(Photos by Robin Holland)

In their conversation with Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL this week, sociologist Orlando Patterson and economist Glenn C. Loury discussed the possibility of redefining the target populations of social programs. Patterson remarked on one approach:

“There’s always a huge problem in policies with respect to black Americans, and that is whether they’re going to be targeted towards blacks... or whether it’s gonna be universal. That is, you take the view that it is not a black problem... a shift from the targeted approach to a universal approach, in which affirmative action will be for the white poor as well as the black poor.”

Loury noted that such a policy would not necessarily produce the same results as the race-based system currently in effect.

“If we say affirmative action at leading American universities is now open to poor people, regardless of their race, no more of these middle class blacks who have lower test scores getting into places like Princeton or Harvard or any place like that. The result of that, the actual result of doing it, just like that and nothing else, will be for every black that might have benefited, there are going to be ten poor whites who could potentially benefit. It will be a significant reduction of the number of blacks at these institutions. Now, maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s not okay.”

What do you think?

How are these programs affected by the growing multiculturalism in the US, when divisions are less black and white?

Tag(s): race
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(Photo by Robin Holland)

In this week’s JOURNAL, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Ron Walters discussed how race has affected the presidential election process and the media’s coverage thereof.

Jamieson said:

“I heard a commentator say, when Senator Obama announced, that he’s running to be 'the first black president'... He’s running to be our president, the president of all of us. And to some extent to say that he’s running to be 'the first black president,' I knew what the commentator meant, but I thought that is problematic for that candidacy.”

We invite you to discuss in the space below.

Tag(s): America , Polls , election '08 , race
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This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers spoke with Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) in Chicago and Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-Il) pastor for more than 20 years, who’s been embroiled in controversy.

“When something is taken like a sound bite for a political purpose and put constantly over and over again, looped in the face of the public, that's not a failure to communicate. Those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they wanna do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic or as the learned journalist from the New York Times called me, a "wackadoodle"... I think they wanted to communicate that I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ... To put an element of fear and hatred and to stir up the anxiety of Americans who still don't know the African-American tradition, know nothing about the prophetic theology of the African-American experience, who know nothing about the black church, who don't even know how we got a black church.”

Some have argued that TUCC’s “Black Value System,” which emphasizes commitment to the “Black community” and “Black family” rather than to communities and families in general, prioritizes racial identity in an inherently racist way. Arguing that Wright himself might be a racist who holds racial animus against certain groups, commentators have pointed to his statement that “white folks’ greed runs a world in need” and to his accusation that the U.S. government “invented the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.” Furthermore, Wright’s association with Louis Farrakhan, whose history of anti-semitic and anti-white statements has been condemned, has brought further controversy.

In contrast, some have come to the defense of Wright's rhetoric and his notion of “the prophetic theology of the African American experience” and black liberation theology. In today’s Dallas Morning News, Gerald Britt dismisses “attempts to delegitimize Dr. Wright and Trinity United Christian Church for its Afrocentric theological emphasis” and argues that the black church “has been admired for its powerful presence within the African-American community; its worship is envied for its emotional freedom.”

What do you think?

Tag(s): America , belief , culture , election '08 , faith , race , religion
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(Harris photo by Robin Holland)

This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers spoke with former Senator Fred Harris (D-OK), one of the original members of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission.

Convened by President Lyndon Johnson in the wake of 1967’s riots among inner-city blacks in Detroit and dozens of other cities, the Kerner Commission sought to learn what had happened, why the riots had occurred, and what could be done to prevent similar events from happening again. The resulting (and immediately controversial) 1968 Kerner Report concluded that the riots emerged from severe poverty and limited opportunity in America’s urban ghettoes, for which the Report blamed institutional racism.

The report recommended a series of measures to try and change the situation, including using the government to create jobs, expanding affirmative action, and beefing up welfare and other social services. Regarding the Commission’s recommendations, Harris said:

“I think virtually everything [the Kerner Commission recommended] was right... one of the awfulest things that came out of the Reagan presidency and later was the feeling that government can’t do anything right and that everything it does is wrong. The truth is that virtually everything we tried worked. We just quit trying it. Or we didn’t try it hard enough. And that’s what we need to get back to.

We made progress on virtually every aspect of race and poverty for about a decade after the Kerner Commission report and then, particularly with the advent of the Reagan administration and so forth, that progress stopped. And we began to go backwards... When we cut out a lot of these social programs, or the money for them... [and] we don’t emphasize jobs and training and education and so forth as we had been doing, there are bad consequences from that... I think what you need to do is to help people up, give ‘em a hand up. And recognize the kind of terrible conditions that they’re grown up in.”

