Racism Metrics Among Americans

Once you read up on research by those who study racism, it is a little annoying when the term is applied too broadly especially as has been common over the past year both to individuals and institutions.

I always felt my father was racist but having come in contact with true racists while turning Durham, North Carolina’s image around in my past professional life, I now realize he wasn’t.

He was born in 1923 just as the first studies were launched to determine attitudes toward various groups among Americans.   Back then Americans readily expressed their racial prejudice.

But before I get into how prevalent racism was back then, let me touch on what was happening in America during my father’s formative years.

In fact, in the review of this research in the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, the authors note that in the 1930s it “may have been as politically incorrect to express tolerance as it is to express intolerance” today.

Keep into mind that even into the 1930s Black Americans were being lynched at an average of fifty to one hundred per year.

Those occurred primarily in the South, but even in my father’s native Pacific Northwest, this was also the heyday of nativism which included a resurgence of groups such as the KKK.

Nativism was an anti-immigrant movement spearheaded by politicians such as Congressman and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, newspaper editor and Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington state as well as Presidents Coolidge and Hoover.

As an aside, Johnson coined the phrase “Keep America American” which was picked up by the Klan.  Coolidge rephrased it as “America must be kept American.”

In fact, a 1930s survey of lodging establishments across the country just as travel and tourism became mainstream found that 90% would not accept Chinese as guests.

Germans and Eastern Europeans were the primary targets of nativism back then but it appears to be essentially the same play book that Republican hopeful Donald Trump’s campaign strategy has resurrected today only targeting Latino immigrants this time.

Today, surveys show that only 10 to 15 percent of Americans harbor explicit prejudice against Black Americans compared to about 60% from the 1930s up through the 1950s.

I suspect there may be the same percentage of blacks who are openly prejudiced toward whites.

But racism or prejudice or should I say acceptance of other groups occurs on a spectrum and there is evidence that 7% of Americans are truly virulent racists.

During the 1990s, the organization I led mounted a grassroots effort that reversed the negativity toward Durham manifest by a majority of those living in nearby communities.

But researchers who were helping us told us not to bother when those who continued to be very negative was reduced to single digits.

From reading verbatims, reports from mystery shops and especially online comments to news stories, it was abundantly clear they fell among those remaining were hard core, virulent racists.

Having always been more diverse, Durham was merely a surrogate for their animosity.

We succeeded in the image turn around by inoculating those who were uncertain and reinforcing those who were positive about Durham while appealing to those who were “milder” negatives with better information.

This is why we were wise not to launch a big ad campaign.  Far too blunt as a marketing tactic, traditional ads merely reinforce existing opinions (positive and negative.)

In the wake of Supreme Court rulings on the unconstitutionality of segregation, by the dawn of the 1960s Americans were gradually becoming much more egalitarian and self-conscious about intolerance.

So by the 1970s scientific surveys to determine prejudice had to become more covert as attitudes toward explicit prejudice changed.

By then my dad was turning 50 was apparently too ingrained to make the shift or maybe he just liked pushing my buttons during during lively debates on visits home.

However, I had noticed growing up that while he seemed explicitly prejudiced toward some groups, at least in rhetoric, he wasn’t at all when it came to individuals.

You often hear something similar voiced by regressive politicians and some celebrities who when caught making insensitive or racist remarks are quick to rationalize that Black people are some of their best friends.

Studies show that 75% of Americans - including some who are Black -have an implicit preference for white vs. black racial groups.  It often results in institutional bias where studies show that even a percentage point or two of discrimination on an individual level can add up to a disadvantage for Black Americans overall.

It is reflected in the analysis of tipping practices where patrons, on average, including those who are Black are found to give higher tips to Caucasian servers.

It is why studies also find that many Americans are favorable to leveling the playing field based on gender but not ethnicity, betraying an implicit bias.

But about 40% of Americans have what researchers call aversive racism, a term coined in the 1980s, which means they avoid interaction with other racial and ethnic groups.

