| White America's View of Black America: Ralph Ellison Meets Sigmund Freud
In the introduction to my previous diary, Two Long Recessions, I noted the existence of two hidden recessions, one a three-decae recession in the American quality of life, unmeasured by standard economic methods, such as the GDP, the other a perpetual recession afflicting black America. Then I wrote:
Combining the two perspectives, it is obvious that Black America as a whole remains in very dire circumstances. Yet, we can look forward to another round of anti-affirmative action initiatives this year, particularly in certain swing states, even as Barack Obama tries to run a campaign that is not about race. This constellation of facts gives us clear warning of how necessary it is to begin establishing a more realistic foundation for discussing both race and economics.
In the diary itself, I dropped several hints of topics to be further explored in a followup diary. Here I will take up those topics, reflecting on the enduring invisible realities of Black America, and how they may well emerge-at least partially, in the months ahead.
Before I do so, however, I want to suggest a formal framework for considering what follows that closely mirrors what Ellison described so vividly in artistic form. This framework is that of Freudian ego defense mechanisms-as Wikipedia puts it, "psychological strategies brought into play by individuals, groups and even nations to cope with reality and to maintain self-image." Defense mechanisms can be categorized in varous ways, one of which is in terms of levels, from the most pathological to the most healthy. Level 1 mechanisms, Wikipedia explains, are "common in overt psychosis". They also aptly describe how White America sees-or rather fails to see-Black America:
Categorization of Defence Mechanisms
Level 1 Defence Mechanisms
The mechanisms on this level, when predominating, almost always are severely pathological. These three defences, in conjunction, permit one to effectively rearrange external reality and eliminate the need to cope with reality. The pathological users of these mechanisms frequently appear crazy or insane to others. These are the "psychotic" defences, common in overt psychosis. However, they are found in dreams and throughout childhood as healthy mechanisms.
They include:
- Denial: Refusal to accept external reality because it is too threatening; arguing against an anxiety provoking stimuli by stating it doesn't exist; resolution of emotional conflict and reduce anxiety by refusing to perceive or consciously acknowledge the more unpleasant aspects of external reality.
- Distortion: A gross reshaping of external reality to meet internal needs.
- Delusional Projection: Grossly frank delusions about external reality, usually of a persecutory nature.
Just keep that in mind, as you read what follows.
Black America: A Few Basic Facts
Let us begin by quickly reprising certain basic facts. First, the Black unemployment rate has been roughly double the White unemployment rate since 1972, when comparable records first started being kept (as the difference between the Black and White rates closely tracks teh Black rate itself):
Second, Black unemployment is not simply due to Blacks being less qualified. In field tests, Whites with similar qualifications are routinely and significantly prefered over Blacks. In fact, Whites with similar qualifications--but with a criminal record are slightly preferred over Blacks.
As noted in my previous diary, In April, 2005, Princeton University sent out a press release :
Many New York employers discriminate against minorities, ex-offenders
by Steven M. Schultz · Posted April 1, 2005; 10:56 a.m.
Black applicants without criminal records are no more likely to get a job than white applicants just out of prison, according to a Princeton University study of nearly 1,500 private employers in New York City.
The study, "Discrimination in Low Wage Labor Markets," was conducted by sociology professors Devah Pager and Bruce Western . It is the largest and most comprehensive project of its kind to date.
The study, which investigated discrimination against young male minorities and ex-offenders by employers, also showed: • Young white high school graduates were about twice as likely to receive positive responses from New York employers as equally qualified black job seekers;
• Ex-offenders face serious barriers to employment; a criminal record reduced positive responses from employers by about 35 percent for white applicants and 57 percent for black applicants.
Even without criminal records, however, black applicants had low rates of positive responses, about the same as the response rate for white applicants with criminal records. Hispanics also faced discrimination by employers, but were preferred relative to blacks.
Note that these ratios--"about twice" and a reduction of 35% compared to 57%--are quite in line with blacks having twice the unemployment rate of whites.
The Criminalization of Black America
The above results are bad enough in themselves, but there's an additional level of discrimination involved, since blacks are incarcerated far more frequently than whites are, so that blacks and whites with similar behaviors are treated very differently, first by the criminal justice system, and then by employers.
In May of 2007, Harry G. Levine, of the Sociology Department of Queens College testified before the NY State Assembly [PDF] and presented graphs that vividly demonstrated the vast disparities involved in incarcerating marijuana users in New York City. The following are some of the key charts from his presentation.
