Four days after President Obama took to the White House podium to talk about the outcome of the Trayvon Martin case, many people are still discussing what he said, which isn't surprising. In some ways, it was a bravura performance.
In explaining how history shapes the way many African-Americans view the criminal-justice system, and in personalizing some of the trivial but humiliating slights experienced by young black men, even college-educated ones like himself, the President gave voice to realities that are too often ignored. In pointing to high crime rates among African-American youths, and the problem of black-on-black crime, he acknowledged another reality, one that shapes how many non-whites perceive blacks. And in taking a few well-aimed jabs at Florida's Stand Your Ground laws, he highlighted the one indisputable message of the Martin case: guns do, indeed, kill people. (Had George Zimmerman been unarmed when he came across Martin, we almost certainly wouldn't have heard of either of them.)
All of these things needed saying, and Obama said them well, deftly avoiding the dangers of coming across as angry or professorial. But one thing that the President didn't do was call for a rethink of race relations in terms of broader social and economic policies, nor did he call for a big political debate about race. "I haven't seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations," he noted. Rather, he asked for "soul-searching," calling on Americans to ask themselves some questions, such as, "Am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people as much as I can, based on not the color of their skin but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy."
Appropriate, certainly. But sufficient for the scale of the larger problem?
In thinking about racism, and racial issues, it is surely a bit artificial to try to restrict the analysis purely to the private sphere, or, indeed to law and order. (Obama also suggested that the Justice Department could work with local authorities to improve police training and other things.) The criminal-justice system is where racial tensions and disparities often play out, and occasionally erupt, but it isn't at the core of the matter. The core issue, as the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in his classic 1944 study, "An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy," is the enduring contradiction between America's stated ideals-liberty, justice, equality of opportunity-and the subjugated conditions in which many black Americans live out their lives.
Of course, many things have changed for the better since Myrdal and his research director, Ralph Bunche, published their findings. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed racial discrimination in schools, restaurants, polling stations, and other public places, and the Voting Rights Act, the following year, finally opened the polls in the South. New careers opened to blacks and other minorities. Poverty rates fell in black communities, and education levels rose: over time, many more blacks moved to the suburbs and joined the middle classes. But many got stuck behind, and the terms of the debate about what was responsible for their failures changed dramatically.
In 1965, the year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a freshly minted Harvard Ph.D., wrote a report for the Labor Department titled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," which pinned responsibility for things like persistent poverty, high dropout rates, and rampant crime on the breakdown of two-parent families in the black community. As the years went on, other conservatively inclined analysts blamed Johnson's Great Society programs for creating a culture of dependency. On the progressive side of the political divide, academics such as William Julius Wilson-another Harvard man, by way of Chicago-strenuously resisted these arguments, pointing to the demise of the manufacturing industries on which blacks depended for employment, and to the continuing reality of racial discrimination and segregation.
Bitter battles were fought over these issues, political campaigns were waged, friendships were broken. Following twenty years of right-wing agitation about the deleterious effects of anti-poverty programs, President Clinton signed the 1996 welfare-reform act, which obliged the recipients of cash assistance to work twenty hours a week, and placed a five-year limit on state handouts. With the economy buoyant, the critics who said these actions would lead to a surge in homelessness, crime, and other problems proved to be mistaken, but so did those who argued that welfare reform would transform minority communities for the better.
Last month, in a useful report titled " The Moynihan Report Revisited," the Urban Institute highlighted the continuing disparities between black America and white America, and the stubborn endurance in poor black communities of the "tangle of pathologies" that Moynihan had observed. Here are some of the report's findings:
In non-Hispanic white families, twenty-nine per cent of babies are born out of wedlock. In non-Hispanic black families, seventy-three per cent of babies are born out of wedlock. Largely because black children are far more likely to be living with a single parent, they are much more likely to be living in poverty. In 2010, about thirteen per cent of non-Hispanic white children were living in poverty, compared with close to forty per cent of non-Hispanic black children. As has been the case since at least the nineteen-fifties, unemployment rates among black men are roughly twice as high as among white men. (Among white men aged twenty and over, the jobless rate is 6.2 per cent. Among black males, the rate is thirteen per cent.) In 2010, white men in full-time employment earned about $52,000 a year, on average. Black men in full-time employment earned, on average, about $35,000. Largely as a result of the war on drugs, incarceration rates for black males have risen sharply since the nineteen-seventies. By 2010, almost one in six black males had spent some time in prison. The rate for white males was roughly one in thirty-three.
