Our Best And Our Brightest

For years many blacks have just come to accept that integration was the path to success in America. Blacks who have been able to have deftly navigated the integration maze either through employment, education, or athletic achievement. And once reaching the pinnacle of their success they have chosen to leave their neighborhoods, friends, and communities to relocate into white America where they take on mythical status as being more than black. To whites they become not like those other blacks and therefore become more acceptable to their white sensibilities. And in some cases blacks believe they have some mythical characteristics that separate them from other blacks. In their wake they leave behind a community that is devoid of role models and success stories. They leave behind a community that is becoming more financially and morally bankrupt.

Before integration and the black man’s desertion of the black neighborhood the only place for successful black men was within the black community. They didn’t have the option of leaving and joining the majority population so their influence and their example were there for all to see and emulate. With the exodus of these heroes the black community has been left with smoke hounds, drunks, and prison gang leaders for masculine role models. And people wonder why young black men are doing so well? When you remove the presence of successful men in a community a vacuum is created and as with any vacuum something or someone is always there to fill it. In the case of the black community it has been filled by despair, hopelessness, and this penitentiary mentality. The heroes we have been left with are those who exploit and pander to violence, criminality, and gangsterism.

I remember when I was growing up we had professional athletes, doctors, and professional men as neighbors. We interacted with them daily and got to see that a black man could be successful without resorting to dealing drugs, robbing people, and killing their brothers. These men provided hope just by their very presence to many young black men who otherwise would have been consumed by their circumstances. Even children who did not have fathers at home still could go out into the community and see that there had been others who were able to overcome their surroundings and reach to another level. As blacks have been able to wrestle success from the clutches of an economic system that for so long had ignored and marginalized them they began to seek the safety and comfort of the suburbs. While I have no problem with anyone who wants to make a better life for their families in the suburbs, I do believe that we all have to be cognizant of the consequences of our actions. As more and more successful blacks have migrated to the suburbs in their wake they have left a more engrained and intransigent form of poverty, a poverty that feeds on itself and creates more poverty.

In my opinion there are two ways to be successful. One is to migrate to the suburbs and integrate into an established system of success. This of course is the easy route to take because the only work involved is assimilation into the larger culture. The second and by far the more difficult way is to stay where you are and rebuild the institutions that you have. By doing this you create and enforce your own definition of success which may be different from the larger culture. The key question in all of this I guess is do successful black men owe any loyalty to their communities besides trying to sell them sneakers or an occasional drive through the hood? Each person must answer this question within themselves, but as a Christian I am not only judged on what I do but also on the opportunities I have to do the right thing and do not.

Our black youth in our communities are at a crisis point. They are angry and for good reason. When they needed a black man to protect them and to lead them there was no one positive there. Instead what was there was gangs, criminals, and disengaged fathers. No longer were there positive role models to emulate and find a communal sense of pride in. As more and more black kids are growing up without fathers the need for hope has never been greater. These kids need to know that they matter in a world that has basically ignored, shunned, and made them feel invisible. They continue to cry out in dysfunctional ways, but it is the only way they know how to say we are hurting and no one seems to care. It is time for all of us to come together not as a white community or a black community but as one community to rebuild and restore our promise to one another. Yes, I am my brother’s keeper.

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Jeremiah Wright Is Not The Problem

Why is it that in America we always look for the easy and the convenient. We always want everything to fit into a nice neat box. That’s right, no contemplative thought, no analyzing, just give it to me in a form that will not require a lot of work or thought on my part. It is a simple task to chalk up the Reverend Jeremiah Wright as some angry black lunatic who is going to single handedly destroy the Obamania tour. It is amazing to me how so many people blogging will write all these prose and essays extolling the virtues of the American electorate and how badly they want policy white papers and how hungry they are for detailed plans. When the truth of the matter, as the fall-out from Reverend Wright has once again displayed, is that the majority of voters could care less about timetables and figures. Not when there is some juicy story floating around about some crazy black man and his relationship to the leading Democratic Presidential contender.

