoe law firms, engineering offices, and local shipping companies. White voters often act as a swing bloc, propelling blacks or Creoles into the city's top political jobs. That was the case with Mr. Nagin, who defeated another African American to win the mayoral election in 2002.
OK, I've been writing that Ward Connerly has taken advantage of affirmative action programs. I have no problem with people taking advantage of such programs.
I've come to understand affirmative action programs, in government contracts, as being pure set asides OR requirements that companies who win government contracts use some percentage of "disadvantaged companies" as subcontractors. Here "disadvantaged companies" tend to mean minority and/or women owned companies.
LaShawn Barber found it "repugnant" that I mention this because in previous "discussions", she has mentioned that she discussed this with him and he denied it.
So, I did some Googling...
The African American website had this:
Though some of his critics believed that Wilson contributed to his success, others disagreed. In addition, a Jet article cited a story in the San Francisco Chronicle which stated that he had accepted $140,000 over the years in affirmative action contracts from the government. Though roughly half of his business did indeed come from the government, Connerly disputed that it was affirmative action money, telling Donna St. George of the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service, "I don't think there's a minority around who hasn't benefited from the climate of inclusion that affirmative action has fostered. But I have never gone after the preference." He mentioned that he never listed himself on minority rosters, nor did he apply for minority "set-asides." However, Ayres in the New York Times reported that Connerly had indeed listed his firm as minority-owned in order to "keep all the benefits of a government contract." Pooley in Time, on the other hand, noted that Connerly had only disclosed his race after it was required.
The article mentioned is one that Ms. Barber said that Connerly disputed. The full article can be found here.
A follow up article by the Chronicle stated the following:
Contrary to the report, Connerly did not register as a minority businessman before receiving a 1989 contract for $1.1 million. Kent Smith, executive director of the Energy Commission, said he erred when he told The Chronicle that the contract was awarded under the state affirmative action law.
Although the law had been enacted when the contract was awarded, the law was not implemented at the Energy Commission until 1990.
It then continues:
Connerly did, however, receive two Energy Commission contracts in 1992 and 1994 as a minority businessman and agent for the California Building Officials, a group that, by law, had to be trained in energy conservation. The contracts were legally awarded without competitive bidding.
Furthermore, records made public this week by the Energy Commission show that Connerly again enlisted in the minority program on April 26 and May 4 of this year -- but the two contracts he sought were awarded to other bidders.
...
In an effort to explain his use of the program, Connerly submitted a statement last month to the Energy Commission that read in part: `We are disclosing our group identities solely because the state procurement process requires that minority and women owned businesses be used and it would work an extreme disadvantage to the proposer of this proposal to involve an additional subcontractor merely to comply with the (minority) requirement.'
This comes from the first article:
Connerly, in an interview, acknowledged that his firm participated in the `repugnant' race-based program, but he denied that it was affirmative action. Instead, he characterized the program as a `policy that requires that every contract . . . include participation of at least 15 percent of minority businesses and 5 percent of women.'
OK, that looks like an affirmative action program. In fact, this type of requirement has been called such and fought against by people who disagree with affirmative action. Lastly, Connerly filed a law suit against the law that required contractors to get minority contractor participation, but after the report.
Unless I'm missing something here, it looks like he took advantage of affirmative action programs. It doesn't matter that he didn't go after "disadvantaged" set asides or "disadvantaged" company participation.
Reading today's Detroit Free Press, I run into an article dealing with the tension black metropolitan Detroiters encounter when they move into formerly all white suburbs. I grew up in Inkster, a small mostly black suburb outside of Detroit used by Ford in the mid 20th century to house black workers. Moving to Redford (a predominantly white suburb) in the eighties we experienced racism from adults and kids. The significant difference from our end was that we KNEW why we were being hassled. There are some class dynamics going on in this article that aren't being uncovered (Taylor, Trenton, and Warren are not just white suburbs, but rather are white working class suburbs). But when the black mother of a black child tells a reporter that her nine year old child didn't know what race was...there is a problem that goes beyond the actions of white racists. Black children brought up blind to the realities of racism are automatically crippled.
This week's cover of the Amsterdam News , New York's longest standing Black weekly, features a picture of the Honorable Louis Farrakhan with headlines referencing the ADL and the Millions More March scheduled for October 2005.
The article includes some interesting tidbits, including Russell Simmons' support adn international travel plans of Min. Farrakhan to generate support in Africa and the Caribbean. Nonetheless, the core of the article is Abe Foxman's missive to "30 black leaders" (unnamed in the article) requesting that they disassociate themselves from the event.
I have not finalized my personal decision to attend. I attended the first MMM. Nonetheless, I would hope that those 30 folks who received the letters would accord them the proper respect - namely a place in the trash bin. Quite simply, this discourse about Black-Jew relations is boring and fruitless. Nine times out of ten, the discussion is based on a short-lived 1960's US-centered strategic alliance. Harold Cruse may have done the best job of addressing this "relationship" in Crisis.
I love the ADL's policy of calling for denounciations. It is one of the most successful tactics used in politics today. It allows groups with self-serving agendas to create a public discourse about issues that lack substance while creating implicit public support for their own position. Of course, having money and media access helps.
