Democracy at Home

Charles S. Johnson, III

Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 p. 3

Following the tragic loss of thousands of lives in two of our most diverse cities, our nation is struggling with feelings of suspicion, insecurity, and fear. And many have responded by looking for scapegoats.

In Dallas, Texas, a Pakistani Muslim storeowner was recently shot and killed. An arrow was shot through the front window of a Muslim-owned laundromat in Green Cove, Florida. Four men in the Atlanta area attempted to stab a Sudanese man, saying, “You killed our people in New York. We want to kill you tonight.”

But racial or ethnically-based attacks such as we are currently experiencing are far from new in the South. We have seen such times before. One such time was in the period immediately following the First World War, when soldiers returned from saving the world for democracy only to be confronted with an outrageous failure of democracy at home. In the Red Summer of 1919, there were more than twenty-five race riots and seventy-six lynchings in the United States. Two hundred African Americans were killed in a single riot in Elaine, Arkansas.

It was against this background that an interracial group of Southerners came together in 1919, determined to transform what we used to call race relations. After working for more than two decades to end lynchings and alleviate property, this group by the end of the Second World War had embraced the strategy of pursuing equal opportunity through research and action, and what emerged was the early Southern Regional Council.

The Council has always linked work for racial fairness with the struggle for democratic rights. As we continue to share our concern for the victims of the recent tragedies, commend courageous relief workers, and express our convictions about U.S. actions abroad, we must also continue working to strengthen democracy at home. In light of the nation’s sudden discovery last year that our election system simply doesn’t work in the way that we thought it did, we must support the strongest possible election reform legislation moving through Congress. Election fairness is a civil right linked to national policy on every domestic and international concern.

We also cannot abandon our efforts to improve race relations at home. It is critical to expand and intensify that work, giving greater recognition to the increasing diversity of our nation. In light of recent events, we must work to deter acts of hate against innocent Arabs and Muslims as well as other immigrants. But the recent grotesque Halloween activities on the part of fraternity members at Auburn University and similar incidents at the University of Louisville and the University of Mississippi remind us that we cannot step back from efforts to heal longstanding racial divides and end inequalities.

The U.N. World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa may have dropped out of consciousness since September 11th, but as long as inequalities remain, we cannot sideline the struggle against racism.

Civil liberties are fundamentally linked with civil rights. We should be able to strengthen the government’s ability to respond to terrorism without denying the right to dissent. However, some of our national leaders do not appear to share this belief. Under intense pressure to respond to the horrific attacks, U. S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and a number of members of Congress have taken a short-sighted view in lifting protections for civil liberties, initiating changes that directly affect immigrants and endanger the privacy rights of all Americans. The “U.S.A. PATRIOT Act” (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism), limits the role of the courts in checking law enforcement authority, eases safeguards against the misuse of surveillance and searches, permits incarceration of non-citizens on suspicion, allows deportation and exclusion of non-citizens for beliefs and associations, and interferes with the attorney-client privilege. Unilateral executive orders which diminish the role of the courts using military tribunals undermine democracy in the process.

Fear, suspicion, and distrust still live with us. The kinds of recriminations that we’ve seen in the past months remind us that, although we think we’ve come a long way since 1919, we still have a long way to go. If we are to avoid another Red Summer, we may wish to consider a little dose of interracial- and interethnic-cooperation. Intergroup cooperation is the key to broadening civic participation and preserving democratic rights.

Justice, above all, is what we as a nation must pursue. This has been recognized since the days that the Republic was founded. Before the Constitution’s signers wrote of domestic tranquility, before they wrote of promoting the general welfare, and even before they wrote of providing for the common defense, the authors of the Preamble wrote of a goal to establish justice.

The work of today’s Southern Regional Council is in the tradition of our nation’s historic pursuit of justice. The new realities which confront us as a result of recent events cannot and will not deter us in our quest.

Charles S. Johnson, III, is president of the Southern Regional Council and an attorney in the law firm of Holland and Knight.

One Nation, Unquestionable: The News Media Responds to September 11

By Patrick Wehner

Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 pp. 4-7

Amid the pulse of satellite uplinks, videophones, webcasts, and tickertape displays, the taglines manufactured by the news media in the wake of September 11 have become such permanent fixtures on our television and computer screens that one almost expects to see their images burnt-in even after the power is switched off. The unfolding storylines range from “A Nation Challenged,” the struggle against adversity reported daily by both the print and online editions of The New York Times, to “America Strikes Back,” the big-budget Hollywood revenge fantasy that, in an unprecedented display of cooperation, is being heavily promoted by no fewer than three competing television networks. A recent report on National Public Radio likened these taglines to branded products, suggesting that in a competitive news environment where the available facts are essentially the same, subtle differences in style or image-say, “Attack on America” versus “Terror Hits Home”-can provide an edge in promoting audience loyalty.

The comparison highlights some uncomfortable truths. Much of the official news has been the same, especially when it comes to the military action in Afghanistan. The news editor coordinating the post-September 11 coverage for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Bert Roughton, Jr., recently told an audience of journalism students at Emory University that despite the obstacles faced by correspondents filing from the war zone, the “biggest problem we have with information is not there, it’s in Washington.” The enduring lesson that Donald Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs learned from the Gulf War was that while the press corps may grumble, they will continue to cover military briefings that are little more than public relations events largely out of a need to have something to report each day. Comparing the major media outlets to commercial brands also admits the distasteful reality that the news business remains a business even in a time of crisis. While not all differences in coverage are the result of calculated attempts to improve market share, the marketing experts have successfully convinced many news executives that ratings and circulation are all about “selling a relationship.”

The problem with the brand analogy is that the goal of differentiating a media “product” is simply inconsistent with all the obvious repetition. Overworked phrases like “The War on Terror” or “America’s New War” accomplish little in distinguishing one news organization from another when everyone else is using them. So while the idea of branding the news surely captures the spirit of our market-driven society, it must also be said that sometimes a cliché is just a cliché even if it achieves that status in record time.

Despite their apparent emptiness, clichés have consequences. Swaggering taglines like “America Fights Back,” for example, seem to be encouraging viewers to put their feet up, adjust the surround sound, and enjoy the special effects. But it is the more innocuous slogans, the wildly popular “America Unites” among them, that may have the most lasting effects. The sentiment is undeniably heartfelt: stories of people drawing together in the aftermath of the attacks bolster a belief that we as a nation will survive the present crisis and perhaps locate new sources of communal strength. There is also some factual, or at least statistical, justification for this continual refrain. We have all heard the polling figures-overwhelming support for a military response, high approval ratings for a President whose election was bitterly contested a year ago. Grief and confusion create a longing for certainty, community, and institutions deserving of our trust, and journalists, being human, share in those desires. Dan Rather’s post-September 11 appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” provided one dramatic example. The CBS news anchor’s pledge to “line up” wherever President Bush asked horrified many of his fellow journalists because it revealed how close to a vanishing point objectivity was being pushed.

Ironically, in helping to harden collective longings into something-an accepted truth, an article of faith, a reassuring cliché that is no longer open to discussion, the major media have contributed to a climate where journalists are condemned for living up to their professional principles. Unpopular with the public even before September 11, reporters who have asked difficult questions about the reasons behind the attacks or the wisdom of U.S. foreign policy have encountered outrage on an entirely different scale. Roughton, for example, acknowledged intense pressure from Journal-Constitution readers to be unconditionally supportive of the war. Speaking of journalists’ professional mandate to uncover the truth, however embarrassing or inconvenient it may be to those in power, he admitted, “I think right now, the American

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public isn’t very sympathetic to our cause.” Nor have the charges of treason and accusations about a lack of moral character been limited to rank-and-file reporters. Talk-show personality Bill Maher, bestselling novelist Barbara Kingsolver, and even media tycoon Ted Turner have been met with a chorus of angry responses for having dared to disrupt the consensus.

Lost in the controversy surrounding Turner’s speech at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. on October 10, 2001-in which he proposed, with no apparent sense of personal irony, that U.S. leaders could be more “humble” in their dealings with the rest of the world-was the CNN founder’s pointed criticism of both the broadcast and print media. Turner accused news executives of having contributed to American audiences’ lack of knowledge about international affairs by closing many of their overseas bureaus in the 1990s. “Americans are woefully uninformed at the current time about international news in general, and I’ve always said we were doing that at our peril,” the Cox News Service quoted Turner as saying. While the media billionaire has seldom allowed facts to get in the way of his opinions, his observations about the decline of international news parallel the findings of A number of surveys and reports by media research institutes. Citing studies conducted by Harvard, UC-San Diego, and a broad range of professional groups, media critic David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times estimates that newspaper and television coverage of international events has declined by as much as 80 percent since the mid-eighties. News organizations often claim to have cut back on their foreign staff for budgetary reasons, but Shaw argues a far more significant factor in the decline was that after the Soviet Union dissolved, “most news executives decided that Americans weren’t interested in international news.” Scandals, celebrity gossip, and “soft” lifestyle features replaced coverage of overseas events.

