Sharpton '08

Hurricane Katrina was a slap in the face.

We all looked at the vast sea of African Americans stranded and flooded out, and said: “Oh my, maybe there are still race issues in America.” But the shock wore off, and despite recent news about the Bush administration cutting the proposed budget for levee rebuilding by more than 60%.

Then Michael Richards has a melt down on stage, and we all are reminded that “oh yeah, we never did deal with this, did we?”

The issue of race is a very tough one. People who bring it up are often attacked on one side as bigots, or on the other side as whiners. As a result, the media and white America are hesitant to really engage the issue. In fact, it is hard to even identify what the big question is anymore.

So, here is my stab at it:

Blacks are disproportionately poor, undereducated and incarcerated. The promise of civil rights was that this was supposed to go away. In time, as institutional barriers were removed, the demographics of poverty were supposed to even out across the races. But this is not happening, or at least it is happening so slowly that many don’t perceive progress.

Then, occasionally, somebody does something stupid and insulting, like Mr. Richards, or President Bush (Katrina non-relief, or submitting an amicus brief to the Supreme Court against affirmative action on Martin Luther King Day), or Trent Lott, and the suspicion that the racism is still alive and rampant seems to be confirmed.

We in the white-world see the legal leveling of the laws and now we don’t know what to do now to make things better between the races. We see a few dinosaurs out there who are openly bigoted, but we see them as the exception rather than the rule.

The race question boils down to this, in my opinion: If racism is largely a thing of the past, then why are so many blacks so hopelessly poor?

I think the answer is that racial attitudes have been slow to reach the neutrality we aspire to, so there are latent problems of bigotry. It is only 40 years since the civil rights movement, and hearts sometimes take a generation or two to catch up to what we aspire to. I don’t know what, if anything, we can do to overcome this besides waiting.

But the bigger issue, I think, is that we are becoming a more class-stratified society. Wealth is being concentrated more and more every day in fewer and fewer hands. Those at the bottom have fewer opportunities for upward social mobility. Unfortunately, those who had less when this trend started in the early 80’s were caught holding the short straw. I think that race is secondary to class now in terms of explaining lack of opportunity. I believe that racism is on a heavy decline, but that lack of new opportunity leaves blacks stuck in the same position they would be in if there were pervasive racism.

In order to fulfill the ultimate American ideal of everyone being able to succeed based on how hard they work we will have to take a hard look at not only race, but also class. We will have to admit to ourselves that some of us got a big head-start in life, and others were held up. We will have to admit to ourselves that sometimes we succeed because of things that we did not do, and that others fail because of things they did not do.

In my opinion if we address the issue of concentration of wealth we will make great strides on race.