Robert Blauner, a sociologist, wrote Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America, 1989. Much of this book is based on 20 years of interviews with both blacks and whites; this a rare longitudinal study that sees the impact of social change upon American race relations. Social change in America takes place a at rapid pace making it difficult for scholars to keep up. Next some excerpts from the Conclusion of Black Lives, White Lives:
"Among the blacks we interviewed in 1968 there was a marked ambivalence toward integration. Ten years later this ambivalence had become a full-fledged disillusionment; neither integration nor Black Power had brought about the kind of fundamental changes in American society that people had expected. And despite some important reforms, it was clear that a racial revolution was not going to happen in the foreseeable future. . . . " Still true in 2015.
"In the sixties people viewed Black Power and integration as mutually exclusive strategies. . . . Since the early 1980s, black politics has been based on the recognition that a synthesis of the two strategies is needed. Integration alone cannot be expected to bring about racial equality, . . . Today the people left behind have less hope of a better life than their counterparts did in the sixties: the urban ghettos are even more economically and socially depressed. And segregation---though no longer sanctioned by law---remains prevalent in schools and neighborhoods."
"The loss of community is seen as the most serious cost of integration. . . . American society had become more violent and dangerous, more individualistic---even nihilistic--- and less bound by traditional values."
Summary
Only one of the 10 whites interviewed had significant contact with blacks; so most whites only have a superficial understanding of Blacks and the impact of centuries of oppression and poverty.
Most blacks' "life histories go deeper, and are more firmly rooted in a philosophy of life [often a biblical one].."
Neither black nor white have found a way to solve the fundamental problem of American racism/ethnocentrism/oppression. This applies to both black and white churches. All American churches need to dig deep into the scriptural teaching on ethnocentrism and oppression, then move toward solutions using justice, reconciliation, shalom and the kingdom of God.
Blauner's scholarhip and analysis is excellent, but, in a sense, he is outdated. Even as he was finishing his book (1989), events had left his analysis behind. During the 1980s, the Reagan era, the Reagan Revolution, spawned two new systems of oppression---the racial wealth gap and mass incarceration based heavily on racial profiling. These systems of oppression have always been present in American society but they took on a new level of magnitude under Reagan. For documentation on Reagan and the wealth gap, see The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (1990); for documentation on Reagan and mass incarceration and racial profiling, read The New Jim Crow (2010).
Kevin Phillips, author of The Politics of Rich and Poor, was once a key conservative Republican strategist, a brilliant analyst and writer. After the Reagan era, Phillips was disillusioned by what he saw happening; the gap between rich and poor doubled; the rich prospered, the poor suffered. So Phillips decided he needed to expose what had happened. By this time Phillips had matured, moved beyond ideology to statesmanship. In book after book, a total of 15 quality books, Phillips dug deeply into both American history and current economic and political analysis. Google the Wikipedia on Phillips and the book review of The Politics of Rich and Poor by Brett Crow.
After reading both Phillips and Alexander on Reagan and the racial wealth gap and mass incarceration, both of which Reagan started, I now conclude that the Reagan Era was a demonic one, an evil empire, to coin a phrase, with impacts that none of the following presidents, Republican and Democratic, have undone. So in 2015, during the Obama era, both mass incarceration and the racial wealth are running wild, unchecked by either the government or the American church. Much talk, but little concrete action.
Now a 2014 update from the pen of Dean Starkman; see his article in the June 30, 2014 issue of The New Republic entitled "The $236,500 Hole in the American Dream: The wealth gap between black and white families is greater than ever. Here's how to close it."
Starkman begins his article on the racial wealth gap referring to Thomas Piketty's book on wealth---economic inequality---titled Capital in the Twenty First Century: "Piketty argued that the more important factor driving the divide was not compensation [income] but assets [wealth]. The machinery of a market economy, he demonstrated, grinds out returns on wealth that are higher than income. . . . '
But Piketty ignores the racial component so Strakman turns to Ta-Nehisi Coates' article in The Atlantic titled "The Case for Reparations." "Coates frames centuries of discrimination against African Americans as a story of wealth stolen or denied. Retracing 250 years of ugly U.S. history, he inventories the many ways blacks have been suppressed economically, and sometimes violently: slavery Jim Crow, predatory lending scams, barriers to advancement---both legal and de facto---of astonishing variety."