Nathan McCall, an author, former Washington Post reporter, and visiting professor of journalism at Emory, sees a historic parallel for recent events in the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, issued in 1968 and more widely known as the “Kerner Report.” Among the Report’s most significant findings, notes McCall, was that “there was a lot of racial hostility beneath the surface in the nation’s African-American communities, and the media was partly to blame for that bubbling up.” The Commission described at least two ways in which the media bore some measure of responsibility for the violence occurring in neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Newark, and other American cities during the 1960s. “One, the media had compounded the frustrations in African-American communities where people’s grievances weren’t being heard. Two, it undermined the consciousness of the rest of the country who didn’t even recognize the problem or the injustices that were occurring.” In a similar fashion, reductions in the amount of resources expended on the gathering and reporting of international news have left many American audiences unaware of the deep resentments that U.S. foreign policies have inspired. “Here we are forty years later,” says McCall, “and it’s just that it’s happening on an international scale.”

As it happens, the media’s response to September 11 demonstrates more than one form of historical amnesia. Part of the irony behind all the present assertions of unity is that for the past three decades, media decision-makers have been conducting business according to a decidedly opposite set of principles. Since the 1970s, the prevailing wisdom among advertising and media executives has been that American society is increasingly fragmented into separate interest groups and lifestyle enclaves. The magazines, cable channels, radio stations, and websites that have thrived have been those able to deliver a detailed portrait of a niche audience to their potential advertisers. Even newspapers, once the medium promoted as offering “something for everyone,” have focused increasingly on upscale suburbanites with “zoned” editions edited for specific neighborhoods and a greater emphasis on local news, lifestyle, and personal finance. Those who work the business side of newspaper publishing readily admit that these kinds of features help attract advertisers with images of affluent readers. Whether the media, in their sudden passion for our shared connections, will reaffirm an obligation to serve all segments of American society by making substantive changes in their coverage remains to be seen. Already, the worst excesses of “America United” resemble the idealized world that journalist Naomi Klein calls “Representation Nation”-the ethnically-balanced visions of harmony that are featured in Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger ads.

Not coincidentally, media institutions that have historically expressed the double consciousness of their audiences-as both American citizens and members of distinct and often oppressed social groups-have proven to be among the most willing to question the limits of unity. The African-American press and ethnic newspapers have focused on local angles to the September 11 events, have covered benefit events and prayer services, and have attempted to alleviate the anxieties of readers for whom English is a second language. But black newspapers like the Atlanta Daily World and the Baltimore Afro-American have also featured a steady procession of columnists reaffirming a commitment to civil liberties, objecting to racial profiling practices, and questioning the wisdom of U.S. foreign policy. In a commentary pub-

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lished in the October 11 issue of the Atlanta Daily World, for example, columnist Hazel Trice Edney expressed concern that U.S. government actions often seemed uncaring and arrogant to people in the developing world, citing the U.S. walkout on the U. N. Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa as one of the more recent instances. In the Spanish-language press, syndicated columnist James E. Garcia reminded his readers of the mass deportations of Mexican-American citizens during the Great Depression of the 1930s, calling upon them to speak out against acts of violence and discrimination directed at Arab Americans. These examples demonstrate that while many people may feel the need to draw together in a crisis, they are not willing to overlook the ways in which America has failed to live up to its promises, or to ignore the manner in which “unity” can become exclusionary.

Peace demonstrations, marches, and rallies visibly complicate this theme, and press coverage of groups organizing to oppose the war in Afghanistan has been accordingly sporadic. “In the immediate aftermath of the attacks in D.C. and New York, there was a kind of united front and a real frenzy that we saw in the media,” says Lance Newman, a member of the steering committee for the Georgia Coalition for Peace, an Atlanta-based activist group composed largely of veterans of the street protests against institutions like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. When the media have reported on the activities organized by local peace groups, the tone of the coverage has been “fairly patronizing and sarcastic,” Newman observes. The eagerness with which many news executives have aligned their organizations with the cause of unity has made it difficult for peace groups to have their messages heard. “I think there’s a lot of people out there who oppose the war but don’t feel confident enough to put themselves on the line right now because they see what’s going on,” says Newman. “They see the crackdown on civil liberties, they see the way dissent is treated in the media, and they expect that’s how they are liable to be treated.”

When dealing with groups who oppose the war, the media seem to have little awareness of past mistakes. In late September, for example, more than a dozen black churches in the Cascade Heights area of southwest Atlanta organized a march for peace. Although other vigils and demonstrations had been held in downtown Atlanta parks and at the King Center, the march down Cascade Road was noteworthy for the number of participants (eight hundred, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s estimate), for the range of ages that was represented, and for the fact that the marchers identified themselves by faith rather than membership in an anti-war group. “We gather to pray

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and speak a word of peace” read the statement issued by the march organizers, “first to the hearts and minds of those most directly affected by these horrific and haunting events, but also to the nations of the world, who have begun to position themselves for international conflict.”

All three of Atlanta’s leading television stations reported on the march, but only one emphasized the congregants’ clear message that one might pray for the country while still opposing retaliatory violence. Of the other two, one focused almost exclusively on the presence of famous leaders like the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Georgia Governor Roy Barnes. (While the presence of these leaders was a significant show of support for the marchers, the fact that this station only highlighted Jackson and Barnes ignored the important message of the march.) The final station’s 45-second piece featured a white man as the subject of its single on-screen interview, the reporter apparently having concluded that the real story of the march was the presence of people who admitted membership in a socialist group. Such racism and red-baiting seemed straight out of an era of Civil Defense drills and automotive tailfins, and the reporter went on to emphasize the “controversial” nature of the march. Overlooked was the more compelling reality that many of the marchers were acting on their own definitions of citizenship and solidarity, offering them as an alternative to President Bush’s “either you’re with us or against us” rhetoric.

Journalists and their critics alike agree that a few positive signs have appeared in the past weeks that seem to indicate that news organizations are beginning to focus on missed opportunities. But if there is a growing recognition of where news organizations might have failed their audiences in the past, many of the ongoing problems have yet to be addressed. When the events of September 11 have become more distant history, predicts Professor McCall, “someone will have a big media convention somewhere and the big mucketymucks will talk about what we could have done better with what I call progressive hindsight. Journalists-we’re all very good at being progressive in retrospect. The problem is, it’s always hard to get changes made in midstream, when they would make the most impact.”

Patrick Wehner is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life at Emory University and served as a special contributing editor for this issue of Southern Changes.

Hate in the News: Violence Against Arab Americans and Muslims

Kelvin Datcher, Southern Poverty Law Center

Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 pp. 8-9

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, another form of terrorism emerged. This terrorism was homegrown, and most often, Americans were attacking Americans. Within hours-and long before any suspects had been identified-reports of harassment and violence against Arab Americans and Muslims began to pour in. Within days, the harassment and violence had escalated to murder.

The areas that saw the most violence during this “backlash” were Michigan, California and New York, not coincidentally the three states with the largest Arab populations.

The American South did not escape the senselessness, however. There were scattered reports in most states, but Florida, which has the largest Arab American population in the region with about 50,000, saw the most numerous and startling incidents.

Among those acts, an Orlando disc jockey blamed “ragheads” for the attacks on air, arrows and bullets were fired into mosques, and Islamic schools and businesses were closed due to bomb threats. The man accused of the first murder during this wave of violence also has southern roots. Frank Roque, whose alleged Arizona rampage includes shooting and killing one Sikh man and shooting at a Lebanese-American and into the home of a Syrian family, is a native Alabamian.

The South’s legacy of racial strife has been rekindled anew, and this time it is not limited to black and white. Following are a list of attacks of violence against Arab Americans and Muslims in Southern states, provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

-Kelvin Datcher, Staff Writer, SPLC. Alabama

A Middle Eastern store clerk was beaten.

An Indian medical student’s car was vandalized.

Florida

Someone attempted to run a Muslim woman in Brooksville off the road.

The pilot of a United Airlines flight from Tampa to Cairo arbitrarily refused to allow an Egyptian American to board.

Police found a bullet embedded in the wall of Hernando County’s only mosque.

An arrow was shot through the front window and into a washing machine at a Muslim-owned laundromat in Green Cove.

The Islamic Center of Northeast Florida closed its school for a week after a deluge of threatening phone calls. The mosque is also paying for an off-duty police officer to conduct daily patrols after someone drove a car onto the grounds and yelled curses about Muslims and God.

A Palestinian American in St. Petersburg had his car vandalized with paint. A threatening note was also left on the windshield.

Three Jacksonville traffic schools were closed after receiving bomb threats. The schools are owned by Arab Americans.

A family in Temple Terrace found their garage door vandalized with the words “Muslims F***.”

Georgia

Four men in the Atlanta area attempted to stab a Sudanese man. They said, “You killed our people in New York. We want to kill you tonight.”

