The King of Civil Rights
Photo by Associated Press, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I’ve written in the past that my principles haven’t changed much. For the most part, I still hold the same conservative principles now that I held during the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump presidencies. As the Republican Party changed around me, I’ve stayed pretty much the same.
Race relations is one of the areas where I have changed my opinion, largely because I’ve been exposed to new ideas and information. In years past, I would probably have fit in with people who said that the Civil War ended slavery 150 years ago and that minorities have a lot of affirmative opportunities in modern America, yet a lot of those opportunities are wasted.
That’s not untrue, but it’s also not the full story.
It took me a long time to fully appreciate that even though slavery ended in 1865, the unequal treatment of black Americans continued for more than 100 years after that. When I was a student at the University of Georgia, I often drove past a historical marker in Madison County as I crossed the Broad River. That marker tells the story of Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, a decorated US Army veteran of World War II who made the mistake of driving through Athens in 1964, 99 years after the Confederate surrender and abolition. Penn and two other soldiers in the car attracted the attention of several local members of the Ku Klux Klan who followed and attacked them several miles outside of town, killing Penn.
What happened next was just as shocking and shameful. A local white jury acquitted the klansmen, but, thanks to the recent passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, two were convicted on federal charges. (I discussed the story in more detail in my blog back in 2012.)
This incident occurred less than 20 miles from where I grew up and less than a decade from when I was born yet I grew up in an entirely different world. I didn’t know when I started school in the mid-1970s that my class was one of the first to be racially integrated in my county’s school system. I can’t help but think that some of my black classmates were not as ignorant about recent history as I was.
The point is that people are right when they say that no living black person has personal memories of American slavery. That is far different than saying that no living black American has a memory of the oppression of racial discrimination and segregation.
A great many black Americans remember segregation all too well. Even more are only one generation removed from that travesty of justice that was “separate but equal.”
Even today, I think that many black Americans are more intimately familiar with racism than most white people can either understand or admit. Even prominent black Republicans like Tim Scott will testify that they have been harassed because of their skin color. Cell phone video and police body cameras shine light on the treatment that even law-abiding black citizens can receive at the hands of police. Bull Connor may be long gone but his spirit lives on in at least some police.
Let me interject here that I am not anti-police, nor am I a part of the Defund the Police movement, but given the amount of evidence of improper behavior by the police in just the past few years, you’d have to stick your head into the sand ostrichlike to assert that there is no problem. The fact that police sometimes brutalize and kill white Americans is not an excuse either. We should not tolerate bad killings and needless brutality of Americans of any color.
Even though we still have work to do, America has changed a lot in my lifetime. When it comes to race relations, America is a much better place today than it was half a century ago. That change is due to the courage of hundreds of thousands of Americans who took small steps toward treating blacks like humans who deserved the same respect as a white person.
But it is also due to the influence of Martin Luther King. More than any other person, King came to symbolize peaceful resistance to segregation. His use of the same Christian Bible that segregationists and white supremacists had perverted for their own ends won many whites over to the cause of civil rights. At the opposite extreme, the hatred and cruelty of people who used violence to keep blacks “in their place” pushed many away.
Growing up, I would sometimes hear critiques of King’s personal life. I’ll acknowledge that he was a human being with human failings, but regardless of his flaws, King was the right man at the right time. He was the man America needed and I believe that he was the man that God sent. Without King, the Civil Rights struggle might have been much more violent than it was.
King died at the hands of a violent man on April 4, 1968, but his legacy lives on. Today, even though America is still far from racially perfect, King’s dream that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers” has come to fruition.
When I was a boy, we could be friends with black people but we were expected to keep our distance. That was progress in itself, but today my niece can date a black classmate without fearing for his life or her reputation.
I like to think that God allowed King to have a glimpse of the flawed paradise to come before he called him home. As he said the night before he was murdered, he had “been to the mountaintop” and “seen the Promised Land.”
We may not yet be at the mountaintop, but we have gained in elevation since Martin Luther King’s day. And we are still climbing toward the Promised Land.
I don’t believe that talking about our past failures or acknowledging our current problems is anti-American as some seem to think these days. Talking about our past helps us to remember it and avoid similar problems in the future.
