Legislative Gazette

By Alan Chartock
Fri, May 9, 2008 2:59 pm

Sometimes society’s biggest problems are swept under the rug but sometimes history catches up with us. Take America’s history of racism. This country, as a whole, has always based people’s worth on the amount of pigment in their skin. We know full well that we imported people to this country from Africa and treated them as beasts based on the color of their skin. Some of the most venerated leaders in our American pantheon of history, including Washington and Jefferson, kept slaves despite the fact that they acknowledged doing so was both intellectually and morally indefensible. The young and great Lafayette called us on it and spent his life trying to eradicate this blight on our national character. That theoretical and religious understanding which risked world condemnation led to a great civil war, pitting the industrial North against the agricultural South and the slaves were “emancipated.” Of course, we know that you can legally emancipate people but when you keep them in bondage through other means, their chains, though invisible, are just as impenetrable. Racism persisted in the South through segregation and then Jim Crow laws as well as in the North, perhaps less blatantly but no less effectively. Many of us recall a time when this country allowed lynching, separate water fountains, inadequate education and intolerable housing based on the same factors that determined who would be a slave and who would not. In the great scheme of history, this took place a blink of an eye ago. We are still living with the consequences.
Our prisons are disproportionately filled with people of color. Our poorest citizens are still people of color. We have forced those who are undereducated, undernourished and under-respected to live at the lowest stratum of society. We have created a class of have-nots who are the most vulnerable when it comes to drugs and poverty and criminal acts. It took the murders of Martin Luther King and Emmett Till and three young boys buried in an earthen dam to make for limited change. Just as an operation leaves scars, the consequences of this legacy of injustice still plague us today. For those citizens with the greatest amount of skin pigmentation, the consequences have been awful. Just look at the prevalence of diabetes and other diseases and you will see what our history has wrought. The perpetuation of more subtle forms of racism has caused the white middle class to feel threatened by those who we have placed at the bottom, educationally and socially. This, despite the fact that the overwhelming number of people of color are just as law abiding and loving to their families and afraid of drugs and crime as I am. Those at the top rungs of power maintain control by playing us off against one another. That’s what the Republican “Southern Strategy” is all about and that’s why we keep electing Republican presidents. Some politicians have seen fit to bring a few politically compliant black citizens into their administrations. Condoleezza Rice and Clarence Thomas are symbols of our schizophrenic attitude. As a society, we know we’ve done a really bad thing. Until we make the same corrections we made in the Civil War, we will continue to be plagued by crime and drugs and poverty.
The people who live closest to those who are black are most likely to worry about empowerment. It is not surprising that Barack Obama has had the toughest time getting votes in some of the biggest industrial states. On the other hand, for the first time ever, one of the major candidates for the presidency is a brilliant and level-headed black American. It is clear that he knows what he represents. Like the great Jackie Robinson, Obama has to take what is being dished out by his opponents with equanimity, despite the unfairness of the attacks. In a country filled with racial fear and hatred, this man risks all but he goes forward.
In the end, the question is whether Americans will recognize that we will never be whole until we deal with the allocation of resources based on race. That means making our schools better and giving every child a chance to become a Barack Obama. It means at a great accessible state university anyone can have the opportunity to receive a higher education and a health care system where everyone gets treated equally. Underneath, we all know what the stakes are. The question is whether we have the internal courage to do what is right. We can do it now or we can do it later. But if we wait, the consequences will continue to be severe.
We finally have a black governor in New York. He is bright and decent and knows full well what cards he has been dealt. Tough times, tough decisions but a chance to put right that which has been wrong for so long.