Hannity, Clinton, Obama, Rev. Wright and "Racism 101": Part Two

Hannity, Clinton, Obama, Rev. Wright and "Racism 101": Part Two

By Walter C. Uhler

Created Apr 4 2008 - 9:47am

I'd be a millionaire, if I had a dime for every time some white American

expressed some variant of the opinion: "Slavery ended a long time ago.

Blacks have it much better today. They've achieved equality under the law

and many middle class blacks have achieved de facto equality. Why can't they

just get over it?"

Well, it's one thing to insist that blacks take responsibility for their own

lives, even in the face of past and present racism. In fact, a November 2007

Pew Research Center poll found that 53 percent of America's blacks believe:

"blacks who don't get ahead are mainly responsible for their own condition."

But, it's quite another thing to close one's eyes to the impact of past and

present racism.

When discussing the current indifference of whites to the cumulative impact

of past racism, perhaps political scientist Roy L. Brooks put it best: "Two

persons - one white and the other black - are playing a game of poker. The

game has been in progress for some 300 years. One player - the white one -

has been cheating during much of this time, but now announces: 'from this

day forward, there will be a new game with new players and no more

cheating.' Hopeful, but suspicious, the black player responds, 'that's

great. I've been waiting to hear you say that for 300 years. Let me ask you,

what are you going to do with all those poker chips that you stacked up on

your side of the table all these years?' 'Well,' said the white player,

somewhat bewildered by the question, 'they are going to stay right here, of

course.' 'That's unfair,' snaps the black player. 'The new white player will

benefit from your past cheating. Where's the equality in that?' 'But you

can't realistically expect me to redistribute the poker chips along racial

lines when we are trying to move away from considerations of race and when

the future offers no guarantees to anyone,' insists the white player. 'And

surely,' he continues, 'redistributing the poker chips would punish

individuals for something they did not do. Punish me, not the innocents!'

Emotionally exhausted, the black player answers, 'but the innocents will

reap a racial windfall.'"

Commenting on this "racial windfall," Paul L. Street concludes, "there is

something significantly racist about the widespread mainstream white

assumption that the broader white majority society owes African Americans

nothing in the way of special, ongoing compensation for singular black

disadvantages resulting from overt and explicit past racism." [Paul L.

Street, Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis, p. 23]

Americans familiar with the work of sociologist Dalton Conley know that that

slavery and Jim Crow sharecropping have been curses that keep on cursing,

especially by preventing most African-Americans from accumulating the wealth

they should have gathered otherwise. As Professor Conley sees it, "wealth

accumulation depends heavily on intergenerational support issues such as

gifts, informal loans, and inheritances." [Dalton Conley, Being Black,

Living in the Red, p. 6] "Wealth is much more stable within families and

across generations than is income, occupation, or education. In short," says

Conley, "we are less likely to have earned it and more likely to have

inherited it or received it as a gift." [ibid, p. 14]

"In 1865, at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans

owned 0.5 percent of the total worth of the United States...However, by

1990, a full 135 years after the abolition of slavery, black Americans owned

only a meager 1 percent of total wealth." [ibid, p. 25] According to

Professor Conley, "In 1994, the median White family held assets worth seven

times more than those of the median nonwhite family." [ibid, p. 1] In a

word, the deliberate impoverishment of slaves and Jim Crow sharecroppers

played a major role in preventing blacks from passing significant wealth to

their descendants.

(Much in the spirit of Barack Obama and, perhaps, Hillary Clinton, Professor

Conley believes that the racial gap in wealth can be remedied by an

"aggressive wealth-accrual policy" that would benefit both whites and

blacks, who are "asset-poor." Class, rather than race.)

Moreover, it wasn't merely the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow sharecropping

that retarded the creation of wealth by African-Americans. During the 1930s

and 1940s, African-Americans suffered yet more discrimination and abuse --

this time from "Crackers" in the U.S. Congress who conspired with

office-holding and administrative racists in Southern states to assure, to

the best of their ability, that only whites benefited from President

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal" social welfare programs. It gave an

insidious new meaning to the South's insistence on "States Rights!

As Ira Katznelson has written in When Affirmative Action Was White: During

the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s "the southern wing of

the Democratic Party was in a position to dictate the contours of Social

Security, key labor legislation, the GI Bill, and other landmark laws that

helped create a modern white middle class in a manner that also protected

what these legislators routinely called 'the southern way of life.'" [p. 17]

Thus, "at the very moment when a wide array of public policies was providing

most white Americans with valuable tools to advance their social welfare -

insure their old age, get good jobs, acquire economic security, build

assets, and gain middle-class status - most black Americans were left behind

or left out." [p. 23]

How could such a thing happen? It happened because a Cracker in the U.S.

