Richard Kahlenberg: Obama, race and northern whites
[Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author of, most recently, Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy.]
... All hell broke loose in May 1968, when the community control school board in Ocean Hill-Brownsville summarily fired eighteen white unionized educators. The liberal teachers union, led by Albert Shanker, who had marched with King in Selma and sent teachers to Freedom Schools in the South, went on a series of strikes for 36 days. At the time, it was the longest and largest teachers’ strike in American history. Black Power activists further discredited themselves when they embraced egregious anti-Semitism toward Shanker and the heavily Jewish teachers’ union. They praised a student’s poem that began, "Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head/You pale-faced Jew boy–I wish you were dead."
What were liberals to do? They knew that it was wrong when white people fired black people without cause, and they knew it was wrong when right-wing business leaders attacked unionized employees. But what was one to think when blacks fired whites and the assault on labor came from the left?
Most New York City liberals, black and white, sided with the Black Power community control activists. But there were exceptions, including A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph was a bastion of the movement, according to [Tom] Sugrue "the best-connected and best-known man in black America" when he successfully pressured FDR to end segregation in American defense industries in 1941. In Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Randolph argued that no one should be fired by race; it didn’t matter who was doing the firing. He was joined by Bayard Rustin, a close aide to King, who organized the 1963 March on Washington and criticized community control as "the spiritual descendant of states’ rights."
As Sugrue observes, the community control effort in New York City and other places yielded no real gains in student achievement, nor was it particularly popular among rank-and-file blacks. "The problem was not one of governance, it was one of resources," he concludes. Sugrue draws a similar conclusion from efforts to integrate schools by race: Verda Bradley, the plaintiffs’ mother in the Milliken case, "did not believe that association with white students would help children like Ronald and Richard overcome their educational or ‘cultural’ deficiencies." Instead, she says, "we were upset because they weren’t getting as many materials as some other schools." Sugrue agrees heartily.
This seems like a plausible lesson to draw from the community control and school integration efforts, but it’s not empirically sound. In the 1977 Milliken II case, which Sugrue fails to mention, the Supreme Court ordered substantially extra funding for Detroit schools as an answer to the failure to integrate in Milliken I. But as UCLA’s Gary Orfield has noted, the funding for parent involvement programs, special reading initiatives, better teacher training, and the like yielded no significant benefits. Other cities–like Washington, D.C. and Newark, New Jersey–have outspent their suburban counterparts, with little positive results to show for it.
What are we to make of these findings? That money doesn’t matter in education, or that blacks need to sit next to whites in order to learn? Neither. Instead, a long line of research shows that while money matters a great deal in education, people matter more, and that poor kids of all colors do better in middle-class environments. Sugrue is right to focus on "resources," but he construes the term too narrowly as per-pupil funding. Having classmates who have big dreams, value academic achievement, and don’t disrupt class is an important "resource." So is having a cadre of parents in the school community who volunteer in class and know how to hold school officials accountable. So are excellent teachers, many of whom won’t teach in high-poverty schools because they believe they won’t get much parental support and are worried about their physical safety. For all these reasons and others, separate schools for rich and poor, even when equally funded, are inherently unequal. Detroit schools are inferior not because they have "too many" black students but because they have extreme concentrations of poverty. While black students saw no academic gains in Boston when they integrated with poor and working-class whites, low-income students given the chance to live in and attend schools in affluent white suburbs of Chicago under the Gautreaux program saw substantial gains.
The reality of economic class is also important to understanding the battles Sugrue describes over affirmative action in higher education and employment. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement faced a crossroads: With the passage of legislation to outlaw future discrimination in employment and education, what should be done to remedy the legacy of centuries of brutal discrimination against blacks? The issue split the Civil Rights community. Of course, Black Power advocates had no qualms violating the principle of nondiscrimination when it favored blacks, but many mainstream leaders also made strong arguments that given the history of this country, it was necessary to temporarily discriminate in favor of blacks to set things right. As early as 1963, Sugrue notes, Whitney Young of the Urban League began pushing for reparations or "compensatory" programs to remedy the nation’s history of discrimination. He called for a "Marshall Plan for the Negro" and the hiring of "Negroes because they are Negroes."
Oddly, Sugrue fails to mention the alternative view, espoused not only by Randolph and Rustin, but by King himself. King struggled with the argument advanced by Whitney Young and others, but he ultimately rejected it. In his 1964 book, Why We Can’t Wait (and in 1967 testimony before the Kerner Commission), King called for "compensatory consideration," noting, "if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner." But instead of calling for a special program for blacks, as Young had, King called for a color-blind Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged: "While Negroes form the vast majority of America’s disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from such a bill." King continued, "It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor." King knew that class-based approaches would be colorblind but not blind to history; that race-specific programs would disrupt the progressive coalition with whites; and that on their merits, America needed a broader Poor People’s Campaign to root out inequality. (By contrast, the Urban League had long called for an alliance between blacks and white employers and opposed unionism.)
