Martin Luther King Can Stop Dreaming Now
I’ve had more than a few acquaintances, most from privileged backgrounds who voted for Barack Obama, suggest that the election of a black man to the White House serves as proof that America has moved beyond race and that Martin Luther King’s vision is becoming a reality. The mainstream press, also comprised of people from privileged backgrounds who voted for Obama, have eagerly perpetuated this idea. As we see TV footage of Obama’s children preparing to go to their racially integrated private school, we can feel almost as if our own children have made friends with playmates from Chicago’s south side, and realized Martin Luther King’s dream.
One game that all children love to play is called “Let’s Pretend!”. “Let’s pretend we’re Power Rangers!” “Let’s play princesses!” None of the kids actually believes that he or she is a Power Ranger or princess, and adults could learn a lesson from children in this regard. Wishful thinking may make us feel good, and carries little penalty for the privileged, but do the facts really support the idea that racial equality has made progress in America? In order to keep this reality check short and sweet, let’s take a look at just one issue that is central to Martin Luther King’s dream; racial segregation of children.
First, read this week’s story about racial segregation at schools in Romania. As you read it, you can empathize with the various people interviewed, and maybe even see some disturbing parallels to the way that wealthy Obama supporters send their kids to private schools to expose them to “only the very best”. But you might also be a bit smug in the belief that Romania is where America was in the 1950’s. Yes, our richest people may be elitist, but the masses in America no longer segregate based on race or class, right?
Wrong. Read this story from East St. Louis, in Barack Obama’s home state of Illinois:
“"We have a school in East St. Louis named for Dr. King," she says. "The school is full of sewer water and the doors are locked with chains. Every student in that school is black. It’s like a terrible joke on history."
It startles me to hear her words, but I am startled even more to think how seldom any press reporter has observed the irony of naming segregated schools for Martin Luther King. Children reach the heart of these hypocrisies much quicker than the grown-ups and the experts do.”
The article is well-researched. Many parts of the article could apply to articles about Martin Luther King Avenue in any major American city, and about schools in Detroit, Flint, Baltimore, Boston, or Los Angeles. Yes, even Seattle. The article concludes with this powerful exchange:
“"Is it ’separate but equal,’ then?" I ask. "Have we gone back a hundred years?"
"It is separate. That’s for sure," the teacher says. She is a short and stocky middle-aged black woman. "Would you want to tell the children it is equal?"”
We can keep congratulating each other for making a better world than our racist ancestors did (and by “our”, we never mean “my”). But sometimes we need to come back to reality. Are things really better? Of course, it’s not just the schools. You can read “Off the Books” for a gripping 7-year sociological study of the forgotten poor in Obama’s home city of Chicago. Or “Prison Nation”, which is pretty depressing.
I’m not preaching here, and I’m not offering any answers. If you want to play Power Rangers, we can play. If you say “Let’s pretend there is no racial segregation”, we can play that too. But just like that John Lennon song about “Imagine there’s no hunger”, we need to remember that it’s just pretend. You wouldn’t expect a little boy to jump out a 10th story window because he’s pretending to be a Power Ranger, and we shouldn’t let our grown-up games of make-believe drive or justify our major lifestyle or policy decisions.
November 29th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
And for the record, this isn’t a rip on Obama. I supported Obama since early in the primaries, and am sure that Obama has a very realistic perspective on this issue, just like the people from East St. Louis who voted for him.
The reason I used examples from Obama’s turf is to effectively juxtapose what I see as two groups within the pro-Obama movement: those who pretend that it is so, and those who know from experience that it ain’t so.
December 1st, 2008 at 10:36 am
In the interest of honest dialog, I suppose that my sentiment (as a white person who did not vote for Obama) would be more like this…
I think everyone got a “get-out-racism-free” card, which is a fine relief after being blamed generally in popular culture for so many terrible things that we had nothing to do with.