The report confirmed that some things have changed for the better. Since the nineteen-sixties, over-all rates of residential segregation have declined significantly, dropout rates among blacks has fallen, and the proportion of blacks graduating from college has more than doubled. But the report also demonstrated that progress is relative. Particularly in poor areas, economically enforced racial segregation remains the norm. And, over all, blacks are still five times more likely than whites to live in high poverty neighborhoods-i.e., areas where more than forty per cent of the inhabitants live in poverty. Those neighborhoods tend to have worse schools. In higher education, too, there remains a big gap between the races. In 2010, close to thirty per cent of white men had completed four years of college, compared to about twelve per cent of black males.
Here is part of the report's conclusion:
Almost five decades after Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his report on black families, the United States still struggles with many of the problems he identified. Although social progress has created opportunities for many talented members of the black community, success has been made more difficult by the high barriers many blacks face....
Structural barriers to black progress include criminal justice policy, residential segregation and concentrated poverty, the state of public schools in predominantly black communities, and lingering and pernicious racial discrimination....
Although the level of overt discrimination in the United States has diminished markedly since the 1960s, race remains a factor in determining economic opportunities and outcomes. Whether discrimination is overt, subconscious, or based on statistical profiling, it impedes black economic progress. Continued, aggressive enforcement of antidiscrimination statutes as well as affirmative action policies are required to ensure equal opportunity.
What does Obama think of all this? As America's first black President, he embodies the fact that race relations have changed, and that some blacks have breached the uppermost echelons of the American establishment. As a former community organizer, he doesn't need a report from the Urban Institute to remind him of the problems faced by many who are less fortunate.
Still, apart from an occasional speech to black colleges, he has largely avoided addressing racial issues during his term of office-a stance that some critics in the black community have described as politically craven, but which may also be politically astute. With budgets pinched, and with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, the President knows all too well that there is little prospect of obtaining funding for new anti-poverty programs aimed explicitly at minorities. And with the G.O.P. also holding power in a majority of state houses and state legislatures, where many sentencing policies are determined, there is little chance of reforming the drug laws. In such circumstances, a strong argument can be made for focussing on race-blind policies that happen to benefit minorities disproportionately, such as widening access to health care, protecting income-support programs, and trying to toughen up the federal gun laws.
In choosing the aftermath of George Zimmerman's acquittal to talk about race, Obama also kept his comments carefully circumscribed. Suggesting it was time to think about "how do we bolster and reinforce our African-American boys?" he explicitly acknowledged that big new federal initiatives were non-starters. What he seemed to advocate was stepping up private-sector efforts and mentoring programs of the sort encouraged, twenty-odd years ago, by George H. W. Bush, with his much mocked "thousand points of light" initiative.
In a nod to his role as the symbol of hope rather than disappointment, Obama closed his remarks on a markedly upbeat note: "As difficult and challenging as this whole episode has been for a lot of people, I don't want us to lose sight that things are getting better." As he often does, he brought up his daughters, Malia and Sasha. After listening to them, he said, and seeing them interact with their friends-some of whom, presumably, are white girls who attend the the exclusive Sidwell Friends School-he was confident that the younger generation is "better than we were on these issues. And that's true in every community that I've visited all across the country." He went on: "We should also have confidence that kids these days, I think, have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did; and that along this long, difficult journey, we're becoming a more perfect union-not a perfect union but a more perfect union."
Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty.
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