First, the rate of marijuana arrests skyrocketed out of nowhere in the last decade:
Second, the result was a much greater increase in number of arrests of Blacks and Latinos, even though the arrests of Whites increased slightly more proportionately:
Third, the arrest rates of Blacks was almost eight times that of Whites:
Fourth, the background reality is that Whites use marijuana slightly, but consistently, more than Blacks do:
In his testimony, Levine stressed the point that this policy-which obviously involves a tremendous public expenditure, as well as having a tremendous impact on populations subject to mass arrests-is not one that is readily explicable, or that proponents even want to discuss:
Why has New York City been making this enormous number of marijuana possession arrests?
The New York City Police Department does not like to talk about its marijuana arrests. The NYPD holds no press briefings and offers no press releases or documents taking credit for capturing record numbers of marijuana offenders. It would appear that the police, from the Commissioner and Mayor on down, have not wanted attention drawn to the city's extraordinary number of marijuana arrests. As a result there has effectively been no media coverage of the arrests. 2 The dramatic increase in marijuana arrests began in 1996 and 1997 with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. But marijuana arrests have continued at historically high levels under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and have remained high even after the bombing of 9-11 when one might think there were more important things for NYPD to do.
It's also worth noting that-- contrary to his own hype--Giuliani was not responsible for cleaning up New York and making it safe again. As Joe Conasan pointed out in Salon late last year, crime plummeted across the country in the early 1990s, David Dinkins was largely responsible for the significant increase in the number of cops in New York, and Police Commissioner William Bratton-now in Los Angeles-was largely responsible for implementing the crime-tracking system, "Compstat" that played an important role in driving performance improvements, but Guiliani could not stand sharing credit with him, and thus eventually forced him out. While marijuana arrests doubled under Bratton from 1994 to 1996, they tripled in the two years after he left. It's impossible to say if Bratton would have changed direction, but successors clearly did not.
Levine continued:
Because the NYPD is not publicly claiming credit for making record numbers of marijuana arrests, my colleague Deborah Small and I have been trying to understand who wants the arrests, or likes them, or gains from them. The most important constituency we have found has been significant sectors of the New York Police Department. From our research and interviews, we identified several major incentives within the NYPD for maintaining high levels of marijuana arrests.
Marijuana arrests are generally easy, safe, and provide overtime.
Ordinary New York police, street cops and narcotics police, like making marijuana arrests. The arrests are relatively easy. People arrested for smoking or possessing marijuana tend to be non-violent, easy to handle, and, in the words of one cop, "clean" - meaning physically clean, not smelly or dirty. This matters because the arresting officer is "married" to the arrestee through the booking process, sometimes for many hours. Because NYPD pay scales are very low, police naturally want overtime work....
Marijuana arrests generate records, facilitate supervision of police activities, and allow police at all levels to show they are being productive.
Police supervisors from the precinct level up to the police chief and perhaps even the Mayor also like the marijuana arrests. When cops are making many marijuana arrests (and other minor misdemeanor arrests such as having an open beer can in a paper bag) they are keeping busy....
Further, at a time when other crimes (and therefore arrests) are down significantly, making many misdemeanor arrests is a handy way for supervisors, from the precinct on up, to show that cops are not sloughing off. Even though all categories of reported crime have dropped significantly since 1990, by making many marijuana and other misdemeanor arrests, police at all levels can show high numbers of arrests and high productivity.
Police assigned to marijuana duties (and misdemeanor arrests in general) can easily be shifted elsewhere when needed.
Police supervisors also like having cops assigned to making marijuana arrests because if something big comes up - an emergency, fire, bombing, visiting dignitary - they can pull the police off making marijuana and other misdemeanor arrests with absolutely no effect on other crime. No ongoing investigation is affected by temporarily reducing the marijuana arrests....
Marijuana arrests provide an easy way to target and acquire information on young people.
Along with national and other local police agencies, the NYPD seeks to get as many young people as possible "into the system" - meaning getting them fingerprinted, photographed, and now increasingly DNA tested. Marijuana arrests are the best and easiest way currently available to acquire data on young people, especially Black and Latino youth, who have not previously been entered into the criminal justice databases. There is nothing else police currently can do that gets as many new people "into the system" as the wide net of marijuana arrests and other misdemeanor arrests. Black and Latino youth are disproportionally searched and arrested because it is easy and convenient to do so, and because they usually lack political and social connections that might make the arrests troublesome or embarrassing for the arresting officers or their commanders.