If you fail or succeed, it has little to do with the color of your skin. White people don’t hate black people, which is a popular stereotype today. White people don’t work to oppress anybody because of a skin tone.
Obama was raised by white parents, in a white culture. He was elected by a white culture. His skin color wasn’t the issue. Culture was.
Contrast Obama’s upbringing with children raised in urban poverty. Children raised in that type of culture, black or white, are seldom as fortunate as Obama. For example, in Detroit, less than 1 out of 4 students graduate from high school! In Detroit, the graduation rate is even lower for white students.
When I look at the mess of corrupt politics in Detroit, I could wonder if there is hope for any child born in that city. Detroit has little tolerance for outside interference from people like me (i.e. there is no tolerance for well intentioned white people trying to help/interfere, unless they help/interfere by maintaining the status quo). Detroit gets lots of money to spend on schools, per student, but it often emerges that the money was wasted in some dysfunctional way that cheated the students first. And, it seems that the politicians are not really held accountable by voters, but reverse racism plays a big role in the elections.
In many respects, the country is reaping the rewards of slavery and segregation, with distrust on both sides of the racial divide. But, I also note that we are always making progress, and over centuries, things have improved, not worsened.
I believe the sermon on the mount, as Obama does, but I also believe the rest of the Bible (there are no obscure passages in Romans).
Mankind, white or black, is inherently corrupt. Electing a black man as president will not change what is in a man’s heart, black or white, nor will it cancel out the consequences of sin in society.
Only a strong responsible church can bring lasting social progress. And, a strong responsible church is both color-blind and concerned for justice.
December 1st, 2008 at 1:47 pm
I can’t tell if you’re saying that the problem will never be solved (which I might agree with), or that it will be solved if only attendence at churches would increase (which I cannot agree with).
If you read the full story about East St. Louis, you can surmise that the issue isn’t one of religion. Is it lack of church that causes the white people in the “bluffs” to avoid the black people in the “bottoms”?
St. Louis was named after a Christian saint, and the entire area is still Christian. No doubt, many of the families from the “bluffs” who send their children to schools where they can avoid black kids, go to Christian churches on the bluffs. They probably sincerely feel that the world’s problems could be solved by Christianity, as they flush their sewage down to the residents of the “bottoms” and send a few dollars to missionaries overseas while watching international crises on TV and feeling compassion.
Likewise, there are plenty of churches and churchgoers in the “bottoms”. In fact, it’s quite plausible that the % of attendance is higher among the black population. So one cannot say that the people on the “bottoms” would have better prosperity if only they repent of their wicked ways and become Christian.
The fact is, the churches in America are just as segregated as ever. That’s not meant as a smear against them — I am just stating a fact — whatever the vast majority of churchgoing people feel about the Bible, it certainly doesn’t extend to any sort of practiced belief that the people on the bluffs are responsible for helping the people on the bottoms. The people from the bluffs avoid the people from the bottoms, whether they are Christian or not — the exact same pattern was seen in the story from Romania, where parents would pay extra to ship their kids to another school to avoid the minority kids.
So, I don’t buy the notion that getting more people in churches would solve the problem. You can rightly argue that “all of those people aren’t really Christians”, but then you are really just arguing that the church should be abolished and rebuilt to your standards.
Besides, where exactly do holy scriptures promise to bring about an end to earthly social injustice or poverty? To say that “if everyone believes, then poverty and social injustice will vanish” seems to be a massive unsubstantiated embellishment.
December 1st, 2008 at 2:52 pm
The solution that I propose is a stronger church, and a color-blind church. I am not advocating church attendance and religion.
Consider William Wilberforce, Abe Lincoln, and Martin Luther King. View civil rights as a progression over the centuries, starting in Roman times. You will always find God working through imperfect people, but only when imperfect people let him work.
I am trying hard to think of any social movement of any merit that advanced the state of humanity which did not have its origins in the church. Nazism? Socialism? Humanism? AIDS?