House of Representatives, John Rankin of Mississippi, "led the drafting of a

law that left responsibility for implementation mainly to the states and

localities, including, of course, those that practiced official racism

without compromise." [p. 123] According to Katznelson, Rankin "keenly

grasped that black veterans would attempt to use their new status, based

upon service and sacrifice, along with a new body of federal funds, to shift

the balance against segregation." [p. 126]

Take the case of the GI Bill. "Between 1944 and 1971, federal spending on

former soldiers in this 'model welfare system' totaled over $95 billion."

[p. 113] As Katznelson notes, "with the help of the GI Bill, millions [of

veterans] bought homes, attended college, started business ventures, and

found jobs commensurate with their skills." [p. 113] Yes, it helped many

blacks and should be credited "for developing a tiny group of professionals

into the large, stable, and growing 'black bourgeoisie' that exists today,

composed of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and mid-level civil servants." [p.

120]

But, "on balance, despite the assistance that black soldiers received, there

was no greater instrument for widening an already huge racial gap in postwar

America than the GI Bill." [p. 121] Soon after the law's enactment, a

delegation "told the Veterans Administration.that discharged Negro soldiers

in the South are discouraged from enjoying the benefits of the 'GI Bill of

Rights." [p. 122]

One consequence of this discrimination wouldn't be seen until 1984, when GI

Bill mortgages had largely matured. In 1984, "the median white household had

a net worth of $39,135; the comparable figure for black households was only

$3,397.Most of this difference was accounted for by the absence of

homeownership." [p. 164]

Whites, especially in the South, made a last ditch attempt defend "the

southern way of life," when they engaged in violence to prevent the

integration of schools, as required by the historic 1954 Supreme Court

ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. As Mark M. Smith has observed, in his

book, How Race is Made, "In years to come, civil rights activists let such

men and women lay bare their visceral fury to the world, their glowering

faces, punching fists, and kicking raw feet, frightening testimony to their

determination to protect their society. It was a wise strategy. Seeing

segregationists spew their hatred with such ferocity on national television

shocked many." [p. 138]

Fury and violence weren't the only tools available to whites, who wanted to

keep blacks "in their place." Until the enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights

Act, most southern voting districts "employed literacy tests as a condition

for entitlement to vote. The tests were employed in an explicitly racially

discriminatory manner, with blacks given lower scores than whites regardless

of their actual performance on the tests." [blum, p.24]

Fortunately, the enactment of Civil Rights legislation greatly diminished

the most overt forms of racism. Unfortunately, overt racism has been

replaced by what scholars call "symbolic racism"- "a coherent set of beliefs

including the sense that discrimination is no longer an obstacle for blacks,

that their current lack of upward social mobility is caused by their

unwillingness to work hard, that they demand too much of government, and

that they have received more than they deserve." [Hutchings and Valentino,

p. 390]

Symbolic racism, which is deeper and more widespread in the South than

elsewhere in the United States, has become the bedrock upon which the

Republican Party bases its "Southern strategy." Lee Atwater (who worked with

both Bush's) put it this way: "You start out in 1954 by saying 'Nigger,

******, ******.' By 1968 you can't say '******' - that hurts you. Backfires.

So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.

You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes,

and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a

byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites." [bob

Herbert, "Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant," New York Times, Oct. 6, 2005]

Thus, even if we put aside the issue of a final reckoning for past

injustices, there's still the matter of the willful blind eye that symbolic

racists and other ignorant Americans turn to stark evidence of present-day

racism.

Present-day racism? Yes, "in June 2000, American General Life and Accident

Insurance Co., one of the nation's largest life insurance companies, agreed

to pay $206 million to settle allegations that it had overcharged millions

of mostly poor, black customers for burial insurance because of their race."

Consider that, "in November 2000, Coca-Cola agreed to pay more than $156

million to current and former employees of color alleging racial

discrimination." [blum, p. 25]

Present-day racism? As professors Maria Kyrsan and Amanda Lewis note, in

"Racial Discrimination Is Alive and Well" [Challenge, May-June 2005], "No

matter what the employment rate generally is, African Americans are

unemployed at twice the rate of whites." [p. 38] Fine, but how does racism

enter in?