As a result of these factors and others, in the last ten years the NYPD has made a great many marijuana misdemeanor arrests, and many other low-level and arbitrary misdemeanor arrests as well, catching in their nets overwhelmingly poor, Black and Hispanic youth, mainly teenage boys and young men.
This collection of reasons reflects a set of bureaucrtatic priorities that would never be allowed to dictate public policy that radically impacted a powerful constituency. It is the sheer continued invisibility of Black America that allows such petty rationales to drive policies that profoundly reduce the life-chances of hundreds of thousands of black youth in New York City alone.
This is a pattern of profoundly racist impacts, but it does not require any conscious racist intent on the part of anyone. It is a perfect example of insitutional racism in a system of what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls "racism without racists" (Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States).
Because individual Whites do not experience themselves as racist, and because they do not see the daily realities that I have discussed above, there is a profound disconnect between the separate realities of White and Black America-despite all of Barack Obama's rhetoric to the contrary. Aspiring to bridge that divide is, of course, highly commendable. But actually briding that divide is a far more important, and far more difficult task.
Instead, we are likely to face a much nastier short-term future, with racism riding high in anti-racist drag.
As Digby noted recently, ("Content Of Their Characters"), this CNN report is a harbinger of what's to come:
Come election time in November, voters in five states might have a decision to make as big as whom to elect president.
Ballot initiatives have been proposed in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma that would give voters the chance to decide whether they want to do away with affirmative action in government-funded projects and public schools.
Ward Connerly, who heads the American Civil Rights Coalition -- a nonprofit organization working to end racial and gender preferences -- and the main backer of the ballot initiatives, says the 37 word initiative would read: "The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting."
"It would forbid any state or local agency or special district from engaging in preferential treatment," Connerly said.Video Watch what Connerly says about the initiative »
Connerly, who is of African-American and American Indian descent, said affirmative action causes resentment. He criticized cases in which a Caucasian student might be denied a college slot in favor of a black student with a lower grade-point average.
"It's foolish not to think that the kid who is turned away is not going to ... resent that," Connerly said.
But, of course, as we've just seen, Connerly is just peddling myths and outright lies. It's black kids who lose out to white kids thousands of times every day, while whites remain utterly oblivious, because the collective experience of Black America remains invisible to them. Connerly is, quite simply, an inciter of racial hatred pretending to be the exact opposite. And this is increasingly central to the GOP's evolving strategy of deep deception. The Iraq War lies were child's play by comparison.
Digly notes:
Arizona, Colorado and Missouri. Hmmm. Why do you suppose they chose those states? I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact they are big swing states with large minority populations aren't you?
I wrote earlier about how the Republicans are going take advantage of the zeitgeist to position Maverick McCain as the real post-partisan. (The Democrats you see, are playing the same old tired identity politics of the past, while the rich, white, war hero Republican has risen above all that to reach across the aisle many times --- often angering his own party --- to put his country before petty partisan concerns.) By urging equality for all people instead of just the favored minorities, the conservatives are ones who are truly transformational. They don't believe in divisive racist and sexist policies like affirmative action. As the great conservative hero Martin Luther King always said, they want Americans to be judged by the content of their characters. And nobody has more character than the straight talking, war hero, John McCain.
It would be wrong for anyone to say that they are trying to boost turnout among their racist, sexist, xenophobic base in major swing states. In fact it's the opposite. By putting such issues on the ballot, they are giving people of good character a way to move past all these phony racial and partisan divisions and transform our politics. Yes they can.
Remember the reality: (1) Through good times and bad, blacks persistently have roughly twice the unemployment rate of whites. (2) When it comes to hiring, whites with criminal records are marginally prefered over Blacks with similar qualifications and no criminal record. (3) Far more Blacks than Whites have criminal records, because of institutional racism in the practice of law enforcement. (4) Once Blacks have criminal records, they do dramatically even worse in comparison to whites.