Kentucky

Two Islamic meeting places were vandalized.

A Lexington man posted a sign in a neighborhood reading, “Arabs are Murderers.” He refused to remove the sign when his neighborhood association asked him. Two Arab Americans live in the neighborhood.

An Indian student was attacked when he was mistaken for an Arab.

Louisiana

The Jefferson Parish public school system in New Orleans closed down due to classmate taunts of Arab and Muslim students.

Tennessee

Two Arab American clinic workers received threatening phone calls. They were told to “go home and get out of our country” and called “foreign fags.” Their daughter in Atlanta, Georgia, also received threatening phone calls.

Texas

At least six bullets shattered windows at the Islamic Center of Irving.

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In San Antonio, a Delta Airlines pilot ejected an Arab businessman from his first-class seat.

A window at the Islamic Center of Carrollton was broken by a slingshot-type device, according to police.

A San Antonio Iranian restaurant was vandalized.

A professor of Middle Eastern languages and cultures at the University of Texas was spat on by a pedestrian.

In Austin, an Arab American realtor received anonymous telephone threats ordering him to “leave this country or else!”

At the University of Texas in Austin, students wearing Islamic garb said their bags were searched by university police before they were admitted to classrooms and they were told to leave the student union because of “anti-Muslim sentiment.”

In San Antonio, two Muslim girls were verbally abused at their high school.

A Pakistani Muslim storeowner in Dallas was shot and killed. The FBI is investigating the shooting as a bias-related crime.

Three bullets struck the Sahara Grocery Market in San Antonio.

A woman was sent home from work the day after the attacks following a meeting with her boss, who had singled her out because of her Palestinian heritage. He stated he didn’t know if she would be celebrating the death of Americans in the office.

A Molotov cocktail was thrown against the side of the Islamic Society of Denton, causing an estimated $2,500 in damage.

Virginia

An Islamic bookstore was vandalized in Old Town Alexandria.

Two Virginia mosques reported vandalism and threatening phone calls.

A woman was charged with threatening to bomb a mosque in Hampton.

Washington, D.C.

Rippy Singh was stopped by four white men in a car who accused him of being a terrorist and who said “we will bomb you.”

A Sikh was leaving work when he was accosted by pedestrians who began to yell verbal expletives at him. They threatened to “get” him and bomb him in retaliation for the terrorist acts.

At Dulles International Airport, a United Airlines flight to London was delayed for four hours after a Saudi pilot requested permission to fly in the cockpit jump seat, a courtesy extended to pilots of all U.S. carriers before September 11. The United pilot refused and returned to the gate where the Saudi pilot and two other men were detained and questioned by the FBI and INS for three hours before being released.

The Islamic Center received bomb threats, causing Massachusetts Avenue to be closed off.

Two women wearing traditional religious headdress where spat upon as they rode a subway near the White House.

Sources: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (www.adc.org), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (www.cair-net.org), the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (www.apalc.org), police and wire reports. These incidents and others from states beyond the South-as well as resources for combating racial violence and discrimination-are posted on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website: www.tolerance.org.

Race, Class, and Reconciliaton

By Dan T. Carter

Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 pp. 10-13

People of color have had to deal directly with issues of race for all of this nation’s history; they couldn’t avoid it. For those defined as “white,” and particularly those outside the South, it’s been a sometime thing: notably during the struggles over slavery, war, and reconstruction in the mid-l9th century, and during the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and the struggles that followed.

There has always come a time, however, when whites tired of this subject.

For one of the inescapable themes of the history of the nation and particularly the American South is the effort of whites to maintain racial supremacy over their darker-skinned brothers and sisters. First there was slavery, then the struggle of white Southerners to maintain a separate nation built upon that institution, then the use of terrorism by the Klan and other vigilante groups to overthrow the legally constituted biracial governments of the post-war South, followed by the disfranchisement of black Southerners, the escalation of white on black terrorism through daily acts of violence–the most heinous of which involved the lynching of thousands of black men (and women)–the creation of segregation, a hellish institution designed to systematically degrade black Southerners through the first sixty years of the 20th century and exclude them from educational and economic opportunities within the South. . . .

No wonder we want to smooth over the rough and crooked places of our past–to dismiss the deep historical events of hundreds of years with an impatient: “Get over it: that was a long time ago.”

Some of it was a long time ago. Today, I think the majority of white Americans would agree with the proposition that a society that accepts any form of hierarchy based upon so-called “racial” considerations is inconsistent with our democratic aspirations and incapable of achieving a meaningful reconciliation of its citizens. Now this is a commonplace conviction; only a handful of extremists would openly accept the notion that genetic differences based upon race justify forms of discrimination. But I offer an important corollary: if we truly believe that skin color is not a determinant of intelligence, creativity or ability, we have an obligation–a moral obligation–to do more than murmur pieties about equal rights or equal opportunities. We must do everything in our power to change a society in which it is obvious that deep racial inequalities remain despite the progress of the last half century. That is not easy and it requires more than conventional rhetoric about equal opportunity; it requires uncomfortable choices and no little sacrifice.

And this at a time, when I suspect most of us would agree that “sacrifice” is not exactly the prevailing theme of our contemporary political culture. When lawmakers beholden to corporate America face the choice between building classrooms to replace trailers for our children or helping the super rich buy another chalet in Switzerland, it’s no contest. It is easier to fill our political platforms with a rainbow of complexions, to join enthusiastically once a year on Martin Luther King’s birthday to utter platitudes about equality. We insist that we’re serious about the problems of racial discrimination, but our actions–in contrast to our words–treat the conundrums of race as though they were minor annoyances; a vexatious hangover from an older era.

Yet the reality is inescapable: as we begin the 21st century, far more people of color than whites continue to live in the shadows of American life while the racial dimensions of disparate treatment in income, education, health services, and in our judiciary and penal system are ignored. And the question which John Kennedy asked a quarter century ago remains no less relevant today: As long as “Negro Americans remain in the shadow of a full and free life,” he asked six months before his death, “who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”

It’s much easier to relegate the uncomfortable shards of our past to a safe and comfortable category we call “history.” Even the more recent past becomes the victim of our desire to forget uncomfortable truths. The hustlers of our popular culture have reshaped the complex history of the civil rights era into a slick pre-packaged series of rhetorical slogans that allow present injustices to live comfortably with historical memory and the great voice of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King survives as a soothing icon to black and white, conservative and liberal alike. California businessman Ward Connerly launched his successful anti-affirmative action referendum on King’s birthday with the announcement that Martin Luther King would have approved since he “personifies the quest for a color-blind society.”

Forgotten is the Martin Luther King who dismissed such arguments in his Stride Toward Freedom. It was “obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a

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race three-hundred years after another man, the first man would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner.” Forgotten is King’s denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam, or his call for a “restructuring of the architecture of American society,” a restructuring in which there had to be a “radical redistribution of economic and political power and wealth.”

As Julian Bond put it, we don’t like to remember “the critic of capitalism, or the pacifist who declared all wars evil, or the man of God who argued” that a nation that chose “guns over butter” would end up starving its people and destroying its soul. The historical radicalism of King’s call to struggle has been stripped away, leaving only a soothing pablum of feel-good sentiments.

There is actually a justification for promoting this kind of cultural amnesia. Historian Ernest Renan argued that every nation is a community both of shared memory and of shared forgetting. Forgetting, wrote Renan, “is an essential factor in the history of a nation.” To the extent that we may become caught up in an endless cycle of fruitless recrimination, Renan may be right.

But I prefer the ancient wisdom of the Jewish tradition: only remembrance can bring redemption.

This does not mean that times have not changed, or that we should let our remembrance of a bitter past blind us to the journey we have made and the opportunities that lie ahead. Much has happened in the past half century for the better as the harshest contours of American racism have been worn away by the persistent struggles of the civil rights movement. In Columbia, South Carolina, today, my next door neighbors are an African-American couple who personify the American dream. He is the personnel director for a major international corporation based in Columbia; she a former assistant to the Governor of South Carolina. My neighbor across the street is a successful young Chinese-American attorney. My next door neighbor is a Lebanese-American cardiologist; a woman working in a specialty almost exclusively male just two decades ago. Three houses away is an African-American neighbor who has just become the number two budget officer for the state. These professionals are not simply tokens; they reflect the growing opportunities that do exist for those individuals given the chance to develop their abilities.

At the same time, the conflict between good and evil enacted on the television screens of the 1950s and 1960s seem far away. There are contemporary racial issues that reflect newer versions of that age-old struggle, but often we deal not with unambiguous moral decisions, but day-in, day-out struggles to determine what is the best of a series of uncomfortable choices. How should we judge “ability” and promise in a way that is fair? What discriminatory results are the consequence of purposeful racism and what reflect happenstance or simply the results of unquestioned institutional patterns? Was I denied this job because of the color of my skin? Or was the other candidate truly better qualified? Is it possible to achieve a redress of past injustices by fathers and mothers without penalizing sons and daughters? Each action, each word must be weighed; it is surely one of the most bitter and exhausting legacies of our past and our ongoing association of darker skin color with notions of inferiority.