Black-Jew relations are similar to those between Blacks and any other international culture group engaged in commerce and trade within a settler-colonial nation dominated by white supremacists. Blacks and Indians in South Africa, East Africa, Guyana and the Caribbean have similar relationships to that evidenced by Blacks and European Jews in the US. A similar thing can be said of Chinese immigrant communities in the Caribbean. There has been and will continue to be economic and political competition, amid social attraction and rejection, with locked social orders locating Africans at the low end - and immigrants at a rung or two above.
I would simply argue that the biggest difference in the US(and to my mind, it constitutes an "isolated incident") is the role of Euro-Amer. Jews in supporting the world's first televised social justice movement. If the "Civil Rights Movement" were not televised, the B-J relationship might be viewed in the context of all other inter-ethnic relationships. It is exaggerated to the same extent that all things "New York" or "Los Angeles" are exaggerated. There is far less substance and agreement to the relationship than is imagined.
Mexican President Vicente Fox was sound criticized for comments made about blacks during a speech criticizing US policy. Fox noted the following:
"There's no doubt that the Mexican men and women _ full of dignity, willpower and a capacity for work _ are doing the work that not even blacks want to do in the United States,"
Now to be fair, he's right. The jobs that Mexican immigrants take are jobs that most Americans would not want to take. Where Fox makes the mistake is in revealing the fundamental nature of the contemporary racial hierarchy. "...Doing the work not even blacks want to do." That is to say, the work that not even the lowest among you would do for money.
Edited to add: Bomani's got the same ideas on this, but fleshes them out a bit more.
Southern heritage buffs vow to use the Virginia gubernatorial election as a platform for designating April as Confederate History and Heritage Month.
The four candidates for governor have differing views on whether to pay official state homage to the Confederacy, an issue that has been debated for years in the commonwealth.
"We're not just a few people making a lot of noise," said Brag Bowling, a spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the oldest hereditary organization for male descendents of Confederate soldiers. "This is not a racial thing; it is good for Virginia. We're going to keep pushing this until we get it."
[ Emphasis mine ]
To the spokesman I write,
BULL.SHIT.
Unpacking the science and the politics could be complicated absent a clear understanding of what *blackness* is. It is fundamentally a unique form of interpersonal communion arising in the uniquely hostile social environment which was chattel slavery and jim crow America - nothing more and nothing less. Now if a simple autodidactic layperson - such as myself - can easily grasp this fact, what's wrong with all these big-headed scientists? Fascinating discussion of the Leroi article posted on the 15th - especially big props to the editor-in-chief of the New Scientist who fundamentally gets it. The Provost at Georgetown shows his behind in a Lawrence Summers on steroids moment...,
Armand Leroi is bound to please the right wingers with his view that "genetic data show that races clearly do exist". I'm sure that is not his intention but I also doubt that everyone will read as far as his belief that "skin colour does not give the measure of a man, that it tells nothing about his abilities or temperament". That genetics has a bad history of being misunderstood and misapplied scarcely needs restating.
James J. ODonnell, Andrew Brown, Tim D. White, Alun Anderson, Nicholas Humphrey respond to Armand Leroi
JAMES J. O'DONNELL
Classicist; Provost, Georgetown University; Author, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace
From the Enlightenment forward, it has been assumed that good science is the instrument of good politics. Science disabuses us of error and shows that bad politics are undergirded by falsehood.
But what if good politics turn out to be undergirded by falsehood? Then the honest and honorable supporters of science are tempted to suppress, modify, or veil in discreet silence the discoveries of science -- or even the questions that scientists would ask. That is a dangerous temptation, because the enemies of good science are still all around us, promoting notions of "intelligent design" (to argue that while the deity may have the taste, talent, and ingenuity of Rube Goldberg in the things he creates, at least he exists) and opposing lines of research that offend ancient proscriptions.
The answer is better science, better reporting about science, and bravery. The future of genetics will surely reveal differences between and among groups of people that overlap with stereotypes, prejudices, and myths. Some of those developments will appear to reinforce bigotry: so be it, as far as that goes, but the important thing is to communicate a science that continues to move forwards. In the 1950s, going heavy on the margarine and light on the eggs seemed the apex of science regarding cholesterol and heart attack risk. Now the margarine of those days appears itself to be a killer. Similarly, the genetic discovery today, while true, will also likely be at a greater level of generality than what we will know in 10 or 20 years.
That's why it will take bravery: to tell the truth now, to persist in research, to oppose people who draw stupid conclusions from good science, and to make better science.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
ANDREW BROWN
Journalist, the Guardian; Author, In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite
Yes, of course the genetics of human diversity are interesting, and some scientists are interested in them for disinterested motives. But I think it is unfair to Gould to suppose that there are only bad reasons to be leery of this interest, and unfair to Lewontin to suppose that there is anything very much more illuminating or important that we can say than that race is a social construction even if we can find genetic clusters which would, as Armand Leroi suggests, allow a geneticist to look at a sample of my spit and tell from it where all my great great grandparents lived.
In defence of Gould, I would say that of course a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; and the best cure for dangerous knowledge is more and better knowledge. However, there is no guarantee that we will find this further knowledge quickly or at all; while we are looking, great harm may be done with the dangerous and partial stuff. There is nothing unreasonable in wishing that certain discoveries had never been made. Some people would consider lobotomy, or even Freudian psychoanalysis cases in point. I am certain that any research in to human genetic differences will be seized on by racist scientists and racists generally. Whether you think an advance in knowledge is worth this cost is a political judgement with no obvious or final answer.
