The Age of Colorblindness

According the the main stream media, we live in an age of colorblindness. Across the board they repeat the refrain - the Civil Rights Movement created equal opportunity for all. Here are some recent examples. From the Washington Examiner - “Race relations in America have never been better." From The Economist - “Before the 1960s…most blacks were poor…almost none were to be found flourishing…None of that is true today.” And the Wall Street Journal,  “The civil-rights battles of the 1960s have been fought and won…The racial disparity that persists today…is evidence that too few blacks…have taken advantage of the opportunities now available to them.”

The only blindness here is their own refusal to face the facts. In all measures of well-being, minorities face a system of inequality that denies them equal opportunity to achieve the "American Dream". Choose any area - quality education, access to health care, employment & income, housing, etc - and what you will see is deep, structural inequality. And by most measures, the situation is getting worse, not better.

Two statistics demonstrate how grossly unequal American society is. The first is wealth. In 2013 the average white American had a net worth (assets minus liabilities)12 times that of African Americans. The second is incarceration rates. Black males are 7 times more likely to be incarcerated than white males. These two factors alone (and unfortunately there are many, many others) have a devastating effect on the black community.

It's time for us to take the racial blinders off.

Charleston and Racism (3)

The following is from a sermon by the President of the North Carolina NAACP, the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II. It expresses my feelings in words far better that I could ever write.

A deeper meaning of forgiveness in the Christian nonviolent tradition reveals a critique that knows when the perpetrator has been caught but the killer is still at large.

There is a scripture that says we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against the powers and rulers of the darkness. Within the nonviolent faith tradition, it has always been clear that hate cannot drive out hate and evil cannot drive out evil. And so the Christians at the Charleston Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church who were able to forgive the murder of nine of their fellow worshipers 48 hours after losing their loved ones are consistent with their faith. Jesus said as he was being murdered by the state, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

But this forgiveness should not be misinterpreted as a dismissing of the greater evil. The forgiveness in Charleston is also an act of resistance to the attempts to lay the blame for this horror at the feet of one man. If America is serious about this moment, we cannot just cry ceremonial tears while at the same time refusing to support the martyred Reverend Pinckney and his parishioners’ stalwart fight against the racism that gave birth to the crime.

The perpetrator has been caught, but the killer is still at large: the deep well of American racism and white supremacy that Dylann Roof drank from. These families are challenging the schizophrenia of American morality, which allows political leaders to condemn the crime but embrace the policies that are its genesis.

Many South Carolina politicians and others around the nation are decrying the killings but steadfastly refusing to quell their divisive race-implying rhetoric. They have condemned the violence but have not ceased their push for policies that promote race-based voter suppression; adversity toward fixing the Voting Rights Act; cutting public education in ways that foster resegregation; denying workers living wages; refusing Medicaid expansion; allowing the proliferation of guns; and flying the Confederate flag, a symbol of slavery, racism, and terrorism against African-Americans, at the state Capitol.

Some even use racial code words to criticize the president, all in the name of taking their country back and preventing its destruction. And they refuse to admit that there is a history of racialized political rhetoric and policies spawning the pathology of terroristic murder and violent resistance.

When they were murdered, Reverend Pinckney and his parishioners were advocating for a better life for people of all races. They were standing with fast-food workers demanding a living wage. They were calling for the Confederate flag to come down. They were fighting against voter suppression and for funding public education, expanding Medicaid to allow the poor and near-poor of all races to have healthcare. They were mobilizing for police accountability and marching for justice in the recent killing of Walter Scott, an unarmed African-American man shot in the back by a police officer in North Charleston.

These brave family members are telling America that you cannot focus only on Dylann Roof and absolve the nation of its historic sickness. In a profound way, they are saying that giving the killer the death penalty is not going to fix what ails us. Arresting one disturbed young man will not bring “closure” or “healing” to a society that is still sick with the sins of racism and inequality, where too many perpetuate the slow violence of undermining the promise of equal protection under the law, which preachers like Denmark Vessey, Martin Luther King, and Clementa Pickney fought for.

These family members are asking us to forgive the sinner but hate the sin. They are issuing a clarion call born of their pain and loss to create a society that truly embraces justice and equality, that ends the policies of racism and poverty that guarantee there will be more Dylann Roofs and more acts of terror, because only then will we apprehend the real killers.

In light of this, I believe real healing would be writing and passing a bipartisan omnibus bill in the name of the nine Emanuel Martyrs that implements Medicaid expansion, raises public education funding, passes living-wage requirements and new gun-control laws, removes the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse, and restores the Voting Rights Act.

The very seat Reverend Pinckney held in the state Senate is in jeopardy as long as Section 5 of the VRA has been gutted. And even if it passed, the current reform bill in the US House would exempt Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee from coverage. If we want closure, let us name a VRA restoration bill after the Emanuel Nine.

We have no choice. We must see transformative action, not temporary ceremonial displays. Until we deal with the issues of race, poverty, and violence that threaten to tear our nation asunder, it is not just America’s soul that is at stake, but America itself.

