Combatting Racism in America

The Israeli paper, Haaretz, reported that Israel had approved construction of some 4,000 units on the West Bank for Israeli settlement. The US State Department condemned the announcement. As University of Michigan Middle-East expert Juan Cole described it, Israel would take “land owned by Palestinian families and bring in squatters from Israel” to settle on their land. Now we learn that Israeli soldiers beat and kicked pall bearers at a reporter’s funeral.

I drafted commentary condemning what happened. And then Payton Gendron killed ten people at a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo. And it’s clear that the racists in this country have been buying racism and murder in all guises filled with made-up conspiracy theories and racial libels. One moment it’s Blacks, the next is Jews, and another moment its Muslims. Actually I was studying that in the 90s and Republicans blocked every effort to investigate the dangerous racism of armed private militias training around the country. Their efforts to block investigation of armed racist groups then and their embrace of racist slander now mean they own it.[1] Patriotic Republicans need to create a new party of patriots which the existing Republican Party is not.

Tut-tut – but what are we going to do about it? Suburbanization and other forms of segregation don’t work – it permitted and even encouraged a reign of intimidation and terror in the formerly segregated South; Israel segregates its Palestinians from its Jews in schools and towns and see how that is solving problems. So what should we do? Take down Trump and all his followers? Then what?

My work has had me focused like a laser on the US Supreme Court? It is a major problem. Yes, but how long will dealing with that take? I’d vote to defund all the expenses that allow it to function like a court – but who’d join me?

Real gun control? We now have an armed population like the places most likely to suffer civil war. In fact the diffusion of guns is one of the stongest indicators of a country about to fall apart.[2] Gendron’s real-time posting of the video of his attack was obviously intended to incite a race war. Some of us have been trying for years to deal with guns. Are we going to hold our breathe?

How about creating liberal militias designed to counteract the armed racist militias? That of course is an invitation to civil war in which the defenders will be blamed for starting it.

Repeal the Second Amendment? The rules for amendments will block that.

National service or restore the draft? That would force people to work together. The military  has dealt with integration more effectively than most American institutions. There has long been a movement for national service. It’s hardly clear if it has a political chance but it is one I would wholeheartedly support – it may be the one response that could change our society for the better.

Each and all of those strategies? Racism and prejudice are universal threats. We have to stamp them out all over or be consumed by them.

Here in Albany, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, men and women, gays and straights, Blacks and whites have all prayed together, with each other and for each other’s safety and well-being. That’s as it should be.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on May 31, 2022.

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[1] Kenneth S. Stern, A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate 128 (Norman: U. Okla. Press, 1997)

[2] Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and the Breakdown of American Politics, 175-77 (New York: NYU Press 2016)

The Rise of Intolerance in America

For the podcast, please click here.

I have to report a problem and I don’t know how to deal with it.

One of my professors, Karl W. Deutsch, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, wrote a book in which he showed the connection between violence, the speed of integration and the relative size of the integrating group.[1] Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders were certainly correct that it’s hard to go slower than the centuries it has been taking to incorporate the African-American people into the body politic. But we liberals are changing America and to the wrong wing it seems we are doing it very fast. We’re changing American morals, what you can see in a movie theatre or on your screen (though many of them watch), our sexual codes, who can marry and what they can do together, religious pluralism replacing a strictly Christian perspective and our acceptance of people of darker hues. And the people of color seeking integration into American culture is proportionately large. Frankly I am infinitely more comfortable in gatherings in the Black community than I am with the wrong-wingers who challenge the very idea of mutual acceptance and respect. The polls are making it clear that the pushback, the violent pushback, is coming from the racists who can’t imagine living in a multi-color world, are terrified and outraged by it. What Karl Deutsch uncovered many decades ago scares me.

Some of us have been reporting for years on the connection between so-called patriot militias, gun sales, and a gun culture that has gone way beyond hunting and become political and racist, indeed revolutionary as their literature and signs proclaim. I certainly don’t mean everyone who owns a gun but it doesn’t take all of them to create a huge problem. The political use of weapons became obvious in the shooting of members of Congress like Gabby Giffords, the armed insurrection in Michigan, at the U.S. Capitol and elsewhere. Domestic terrorism, much of it wrong-wing, has become the number one form of terrorism in the U.S. Threats of violence are being built into statutes and “normalized” as part of American politics. The social science literature tells us that the prevalence of guns predicts the end of democracy.[2] But we have not been able to do anything about it until very recently, not just gun control, but combat it via law enforcement and terrorism investigations and prosecutions. In other words the wrong wing has dug in politically and are blocking any attempts to hold them in check. So they get ever more dangerous.