Sugrue doesn’t grapple with King’s argument–he simply ignores it, and in doing so ignores a crucial distinction among Northern white critics of the movement. What Sugrue fails to grasp is that there was a sizable subset of whites–think of New York City teachers who were strong supporters of King–who felt betrayed when Black Power activists called for hiring and firing based on race, whether in schools or offices. Nowhere does Sugrue distinguish between those Northern whites who were hostile to black advancement generally and those who objected to changing the rules about nondiscrimination. Nowhere does he distinguish between those whites who were offended by black separatists and those whites who never wanted integration in the first place. And yet when we consider the legacy of the Civil Rights struggles, it is absolutely essential that we keep such distinctions in mind.
Barack Obama’s presidency raises a number of interesting questions for Sugrue and others who take his view of the Northern Civil Rights movement. Clearly, Obama does not agree with the type of proposition advanced by Sugrue, namely that the political costs of embracing Black Power are negligible. Obama’s association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright was the single biggest threat to his campaign, and Obama wisely distanced himself from his former mentor. Indeed, had Obama taken Sugrue’s racial pessimism to heart, he never would have contemplated running for President at all. One has to wonder what Sugrue, who spends 500 pages minimizing the difference between Southern and Northern white attitudes, makes of the fact that John McCain trounced Obama among Southern whites by 38 percentage points but ran roughly even among whites in the rest of the country.
If Obama was right to ignore the type of racial pessimism that pervades Sweet Land of Liberty, he is also smart to reject Sugrue’s undiluted support for racial preference programs. The issue is likely to resurface next year, when the Supreme Court may consider a challenge by conservatives to the use of race in admissions at the University of Texas at Austin. Whereas Sugrue exhibits no concerns about racial preferences, Obama has been torn. During the campaign, he generally supported race-based affirmative action, but he also suggested that his own economically privileged daughters do not deserve affirmative action preferences, and that low-income whites do. In practice, this is an important concession, because 86 percent of blacks at selective universities currently come from middle- or upper-class backgrounds....
Read entire article at Excerpt from a review of Tom Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas (spring edition)
... All hell broke loose in May 1968, when the community control school board in Ocean Hill-Brownsville summarily fired eighteen white unionized educators. The liberal teachers union, led by Albert Shanker, who had marched with King in Selma and sent teachers to Freedom Schools in the South, went on a series of strikes for 36 days. At the time, it was the longest and largest teachers’ strike in American history. Black Power activists further discredited themselves when they embraced egregious anti-Semitism toward Shanker and the heavily Jewish teachers’ union. They praised a student’s poem that began, "Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head/You pale-faced Jew boy–I wish you were dead."
What were liberals to do? They knew that it was wrong when white people fired black people without cause, and they knew it was wrong when right-wing business leaders attacked unionized employees. But what was one to think when blacks fired whites and the assault on labor came from the left?
Most New York City liberals, black and white, sided with the Black Power community control activists. But there were exceptions, including A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph was a bastion of the movement, according to [Tom] Sugrue "the best-connected and best-known man in black America" when he successfully pressured FDR to end segregation in American defense industries in 1941. In Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Randolph argued that no one should be fired by race; it didn’t matter who was doing the firing. He was joined by Bayard Rustin, a close aide to King, who organized the 1963 March on Washington and criticized community control as "the spiritual descendant of states’ rights."
As Sugrue observes, the community control effort in New York City and other places yielded no real gains in student achievement, nor was it particularly popular among rank-and-file blacks. "The problem was not one of governance, it was one of resources," he concludes. Sugrue draws a similar conclusion from efforts to integrate schools by race: Verda Bradley, the plaintiffs’ mother in the Milliken case, "did not believe that association with white students would help children like Ronald and Richard overcome their educational or ‘cultural’ deficiencies." Instead, she says, "we were upset because they weren’t getting as many materials as some other schools." Sugrue agrees heartily.
This seems like a plausible lesson to draw from the community control and school integration efforts, but it’s not empirically sound. In the 1977 Milliken II case, which Sugrue fails to mention, the Supreme Court ordered substantially extra funding for Detroit schools as an answer to the failure to integrate in Milliken I. But as UCLA’s Gary Orfield has noted, the funding for parent involvement programs, special reading initiatives, better teacher training, and the like yielded no significant benefits. Other cities–like Washington, D.C. and Newark, New Jersey–have outspent their suburban counterparts, with little positive results to show for it.