Charleston and Racism (2)

I submitted the following Letter to the Editor to the Wilmington, NC StarNews this morning.

Eugene Robinson’s column (Americans must go beyond speeches and symbols to end racism) was a breath of fresh air in response to the brutal murders in Charlestown.

The problem of racism goes far beyond the individual acts of hatred and the existence of hate groups. It can be found in a system of segregated and unequal schools, which fail to meet the needs of minority students. It is present in the school-to-prison pipeline, which funnels African-American youth into a prison system, where young black males make up a majority of those serving time for non-violent crimes.

It can be seen in racial profiling by the police and in legal discrimination (in employment, housing, voting, etc.) against those who have served time in prison (again, mostly minorities). It can be found in the extreme inequality of wealth; median wealth of whites is about 8 times that of blacks.

Racism is a system of oppression, which has deep roots in our society. It had its origins in slavery and was resurrected after the Civil War as Jim Crow segregation. The Civil Rights Movement broke down some of the barriers of Jim Crow, but since 1968 we have seen the erosion of these limited gains and in some cases, particularly mass incarceration of young black men, new and more sinister forms of oppression.

Yes, take down the Confederate flags and change the names of parks and streets which honor those who defended slavery and Jim Crow. But if we are really committed to end racism, we must dismantle the entire system that continues the oppression of people of color. 

George Vlasits, 6/24/15

Needed: A Progressive Paradigm Shift

What we, as progressives need is a “paradigm shift”. To be sure, we need a millionaires’ tax, we need to reject cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, and we need to take hundreds of billions from a bloated military budget to fund our communities’, to build roads, to provide education for our children, etc.

But winning some (or even all) of these battles will NOT change the situation we are in unless we tie them to a revolution in the way Americans think about the role of government in society. In 1962 Thomas Kuhn popularized the concept of “paradigm shift” in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolution, in which he argued that scientific advancement is not evolutionary, but is accomplished through revolutions where “one conceptual world view is replaced by another.” (Think - Newton,
Darwin and Einstein) I would argue that this same model applies to Americans’ ideas about government.

The reactionaries (please, let’s stop calling them conservatives, because that’s not what they are) understand this. More than 40 years ago they set out to produce just such a paradigm shift, to reverse the social and economic thinking of the previous 70 years of history in this country. To undo what the Progressive Movement, the New Deal and The Great Society had accomplished, they had to vilify government as the source of all problems in society (particularly in the economy) and to promote the ideas of economic individualism and the free market as the solution to these problems.

Their intellectual forefather, Friedrich Hayek, provided the economic and philosophical underpinnings in his book, The Road to Serfdom. In this work, Hayek argues that government intervention in the economy (and collective action more generally) inevitably leads to tyranny and that the only defense of individual liberty is the free market and laissez faire capitalism. These ideas, further developed by the Chicago School of Economics and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, formed the basis for the neoclassical school of thought and the antigovernment politics of the new right.

Enter David Stockman, et al. From the Reagan “revolution” to the Tea Party, the arguments of reaction have been based on the acceptance of this conceptual framework. If we accept this paradigm (and it is today, and has been for the past 30 years, the dominant framework in economics and politics), the best we can hope for is to fight a rear guard action to slow the erosion of programs that meet the needs and defend the interests of ordinary Americans.

What we need is to shift the paradigm, to reassert the concepts of collective response to problems and the expansion of the public sector as the only guarantor of real individual liberty and social progress. This won’t be easy, but to use a sports analogy, the best defense is a good offense.

To change the debate we must do three things: first, redefine what government spending is and why it is critical to society; second, make clear that the current deficits are NOT primarily a product of increased spending (with the exception of spending on the military & war, which has played a significant role), but rather of reduced revenues due to tax cuts for the wealthy; and finally emphasize that the current economic problems are a product of the exact policies which the reactionaries keep shoving down our throats.

Government (more accurately “the state”) is the way in which a society protects and provides benefits for individuals that they can not effectively provide for themselves. It performs that role by taking some of the wealth produced by society (usually through taxes) and investing it to make available these benefits and protections. While individuals may disagree with this or that particular use of society’s resources (and as progressives we do disagree with its use to project American power and dominance abroad), we need to recreate a consensus that overall what governments do is both necessary and beneficial. Here we can use examples to demonstrate how society could not possibly function without these collective activities (police, roads, schools, etc.)

Well duh, everybody knows that, don’t they? No, this is where the reactionaries get support from ordinary Americans, by simply denying this role for government. What progressives must do is repeat this framework whenever we fight for a particular program. We need to point out that the collective actions of government benefit society even when they may not affect a particular individual. Public education benefits everyone in a multitude of ways, even those who don’t have children in the schools!

But government has a second role to play (and one that it has not always carried out). Jared Diamond in his book “Collapse” points out that individuals’ and private corporations pursuit of their short-term interests may frequently occur at the expense of  other individuals and of the long-term survival of the society. Thus a critical role of the state is to defend those collective and long-term interests against rapacious forces that threaten individual and/or group survival (read coal and oil industries and global warming).