The Left is often accused of groundless optimism about human nature. In this case Gould was pessimistic and his grounds for pessimism seem reasonable to me. If you look at the way that science is twisted and abused in the current American debates on climate change and creationism, it's difficult to feel that a public debate on the reality of race will be conducted in a spirit of disinterested longing for truth.
But let's look at the sort of knowledge that Leroi wants. The genetics of skin colour are interesting and could perhaps be worked out quite quickly. The genetics of breast shape are possibly even more interesting and I'm sure you could get funding to study them. But the real fascination and the real tabus surround the genetics of intelligence and behaviour. If these turned out to vary between races, as it appears they vary between sexes, we would have a sensational scientific discovery.
Now, one of the points about this list is that the more interesting these qualities are, the harder it is to read them out from the genome. Breast shape may be produced by genes and nutrition, but what constitutes a desirable shape has varied greatly in the last fifty years, and the kind of nutrition that fashionable women allow themselves has varied with this preference too. Similarly, the kinds of intelligence, and the kinds of behaviour, that are rewarded and considered desirable in children, have changed a great deal in the last hundred years, and will presumably change a great deal in the next century too. To call some human trait "socially constructed" doesn't mean we can change it at will; and it certainly doesn't mean there is no genetic component.
This comes out clearly in the classic Wilson/Daly studies of homicide rates. These show there must be a strong genetic component to our species' homicidal behaviour, simply because the pattern stays constant across widely differing societies with widely differing homicide rates. But the evidence which shows us this also shows that changing the environment can hugely diminish the rate at which young men do in fact kill each other. Which half of the story is more important?
Still, we can be certain that the research will be done. Some new things will be found, and on an individual level, they will be important and useful. We will know more about genetic variations among human groups, and we may, just possibly, discover more about the genetics of behaviour and intelligence and how they vary. On that subject we could hardly know less than we do now. The real question is how these two kinds of knowledge will fit together. Will there be any correlation between the clusters of genes that control appearance, which do undoubtedly exist, presumably as a result of sexual selection; and other gene clusters, as yet undiscovered, which affect intelligence and behaviour? It is these second clusters that people are really interested in, and here there is no evidence to suggest that Lewontin's results are misleading and that the variations are greater within races than between them (and that the greatest variation is found in Africa). But we won't know for a very long time because we don't know which genes are involved and even whether they cluster.
In the mean time, all those people who already think they know what "race" means will be convinced that science has proved them right. They will twist the work of decent scientists like Leroi to indecent ends. Gould himself had this happen to him when creationists abused his work on punctuated equilibrium. Only if you think that racism is, in the modern world, less widespread than creationism can you laugh at the spectacle of Gould's ghost wringing his hands.
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TIM D. WHITE
Paleontologist; Co-director Middle Awash Human Origins and Evolution Project
Human Variety: Evolution's Creation
Armand Leroi's points are made stronger by adding the dimension of time. Countries and races may seem ancient and fixed without the perspectives of history and evolutionary biology. It is sobering to consider that only fifteen generations separate us from Washington, Jefferson and Napoleon.
Ten thousand generations ago, a man died at the edge of a tropical African lake. The place, now called Herto, is in today's Ethiopia. We now know Herto man by the tools his people fashioned from volcanic rock, and by his skull. His skin was almost certainly dark, but a forensic scientist would be baffled by the shape of the man's skull. It clearly belongs to our species Homo sapiens, but it defies attribution to a specific modern human group.
Whether measured in geological or evolutionary terms, Herto man didn't live very long ago. After all, the well-known Australopithecus female "Lucy" was born nearby, but she had died about 200,000 generations before Herto man was even conceived. By any reckoning, our species is a youngster among hominids, primates, and mammals.
The Herto man lived at the same time that European neanderthals (presumably light-skinned) inhabited a landscape refrigerated by the penultimate glaciation. Therefore, when combined with studies on modern human and neanderthal DNA, it is clear that Pleistocene Earth witnessed hominid biological variation at the species level.
Human evolutionists have long known that today's one-hominid planet is an anomaly rather than the rule. And racial variation would certainly have characterized any of the hominid species spread across major segments of the Old World. We can already dimly perceive a bit of that sub-specific variation in the skeletal fragments already recovered, but we can still only imagine the soft tissue features that would have distinguished Iberian, Malayan and Somalian Homo erectus.
But when did geographic diversity arise within Homo sapiens? By baffling the forensic scientist, the Herto man gives us a clue. His skull is shaped more like a modern Australian aboriginal than a modern Ethiopian, but no modern human matches it exactly.
So the 160,000-year-old Herto cranium shows us that the skeletal features allowing contemporary forensic scientists to differentiate today's Africans from Europeans or Asians had not yet evolved, even at this late date in human evolution. Confirmation comes from studies of the modern human Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. These suggest that the common roots of the human species are very shallow compared to the vast majority of other mammalian species. Whether considered paleontologically or genetically, it appears that much of the physical variation to which Armand Leroi draws our attention evolved during the last little bit of our more-than-six-million-year tenure as a lineage separate from the African chimpanzees.
