George Floyd, Protests, and Rioting (Part 2): Real Problems…and Politics

In my last post, I argued that, despite the fact that there are certainly racial injustices in America today and certainly instances of unjust police brutality and harassment, the prevailing narrative that is often pushed in our society today about how racist white police officers were  “hunting down black men” and that white people were “committing black genocide” is simply not true. In this post, I want to try to focus on what/where the most severe racial problems in this country really are. I’m not an expert by any means, but hopefully what I say will be worthwhile.

The First Two Categories of Racial Problems
When it comes to racial problems in America today, I think we can break them down into three general categories. The first category is what I’ll call general racism. It’s the racist attitudes, actions, and biases that many people just have. I imagine just about any black person will tell you they experience this on a regular basis: strange looks in the store, white parents not letting their children go to a birthday party of a black classmate, actual racist name-calling and other racist speech. Or in the case of some cities like Boston, black athletes are subjected to a constant barrage of racist name-calling from lowlifes in the stands. I particularly remember back in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected, one of my students who was black told me that one of her white friends at the school with whom she had grown up told her that that her parents had quipped something like, “Next thing you know, those blacks will be lynching whites now!” As disgusting as this kind of racism is, it is always going to be around. It’s not illegal, and in a country in which there is free speech, people are free to be racist jerks in their attitudes and speech. That being said, that kind of behavior can and should be addressed in other ways if it happens at a workplace…or Fenway Park…in the form of firing the person or banning the person from games.

The second category is what I’ll call police-related/perceived racism, not in the sense that police are necessarily racist, but in the sense that it is a fact that police are predominately stationed in, and are called to, those areas in which there is more crime. And in America, the areas in which there are the highest crime and murder rates are the inner cities, which tend to be predominately minority/black communities. It goes without saying that if you are working in a high crime area, it is human nature to be a bit more suspicious of people and a be bit quicker to respond with force at the hint of any problem, not because they are black, but because it is a crime-filled area.

That being said, most police officers still maintain a high degree of professionalism and ethics in their job. At the same time, some obviously don’t, and that is where a major problem lies. As many are now realizing, a major problem has been that police unions have negotiated deals that make firing bad cops a really hard thing to do. That is a specific problem that needs to be addressed in order to deal with those cops who are racist or who do use unnecessary force and brutality.

The Root Cause of Racial Problems (at least in my opinion)
That, though, really isn’t the root of the racial problems in our society. The root cause can be seen in a third category, which I’ll call politically neglectful racism. Again, this is particularly prevalent in our inner cities, where there is shocking poverty, a failed education system, drugs, gangs, and no real economic opportunities for people who are born into all that and find themselves are virtual prisoners in a hopeless situation. If you want to see a picture of what true hopelessness looks like, go visit the inner cities of some of our major cities—you’ll see it. And when you do, you should realize that the root problem isn’t cops hunting unarmed black men—like I said in my previous post, that rarely happens. And it isn’t even those instances police harassment and brutality—although too often when that does happen, those bad cops often get away with it.

The real problem that continually oppresses so many minority communities is how politicians and city leaders have utterly abandoned those communities and have just sat around for decades doing absolutely nothing to help them. They see the drugs, the crime, the poverty, the failed schools, but seem to never lift a finger to actually improve the situation on the ground to where there isn’t as much of a need to call the police in the first place. I will never broadbrush all police as bad because of the actions of a few bad actors. Most cops are good, hard-working, and honorable people. I will also never fault politicians who at least try to work in bi-partisan fashion to address some of the toughest problems in our country. But what I cannot forgive is the utter failure of incompetent and corrupt politicians and parties that never seem to do anything to address the problems that are ravaging minority communities in the inner cities. In my opinion, this is where the root cause of so much of our racial problems is to be found.

And here’s where what I am going to say is going to sound partisan. I’m sorry, but it is factually true: The cities in which minority communities suffer from poverty, crime, failed schools, and hopelessness the most (cities like Chicago, New York, Detroit, DC, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Oakland) all have been run by Democrat majorities for decades. Chicago hasn’t had a Republican mayor since the 1920s—that is almost a century of Democrat control. I’m not saying all Democrats are bad or all Democrats are as incompetent and corrupt as the Democrats who run Chicago (and those other cities). But I am saying that whatever the Democrat party has been doing in those cities for decades (and in Chicago’s case, almost a century!), it certainly isn’t working.

The ambivalence of some of these leaders is astounding. In light of the rioting and killing that has gone on in Chicago over the past two weeks, when Mayor Lori Lightfoot was on a conference call with her city aldermen, Democrat alderman Raymond Lopez told her of the destruction that was going on in his ward. He told her how the police weren’t able to keep control, how they were begging churches to help them by getting in between the rioters and the police, how half his neighborhoods were “already obliterated,” how he was afraid that the rioters would start attacking residential homes, and how gang-bangers were walking around with AK-47s, “looking to settle some scores.” And what was her response? “I think you are 100% full of shit. If you think we’re not ready and we stood by to let the neighborhood go up, there is nothing intelligent I can say to you. …That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”

That is the mayor of Chicago. 700 Chicago residents are killed every year, and over the past two weeks, as her own aldermen are telling her, neighborhoods, decidedly minority neighborhoods, are being “obliterated” as gang-bangers with AK-47s are walking the streets, and that is her reaction. If you want to know who is most responsible for the hopelessness and oppression of inner-city minorities, it is politicians like her. I don’t care what party it is, but if a political party has been running a big city for decades and decades, and they continue to produce city leaders like Lori Lightfoot who are either too incompetent or corrupt to protect and improve the lives of those minority communities that have suffered the most, then that party has to be voted out of power.

