A new race narrative emerges

“For we know now, that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t have enough money to buy a hamburger?”
- Martin Luther King, Jr., in his address to strikers in Memphis,Tenn., March 18, 1968

This past Sunday, CBS News Sunday Morning had a segment on race relations in Memphis. They highlighted some of what has happened there in the 40 years since Martin Luther King’s assassination. Their coverage shows just how hard it is to convey the realities of race in our society.

I don’t want to bash CBS News – after all, it’s good that they’re giving attention to race, and to the great work being done by the Common Ground coalition in Memphis (and with whom we’re proud to work). But the CBS story makes a good case study of the limits of the old paradigm of talking about race. I think of it as the “can’t we all just get along” paradigm.

Sunday Morning made a typical mistake – they conveyed that the main problem with race is that people pre-judge and fear one another.

Of course, that is a problem, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. By focusing only on that, we get a distorted view of the problem. We don’t get to the root of the matter.

Over the past 15 years of grass-roots work, we’ve had the chance to witness a transformation in how people think about race. More and more people are digging deeper, to understand and tell a more complete narrative about race. It’s one that is likely to get us somewhere.

This deeper understanding is coming from researchers and scholars. But it’s also coming from black, white, and brown residents of communities that are trying to make a difference in poverty, jobs, education, and health care. (And in the case of Memphis, it’s coming from journalists, nonprofit leaders, public leaders, faith communities, and the grass roots.) 

They’re seeing and talking about what The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change calls  “persistent disparities between people of color and white Americans in almost every quality-of-life arena, the most basic being income, education, and health.”  They’re analyzing the “subtler, racialized patterns in policies and practices… that generate differences in well being… " (For a free download of this accessible Aspen report, click here.)

To be sure, it will require new language to cover this story. It’s more difficult to tell the story of institutions and policies than it is of individuals. That's part of the reason CBS got stuck in the old paradigm. When they covered “white flight” from Memphis or disparities in graduation rates, they needed to provide context.  We all need to understand the policies and arrangements that helped create those situations. Without that context, it is too easy to assume that everything will somehow get better when we all get along. 

This is where the work of today’s Memphis comes in. The Common Ground program will provide opportunities for all kinds of people to build trust, dispel stereotypes, and create multi-racial coalitions. But they’re going beyond that. They’ll provide opportunities to examine the disparities, understand where they come from, and take steps to do something about them.

As Harlon Dalton says in his great book, Racial Healing, “If we are to make good on the promise of racial healing, we have to build a future in which there are  no permanent winners and permanent losers, in which race and social position have no correlation, and in which true equality is the norm rather than the exception. In short, we have to transform the very meaning of race.”

A new race narrative is emerging in the United States - one that is not just about individuals or relationships, but about working together democratically to create systemic change. It may be that in 2008 we are finally ready to hear Dr. King’s words and to act on them.

Martha McCoy is executive director of Everyday Democracy.

Comments

[Julie Fanselow]

Thank you, Martha. The theme that seems to be (finally) rising in the national consciousness is that racial integration is one thing but true inclusion is another goal, lofty yet very attainable.

[Michael Weiksner]

Hi Martha,

This piece is thoughtful and provocative.

I agree with the premise but not the conclusion. Black poverty is indeed a problem, but I am not convinced that the problem requires a racial solution.

As Barack Obama points out in his historic response to the Wright contraversy, we've made a lot of progress. Racial prejudice has been reduced by leaps and bounds in the last few generations, especially among whites. But racial gaps in outcomes do remain.

But also as Barack Obama points out, the real problem now is really fighting poverty for all Americans and not black poverty in particular. I think these kinds of solutions can bring more people together and solve the problem at its root. and even general anti-poverty programs will, as a by-product, close the racial gap in economic outcomes.

Thanks again for your thoughts. And I've started a conversation on e-thePeople based on your original post:
http://www.e-thepeople.org/article/784201/view

- Mike

[Martha McCoy]

Hi, Mike, thanks for this comment, and for starting a conversation on e-the-people. I look forward to joining!

I agree that we need to address poverty for all, and work to achieve a good education for all, as two examples. That should be our goal. But while we're doing that, if we don't explore why racial disparities persist and in some cases deepen -- in spite of our progress in reducing prejudice -- then we we won't create adequate solutions.

A large part of creating solutions that work for everyone will come from creating a more inclusive democracy grounded in the voices of all people. Some of us (such as Everyday Democracy and yourself as part of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium etc.) are holding up that vision and learning from what is happening on the ground.

We've also seen clearly in the communities we've worked with over the past 15-plus years that without a "racial lens" on the general work, people struggle with understanding racialized patterns (people struggle with this reality even in mostly white communities). That is why we developed a resource to help people bring this lens to their general work to solve public problems -- we created it because of the great demand. In democratic settings, people end up trying to figure out a racial literacy that we didn't learn in school, in our history books (for the most part) or in any meaningful integrated democratic space (again, for the most part). Creating an inclusive, multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy, that is reflective of the new realities of the dialogue in 2008... that is an exciting and worthwhile project.

I look forward to carrying on this discussion with you.

[Nancy Thomas]

This is such an interesting question: whether the solution to poverty calls for a "race solution." My fear is that this nation is "resegregating," (to use a term from Beverly Tatum's new book) and that the race-poverty connection is increasing, not decreasing. Nationally, residential segregation is highest in the Northeast and the Midwest. My state of Connecticut is an example of what's happening.

Race is associated with economic and social disparity, as evidenced by nearly every statistic imaginable on poverty, health care, infant mortality, child welfare, test scores, crime, drug abuse, incarceration, income levels, and home ownership. Nationally, 76% of those living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty are black or Hispanic/Latino. According to a 2007 CT State Commission report on child poverty, child poverty rates in 2006 have made no progress since 1990. In 2006, Hartford had the sixth highest child poverty rate in the nation (among cities with populations over 100,000). In 2006, Latino/Hispanic and African American children in Connecticut were seven times more likely to live in poverty than white, non-Hispanic youth.

Consider schools and racial isolation. Last October, Trinity College researchers published statistics on school populations in and around Hartford.In Hartford, the percentage of minority students changed from 91% in 1988-89 to 94% in 2006-07. Other districts also experienced increases in racial isolation from 1988-89 to 2006-07: Bloomfield: 74% to 95%; East Hartford: 23% to 76%.

For some, it’s easy to assume that we live, work, and educate our children in an integrated society, but for many, that simply is not the case. 2006 census data tells us that the US population is 74 % white, 15% Hispanic or Latino, 12 % black or African American, and 4% Asian. In Connecticut, these levels of diversity are rarely reflected in neighborhoods, workplaces, or schools.

I wish poverty were race-blind, but it isn't. I think we have to name it in order to resolve it.

[Sandy Boyd]

Systemic racism may not end until the WASP-MVSsystem people (those who privilege WASP heterosexual males)learn that we all have the same value and potential& it would be the right thing to do to maximize everyone's potential from conception to the coffin.

[Julie Fanselow]

Sandy,

Do you have any ideas on how we might best be able to do what you suggest?