Americans who fall into these groups today probably don’t self-identify as racists.

Nor are police officers using stereotypes to make lightning quick life or death decisions protecting neighborhood where less than 25% of the residents, according to Harvard Sociologist Orlando Patterson are structurally disconnected and/or mimicking a street culture that is often itself racist and misogynist as well as defiant of authority and laws.

This all crossed my mind recently while driving home from a lakeside retreat in the county north of Durham.

I was mulling over how a heavy-set white woman had been loudly pontificating up and down the isles of a Walmart to anyone who would listen characterizing Durham as a cesspool, albeit one which provided her with job when a pickup flew past in the opposite direction.

Speeding north along Dirgie Mine Road through Allensville it was streaming two huge, 4’ x 6’ Confederate flags on each side of the truck’s bed.

Doing a little stereotyping of my own, I wondered if the occupants were just trying to intimidate the fourth of the residents there who are black.

Or maybe they were returning from one of the demonstrations of support for that bygone symbol or maybe they just proud albeit insensitive and shallow good ole Southern boys.

Researchers use the term disassociation to describe how our minds operate at two levels, one automatic and the other reflective.

This is how so many Americans can profess to be egalitarian but their automatic responses are clearly biased.

My dad was very egalitarian but reflecting the norms of his youth also very biased when it came to blacks as a group.  Pushing back against his attitudes while growing up I’m sure played a role in propelling me to be much more tolerant and accepting of other groups.

But wondering if I also absorbed an implicit bias when it comes to race, during my summer hiatus from these posts I took the test related to race at Project Implicit.

It was devised in the late 1990s by researchers at the University of Washington, Harvard and the University of Virginia including the two authors of Blindspot, which I also highly recommend.

The test is ingenious for many reasons including that test-takers can’t “game it.”  I suspect that may be because it also measures hesitation.

There are also tests to measure implicit biases based on age, gender, sexuality, weight and religion to name a few.

I turned out to be neutral when it comes to race.  In other words, I am not biased toward or against others on the basis of race.  I have yet to take the other tests but I suspect I may be implicitly biased on the issue of weight.

Take it for yourself, regardless of your ethnicity and especially if you feel or get the impression from others that you may be racist, even somewhat.

It should be require of elected officials seeking to undermine voter rights.  

“Get Over It and Move On”

I’ve tried to shake it but I can’t -- for long anyway -- get a comment I heard three days ago in a news report from a small town in South Carolina, less than three miles along US Route 176 from the North Carolina line.

It is along this route, nearly 475 years ago to the day that I heard this quote, that Hernando de Soto marched up into the Blue Ridge Mountains, becoming the first European to explore inland across the Southeast.

It would be another 220 years before European settlers reached this area, a few bringing or obtaining enslaved African Americans, some as status symbols.

It wouldn’t be until 15 years after the Civil War that the little town was established, the year that a white supremacist organization called the Ku Klux Klan began to terrorize African Americans and white sympathizers along both sides of the border here.

Until now, I’ve only known the area from its reputation as a spectacular motorcycle route.  But the statement by a resident there last week ruined that impression.

It was a reaction to calls by the legislator representing the area to remove the Confederate battle flag from where it flies above the state capitol in the wake of a murder of nine African Americans 228 miles southeast along US Route 176.

He is also a former city council member and mayor of the little town and a close friend and colleague of one of those slain.

The quote from a constituent objecting to the flag’s removal from state property was:

“Is it hurting anyone?  No. If somebody has poor feelings about it, get over it and move on.”

Germany has many monuments honoring soldiers who were killed during WWII, including many in the areas my father’s American Tank battalion overran at the end of the war and then dismounted to search for pockets of resistance while liberating Dachau, first of the concentration camps established by the Nazis.

Remembrances for the victims is why places such as Dachau are now monuments.

I know people who lost their German fathers and husbands in that war before immigrating to America.  It is clear that many were caught up in that war without being part of its cause.

