#480: Is this, finally, our nation’s Great Awakening?

In this moment of national crisis, the popular uprising triggered by George Floyd’s killing raises the question: Is America finally ready to acknowledge and repair the systemic racism embedded in our culture? 

William Bratton is the former police commissioner in Boston, New York city, and Los Angeles.  When interviewed recently about George Floyd’s killing, he referred to slavery and racism as “America’s original sin--the scar that never heals.” My own awakening to that scar’s depth took many years, but I was fortunate to have many opportunities.

In December 1969, during my senior year at Holy Cross, all the Black students packed their bags and left campus, vowing never to return unless a group of expelled Black students received amnesty.  During a recent student sit-down protesting a campus visit by GE recruiters considered “scabs” (since GE was on strike), a disproportionate number of the protestors punished were Black.  A college administrator offered the excuse that, in a big mostly white crowd, those students were easier to spot!

In response, we white students went on strike in solidarity with the Black students.  Eventually amnesty was granted, and all the Black students returned to a campus newly awakened to their plight.

I spent the summer of 1971 as a research assistant for a doctoral thesis on “Racial Stratification in the US in the 20^th century.” My job was collecting data for the chapter on lynching.  I constructed tallies of the lynchings in each state for each year since 1900.  Such tallies were rarely published in mainstream (white) periodicals, so I spent two months digging through obscure, often defunct Black journals that printed monthly totals of lynchings.

One day a Black reference librarian confronted me.  Why, she asked, was a white boy like me searching through these Black journals?  Why wasn’t this job given to a Black student?  What was I trying to prove?

Our encounter, perhaps 20 minutes long, ended with me (1) getting access to the archives I sought and (2) realizing that the burden of proof was on me to both acknowledge my privileged state and to persuade her of my bona fides.

My research left me appalled. I learned that thousands of Blacks were lynched not only without trials but also often without being charged, and even without any crime at all being committed.  Blacks were often lynched to cover the crimes—or simply the embarrassing behavior—of whites (as when a white girl flirted with a Black who was then lynched for rape after she was, in fact, beaten by her white boyfriend).  Blacks were lynched singly and in groups.  Blacks were not just lynched by hanging: Blacks were shot, drawn and quartered, tarred and feathered, buried alive, burnt at the stake, blowtorched, skinned alive. Pregnant Black girls were lynched after their babies were ripped from their wombs.

And blacks were lynched in frighteningly large numbers throughout the 20^th century, well into the 1950s— right into my own lifetime.

It became clear to me that lynching was a cultural institution aimed not at justice, nor at crime, not even at individual conflicts. Lynching was often disguised as vigilanteeism, but in reality it aimed at terror--terror to frighten the Black population into continued submission.  In short, lynching replaced slavery to keep Blacks in their place during the Jim Crow era. And I saw that, as lynching finally faded away, the states with the most lynching became the states that executed the most Blacks.

My work that summer made me aware that terror against Black people had “evolved” from one institution to another: from slavery to lynching to the death penalty to mass incarceration to police brutality.  These different forms of terror all aimed to keep Blacks in “their place.”  Whites thus aimed to maintain supreme control.

In 1972 I moved to Washington, DC for work, and barely three miles away whole city blocks still lay in ruins from the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination four years before.  My job was in a comfortably white suburb, but there was nothing comfortable about those burnt-out Black neighborhoods.

In April 1973 I flew to Chicago to scout the University of Chicago for my doctoral studies.  Riding the elevated train south from the Loop would bring me west of the campus, so I planned to catch a bus east to the school.  I soon realized I was the only white person on the train, and every station stop simply added more Black passengers.  Finally an older Black woman got up and approach.

“Do you know where you’re going, young man?” she asked.

I told her my plan to reach the campus.

“Well, it’s best if you get off this train as soon as possible.  This is not a safe train for you.”

I thanked her, thinking that I was still not fully aware just how deeply divided our culture was--and had been for generations.