In contrast to these facts, here is what the General Social Survey tells us about recent attitudes (2000-2006) towards Black's lower economic status and affirmative action:
Attributed Causes For Blacks'
Lower Economic Status | | Cause | View | EXT
LIB | LIB | Mod
Lib | Mod | Mod
Con | Con | Ext
Con | TOT | | Inborn disability | YES | 11.7 | 8.4 | 7.5 | 11.1 | 9.9 | 8.8 | 17.9 | 10.0 | | NO | 88.3 | 91.6 | 92.5 | 89.0 | 90.1 | 91.2 | 82.6 | 90.0 | |
Precise wording: 266. On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are: b. Because most (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have less in-born ability to learn?
This is a classic racist view of Blacks. It is still promoted as respectable by the rightwing establishment (see, for example, The Bell Curve), but even most extreme conservatrives no longer believe this. Like the man said, "racism without racists."
Attributed Causes For Blacks'
Lower Economic Status | | Cause | View | EXT
LIB | LIB | Mod
Lib | Mod | Mod
Con | Con | Ext
Con | TOT | | Discrimination | YES | 51.0 | 48.7 | 43.2 | 36.2 | 27.9 | 24.9 | 24.4 | 35.4 | | NO | 48.4 | 51.3 | 56.8 | 63.8 | 72.1 | 75.1 | 75.6 | 64.6 | |
Precise wording: 266. On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think
these differences are: a. Mainly due to discrimination?
Three out of four conservatives say "no." Even almost half of "extreme liberals" say "no." They are not just mistaken. As the information above shows, they are downright delusional.
Attributed Causes For Blacks'
Lower Economic Status | | Cause | View | EXT
LIB | LIB | Mod
Lib | Mod | Mod
Con | Con | Ext
Con | TOT | | Education | YES | 54.1 | 59.7 | 52.4 | 42.2 | 42.7 | 38.4 | 28.1 | 44.7 | | NO | 45.9 | 40.3 | 47.4 | 57.8 | 57.4 | 61.6 | 71.9 | 55.3 | |
Precise wording: 266. On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are: c. Because most (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) don't have the chance for education that it takes to rise out of poverty?
In the real world, education is a major factor holding Blacks back. More than half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, "separate, but (not really) equal" remains the general rule for education in America. But it's not even on the radar for almost three out of four extreme conservatives, and a majority of moderates. They simply cannot see the reality of Black America today. It remains invisible to them.
Attributed Causes For Blacks'
Lower Economic Status | | Cause | View | EXT
LIB | LIB | Mod
Lib | Mod | Mod
Con | Con | Ext
Con | TOT | | Lack of Will | YES | 36.6 | 37.0 | 41.1 | 51.1 | 50.3 | 57.0 | 65.4 | 49.2 | | NO | 63.4 | 63.0 | 58.9 | 48.9 | 49.5 | 42.9 | 34.6 | 50.8 | |
Precise wording: 266. On the average (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) have worse jobs, income, and housing than white people. Do you think these differences are: d. Because most (negroes/blacks/African-Americans) just don't have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty?
Lack of will! That's what almost two out of three extreme conservatives say the problem is, and more than half of all moderates agree! Lack of will is why those employeers choose white convicts over blacks with a clean record. Yesirree!
Delusional. There is no other word for it.
Finally:
| Whites Hurt By Affirmative Action? | | Likely? | EXT
LIB | LIB | Mod
Lib | Mod | Mod
Con | Con | Ext
Con | TOT | | Very Likely | 18.9 | 14.5 | 15.2 | 18.0 | 18.7 | 21.5 | 35.1 | 18.7 | | Somewhat Likely | 32.9 | 43.5 | 49.7 | 50.2 | 48.5 | 50.5 | 40.0 | 48.3 | | Not Very Likely | 48.2 | 42.0 | 35.1 | 31.8 | 32.7 | 28.0 | 24.9 | 33.1 |
Precise wording: 414. What do you think the chances are these days that a white person won't get a job or promotion while an equally or less qualified black person gets one instead?
So, by 3-1, extreme conservatives think it's "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that whites will be hurt by affirmative action, but discrimination is not the main problem confronting blacks. And by roughly 2-1, moderates agree!
- Delusional Projection: Grossly frank delusions about external reality, usually of a persecutory nature.
No one with the most elementary knowledge of Black America today could entertain any such notions for even a millisecond. Yet, they represent the common sense of White America.
Make no mistake, Connerly/McSame will be running this year to make sure that Black America remains an Invisible Nation.
And the question remains: What will Obama do?
What will any of us do? |
