Not Done Yet

I've been saying ever since Barack Obama was elected president that just because America has elected a black man to be president doesn't mean that all racial issues have magically been solved. It's not that simple. Now, the Civil Rights Project at the University of California has issued a report saying that they agree with me. (Well, my point at least.)

According to the report, public schools are more segregated now than at any point since the civil rights movement. In some ways, that's pretty shocking. I mean, we'd like to think that we've made some progress over the last half century. On the other hand, it's not really that surprising.

I would posit here that the operative factor in play is not race, but rather poverty. The way our public schools are structured (for the most part) is in residential zones whereby kids go to the school near where they live. Given that neighborhoods tend to be economically homogenous (think the Upper East Side's median income versus that in the South Bronx) it's not surprise that the schools are likewise divided along economic lines. Given that race and poverty tend to track together, it's no surprise that the schools are racially divided.

So what are we going to do about it?

Usually, I try to have some answers, but on this one I'm a little stumped. I would say that trying to racially/economically balance schools doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me (think bussing or a totally unzoned school system) because I don't think it gets at the underlying issues. This is one of those examples of a school issue that affects and is affects by all sorts of things outside of the school. And unfortunately, I don't know what the answer is. What I do know is that until we figure it out and get the system working so that upward mobility is more than a catchphrase from another era, the problems we're talking about now are only going to get worse.

The Murderous Fires of Race and Class

The facts are grim for black America. As Ralph Reiland highlights in his column yesterday, they are very grim indeed. Each year more blacks are killed in this country than soldiers have been killed in Iraq in over five years. While blacks make up only 12% of the country's population, they committed 52% of the murders and were victims of 47% of the murders in America. As the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education finds, blacks are three times more likely to live in prison than live in a college dorm.

Sobering facts all.

Reiland then follows this up with a bit of a non-sequiter. He says that this is all evidence that Barack Obama shouldn't have been listening to the sermons of Jeremiah Wright. That's the best lesson you can draw from this?

While I think Wright's comments were reprehensible and I agree that Obama probably shouldn't have tied himself so closely to the guy, this argument doesn't make sense. Reiland writes that the "murderous fires in the black community were being stoked from the pulpits of black churches." Murderous fires? Really? This strikes me as kind of like blaming the sinking of the Titanic on the people who said the ship was unsinkable. Yeah, you can probably make some sort of case for it. And yes, the remarks certainly didn't help matters very much. But the ship still had to hit an iceberg for it to go down.

So what's the iceberg that black America has hit?

Despite the apparent national imperative to talk about race, I can't help but think that race may be beside the point. At least, I don't think it's the main point right now. For that we have to look at class.

Forgive me a brief digression. Bill Cosby, after becoming famous as a great comedian, became infamous for excoriating the black community for spending money on flashy, big ticket items rather than investing in the future. Never mind that this really shouldn't have been controversial (investing in the future is obviously better than having $500 sneakers). What Cosby missed was that this wasn't a black problem. As this article from Slate points out, the issue is one of economics rather than race. It's not that black people spend more on conspicuous consumption, it's that poor people, economically segregated, spend more on conspicuous consumption.

So now back to murder. The question becomes, is this a black problem or is it a poor urban ghetto problem? Clearly, there is likely to be a significant amount of overlap between these fields. But drawing a distinct line between the two is still important if we want to find a solution. If the issue is poverty, that dictates a path of increased education, social services, and similar approaches. If the issue is race and only race, then, well, we may have a bigger problem on our hands than anyone realizes.

Where I'm going with this is that focusing on these problems as problems of race when they are actually problems of class is like taking pepto bismal of appendicitis. You might feel like you're taking strong action, but nothing's actually getting done. It's time to look at class in America. If we fix that, I think the racial issues will start to work themselves out. I don't see it happening the other way.