That fall my wife and I move to Hyde Park, the university enclave on Chicago’s South Side. We soon learned that none of our neighbors dared to venture into the “ghetto” neighborhoods to our north, west, and south.

 The following summer my parents visited and I offered to drive them to see the house they had lived in when my father was in the navy in the 1940s.  Thirty years later, it was an all-Black neighborhood, and when we parked across the street the Black gentleman rocking on the porch was clearly frightened by this car full of white people staring at his house--and we were too frightened even to explain our presence.  We simply drove off. To this day I regret I did not talk to the man.

In 1977 we moved to Dorchester, a rapidly changing inner-city Boston neighborhood with its historic Irish and Italian population fleeing as Black families moved in.  We found our apartment by word of mouth: it  had been off the market for two years for fear of Black tenants. Our suburban relatives were often reluctant to visit our “tenement” home, but we stayed.

Our children eventually enrolled in the Raphael Hernandez Bilingual School, where they acquired a unique education as members of a white minority in a multiethnic student body.  This was, of course, fresh in the wake of Boston’s busing crisis over segregated schools, and as we persisted we witnessed most of our white neighbors moving away rather than subject their kids to Boston’s public schools.  Citywide, schools became increasingly Black as white families abandoned a school system they could no longer dominate.

We still live in Dorchester, and our once lily-white neighborhood now includes a stable mix of Black families, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Haitians, gay couples, and a remnant of the Irish and Italians.  But as late as the late 1990s, my daughter’s Holy Cross classmates were often not allowed by their parents to spend weekends at our “inner city” home.

By now our own family includes people of color on both sides: my brother’s wife is Chinese-American, and our nephew’s wife is African-American. Their wonderful bi-racial kids are now our beloved kin.

Through all this time I’ve met my share of overtly racist people, but for every person who spouted racist sentiments there have been many more who were simply blind to, or even in denial of, racism’s pervasive grip on American Life.  Perhaps they have not benefited from experiences like my own, which awakened me to the reality depicted by the evocative imagery of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:

African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air.

For me, the basic truth is that slavery’s impact has never been eradicated.  And this brings me back to the notion of slavery as our Original Sin.

Most people’s worldview is shaped by their view of human nature. People who think human nature is simply good expect a world of happy human relations, and seek to blame any distress or injustice on external forces. People who see human nature as basically evil expect the worst of others, and seek to shield themselves from all threats.  But Christians have a more complex view.  For us, human nature is essentially good but factually flawed and wounded. We therefore hope for the best but expect that humans, unaided by divine grace, will typically fall into evil ways, not because of external forces alone, but because there is a moral misery within us.

This idea is usually applied to the whole human race.  But what if we apply it to a nation?  Is it possible that our national character is so rooted in our original enslavement of others that we as a people are fatally wounded and permanently incapable of goodness?

My own experience since 1969 until now has made me think so.  Yes, we have witnessed great gains since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  Since the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther king, we have seen Blacks take leading roles in movies, television, sports, business, and politics at all levels--including the presidency itself.  Mixed-race couples and families and now more widely accepted, and there are broad legal protections for Blacks in housing, folding, employment, voting, and education. 

But the Covid-19 crisis has exposed how superficial some of these gains have been.  Black Americans are harder hit by the pandemic because Black Americans still lacked the privileges white Americans enjoy in housing, health care, wealth, and education. It was Dr. King himself who believed that America’s wounded nature would require more change than mere civil rights:

The Black revolution is much more than a struggle for civil rights of the Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws--racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society.  It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.

The moral ills King decried in 1968 remain deep flaws in American Life.  One might even think that their persistence, despite all the activism and progress of the past 50 years, proves that no treatment will ever heal our national scar, so deep is the wound.  We might fear that slavery and racism comprise not only our Original Sin but even our permanent moral defect.