But I also don’t believe that we should pick at scabs that are healing and overindulge in racial navel-gazing. Part of the healing process is moving beyond the problems of the past. There’s a balance to be found there.
We should all take a moment to celebrate Martin Luther King Day and honor his memory and his sacrifice, but King’s greatest success may be that segregation, scarcely 50 years in the ashbin of history, now seems to be such an anachronism and that racism is so culturally poison that even racists try to hide their true nature.
Well past his death, King was one of the most widely-loathed people in America. Memory is short, which allows the ideological descendants of those who loathed him then to claim him as a secular saint based on The Only Thing He Ever Said.Report
Agreed. King was even more of a class warrior then a race warrior, having figured out that getting poor whites on his side was integral to success.Report
A Great Man.
You can measure the size of his accomplishment by the fact that (very close to) no one argues for bringing back the things he stood against.Report
“For the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country, even today, is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists. Racism can well be that corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on western civilization.”
“There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we now have the resources to get rid of it. The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty … The well off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.”
“Armies of officials are clothed in uniform, invested with authority, armed with the instruments of violence and death and conditioned to believe that they can intimidate, maim or kill Negroes with the same recklessness that once motivated the slaveowner.”Report
We had a war on poverty and continue to have one. Having implemented this idea, it’s not entirely clear the results were what we wanted but that’s a different problem.
Big picture all of MLK’s ideas were either implemented and/or tried. So his various goals have been accepted, what we have now is a lack of clarity in terms of what to do.Report
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but American public schools (and even more so, private schools) remain pretty segregated, as does housing, and that this segregation has very real social, cultural, political, and economic consequences. Is the segregation as great as it was in 1950s Alabama? No, of course not, but desegregation is not complete, and may have moved backwards over the last several years.
Here’s hoping your education on the subject of race continues. Looks like you’ve got a lot of ground to cover.Report
There is a vast difference between segregation enforced by the gov and segregation created by cultural forces as a summation of individual choices. It’s more of a class thing now days.
Anyone can now leave their class and go join another. That’s a lot harder than it sounds. Most choose not to.Report
People have been working their asses off too leave the poorest classes but it doesn’t seem all that easy.Report
Cultures have support systems and ways to prevent you from leaving. Leaving your culture is hard. Going back is easy. Staying put in your culture is easier still.Report
And rather then helping people where they are, you judge them repeatedly for not moving where, when and how you expect them to. You, whether you realize it or not, are part of perpetuating those systemic barriers.Report
All of my kids are/were high achieving.
Other kids benefit from them being in the classroom. Ergo my kids are an educational resource.
I don’t care if the other kids don’t add to my kids’ educational experience, all I ask is they don’t subtract from it.
If me refusing to put my kids in with disruptive kids is a “barrier” then whatever. My responsibility is to my own kids.
I expect other parents to do what is best for their kids. This is a good thing, my kids benefit a lot from that sort of thing. The little league’s coaches are all parents with kids on the team. The team needs 8+ other players to function. The same logic works for volleyball, first robotics, the PTA, and so on.
I expect the government to not be anywhere close to a substitute for an active involved parent.
This is not a race thing. No one blinks at minority kids on the various teams. I didn’t think twice about sending my youngest into a majority minority school.
This is upper-middle class and helping children is a Good thing.
That means me refusing to sacrifice my kids to virtue signal on race relations is a Good thing.
The bottom line is I’m not the one who needs to change because I’m not the one with the self inflicted set of problems.Report
And that’s the crux of the matter isn’t it? you see all this poverty, all this lack of educational success as a sum total of personal choices. You don’t give any credence to the impact of systems – despite your continued allusions to culture and what you see as its perverse disincentives.
Culture is a system of systems dude. Those kids in your kids class won’t see your kids as an educational resource if no one has told them to. As a parent you ought to know that. And how involved can a parent working two or three jobs just to stay ahead be in their kid’s lives? Really? No one chooses to become poor. no one chooses to be laid off when their company moves over seas to goose profits. No one chooses to be red lined. But those things happen to people, they have impact, and they aren’t going to be solved by individual personal choice.Report
There is a vast difference in the implications for policy, sure, but not so much for outcomes, particularly given the vast disparities in educational resources, access to employment, policing, even access to credit that coincide with existing segregation.
