Facts of Systemic Racism

"I continue to believe that in this country the opposite of poverty is not wealth. I really don't think that's what we're talking about. I think in America, the opposite of poverty is justice." ~Bryan Stevenson

As soon as I heard that quote, I stopped and had to reflect on that. "The opposite of poverty is justice." Wow. It's not wealth we're striving for to keep someone out of poverty. It's justice. That's powerful.

You can watch the entire segment on this week's Bill Moyers Journal.

Since Monday is the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the segment takes time to point out his involvement in the Poor People's Campaign right before he was killed. King recognized that how we all deal with poverty was and is an even bigger obstacle than dealing with race, though the two often go hand in hand. I have often heard it said that his fight for justice among the poor is what led to his death.

Poverty and racism are systemic issues. Yet, despite my understanding of that, I often revert to challenging people to take personal responsibility. I tend to believe that my weakness in this area is because I have not had to experience that systemic discrimination and injustice on a personal level. While personal responsibility and how people interact with others is definitely part of it, there must be a deeper understanding of how the problems are ingrained in our society and need to be dealt with in order for us to change course.

On Bill Moyers Journal, Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander do a great job of pointing out how it is so ingrained in the fabric of our existence.

Did you know that...

• In 2004 Alabama tried to get rid of segregation language in the state constitution, and a majority of people in Alabama voted to keep that language in that prohibits black and white kids from going to school together?
• Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman made it a point to figure out a way to make black people appear to be the problem stating, "The whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."
• Over the last 35 years, there haven't been tremendous fluctuations in the violent crime rate in this country, yet we've gone from 300 thousand people in jails and prison in 1972, to 2.3 million people in jails and prisons today. With nearly 5 million people on probation and parole. 
• Black people are 13 percent of the population of this country. They're about 14 percent of the drug users. But they end up being about 60 percent of the people sent to prison.
• If you are a black man, you have a 32 percent chance you're going to jail or prison, but if you live in a poor and/or minority community, urban community, rural community, it could be 60 or 70 percent.
• The rates of drug use are about the same among all racial groups. But also, the rates of drug sales are about the same among people of all different races as well.
• The Reagan Administration actually hired staff whose job it was to publicize crack babies, crack dealers in inner city communities, in the hope that these images would build public support for the drug war and persuade Congress to devote millions of more dollars to the war. 
• In some states, we spend $45,000 a year to keep a 19-year-old in prison for the next 30 years (or $1,350,000) for drug possession, yet we're only willing to spend about $1500-$4500 a year to educate a child in his younger years.

It always amazes me when I hear quotes and statistics that demonstrates the bias in our country. We want to believe that racism is not our problem...that we didn't create it. We want to believe racism is a misconstrued perception by people of color. But the reality is that people of color have seen and heard...and still see and hear...what we overlook because statements like that of Richard Nixon's Chief of Staff wasn't calling me the problem, but was placing the blame on someone else. The fact that Ronald Reagan hired a staff to publicize the worst parts of the inner city kept the focus off of the similar problems in the rural, white area where I grew up.

Though all of the bullet points I stated disturb me, what completely baffles me is why we would be willing to spend $45,000 per year on a kid for 30 years to keep him/her locked up in a cell, but are not willing to invest even half of that in his childhood education. And from being in the inner city schools, I can guarantee that if that much money was spent on high quality learning opportunities, many things would be different for the children growing up in the inner city.

Reversing environmental decline

I try to be conscious of the environment.

I wouldn't say I'm completely green. When I want to fight mosquitos in my back yard, I go to the products I know...which usually aren't necessarily environmentally healthy. When I purchase hair care products, I buy what I like and what seems to work.

But I try.

I go behind people and shut off lights. I have my blue trash can beside my regular trash can and make sure everyone who comes to my house recycles...and try to encourage it even when I'm not at my house. Most recently I have taken up composting (still not sure how to do that, but I'm working on it).

So as I watched Bill Moyers and Daniel Goleman talk about Goleman's new book, Ecological Intelligence, I was listening for new tips.

He mentioned two sites that can help us find safe, healthy, and green products:
Good Guide and Skin Deep--both very helpful to see what we're actually buying...tells if the ingredients are linked to cancer...and offers other products that are less toxic. I never knew so many were related to cancer!