But now the perfect storm of pandemic and police killing has unleashed fresh healing forces.  People pent up from confinement take to the streets, unmindful of the health risks, to decry the death toll that both police and pandemic have taken on Black America.  We now see both the spread of virus and the blight of brutality as symptoms of our deeper moral malady.

And now come polls suggesting that, for the first time ever, a majority of Americans are finally awakening to the historic reality of systemic racism.

So against all odds, amid all the sickness and chaos, all the failed national leadership and the heroism of frontline workers, all the patience of those staying home and the persistence of protesters marching and kneeling and even lying in our streets--amid all this rises the hope that now, at long last, we might be ready to shed our past, to rip off that ancient scar and find true healing of our deep national wound and, with God’s grace, get to our nation’s promised land where we can, finally all together, breathe freedom’s fresh air. 

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2020

#458: Why Can’t We Make America Idealistic Again?—Part 2

The 2016 election has forced me to reflect on the many ideals that both our major parties—and my own generation--have abandoned. Last time I reflected on Transportation. This time: Education.

My generation, children of the ‘60s, invented the “generation gap” by committing ourselves to fundamental change. We expected that when our turn came, we would change the world.  And we knew “the whole world is watching.” And now our time HAS come, and the whole world IS watching. What do they see?

 Now, so many years later, it seems to me that our generation has lost the capacity for idealism. 

Far from fulfilling our mission to change the world, we have betrayed our mission by failing to even sustain the ideals of our past.  On issue after issue, our baby boomer leadership (in national office since 1992) has discredited new initiatives as “too idealistic”--meaning impossible to achieve--while allowing other nations to pass America by. We now risk leaving our country less idealistic than we found it!

Ironically, this does not mean that idealism is dead. In many fields, our allies in Europe and Asia and Canada and elsewhere have been inspired by our pioneering efforts. As I watch other nations embrace American innovations and build better futures on them, I ask myself over and over, “Why can’t we?”

This post is the second in a series that surveys such issues.  In each case, I reflect on our past embrace of idealistic change. I observe how we have fallen behind our allies as we have quit on that ideal while they have taken our place and sustained such idealism. In each case I ask “Why can’t we?”

This time I look at education.

Perhaps my idealism derives from where I live, since Massachusetts has in many ways been a land of idealism since its founding.

Boston Latin School Then....

 My three children are graduates of the Boston Latin School, the first public school in America, founded in 1635.  It was designed for Boston’s elite, and funded mainly by donations, but was followed in 1644 in Dedham Massachusetts by the first public school supported completely by taxes.  In 1820, Boston English School became the first public high school in America, offering a publicly funded 12^th grade education to all.  And an 1827, a Massachusetts law required that all grades of public school be open to all students free of charge in every town and city in the Commonwealth.  This means that, for nearly 300 years, publicly funded universal education has been the law in Massachusetts.

This ideal soon spread across America, which became the first country in the world to establish universal public education for its people.  And for most of our history as a nation, we have led the world in literacy and the educational attainments of our population.

By the period immediately following World War II, the majority of Americans were achieving a high school education in schools that were free of tuition.  In addition, many others had access to professional training programs (such as the apprentice program in which my father trained during a 39 year career at General Electric).

Of course, over the last 50 years, a high school diploma has been losing its career value, as increasing numbers of Americans have gone to college. 

In most high schools across America, the majority of graduates are now going on to some college study.  Soon the majority of the working age population will have received a college education. College is now the rule, not the exception as it was for my father’s generation.

By now, for many careers, a high school diploma is no longer competitive in the workplace.  This means that, for most Americans, a K-12 education cannot provide the career benefits that it used to.  Yet the United States has not extended publicly funded, tuition-free education beyond high school. 

This means that our world-pioneering ideal of public education, providing free schooling for all, has been frozen in place since 1821!

The result is that the United States is no longer the leader in providing public education for its people.  Instead, our allies are bypassing us by establishing free (or heavily subsidized) higher education.  For more than a generation, this has been happening in Canada, France, Germany, and throughout much of Europe.  The result is that most young people in those countries can acquire a college education without acquiring any debt.