First, from the findings of researchers, who sent out resumes to a wide

sample of potential employers. "The resumes were identical except for the

name at the top. Some had black-sounding names like Tamika or Tyrone. Others

had white-sounding names. But the resumes were identical. It turned out in

this well-controlled study that the person with the white-sounding name was

much more likely to get a call back than the one with the African American

name." [ibid, p, 40]

Second, "Kathryn Neckerman and Joleen Kirschenman did a study where they

interviewed employers in-depth. They found widespread evidence of a racial

hierarchy and belief in stereotypes. These views were quite readily

verbalized by employers, who admitted that they, for example, selectively

recruited in some communities. They preferred to hire white ethnics or

Hispanics and had negative stereotypes of black inner-city applicants in

particular." [ibid, p. 41]

Thus, it's perhaps no accident that the huge expansion of the black middle

class since the 1960s is due largely to jobs obtained in the government

sector.

Present-day racism? In October 2005, Van Jones wrote about the

disproportionate rate of arrests and convictions of blacks and cited an

analysis conducted by two researchers for Justice Department: "Two-thirds of

the studies of state and local juvenile justice systems they analyzed found

that there was a 'race effect' at some stage of the juvenile justice process

that affected minorities for the worse." [Van Jones, "ARE Blacks A Criminal

Race? Surprising Statistics," Huffington Post Oct. 5, 2005]

Using data about drug use and incarcerations from four studies written

between 1999 and 2005, Jones concludes: "The Monitoring the Future Survey of

high school seniors shows that white students annually use cocaine at 4.6

times the rate of African American students, use crack cocaine at 1.5 times

the rate of African American students, and use heroin at the same rate of

African Americans students [sic], and that white youth report annual use of

marijuana at a rate 46% higher than African American youth. However, African

American youth are arrested for drug offenses at about twice the rate

(African American 314 per 100,000, white 175 per 1000,000) times [sic] that

of whites, and African American youth represent nearly half (48%) of all

youth incarcerated for drug offense in the juvenile justice system."

Such racism in America's juvenile justice system is but part of a larger

pattern of racial discrimination that recently prompted the United Nation's

Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to urge the United

States to rectify the "stark racial disparities" in criminal justice systems

throughout the country. ["UN Faults US on Racism," Human Rights Watch, March

7, 2008]

Present-day racism? With reports that America's schools are experiencing a

new wave of resegregation, it became national news when 16-year-old Kiri

Davis recreated "the famous 1940s experiment conducted by Dr. Kenneth Clark

that studied the psychological effects of segregation on black children."

["What Dolls Can Tell Us About Race in America," ABC NEWS, Oct. 11, 2006]

"In Clark's test, [black] children were given a black doll and a white doll,

and then asked which one they thought was better."

"Overwhelmingly, they chose the white doll."

The results from Clark's experiment led him to conclude that "prejudice,

discrimination and segregation" caused black children to develop a sense of

inferiority and self-hatred; a conclusion that influenced the Brown v. Board

of Education decision to end segregation in the nation's schools. [ibid]

In the test administered by Kiri Davis some sixty years later, Davis asks a

little girl, "'Can you show me the doll that looks bad?' The girl

immediately chooses the black doll. Why does that look bad," asks Kiri.

"Because it's black," the girl answers.

In fact, 15 of 21 children (ages 4 and 5) "said that the white doll was good

and pretty, and that the black doll was bad." [ibid] How's that for the

impact of present-day racism?

Symbolic racists also would do well to consider the deadly present-day

impact of previous racism. For example, when you think about hurricane

Katrina's devastating impact on the lives of African-Americans living in New

Orleans, think racial segregation. As Richard Thompson Ford writes, in

recent book, The Race Card, "Racism didn't flood the black neighborhoods of

New Orleans, but racism established and enforced the residential patterns

that made those neighborhoods black." [p. 55]

And New Orleans wasn't alone. "Many American cities were segregated by force

of law until the Supreme Court invalidated racial zoning in 1917. Those

cities and many others replaced racial zoning with an almost equally

effective private substitute - racially restricted real estate covenants -

until those too were invalidated in 1948. Banks, real estate agents,

residents, and in some cases the federal government conspired to enforce

segregation informally until Congress prohibited housing discrimination in

1968." [ibid]

Yet, although the evidence of present-day racism is overwhelming, such

widespread and continuing racial discrimination does not justify the growth

of a very troubling, self-destructive black "oppositional culture" in

inner-city ghettos (See Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street.)

On the other hand, when a white Department of Defense colleague asked me to

comment on a speech by Bill Cosby - in which Mr. Cosby tore into blacks,

especially black parents, for the poor upbringing and resulting social

pathologies of so many black children - I not only recommended Elijah

Anderson's sobering book, but also asked why white Americans weren't equally

outraged by the social pathologies of low-class whites - a much larger

American sub-group, often called "white trash" by mean-spirited folks. I

suggested to my colleague that the double standard, itself, constituted

evidence of widespread racism in this country.