What are we to make of these findings? That money doesn’t matter in education, or that blacks need to sit next to whites in order to learn? Neither. Instead, a long line of research shows that while money matters a great deal in education, people matter more, and that poor kids of all colors do better in middle-class environments. Sugrue is right to focus on "resources," but he construes the term too narrowly as per-pupil funding. Having classmates who have big dreams, value academic achievement, and don’t disrupt class is an important "resource." So is having a cadre of parents in the school community who volunteer in class and know how to hold school officials accountable. So are excellent teachers, many of whom won’t teach in high-poverty schools because they believe they won’t get much parental support and are worried about their physical safety. For all these reasons and others, separate schools for rich and poor, even when equally funded, are inherently unequal. Detroit schools are inferior not because they have "too many" black students but because they have extreme concentrations of poverty. While black students saw no academic gains in Boston when they integrated with poor and working-class whites, low-income students given the chance to live in and attend schools in affluent white suburbs of Chicago under the Gautreaux program saw substantial gains.
The reality of economic class is also important to understanding the battles Sugrue describes over affirmative action in higher education and employment. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement faced a crossroads: With the passage of legislation to outlaw future discrimination in employment and education, what should be done to remedy the legacy of centuries of brutal discrimination against blacks? The issue split the Civil Rights community. Of course, Black Power advocates had no qualms violating the principle of nondiscrimination when it favored blacks, but many mainstream leaders also made strong arguments that given the history of this country, it was necessary to temporarily discriminate in favor of blacks to set things right. As early as 1963, Sugrue notes, Whitney Young of the Urban League began pushing for reparations or "compensatory" programs to remedy the nation’s history of discrimination. He called for a "Marshall Plan for the Negro" and the hiring of "Negroes because they are Negroes."
Oddly, Sugrue fails to mention the alternative view, espoused not only by Randolph and Rustin, but by King himself. King struggled with the argument advanced by Whitney Young and others, but he ultimately rejected it. In his 1964 book, Why We Can’t Wait (and in 1967 testimony before the Kerner Commission), King called for "compensatory consideration," noting, "if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner." But instead of calling for a special program for blacks, as Young had, King called for a color-blind Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged: "While Negroes form the vast majority of America’s disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from such a bill." King continued, "It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor." King knew that class-based approaches would be colorblind but not blind to history; that race-specific programs would disrupt the progressive coalition with whites; and that on their merits, America needed a broader Poor People’s Campaign to root out inequality. (By contrast, the Urban League had long called for an alliance between blacks and white employers and opposed unionism.)
Sugrue doesn’t grapple with King’s argument–he simply ignores it, and in doing so ignores a crucial distinction among Northern white critics of the movement. What Sugrue fails to grasp is that there was a sizable subset of whites–think of New York City teachers who were strong supporters of King–who felt betrayed when Black Power activists called for hiring and firing based on race, whether in schools or offices. Nowhere does Sugrue distinguish between those Northern whites who were hostile to black advancement generally and those who objected to changing the rules about nondiscrimination. Nowhere does he distinguish between those whites who were offended by black separatists and those whites who never wanted integration in the first place. And yet when we consider the legacy of the Civil Rights struggles, it is absolutely essential that we keep such distinctions in mind.
Barack Obama’s presidency raises a number of interesting questions for Sugrue and others who take his view of the Northern Civil Rights movement. Clearly, Obama does not agree with the type of proposition advanced by Sugrue, namely that the political costs of embracing Black Power are negligible. Obama’s association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright was the single biggest threat to his campaign, and Obama wisely distanced himself from his former mentor. Indeed, had Obama taken Sugrue’s racial pessimism to heart, he never would have contemplated running for President at all. One has to wonder what Sugrue, who spends 500 pages minimizing the difference between Southern and Northern white attitudes, makes of the fact that John McCain trounced Obama among Southern whites by 38 percentage points but ran roughly even among whites in the rest of the country.
If Obama was right to ignore the type of racial pessimism that pervades Sweet Land of Liberty, he is also smart to reject Sugrue’s undiluted support for racial preference programs. The issue is likely to resurface next year, when the Supreme Court may consider a challenge by conservatives to the use of race in admissions at the University of Texas at Austin. Whereas Sugrue exhibits no concerns about racial preferences, Obama has been torn. During the campaign, he generally supported race-based affirmative action, but he also suggested that his own economically privileged daughters do not deserve affirmative action preferences, and that low-income whites do. In practice, this is an important concession, because 86 percent of blacks at selective universities currently come from middle- or upper-class backgrounds....