American students, by contrast, face the daunting prospect of assuming levels of debt comparable to the mortgage on a house.  I remember my shock when, as my oldest child entered college, the chief financial officer of her school predicted the day when entering freshmen would sign a 50-year loan to pay for their education!  The very image of an 18-year-old committing to debt that would last past retirement age boggled my mind. To this day, my European friends are horrified to hear of U.S. college costs.

So we should not be surprised, as our allies pass us, that more and more American students are leaving the U.S. to study abroad.  In 2012, 46,500 Americans were enrolled in degree programs in 14 countries. (NOTE: These are NOT “semester abroad” students who return to their U.S. schools; these students are receiving foreign diplomas). 68% of these were in the United Kingdom and Canada, with France and Germany close behind.

Germany has become especially popular because university study there, even for international students, is tuition-free.

Jeffrey Peck, the Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College, City University of New York, described the “ideal-gap” between Germany and the U.S.:

"College education in the US is seen as a privilege and expected to cost money and in Germany it is seen as an extension of a free high school education where one expects it to be provided,"

The Germans are not simply altruistic in this regard. The hope is to attract skilled foreign students who will stay in Germany. Sebastian Fohrbeck, of the German Academic Exchange, reports that 50% of foreign students stay in Germany.

Other US allies are nearly as generous.  Public universities in France, including the Sorbonne, cost approximately $250 per year of study.  Belgian universities cost $960.  Finnish universities cost $1500.  Italian universities cost of $1000, Spanish universities cost $1500.  And Norway, like Germany, is totally free.

Back home, the average cost of public universities for out-of-state students is $23,800 per year.  The average cost of private universities is $31,231 per year. The old idea of "working your way through college" has become a bad joke.

The results of such astronomical fees should not surprise us. Americans have accumulated $1.2 trillion nationwide in college-related debt.  300,000 Waiters and waitresses in  the United States are working to pay off such debt.  30% of such Americans are indebted despite having dropped out of school.  Altogether, 40 million Americans--more than the population of 200 countries--are burdened by college debts.

We’re now looking at an entire generation of Americans who are forced to choose between 3 unhappy options.  First: they may go without college and suffer the competitive disadvantage for the rest of their careers.  Second: they may get a college degree and carry lifelong debt for up to 50 years.  Third: they may go to a foreign country for less costly or even free study--and many of them will remain there, draining away the brainpower of our country.

Do not be surprised if the numbers who choose option #3 keep growing—many after dropping out of an American university due to its cost. (Ironically, the colleges rich enough to guarantee students they will have no debt are largely reserved for the highest-achieving high school students. In other words, we are back to Boston Latin’s model of school for the privileged elite).

.......and now: Boston Latin School today

 So while we were once first in education, first in publicly funded schools, first in educational attainment, first in literacy--now our allies have bypassed us, and we face the challenge of catching up.

Yet in our political life, in our public policy, the idea of “free college” is regarded as an impossible ideal--something it is unrealistic to expect or even campaign for.  We seem to be a people no longer willing to fund what the public needs.  We seem to be a people no longer capable of maintaining our own ideals.

And so, as I observed with transportation, so with education: I look around the world, I observe what our allies have been doing to pursue the very ideals that we originally inspired in them.  In so many countries where education was once a privilege reserved to a tiny elite of the population, our American experiment in public education inspired them to see education as a human right (as the Catholic Church teaches) and to invest in the spread of free education for all. And they have kept that ideal alive as times changed.

So as I observe what they have accomplished, and compare that with our failure to keep our own educational ideals alive, and hear so many fellow Americans proclaim that such a goal is romantic, naive, and unrealistic, I feel compelled to point to our allies’ real-life experience, their success at making the ideal a reality, and I ask the sad question that keeps coming to my mind: “Why Can’t We?”

NEXT time: Employment

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016