Now I am imaging a world without the church, and I see slaves being fed alive to a pack of lions while a crowd of 30,000 suburbanites cheer at Tiger stadium.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:26 pm
The East St. Louis article was written 20 years ago. Interestingly, it was also written 20 years after LBJ’s great society.
I quote it below, because I am often amazed to see how much money is unsucessfully spent per pupil in Detroit:
“What such critics also fail to note, as Solomon and principal Sam Morgan have observed, is that the crumbling infrastructure uses up a great deal more of the per-pupil budget than would be the case in districts with updated buildings that cost less to operate. Critics also willfully ignore the health conditions and the psychological disarray of children growing up in burnt-out housing, playing on contaminated land, and walking past acres of smoldering garbage on their way to school. They also ignore the vast expense entailed in trying to make up for the debilitated skills of many parents who were prior victims of these segregated schools or those of Mississippi, in which many of the older residents of East St. Louis led their early lives. In view of the extraordinary miseries of life for children in the district, East St. Louis should be spending far more than is spent in wealthy suburbs.”
I agree. If the country can transfer 120 billion dollars from the Federal treasury onto the balance sheet of a corrupt AIG insurance corporation, then we can come up with money to break this cycle of poverty. But, it is 40 years after LBJ’s Great Society, and it seems that Federal money just gets swollowed by corruption and bad government. In Detroit, the connection between a corrupt government and a poor quality of life is very clear.
The children are still just as bad off as they were in 1988 and 1968.
The question is this? 40 years after HUD, what can I do for students in Detroit or East St. Louis? What can I do to break the cycle of poverty? The fact that I haven’t made a difference through voting, charitable contributions, or public service doesn’t make me racist. The problem is too big for me, and it is too big for campaign promise breaking Obama. The problem is not too big for God.
My theory is this… Social injustice is the norm. As individuals, we are called to resist it. Calling it racism is a stumbling block.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:37 pm
My apologies for spamming your blog. This is summarizes the state of things in East St. Louis in 2008.
“There must have been 400 teenagers,” estimates Tony Huelsmann, a bartender at the Delmar Lounge, which sits on the city’s border. “They streamed by our windows for fifteen minutes. The University City police had a K-9 unit out pushing the kids along, and it’s a good thing, in my opinion. These kids are ruining the neighborhood. You can’t walk the Loop without getting hassled by them. They clog the sidewalks and won’t get out of the way. I’ve heard numerous reports of them jumping innocent people.”
From: Out-of-control shoplifting at the St. Louis Galleria. Violent attacks in the Delmar Loop. Is MetroLink a vehicle for crime?
http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2008-08-20/news/out-of-control-shoplifting-at-the-st-louis-galleria-violent-attacks-in-the-delmar-loop-is-metrolink-a-vehicle-for-crime/
December 1st, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Right, the situation for the “bottoms” hasn’t gotten better. The whole debate about rail link highlights the way that the rest of society views them, shuns them, and tries to isolate from them.
And I agree about spending per pupil — I also thought about the Detroit schools when reading that.
IMO, asking “what can I do to break the cycle of poverty” is asking the wrong question. None of the major religions claim to have an answer to that problem, and so to answer it one must veer off into secular political philosophy, or twist one’s faith into a mere self-help philosophy.
The post wasn’t meant to be a post about religion, but I think that Christianity (and Judaism and Islam, for that matter) are clear on this. The split between “bluffs and bottoms” is almost identical to the ancient split between “Jews and Samaritans”, which seems significant — and there is very little ambiguity in phrases like “whatever you do for the least of these”, or “give away all that you own to the poor”. The faiths seem unanimous in the idea that poor, abandoned, sick, and broken people are an opportunity for the fortunate to build up treasures in heaven — and equally unanimous that religion is not a program for eliminating social injustice on earth.