"Notwithstanding its undeniable historical roots, the bulk of the [current] black-white wealth gap can be traced to current policies and structures that have made the wealth divide grow at an accelerating pace over the past 25 years [beginning in the Reagan era]."
The next experts that Starkman turns to are Thomas M. Shapiro Melvin L. Oliver, white and black sociologists who have specialized in studying the racial wealth gap, their first book (1995) being Black Wealth/White Wealth. In 2014, Shapiro and colleagues published : "The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap; Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide." Starkman summarizes: "In 1984 the median working-age white family had inflation-adjusted assets worth $90,851, compared with a net worth of only $5,781 for the median black family of working age. . . . [in 2010] the median white wealth had jumped to $265,000, while median black wealth was just $28,500."
"Notably, all the material factors the report identifies are traceable to policies put in place in the post-Civil Rights era [primarily the Reagan era]. Wealth in America has continued to be quietly and overwhelmingly funneled to whites, principally because the asset-building policies now in place are aimed at people who already have assets. Meanwhile the better-publicized federal cuts in safety-net programs and aid to cities and states that began in earnest under Ronald Reagan have not only made day-to-day existence more difficult . . . but undermined black asset accumulation as well."
Starkman's conclusion: "African Americans' accomplishments, on their own, will never, ever be enough to dig them out of the hole they've been thrown into." The government will have to make radical and comprehensive changes in policy and the churches will need to make a radical commitment to justice, to the repair of black families and communities.
To tackle housing, residential segregation and predatory loans must be stopped and policies reshaped to favor the poor, not the rich. The same for tax-free retirement plans. "the government could roll out means-tested subsidized education accounts . . . baby bonds." Starkman develops these ideas and more in his article. Current government policies are legalizing systems of oppression the benefit the rich and oppress the poor---in direction violation of James chapter two.
But to change the racial wealth gap will take a political revolution, and the churches will have to lead this revolution. But at this point the church lacks both the theological foundation and the moral courage to do so.
But it may be that the above comments are too factual; possibly the reader needs to hear an astonishingly agonizing and gripping personal account from Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of the widely-read article, "The Case for Reparations." In the September 2015 of The Atlantic, Coates has an article titled "Letter to My Son." This is an unvarnished look at black life; next some excerpts:
". . . white America's progress . . . was built upon looting and violence. . . . the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land."
". . . the [American] Dream rests on our [black] backs."
"But all our phrasing---race relations racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy---serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth."
"What should be our aim beyond meager survival? . . . . I have asked this question all my life. The question is unanswerable."
Some comments on fear in the ghetto:
"All of them [young black men] were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. . . . My father was so very afraid. . . . the violence rose from fear like smoke from a fire"
"To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease."
"The culture of the streets was essential. . . . I could not retreat into the church. . . . We would not kneel before their God." "Everybody of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white."
"Our bodies built the Capitol and the White House."
Millions of black fathers could write this same letter to their sons and daughters. This will only stop when millions of white mothers and fathers write letters pledging to repent, restitute, and repair, to do justice so that the oppressed blacks can experience liberty and justice. If any of you write such a letter, please send a copy to me [ lowellnoble@gmail. com ]
Coates talks a lot about the black struggle to survive and urges his son to continue the struggle, but he does not much hope beyond that. No false hopes are expressed.
How can we end the endless 400 year struggle? Or are blacks doomed to endless struggle? Without White Christians and white churches entering into the black struggle by repenting, restituting and repairing damaged lives, families and communities according to kingdom of God principles, according to Jubilee justice principles, the endless struggle will continue.
Some specific issues which should be tackled:
* mass incarceration
* racial wealth gap
* PTSD or PTSS or PTOS, personal and social
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