Anyone can now leave their class and go join another.
I would like to have a bit of what you’re smoking.Report
I would phrase it as “bad cultural habits have predictability bad outcomes”.
The problem is we’re not sure how to get large numbers of people to change.Report
I’m sure you mean that people will need to change in large numbers to combat institutional and structural racism, so on this we agree, it is a difficult problem.Report
The big question is which people need to change and what do they need to do? If the solution to “structural racism” is I need to change, then “no”.
Job moved me to a different state recently. I used google to figure out which was the best High School in the area, so I moved there. School is majority minority but whatever, imho race is irrelevant.
When there are enough people like me, this behavior and the associated cultural attitudes results in concentrated poverty.
Similarly if I were creating jobs again (my company failed), then I would never locate the company in an area were worker safety is a concern.
The good news is these evaluations are race neutral. That’s also the bad news. I strongly expect this is a big driver of the current situation. Well, that and marriage rates.Report
That evaluation is NOT race neutral for far too many people. Which is a huge part of the problem. and a pillar of structural racism.Report
The evaluations are race neutral (and even race blind).
The effects may not be.
However that’s not my problem, I get to control my own actions, not everyone else’s.Report
Here’s why it will be so hard to get enough people to change their behavior: they think like you.Report
So we’ll fix this by controlling a group of people who “don’t think correctly” and ensure that they are punished for wrong think or are reeducated to think correctly? Or will you just punish their “wrong behavior”?Report
You’re not wrong, but I’m not the one with the problem.
Big picture the solution is for everyone else to adopt my cultural habits.
That’s way more useful than trying to pretend that dysfunctional cultural habits aren’t dysfunctional or that they shouldn’t have predictable outcomes.Report
Arrogant much fellas?
There’s a whole slew of reasons why you both have problems here . . . beginning with the idea that people are where they are SOLEY by their own choice. You both then make the additional error that people will change DESPITE the systems around them, and the will change without any change in incentives or systems.
Human history has yet to work that way.Report
My expectation is their parents had a lot to do with where they are. Children are learning machines, they are great a copying cultures.
Which doesn’t change that various cultural habits are great at predicting where you’ll end up if you adopt them, nor that adopting them needs to be viewed as a choice at some point.
My badly failed business didn’t push me down for long. I expect my divorce won’t either.
I fully agree with this, but this line of thought leads to places the left doesn’t like.
If you stop blaming centuries old crimes and wondering how to fix “the systems” and “the incentives”, then you’ll start wondering if the welfare state is creating incentives.Report
You’d be measurably wrong about that. Parents can’t teach, much less sustain tools to their kids that the parents themselves lack, in systems designed to stymie that teaching.
Red lining – a “centuries old crime” – continued to occur regularly in many places in the US into the 1970’s These are modern problems.
Interestingly we have post-Clinton reform statistics that can answer that question. And generally its not “the welfare state” that creates negative incentives. And let’s be blunt – even if we got your fever dream to come to fruition and got ride of every welfare program on the books, the only real measurable outcome would be a massive increase in abject poverty. Surly that’s not what you want to have happen?Report
Children mostly learn from example. Bad examples count. Should daddy beat mommy or even not exist, how do you spend money, or even how do you answer problems.
There are exceptions but this sort of thing is why the next generation will likely have the same culture as the current.
Saying that it happened “in many places into the 70’s” conflicts with calling it “a modern problem”. We haven’t seen it for two generations. If you want to exchange my “centuries” for “generations” then what I said still holds. Doing backflips to connect things we haven’t seen for two generations to the current situation is an effort to avoid looking at our current problems.
So the explosion of out of wedlock families that followed welfare had nothing to do with paying people to not get married. My four pairs of relatives who have announced that they were not getting married to min/max gov benefits must purely be a white thing. Got it.
What current “negative incentives” do you want to blame instead?
Straw man much?
