If you click through to see this song at YouTube, it says it is from 1963. Wikipedia, in contrast, says the song came out in 1964. While this distinction is of no consequence for what I want to say here, it does offer a fair warning to not believe everything that 's online, including what I say in this post. I will try to avoid deliberately distorting matters, but inadvertent distortions might very very well creep into my argument.
Let's begin with a few other dates that help to identify the time. Brown v. Board of Education happened in 1954. It overturned the concept of separate but equal, as articulated in Plessy v. Ferguson. The decision was rendered soon after Earl Warren became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Warren had received a recess appointment made by President Eisenhower in fall 1953, but was subsequently confirmed by acclimation of the full Senate early in 1954, which itself stands in quite a contrast to the present moment. Indeed, Warren wrote the Brown opinion and orchestrated a unanimous agreement with that opinion among the other justices. The Brown decision is the most clear articulation of a moral principle that I am aware of with regard to public policy in the schools. Yet articulating the principle and implementing it are two quite different things.
On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson became President. I was 8 years old then and in 4th grade at P.S. 203 in Bayside Queens, NYC. To the best of my recollection, busing to achieve integration hadn't yet started in the NYC schools at that time. President Johnson signed The Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2, prior to the election LBJ had against Barry Goldwater that would occur that November. There was an extensive filibuster against the act that was ultimately defeated.
“It is an important gain, but I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” Johnson, a Democrat, purportedly told an aide later that day in a prediction that would largely come true.
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution happened a month later. I don't know anyone of my generation who believes that decision was other than a colossal blunder. It provided the basis for a dramatic escalation of America's presence in Vietnam. I believe the political calculus, of which LBJ was said to be a master, was that if the Democrats were going to be so liberal regarding Johnson's Great Society, then they needed to show a tough side too, and this was it, to serve as a counter to Goldwater, who was an incredible hawk.
The pace of the news cycle was much slower then. But it still may be that the electorate can't well process more than one big issue at a time. The Vietnam War competed with Civil Rights as that number one big issue.
There are many other important events and pieces of legislation that one might add to this timeline. In the interest of keeping this piece of reasonable length, I won't do that. I will simply note that in fall 1966 I started at Junior High School 74, only a ten minute walk from where I lived. There was busing of Black kids to the school. Likewise, there was busing of Black kids to Benjamin Cardozo High school, which I attended beginning in 1968, as 74 switched from a Junior High to a Middle School. (I still have no idea why this happened. But Middle School eventually became the new normal.) At 74, I don't have any recollection of racially motivated incidents. In contrast, at Cardozo I experienced that repeatedly when outside the building waiting to get in. Being panhandled was a recurrent activity. Also, there where White toughs who seemed to be looking for a fight to get into with the Black students. I have no explanation for this difference other than that the high school was much bigger than the junior high regarding the number of students. Indeed, in 10th grade I was on late session, and that may have been when I most experienced panhandling. Students on late session couldn't be let into the school until some of the students already there were dismissed. I do want to point out that the integration was far from complete, inside the school. Academic classes were tracked and the tracking created a school within a school effect. The tracking predated busing, so wasn't immediately dismantled when busing started.
Sam Cooke's song presumes a change that is profound and persistent. The first question in my title is about whether any of that happened in the 1960s and early 1970s. In spite of the high minded intentions of the Great Society and busing to achieve integration, I'm not sure that it did. Indeed, one of the things I'd like to argue here is that in considering the present we do a deep look at the 1960s, so we can ask the following. If a change didn't come then, why didn't it happen? Might those same issues exist today? If so, can we do something to not repeat that history?
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One of the things about current politics that disturbs me, this is not a left versus right thing as everybody does it, is that solutions are proffered before the issue is fully described and analyzed. Then as a voter your loyalty is tested by whether you subscribe to the proposed solution or not. I wish so much that we could be far more deliberate and consider the various related issues in their totality, produce a good narrative that explains why those issues manifest, and only then begin on what a good solution might look like. But nobody seems to have the patience for that. They want to race ahead to get to the answer. The wanting to be quick about it trumps whether what they have in mind is indeed an answer, or if instead it is merely window dressing. A particular example triggered this post.
I have a PayPal account for a non-profit where I am the treasurer. The non-profit raises funds for an organization in Uganda. So, I end up checking PayPal at least once a day to see if there have been new donations. This message has been on PayPal's login page for a while.