Thomas C. Schelling, wrote a very famous article[3] in which he showed that in any population with a distribution of feelings about living near neighbors who differ in such ways as race or religion, even where most people are fine with it, the community will resegregate because those most nervous will move out and the community will become proportionally more dominated by the other group. Good riddance perhaps except that the next most nervous group will move out until the community resegregates.

My own Albany neighborhoods have been integrated and I like it that way – some of the people of color have been students of mine and I’m delighted to have them as neighbors. It’s also clear that the neighborhood is slowly darkening because there has been no violence and lots of acceptance. I like a polyglot world and feel quite safe in it, but I’ve no idea who will leave, and what part color will play in their decisions. If integration improves understanding, resegregation does not.

In other words I don’t see good and peaceful solutions. Edward R. Morrow used to end his broadcasts by saying “Good night and good luck.” Yes, for all of you, in spades.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on Feb. 1, 2022.

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[1] Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1953).

[2] I described and cited the literature in Unfit for Democracy (NYU Press 2016), particularly Chapter 8, at 175-77.

[3] On the Ecology of Micromotives, 25 Public Interest 59 (Fall 1971).

The Case for Black Reparations

Many years ago, one of my professors at law school, Boris Bittker, wrote a book called The Case for Black Reparations. Bittker was known mostly for his work on taxation, but he cared and wrote a great deal about race. One year at Reunions, he took my wife and me to see a pair of very interesting films about the confinement of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast in internment camps during World War II, and the experience of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii, many of whom served in the American military. Bittker’s book on black reparations went through the issues in a very lawyerly way as if he were arguing to a court. But let me describe it on a very human level.

First the white slavers stole the freedom of Africans. Then they stole many of their lives, and, of those who survived, they stole the fruits of Black labor. When finally, the slaves were legally freed, White Supremacists stole it all again: the lives of African-Americans by lynching, their labors by a century of intimidation that virtually re-enslaved them. And when finally they found places where they could prosper, White Supremacists, many in the white robes of Klansmen, burned those places to the ground – the Black Wall Street in Tulsa,  Rosewood in FL;  changed election results by murder in places like Colfax County, Louisiana,  and Wilmington, North Carolina; and went on murderous rampages in a number of northern cities.  When whites made programs that helped build white wealth – like Social Security and Unemployment Insurance – jobs held by Blacks were excluded by statute. When Blacks sought good jobs, discrimination shut them out. When segregation finally became illegal, African-Americans had to start again on the ground floor of white men’s businesses, where once again they were given little for their effort – how many times do Trump and his white supremacist supporters insist on making their own wealth by stealing the labors of African-Americans?

And when they engage in peaceful protest, they’re told it’s unseemly behavior. Heaven forbid a Black man take a knee, or complain that Black Lives Matter. We aren’t supposed to focus on righting the wrongs to our African-American friends, colleagues, clients, customers and citizens.

So yes, there’s a strong case for reparations. I understand we’re not equally responsible nor equally beneficiaries of the wrongs done. But we Americans quite ordinarily help each other when we can. And, anyway, that’s a problem for the tax code – if the rich make the poor pay for reparations, it will be just as unfair as everything else the rich make others pay for. It matters how it’s done.

I have, however, one reservation. The most important thing that we can do for our African-American brothers and sisters is to secure their safety. We’ve all been talking about that nonstop for quite a while as each new case surfaces of African-Americans viciously and needlessly killed.  I’ve been commenting about that for years and have worked to fight it in the courts. I’m not sure what road gets there first, so that my friends, colleagues and former clients can enjoy their lives, family, property and careers in safety. That will take more than money. It will take effort and commitment to turn so-called law enforcement around so that it enforces the law for the benefit of everyone, including people of color. Few things would give me greater joy or peace of mind than to be able to share this life in peace and justice with all of you.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on July 7, 2020.