Moyers also interviewed Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who offered his own perspective:

"The knee jerk reaction [is] to spend more money. Well, you know what? I can show you places in the city of Newark where we're doing more with less simply because we have good people stepping forward and saying, "I'm not gonna tolerate this any more in my nation, in my community, on my block." They're doing mentoring programs. You have grassroots leaders... Because it's all about the spirit. It all comes down to a spiritual transformation... At some point in America, we're going to have to get beyond blame and start accepting responsibility."

What do you think?

Which do you think is the more effective approach to tackling the problems of the inner city --- Fred Harris' top-down government strategy or Cory Booker's emphasis on individual and grassroots responsibility?

Tag(s): class , government , race
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We invite you to respond by commenting below.

Tag(s): America , Bill's Column , LBJ , democracy , government , race
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In his conversation with Bill Moyers on this week’s JOURNAL, scholar Shelby Steele said the following:

I am black and happy to be so, but my identity is not my master. I’m my master. And I resent this civil rights leadership telling me what I should think and what issues I should support this way or that way. And that’s where, in black America, identity has become almost totalitarian... You [must] subscribe to the idea that the essence of blackness is grounded in grievance, and if you vary from that you are letting whites off the hook. And we’re gonna call you a sell out. We’re gonna call you an ‘Uncle Tom’... I was gonna have a life or I was just going to be a kind of surrogate for blackness... but you enter an exile where the group identifies you as someone who is a threat, and part of being black is despising or having contempt for people like me.

What do you think?

To what extent are racial divisions and classifications reinforced by minority group identity?

Tag(s): America , culture , race , speech
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Dr. Ronald Walters, in his interview with Bill Moyers this week, explains that he believes some African Americans have not embraced the Presidential candidacy of Barack Obama because the Senator is focused on a national middle ground, and thus unable to highlight the core issues of the African-American community. Walters states:

Barack Obama has to maintain that middle. And, therefore, he has to marginalize, to a great extent, over hot button racial issues...

...His campaign has said that, "We have to continue to develop our base in the white community. We have, therefore, to continue to make them comfortable with the idea of your candidacy. We can't do that if we're going to bring up these hot button racial issues."

What do you think?

Can a Presidential candidate, searching for a multi-racial national base in order to be elected, avoid alienating his/her own minority base?

Tag(s): election '08 , race
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In this week's JOURNAL, Bill Moyers put the following question to Dr. James Cone:

BILL MOYERS: How do you explain the current spate of the appearances of the noose again? Up comes this story right here from the suburbs of New York -- a noose found in the basement locker room of the village police department. The deputy chief of police is black. And then you've got Jena and you've got what happened at Columbia [University], near your office.

Do you think these people understand what that's the symbol of? Of what actually happened to human beings when that noose was placed around the neck? Or is this just some kind of grim game?

We invite you to discuss your answers to Bill Moyers' question below.

Photo: Robin Holland

Tag(s): race
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In this week’s JOURNAL, WVON Chicago radio program director Coz Carson says:

“There’s a great deal of mistrust for mainstream media when it comes to African-American issues. So when we approach people, when we ask them to speak to us, they feel like they’re speaking with family, they’re speaking with people who understand their plight.”

A paper from Stanford University's Political Communications Lab about political preferences and news polarization argues that since “people prefer to encounter information that they find supportive or consistent with their existing beliefs” there is a “real possibility that news will no longer serve as the ‘social glue’ that connects all Americans… [as they turn] to biased but favored providers.”

What do you think?

Do ethnic media serve their communities in ways the mainstream media can’t? If so, how?

Tag(s): America , democracy , journalism , media , race
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The recent firing of Don Imus for making racial slurs on the radio has stirred up much discussion about racism in America, particularly the role that certain derogatory words play in fanning the flames of social bigotry.

Russell Simmons, founder of legendary hip-hop label Def Jam, has been at the forefront of this debate recently, pushing for a ban on the use of 3 words in hip-hop lyrics that he deems sexist and racist:

"The words 'bitch' and 'ho' are utterly derogatory and disrespectful of the painful, hurtful, misogyny that, in particular, African-American women have experienced in the United States as part of the history of oppression, inequality, and suffering of women.

The word 'nigger' is a racially derogatory term that disrespects the pain, suffering, history of racial oppression, and multiple forms of racism against African-Americans and other people of colour."

--Russell Simmons

But Melissa Harris-Lacewell, with whom Bill Moyers talks this week on THE JOURNAL, believes that banning certain words only serves to "cover over racism" and that truly facing the issue of bigotry in America today requires new tools:

"I hope by the end of my class though, they would be saying, 'Look, we recognize that even if we got rid of every derogatory, racial utterance, even if no one ever, black or white, used the 'N' word again, that this would not actually end racial inequality in America.'

I hope that my students have learned something about the structural nature of inequality and the way that racism gets perpetuated through our assumptions and our history and our culture, and not just through bad words or language."

--Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell

What do you think? How important are words in fighting prejudice in America?

Photo: Robin Holland

Tag(s): race , women
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