One way to help understand the changing nature of our dilemmas is to recognize that racial ideas and attitudes increasingly reflect assumptions about class. In my Southern childhood the “single drop” theory of race was almost unchallenged. Black was black. We all know the once fashionable historical cliché about Brazilian race relations: that race was important, but “money whitened.” Well, that wasn’t really true about racial attitudes in Brazil, but there clearly was a difference between American and Latin societies.

That too is changing. I don’t in any way mean to suggest that race has disappeared as a constant (if often unconscious) measure of judgment by most white Americans. Still, as the overt racism of an earlier generation declines, and a broader African-American and Hispanic middle class emerges, the way is paved for whites (and some African Americans) to see class, as opposed to race, as a legitimate means of separating our society into winners and losers.

The problem for me is that this amounts to a shift from a hierarchical society built upon the foundation of racism, to one resting on the notion that there are vast differences in human beings that justify massive social and economic inequality. Increasingly that is seen as progress. Not for me.

Quite apart from the fact that I find it morally repugnant, I don’t believe that true social reconciliation in our democratic society is possible unless we arrest the growing economic inequality between our citizens. Since 1979, overall income in the United States has increased over 55 percent. But the greatest increase, by far, has been for the wealthiest Americans. Over half the growth in after-tax income has gone to the top one-half percent of America’s taxpayers and the results are what one would expect.

In 1977, the bottom 20 percent of the American people received a little less than 6 percent of the nation’s annual income, while the wealthiest 1 percent received some 7 percent. Today that bottom 20 percent receives 4 percent of the nation’s annual income; the wealthiest 1 percent has seen its share almost double, to 13 percent. And today, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans control

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more than 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, a maldistribution of wealth greater than at any time since the 1920s.

Now the argument, of course, is that a rising tide lifts all boats. With everyone growing richer, why should we be concerned if some groups are a little wealthier than others?

Only that is not the case. In inflation corrected dollars, the top 1 percent has seen its after-tax income increase 120 percent in the last quarter century, the bottom 20 percent has actually suffered a decline of 12 percent in after-tax income. Thirty million Americans–more than half of them children–still live below the poverty line; forty-two million Americans still have no health insurance. And despite the last ten years of steady economic expansion–once you exclude increased family income due to the growing number of dual wage earners–it is only during the last two and a half years that childhood poverty has begun to decline and the mid-50 percent of households in America has seen a slight increase in income. So much for a rising tide lifting all boats.

Now this shift in the distribution of income and wealth stems from many sources: The internationalization of trade, the opening of a global labor economy, the decline of trade unions and the displacement of semi-skilled and skilled workers through new technologies. But the evidence is inescapable that the growing gap between rich and poor has been exacerbated by deliberate government policies of the past two decades, particularly tax policy.

Despite all the talk of “tax cuts” in the 1980s, the bottom half of the population actually saw its taxes increase as escalating social security, medicare and excise levies and increasingly regressive state and local taxes offset the marginal declines in the federal income tax rates. While the 50-to-90th percentile received a very modest reduction in taxes, the nation’s richest 1 percent of Americans saw an annual decrease of 15 percent in federal income tax liabilities in the decade of the 1980s.

These were policy decisions, deliberately made, not the inevitable consequences of free market forces beyond our control. The underlying philosophy seems to be: If you make the lives of the poor, the working class and the marginal middle class more precarious and give them less money, they will be more productive and resourceful workers, returning benefits to society as a whole. And then if you give the rich and the well to do more money and make their already secure and prosperous lives even more secure and more prosperous, they will be more productive and resourceful in returning benefits to society as a whole. You think I engage in polemical exaggeration? How else can one describe the policies of the dominant national party whose main economic goals are to freeze the miserably low minimum wage for the poor, give a massive tax cut for the rich and allow them to pass on their vast wealth to their sons and daughters.

I realize that I am on far shakier ground here. For the last thirty years, conservative think tanks have been pouring out an endless intellectual justification for this proposition: that there is a natural hierarchy of class and intelligence which functions equitably on the basis of social and economic competition and any attempt to interfere with the unfettered forces of the marketplace can only lead us backward on that archaic and discredited path of socialism and social democracy. As Dinesh D’Souza concludes in his recent book on The Virtue of Prosperity, the “prime culprit in causing contemporary social inequality [in America] seems to be merit.”

Really? In 1974, the nation’s corporate chief executive officers made, on average, 34 times as much as their workers. By 1996, it was 180 times that of their workers. By the beginning of this century, it was nearly 200 times that of their employees. Are we to believe that the merit of corporate leaders has increased sevenfold over that of the men and women in their employ?

I have a word for that kind of smug justification for the status quo; it’s not one that I prefer to use in polite society.

To be fair, most of us–conservative, centrist and liberal alike–are uncomfortable with the fictional character Gordon Gecko’s unvarnished assertion that “greed is good.” And so we conceal the unpleasant realities of our current economic system with slogans about promoting individual opportunity, or using education as a means of redressing powerful imbalances of economic and educational opportunities. At times I feel as though I’m watching the captain of the Titanic solemnly hand out teaspoons to the passengers left on the sinking decks, with the cheery instructions: “Start bailing, you’ll be fine.” The truth is, those of us who are safe in our life rafts daily check our retirement portfolios as our hearts increasingly vibrate in harmony with the raucous Muzak of our contemporary culture: that clanging bell that daily opens and closes the New York Stock Exchange.

So where can we begin.

First, I would suggest, by expanding our vision of reconciliation beyond the issue of race, gender, ethnicity and sexual discrimination to include a demand for broader economic and social justice.

Looking back on the last generation, we can see now that there has been a constant struggle for personal freedom and autonomy. Remember in the 1960s and 1970s–all politics is personal? While the battles still rage, I would argue that victory was won by social libertarians–Jerry Falwell and John Ashcroft notwithstanding. In the 1980s, there was a different kind of struggle: a battle for unre-

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strained economic freedom. To a considerable degree, that struggle was won by conservatives. But somehow in our headlong race for cultural and economic freedom, we have lost touch with an earlier dream most recently embodied in the call for what John Lewis describes as “the beloved community.” Instead we have come to accept as normal a society divided into the fabulously wealthy few, a comfortable upper middle class and half a nation one short step away from economic disaster, struggling to survive.

I do not believe real social reconciliation is possible based under these conditions. But recreating a sense of what might be–what should be–will not be easy.

A couple of brief suggestions:

Today we live in “America, Incorporated,” in which rampant individualism operating within the framework of the marketplace reigns with only a murmer of protest. Well, let me enter my dissent. We are not autonomous. If we look honestly at our own lives we see the truth of the old Irish expression: that “we all drink from wells we never dug; we warm ourselves by fires we never built.” As a means of allocating resources and creating wealth, corporate capitalism has a positive place in our culture, but if we allow it to make our decisions, as a society we end up in the same position of the cynic described by Oscar Wilde. We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I don’t underestimate how hard that may be, for words have been corrupted in true Orwellian fashion. Some people, said the Puritan martyr Richard Rumbold as he stood upon the scaffold, believe that “Providence had sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden. I do not.” But today those who are booted and spurred no longer swagger and proclaim their God given right to exploit those beneath them; now they speak with the voice of humility and concern–everyone feels everyone’s pain–and there is much talk of offering a helping hand to those in need.

Well, I propose that we all become cantankerous naysayers whose main duty is simply to remind all who will listen that those of us who are comfortably settled atop the pyramid of our unequal society, are always ready to talk about “compassion.”

But there is another language that has come from authentic social movements bent on changing our society by breaking down the barriers that divide us: the struggle for economic justice in the 1930s; the fight for racial justice in the anti-slavery and civil rights movement. These authentic political movements have emerged when least expected. As one of my favorite writers said, a keen sense of irony has seldom led anyone to mount the barricades. Our task in the future is to not to lead, but to be a part of that struggle.

What I do know is that, when that moment arrives, the voices that bubble up from the grassroots will not use the paternalistic language of “compassion”: they will speak of something far more fundamental–justice.

Dan T. Carter is Educational Foundation Professor of History at the University of South Carolina.This article is adapted from a speech Carter presented at the Reconciliation Symposium held at Emory University on January 26, 2001.

Southerners in South Africa: The World Conference Against Racism

By Gwen Robinson

Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 pp. 14-15

On August 29th Rev. C.T. Vivian, the celebrated Atlanta civil rights activist, walked into the Non-Governmental Organization Forum (NGO) of the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Racial Intolerance in Durban, South Africa. Within minutes Rev. Vivian was surrounded by fellow activists, grassroots leaders and friends from around the South. As he made his way to do an interview with South African Broadcasting, Rev. Vivian became the center of a group of friends from his generation of civil rights leaders in the U.S. South, admirers from younger generations in the U.S. and other countries, and reporters eager to hear his take on the U.N. Conference. While the United States government did not have a large, high-level (or, some would argue, positive) presence at the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), Rev. Vivian and more than three hundred others from the U.S. South were there to make their voices heard.

