The Long Haul

Wendy Johnson

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 1-2

A federal court lawsuit filed November 17 challenges the constitutionality of yet another congressional election district. The newest challenge, to U.S. Representative Robert Scott’s Virginia district, represents the eleventh majority-black or -Hispanic district to be challenged by associates of the “Campaign for a Color Blind Society Legal Defense and Education Fund.” In its aggressive and deliberate campaign to undermine and destroy hard-won democratic ideals, the political right wing has been skillful in standing history on its head–taking language and concepts defined and shaped by the Civil Rights Movement to undermine its past victories.

This misappropriation causes confusion, blurs the lines between inclusion and exclusion, and hides the real debate about the potent and powerful role race plays in the daily workings of this country, not only in gaining fair electoral representation, but also in having access to quality education, well-paying jobs, and equal opportunities.

Take, for example, the California “Civil Rights” Initiative. This proposed constitutional amendment for the November 1996 ballot (if it gains enough signatures) reads: “Neither the state of California or any of its political subdivisions or agents shall use race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin as a criterion for either discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group in the operation of the State’s system for public employment, public education or public contracting.”

The proposed amendment doesn’t sound ominous but its application would, in effect, give opponents of affirmative action a mighty club for beating back the gains of women and minorities in public agencies and schools. If the amendment becomes law, all public con-tract set-aside programs for minority and women-owned business would end; state schools could end minority

---

Page 2

scholarships and diversity programs; government agencies would be exempt from setting up an affirmative action program–except by order of a judge.

Essentially, this so-called civil rights initiative would wipe out state-sponsored affirmative action–even where an agency has admitted past discrimination. When the language for this amendment was tested in a state-wide poll (designed by Louis Harris for the Feminist Majority Foundation in April 1995) 81 percent supported it.

But when told the initiative results in “outlawing all affirmative action programs for women and minorities,” 58 percent opposed the California initiative. When asked about a different proposition: “The state may use affirmative action programs designed to help women, minorities, and others who have not had equal opportunities in education, employment, and in receiving government contracts to achieve equal opportunities,” a solid 68 percent to 25 percent majority supported it.

Not only have those who seek to end minority office-holding stolen the language of the Civil Rights Movement in an effort to undo laws supported by a majority of Americans, they have imitated Movement strategies as well, building a grassroots base and utilizing the federal courts to press their cause.

Alabama State Senator Hank Sanders best characterizes our struggle: “The fundamental assumption about the Civil Rights Movement is that its work is or will be finished. The reality is that it will never be finished in our lifetimes. In our efforts we often ran one-hundred-yard dashes, but we are in a marathon, so we really have miles to go.”

We have blazed trails with major advances in voter registration, redistricting, and the election of leaders from previously disenfranchised social groups. Now a complacent and disaffected population becomes more and more cynical of the electoral process as a way to achieve social change, of redistricting as a mechanism for advancing democratic goals, and of the possibilities for a common language of understanding in the struggle for civil rights.

As we prepare for the miles ahead, we must craft a progressive unity for civil and human rights. The language, principles, and concepts articulated by architects of the Civil Rights Movement are no longer commonly understood. We must study our history, reassert our roles as stewards of democracy and fairness, and revitalize the language and concepts of justice that have been perverted and twisted by the partisans of reaction.

More than anything else we must begin to craft a political and social movement that can capture the imagination of millions of Americans and move citizens of the South and of this country to greater political participation at local, state, and federal levels.

Another Dry, White Season

Wendy Johnson

Vol. 19, No. 2, 1997 pp. 1, 3-4

President Clinton’s call for a national conversation on race comes at a pivotal time, a time when the neoconservative misuse of “color-blind” rhetoric has encouraged a willful obliviousness to enduring racial problems and a retreat from any meaningful engagement. Whether or not Clinton’s race initiative can stem this disturbing tide and make progress toward racial justice will depend on the access that minority voices can have to the public ear, the effective content of the conversation, and the willingness of white Americans to listen and act affirmatively. What should the discussion include?

One place to start would be to publicly acknowledge the dramatic racial inequalities that persist. Advocates of racial justice must find ways to publicize and reiterate the facts: that the percentage of blacks and Latinos living in poverty is about three times more than the percentage of whites; that per capita income of blacks and Latinos is

---

Page 3

less than 60 percent that of whites; and that blacks and Latinos are about twice as likely to be unemployed.

Other disparities are lesser known but equally alarming, such as the fact that even middle-class African Americans and Latinos with identical incomes to whites are significantly poorer and less financially secure because their net wealth is about eight times less. Why do minorities have so much less in total assets than whites? To begin with, there is the historical legacy if racial and class oppression in the very direct form of less inherited wealth. Next, continuing institutional discrimination plays a large part. For years, white firms denied life assurance to African Americans, and African Americans ire still denied home mortgages at twice the rate of similarly qualified white applicants.

