Only a socioeconomic analysis of racial injustice will take us beyond tribal grievance to effective action
By Herbert Rothschild
New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston, the four largest cities in the U.S., all have Black mayors. Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Newark, Pittsburgh and St. Paul, among others, also have Black mayors.
Two out of the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are Black. In Congress, there are 57 Black representatives and three Black senators. The percentage of Blacks in the lower chamber closely matches the percentage of Blacks in the overall population (the Senate is a different story). Our vice-president is Black.
I could cite similar prominence in other areas in which Blacks, when I was growing up, had almost no visibility. These would include TV network news desks, programs and ads, the faculties and administrations of traditionally white colleges and universities, and coaches of major league sports teams.
Well, what’s my point? I have two.
I’ll begin with my protest against those who, for whatever motives, insist that there has been no racial progress in the U.S. Such insistence makes me angry. It makes me angry because it’s dismissive of the sacrifices of the people, mostly Black, who struggled against racial oppression. It makes me angry because it’s dismissive of the millions of white people who came to reject what their culture told them to think about their Black sisters and brothers. It makes me angry because it refuses to acknowledge that our nation can strive to realize its best self. But most of all it makes me angry because it isn’t true, and I don’t like willful disregard of the truth whether it’s about climate change, the 2020 presidential election, or this.
More importantly, to claim that nothing has changed is a major obstacle to working at the enormous challenge we still face. I don’t mean that it may discourage people from continuing to struggle against racial injustice — although why it shouldn’t I can’t imagine. I mean that it obscures the nature of the challenge and plays into the hands of those who wish to turn back the clock.
Try to view the current state of affairs through the eyes of working-class whites in Appalachia or a city in Ohio where the sole manufacturing plant recently closed. They don’t know the realities of life in South Chicago or East Oakland or the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. The Black people they see are national TV hosts, rich professional athletes, Black entertainers on the red carpet.
The people Hillary Clinton called “deplorables” aren’t thriving in an America where, for 50 years, wealth has flowed at an ever-accelerating rate to the top, and they are full of resentment. Far too many of them think the deck has been stacked against them, not as members of the working class, but as whites. And the wealthy elites and the corporations they control have plenty of politicians in their employ to deflect blame from themselves onto people of color.
The refusal of “woke” progressives to acknowledge how much effort has gone into redressing past injustices is the obverse of a similar refusal of resentful whites to acknowledge how much effort was needed and how much more still is needed. They keep reinforcing each other’s shared determination not to look at any portion of reality except what fits into their narrative — police murders of Black men, for example, on the one hand, and Tiger Woods, for example, on the other.
When a white person complains about Black advantage, I could respond that whites hold 75% of seats in Congress whereas whites make up only 59% of the population. But why would I do that? Is the goal to establish who has the greater cause for resentment? If we wish to create a more perfect justice, we need to acknowledge all injustice and also carefully assess the ways and degrees to which injustice manifests itself.
In 2009, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested after a neighbor saw two Black males apparently trying to break into Gates’ home and called the police. The men were Gates and his driver, who were struggling with a stuck door. The consequence of that encounter was that then-President Barack Obama invited Gates and the arresting officer to the White House to talk things through. This January, Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old black man, was pulled over without cause while driving near his Memphis home. He was beaten to death by five police officers. All the cops were Black.
Race may have been an issue in both cases, but race doesn’t adequately account for the different beginnings and drastically different endings of these incidents. The five officers were part of a “hot spot” policing unit named SCORPION. The Memphis chief of police, a Black woman named Cerelyn J. Davis, had commanded a similar unit in Atlanta named Red Dog, which had been disbanded in 2011 after the city settled an expensive lawsuit alleging excessive force. Only when we factor in the disparity of socioeconomic status between Gates and Nichols can we account for the disparity between their encounters with those authorized to police the boundaries of our social order.
If we are concerned about racial justice, we must focus most of our attention on our inner cities, where what their residents experience aren’t occasional but continual affronts to their dignity and impediments to their hopes. We have to ask why such conditions exist decade after decade and why so many people are condemned to live in them at a time when so many other people of the same race or ethnicity are thriving.
Only if we ask such questions can we initiate an analysis that will take us beyond tribal grievance and make possible comprehensive progress. And it would induce us to present ourselves to those whom we now perceive as antagonists, not as their self-righteous judges, but as fellow Americans who share a need for recognition and respect.
Herbert Rothschild is an unpaid Ashland.news board member. Opinions expressed in columns represent the author’s views and may or may not reflect those of Ashland.news. Email Rothschild at [email protected].
May 12 update: Photo caption corrected.