Like Marco Polo, Herodotus and Columbus, we all recognize that modern human physical variation is geographically patterned. Was this always the case? No, most fundamentally because we were not always modern humans! Phenotypic variation among primates results primarily from Darwinian selection, mate choice, and genetic drift. Our molecules and the fossilized bones of our ancestors indicate that our roots are shallow relative to other mammalian species. Our anatomical and physiological variation inform us about the where and when of our origins.
Our genes, our bodies, and the racial variation in our young species are not social constructs. Rather, these are all the products of evolutionary forces operating over the last couple of hundred millennia. Understanding any of them requires the unique perspective of evolutionary biology.
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ALUN ANDERSON
Editor-in-Chief, Publishing Director, New Scientist.
Armand Leroi is bound to please the right wingers with his view that "genetic data show that races clearly do exist". I'm sure that is not his intention but I also doubt that everyone will read as far as his belief that "skin colour does not give the measure of a man, that it tells nothing about his abilities or temperament". That genetics has a bad history of being misunderstood and misapplied scarcely needs restating.
Leroi's call for a better understanding of the genetics of human diversity is welcome. Whether everyone would classify "we don't know why some girls have big breasts and some of them have small breasts" as an "important question", I'm less than sure although it may be one that will attract novel sources of research funding! More generally, knowing more about diversity might settle the question of whether "beauty" is really an expression of biological fitness and that would certainly be worth knowing.
Trying to resurrect race is much less worthwhile. All that has really happened in recent years is that some geneticists have realised that if you measure a number of different genetic differences between people you can then cluster these differences into groups that broadly mirror our common sense notion of race. This is not really too surprising as we would anticipate that if we can make a reasonable guess about someone's origins then must be some set of genetic differences underlying them.
The trouble is that these genetic clusters are not that well defined, still muddle up some people with quite different origins, and have not been associated with anything deep or fundamental about people of different origins. Leroi pretty much says so himself. To fill out the quote above, Leroi says in full that "Some [contributors to the journal Nature Genetics] argued that, looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist". Elsewhere we find "Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences". Leroi at first appears to support the view that classifying people by "race" would at least make it possible to "improve medical care" by tailoring treatment to race. But he quickly goes on to say that: "Everyone agrees that race is a crude way of predicting who gets some disease or responds to some treatment".
Indeed so, for a focus on race can blind doctors to groupings that cut across racial lines. Sickle cell anaemia, for example, is often regarded as an African disease but occurs in a number of groups around the world. Nor would a broad classification based on "racial categories" tell you that Ashkenazi Jews, for example, are prone to a rare mutation that causes breast cancer. These issues have been explored in some depth in New Scientist.
Race is too crude and too shallow a concept to be worth resurrecting even as a scientific shorthand and has already done too much harm. In medicine, it is the individual genotypes determining disease susceptibility and drug reactions that are worth pursuing. If we would like to know more about diversity—why some people have straight and some have curly hair, for example—classifying broad racial clusters does not really help us to find the answer.
Although in my view Leroi overstates the case for race as a useful concept, I still applaud him for speaking about diversity and biology. At a recent session I chaired at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on Gender and the Brain, the real anger came from US scientists and intellectuals, venting their frustration that any discussion of biological differences relating to sex or race is a forbidden zone in universities in America. Although this session occurred at the height of the controversy over Larry Summers's poorly thought out remarks on female scientists, which certainly raised temperatures, it does indeed seem an indicator, as Leroi put it, that "it's time that we grew up".
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NICHOLAS HUMPHREY
Psychologist, London School of Economics; Author, The Mind Made Flesh
Let me change the subject away from race, to Leroi's provocative remarks about beauty and deformity.
Here's the problem. If the most beautiful person in the world is whoever it is who carries the fewest fitness lowering mutations, then (other things being equal) presumably the most beautiful person in the world is also the fittest person in the world. But this begs the question. Is she the fittest because she is regarded by potential mates as the most beautiful (and therefore gets to choose the best possible of fathers for her children). Or is she regarded as the most beautiful because she is seen by potential mates as the fittest (and therefore gets to be chosen by them as the best possible mother for their children).
Either way, I worry about Leroi's assumption that maximal beauty does in fact equal maximal fitness. There are many reasons why, as matter of fact, great beauty may not lead to great reproductive success. W.B. Yeats pointed to more than one of these when, in his "Prayer for his Daughter," he prayed for her to have beauty but not too much of it.
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.
Still more to the point, in the context of Leroi's discussion of deformity, sometimes an admixture of ugliness — even of deformity — can be a positive asset in its own right. For the fact is that individuals who start life with a disadvantage, and who are obliged to compensate as best they can, may come up with alternative ways of doing things that leave them ahead of the game. Lord Byron, who is said to have had a club foot, drew attention to this paradoxical aspect of deformity in a remarkable poem, "The Deformed Transformed."
... Deformity is daring.
It is its essence to o'ertake mankind
By heart and soul, and make itself the equal —
Aye, the superior of the rest. There is
A spur in its halt movements, to become
All that the others cannot, in such things
As still are free to both, to compensate
For stepdame Nature's avarice.
Thus even "deleterious mutations" can prove a blessing in disguise. Of course no doubt Leroi would say in that case they don't count as "deleterious." But this is an old move. As Sir John Harrington pointed out, on the subject of "Treason.":
Treason is ne'er successful
Here's the reason:
When it's successful,
Then it's not called "treason."
Solve this paradox;
We're discussing people who honestly feel friendly, but withold somewhere in their minds a willingness to be equally human.