What I would suggest is taking a hard look at incentives and restructure things. Phasing out benefits has been a mess. Replacing Welfare with a flat UI would likely be helpful. Eliminating a lot of the welfare based micromangement would also be helpful.
Any program that filters on marriage is encouraging people to not be married. It’s benefits either need to be eliminated, directed to married couples, or structured so marriage doesn’t make a difference.
Big picture dysfunctional behavior should be punished, not rewarded/enabled. That’s really harsh and goes the face of “all cultures are equal” but it’s pointing a finger at the sources of our current problems as opposed to what our problems were generations ago.Report
in historical terms, the 1970’s is current – I was alive then and a mere 51 years later I’m still alive. ANd while redlinning is no longer visible, it does still occur – plus getting out from under its pernicious effects in 2 generation (effects that literally go back to the founding to the country) is a laughable blindered expectation.
The problem you have is that what you see as dysfunctional behavior by individuals I see as dysfunctional behavior by systems. Change the systems and of necessity most individuals who interface with them will have to change behaviors. Punishing the behaviors of individuals within the system leaves the systems in place and renders any change seen at the instant or the individual unlikely to replicate because the system forces stasis or equilibrium.
I’d also note that most existing welfare programs no longer filter on marriage, so saying they incentivize not-marriage seems . . . unsupportable.Report
So how many generations need to go past before parents have more influence on their children than these generations ago events? And maybe more importantly, are they vectoring in a positive direction? What I see is a minority middle class, who largely has the same values and behavior I have with the same results, and a minority lower class, who don’t.
This is a wonderful statement in combination with blaiming systems that haven’t existed for two generations.
What current system do you want to change? What current system has negative incentives? If the only thing you can point your finger at is things that haven’t existed for decades, and you really don’t want to talk about culture, then you don’t have any solutions.
Five years ago or so my younger brother was in this situation. He’s a PhD Chemical Engineer, more of a math guy than I am, highly compitent in many fields, and has a poisonous ex-wife. That last is important because his legal situation in fighting with her over their kid would have been improved by getting re-married. So with all of that, him trying to walk me through the math on why he wasn’t getting married to his pregnant girlfriend to save money means more than your impression. BTW they did get married later.
Which systems do you want to change if you don’t like my suggested changes?
And keep in mind, I’m not going to change my behavior. I’m not the one who is experiencing problems nor am I the one with the self destructive behaviors. Asking me to put up with behavior from minorities that I wouldn’t tollerate from my relatives is a non-starter.Report
Let’s start with systems that force black men (adjusting for education and experience) to send out five the number of resumes as a white man to get the same job.
Let’s continue with systems that pay women 82 cents on the dollar for the same job a man does, again adjusting for education and experience.
Let’s finish killing off redlining, which is demonstrably alive and well in many parts of the US.
Let’s revamp public education so that educational outcomes are not tied to property taxes, perpetuating disparities in outcome based one economic status.
Let’s dismantle systems that seek to actively destroy LGBTQ+ people (as in make sure they die).
I’d say those would all be a good start . . . .Report
NPR did a thing on this, seems it’s more of a class thing than a race thing. More importantly the expected fiscal impact of this is approximately zero. People put out resumes until they get a job.
We’re looking at personal choices about work life vs family balance. In practice that 82 cents means we compare a male dentist who is working 5 days a week to a female who is working 4. Subtract pregnancy and the raising of children and there is no issue.
So with that as the source of the “problem”, what do you want to do? Force women to make different choices? Give them 5 days of pay for 4 days of work? Dismantle the free market for labor? If you don’t have a suggested change then you’re just complaining about the outcome.
Source? If you’re going to claim the already outlawed redlining is alive and the source for ongoing inequality, then I need links.
What we’ll find out is…
1) The rich’s educational money cannons don’t add value.
2) Parent involvement matters a lot.
3) Two parent households do a lot better than one.
4) It’s very expensive to fix children who mirror problem behavior they get at home
Intuitively, it’s cheaper and easier to educate the upper middle class. Part of that is parents help. When my kid incorrectly learned how to count to 20, I drilled her until she relearned it. Ditto 100 (different kid). I’ve had to sit down and help with math lots of times… although that’s uncool enough that the girls find other sources online.