As such examples attest, the ludicrous notion that we now live in a discrimination-free society must be thoroughly dismissed. Such a repudiation has proven difficult largely due to tactics of white denial. Study after study using matched white and minority applicants (with identical education, work experience, age, and size and similar personal traits) have documented the persistence of discrimination not only in the housing but also the job market. These facts of discrimination, like those of inequality, must become part of the national common sense.

As those members of Congress who amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 realized, the issue of discrimination must by taken out of the realm of personal intention and understood as a systematic process. In hiring practices, for example, minorities are systematically discriminated against because they have fewer contacts with those whites who can alert them to job openings and who make the majority of hiring decisions.

Another way discrimination can persist without conscious or malicious prejudicial intent lies in the normative considerations involved in any selection process. The notion that gatekeepers into schools, jobs, promotions, etc. can somehow impartially select the “most qualified” candidate out of hundreds, or thousands, of applicants by a pure assessment of technical ability is a myth, and must be repeatedly exposed as such. As historian Dan Carter puts it in this issue of Southern Changes, we must “challenge the worship of a handful of standardized tests as though they alone could judge what makes a person qualified for a job or for admission to college or professional school. We have to talk about the ways in which people actually succeed in college, in the workplace, and in life in general.”

In the absence of perfect information, pure impartiality, or even a clear understanding of what being technically qualified for a position really means, normative qualities (including style, mannerisms, deportment, and other personality traits) play a major role in the hiring or promoting process. For many relatively privileged positions in business firms–sales, managerial work, etc.–these personal qualities may play the predominant role.

Unfortunately these qualities are highly subject to class, race, and gender bias. Because white men have monopolized the positions of privilege and authority for centuries, these jobs have been racially and sexually stereotyped to entail the very normative characteristics they possess, while subordinate positions are often stereotyped as appropriate for minorities and women. Asian Americans, for example, are the most educated population in the nation, but they are not promoted in proportionate numbers because they are frequently stereotyped as “technicians” poorly suited for people-oriented managerial work. Introducing people of divergent racial backgrounds, languages, and cultural identities into traditionally white male occupations will help break down such occupational stereotypes and may help change the very structures of power in the process.

Because of occupational stereotyping, entrenched networks, and other forms of systematic discrimination,

---

Page 4

white men continue to dominate the professions and the most influential positions in our society. As noted in The Affirmative Action Debate, edited by George E. Curry, while white men are 33 percent of the population, they constitute 86 percent of the partners in major law firms, 88 percent of the holders of management-level jobs in advertising, 90 percent of those occupying the top positions in the media, 90 percent of the members of the U.S. Senate, and 95 percent of all senior managerial positions at the rank of vice president or above. In Fortune 1000 industrial and Fortune 500 service industries, white men hold 97 percent of senior management positions, while African Americans hold 0.6 percent, Asian Americans 0.3 percent, and Latinos 0.4 percent. As of 1996, there were only two female CEOs in Fortune 1000 companies.

Numbers like these should convince the public that minorities continue to face systematic discrimination in the workplace. Even before entering the job market, however, minorities have already faced substantial structural discrimination in attaining the necessary educational qualifications. As Gary Orfield documents in this issue, the racial and ethnic segregation of African-American and Latino students is spreading across the nation and producing a deepening isolation from middle class students and from successful schools. This segregation, Orfield says, is “not simply racial segregation; it is segregation by class and family and community education background as well.” While only about 5 percent of the nation’s segregated white schools face conditions of concentrated poverty among their children, more than 80 percent of segregated black and Latino schools do. High poverty schools usually have much lower levels of educational performance on virtually all outcomes, for a variety of reasons that Orfield discusses.

Increasing segregation in schools is enabled by persisting residential segregation. This American Apartheid, as one study has deemed it, is perpetuated both by the preference of whites for predominantly white communities and by realtors who respond to this demand by steering black customers away from white neighborhoods. Housing audits conducted over the past two decades have documented the persistence of widespread discrimination against black renters and homebuyers. As with schools, these systematic patterns not only segregate by race but also concentrate poverty.

According to Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., however, it is neither the school-day nor the hours spent in one’s neighborhood which are the most segregated times. “Four o’clock every day,” says Jackson, “when editors meet with their staffs to discuss the next day’s news consumption, is perhaps the most segregated hour in this nation.”

The persistence of segregation in the newsrooms is particularly dangerous because the media plays a big role in deciding how and if issues of race are addressed and whether racial prejudices and stereotypes are challenged or exacerbated. In his article, “News and Blues: Minority Journalists in the South, Twenty-Five Years Later” in this issue, Reginald Stuart points out that while minorities have made impressive gains over the last twenty-five years, they remain under-represented in the media. To make matters worse, federal policies deregulating the media “threaten to wipe out what little minority ownership of mass media properties there is.”