But Germany doesn't fly the Nazi flag anywhere, although it makes appearances in museum exhibitions.  In this country, while some collectors may have one that was brought back as a souvenir of war, it is viewed in disrepute, a symbol of white supremacist extremists.

Although, they too might rationalize it by saying “If somebody has poor feelings about it, get over it and move on.”

A far more thoughtful interview last week was with John A Powell, an African American law professor at UC Berkley and author of Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society.

From parents who were sharecroppers in the South, Powell reminds us on the program On Being with Krista Tippett that “race is deeply relational.”  Any discussion is about whiteness as much as about color. 

In her blog, Courtney E. Martin writes that “Black people, people of color in general, don’t have the luxury of forgetting, especially as long as white people, particularly the “good ones,” remain so fragile.  She’s referring to our inability to discuss race.

Professor Powell, in his interview, states that “race is in the DNA of this country…it is like gravity.”   Any history of slavery, such as From Slavery to Freedom by the late Dr. John Hope Franklin, Powell would assert is really a history of America told through that institution.

To illustrate that point, he notes that when he taught white students at the University of Minnesota about the history of Native Americans, it was just a lens into the history of America.

He repeats an observation by the African American author Tony Morrison that any discussion of the effects of slavery should include what it’s done to mark the white identity as well.

Powell noted in the On Being interview last week, “The human condition is one about belonging…how we define the other affects how we define ourselves.”

“And so when we define the other as extreme, it means we have to cut off large parts of our self.”

Powell, when he explains that the notion of being American is and has historically been an ever evolving and expanding “we” would agree with the opinion read a few days later by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

The conservative Justice reminds us that the notion of freedom in the Constitution has been forever evolving.  It was first limited to property-owning white men and has been expanded ever since to include all Americans including now the freedom of gay and lesbian Americans to marry.

Kennedy wrote for the majority, “The past alone does not rule the present.  The nature of injustice is that we do not always see it in our own time.  The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all its dimensions…”

He continues, “…and so they entrusted future generations to a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”

Honoring war dead such as ancestors who fought to preserve a way of life called slavery is to respect their sacrifice without condoning the injustice requiring it of them.

But flying their flag is an insult, just as flying the Nazi flag is an insult, just as flying the flag of ISIS is an insult to freedom and justice.

The Confederate flag as an artifact of history is important to preserve.  But not when flown, as it has been in South Carolina beginning in the 1960s, to signal refusal to accept the end of desegregation.

But what’s far more important, in my opinion, than all of the energy we spend pushing and pulling over symbols such as a flag, is the need for us to discuss race, white as much as black or brown, beginning with implicit bias.

A wonderful start is to read or listen to the words spoken by John A. Powell.

Profiling May Not be the Problem

In a recent NYT op-ed, Northeastern University researcher, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett suggested something that made me realize that our brains are wired to profile.

She describes our brains as predictive organs that make thousands of “neural ‘guesses’” at a time that “largely shape what you see, hear and otherwise perceive.”

Profiling in and of itself is not racially biased but, she contends, for some it may be “one pernicious way in which racial bias expresses itself.”

But those who seek to curb racism by curbing profiling seem misguided to me, especially when our brains are wired to subconsciously profile.

This is probably why so many people rolled their eyes when a law was pushed through in New York City prohibiting the running of credit checks on job applicants.

As justification, in part, advocates pointed out that the percentage of people with scores of 700 or above is less than half among blacks what it is among whites.

A recent Illinois study found that the average credit score in minority neighborhoods was 107 to 130 points lower than in other neighborhoods but so was the percentage who made late payments, by three to six times.

Poverty is more likely the cause than racism.

In the process, people seeking social justice on behalf of others often make unfortunate and inaccurate stereotypes in the process such as linking race to poverty when as the excellent blog Breaking Brown points out “the real welfare queen is uneducated, single and white.”

Of course, I agree that bad credit should not be used to disqualify a candidate before allowing them an opportunity to explain.  A check of existing employees in most workplaces should be enough to warrant credit counseling as a benefit.