 

Not If We Rest On Our Laurels

Americans like to say we’re no. 1, we’re the greatest, the world’s only superpower. So this is for the America greatsters. Not if we rest on our laurels, we’re not. Our genes came from all over the world. The science that’s been our glory, had many stages of development off our shores. The world doesn’t sit still waiting for the U.S. to create the next big thing. Several Asian countries have nuclear weapons. Several are challenging our digital developments, invading our privacy and platforms in ways that threaten the utility of what gets designed here.

Americans like to say we’re the richest country in the world but seldom want to do more than say it. If one examines the data, some Americans are extremely wealthy, but most of us aren’t and don’t live as well as average people in many industrialized countries. That’s in the data.

We like to say we have the world’s best health care system but it didn’t outperform everyone else in the Covid-19 crisis, and our life expectancy is not so high among westernized countries.

We developed the best education the world had known but we have largely abandoned it, abandoned the grade schools and abandoned the state colleges and universities.

We’re not the greatest if we rest on our laurels. We’re not the greatest if we treat scientific prowess as established, abandon science education from kindergarten through graduate schools and stop investing in scientific research. We’re not the greatest if we ideologically assume that government has been hamstringing our scientific prowess when in fact much American technological prowess was the result of government investment – in nuclear physics, in getting to the moon, in the initial development of the internet – programs which spawned modern broadcast and digital technology and virtually everything we use in modern life. American technological progress didn’t end with Thomas Edison; modern progress developed in tandem with government investment. Most of the important drugs we rely on depended on government investment and it’s crucial for vaccines.

We’re not the best if we assume everyone will still come to American universities while great universities develop abroad. We’re not the best if we insult everyone with our boasting and then expect them to continue coming here to study, live and work. We’re not the greatest if we continue to disparage people from eastern countries while failing to notice that they are closing the gap and even outstripping us in technological development.

We’re not the best if the method people adopt so that we are great again, let alone the best, is by dividing us against each other, blocking half the country from contributing to the extent of their abilities. Our sports teams were not at their best when we had a color line. And no field of activity will continue to rank at the top by excluding people with obvious talent. That’s just deadweight loss, using our energies to fight one another instead of building up our abilities.

No, America cannot be the best, or number 1, or great again if we rest on our laurels.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on May 12, 2020.

 

Heaven in Hawaii

We were out of town most of last month and the trip back took three separate flights, all the hassle of traveling by plane, and more than 24 hours from leaving my wife’s cousin to walking into our front door. We’re still recovering from the time difference, the lack of sleep and the heat wave in heaven.

Yes, I’ve been to heaven and back and made interesting discoveries. First, some locals call it HaVaii – no W in the sound. In heaven, there are people from all over the world, down under and up top, east and west, all the continents and colors, many of whom speak six languages and everybody smiles. Yes it’s possible to pull a muscle even in heaven but when I fell two men rushed to help me – one had ancestors in Africa, the other in Europe – and both were lovely, wonderful men, determined to get me back on my feet.

Strange things happen in heaven. Mark Twain thought it very strange that human beings assume that everyone will play the harp in heaven though most wouldn’t be caught near one on earth. Perhaps equally strange, my wife got me into the ocean. I hadn’t done that in decades since our children were small. I had good memories of the Atlantic near West Palm but I forgot about the surf in Jones Beach and it played with me like I was a toy. When my wife tried to help me, it knocked us both down.  One more thing an aging reader and sitter like me has to relearn – how to face the ocean, stare it down and charge.

Life is so different in Hawaii from the constant patter from Washington about race, color, ancestry and who the heck is better than everybody else. Hawaii is proof that life can be lovely. Except that so many people, and worse, builders and hotel magnates, have made that discovery that they have changed the climate. One of our taxi drivers told us how lovely the climate was on the hill behind Honolulu. And my wife remembered it from a trip half a century ago – though we were clearly a couple by then we came home from Iran at different times and by different routes so I missed seeing Hawaii before there were clouds in heaven.

A photo of my wife was taken in D.C. with a frame that said “citizen of the world.” That is what peace means – that we are citizens of the world and recognize the same in others, treating others, all others, like we ourselves would like to be treated, the Golden Rule, or loving our neighbors as ourselves, another biblical formulation.

I’ve had that pleasure before – on the mall in Washington the day Martin Luther King told us about his dream, or in the offices of the NAACP or the legal services program, in the company of many of this area’s great folk singers, former Peace Corps Volunteers, or sometimes just on the streets of New York where people have learned to live and love together, and among other dear family, friends, colleagues and neighbors – I’ve been lucky enough to live and work largely in supportive environments. It’s a wonderful feeling, to see the love without having to watch your back. It spells peace in many languages, and heaven too.

