Breaking the Racial Wall
DOLMAN, JOSEPH
Writers & Writing Breaking the Racial Wall By Joseph Dolman SOMETHING REMARKABLE happened on election night this past November in the section of the Bronx where I live. When NBC News called...
...The newly emergent multicultural demographic that includes whites, Asians, Hispanics, and middle-class blacks is precisely the crowd that so heartily hailed Obama’s victory in my neck of the North Bronx on election night...
...But can he...
...Although there is a great human diversity in our cluster of homes and apartment buildings, nobody among our 4,500 residents makes much of it...
...The hearings constituted a “crack in the racial wall,” said the New York Times...
...They keep whatever racial and cultural animosities they may have developed in their lives under a tight rein...
...The addition of human rights could make clear a concern with the nexus between race, sex, disability, age, national origin, sexual orientation, religious discrimination, poverty, and civil liberties concerns,” she says...
...OBAMA HAS ACKNOWLEDGED this dilemma with far more candor...
...Berry’s answer is not very illuminating...
...The distance America has traveled since 1957 is almost unfathomable, but we have miles to go before we can rest on our laurels...
...I think it does...
...This legacy has bred anger among blacks, Obama added, while whites drawing on their immigrant experience have built resentment against busing and affirmative action...
...That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations—those young men or increasingly young women we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future...
...Here she may be onto something...
...Berry fumes about opposition to quotas, but she fails to address the undeniable dilemma they pose...
...She believes this has caused poorer blacks to lose indispensable black support...
...Ber ry, who served on the commission from 1980 to 2004, reminds us that progress in the world of Washington is the product ofiffy tradeoffs, arduous quests for information, bruising political fights, and surprising contradictions...
...What we may glean from her account is that civil rights progress does not simply arrive on the wings of eloquence, ready for molding into landmark legislative packages like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965...
...Her advice for a major remake of the Civil Rights Commission is to turn it into a civil rights and human rights commission...
...It is a world where leaders occasionally do admirable things for bad reasons...
...Nevertheless, it is only fair to ask how, specifically, black middle-class disinterest has affected poorer blacks...
...Racial issues do sometimes pop up, but they are not the first order of concern on anyone’s agenda...
...This is where we stand, he said—in “a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years...
...It is a world where crippling pushback from ang r y opponents is always possible long after the decisive battles seem to have been won...
...But as the movement winds down Berry’s perceptivity and moral clarity begin to fade...
...She talks about complacency and continued discrimination...
...It was as if they were shouting because America had elected a President who looked like he might feel at home in our building, who might actually help the country solve some of its more durable racial issues...
...No longer did they always involve a clearcut conflict of good versus evil, pitting black progress against white backlash...
...Only once does Berry come close to shedding new light on our racial plight...
...In a world where brutal police officers, suppression of minority votes, and job inequities remain common problems, the commission still has a job to do...
...President Dwight D. Eisenhower suggested the commission in 1957 as a way to cover his basic disinterest in civil rights...
...They are the people who make our economy run and our democracy flourish—the teachers, mechanics, nurses, computer technicians, assembly-line workers, bus drivers, postal workers, store managers, plumbers, and repairmen who constitute America’s vital heart...
...Most want the American economy restored and Islamic terrorism routed...
...In a 1998 speech at Portland State University, President Bill Clinton described the impact of the new demographics: “Today, largely because of immigration, there is no majority race in Hawaii or Houston or New York City...
...Then she says: “Incarceration rates as a result of the drug culture narcotized organizing efforts among the poor...
...She is troubled, for example, by opposition to affirmative action programs at elite universities...
...For the first time, too, African-American witnesses were seen by their white and black fellow citizens talking to members of a government agency who respectfully listened...
...When NBC News called Ohio for Barack Obama shortly after 9 o’clock, a spontaneous cheer welled up from countless unseen voices inside our 22-story Riverdale apartment building...