As he talked something else struck me. He talked about suntan lotion and how the ingredients in suntan lotion wash off in the water and is killing the coral reefs.

This struck me. A few years ago I went to Jamaica with my environmentalist cousin. She had been in the Peace Corps there and was very disappointed when we returned to find the coral reefs nearly non-existent. As we talked, she spoke of the Jamaicans not taking care of their land and how the trash in the water has hurt the ocean life.

But now I wonder...Is it really the Jamaicans that are hurting their own ocean or is it the tourists? We know tourists go there for sun and beaches. In fact that was another discovery we made on her return. I posted about it here. There were huge monstrosity hotels that had taken over the locals' beaches. I'm not so sure it's the Jamaican's fault.

As Goleman points out, there is a hidden cost to our "stuff" and the things we want and think we deserve. The coral reefs in Jamaica are dying. The landfills in our own United States are probably full of junk McDonald's happy meal toys that kids only like for the moment they open the plastic packaging.

Are we all really thinking about what our own selfishness can do and is doing? And how can we make a concerted effort to turn this around?

The really cool thing about Good Guide is that you can two really cool things... Once you go to a product, you can click on the "contact this company" button and tell the company why you're not buying their brand anymore, or why you are now buying their brand. Secondly, you can also inform all of your friends as to why you've just done that.

Not all of us take the time to look at these things...but for those of us who do, I think once we start making the information more accessible to others, being more green might catch on and companies will look for ways to become more green to satisfy their public.

Hopefully we can begin reversing the rapid evolution of environmental decline.

See the Bill Moyers segment here:

Bill Moyers commentary on Jeremiah Wright

At the risk of beating a dead horse...and being just like the media, I feel the need to bring Jeremiah Wright up just one more time (unless, of course, something comes up again :) ). I really appreciate Bill Moyers' perspective. He articulates so well the points that I have thought about over the last few weeks. I wanted to give everyone the chance to see what he said on the Journal last night. I couldn't get the video so you can either click on the link or read the transcript below.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05022008/watch.html


May 2, 2008
BILL MOYERS:Welcome to the Journal.
I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam, "Who's telling the truth over there?" Everyone he said. Everyone sees what's happening through the lens of their own experience." That's how people see Jeremiah Wright. In my conversation with him on this broadcast a week ago and in his dramatic public appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto the public stage. Over 2000 of you have written me about him, and your opinions vary widely. Some sting: "Jeremiah Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American hating radical," one viewer wrote. A "nut case," said another. Others were far more were sympathetic to him.

Many of you have asked for some rational explanation for Wright's transition from reasonable conversation to shocking anger at the National Press Club. A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and see this complicated man more clearly, but I'm not a psychologist. Many black preachers I've known - scholarly, smart, and gentle in person -- uncorked fire and brimstone in the pulpit. Of course I've known many white preachers like that, too.

But where I grew up in the south, before the civil rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black men to express anger for which they would have been punished anywhere else; a safe place for the fierce thunder of dignity denied, justice delayed. I think I would have been angry if my ancestors had been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated, whipped, and lynched. Or if my great-great grandfather had been but three -fifths of a person in a constitution that proclaimed, "We the people." Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Connor, and Jesse Helms. Even so, the anger of black preachers I've known and heard about and reported on was, for them, very personal and cathartic.

That's not how Jeremiah Wright came across in those sound bites or in his defiant performances this week. What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory words is an attack on the America they cherish and that many of their sons have died for in battle — forgetting that black Americans have fought and bled beside them, and that Wright himself has a record of honored service in the Navy. Hardly anyone took the "chickens come home to roost" remark to convey the message that intervention in the political battles of other nations is sure to bring retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that actions have consequences. My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes, people are understandably seething with indignation over Wright's absurd charge that the united states deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being. But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory the U.S. Public Health Service conducted a study that deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into believing that they were being treated, while actually letting them die for the sake of a scientific test. Does this excuse Wright's anger? His exaggerations or distortions? You'll have to decide or yourself. At least it helps me to understand the why of them.

But in this multimedia age the pulpit isn't only available on Sunday mornings. There's round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who for their own reasons set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn't running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions, or thinks AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God's judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of a preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon white house in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy and wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren't.

Which means it is all about race, isn't it? Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettles some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. Politics often exposes us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this — this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said "beware the terrible simplifiers".