That isn’t to say that religion hasn’t done good for mankind. But I strongly dispute anyone who claims that theorized systemic benefit to man is the yardstick by which to measure religion. IOW, to say that a particular religious doctrine is good “because it is theorized to provide benefit to man”, *completely* misses the point; such people might as well be atheists, since it would be more honest. Furthermore, I realize your viewpoint on this is essentially mainstream in evangelical Christianity and liberal Judaism. But I think it’s completely unsubstantiated by the religious texts and is a modern invention. In fact, I would go so far as to say that such emphasis on “systemic benefit” or “utility” in the Hume sense is exactly what all of the greatest religious teachers spoke out *against*. You once posted here some quotes from Tolstoy, who I believe made the same points.
December 1st, 2008 at 10:02 pm
My original post was making this point…
The problem in East St. Louis is not racism. The problem is culturalism. Poor urban culture is at odds with suburban middle class culture. Obama proved that the color of the skin is not the issue. Culture is the issue.
My last post was to make this point. My inability to eliminate social injustice doesn’t make me racist. Now, would I be racist if I tried to stop the spread of poor urban culture into a rural poor school?
Regarding the religious context, I think you have miss represented my ideas. I’ll repeat them.
First, if the poor urban culture reflected true christianity, many of the problems would go away. Please don’t tell me that guns, drug, theft, prostitution, pollution, vandalism, and violence are Christian, even if some of the perps did attend some kind of Church service. And, where you might tell me how un-Christian suburban culture is, you should also admit that these sins are also at the root of many problems that will destroy the culture and hurt children.
You may claim that religious revival doesn’t happen? Consider England before and after Wilburforce.
Second, I feel that I cannot do much to help poor urban children in Detroit in a meaningful way. But I must do what I can, amid other demands and priorities. And, as I look back in history, I see the divine hand of providence working to eliminate social injustice in a way that elevates humanity much higher than we could ever expect given mankind’s manifest sinful nature. On that, I will place my hope.
December 1st, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Racial segregation is an empirically observable fact, but I don’t blame “racism”, and I don’t even know WTF “culturalism” means. I am suspicious of *any* “ism”, since it usually implies that the speaker is trying to use systems-thinking to ignore individual wills and responsibilities.
I agree completely with your statements about suburban culture and the potential impact to children of future generations — we seem to agree vehemently on that.
OTOH, I don’t think that the emphasis on prostitution or drugs in the “bottoms” is particularly fruitful:
A philosophy which says that some sins are worse than others (i.e. that being a hypocrite and keeping your money from the poor (like the couple who were struck down in Paul’s church) is less sinful than drugs; or more pointedly, that being a john from the bluffs is less sinful than being a prostitute from the bottoms), is contrary to any orthodox form of Christianity, and is anti-Christ.
Or, to elaborate, a philosophy which says that one group of people are sinners (people from the bottoms), while another group are not (people from the bluffs), is absolutely anti-Christ. You yourself obliquely referenced “heart is depraved above all things”, and one of the “unambiguous” passages from Romans which you mention is “all have sinned”. The operative word is “all”.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:24 am
Culturalism: I am suspicious of people with different values and culture. For example, Romand Catholics vs. Protestants, or Gypsies vs. Spainards.
Culturalism is the difference between the country electing Barak Obama and the country electing Jesse Jackson.
Obama is a Harvard man, with an Irish-American upbringing, and Irish-American culture. His skin color just happens to be half-African. Judging by the cabinet that he has assembled, he might as well be John Kerry. Nobody cared about the color of his skin. They cared about his culture.
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Assuming that Obama “might as well be Kerry” (and “not Jackson”), would imply that the race breakdown of exit polls would look the same:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/11/04/exit.polls/
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html
But they don’t look the same. Anyway, changing the name doesn’t really change the issue. You’re correct that people discriminate against others based on many factors besides race. MLK wasn’t speaking only about race. Although, race and poverty are the most common — I know of very few Dutch people who would say “roll up the windows, we’re driving through a Mennonite neighborhood!”, so it would be absurd to argue that cultural differences are *all* that is necessary for people to rationalize discriminatory behavior.