But, beyond this racial double standard, symbolic racists do their country a

double disservice. Not only do they belittle the existence of present-day

racism, thereby turning a deaf ear to potential remedies, they also provide

fertile soil for the reemergence of overt racism.

As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "God Damn America" (a sentiment that was

shared by Thomas Jefferson, see part one of this article here:

http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/damn.html [1] ), Sean Hannity and FOX

NEWS also has heaped scorn upon Rev. Wright's reference to the "US of KKK

A." Again, Hannity's racial hypocrisy was astounding!

Simply consider that on November 14, 2007, Hannity's former co-conspirator

to fill WABC's airwaves with hate, Hal Turner, went on the Warren Ballentine

radio show and asserted: "We are going to begin lynching blacks in this

country again next year!" He followed that assertion with a suggestion that

we must return to what worked in the past, a rope. ["Hate Groups:

Mainstreaming the Far Right," The Center for Democratic Renewal, February

2008]

Turner made his assertion in the wake of the huge September 2007, "Jena 6"

rally against racial discrimination and hate in Jena, Louisiana that sparked

a flurry of some 50 to 60 "noose incidents." The flurry marked a spike in

noose-specific offenses that, according to a Justice Department report in

2000, have been increasing in professional environments. In fact, in October

2007 "seven black workers employed by an Oklahoma-based drilling company won

a $290,000 settlement in a discrimination lawsuit which claimed they felt

threatened by the display of a noose on a Gulf of Mexico oil rig." ['Noose

incidents; Foolish pranks or pure hate?" CNN.com, Nov. 1, 2007]

In fact, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) had put out a call:

"All across the country, white people are spontaneously hanging nooses from

trees to say that white people will not be intimidated by ****** mob rule

and to show support four our 'Lynch the Jena 6' campaign."

The NSM appears to have picked up where the KKK left off. As the authors of

"Hate Groups: Mainstreaming the Far Right" have written: "The practice of

lynching exploded following the establishment of the Ku Klux Klan in 1867 as

the organization used lynching to promote the concept of white supremacy. It

has been estimated that between 1880 and 1920 an average of two African

Americans per week were lynched in the United States."

"Lynchings weren't just murders - there were, in many cases, sanctioned

murders: casually reported in the newspapers, ignored by law enforcement;

celebrated with family picnics; photos of hanging victims turned into

postcards, and 'souvenirs' were taken from the scene of the crime." [ibid]

Mr. Turner's prediction of more lynchings came just last year, when the

number of hate groups operating in America rose to 888. That number

represents an increase of 48% increase since 2000. ["The Year in Hate,"

Southern Poverty Law Center, Spring 2008] And it came just a year after law

enforcement agencies reported that 4,737 single-bias hate crime offenses

were racially motivated. Of these offenses 66.2 percent were motivated by

anti-black bias.

Thus, although it might be a bit of a stretch today (but certainly not

during the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century) to refer to the

United States of America as the "US of KKK A," Rev. Wright's assertion did

not merit the outrage it received across white America, especially in light

of the "noose incidents" that have increased since 2000 and spiked in 2007.

Are we a nation of amnesiacs?

My closest African American friend, Stanley Brown, gave me his considered

opinion about the outrage, which I publish here with his permission: "They

finally found Barack's swift boat issue. It will probably never stop.

Politics is a dirty business and Americans are easily led around like sheep

(sheep are dumb). This issue of Rev. Wright allowed race to become the

issue, to which white America can assert their sense of superiority making

white (thought) right. The media disguises the whiteness as patriotism

because most Americans have little knowledge of world events unless

provide[d] by our fair and balanced media. It's as if the sons and daughters

of slaves and victims of a Jim Crow society, now James Crow, Esq., should

have the same perspective of America. It would actually mean that African

Americans [were] insane, if they did. We are all a sum of our experiences.

It's a testament to how far we haven't come and our lack of desire for real

intelligence."

"Symbolic racism" and the "US of KKK A." My brief, two-part, introduction to

"Racism 101" should persuade you that Rev. Jeremiah Wright's utterance about

present-day racism is no more outrageous than are the smug, self-serving

beliefs of symbolic racists who maintain that "discrimination is no longer

an obstacle for blacks, that their current lack of upward social mobility is

caused by their unwillingness to work hard, that they demand too much of

government, and that they have received more than they deserve." And nothing

said by FOX's Sean "Lee Atwater" Hannity will make it so.

_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their

spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their

government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are

suffering deeply in spirit,

and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public

debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have

patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning

back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at

stake."

-Thomas Jefferson