Even heaven isn’t perfect. There are justified complaints about the way those with native Hawaiian ancestry have been dispossessed of some of what should be theirs but it’s still a joy to see the way people live and work together. On the way out, I had a chance to interview two African-American women who’ve been working there, one a military officer, and they confirmed the rewarding pleasures of living and working with people there.

There’s so much more to enjoy in the islands than beaches and breezes, luaus and leis. You’ll find great examples there of the spirit that made America great.

• This commentary was broadcast on Nov. 5, 2019, on WAMC/Northeast Public Radio

Take America Back

It is painful to see the forces of hate killing men, women and children on many continents and here in many states, in schools and public places, taking apart the work of what we have been honoring as the greatest American generation who spilt their blood for the America they loved. It is painful and frightening to see the effort of the alt-Wrong to rip apart the free world that this country took the lead in creating. It’s painful to see terrorists crediting an American president as their inspiration for murder.

When I was a small boy, American men were fighting, and dying, in the Pacific, Africa, Italy and, after the landing in Normandy, through France and Germany. They were struggling for freedom, democracy and brotherhood. As the war ended, Truman sent Franklin Roosevelt’s widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, to the UN. Truman sent her there to make clear to the world the depth of America’s commitment to building a robust and sustainable free world. She chaired the seventeen-­member UN Commission on Human Rights and led that body in the development of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You could have drawn much of it from our own Constitution. These were American ideals on the world stage.

In 1948, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Vinson held racially restrictive covenants unconstitutional. Then in 1952 the NAACP brought five cases to the Supreme Court challenging segregation and seeking to overrule Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that had upheld segregation in 1896. The Truman Administration told the Court that the US was being attacked around the globe because of segregation and that segregation complicated American foreign policy. Obviously important, the case was reargued after President Eisenhower took office and Chief Justice Vinson had died. Eisenhower’s Justice Department submitted its own brief to the Court, and it underscored the arguments of the Truman Administration that this country needed to end segregation. The Supreme Court agreed; in Brown and a series of cases it made clear that American government could make no distinction of race, creed or heritage in its treatment of Americans.

Americans cheered Brown and made clear it was a popular decision. We believed what they said in the Declaration, that “all men are created equal.” Americans fought a Civil War over that principle. By the time of Brown, this country had embraced people like Jesse Owens, Marion Anderson, and Ralph Bunche among many others. With some obvious and vocal exceptions, Americans embraced the end of segregation. That is the America embraced the world over, admired for its principles and its heart. That is the America that took all of us to its heart regardless of which country our ancestors came from, which faith they brought. That is the country that our ancestors embraced with both love and pride, the America they wanted to be part of and contribute to. That is the America they wanted for us. That is the America we need to take back.

An America with neither mind nor heart clearly needs a trip to see a Wizard of Oz. An America with a man in a position of power who gloats that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” with impunity is an America which actually does need to deport someone, and to wall out the orange-haired imposter before he corrupts our genetic inheritance.

— A version of this commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 19, 2019.

The Sacredness, and the Uniqueness, of Brotherly Love

The ethnic slaughter in so many parts of the world – Kenya, Myanmar, Rwanda, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, the “troubles” in Ireland, Ukraine, the blood shed at the separation of Pakistan and India – make the uniqueness of American anti-discrimination rules stand out both for their moral high ground and for their protection of human life.

They provided a way to live together in peace, even if getting there has been difficult. They provided a beacon, a light to the world, on living together. Conceived in part as a city on a hill; America was to light the world with our example. Indeed it has. That strong belief in the equality of mankind and the welcome to people from all across the globe has always been attractive.

The Enlightenment in Europe was largely about the idea of equality and learning to live with people despite differences in religion and diverse origins. America was founded on that Enlightenment ideal and, while never quite satisfying its own ideals, to an appreciable extent lived it. In the colonies, after the Revolution and until modern times, the U.S. has welcomed immigrants. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and other faiths were here from the Founding and helped build this country. It is an experiment both in peacefulness and in the Biblical injunction to love thy neighbor, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. It has been a religious enterprise, a nation building enterprise, and an enterprise in foreign affairs for which this nation has been justly celebrated.

Until now.