On a related subject, an excellent investigative report in Mother Jones this month incorporates research done at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation.

It documents the horrific cost of gun violence, $229 billion each year.

Much of it, nearly $13 million a day is passed on to taxpayers.

To put this in perspective, this will soon eclipse the cost of smoking on society.

The report points out that while 93% of gun suicide victims are white, 57% of gun homicide victims are black.  So are the majority of offenders according to FBI statistics.

In a separate but related piece, the researchers point out the huge disparity in the percentage of homicides solved when there is a white victim compared to case involving black victims.

Police shootings are a tiny sliver of the gun violence in America.  Based on the way our brains work, it makes sense that they will concentrate resources in minority neighborhoods on behalf of minority victims, in pursuit of minority offenders.

But essayist Tim Wise calculates from FBI data that only about 1% of African Americans including 2% of black males will commit a violent crime in a given year.

He continues that “No more than .7 percent (seven-tenths of one percent) of African Americans will commit a violent crime against a white person in a given year, and fewer than .3 percent (three-tenths of one percent) of whites will be victimized by a black person in a given year.”

He concludes, “Whites are 6 times more likely to be murdered by another white person as by a black person.”

It seems to me that profiling isn’t the problem nor is the use of statistics which can be a useful way of predicting crime.

Racism is the problem and it is people who are racist.

Symbolic For The Living

Later this month, as they do every few years, a group of volunteers in Durham, North Carolina, including some city and county officials, will invest some time and “elbow grease” to tidy the historic Geer Cemetery.

It is an all-black burial ground was established in 1877, twenty years before the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed “separate-but-equal” laws in the South, known as Jim Crow laws. In many states, that even included segregation after death.

Geer had fallen into such disrepair, that four years after that 1896 decision, the 10-month-old Durham Sun opined in an effort to get the city to restore this hallowed place.

But 115 years after that editorial, the City of Durham still finds excuses as to why that can’t happen.

Rather than racism, I suspect it has much more to do with bureaucratic inertia enabled by a reticence found commonly which is that asking questions is associated with criticism and “rocking the boat” with retribution.

This cultural affliction is very difficult to root out and inhibits private as well as public entities.  In my observation, it is most often the culprit holding organizations back from being more innovative.

This will be the fourth or fifth time in my 26 years of residence that volunteers have filled the city void.  Geer Cemetery is only a few blocks from my first house here on Shawnee Street in the Old North Durham neighborhood.

I grew to know the old cemetery during morning walks there with our dog at the time, named Jack.

On an April morning walk less than a year after my arrival, I saw members of the former Durham Service Corps (DSC) working to rehabilitate the old cemetery, a project documented in the report Reclaiming Yesterday.

Volunteers set to do the same thing next month are well advised to click on this link and read the report.

Resurrected, the DSC would be a more strategic, comprehensive and sustainable approach to both the issue of youth employment as well as maintenance of commons such as Geer Cemetery.

There are many benefits to engaging volunteers including a sense of community, physical activity and camaraderie, as well as bringing greater awareness to issues.

But a disconnect occurred about thirty years ago when governments at all levels, including those in Durham, seemed to forget that matching grants such as the one meant to pilot DCS as well as volunteerism are not mean to replace caretaking but to supplement it.

It isn’t that simple when it comes to cemeteries.

When it comes to a true census of cemeteries, it is volunteers including genealogists across the country who work hard to track cemeteries including hundreds in Durham County alone, mapped and maintained on the web by Allen Dew who partners with the Durham-Orange society.

Only a couple fall under the stewardship of the City of Durham.

Keep in mind that even progressive counties such as Durham didn’t begin the practice of issuing death certificates until 1908, a practice not required across North Carolina until 1913, a decade after that chide in the Durham Sun newspaper.

Some cemeteries here are incorporated with places of worship but most are small family plots including those I see seemingly protected in the right-of-ways along roadsides as I ride my Harley.