The final ingredient for a successful conversation on race will perhaps be the most challenging. Due to what Dan Carter identifies as the “dogma of the marketplace” dominating the current political climate, the effort to link the issues of racial injustice with those of class exploitation has become more difficult just as it has become more crucial. Both domestically and internationally, a disproportionate number of people of color continue to engage in the world’s most exploitative work at the bottom of the wage and benefits ladder. Racial prejudice helps make the most egregious forms of economic exploitation more tolerable to the white, middle classes of America and other Western industrialized nations, just as it once helped justify the economic exploitations of slavery and colonialism. The conventional notion that it is somehow appropriate or acceptable that blacks, Latinos, or Asians occupy positions of subordination and poverty because of their supposed inferiority (whether defined biologically or, more common today, culturally) acts as a formidable barrier to the formation of broad-based political coalitions capable of demanding international labor market policies geared to minimize exploitation and social welfare policies geared to guarantee decent standards of living.

Is Bill Clinton up to asking the sort of questions raised by this issue of Southern Changes? Rather than waiting in dread through another dry, white season, we must use the space created by Clinton’s initiative to encourage innovative work on remobilizing a consensus for achieving social justice.

Legacy of Violence

By Wendy Johnson

Vol. 24, No. 1-2, 2002 p. 3

Between 1882 and 1968, 4,743 Americans are known to have been victims of the terrible and violent crime of lynching. A recent article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution defined the word lynching as “an illegal death at the hands of a group acting under pretense of service, race or tradition.” More than 70 percent of those who lost their lives to a violent and unchecked mob in the name of preserving “tradition” were black. The allegations for which lynchings were carried out include such shockingly innocent acts as “being obnoxious,” “insolence,” “trying to vote,” “suing a white man,” “frightening a white woman,” and “acting suspiciously.” The very word–lynching–was a feared and hateful term and it continues to strike fear in many African Americans who can clearly remember acts of racial violence committed for breaches of “tradition.”

This brand of terrorism enjoyed a perverse popularity especially in the seat of the former confederacy where four out of five lynchings occurred. Mississippi and Georgia sowed the most violence, recording more than five hundred lynchings each. Nearly 93 percent of lynchings in these two states were committed against African Americans. Texas ranks third with 493 lynchings.

While many Ku Klux Klan branches helped perpetrate racialized violent crimes against blacks that went unpunished, community members colluded in ways incomprehensible. Elected officials, newspaper editors, and law enforcement officials were involved in many of these vigilante murders. Look carefully at the photograph on page 6. Countless community members and entire families bear peculiar witness to the lynch mobs’ offering–not in horror but in mutinous resentment and triumph. They push forward, some perched on friends shoulders or in trees, to better view the mentally retarded seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington as his executioners repeatedly lowered him into the flames and lifted him out again. A postcard of white boys slouched around Washington’s grotesquely charred and hanging corpse bears the chilling note, “This was the barbeque we had last night….your son, Joe.”

Emory University and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site are showing several images of Jesse Washington’s lynching as part of a collection entitled, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, a rare exhibition of photographs, postcards, and artifacts documenting the history of lynching in America. These brutal images are being seen for the first time in the South.

Deeply disturbing, these images communicate immediately with the viewer: you find yourself holding your breath and flinching involuntarily. As your body physically reacts, your heart and mind reflexively ask “why such an exhibit?” James Jordan, curator for Without Sanctuary offers a response. “I want this exhibit to challenge the sense of safety that comes with denial. I want it to trouble the waters…..so that the virulent and growing racism, nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment of today will be understood to be a dangerous vestige of the recent past.”

In his article, “Return to Sender,” author Mark Auslander adds his explanation. He describes the process leading up to the exhibit, including public forums that debated exhibit intent and how to exhibit this violent phenomenon without wielding irreparable harm.

Several communities devastated by white mob violence over the past century have begun to confront these painful legacies of shared suffering and destruction and are designing actions for healing and reconciliation. “Lifting the Veil of Silence,” a workshop held in Atlanta last fall, brought nine of these communities together to liberate the truth about lynching. They feel an urgent need to “confront these atrocities against primarily African-American citizens, resurrect and record this history, remember the dead, and begin to heal these long neglected but still festering wounds.” The stories of several of these communities are offered in this issue.

Confronting a “dangerous memory” is an appeal for community remembrance and reconciliation. The challenge offered by the Without Sanctuary exhibit and these nine communities is a challenge we should all be willing to accept.

Wendy Johnson is executive director of the Southern Regional Council.