...She cites a 2007 Pew poll showing that 53 per cent of blacks think individuals are mostly responsible for their situation, despite discrimination...
...America’s racial and ethnic composition changed rapidly after the 1960s, making some civil rights issues more complex...
...Berry, though, seems stuck in a black-white paradigm...
...Civil Rights Commission still have a role to play...
...Her book is thus an important history of a crucial institution as the civil rights movement hit its peak...
...Joseph Dolman, a longtime New Leader contributor, is a freelance writer and critic and former Newsday columnist...
...They demand respect, order, good schools, and a place where they can raise their children without undue worry...
...Lacking enforcement powers beyond an ability to issue subpoenas in connection with hearings, the commission created an important supporting role for itself as the civil rights movement went into high gear...
...That was the commission’s high-water mark...
...The following year, as Berry notes, its televised hearings in Jackson, Mississippi, “afforded whites a view of the terror, violence and discrimination perpetuated by whites against blacks in the state...
...Yet even this turn of events is a sign of progress in a strange way...
...Most people work very hard to pay their mortgage or rent...
...As black incomes have risen, she says, many middle-class blacks have adopted views that are closer to white attitudes...
...Within five years, there will be no majority race in our largest state, California...
...As we work to ameliorate our failings, however, it is important also to celebrate the achievements of racial progress over the last 50 years...
...Our neighbors are American-born and foreign-born, middle class and working class—from every imaginable race, religion, ethnicity, and caste...
...Its meticulous hearings and fact-finding missions offered up hard evidence that served as the underpinning for the Civil Rights Act of 1964...
...It is important as well to understand that at this stage in our history the old culture of anger and protest will do little to change the legacy of defeat...
...Mary Frances Berry’s latest book, And Justice for All: The United States Commission on Civil Rights and the Continuing Struggle for Freedom in America (Knopf, 425 pp., $30.00), offers cautionary tales as she describes the agency’s victories and defeats along with its mind-numbing ideological wars against conservative Presidents and unsympathetic members of Congress...
...Through upward mobility, Obama has pointed out in The Audacity of Hope, the black middle class has grown fourfold in a generation, black poverty has been cut in half, and Hispanics have seen comparable progress: “In their hopes and expectations,” he writes, “these black and Latino workers are largely indistinguishable from their white counterparts...
...The elation was telling...
...In a speech last year he said, “For all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American dream, there were many who didn’t make it— those who were ultimately defeated in one way or another by discrimination...
...In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States...
...But the raw emotion they showed on election night seemed to transcend all that...
...Berry legitimately complains about Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 strategy to win white Southern votes by pandering to the region’s boiling racial resentments...
...It is a world where good people sometimes perform less than heroically...
...Drug addicts are not able to organize a movement or a riot, and thus those who most needed to make demands succumbed to a kind of pacification.“ She never quite explains who orchestrated this pacification or why middle-class families should force themselves to live in such an environment...
...The commission had to admonish the Kennedy Justice Department for its reluctance to prosecute Southerners who were obstructing voting rights workers...
...That sounds like an invitation to endless squabbling on the panel and ponderous, ideological, dust-gathering reports...
...The answers, instead, lie in issues that are not exclusively racial—in personal accountability, in effective public school systems, in better health care networks, and in safe streets patrolled by highly trained and courteous police officers...
...Throwing open the balcony door, I heard a similar roar reverberating from the high-rises around us...
...Yet she doesn’t tell us what fairsounding explanation officials could offer, say, a Korean student with excellent test scores from a struggling family, who lost out at a coveted university to an African-American or Hispanic student with lower scores...
...But his remarks raise another question: In the face of this stalemate, does the U.S...
...ON THOSE RARE OCCASIONS when Berry does venture away from the old paradigm, the results are not encouraging...
...She bitterly condemns, with abundant reason, Ronald Reagan’s attempt to wreck the commission’s mission of finding and publicizing systemic discrimination...
Vol. 92 • January 2009 • No. 1