Southerners’ experiences at the WCAR seem to fall into two categories: insiders and outsiders. For those people who were involved in the preparatory meetings that happened in the year before the conference, the World Conference was the culminating event in an ongoing process. There were major “prepcoms” (meetings to prepare the U.N. document on racism for the conference) in every region of the world. Southerners were represented at the meetings in Geneva, Switzerland; Santiago, Chile; and Quito, Ecuador among others. At the preparatory meetings the language for many issues was discussed, including whether the trans-Atlantic slave trade should be declared a crime, whether the treatment of dalits (the untouchables) in India should be included as racism, and whether Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians should be included as the only nation specifically condemned for its actions.

“When we went to the prepcoms we spent most of our time lobbying for the language we wanted in the document and listening to the official governmental discussions. Some of the work continued after the two or three-day meetings ended, so it was hard to keep up with all the decisions. You really had to pay attention,” said Beni Ivey of the Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta, who is also on the U.S. NGO Steering Committee for the WCAR. Ray Winbush of the Race Relations Institute at Fisk University also participated in the prepcoms. “We hit the ground running in Durban because we knew who we had to influence from the prepcoms. We met with the President of Senegal in Durban because he is the biggest opponent of declaring slavery a crime. I would say that 80 percent of what we did was behind the scenes.” While the debates over language may seem esoteric to most people, people involved with the process argue for its importance. “Our struggles need to be enshrined in the document so that we can use it later in law,” explained Elaine R. Jones of the NAACP Legal Fund. “You can’t change anything without the force of law.”

The behind-the-scenes nature of much of the negotiations left many people who were not familiar with the process feeling lost. For many grassroots delegates at the Durban Conference, the large sessions and official negotiations over language were too obscure to be meaningful. But grassroots delegations had other reasons for attending. “We went to tell the story of the South and the history of oppression here” said Leah Wise of the Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network in Durham, North Carolina. “When you say you’re from the U.S. here most people think that you are either privileged or that everything was fixed with Dr. King. When our folks tell their stories about what it’s like to work in a processing plant or to work as a migrant farm worker, the people here are amazed.” Wise’s group included thirty grassroots workers from Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. This group went to Durban a week early to meet with South African organizations working on economic justice. Environmental justice groups also went to Durban early to do a toxic tour of the city and to meet with organizations fighting toxic pollution and racism. International Possibilities Unlimited, IPU, sponsored forty

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grassroots environmental justice activists to attend the WCAR including representatives from Citizens for Environmental Justice in Savannah, Georgia. The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond conducted two training sessions in South Africa before the conference opened. The Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation sponsored a group of Brazilians to attend the conference and distributed their comparative study, Beyond Racism. (See end of article for more information on the report.)

Despite the differences in experiences, almost everyone agreed that the conference was as much an experience of racism and intolerance as an event to dismantle racism. One of the major drawbacks to the conference was the disorganization, due in large part to the role of the United States. The U.S. committed $600,000 to the World Conference early on, but by June the U.S. was reported to have only paid $250,000. By comparison the U.N. Conference on Women received more than $6 million from the U.S. government for organization and implementation. Beyond a lack of commitment, however, the Bush administration was actively engaged in blocking issues it did not want addressed. “It’s not as if our government just said ‘I’m taking my marbles and going home.’ It’s as if they took their marbles and then kicked everyone else’s around the playground. They have been attending every international meeting after the Durban conference trying to derail the process” said Ray Winbush. The major points the U.S. objects to are specifically naming Israel as a racist state, and declaring the slave trade a crime. The government also continues to block any mention of reparations in the U.N. document. Since much of the final negotiations will happen at small, international meetings, the vigilance of U.S. non-profits that continue to follow what’s happening is key.

Beyond the financial and political concerns, however, the conference illuminated, once again, what is needed to fight racism: shared power. The U.N. process is not structured to be participatory and that culture was very clear to the participants. The agenda of the NGO Forum was changed at the last minute. Hotel reservations and translation arrangements were continually bungled and overall, the conference felt confused. The large sessions had anywhere from two to five hundred participants and were set up as panel presentations with limited time for audience participation. Smaller workshops were scattered around the city, leaving many delegates exhausted trying to figure out where to go.

“We come back recognizing the significance of what we’ve done in the South,” explains Leah Wise “We have developed some strategies that other people haven’t; the intensive relationship building and linking economic and racial oppression. Grassroots people in the South can use their experiences to help people around the world better understand how to fight oppression.” Without changing the power dynamics that say only the experts, only the people with access to money and privilege should have any say, racism in all its forms cannot be dismantled.

The ongoing relationships that have the possibility to undermine current power dynamics is the most hopeful outcome from the World Conference Against Racism. The conference allowed civil rights, economic justice, environmental justice, and women’s groups from the South and around the U.S. to meet groups from Mauritania who had experienced modern day slavery, indigenous activists from Guatemala, and human rights activists from China, among many, many others. Some of these connections have turned into ongoing relationships. “I would say that we forged relationships of steel” said Beni Ivey. “There are African-American, Latino, Asian, and White leaders from across the South who have participated in a major international event and who have come back with a renewed commitment to forging a multi-racial coalition in the South.” Ben Okri, the Nigerian novelist, wrote that dreams are most insurgent when they are suppressed. The dream of what the U.N. Conference Against Racism could have been was lost. But the idea of a world where racism is cracked or eroded just a little bit is surely rebellious and alive.

Gwen Robinson is a community organizer and writer living in Atlanta.

The Southern Education Foundation recently released a report on the relations between persons of European and African descent in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States, all of which have larger populations of poor, uneducated black people. The report documents the costs and consequences of racism. It can be downloaded free of charge at www.beyondracism.org.

Race and Nation: Bridging Racial and Ethnic Communities

Staff

Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 p. 16

The Southern Regional Council’s (SRC) participation in the Race and Nation in the Global South collaborative, focusing on recent immigration to the American South, is one element in SRC’s new initiative, Partnerships for Racial Unity.

As the SRC continues to work towards better understanding and collaboration between members of the white and African-American communities, the Partnerships Program allows the SRC to expand that work by learning from new immigrants as they arrive in and adapt to the South. The Partnerships program seeks to bridge racial and ethnic communities and foster multi-racial collaborations.

The Race and Nation project combines community-based research with popular education to investigate and influence the changing racial dynamics of the region. We hope better to understand both the experiences of new immigrants as they arrive in and adapt to the South and the attitudes of more long-term residents toward new immigrants. The overall goal of the project is to identify areas of potential collaboration as well as conflict among different groups, and to encourage multiracial efforts to address common needs.

The Race and Nation project’s goals are to analyze the changing racial-ethnic context of the South and, to use that knowledge to build the collective vision, personal relationships and organizational ties necessary for joint, long-range, inclusive, racial justice work at the local and regional levels. The analyses and strategies for effective bottom-up strategies for anti-racist work will then be widely disseminated through the region, increasing the capacity of local and regional organizations to work effectively in the changing racial-ethnic context of the South.

With research partners at the Center for Research on Women (CROW) at the University of Memphis and the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee focusing on the state of Tennessee, the SRC is focused in the urban center of metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia. Project Director Dwayne Patterson and Project Associate Blanca Rojas are meeting with local activists and conducting research in the Chamblee/Doraville area. Approximately fifty interviews are being carried out in this area of cultural co-existence that stretches along Buford Highway in DeKalb County, which has developed, over the past two decades, into a powerful economic generator with hundreds of small Asian and Latino businesses. Unlike the long-established immigrant communities of New York and Los Angeles where different ethnic groups tend to establish distinct neighborhoods, the Chamblee/Doraville area blends Asian and Latino businesses and people.

One of every ten people in Metro Atlanta is Latino or Asian. The 2000 Census showed a 300 percent increase in Georgia’s Hispanic population, the third highest among Southern states. These changing demographics have made DeKalb County one of the most diverse in the nation, with African Americans comprising 55.3 percent of the population, whites 37 percent, and Hispanics and Asian Americans comprising 7.9 percent and 4.6 percent, respectively. Attracted by economic opportunity, increasing numbers of men, women, and children from Mexico and other Latin American as well as Asian countries are moving into the area. New immigrants are settling in homes and apartments, working in construction, the service industry, and many other professions, attending local schools, and buying groceries, clothes, and more in local stores.

Based on the initial interviews, it is possible to identify four general areas of special interest:

• Access to education, including education rights for immigrant students and parent involvement programs;
• Political representation and civil rights, including census counts, redistricting issues, access to drivers licenses, and relations with the police and the Immigration and Naturalization Service;
• Employment and economic status, including work relations and perceived job competition; and
• Community/neighborhood relationships, problems and needs, including crime.