Then you may be psychologically qualified to undertake this science
there's one aspect of human inheritance that people are resolutely ignoring. And that is normal human variety. Or, to put it more crisply: race. If we look around the world we find that people look very different from each other. These differences are manifestly genetic. They must be. That's why people's kids look like them. Yet we know nothing about that variety. We don't know what the differences are between white skin and black skin, European skin versus African skin. What I mean is we don't know what the genetic basis of that is. This is actually amazing. I mean, here's a trait, trivial as it may be, about which wars have been fought, which is one of the great fault lines in society, around which people construct their identities as nothing else. And yet we haven't the foggiest idea what the genetic basis of this is. It's amazing. Why is that?
[ Edited for some clean up ]
If "Black liberals" can be race hustlers, why can't "Black conservatives"?
[ edited ] Didn't Alan Keyes race hustle when he ran for the senate seat in Illinois? Come on, tell the truth.
From an exchange on Booker Rising:
Massie as race hustler, DS? Which race is he hustling?
LB, I number of times I've pointed out glaring inconsistencies in some of his pieces.
In this one, I point out that he's slamming Blacks for the idea of a Black community. If he believes that Blacks should look at Blacks as a part of America, then he should stop bashing the Black community because it's something that he doesn't believe in.
By bashing the Black community, which he doesn't believe in, he's using race when it's convienient. Thus, to me, he's hustling the race issue.
Next, the idea that most Blacks don't consider ourselves as being part of America fails under the light of inspection.
Start with the fact that Blacks are more likely to live in an integrated neighborhood than whites. Continue with the fact that most Blacks still strive for, and believe in, integration.
Consider the make up of the military, recent recruiting data not withstanding. The percentage of Blacks in the military exceeds the percentage of Blacks in the general population. If Blacks didn't consider ourselves as a part of America, the percentage in the service would be lower than in the general population.
Condi Rice and Colin Powell have called themselves African-American. Now tell me that by them calling themselves African-American, they don't consider themselves to be American. Yet, those who are intellectually lazy or who just want to throw flames, state that by calling themselves African-American, they are belittling themselves as American. Or better stated, they are down playing that they are American.
There is a sticker that says, "American by birth. Texan by the grace of God!". I've seen that sticker a lot. Does it mean that the person is not considering themselves to be American?
Of course not.
Let's look at something here. More and more, employers are complaining about high school graduates, no matter what race, not knowing basic things to make them good ENTRY LEVEL employees. McDonald's uses pictures on their registers for a reason. It's because the employees are less prone to errors if there are pictures on the register instead of ordinary numbers.
"Anti-intellecutalism" exists in America, in general. People don't want to admit it, but the "geek" vs. "cool" thing is an issue of "anti-intellectualism". But, it's a Black issue?
In "The End of Racism", D'Nish D'Souza bashes Blacks for believing in the group. But then he turns around and writes that Blacks should act like Jewish people whose money circulates in the Jewish community a number of times before "leaving" the Jewish community. "Black money" cirulates less than 1 time before it leaves the Black community. He wrote that Blacks should act like some immigrant groups who poll money to fund start up businesses for others within their group.
Am I the only one to see the intellectual flip-flop there? How can you say Blacks should not act as a group and then turn around and say Blacks should act like these groups who act like a group?
I keep writing that Blacks shouldn't allow ourselves to be caught up in the madness and this is just a small example of why I think so.
For the past couple weeks I've been indulging a guilty pleasure - no holds barred textual street fighting. It's what invariably happens when I go to visit a sleeply little listserve with an established pecking order and protectionist orthodoxy. Think Vin Diesel's character in Knockaround Guys, and you have a pretty clear picture of what I'm talking about. I'll watch the list flow for a minute, identify the toughest poster(s) - whose self-appointed job it is to enforce aggregate status quo by challenging and discouraging potentially upsetting ecclexia.
Posting something certain to draw a response from the local toughs, I then proceed to share with these hapless rubes (it's always doods too) the hard-earned monstrousness I've amassed over the course of the preceding 2000 textual brawls.
Just like your local divey tavern, listserves exist for socialization, validation, and transaction. Both lurkers and active posters alike are embarked on individual quests for *something*. Whether the urge to socialize, or, the basic shameful human primate propensity for rubbernecking gory altercations, the listserve ecology hosts no innocents - just experience and objective gradients running the gamut from newbie to seasoned regular.
My objective is twofold, first, I enjoy the mayhem. If I ever even attempt to say otherwise, I'm lying like a dog. Second, and more importantly, I long ago discovered the developmental value of friction. Basically, if you put somebody's beliefs and ego to the test, they'll either duck and fold, or, actually step up with their A-game and yield some deep thought you'd otherwise never hear in a thousand years of *civil* conversation. THAT is the scarce and precious commodity I'm trawling lists to harvest in the first place.
Ideally, the fight isn't staged simply to wreak devastation. Rather, the goal is to call out the resident champion of an aggregate pov and elicit from that individual the ideative first fruits of the collective he exemplifies. Every Fallujah I've left in my wake is a zero-sum game both literally and figuratively. [and a superb illustration of the absurdity of neocon mentality and policy to boot]
Having temporarily abandoned my afrostocratic haunts in favor of a little good old red-state neocon slumming and brawling - I'll admit I've left a few Fallujah's scattered across the digital countryside. I thought I was embarked on yet another one until yesterday, when a pitched battle finally resulted in pacification of a sizeable enforcer clique and a tentative detente with its champion. Make no mistake, it wasn't "hail and well met" it was straight up ugly and savage until the bell rang and my adversary said "no mas".