I was bothered by this and ultimately it was my irritation that encouraged me to write this post. It seemed far more marketing than substance, to me. I will give a bit of analysis of that in a subsequent section. Here let me simply observe the following. The George Floyd execution made available to many people the excessive use of violence that Black people face on an all too regular basis. There was ample evidence of such excessive violence before this, much of it highly publicized. Why people didn't put two and two together until now, I don't understand. But they didn't. That NFL owners have rethought players taking a knee during the National Anthem is not because they too saw the light about the plight of Black people. It's because they came to understand that the fans, majority White, had seen the light and they needed to show they were aligned with what the fans are now thinking. Likewise, companies like PayPal, this piece mentions YouTube and Walmart among others, are reacting now because of the same reaction among their customer/user base.
If these companies had been prescient about these matters, they would have reacted in much the same way as they are doing now when Colin Kaepernick first took a knee during the National Anthem, in the last preseason game of the 2016 season, or perhaps even earlier. (Trayvon Martin was killed in February 2012.) But they weren't prescient then, which makes one wonder if they are still not prescient now. And, if not, why should one buy into these gestures as anything other than marketing devices? If that's what they are, we shouldn't be swayed by them. We should want something more, something earnest and durable, something that we can reasonably expect will improve the situation.
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When I was a kid the acronym WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) was in fairly common usage. This was used as the designation for people who were in control of society. JFK's election marked a breakthrough for Catholics. Where I grew up in Bayside there was a Catholic church just two blocks away from where my family lived, St. Roberts. It had a parochial school for grades K-8 that was an alternative to the public school. Why middle income families would want to send their kids to parochial school, I still don't get to this day. Wasn't it possible to get sufficient religious training for the kid outside of school? But that it happened, in large numbers, I have no doubt. And, to be fair, some Jewish kids, like my orthodox cousins, went to Yeshiva. The Catholic kids were mainly of Irish or Italian decent. The theory we were taught in social studies at the time was that NYC was a melting pot. Eventually, we'd all simply be Americans. The public schools had a chance to perform such melting, if every student attended them. As things were, it mainly didn't happen that way. Instead, the public schools I attended inadvertently reinforced the idea that the Jews were the Chosen People, as a significant majority of the high academic achievers at these schools were Jewish.
There were other differentiators that mattered as well. During the Vietnam War, a significant divider was about whether you were for the war or against it. Emblematically, this was cast as the hard hats versus the hippies, a division that the show All in the Family captured quite well. Then, there was also a very strong north-south distinction among Whites, which focused on the race issue, specifically including Blacks as equals or not. Before too long, the Republican Party has captured most Southern Whites, as the LBJ quote above suggested would happen. The Democratic Party had more of the Northern Whites. Thus, rather than have a mixture of conservatives and liberals within a political party, there became separation of these types across the parties. National politics became increasingly fierce thereafter; this is one explanation for that.
Let us note that even if an integrated solution is imposed by government, it may not be a real change if significant numbers of people opt out of the solution. We've already noted the possibility of going to parochial school instead of public school. There is also the possibility of attending private schools that have no religious affiliation. In the 1970s, the opt out happened mainly by families moving to the suburbs, emblematic of the phrase, "white flight." In case this is not obvious, the families that did opt out tended to be wealthier. Years later, when there was a reverse trend toward urban gentrification, but with busing no longer in vogue, the quality of the neighborhood schools reflected the wealth in the surrounding communities. Did this represent overall progress? Or was it a return to the way things were in the early 1960s?
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While I understand the need for some level of aggregation when in discourse about racial issues, I do not like being referred to as White. I also do not like the phrases White Privilege and White Guilt, at least as far as they are applied to me. I will explain why and then offer an alternative that I prefer. I've lived in Champaign Illinois for 40 years. It is a college town. Life revolves around the university here. On campus, while I was a faculty member and an administrator as well and later when I was retired but would teach one course a year under contract, I had a strong ethos of collegiality, which I applied to all my interactions. That ethos is race blind. I would much prefer to live in a world where collegiality is the norm in the way people behave and race fades into the background as an issue. I have been largely successful in achieving this ethos within my own limited universe. It is not that everyone I've interacted with is also collegial. There definitely have been jerks now and then. But race was largely a non-factor in determining who was collegial and who was a jerk. This is not to argue that racism is absent on campus. That is definitely not true. But if most people behave according to the proverb, when in Rome do as the Romans do, then setting the tone in a collegial manner can encourage others to do likewise. Further, there is an educational aspect to this, about how one should behave. People can learn to be collegial by repeatedly behaving that way. This is the ideal I'd like to see extended to society as a whole.
In getting from where we are now to better approximating this ideal, it is evident to me that the opting out behavior, which in the rest of this piece I mean to stand for many additional behaviors that are anathema to desegregation and fair treatment, stands as a significant obstacle, one that is likely to take some time to address sufficiently. As with the PayPal example, I find us wanting a quick hitter type of solution, which might work in a single instance but then very likely will lead to reversion to form. I'd put the expression White Privilege in that category. Realistically, many people are heads down about their politics now - get Trump out of office, that is job one. Build the solidarity that is necessary for that. Only after job one has been accomplished should we consider what to do next. I understand that thinking. But it doesn't do anything to combat systemic racism.