Following is an excerpt from one of the interviews conducted by the SRC’s Partnerships team.

La nación y la raza: colaboración entre comunidades étnicas y raciales

Staff

Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 p. 17

La participación del Southern Regional Council (SRC) en el proyecto “La nacón y la raza: construir comunidades nuevas en el sur”, dedicado al estudio de la inmigracón reciente en el sur de los Estados Unidos, forma parte de la nueva iniciativa“Partnerships for Racial Unity” (Colaboración para la Unidad Racial).

A través del programa Partnerships, el SRC ha podido ampliar el trabajo ya iniciado para promover una mayor comprensión y colaboración entre los miembros de las comunidades anglosajona y afroamericana, aprendiendo acerca de los nuevos inmigrantes mientras se establecen y se adaptan a la vida en sur. El programa Partnerships busca reunir a diversas comunidades para promover la formación de colaboraciones multiraciales y multiétnicas.

El proyecto “La nación y la raza” combina la investigación basada en la comunidad y la educación popular, con el objeto de comprender mejor e influir en la dinámica racial y étnica que está cambiando en la región. Esperamos poder llegar a comprender mejor dos tipos de situaciones: las experiencias de los inmigrantes recién llegados mientras se adaptan al sur y las actitudes que adoptan los residentes ya establecidos en relación a los nuevos inmigrantes. La meta del proyecto consiste en identificar las áreas en las que sería posible colaborar, así como las áreas de conflicto entre los diversos grupos, y promover esfuerzos multiraciales y multiétnicos para tratar de resolver las necesidades comunes.

El proyecto “La nación y la raza” intenta además analizar el contexto racial-étnico que está cambiando en el sur y utilizar ese conocimiento para construir una visión colectiva, establecer relaciones personales, y crear lazos entre organizaciones-lo cuál resulta necesario para poder desarrollar un trabajo inclusivo de justicia racial y étnica al nivel local y regional.

En colaboracién con el Centro de Estudios de la Mujer (Center for Research on Women, CROW) de la universidad de Memphis y el Centro Highlander en New Market, Tennessee, que se dedican a estudiar la inmigración en Tennessee, el SRC trabaja en el area metropolitana de Atlanta, Georgia. El Director del proyecto, Dwayne Patterson y la asociada Blanca Rojas, se reúnen con activistas locales y conducen la investigación en el área de Chamblee/Doraville. Ya han realizado aproximadamente 50 entrevistas en ese área dónde coexisten diversas culturas, que se extiende a lo largo de la carretera de Buford, en el condado de DeKalb-el cuál se ha convertido en un centro económico de gran alcance, con centenares de pequeños negocios cuyos dueños son de origen asiático y latino. A diferencia de lo que ocurre en las comunidades inmigrantes establecidas desde hace mucho tiempo en Nueva York y Los Angeles, en dónde los diversos grupos étnicos han tendido a establecer barrios distintivos, en el área de Chamblee/Doraville las personas y los negocios cuyos dueños son de origen asiático o latino se mezclan en contigüidad.

Una de cada diez personas en el área metropolitana de Atlanta se autoidentifica como latina o de origen asiático. El Censo del 2000 demostró que la población hispana de Georgia ha aumentado más del 300%. Entre los estados del sur, Georgia se convirtió en el tercero con mayor población hispana. Estos cambios demográficos han convertido al condado de DeKalb en uno de los más diversos de la nación, con 55,3% de población afroamericana, 37% de población de origen anglosajón, 7,9% de población de origen hispano y 4,6% de origen asiático. Debido a las oportunidades económicas, un número creciente de hombres, mujeres y niños de Méjico y de otro países latinoamericanos y asiáticos está estableciéndose en el área. Los immigrantes recientes residen en casas y apartamentos, y se emplean en la construcción, en puestos de servicio, y en muchas otras ocupaciones. Los niños asisten a las escuelas locales,y los adultos compran su comida, ropa, y otros productos en los almacenes locales.

De acuerdo con el contenido de las primeras entrevistas, es posible identificar cuatro temas de interés particular:

• El acceso a la educación, incluso los derechos de los estudiantes inmigrantes y programas que involucren a los padres.
• La representación política y los derechos civiles de los inmigrantes, incluso la participación en el censo, temas de partición de los distritos, el acceso a licencias para conducir, y las relaciones con la policia y el INS.
• El empleo y el estatus económico de los inmigrantes, incluso las relaciones laborales y la percepción de competencia por los puestos de empleo.
• Las relaciones comunitarias y barriales, los problemas y las necesidades de la comunidad, incluso el crimen.

El siguiente es un extracto de uno de las entrevistas conducidas por el equipo del programa Partnerships del SRC.

Homero León

Staff

Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 pp. 18-19

Homero Leon, an attorney with Georgia Legal Services, who was born in Cuba and immigrated to Miami with his family in 1960 at the age of four.

My experiences growing up in Miami are varied because we arrived in early 1960 and were one of the first Cuban families to arrive in Miami. It was still pretty much an American town. I was just five years old and when I started school in the first grade, I couldn’t speak English, not a word. It was a terrible experience but I remember it like it was yesterday, being in the classroom with all the English speakers. I’m sure I cried and I remember being scared. When I got to the second grade, the teachers took me aside and said they were going to fail me. They thought that I was a little slow, maybe a little retarded. So I failed the second grade. My problem was that I couldn’t speak English-that was my “retardation.” Now I am licensed to practice law in two states.

The beginning was hard. My parents didn’t speak English and although my father had a decent job in Cuba as a career military officer, he became a tomato picker in Homestead, Florida when we came here. My mother never learned English to this very day although she worked in the factories as a seamstress and has been in this country for about forty years. As more and more Cubans came and opened grocery stores, she would go to the grocery store where everyone spoke Spanish. Cubans opened banks and all kinds of businesses, so when she would go to a business, they spoke Spanish. She never had to learn English. Cubans own many television and radio stations, too!

As the years went by, I learned English and for some reason I began to associate a lot with English-speaking folks. To this day, I never quite mastered how to read and write Spanish, always attending schools that taught English. I guess my parents wanted me to be successful so they figured if I became an Americano I would be more successful. I could “pass” by changing my name to Homer Leon. I became Homer Leon and I was a regular American kid.

Life was easier being Homer Leon than being Homero León, it really was. People treat you different. When you meet Americans and you say your name is Homer Leon, they treat you differently than when you say your name is Homero León. You’ve got an instant connection with folks. They instantly connect with me as an American but if I say I am Homero León immediately most people see me differently-even people who like Latinos. The conversation changes-“Oh, how is it being Latino?” I think they put you in a box. You eat tacos and you like Ricky Martin. But if you are Homer Leon you are a regular American, you watch regular TV and you are regular, you are just folks and normalcy is good. As I got older and went to college I became Homero León again.

The average Cuban in Miami is a right wing Republican and I’m a leftist. I know some people who got beat up and killed-Cubans who were left and center. You are an endangered species if you are a left wing Cuban in Miami. So I was able to go underground as an American leftist-those Americanos are all lefty gringos. It is okay. It is tolerated with the Americano but it isn’t tolerated it with the Chicanos. I rejected my culture, because my culture was so right-wing conservative, oppressive, sexist and all those “wonderful” qualities. In Miami around the Cubans I was Homer Leon but when I went to Tallahassee, a Cuban was a rare thing in 1976. I discovered my ethnic roots and felt more comfortable. It was cool to be a Homero León in Tallahassee. I didn’t have to be a right-wing Cuban. I could just be a Cuban. I could be a left-wing Cuban and we were all lefties in college, so it was tolerable.

I became a legal aid attorney and came to Atlanta, because I met an African-American woman-my ex-wife-who had lived here most of her life. We were in Orlando, Florida, but she considered Atlanta her home and was homesick. “The Civil Rights Movement never came to Orlando, Florida,” she said. “They have no idea what African-American culture is in Orlando. I know there is some in Atlanta. I’m going back. Are you coming with me?” That was nine years ago.

My wife at that time, moved me here to Atlanta and as far as cultural and everything else we moved into an

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African-American neighborhood. This was a first in my life because I had always lived in either Latino neighborhoods or mixed neighborhoods. We were living in Union City at that time but working in Atlanta and we started going to a Black church. At every event my then-wife took me to, I was the only light-skinned person there. I guess my moving to Atlanta and living in the circles I was living, I pretty much thought Atlanta was an African-American town-with a Black mayor and everybody I saw was African American. It was an African-American world as far as I was concerned. And it was good.

Eventually, I did begin to see more Latinos. I moved to Newnan and I started seeing construction sites where everybody building houses was Latino. That was about six years ago. I remember one night when my washing machine had broken down, I went to the little corner Laundromat, a few blocks down from me. About 65 percent of the people there were Latino, doing their laundry-all were new to Georgia. I was surprised, but there it was. Immigration had really spread out.