For those who prefer to accept the Cliffs notes version of events I would suggest you not read any further, because that is not what I will provide. What I will provide is a provocative analysis of the real underlying problem as to why we are having this dust up about a relatively small-time pastor. You see the real problem has nothing to do with Jeremiah Wright. The real problem was exposed 40 years ago by Dr. Martin Luther King in an interview he gave at Western Michigan University. In the interview Dr. King stated that the most segregated hour in America is Sunday morning. You see the problem is that because we do not interact not only Monday through Friday, but also on Sunday we have no concept as to what each other are thinking. We, as blacks are given a better glimpse into white society because we are bombarded with its images on a constant basis. Whites on the other hand have little or no conception of what is going on in the black community aside from the caricatures from television and movies.

The Church in America as a whole has done little to reconcile and heal the wounds of the past. The modern Church instead of preaching the Gospel has instead chose to preach the world. Just the fact that we have a black Church and a white Church should be alarming to anyone who professes to be a Christian. Many whites have asked how could Barack Obama have remained a member of his church when the minister was making the statements he was making. Those of you who are not prejudice how could you have remained in families where racial slurs and prejudice where present? I have known countless whites who have confessed that they have parents, brothers, or sisters have often times used racial slurs and had racial biases. Or that they have attended social events and parties where there were no minorities present and the racial jokes and the N-word were being cast around like lures at a bass fishing tournament. My point is that there is enough blame to go around and if we all just look into our own lives honestly we will see it.

The question I have is this. If you are attending a church and you look around and everyone in that church looks like you and acts like you, then why are you there? I present this question to both black and white. Newsflash – If you call yourself a Christian and everyone at your church looks just like you then you are in the wrong church. How can we expect to worship the same God when we can’t even come together and worship him here and now. It is no wonder so many people have such bad opinions of Christians. We preach togetherness and one Church, one Lord, and one God, but where is that unity on Sunday? We each run off to our safe little church communities and talk about all of these virtues and once the sermon is over we climb right back into our cars and go right back to our segregated worlds. The problem is not this one preacher, no my friends the problem is the Church as a whole in America. If we are ever to overcome the many obstacles that divide us we must begin with the One who unites us.

Martin Luther King Jr. said America’s most segregated major institution is the church.

“At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing and Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation,” King said in 1963. “This is tragic. Nobody of honesty can overlook this.”

Only 7 percent of America’s churches are racially mixed. On June 29, Biggers is planning a nationwide Mission Sunday. He hopes to organize 1,000 churches across the United States to visit churches that “look different from one another.”[1]

How can this be? We talk about love, honesty, and fairness yet we don’t have a clue how to worship God together. The problem is hypocrisy in the Church. Jesus had His harshest criticisms against hypocrites[2] because of their damaging effect on the Church. Hypocrites destroy the Church from inside as well as outside. They destroy it from the inside by undermining the faith of others. How can I trust the preacher when he is running around with the deacon’s wife? They destroy it from the outside by preventing those who want to join the Church from doing so. Why should I join the Church when they are doing the exact same things that the world is doing? I beseech anyone who claims to be a disciple of Christ to look back at what He did. He went out into the world, he didn’t just stay in “His” community. Can we not also do the same? I would ask all true Christians and non-Christians alike to step out of your comfort zone and reach out to those who appear different from you. You may be surprised how much they may be like you.

[1] http://blog.newsok.com/newsroom/2008/01/21/the-most-segregated-hour/
[2] Matthew 23:13-36

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Brooks to the Rescue of the Reagan Myth

It seems that pundit and Republican apologist David Brooks could not sit idly by and listen to the truth about his hero Ronald Reagan. Because of the recent talk surrounding the Reagan visit to Mississippi to kick-off his campaign and its racist overtones, Mr. Brooks is trying once again to write revisionist history concerning “The Gipper”. I wrote an essay detailing this phenomenon called “Revisionist History”, it seems the Republicans have to keep the image of Reagan as the populist hero because of the damage done by the Bush clan. It explains why all of the candidates are falling all over themselves to be the “next Reagan”. So, needless to say his image must not be tarnished by a small little detail like the truth.