Opting out is myopically rational and selfish behavior, an extension of the notion - vote your pocketbook. We were taught that as the thing to do when we were growing up. It is a learned behavior that has hardened into habit over time. But it clearly does damage to the system and it makes the game appear rigged when most of the well off opt out. We've been hearing that the economy was a rigged game for a long time, well before #BlackLivesMatter was established. Opting out must be unlearned and replaced with something else - socially responsible behavior. Social responsibility requires opting in. That much should be evident now. Our rhetoric could say as much, so it should say as much.
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What would the social contract look like if it were to end systemic racism and had the vast majority of people opting in to do the socially responsible thing? I wish I knew the answer to that question. If we could figure that out we might then be able to reverse engineer it to see what must be done now to make it happen.
Absent that, one might envision a more pragmatic approach starting with the question, what can be done so that Black Americans don't face excessive violence from the police? The immediate response might be to give better education to the police and better screening of those who want to become members of the police as well as to provide ongoing evaluation of those currently doing this work. Would that be sufficient? I'm guessing the answer to that is no. Segregated schools and segregated housing will produce excessive police violence. In other words the environment matters, perhaps as much as the skill and the character of the police. If the environment appears hostile, it will evoke a hostile response, even to people who otherwise seem good and decent.
Then you'd roll that back. What can be done to desegregate housing and the schools? Almost surely, this would lead to consideration of income inequality in the overall society, the faults in the criminal justice system apart from the police, the disintegration of the two-parent family among working class people, and possibly a host of other issues.
The starting pragmatic and rolling it back approach might eventually lead to much the same place as the more abstract and conceptual structuring of the social contract. But if only one step in this rolling back were taken per election cycle, it might take quite a while for people to see where this is eventually heading. Would those who have switched from opting out to opting in keep their commitment through the entire process? Or would they eventually get discouraged that this is taking too long without showing sufficient results?
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The pandemic is today's Vietnam War. It has focused the public's attention and rightly so, everyone is scared about their own health and the health of their loved ones. Can we manage the response to the pandemic in a sensible fashion and still make progress on ending systemic racism at the same time?
Let us note that when President Obama first took office, the Great Recession was the big deal issue and many people were in underwater mortgages. TARP, a program established near the end of the Bush administration, had $50 Billion allocated to bail out people in such mortgages. As I recall, much of that money went unspent. Eventually the housing market came back in many communities. But it remained depressed in majority Black communities. This was racism of a different sort, documented here.
Social networking enables people to become woke on certain issues, especially if they can be framed in a visually captivating way. Yet many important issues remain largely invisible. If through more earnest inquiry we become aware of these issues can we find support for addressing them as well? Wouldn't that be a necessary piece of ending systemic racism.
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I want to turn to the PayPal program that rubbed me the wrong way - I referred to it as marketing. Maybe there are bits of it that do make sense. I'm not in a position to determine that. But I can pose the following questions which I think need real answers before we should embrace the program.
- What determined the size of the program? Is it a lot or only a drop in the bucket? Consider that relative to what PayPal can afford. Also consider that in terms of the underlying need.
- Given that other large companies are each doing their own programs, does that make sense? Or would it make better sense if the programs were coordinated into one overall program? Would such coordination require government to do be doing this? So might it be better that these companies pay increased taxes on their profits so that the government could implement a coordinated program?
- These programs are targeted at Black-run businesses. Will employees of these business see benefits as well? Or is this another case of the same old trickle down that lined the pockets of the CEOs, but left the employees with very little for their part?
- These programs seem designed so that those who are running the programs get to pick the winners and losers. What criteria will there be to do this? How can impartiality be assured in the process? Conversely, how can the process not become too clunky as to block applications for grants?
- Might it actually be socially better, for Black businesses and everyone else as well, if PayPal simply lowered their fees, so customers/users got more bang for their bucks, rather than have any such programs at all?
This list of questions probably can be made longer. But this should be sufficient as an expression of skepticism that what PayPal is doing isn't going well beyond mere marketing.
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Let me wrap up. There's an argument being made that White folks need to speak up or write about racism, for there to be any real progress. I've done that on occasion, for instance here. But I know my posts are a slug and people who do work through them want to have a good take away. It is this. The idea that there is a quick solution to systemic racism is a pipe dream. We need to look at the long haul and find an approach which decent people of all colors and creeds can embrace. Let's do the necessary homework to produce such a solution. In my view, it still has yet to be articulated.
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