A lot of the construction for the Olympics was done by Latinos. Economically, I guess these people were and are in great need of money and were able to make money, working very hard and building up Atlanta. I think a lot of African Americans developed resentment to these Latinos. I think that resentment was economically based. The White American resentment, I believe, is more prejudicial. They just don’t like walking into a place, in “their” America, and hearing people speak a language they can’t understand.

I don’t believe you should become an Americano if you are Latino. I believe it is better to keep your culture, keep your language, your literature, your music, your food, to keep that is important. African Americans, I believe the same thing-I love Afro-centric things. It’s wonderful stuff, and we all need it. It is beautiful. I’m totally against assimilation. Multiculturalism is the best for all of us. Tolerance and diversity are wonderful and enrich all our lives.

Racism in the South is almost like an honored tradition; at least in the North they seem more ashamed of it, but here they say, “It was my daddy’s culture; it is our heritage.” Tolerance is not a southern virtue. I see it all around me, and that makes it more difficult to celebrate the beauty of diversity.

This interview was conducted by Blanca Rojas on April 12, 2001.

The Newest South: A Lotta Cultures Goin’ On

By Hector Tobar

Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 pp. 22-23

Reprinted with permission from the May 13, 2001 edition of the Los Angeles Times.

In the center of Memphis, a river port known for its turbulent history of conflict between blacks and whites, there is a place where the old ideas about race and the South don’t make sense anymore.

Drive east from the Mississippi along Union Avenue, just past the studio where a then-unknown Elvis Presley showed up one day to record a song, and you’ll come to an in-between place known as Midtown. Here, there are no ethnic or racial majorities.

“In Midtown, you have everyone and anyone living together,” Claudio Perez-Leon, a Peruvian-born painter, said as he sipped a drink at a local cafe. “All the categories used to divide people are ignored here.”

In Memphis, as in other corners of the South, familiar neighborhoods are being remade, an inevitable consequence of the shifts documented in the 2000 Census. As the South grows-attracting migrants to both its large cities and its rural towns-it’s starting to look a bit more like the East and West coasts.

Census Tract 36 in Memphis offers one of the most dramatic expressions of this new, polyglot South: Its 3,016 residents are split into four roughly equal groups: 28 percent white, 27 percent black, 25 percent Asian and 17 percent Latino.

What’s happening in central Memphis is only the most advanced expression of a trend seen in Southern cities and towns as far afield as Bentonville, Ark., and Raleigh, N.C. All have seen a sharp increase in either their Latino or Asian populations or both.

In the 1990s, Tennessee’s Latino population increased by 278 percent, while North Carolina’s grew by 394 percent. In a handful of rural towns, Latinos have become the largest minority group, mostly because immigrants are taking low-wage jobs in chicken processing and other industries. Latinos make up about 40 percent of the population in Siler City, North Carolina, and Dalton, Georgia, the “Carpet Capital of the World.”

Elsewhere, Asians have become the largest minority in overwhelmingly white suburbs such as Cary, North Carolina (outside of Raleigh), and Germantown, Tennessee (east of Memphis), mirroring a pattern first seen twenty years ago in such Los Angeles suburbs as San Marino and Monterey Park.

Earlier this year, Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton took note of the trend and formed an Office for Multicultural and Religious Affairs. Its mission is to ease the transition of Latinos, Asians, and other groups into the city’s public life-and perhaps avoid the type of racial strife that Memphis became known for in the 1960s.

Already, some observers of this city’s social milieu see the potential for such conflict. Latinos, the city’s fastest-growing minority, are increasingly filling low-wage jobs in construction and other industries.

“There are some people who see the growth of the Latino community as a threat,” said Jose Velasquez of the Latino-Memphis Connection, a social service agency. Some members of the city’s black community “think we’re going to take things from them without having to go through the same struggles.”

In the 1960s, blacks were alone at the bottom of the wage ladder in Memphis-it was a group of such men, sanitation workers, who marched with “I am a man” placards that became a civil rights icon. Their struggle brought the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the city, where he was assassinated in 1968.

Today, the motel where King was killed has been converted into a civil rights museum. This month, it’s exhibiting “Americanos,” a traveling photo documentary on Latino life in the United States.

For the most part, Memphis’ relationship with its Latino immigrants remains in the honeymoon phase. “We don’t have the problems there are in other parts of the country,” said Narquenta Sims, head of the mayor’s multicultural office.

Because many Latinos have just arrived in Memphis, she says, they haven’t developed the resentments or expectations that can build up over time. “You don’t have a lot of second- and third-generation Latinos here,” she says. “Everything is brand new. Let’s keep it brand new.”

In other corners of the South, there have been small but angry protests against the growing presence of Latino immigrants. Last year, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke joined one hundred people at an anti-immigrant rally in Siler City, North Carolina. They carried signs that read, “No way, Jose” and “The melting pot is boiling over.”

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Hoping to prevent such scenes in Memphis, Sims and the mayor’s office have worked hard to promote the city’s growing diversity as an economic asset. They’ve also hosted a number of community meetings with the city’s budding Latino and Asian leadership. More than 1,500 people came to one session that was held, like most gatherings of the mayor’s commission, in Midtown.

“The focus is to get everyone who is not white or African American together,” Sims said. “We tell people, ‘You may be Latino, you may be Asian, but we all have things in common.'”

Indeed, there is a certain historical parallel at work in the latest round of migration to Memphis, a thread that joins the 19th century black sharecropper and 21st century Mexican field hand.

In times past, people came to the “capital of the Mississippi Delta” from the surrounding plantations and down-and-out river towns, black and white men and women making new lives in an era marked by harsh segregation laws. A few brought their guitars and voices and made some of the first recordings of what came to be known as the blues.

Now they come to Memphis from places as varied and distant as do the thousands of packages processed hourly at the FedEx Corporation’s worldwide headquarters here.

There are Vietnamese families from fishing towns on the Gulf of Mexico; Mexican veterans of the chicken plants in Arkansas and Alabama; the families of Somali refugees who have become a fixture in heartland cities from Minneapolis to Columbus, Ohio; and the entrepreneurs from the Indian subcontinent who have become dominant in the hotel business across the rural South.

“It’s not New York or L.A., and it’s never going to be, because it’s hot and humid and it’s still the South,” said Judy Peiser of the Memphis-based Center for Southern Folklore. “But it’s a more cosmopolitan place than it used to be.”

Peiser has seen slow and subtle changes to the city’s cultural landscape, most of which are not yet visible to many outsiders, who still think of culture in Memphis as “blues and barbecue.” A few years back, Peiser became aware of a new Memphis musical tradition, the ranchera concert.

“They have these mammoth dances. All these kids come in, young people working in construction,” Peiser said. “They all have money in their pockets. It’s an amazing scene. They take over entire warehouses.”

Memphis now boasts a Spanish-language radio station. When the popular Mexican band Tigres del Norte came into town, it charged $50 a ticket and still managed to fill a 1,000-seat theater. There are street gangs transplanted from neighborhoods in Chicago and California.

But while Latinos make up a large portion of some neighborhoods, they are still just 3 percent of Memphis as a whole (city officials here say that Latinos were grossly undercounted and that the actual number may be twice the census figure). The idea of Latinos having an effect on political life here is still far in the future.

“In Memphis, our community is still in diapers,” said Juan Romo, editor of the Spanish-language weekly La Voz Hispana. “A lot of people haven’t made up their minds to stay here yet. They’re happy to work hard and send money home.”

Memphis’ growing Indian and Pakistani community is further along, however. In 1991, when Herenton campaigned to become the city’s first black mayor, Indian activists here organized a fund-raiser. “It’s always good to have a friend in City Hall,” said Sudhir Agrawal, an accountant and native of New Delhi.

Agrawal is also a volunteer treasurer of the India Cultural Center and Temple, whose one hundred members come to Memphis to worship every week from Hernando, Mississippi; Little Rock, Arkansas; and other places.

“We are involved [in the community] to some extent but not as much into the politics of black and white,” Agrawal said. “We just go about taking care of our business and moving on and expressing our opinions.”

Sims said it was the Indian and Pakistani community’s support for Herenton that helped lay the groundwork for the creation of the Office of Multicultural and Religious Affairs.

“The Hindus came out for him in a very strong and powerful way when no one else wanted to touch him,” Sims said.

When the office finally opened earlier this year, one of the first calls Sims made was to the Mexican consul in New Orleans. She proposed to the diplomat that Mexico establish a consulate here. It would be the city’s first foreign delegation.

After months of waiting, the city got a response, just the other day, in the form of a letter from Mexico City. Unfortunately, the text was in Spanish, and no one in Sims’ office could understand it. So, she ran it through a computer translation program and managed to decipher the message: No consulate yet. But maybe soon.