Conclusion: Society needs government with adequate resources to carry out those functions. The question then becomes, where can those resources come from, not where can we cut, cut, cut.

Our second task should be a lot easier. “Congressional Budget Office data show that the tax cuts have been the single largest contributor to the reemergence of substantial budget deficits in recent years.  Legislation enacted since 2001 added about $3.0 trillion to deficits between 2001 and 2007, with nearly half of this deterioration in the budget due to the tax cuts (about a third was due to increases in security spending, and about a sixth to increases in domestic spending).” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) And that does not even include the much more significant Reagan/Bush tax cuts of the 1980s and early 1990s.

But tax cuts have had another “side effect” recognized as early as the later 1980s. Kevin Phillips (former chief political analyst for Nixon’s 1968 campaign) in his book “The Politics of Rich and Poor” points out that it was a major factor in the massive transfer of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the very wealthy beginning in the 1980s.

Which brings us to the third point we need to hammer home. While many “mainstream” economists seem oblivious to the fact, the outstanding economic problem of the 21^st century is growth, but rather income and wealth inequality. But more on that later.

George Vlasits - 6/22/15

Charleston and Racism

The brutal murders in Charleston and the disgusting responses of commentators on Fox News and from some prominent Republicans, once again demonstrate that we don’t live in a post racial society. Racism, both on the individual level (more correctly described as prejudice and hatred) and on the societal level (institutional racism) are still, as H. Rap Brown said many years ago, “as American as apple pie”.

Our country’s failure to deal with every social, political and economic issue stems, in large part, from its failure to deal with its history of racial oppression and the consequences of that history for today. That system of racial oppression may have evolved – from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration (see Michele Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow”) and economic inequality (check out the median wealth of blacks and compare it to that of whites), but it is alive and well in all aspects of American society.

The individual violence that targets blacks and makes headlines is just the tip of the iceberg. All aspects of American society – income, wealth, healthcare, housing, education, political representation and so on – are still separate and very unequal. And getting more so. This kind of violence kills just as surely as that of a gun. One man pulled the trigger in Charleston, but to the extent that we fail to take up the struggle against racism and make sure that black lives matter as much as white lives, we are all complicit.

George Vlasits, June 19, 2015

Housekeeping Issues

This is a test of notifications.

Education

Not long ago, George mentioned 3 books on education which he thought might have value.  I was unfamiliar with one of these, Creating the Opportunity to Learn - Boykin and Noguera, so I got a copy & read it.  As one thing always leads to another (a universal law?), in it I found a reference that sounded interesting.  It was to a former teacher/author named John Taylor Gatto, so yet another book to read.  Well, I got it, Dumbing Us Down, & I just started it over breakfast this morning & I'm stunned.  This guy has something to say & right now, I'm almost afraid that I'm going to come to agreement with him - afraid because of the obvious Libertarian appeal of his thesis.  And yet there are aspects of Libertarianism which are linked to anarchism & progressivism.  Somebody, anybody, please read it & share your thoughts - especially if you care about education & learning, even if it's only your own education & learning.  I'll post more as I progress.  Here are a couple of links:

http://www.educationreformbooks.net/dumbing_down.htm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUqOZ6GsF7o

http://www.spinninglobe.net/spinninglobe_html/dumbingrev.htm

Continuing with Gatto & at the same time read Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation.  I'd love to be present at a discussion or debate between these 2 guys but I feel like I'm doing the next best thing.  The two books do seem to converse with each other.  Sadly, they also enrage anyone who cares about kids & learning.  The big difference seems that Kozol believes the system to be reformable.  He says we have a system of apartheid schooling with acceptable to enviable results for the "haves" & appalling methods & outcomes for the "have-nots".  He espouses ending de-facto segregration & bring all schools up to the level of the present middle to upper classes.  Gatto believes that the system itself is so rotten that it needs to be dismantled.  I have not yet learned how it might be replaced but I still have more reading to do.  I'm surely not inclined to believe that home-schooling is an answer for any but a very small minority of students & families.

Here are a couple more links:

http://www.users.humboldt.edu/jwpowell/27806948-Dumbing-Us-Down-by-John-Taylor-Gatto.pdf

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/books/review/the-shame-of-the-nation-separate-and-unequal.html?_r=0

Finished with Gatto & have concluded, as George stated, that he's way off base, an ideologue for a system that would leave the 99% totally at the mercy of the 1% & we already have a damn good idea of the quality of that mercy.  There is, however, one argument of Gatto's that, I believe, requires our attention.  Gatto cites Wendell Berry (a current hero of mine) in asserting that to succed, local institutions need the participation, support, & ultimate control of their constituencies.  In other words, fiats from on high (the federal government) are counterproductive.  There is some truth to that assertion.

Now, back to the comparison with Kozol.  Jonathan Kozol knows education.  Check this out:

https://prezi.com/abficnm0pze5/soci-177-kozol-presentation-chapter-9/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy