Much of my life was spent in going along with the societal norms of
the day. When they changed, so did I. Without thinking. As a small
boy, in the early 40's, I accepted that Negroes were poor and lived in
poor housing because they were shiftless and lazy. My parents never
told me this, nor did they believe it. But somewhere I got the idea
stuck in my head. As a young man I believed that all I had to do was
to get in a girl's face and demand a kiss, and she would bow to my
superiority. After all, women depended on men, and were truly the
"weaker sex". My parents never taught me that, nor did they believe
it for one minute, nor did they practice such behavior in our home.
And as a young boy, I believed our United States was spreading freedom
and democracy around the world. And I believed in God and Jesus
Christ. I never learned any of those things at home. My parents
belonged to the American Communist Party and my dad was an avowed
Atheist. But somehow all this "common knowledge" worked into my head.
My school helped some, by teaching me that our nation was strong
because of all the inventors and industrialists who brought new
inventions and many jobs to the American workers. And I learned about
our great victories over our enemies. And I learned that we had wars
with the Red Savages who Massacred our defenseless Pioneers. I played
Cowboys and Indians, and I was always a Cowboy. And I was taught to
always respect those in authority, because they knew what was best for
me.
And then I grew up and began to unlearn a whole bunch of Crap. I
discovered that the Working Class built this nation, and the
"Industrialists" sucked the marrow out of the workers bones. I
learned that Capitalists were not the smartest and strongest people,
but really were nothing more than common crooks and cheats. I learned
that God was the Tool of the Ruling Class, and Man created Him in his
own image. And I learned that my folks had it right when they chose
to join an organization that promoted collective action for self
preservation.
Finally, I learned that given time and effort, we can make changes.
But we must first identify who our enemy is.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/16/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Acdtually, I think that the sentence is true, with an additional sentence
which is that most white people are unaware of how our society works so
they
are blind to institutional racism. Additionally, they are unaware of how
their individual attitudes toward people of color are influenced by the
effects of institutional racism. Its like people's negative attitudes
toward immigrants. They don't understand the immigration laws, nor the
history of how the US affected the politics and economics of the countries
to the south of our own, nor how our own economy is dependent on
undocumented immigrants.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, October 16, 2016 12:54 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: White Blindness and Denial Characterize U.S.
Racial Attitudes at the End of the Obama Era
"The problem is less an issue of individual prejudice on the part of white
Americans and more about the way leading institutions and social structures
function..."
After reading the article, I decided the above sentence was sarcasm.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/16/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
By Paul Street
Truthdig
White Blindness and Denial Characterize U.S. Racial Attitudes at the
End of the Obama Era
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/white_blindness_denial_characteriz
e_us_2 Posted on Oct 12, 2016
President Barack Obama. (Jacquelyn Martin / AP)
children.
Half a century after the policy triumphs of the civil rights movement,
as the nation's first black chief executive nears the end of his
presidency in the shadow of race riots, anti-black racism remains
entrenched in the United States. The problem is less an issue of
individual prejudice on the part of white Americans and more about the
way leading institutions and social structures
function(https://www.amazon.com/Racial-Oppression-Global-Metropolis-Ch
icago/
dp/0742540820) to make black Americans disproportionately poor, sick,
injured, uninsured, jobless, homeless, underpaid, arrested, criminally
marked and incarcerated. The culprits include:
.A labor market rife with employers reluctant to hire anyone with a
felony record (thereby excluding one-third of adult black
males(http://thenewpress.com/books/new-jim-crow) ) yet more likely to
hire a white job applicant with a felony record than a black applicant
without
one(http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo5485761.html) .
.Real estate agents who steer prospective black homeowners and black
apartment-seekers away from all but predominantly black neighborhoods.
.Mortgage lenders who deny blacks the credit required for home
ownership and business startups.
.Usurious "payday" lenders who target black neighborhoods devoid of
regular banking services.
.Police who target blacks for drug surveillance and arrest even though
whites use illegal narcotics at a higher rate than blacks.
.Police departments that target black communities for stop-and-frisk
stops as part of an arrest- and fine-based "shakedown" revenue strategy.
.Judges who give longer sentences to blacks than to whites convicted
of similar crimes.
.Legislators who push the racially disparate war on drugs and mass
incarceration in the name of "law and order."
.Policymakers who deny adequate resources to highly segregated black
schools while bombarding those schools with mind-numbing standardized
testing regimes, disastrous privatization campaigns and prisonlike
control.
.A financial and corporate elite that refuses to invest in destitute
black communities.
.Food retail chains that fail to build decent, full-service grocery
stores in black neighborhoods.
.Municipalities that steer development dollars, subsidies and other
public resources to mostly white and affluent neighborhoods.
.Gentrification policies and practices that push blacks further and
further away from opportunity and development.
.The packing of millions of black children into schools and
neighborhoods marked by massive poverty and scarred by an absence of
basic services and opportunities.
.State and local jurisdictions that set up special barriers to black
voting.
This is just the short list.
Savage Inequalities
It's no wonder that average black household wealth is 94 percent less
than average white household wealth ($6,314, compared with $110,500),
that black families' median
income(http://www.childrensdefense.org/library/state-of-americas-child
ren/) is less than half of white families' median income, or that the
black poverty
rate(http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/fact-sheets/poverty/) is
nearly three times higher than the white poverty rate. A disheartening
40 percent of the nation's black children-including 49 percent of
black children under 6 years old-are growing up beneath the federal
government's notoriously inadequate definition of poverty, compared
with 14 percent of white children.
In Milwaukee, where the police killing of a young black man sparked
rioting in August, the official black poverty
rate(https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml)
is 40 percent, more than double the white rate. More than a sixth of
the city's black residents live in "deep poverty," at less than half
the official poverty measure, as do a fifth of the nation's black
opportunity.
As serious cost-of-living research has long shown, families on average
need an income of about twice the poverty level to cover basic
expenses. By that standard, the National Center for Children in
Poverty
finds(http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_1145.html) that two-thirds
of the nation's black children live in low-income families, compared
with just less than a third (31 percent) of its white children.
Housing Markets Distribute More Than Dwellings
Residential segregation by race-still quite high in the U.S.-plays a
critical role in feeding these stark disparities. This is because
one's place of dwelling is strongly connected to economic status and
As sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton noted in theirlives,"
important
1998 book "American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the
Underclass(http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674018211) ,"
"housing markets . distribute much more than a place to live; they
also distribute any good or resource that is correlated with where one
including jobs, education, safety, access to green spaces, civicthe Oval Office)?
community, exposure to crime, services and wealth in the form of home
equity. By concentrating poor and working-class black people in a
restricted number of geographical places, including "downstate" (in
Illinois) and "upstate" (in New York and Michigan)
prisons(http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/theviciouscircle.pdf) , U.S.
de facto race apartheid reinforces blacks' persistently
disproportionate presence in the lowest socioeconomic places.
White Denial Lives
Sadly, however, most of white America continues its longtime pattern
of ignorance and/or denial regarding the persistence of racial
oppression in the United States. The most recent comprehensive racial
attitudes
survey(http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/on-views-of-race-and-
inequa
lity-blacks-and-whites-are-worlds-apart/) from the Pew Research
Center shows that less than half (47 percent) of white Americans
understand even the elementary fact that blacks are worse off
financially than whites in the U.S. today.
Half of white Americans with an opinion on the matter actually think
that race relations in the U.S. right now are "good"-a remarkable
belief to hold in light of the extreme racial inequalities that
persist and the significant black protest and police state response
that has arisen over the epidemic of racist police shootings since
2014. Nearly two-thirds of black Americans say the opposite-no
surprise.
Nearly four in 10 (38 percent) whites think that America has made all
the changes it needs to achieve black-white equality. By stark
contrast, 88 percent of blacks think more changes are required.
Just barely more than a fifth (22 percent) of whites (as opposed to 64
percent of blacks) think that blacks are treated less fairly than
whites in the workplace.
A mere fifth of whites see disproportionately unfair treatment of
blacks in the electoral system.
Just a quarter of whites (in contrast to 66 percent of blacks) see
anti-black bias in mortgage applications.
Well less than half (43 percent) of whites see such bias in the courts
system. And just half of whites (as opposed to 84 percent of blacks)
see it in police behavior.
Overall, just barely more than a third (36 percent) of whites (as
opposed to 70 percent of blacks) see racial discrimination as a
relevant "reason why some blacks have a harder time getting ahead" in
the U.S.
And whites are very widely unimpressed by the notion of institutional
racism. More than two-thirds of whites (70 percent) think that the
"biggest problem for blacks today is individual prejudice, not
institutional racism."
Fewer than half (48 percent) of blacks agree.
Whites also think that the problem of racial oppression gets too much
attention in the U.S. Just more than a quarter (27 percent) of whites
(as opposed to 58 percent of blacks) think the country pays too little
attention to race as an issue.
Not surprisingly, just four in 10 white Americans support the Black
Lives Matter (BLM) movement. More than half of white Republicans
oppose BLM, and more than a third of those Republicans do so "strongly."
Still Separate, Unequal
What explains these clueless and even vicious white racial opinions as
we come to the end of the second term of the nation's widely heralded
first black presidency, in a nation that claims to celebrate the
legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. (whose bust sits behind Barack Obama in
Certainly not any increase in black economic status or government81.
polices to advance racial equality and confront barriers to black
advancement. Obama has presided over a significant ongoing reduction
in black net
worth(http://www.blackpressusa.com/is-black-america-better-off-under-o
bama/) , reflecting the racially disparate impact of the Great
Recession and the subsequent weak "recovery" on more vulnerable black
Americans.
Segregation by race-de facto apartheid-is still deeply embedded in
American life. In the Milwaukee metropolitan area, for example, the
black-white residential dissimilarity
index(http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/dis/census/segregation2010.html) is
Eight of every 10 blacks residing in the region would have to move toneoliberal(http://www.thebellforum.com/showthread.php?t=9456) "
another census tract for black people to be evenly spread across the
region.
Harsh racial inequality and apartheid have continued with little
protest or even comment from the nation's first half-white president,
a "vacuous to repressive
(according to Adolph Reed, a political science professor at the"color-blind"
University of Pennsylvania), who rose to power in the name of
post-racialism(https://www.amazon.com/Barack-Obama-Future-American-Polracism"
itics/
dp/1594516316) and has, as president, been reluctant to address U.S.
racial
oppression(https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-price-of-the-ti
cket-9
780199739677?cc=us&lang=en&) in a forthright manner that might ruffle
majority white feathers.
A Not-So-Split Decision
This white racial blindness and indifference is rooted in six key
interrelated and overlapping factors.
A first part of the problem is, of course, segregation. Beyond its
role in generating and reinforcing racial inequality, American
apartheid helps keep black experience invisible to most whites.
A second part of the explanation for white racial blindness and denial
has to do with the difference between what might be called "level-one
and "level-two racism." "Level one" refers to open public bigotry and.
prejudice. "Level two" denotes the underlying covert societal or
institutional racism that operates independent of subjective prejudice.
Level-one racism has a long and sordid history, but it has largely
been defeated, outlawed and discredited in the U.S., most dramatically
in the South, but across the nation as well. The deeper, covert level
of racism, however, has not been defeated-not by a long shot. It
involves the more impersonal and (to be fair) the more invisible
operation of social and institutional forces and processes in ways
that "just happen," but nonetheless serve to reproduce black
disadvantage in the labor market and numerous other sectors of
American life. These processes are so ingrained in the social,
political and institutional sinews of capitalist America that they are
taken for granted and barely noticed across the reigning media and
political culture.
This "split decision"-liberal victory on level-one racism and
continuing progressive defeat on level-two racism-is tricky. It's not
about glass half-empty versus glass half-full. Perversely enough,
level-two institutional racism may be deepened by civil rights
victories and related black upward mobility into the middle and upper
classes, insofar as those victories and achievements have served to
encourage the great toxic illusion that, as black lawyer and author
Derrick Bell once put it, "the indolence of blacks rather than the
injustice of whites explains the socioeconomic gaps separating the
races."
The Oprah-Obama Effect
A third explanation is what some early 21st century anti-racism
thinkers called "the Oprah Effect." It's been harder than in previous
eras to blame millions of white Americans for believing that racism is
dead at a time when U.S. public life is filled with affirmations of
the integration ideal and the nation's ostensible progress toward
achieving it. Highly visible black success stories also help exonerate
white blindness. As black American law professor Sheryl Cashin noted
12 years
ago(https://www.amazon.com/Failures-Integration-Class-Undermining-Amer
ican/d
p/1586483390) , there are now enough examples of successful middle-
and upper-class African-Americans "to make many whites believe that
blacks have reached parity. . The fact that some Blacks now lead
powerful mainstream institutions offers evidence to whites that racial
barriers have been eliminated; [that] the issue now is individual effort.
own standing."
"The odd black family on the block . [or] examples of stratospheric
black success," Cashin wrote, "feed these misperceptions, even as
relatively few whites live among and interact daily with blacks of their
fatalities.
Now, there is Obama. His ascendancy and ubiquitous media presence has
been something of a final nail in the coffin of many white Americans'
already slight willingness to admit that racism continues to provide
meaningful barriers to black advancement and equality: Look, the
president is black, OK? Don't talk to me about racism anymore! Obama's
presidency has provided perhaps the ultimate opportunity for whites to
congratulate themselves on American racial progress.
Neoliberal Racism
A fourth factor is the continuing and longstanding reign of neoliberal
ideology, which privileges individual experience and pain over any and
all social categories and structural or institutional factors-not just
race and racism. With neoliberalism's ascendancy in the dominant
public discourse, the prolific left cultural theorist Henry Giroux has
noted(https://www.amazon.com/Terror-Neoliberalism-Authoritarianism-Dem
ocracy
-Cultural/dp/1594510105) , the nation's "pervasive racial hierarchies
collapse into power-evasive strategies such as blaming minorities of
class and color for not working hard enough" and for "refusing to
exercise individual initiative." Even as an insidious, increasingly
invisible racism "functions" as "one of the deep and abiding currents
in everyday [American] life," this discourse works "to erase the
social from the language of public life as to reduce all racial
problems to private issues [of] . individual character and cultural
depravity." This "neoliberal racism . can imagine public issues only
as private concerns." It sees "human agency as simply a matter of
individualized choices, the only obstacle to effective citizenship
being the lack of principled self-help and moral responsibility" on
the part of those most victimized by structural oppression. "Human
misery is largely defined as a function of personal choices" and "all
problems are private rather than social in nature."
The Nightly News and the Don Lemon Effect
A fifth factor is the Great Recession and the tepid "recovery" that
followed. White willingness to acknowledge societal racism and the
need to open doors to non-white opportunity is always negatively
correlated with whites' sense of economic security. The more
precarious their material situation and prospects, the less
predisposed they are to support increased opportunity for others.
A sixth and critical factor is the "mainstream" corporate news media,
on which white America is overdependent for its understanding of black
experience, thanks in no small part to persistent apartheid. In any
major U.S. metropolitan area, smartly dressed and attractive, racially
and ethnically mixed and cross-gender news teams report a regular
litany of scary stories of violence and criminality from black
inner-city ghettos and black inner-ring suburbs. And just as the
weather forecasters report ever more alarming and extreme
meteorological developments without the slightest reference to the
underlying problem of anthropogenic global warming, the drumbeat of
lurid news from black provinces is never accompanied by any serious
discussion of the horrific crime- and violence-generating conditions
imposed on black America by historical and current societal U.S. racism.
Devoid of essential historical and societal context, the black misery
that whites see on the news strikes many Caucasians as self-imposed
and richly deserved.
The likeable, upper-middle class, black news anchors and reporters are
themselves part of whites' racial blindness problem. Call it the Don
Lemon Effect. They, too, are among "the good blacks" who function to
demonstrate that the far greater number of black Americans struggling
to get by created their own hard times. And the fact that whites like
"good" blacks reinforces the majority white belief that racism
(superficially understood at the low bar of individual prejudice) has
been defeated in the U.S.
How They Police vs. What They Police: Tinder and Spark
It is true that major corporate news media have in the last two years
paid unusually high attention to racially biased police conduct in
connection with protests sparked by an epidemic of police-generated black
But the deeper racism-denying media pattern-itself a key component of
level-two racism-has not thereby been undermined. Excessive police
force is just one small, if critical, part of the bigger problem of
institutional racism just within the criminal justice system (see
Loyola University New Orleans law professor Bill Quigley's recent
essay on "Eighteen Examples of Racism in the Criminal Legal
System(http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/04/none-dare-call-it-justic
e-eigh
teen-examples-of-racism-in-criminal-legal-system/) ").
The attention is always fleeting. The recent black uprising in
Charlotte, N.C., was swept off the nation's telescreens by the first
presidential debate, wherein Donald Trump channeled widespread white
sentiments(http://www.npr.org/2016/09/26/495115346/fact-check-first-pr
esiden
tial-debate) by voicing this opinion on how to approach the race
problem in
America: "We need law and order. And when I look at what's going on in
Charlotte . [a] city where I have investments, when I look at what's
going on throughout . our country . we need law and order. . And I
just got . the endorsement of the fraternal order of police."
At the same time, the major-media reporting on the rise of BLM has
been about how police carry out their tasks vis-a-vis black America:
how they police blacks. It's no minor matter, to be sure. Still, just
as important but missing from the national media coverage and
commentary is the matter of what law enforcement polices when it comes
to race, space and class. It becomes easy to lose sight of the fact
that the police enforce the overlapping and interrelated evils of
apartheid and inequality. It's about keeping blacks in their place, in
more ways than one. This is what they police. And that is what
provides the tinder for the riots and giant black protests that have
been sparked by police killings of black men (mainly) during Obama's
second term.
The roots of racial disparity are in the system. The underlying and
systemically entrenched conditions would not be any more acceptable if
the cops were less murderous and more "sensitive." They certainly will
not be undone by corporate Democrats' and corporate-media talking
heads' favorite
solution: "community policing," which provides fake-liberal cover for
gentrification and enlists middle-class homeowners and upper-end
renters in the enhanced surveillance and racial/socioeconomic
cleansing of high-property-value neighborhoods.
Another media-ignored issue is the question of how and why American
government at all levels pours so much taxpayer money into ever more
militarized policing instead of meeting basic human needs. It's long
past time to trade in the police state and the vast U.S. military
empire for (among other things) free-lunch and green-jobs programs,
for free health clinics, for a guaranteed national income, for
single-payer health insurance, for true neighborhood revitalization,
including community gardens and genuine public and popular education
in the nation's many truly disadvantaged ghettos, barrios and
reservations.
By introducing real and environmentally sustainable social justice and
equality (as advanced by the officially marginalized Green Party), the
nation and its various jurisdictions wouldn't really "have" to police
folks at all.
Don't expect to hear anything about that on the evening news-or in the
next, and thankfully final, ugly, white, ruling-class presidential
debate.
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