Our political leaders ultimately are our employees, andwe should judge them based on their deeds and job performance—not how well they give a speech or pose for a photo-op, but whether or not they actually address the most pressing needs at hand. If they fail to do their jobs, no matter which party they represent, they need to be voted out of office. And when it comes to the topic of this post, namely the root cause of so much oppression of racial minorities in this country, we have to be brutally honest. The places in this country where “the system” is most oppressive to minority communities are the major cities in which Democrats have an ironclad lock on political power. It is simply an undeniable fact.

The Clinton Crime Bill of 1994: Truth and Fiction…and a Complex Reality
Over the past 25 years, though, there has been one major federal attempt to address crime in this country: the Clinton Crime Bill of 1994. With hindsight, many people point to this bill as the guilty culprit that led to the mass incarceration of black men. Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow, makes this very argument. Now, it certainly is true that the “get tough on crime” policy in the Clinton Crime Bill ended up having the effect of disproportionally affecting black communities and turning low-level criminal offenders into life-long felons. Anyone who doesn’t now see the serious flaws in that crime bill simply is not in touch with reality.

But here is where things are going to get really uncomfortable. The general assumption by many today is that the Republican party is primarily guilty for the oppression of black people. But the fact is that the Clinton Crime Bill was championed by a Democrat president (Bill Clinton) and put together by two other leading Democrats (Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden). Now, I am not for once second going to accuse any of those men for being racist or for putting the bill together so that they could oppress black people. That would be ignorant and stupid. It needs to be pointed out, though, that at the time the bill had widespread bi-partisan approval, was endorsed by the Congressional Black Caucus, and had the support of countless black mayors and pastors across the nation. And why did they support it? Because anyone who was aware of what was going on in the inner cities in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s knows that the crime and homicide rates were out of control. People wanted law enforcement to get tougher and try to restore safety and order in those neighborhoods. Thus, the intent of the bill was not to oppress black people, but to rather to fight crime, particularly in the inner cities, where innocent black people were being victimized by rampant crime in their neighborhoods.

And a further fact is that the bill did have an effect on reducing crime to an extent (it just failed to address the other pressing needs in the inner cities). In the 70s-80s, Chicago averaged about 700 homicides a year, most of which were of minorities in the inner city. In the early 90’s before the crime bill, that figure shot up to about 900 homicides a year. By 2001, the average had dropped to about 600 homicides a year and by 2016 it had dropped further to about 400 a year. The past few years, though, that figure has jumped back up to 700+ homicides a year.

Let’s look at New York City. In the 70-80s, the average number of homicides a year fluctuated between 600-700; in the early 90s, it is skyrocketed to 1900 homicide a year; by 2001, it had dropped to about 650 a year, and by 2018, it had been reduced to 290 a year. The reason for such the dramatic drop in NYC also has to do with the stop and frisk policy started by Rudy Giuliani and continued with Michael Bloomberg. In any case, most big cities around the country followed the similar slight declines in violent crime and homicides as Chicago in the same time period.

Given all that, what should be conclude? Is Clinton, Schumer, Biden, the GOP, Giuliani, Bloomberg, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the countless black mayors and pastors who supported those measures all racist? Was their intention to oppress and lock up black men? I certainly don’t think so. Should we ignore the fact that the bill, along with policies like “stop and frisk” really did reduce crime in the inner cities? To do so would be to ignore reality. At the same time, should we ignore the fact that those policies have also had a disproportionate and detrimental effect on minority communities? Again, to do so would be to ignore reality. And if we ignore that reality, we will never be able to address what needs to be fixed.

Instead of issuing blanket condemnations, perhaps a better way to go is to take an honest look at everything and acknowledge they were well-intentioned policies that had mixed results, some positive, some negative. And because we are a free society and we can chose our leaders, we have the ability, indeed the duty and responsibility, to continually try and improve the lives of all people, most importantly those who are suffering the most.

The laws and policies we have today are not reflective of some sort of irrevocable “systematic racism” that is so “embedded in our DNA” that the only option left is for us to tear down the entire system. Rather, they are examples of flawed people working within a flawed system trying to deal with really complex problems and improve the lives of people. No matter what system you have, that is always going to be the case. There will never be a perfect system. We need to make sure that we as a society always continue to address the inevitable problems that will come up with any bill or policy.

It’s like a continual game of “Whack-a-Mole.” A bill will address and fix one problem over here, but then will have the unintended consequence of creating a problem over there. We then have to find a way to fix that problem, but we need to realize that no matter how we fix it, there will always be unintended consequences that we will have to continually address. All that said, though, we can’t ignore all the progress that has been done. Diversity training, the hiring of more minorities in law enforcement, and body-cameras all are positive steps that have improved law enforcement and will, in time, help improve the lives of everyone, especially minorities.

Conclusion Thus Far
It is very tempting, when talking about racism in America, to keep everything at a very shallow and superficial level, where celebrities put out videos of themselves repenting of how they’ve been insensitive, or where people do hashtag campaigns and spout overgeneralized slogans, or where we look for a simple scapegoat to blame for everything. That won’t get us anywhere, though. If that’s all we do, things will only get worse.

If you really want to do something about racism in America, you have to first look around and see where it pops up in your own neighborhood and town and then you have to do decide to specifically do something about it where you live. That’s you’re responsibility. On a national/political level, though, you have to get specific and ask things like, “Where are the worst instances of racial injustice? What are the leaders in those communities and cities doing to address it?” Shine a spotlight on the political leaders who are actually responsible for governing those areas and hold them accountable. That is the only way the deep racial problems in our country will ever be addressed.