After vetting my old school conservative credentials, this individual shared the following gem with me - A Guide to the White Trash Planet for Urban Liberals. It is an eye-opening view into the next big job for Americans of good faith.
Not only must we Work hard on increasing and enriching the level of interpersonal engagement within our own communities, the next evolutionary push will have to involve education, outreach, and socialization - interpersonal communion - with and among the masses of the poor, white, and pissed. This will not be easy. But it is most definitely necessary.
Not only will this enrich both our respective communities, it will comprise a bulwark against the genuinely evil predations that the backers of the present administration have in store for America.
The Full Blown Oprah Effect, Reflections on Color, Class, and New Age Racism really drove home to me the necessity of enlarged, renewed, and full engagement on multiple fronts for any genuinely interested in seeing America politically work its way back out of the regressive nosedive that the neocons have engineered. We have all GOT to Work toward being on the same side, or, we will all surely lose.
"Covert racism may actually be deepened by these civil rights victories and by related partial black upward mobility into the middle and upper classes insofar as those victories and achievements have served to encourage the illusion that racism has disappeared and that the only obstacles left to African-American success and equality are internal to individual blacks and their community – the idea that, in Derrick Bell’s phrase, “the indolence of blacks rather than the injustice of whites explains the socioeconomic gaps separating the races.”
I read the online edition of The Washington Times to get a conservative presentation of the news that they deem is fit to publish.
I remember reading about the Times firing Sam Francis for comments he made at a conference held by American Renaissance. I've read the Times coverage of the American Renissance bi-annual conference and never have I read where the conference is a gathering of individuals to promote white superiority and eugenics.
So, whenever I read something in The Washington Times, I know what to expect when they have coverage of events that may have race involved.
That brings us to this:
Feb. 9, 2005 -- Marian Kester Coombs is a woman who believes America has become a "den of iniquity" thanks to "its efforts to accommodate minorities."White men should "run, not walk" to wed "racially conscious" white women and avoid being out-bred by non-whites. Latinos are "rising to take this country away from those who made it," the "Euroamericans." Muslims are "human hyenas" who "smell blood" and are "closing in" on their "weakened prey," meaning "the white race." Blacks, Coombs sneers, are "saintly victims who can do no wrong." Black solidarity and non-white immigration are imposing "racial revolution and decomposition" in America.
Coombs describes herself as just "a freelance writer in Crofton, Maryland." But this is one writer who's a bit more well-positioned than she lets on.
Marian Kester Coombs is married to Francis Booth Coombs, managing editor of the hard-right newspaper The Washington Times. Fran Coombs has published at least 35 of his wife's news and opinion pieces for his paper, although his relationship to her is not acknowledged in her Times bylines.
And that's not all. Fran Coombs has presided over the Times' republication of articles taken from white supremacist hate groups, not to mention allowing a key employee at the paper to write fawning pieces about the same groups.
Enough said.
Home ownership is absolutely essential when we talk about self-determination. If we don't have some control over the real estate in our communities then we can't ever realistically hope to control our destiny. NO LAND = NO BLACK POLITY.
Quoting from PTCruiser's real estate knowledge drop on the So What? thread at P6, inspired by Spence's most refreshing hardline on measuring representation, and angling off my recent quip about the apparent hostility of redistricting...., today's headline article in the KCStar about the enduring legacy of ubiquitous restrictive real estate covenants...., looks like yet more fertile ground we'll need to mine in order to understand the full parameters of the continuing symptomology of contemporary American apartheid.
By JUDY L. THOMAS
The Kansas City Star
“IT'S RIDICULOUS”: Kim Wrench calls it “a form of ignorance and stupidity” that the Greenway Fields homeowner's association rules still contain a section that prohibits black owners or tenants.
THE POWER OF LIQUID PAPER: Restrictive covenants so offended Harriette Handley when she worked for the Homes Associations of the Country Club District that she covered them over.
Kim Wrench loves the 2½-story modern colonial he bought in the Country Club District more than 15 years ago, but he hates its dirty little secret.
Buried in Section 10 of the Greenway Fields homeowner's association rules — tucked between sections on outbuildings and pergolas — are these words: “None of the said lots shall be conveyed to, used, owned nor occupied by Negroes as owner or tenants.”
Wrench, who is black, tries to ignore the words that are known in legal circles as a “restrictive covenant.” But he can't.
“It's ridiculous that it even has to be on there,” Wrench said. “I look at it as being a form of ignorance and stupidity.”
Although many Kansas City area residents are not even aware of them, more than 1,200 documents involving thousands of homes still contain racist language banning blacks, Jews and other ethnic groups. For the first half of the 20th century, racially restrictive covenants were routinely recorded in plats and deeds and placed in many homeowner's association documents not only here, but nationwide.
Yet many of the covenants never were removed, even after being ruled unenforceable by the U.S. Supreme Court as long ago as 1948 and banned by the Fair Housing Act of 1968. And their vestiges of discrimination — a kind of “curse of the covenant” — still linger locally, The Kansas City Star has found.