The current complaint of Brooks and other revisionists revolves around a speech Reagan gave to kick-off his presidential campaign following the Republican convention. The speech took place in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered just 16 years earlier. In the speech Reagan used the term “states rights” stating that, “I believe in states’ rights.” The term states’ rights has a long history in America and in the South particularly. States’ rights was the false justification used by the Confederacy to secede from the Union and to condone slavery.

The term "states' rights" has been used as a code word by defenders of segregation, and was the official name of the "Dixiecrat" party led by segregationist presidential candidate Strom Thurmond. George Wallace, the Alabama governor, who famously declared in his inaugural address, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!", later remarked that he should have said, "States' rights now! States' rights tomorrow! States' rights forever!" Wallace, however, claimed that segregation was but one issue symbolic of a larger struggle for states' rights; in that view, which historians dispute, his replacement of segregation with states' rights would be more of a clarification than a euphemism.[1]

Mr. Brooks would have us believe that Mr. Reagan and his campaign were unaware of these facts at the time of the scheduling of this stop or the location of the stop. For Mr. Brooks to make this claim is incredulous and completely dishonest, you would have had to be a moron not to know the implications of being in Philadelphia, Mississippi and making a statement concerning states’ rights. If there is one thing we do know the campaign staff for Reagan were no idiots, they carefully fashioned a brand that is still being used today as the standard bearer for Republican and conservative ideas. A brand that began with this speech and as we have gained more insight into the Reagan years it has become obvious that every speech, every movement was carefully choreographed. The idea that this was some campaign oversight or slip up flies in the face of reality.

In reality, Reagan strategists decided to spend the week following the 1980 Republican convention courting African-American votes. Reagan delivered a major address at the Urban League, visited Vernon Jordan in the hospital where he was recovering from gunshot wounds, toured the South Bronx and traveled to Chicago to meet with the editorial boards of Ebony and Jet magazines.

You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase “states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.[2]

Based on his own argument Mr. Brooks makes the case that race played a major role in the rise of the Republican Party, so how did this rise take place? Why would millions of voters flock to a party that didn’t support their views concerning race? According to his article the goal of the Reagan campaign was to move away from the racists roots of the “Southern Strategy” begun by Nixon. I’m sorry you want to move away from racism by going to Mississippi and giving a speech on states’ rights the day your general election campaign begins, am I the only one who is missing something here? That would be like me trying to court the Hispanic vote by going to a rally given by the Minutemen declaring my support of native-born rights and then attending a Cinco de Mayo celebration the same day. How stupid do these people take us for?

Despite their attempts to whitewash history, the truth is that Reagan and his staff knew exactly what they were doing and it is borne out by the policies of his administration. Mr. Brooks states that Reagan could have done something wonderful that day by instead of supporting states’ rights he had said he supported civil rights, but imagine how that would have played with that crowd, so he didn’t. These brand preservers forget one tiny detail, we have a historical record of Mr. Reagan’s policies and legislative agenda and they contain outright pandering and inward support for racist policies. Has Mr. Brooks forgotten about South Africa and Bob Jones University? To have a serious debate it requires a certain amount of honesty, honesty that Mr. Books and his ilk refuse to display.

The Reagan brand is a myth and like all good myths it requires fabricators to keep it alive and flourishing. I can’t say that Reagan was a racist or he wasn’t; only God can know a man’s heart, but I can say that he supported policies that had racist overtones. Mr. Brooks calling a duck a chicken doesn’t make it one.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States'_rights
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/opinion/09brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

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Supreme Court Versus Brown Part Infinity

The fallout from the recent Supreme Court decisions concerning school desegregation is starting to surface in many communities now embolden to return to the segregated past. I recently read about the situation in Tuscaloosa, AL; where the majority white school board and the white superintendent have drawn up a rezoning plan that looks dangerously close to a return to segregation to many observers.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.

Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones.[1]

It is already difficult for most inner-city school districts to desegregate due to white flight and the private school dodge of many white parents. I have to acknowledge that as a parent I understand the desire to have your kids in a safe environment where they are getting a quality education. The problem I have is that instead of complaining about or laying blame why more parents don’t become involved to upgrade and change the existing public education system. It is to all of our benefits that we raise the level of education for all of our children.

Sometimes I just don’t get it; this country could have been the greatest experiment of human interaction in the history of the planet. We could have become the beacon for other nations by demonstrating that people of diverse backgrounds could in fact live together in peace and harmony. I guess alas it is not to be, because all we have done is to further illustrate how fear and divisiveness even among people of the same nation still trumps everything else. Either we are going to try and live together or we are not. It is time for those of us black and white who have a desire to make this thing work to overcome ourselves and come together. I am not advocating that we become one big melting pot, although I don’t have a problem with that, I am suggesting that we are able to atleast have a nation of mutual respect, honesty, and fairness.

We have so much abundance in this land and yet to look at the behaviors of many it would appear that we were in some third world nation struggling to survive on subsistent resources. I couldn’t imagine what this nation would be like if we really had to scramble for survival on a day to day basis. The level of racial animosity would be off the scale. As I have written before, because of our history we have to be compelled within the boundaries of our laws to integrate. I am speaking of integration in the sense of learning to accept our differences and our similarities with empathy and understanding for one another. I don’t expect to someday have us all standing holding hands singing, “We shall overcome” but why are we unable to live together as equals is beyond me. Why must one man dominate another man?

The plan in Tuscaloosa involved redrawing the lines of the district to place more minority students in the lower performing schools. The white parents had complained of overcrowding in the white schools, because so many of the black students wanted to go to the schools where they could get a quality education, go figure. Here is my question, why can’t all the parents come together in the district and raise the level of all the schools? Why must everything in this country be an either/or proposition? If you spread around the students and the resources evenly couldn’t you over time raise the level at all the schools?

Months later, the school board commissioned a demographic study to draft the rezoning plan. J. Russell Gibson III, the board’s lawyer, said the plan drawn up used school buildings more efficiently, freeing classroom space equivalent to an entire elementary school and saving potential construction costs of $10 million to $14 million. “That’s a significant savings,” Mr. Gibson said, “and we relieved overcrowding and placed most students in a school near their home. That’s been lost in all the rhetoric.”

Others see the matter differently. Gerald Rosiek, an education professor at the University of Alabama, studied the Tuscaloosa school district’s recent evolution. “This is a case study in resegregation,” said Dr. Rosiek, now at the University of Oregon.

In his research, he said, he found disappointment among some white parents that Northridge, the high school created in the northern enclave, was a majority-black school, and he said he believed the rezoning was in part an attempt to reduce its black enrollment.[2]

What good is saving money if you are not educating all of your children? No, Mr. Gibson, the cost savings have not been lost in the rhetoric, what has been lost in your calculations is that separate but equal has always been a cheaper way to educate. The way to alleviate the overcrowding in the white schools would have been to raise the level of performance in all the schools, but that would require hard work and commitment which the school board obviously didn’t want to pursue.

In a bizarre twist to the Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind” legislation the parents of the black students are requesting transfers from the lower performing schools based on the criteria of that legislation. In the rhetoric of Mr. Bush, this was one of the goals of the legislation, but let’s wait to see their reaction to it being used as a tool of integration. I have a feeling we are going to see more of these cases as more school districts begin to remove race as a criteria of equal opportunity.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/education/17schools.html?hp
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/education/17schools.html?pagewanted=2&hp

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