Do We Need to Talk about Race?

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

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Attorney General Eric Holder makes a number of interesting points in his remarks on Black History Month. Ultimately, though, I am always sour on the idea of conversations on race. The call to "have a conversation about race" is really a call to discuss why is there racial inequality in America. For Holder, it is specifically a question about black social and economic disadvantage.

I'm not convinced that many Americans know enough of the facts around black inequality to have a useful discussion. I've been pointing out, for example, that few of the leading black public intellectuals even know the basic facts about black poverty. For example, in his recent book, Juan Williams states, “too many poor and low-income black people are not taking advantage of opportunities to get themselves out of poverty,” in complete ignorance of the historic decline in black poverty over the 1990s. I think that most of the discussions that Williams' work has engendered has been harmful to black people.

I much prefer Holder's call for Americans to study black history. I would add that we also need to study the black present. If we could have discussions within and after some serious study of the issues that would be better.

Holder's remarks were greeted with hostility by many. This development is not completely surprising. The racial "conversations" in the online commentary to articles on racial inequality that I have noticed have often been hostile and at times blatantly racist. This fact reveals another problem with the "talk about race" idea.

People assume that if people talk honestly about racial inequality they will be able to come to a shared understanding and a happy compromise about the issues. They do not imagine a situation where everyone becomes more narrow-minded and hateful. But this alternative is certainly a possibility.

DuBois once phrased the question of black disadvantage as "How does it feel to be a problem?" pointing out how that question can be hurtful and inspire defensiveness. And the reversal of the question is "How does it feel to be an oppressor?" This question does not put whites at ease either. There is a reason people are avoiding the discussions Holder is calling for. These discussions can go wrong easily.

A better approach would be to try to have discussions about solutions to the causes of black inequality. For example, Holder mentions that racial relations have changed since the Brown decision. He should have also mentioned that our schools, however, are still separate and unequal. I wish that he had called for not an open discussion on "race" but for a discussion about what can be done to make our schools more integrated and equal. Even this discussion could go bad quickly, but I think the odds of it being productive are higher than a random open discussion.

We do need to have discussions on racial inequality to end racial inequality, but it is a minefield. People engaging in these discussions need to educate themselves and proceed with empathy and caution.



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2009 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Hardships of the African-American Unemployed

Read about the hardships of the African-American unemployed.

Conservative Leaders Still Reject Reality

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com
________________________________________________________________________

[A senior advisor to president George W. Bush] said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Ron Suskind, 2004

"By almost every measure available . . . this recession is steeper than any in the last 40 years, including the harsh recession of the early 1980s," states Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, an organization that I also work for. By every measure except for the way conservative members of Congress have been behaving. They have played petty politics in holding up the economic recovery package while the rate of job losses has increased to about a half a million a month. Everyone seems to realize that we needed urgent action--a month ago--but them.

The global economic meltdown basically started in the United States, but the United States has lagged in implementing an economic stimulus package. The Center for American Progress reports that Argentina, Australia, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia and South Korea have all passed stimulus packages ahead of the United States.

Conservative leaders are big on tax cuts, but the record of tax cuts in stimulating the economy is poor. The Bush administration cut taxes and yet the Bush years had the worst record for economic growth since World War II. Even the conservative economist and former Ronald Reagan advisor, Martin Feldstein, acknowledges that tax cuts are very weak when it comes to stimulating the economy. He states, "Experience shows that the money from such temporary, lump-sum tax cuts is largely saved or used to pay down debt. Only about 15 percent of last year's tax rebates led to additional spending." He adds, "The proposed business tax cuts are also likely to do little to increase business investment and employment." For those of us in the "reality-based community," pushing for more tax cuts in the recovery package and less spending, makes the package worse not better.

Conservative leaders do not seem to get that the point of a stimulus package is too spend money to jumpstart the economy. John McCain recently condemned the recovery package by saying, “This is not a stimulus bill; it is a spending bill.” Consumers are cutting back spending and businesses are cutting back spending causing the economy to tank. The point of a stimulus package is for the government to step in and increase spending rapidly in the hopes ending the downward economic spiral. Conservative leaders think that by limiting the amount of spending in the stimulus package they are somehow being fiscally responsible. How is prolonging and deepening an already severe recession fiscally responsible?

Judging from the statements of Rush Limbaugh, we cannot be certain that conservative leaders even know that we are facing a severe economic crisis. Last month, Limbaugh wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

There's a serious debate in this country as to how best to end the recession. The average recession will last five to 11 months; the average recovery will last six years. Recessions will end on their own if they're left alone. What can make the recession worse is the wrong kind of government intervention.

The current recession began in December of 2007, 13 months ago. In January, the U.S. economy lost nearly 600,000 jobs. This month was the worst so far for job losses. We have lost 3.6 million jobs in total and the recession is not likely to end any time soon, so why is Limbaugh even discussing recessions that last 11 months or less?

There are now 2.2 million blacks unemployed. Without an effective stimulus we could add another million blacks to the ranks of the unemployed before the economy begins to recover. Someone, somehow needs to get conservative leaders back into the "reality-based community" or else they will continue to make matters worse.



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--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2009 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

America's Schools: Still Separate, Still Unequal

Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”
--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.

Purchase Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals
Are Failing Black America by Algernon Austin
Barnes & Noble.com Amazon.com
________________________________________________________________________

What the hell good is Brown V. Board of Education if nobody wants it?
--Bill Cosby, Address at the NAACP' on the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education

Fifty-five years after the Brown decision, blacks and Latinos in American schools are more segregated than they have been in more than four decades.

Schools remain highly unequal, sometimes in terms of dollars and very frequently in terms of teachers, curriculum, peer groups, connections with colleges and jobs, and other key aspects of schooling.
--Gary Orfield, Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society

One regularly hears people speak as if we have in fact achieved the goals of the Brown decision. We have not.

America's schools remain stubbornly segregated and unequal as Gary Orfield documents in Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge. By the standard of integrated and equal education, we have been moving backward, further away from the Promised Land of racial equality.

Given the miraculous success of Barack Obama winning the presidency, some people believe that America has finally overcome racial discrimination. But Obama's achievement is only the removal of one obstacle on the path to equality. There are still many more, including institutionalized inferior education.

Obtaining equal and integrated education for black students may be the most difficult challenge in the struggle for black civil rights. Equal educational opportunity was one of the first goals of the Civil Rights Movement. Many believed that the Brown decision would cause America to provide integrated and equal education for blacks. This did not happen. The majority of black students remain in segregated and unequal schools.

The figure below shows that nearly three quarters of black students attend majority nonwhite schools. Thirty-nine percent attend schools that are 90 or more percent nonwhite.
Source:Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge, p. 26.

Majority nonwhite schools tend to be of lower quality than majority white schools. For example, an analysis of teacher quality from Illinois below shows that even with recent improvements, majority nonwhite schools had much lower teacher quality (ITAC) ratings than majority white schools. The solid black line is the average score for majority white schools. The other lines indicate increasing percentages of nonwhite students as one moves further below the line for majority-white schools. Today, as in the past, the best American schools go to white students, the worst to black students.

Source:Leveling Up: Narrowing the Teacher Academic Capital Gap in Illinois [PDF]



Share this article with a friend. Use the email icon below.

--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2005-2009 by Thora Institute, LLC. All Rights Reserved.