Would Ireland, India and so many other places have escaped their rivers of blood had their colonial rulers sought to bring people together in fairness, and ruled from the moral high ground, rather than striving to divide that they might conquer? To imagine is to wish for them the brilliance of the American solution.

America has brought peoples together for centuries. Public schools were conceived to bring together rich and poor, and they were soon called to bring together boys and girls. The military and large businesses made it their mission to bring people together across ethnic, religious and language boundaries that they might have unified armies and a unified workforce. Businesses created Americanization programs from which immigrants emerged proud Americans. Teddy Roosevelt told America that nothing brings men together like the military tent. Even racial prejudices have been receding in the face of integration – this nation has been celebrating African-Americans in music and the arts from the beginning of the twentieth century if not before, in sports especially since Jackie Robinson joined the Dodger lineup in 1947, and in many other areas since as having colleagues, bosses, employees, neighbors, friends and even spouses from different communities of race, religion and ethnic identity has become much more common. This march toward realizing the promise of equality has been going on for two hundred fifty years. Much of America has been shaped by that march, by its progress, by its moral growth.

Nothing has been more American than reaching out – in private groups and NGOs that have provided services abroad, and in government groups like the Peace Corps, US AID, Volunteers in Service to America, programs to acculturate immigrants here, provide the tools to leave poverty behind, and bring people from all cultures together in our schools and businesses.

Nothing has been so attractive to the world, as the fact that people everywhere could see themselves in us. It is a great heritage, a bulwark against all the beasts of the world; we must not forsake it.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, July 17, 2018.

 

I Have a Dream

The North was segregated after Brown outlawed segregation in 1954. It didn’t happen by private individual choices but by government decisions that blocked banks from lending to African-Americans in both the suburbs and inner cities. Those now well documented decisions created many of the inner cities’ problems and the struggle to make equality real. But who cares?

Who cares because all the proposals to fix a huge injustice, not in the distant years of slavery but now, mean paying to help “them.” It’s fine if someone else pays. But not us, not the wealthy, the middle class or the poor.

So are there answers society could adopt?

We nibble: the Fresh Air Fund, scholarships for the African-American elite, the people who overcame all the potholes and roadblocks in their way.

In 1938, years before Brown, the Supreme Court understood that the inescapable sin of segregation was the barrier to networking. Missouri was prepared to send African-Americans to any law school in neighboring states so that they would get what Missouri called an “equal” education, but not to Missouri schools. Presaging Brown, the Court said it wasn’t equal to deny African-Americans the chance to get to know future colleagues, adversaries, judges and legislators. As Brown would say 16 years later, segregation is inherently unequal.

There lies the real problem of race – any real solution involves us all. Would we put the resources into “their” schools that we put into “ours”? Would we share some classrooms? Would we allow willing parents to send their kids to our schools or would a modest program be too much for us or the racist majority on the court in Washington?

I think there will be success for African-Americans too. Fresh out of slavery, their ancestors created a system of higher education,  fine colleges and universities which survive and thrive. Then they started the climb toward the middle class familiar to many of us. Many African-Americans joined the ranks of civil servants in the federal government. Government service had been a route out of poverty for many of our ancestors. But beginning in 1913, after years of progress, President Wilson excluded African-Americans from all but menial federal jobs, pushing educated and successful African-Americans out of the federal bureaucracy.

That story was repeated after World War II, after Brown v. Board, when federal officials denied that African-Americans had any rights the capitalist system need honor and instead used the federal agencies they controlled to block African-Americans from getting loans to build businesses or join the march to the suburbs. It wasn’t anything African-Americans did, but that deliberate undermining of their efforts and successes laid the seeds of contemporary inner city problems.

There are many more chapters to the story of the ways that the financial and political rugs were pulled from under potentially successful African-Americans and their businesses. The road of our African-American brothers and sisters has been longer, harder, more unjust than the ancestors of most of the rest of us because America made it so.

I was there in front of the Lincoln Memorial when Dr. Martin Luther King shared his glorious dream. That dream of equality belongs to all of us. All of us depend on the crucial American realization that all mankind is created equal. So, like most Americans, I thrilled to King’s words. And I admire the principled courage and dedication of Charlottesville’s counter-protestors. Their presence was an indication of the progress America has made, and their struggle reflects the distance still to travel.  King’s dream, our dream, is still a dream.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, August 22, 2017.