Latino Immigrants in Memphis: Assessing the Economic Impact

By Marcela Mendoza, David H. Ciscel, and Barbara Ellen Smith

Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 pp. 24-26

Immigrants now play a critical part in the labor force across the country, and the same is increasingly true for Memphis. In 1999, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Latinos made up 12 percent of the U.S. workforce. Whereas in the past Latino immigrants in the South tended to concentrate in agriculture, today they often work in the “new economy”-services, distribution and even construction. Although some have significant job skills and/or professional training, undocumented immigration status and/or limited English proficiency narrow the employment options of many Latinos to low-wage work.

Still, the social, economic, and demographic impact of the Latino population in Memphis is substantial. Preliminary data from a study by The University of Memphis Center for Research on Women (CROW) highlights some important findings.

Over the past decade, the Latino population has at least doubled in nine Southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Tight labor markets (at least until quite recently) have been magnets for Latino migration. According to a report by the Selig Center for Economic Growth, North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee are among the top ten emerging states, as ranked by the rate of growth of Hispanic buying power during 1990-2001.

By far the most common reason why Latinos come to the U. S. is employment opportunity. Latino immigrants tend to be of prime working age, both younger and healthier than the general population. Although some come to unite with their families, the driving force behind their migration to and within the U. S. is the search for jobs. In this, new Latino immigrants have much in common with generations of Southerners who migrated from the rural to urban South, or from the South to the North in search of greater economic opportunity.

Today the impact of Latinos as workers is being felt throughout the United States and their share of buying power is rising in every state. In 2000 the Census Bureau counted a total of 35.3 million Hispanics/Latinos in the U.S., which represents a 58 percent increase compared to 1990, 3 million more than the Bureau anticipated. Such high growth in the Latino population is driven both by immigration and by high birth rates among young Latino families. Given the buoyant labor market in the U.S., Latino immigrant workers have tended not to displace local workers, but rather to fuel economic growth in most regional economies.

Latino Immigration to Memphis

In 1990, the largest number of Latinos in the state of Tennessee was concentrated in the Nashville-Davidson metropolitan area. One in three Latinos in the state lived there or in the counties bordering this area. Three other metropolitan areas of Tennessee had also received significant Latino immigration: Memphis, Clarksville, and Chattanooga. Since then, there has been growth of the Latino population in cities across the state. For example, according to the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, the current population estimate in Davidson County is 45,550 Hispanics-as compared with about 8,000 in 1990. (The 2000 Census counted 26,091 Hispanics in Davidson County.) In addition, certain rural areas, such as the counties surrounding Morristown in east Tennessee, have drawn

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an increasing population of Latinos. Even though their numbers may not be large, the presence of Latinos in such relatively sparsely populated rural areas is especially noticeable.

The new Latino immigrants are younger, more skilled, and more highly educated than those who arrived in previous decades. More women and children have joined the immigration flow each year, suggesting that these new Latino families might become permanent settlers. In the early 1990s, almost 70 percent of Latinos in Tennessee were under the age of thirty-five (compared to one of two non-Latinos). Latinos initially found employment in agriculture, in the fast growing service and distribution sectors, and in the construction industry. In 1990, according to the U. S. Census Bureau estimate, 90 percent of all the Hispanics in Tennessee were U.S. citizens. Today, most are not citizens, and many have an undocumented immigration status. Because of their consequent desire for invisibility, population counts of Latinos-including those of the Census Bureau-are likely underestimates.

In 1990, the U. S. Census Bureau counted 8,116 Hispanics-largely of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Mexican descent-in the Memphis Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Many migrants of Mexican descent who settled in Memphis in those years arrived from the U. S. Southwest. In 2000, the census counted 27,520 Hispanics in the Memphis MSA, a 239 per cent increase over 1990. Others place the figure even higher. A study by The University of Memphis Regional Economic Development Center (REDC) estimates a current community of 53,628 individuals of Hispanic heritage in the Memphis MSA.

Frequently, the new immigrants settle in working-class neighborhoods, along with more established residents. Contrary to a commonly held belief that Latinos are seasonally mobile, these groups already constitute a stable, permanent population in these areas. The majority of recent Latino immigrants arrived in Memphis in the company of family and friends.

Enrollment of Hispanic children in the public and private schools of Memphis and Shelby County is clearly on the rise. There was a total of 2,581 Hispanic students at the end of the academic year 1999-2000, up from 572 in 1992-1993.

Homeownership is a good measure of immigrants’ assimilation to the urban context. Latino communities with Spanish-language newspapers and bilingual real estate agents, as is the case in Memphis, have social networks that provide a flow of information about housing opportunities. CROW’s analysis of public records available through the local Tax Assessor’s Office identified 1,584 Memphis homeowners with Spanish surnames. Of these, we estimate that 828 homeowners-based on their Spanish first name and surname, and the location and value of their property-may be first-generation Latino immigrants.

The Impact of Latinos on the Memphis Economy

Latino workers in the Memphis area have a total economic impact of $1,020,000,000 and 35,972 jobs. That impact is made up of the work they do in the Memphis economy and the jobs they create through their consumer expenditures in Memphis businesses.

Most Latinos came to the Memphis area since the mid-1990s in search of jobs in the vast and growing industries of trade, distribution, and construction. In general, these immigrants have found their job expectations fulfilled. Low unemployment rates in the region made it relatively easy to find employment even if they did not speak English. In addition, it appears that Latinos did not displace local workers. From 1995 to 1999, the number of jobs in the Memphis economy grew from 531,600 to 586,300. While the number of jobs grew by 54,700, the number of workers in the labor force grew by only 35,100, so there were jobs available for new workers.

This analysis of the economic impact of Latino workers on the Memphis regional economy uses traditional

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multipliers to estimate not only the work that Latinos do, but also the jobs that their consumer expenditures create. When a new Latino worker accepts a job in, e.g., the Memphis construction industry, he or she helps the regional economy grow both by earning an income and by spending a portion of that income on housing, food, and other locally purchased goods and services. These expenditures help create even more jobs.

The University of Memphis REDC projected a Memphis Hispanic population of 53,628 in 2000. Assuming a distribution of children, men, and women that is based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s analysis of the national Hispanic population in 1999, there are currently 27,429 Latino workers in the Memphis economy. The gender breakdown for Latino workers in Memphis is 9,470 women and 17,959 men.

These 27,429 Latino workers hold jobs throughout the Memphis economy. However, they tend to be concentrated in three economic sectors: construction, distribution, and retail trade. While some workers in managerial and supervisory jobs may earn as much as $18.00 per hour, most Latinos in the Memphis economy are employed in semi-skilled jobs where wages vary between $7.00 and $10.00 per hour. Although most Latino workers earn less than $20,000 per year, they have one unusual characteristic for low-wage workers: they tend to have very high savings rates. We estimate that the typical Latino worker saves almost 30 percent of his/her income, sending over two-thirds of the savings back to a family in Mexico or another Latin American country.

Latino workers earned $570.8 million dollars in wages and salaries in the Memphis area in 2000. As noted above, most are employed as semi-skilled workers in the construction firms, warehouses and retail trade establishments of the Memphis economy. Often speaking only Spanish, these workers use temporary employment agencies or small firms with Spanish-speaking supervisors to gain employment.

Of the $570.8 million that they earned in 2000, we estimate that Latino workers paid at least $85.6 million in payroll/income taxes and sent $125.6 million home to their families in Mexico or other parts of Latin America. In addition, Latinos generated, through their consumer expenditures, approximately $12.3 million in local and state sales taxes. Perhaps most surprising, Latinos spent $359.6 million in the local economy.

The multiplier impact of these expenditures of $359.6 million by Memphis Latino workers is impressive. These expenditures result in another $664.0 million spent locally by workers and businesses that benefit from Latino workers in the Memphis economy. Consumer expenditures by the Latino community also result in the creation of 8,544 additional local jobs in Memphis. These local expenditures and additional workers increase the regional payroll by $570.8 million for Latino workers and $176.5 million for workers in the other 8,544 new jobs.

In sum, Latino immigrants play an increasingly important role in the social life and regional economy of Memphis. They contribute a new element of cultural diversity to the city’s schools, churches, and neighborhoods. In their search for economic opportunity, Latinos recall prior generations of Southerners who migrated for similar reasons. Just as earlier migrants fueled Memphis’s growth as a major distribution center, so too do contemporary Latino immigrants contribute to regional economic development.

Marcela Mendoza is a senior researcher at the University of Memphis. David H. Ciscel is professor of economics at the University of Memphis. Barbara Ellen Smith is director of the University of Memphis Center for Research on Women. The research for this report, was supported by grants from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Charles Stewart Mott Foundations, in a collaboration with Southern Regional Council and the Highlander Research and Education Center. The full report can be ordered from CROW for $5 plus 8.25 percent Tennessee tax ($3 for bulk orders of five or more). All orders must be prepaid. Please make checks payable to The University of Memphis and remit to Center for Research on Women, 339 Clement Hall, Memphis, TN 38152. For more information, call: 901-678-2770 or email: crow@memphis.edu.