Indeed, the latest U.S. census figures show that, while some of the metropolitan areas that had racial restrictions are now integrated, many of those neighborhoods still have few, if any, black residents living in them today.
“The major legacy is the racial separation we still see,” said lawyer Arthur A. Benson II, who researched the covenants as part of Kansas City's landmark school desegregation case. “While there is a lot more integration now than there was 20 years ago, Troost (Avenue) is still a major dividing line in our community. And that's a direct result of the racially restrictive covenants, together with other real estate practices and school practices.”
While society still struggles with racial separation, critics say something should be done to rid housing documents of the illegal covenants. Although unenforceable, the language can be psychologically damaging, reinforcing old fears and sending a message that racism is alive and well in America.
“It's a very insensitive message, one that says although we acknowledge that black Americans can own real estate, we won't go to the energy and the effort to have everything removed so they can feel better about it,” said Ron Branch, president of the National Association of Real Estate Brokers, the nation's oldest minority trade association.
But legal experts say the covenants are very much like a curse in that they are almost impossible to get rid of. And historians trace some of that difficulty to Kansas City, where the covenants were perfected by one of the city's most prominent developers, J.C. Nichols.
Nichols was among the first developers in the United States to promote the restrictions. From 1908 through the 1940s, the J.C. Nichols Co. built dozens of subdivisions in the Kansas City area that prohibited housing sales to blacks.
Creators of the covenants crafted them in such a way that they would be around for a long time. One way to remove them is by state legislation. Other ways are not as easy.
“It can be done, but it's very time-consuming, and it can get very expensive,” said Pete Heaven, a lawyer who drafts rules for new neighborhoods in Kansas and Missouri.
Widespread restrictions
Most of the restrictions — including those in more than a dozen subdivisions in the Country Club District — prohibit ownership by blacks, but some Johnson County covenants are even more exclusionary.
The “Declaration of Restrictions” for Leawood Estates filed by Kroh Bros. in 1945 prohibits ownership or occupancy “by any person of Negro blood or by any person who is more than one-fourth of the Semitic race, blood, origin or extraction, including without limitation in said designation, Armenians, Jews, Hebrews, Turks, Persians, Syrians and Arabians.” An exception is made for “partial occupancy by bona fide domestic servants employed thereon.”
Racial restrictions were common in other Johnson County communities as well, including Prairie Village, Roeland Park and Fairway.
In a document recorded with the Johnson County register of deeds in 1939 titled “Johnson County Development Company et al. vs. Negroes,” a group of homeowners declared that the property was “to be restricted against use or ownership by Negroes.” The property included lots in South Park, which now is part of Merriam.
Those restrictions are still on the books.
Such restrictions were so widespread that in the 1940s three U.S. Supreme Court justices had to excuse themselves from ruling on the covenants because they owned property that contained the exclusionary language.
Even John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan lived in racially restricted neighborhoods before they became president. And the North Dallas home sold by George W. Bush in 1995 had a deed provision that restricted ownership to whites. A spokeswoman said the president was not aware of the covenant, which was put in place in 1939.
But the enduring racist language — which continued to be added to local housing documents as late as 1962 — sends an outdated message that must be changed, said Kevin Fox Gotham, a Kansas City housing historian who now teaches at Tulane University in New Orleans.
“It illustrates the things that people would do to reinforce and create racial segregation,” Gotham said. “It also illustrates that it's not that important to people to remove this racial language. So it's telling of race relations, not only in Kansas City, but around the United States.”
Even though they cannot be enforced, covenants continue to keep minorities away from certain housing developments, said Sherry Lamb Schirmer, an associate professor of history at Avila University and author of A City Divided: The Racial Landscape of Kansas City, 1900-1960.
“I have been told by black people that they're aware of what neighborhoods were once restricted, and often they still see those as hostile zones, so that they'd be more likely to purchase a house in one neighborhood versus another because of that,” Schirmer said.
“So these covenants then have more than simply symbolic meaning. They still have an impact.”
Covenants die hard
Experts say removing the covenants is possible, especially if homeowner documents can be amended.
“If you're lucky enough to have that (an amending procedure) in the document, then you merely need to get an amendment signed by at least 51 percent or two-thirds of the landowners,” Heaven said.
But he said it gets far more complicated when the restriction is in the plat because to amend a plat every property owner has to agree. A plat is a map that shows the boundaries of a piece of land or subdivision.
“A plat is very, very difficult to change,” Heaven said.
John Sheets, executive director of the Homes Associations of the Country Club District, said restrictions written for the J.C. Nichols Co. require that a notice to amend be filed five years in advance of its renewal date — usually every 20 to 25 years — and that all homeowners must agree to the change.
“There's a lot of expense to get every single signature of every homeowner notarized in a timely fashion and then submit that,” Sheets said. “You'd have to have an attorney working on it for two to three years. It would be extremely cost prohibitive. And if one person holds out, the whole thing is off.”
Among the homeowner's associations that still have such restrictions in their covenants, Sheets said, are Armour Fields, which includes the Romanelli Gardens and Meyer Circle subdivisions; Armour Hills; the Country Club District; Country Club Homes; Countryside; Crestwood; Greenway Fields; Stratford Gardens; Westwood Park; and Wornall Homestead, all in Missouri. Those in Kansas include Indian Hills, Mission Hills, Prairie Village and Tomahawk Road. All are J.C. Nichols developments.