There are lots of free examples and a few that weren’t free. Having competent parents interested in your success is a killer edge. Money matters a lot less than we’d like to think.
When I was poor (negative income because my business was failing), my kids had access to a ton of educational enrichment activities “because we were poor”.
Since activities were free, you’d expect them to be massively over stuffed with kids given what the usgov says about our demographics. Instead there weren’t very many. Even dropping the cost of educational enrichment activities down to free doesn’t move the needle much.Report
“Let’s start with systems that force black men (adjusting for education and experience) to send out five the number of resumes as a white man to get the same job.”
It was a 10% lower rate, not an 80% lower rate. It’s probably less, because strongly black names also correlate to lower incomes, so class is being implicitly factored in as well.
“Let’s continue with systems that pay women 82 cents on the dollar for the same job a man does, again adjusting for education and experience.”
It’s about 92 cents, not 82 cents, when taking the factors that Dark Matter lists into account. This one is also likely less, because it’s only adjusted for the most obvious factors.Report
Uber male drivers get 7% more money (that’s your 92 cents). The company’s algorithm can’t tell the difference between male and female drivers so there is no discrimination.
The bulk of that seems to be that men (as a whole) are more aggressive at trying to earn money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap#Job_flexibilityReport
I tried to find examples of modern redlining.
I found one bank in Memphis who wouldn’t lend to minorities in their area. Other than that, three things pop up.
1) Historical examples and hand wringing about it. This is the bulk of the info. Either Team Blue suppresses real examples or they’re vanishingly rare.
2) The federal gov has announced years ago they’re going to crack down on this. But with politicians looking to score headlines the feds have found zero.
3) Claims banks discriminate against minorities. If you adjust for X,Y,Z, the lending rates are different. X,Y,Z doesn’t include credit ratings.
What we have found is banks don’t like lending to people with bad credit and this gets (mis)represented by Team Blue as modern red-lining.
So the question is what to do about that. IMHO we should do nothing. Outlawing banks looking at credit worthiness before making loans will make the wheels fall of the financial system.Report
Wells Fargo keeps getting in trouble for it in multiple states – https://sites.law.duq.edu/juris/2022/04/07/modern-day-redlining/
And Many cities that used to have active redlinning are still segregated (some even more so) – https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redlining/
These are systems issues, and refusing to deal with the systems that keep these practices by misdirecting blame to individual choice is deeply problematic.Report
That’s two examples. I might have seen a third.
However this makes my point. While this still exists it’s like saying the KKK still exists. It’s so tiny that it can’t be a driver for currently observed issues.
True, we’ve gotten more mobile and people self segregate.
Since the driving force is individual choice, it’s not clear what to do about it.
This is the point where you say the word “system”, but what system is that? In order to change a system like this we need to understand it.
I moved to the best school system in the area because I want to do good things for my kid.
What “system” change do you suggest would convince me to move to a low income neighborhood with a terrible school?
Say… a special “elite” class of children who get lots of resources. Doing that for my kids in the middle of an ocean of low achieving kids is probably a political non-starter.
Other than that, I’m not sure how we deal with self segregation if we’re trying to desegregate.Report
“There’s a whole slew of reasons why you both have problems here . . . beginning with the idea that people are where they are SOLEY by their own choice.”
Really, I asked someone else, not you, a question when they slandered me. Hell, recently I just posted how my political outlook changed after watching the republicans in control of the house, and I’m being blamed because “they think like you”. What, with, generally, an open mind? Thanks.Report
You seem to be advocating against any state “sponsored” solution to these issues – which puts us back in the realm of individual choice. Choice is constrained by systems, including culture and economics, and states are generally one of the few actors large and powerful enough to change those systems at meaningful levels.Report
I want to flag that statement for strong agreement.
This also means that if we’re looking at a situation that’s currently dysfunctional, a good question to ask is “what is the state doing”?Report
Not in this thread bud. I’d be happy with any state or personal sponsored solutions that work. To date, I’ve seen most not work, or at least, work for what they allegedly were intended for.Report