On the Effects of Brown

To make it available on the web, I am posting this commentary originally aired on Dec. 10, 2003 together with a note describing the literature:

ON THE EFFECTS OF BROWN
Steve Gottlieb

It is easy to forget how recent are the pathologies that so many of us now routinely associate with black “ghettos”.

My dad taught music in a high school in Brooklyn. Because of the way music was handled, he had almost everyone who came through the school in his classes. When the district boundaries were changed in the early 60s he reacted with relief. The black kids who now came to the school were much easier to handle than the white toughs who now went to other schools.

In my youth black leather jackets were much scarier than black skin.

I am suggesting that the pathologies we associate with poor black ghettos are a product of the past half century.

Before Brown v. Board there was an entirely separate black economy. Riots and lynchings made it a dangerous world for blacks. But you could have all your needs taken care of without ever stepping outside of the black community from hair cuts to a plot in a cemetery. There were black doctors and black hospitals, black stores and black insurance companies. Some black communities were quite successful. Jealous whites burned the black district in Tulsa among others. Slaves had been trained in all the needed skills and one looked to their descendents until poorer whites forceably ejected them after the Civil War. In that black economy, however limited, blacks were masters in their own house.

By the time of Brown, large changes were affecting the black community. Blacks came north for jobs that had been opened by World War II. They moved into cities near those jobs.

Meanwhile, the Federal Highway Administration built the roads that opened up the suburbs. That led to an exodus. We burned a lot of gas in our old 1937 Chevy getting to old friends who’d moved out.

But the Federal Housing Administration red-lined the suburbs. That is, if you were white, you could have your mortgage guaranteed. If you were black, you were not welcome. The suburbs from their origins were lily white not because of white flight from blacks but because a house in the country had been an American dream which whites, but not blacks, were now able to realize.

They couldn’t move to the suburbs, and going all the way back to the time of Brown, what was variously called urban renewal or slum clearance tore down blacks’ homes in the cities. Blacks just called it “Negro clearance.” What happened to all those black businesses? When the government seizes property it has to pay just compensation. But only to the property owners. It assumes that lessees, i.e. most businesses, can get equivalent value elsewhere, that nothing is destroyed. But of course if the business is dependent on the neighborhood trade, it loses what we lawyers call good will and businesses call it loyal customers. As businesses were forced out, they had to start over, on the ground floor.

Minority-owned “mom-and-pop” businesses declined by half from 1960 to 1980.

Storied neighborhoods, live with business and social networks, are simply gone. Torn down to make way for offices and white owned stores. And then deserted even by the whites because there was no neighborhood left to support them – people had gone to the suburbs or been pushed out for “renewal.”

Now add Brown into the mix. all those blacks who had been shopping inside the black community could shop at Woolworth’s and other national businesses. So another economic prop was pulled out from under the black community.

Integration was not an unmixed blessing. Whole industries in the black economy disappeared and, with them, much of the capital that had been amassed. Working in the white economy meant starting the ladder at the bottom, playing by white rules and customs, and insisting on white good faith in hiring, training, educating and promoting blacks.

Ten years after Brown, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 including provisions relating to equal employment, housing, public accommodations and government programs. Then the battle started in earnest with some defendants fighting decade long legal battles to avoid having to do anything. That was when courts started to employ the same remedies that they had for schools, telling defendants that they had talked the talk long enough and now they were going to have to do the behavior. Those orders are the origins of affirmative action.

I don’t want to make the claim that everything was better before Brown. I have lived through that transition and I know better. But I get very depressed when people claim that the black community has not shown the pluck and ingenuity and savvy and dedication to self-help that other immigrant groups have. On the contrary, they followed precisely that pattern until the fruits were systematically pulled out from under them.
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For a brief biliography on resegregation after Brown v. Board, see Stephen E. Gottlieb, Robin L. West, Brian Bix and Timothy D. Lytton, JURISPRUDENCE, CASES AND MATERIALS: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW AND ITS APPLICATIONS, 3rd. ed., 940n (LexisNexis, 2015):