Sheets said that while the restrictions have not been officially removed from the documents, a few of the homeowner's associations have crossed them out.
Some had help from Harriette Handley, an employee of the Homes Associations of the Country Club District.
For 30 years she put together welcome packets for new residents. The packets included the homes association rules. But the racial restrictions bothered Handley so much that she took matters into her own hands.
“Anything referring to Negroes, I would white out,” she said. “I just did it on my own. I don't know whether it was legal or not, but I don't think anyone would complain about it.”
Removing the restrictions from deeds and other documents filed with the county would be more difficult because county officials have no authority to delete them, said Shawn Henessee, assistant director of the Jackson County Records Department.
John Bartolac, director of Johnson County's Department of Records and Tax Administration, said the language also remains in plats and deeds there. Removing the restrictions, Bartolac said, would be “a paperwork nightmare.”
Stephen Todd, regional counsel for the Chicago Title Insurance Co., agreed.
“In Jackson County, most of it's on microfilm,” Todd said. “Or it's in these big old bound books. And that wouldn't be very feasible to snip it out of the book.”
Yet in the 1980s the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began requiring title companies to cross out the restrictions on copies of covenants or note in the margins that the provisions were to be considered deleted, Todd said.
States, however, can require the removal of racial restrictions. In 1999, the National Association of Real Estate Brokers launched an effort to purge discriminatory language from property-related documents nationwide and was successful in California.
In that state, homeowner's associations must remove the racist phrases and individuals can strike the language from their own deeds. But since the law went into effect in 2000, only 24 property owners have gone to the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing seeking the removal of the language, spokeswoman Jacqueline Wagner said.
Last year, California amended the law to allow homeowners to go directly to their county recorder to make the changes, Wagner said, but the department has no information on whether any did.
State Sen. Yvonne Wilson, a Kansas City Democrat, was flabbergasted to learn that the restrictions remained in many Missouri documents. “I had no idea that those were still in there,” Wilson said. “It's an embarrassment. That's offensive language, and it sends a terrible message.”
Wilson said she intended to sponsor a proposal to get the exclusionary language removed.
“I'm going to look into it next week and start the legislative research,” she said Thursday. “If we could legislate it and get it off, that's the best approach to take.”
U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver called the covenants “a national embarrassment” and agreed that the legislature needs to address the issue.
“I think the Missouri General Assembly should entertain legislation that would remove the racial covenants,” said Cleaver, a former Kansas City mayor who now represents the 5th Congressional District. “And it should be an easy bill to pass, because both sides of the aisle would vote for it, even if some of them didn't want to.”
But state Sen. John Vratil said he did not see the issue as one the Kansas Legislature should get involved in. “It's a local issue, and a homes association issue,” said Vratil, a Leawood Republican.
For racial restrictions in homes association documents, association members could vote to remove them, Vratil said.
“It's a question of, is it offensive enough that you're willing to pay $50 to $100 per homeowner to get it removed?” he said. “And I think I know what the answer is. … It's one of those issues that politicians love to talk about because it resonates, but when you get below the surface, most people just aren't interested in going to the time and expense to deal with it.”
Time for change?
When Marsha Ramsey wanted information last summer about her subdivision's regulations on swimming pools, she called the homeowner's association and requested a copy of the restrictions for Greenway Fields.
Ramsey said she did a double take when she read the section prohibiting blacks.
“I was shocked,” she said. “It's just so barbaric I can't even believe it. It's almost beyond my comprehension.”
For Ramsey, it does not matter that the covenants are unenforceable. “That's immaterial,” she said. “This is insulting to a number of people. I'm a white woman, and I'm appalled that it was there a hundred years ago, let alone today.”
Ramsey also does not think it would be too difficult for her homeowner's association to lift the curse once and for all.
“Last week, we got a letter wanting to accumulate $5,000 to fix a wall,” she said recently. “Well, what about sending out a newsletter saying, ‘Let's get this changed'?”
That is what residents of Red Bridge Estates did in 2001.
“We took all of those restrictions out,” said Kenneth Green, who was president of the homes association at the time. “They hadn't been enforced or even looked at for years and years, but somebody did recognize that they were still in there, and we decided to clean them up.”
Green said the process was not that difficult. “It was brought up at the annual meeting, and we voted to do it. Fortunately, we have a lawyer in the association, and he handled it.”
Wrench said he only learned about the racial restrictions in the Greenway Fields subdivision when he bought his pale yellow colonial house in 1989.
But it was just one in a series of surprises, he said.
“I never really met the owner until I showed up for the inspection,” Wrench said. “And when she found out that I was a gentleman of color, she made a big deal out of it. And I heard her tell my agent that she never would have sold her home to me if she'd known she was selling to someone black.”
Still, Wrench never considered moving.
“Moving would just let them win,” he said.
Gregory S. Reeves, The Star's database editor, contributed to this report.
Meant to say something pithy about MLK Day. One of the few things left at the University of Michigan that bears my mark is the MLK Day Celebration. One of the best of its kind in North America as far as I know. A few hundred black students (myself included) and a number of progressive white students fought to get Michigan to recognize King's birthday.
I think, given the political context, that this is a pretty decent example of what many non-blacks think about MLK Day. Please copy and forward to friends if you feel so inclined.