Melvin L. Oliver & Thomas M. Shapiro, BLACKWEALTH/WHITEWEALTH: A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON RACIAL INEQUALITY 17-18, 51-52, 150, 174 (1995) (tracing the continued impact of FHA’s racial preference in enhanced white wealth today); Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A. Denton, AMERICAN APARTHEID: SEGREGATION AND THE MAKING OF THE UNDERCLASS 54-55 (1993) (summarizing FHA’s role in imposing residential segregation); Kenneth T. Jackson, CRABGRASS FRONTIER: THE SUBURBANIZATION OF THE UNITED STATES 203-15 (1985) (describing how “FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy”); FlorenceWagman Roisman, The Lessons of American Apartheid: The Necessity and Means of Promoting Residential Racial Integration, 81 IOWA L. REV. 479, 486 (1995) (review of Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A. Denton, AMERICAN APARTHEID (“the massive new housing production fueled by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) financing of suburban areas was a major cause of increased segregation”) (citing Charles Abrams, FORBIDDEN NEIGHBORS: A STUDY OF PREJUDICE IN HOUSING 229-37 (1955)) (“FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg Laws”). See also National Comm’n on Urban Problems, BUILDING THE AMERICAN CITY 101 (1969) (concluding that “There was evidence of a tacit agreement among all groups—lending institutions, fire insurance companies, and FHA — to block off certain areas of cities within ‘red lines,’ and not to loan or insure within them” but later studies cited above found considerable and explicit documentation).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Steve Gottlieb is Professor at Albany Law School. His most recent book is Morality Imposed: The Rehnquist Court and Liberty in America. This commentary was broadcast December 10, 2003.

Brotherhood

In the height of the Civil Rights Movement we used “brotherhood” to express our quest for more than tolerance, but for closeness as one human family. I’ve never found a gender-neutral term for that feeling, so I continue to use it but in a gender-neutral way – we are all family, cousins, a part of one community. As John Donne famously wrote in 1624, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

Given the waves of hate crimes since the election, I’ve been thinking about brotherhood. This country is built on brotherhood, on sloughing off the ethnic, religious and physical prejudices our ancestors all brought from their old countries. By now those prejudices seem irrelevant. Many of us intermarried and were welcomed in new families. A friend told me that Bahai do it intentionally to bring people into the faith, though he was truly smitten and has a loving marriage. Most of us just happen to fall in love and old prejudices seem quaint and silly.

But brotherhood matters. Many of us watched the shredding of Yugoslavia. An exchange student from Belgrade was living with us, beside herself with grief and anger at the destruction of her country. Some had predicted Yugoslavia would explode once Marshal Tito died. But many intermarried, traveled among Yugoslavia’s regions, and young people, like our visitor, thought of themselves as Yugoslavs. But it came apart, viciously, in a blood bath of what was called “ethnic cleansing.”

Americans like to think America is and will always be ingenious, hardworking, neighborly and welcoming; that’s us – we’re the best. But many of us understand that virtues have to be nurtured, not assumed.

Early in the last century, President Teddy Roosevelt predicted “the military tent, where all sleep side-by-side, will rank next to the public school among the great agents of democratization.” The draft brought people together who had lived geographically, religiously, ethnically or racially segregated lives. As men returned from war, they introduced each other to sisters and friends, integrating families and communities. But the political strains of war in Vietnam ended the draft. Ben Downing recently urged national service on this station but we have nothing that compares with the reach and impact of the draft.

Racial segregation was made much worse by federal officials who required banks to redline cities and suburbs against loans to African-Americans no matter how strong their financial status. That left segregated school districts. Many of us still try to make our schools “great agents of democratization.” But racially homogenous student bodies make integration difficult or meaningless, and courts have made it worse.

Sports and entertainment still reflect integration. I once told Jackie Robinson’s widow how much it meant to grow up rooting for her husband. Black faces have been on national television as long as I can remember. My mother screamed with joy when William Warfield came out on stage and announced he would sing Old Man River. And I’ll never forget the sound of Marion Anderson’s voice when I heard her live. I’ve only caught glimpses of Oprah Winfrey but bless her influence. Familiarity, like minority newscasters and public officials, helps to diffuse prejudice and fear.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League rely on litigation to put racist groups out of business and catalogue hate groups, warning us about their activities and sharing strategies to extend the warm pull of brotherhood.

Other groups try to bring people together, to meet and appreciate each other, like the Interfaith Alliance, individual churches, temples and Muslim Community Centers, who invite people to meetings and festivals. We’ve often broken bread in the Muslim community.

But nothing matches what the draft and schools once did for so many of us. We need better ways to advance peace, justice and brotherhood.

— Most of this commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, April 25, 2017.