I grew fond of cemeteries beginning when I was age three as I would tag along with my parents up the hill behind the horse barn to a small cemetery carved out of our ancestral ranch to maintain the graves of many of my ancestors.

I even remember that it was while visiting the small historic cemetery next to a former Jesuit Seminary on a bluff high above Spokane, Washington one Saturday in 1973 that my daughter and only child decided it was time to be born, resulting in a mad dash down the mountain to the hospital.

Volunteers today also staff a website entitled “Find A Grave,” carefully curating cemeteries and individual gravesites on the web.  The nation-wide effort was founded in 1995 in Salt Lake City by Jim Tipton before being absorbed a few years ago into Ancestry.com.

The gravestone shown here in Holliday is that of one of my great-great grandfathers but it isn’t the original one.  One of that community’s first settlers, he was buried there in 1900 but by the late 1980s the old cemetery was in need of rehabilitation including replacement of headstones.

My maternal grandfather rescued the original marker and delivered it on a trip near the end of his life to my sister in Enumclaw, Washington, where as shown in the image in this blog, it rests in her garden.

Cities first began creating public cemeteries in 1831 and they soon they became viewed as the nation’s first public parks.  In fact, seeing how popular they were inspired cities two decades later to begin creating open and forested spaces dedicated as parks.

Just as WWII broke out in Europe, the Durham County health department closed Geer Cemetery in 1939 because it had become over crowded, although a burial or two was still held there until 1944.

It would be another decade before the U.S. Supreme Court would put an end to segregation, although segregationist candidates would continue to openly run and be elected in states such as North Carolina up through the 1990s.

Standing as a reminder of intolerance and our country’s ongoing struggle to overcome bigotry, historic Geer Cemetery deserves more of our recognition and respect including the city and county.

Strengthening Counter Narratives

It occurred to me that a recommendation I read in a commentary shortly after the recent murders by Islamic extremists in Paris may also be applicable to other groups who feel under siege.

This could include guns rights activists and ethnic groups here in the United States including blacks and Hispanic and others fearful of losing rights or being profiled and stereotyped because of the actions of a few.

Dr. H.A. Hellyer points out that it isn’t enough for Muslins to condemn terrorism or to lay down their lives fighting extremist.

What is really needed, he suggests, is a strengthening of internal “counter narratives” within that religious culture including being more openly critical when there are abuses in Muslim states.

No doubt that law enforcement agencies need to purge the small number in their midst who are racist including those who hide abuses of their authority behind a badge.

Both police officers and protestors have valid points but the real solution for populations where the individuals feel unfairly criticized for the actions of a few is to admit there is some validity to other points of view and strengthen internal counter narratives.

Master narratives often anchor group behavior and attempt to purge outliers for “airing dirty laundry” on the premise that there is only one issue and one solution and admitting otherwise will bring disgrace.

Groups caught up in master narratives lose sympathy this way, even though internally they exhibit a far wider range of opinions.

Mormons, for example, were always divided about the practice of polygamy which before its ban by church leaders in 1890 was practiced by 20-30% of its members, most as a “calling” from local officials.

To have acknowledged the internal tension, which had been expressed since the mid-1830s, was considered off limits because it would show lack of solidarity, undermine authority and strengthen those who persecuted members.

The same could be said of blacks as a group since the mid-1960s who worry internally about self-inflicted problems but rarely admit them, other than to friends, for fear these more complicated concerns would undermine the master narrative of discrimination and victimization.

Occasionally, individuals and groups within that race, have spoken out, such as Dr. Shelby Steele who in 1990 authored a book entitled The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America.

He was roundly criticized by black leaders fearful that acknowledging the role of rearing and personal and neighborhood responsibility would dilute the master narrative, although many blacks agreed with him in private and began marches to that end.

Hispanics often do the same regarding illegal immigration or Hispanic gangs.  And the NRA and other gun rights groups have taken the master narrative to a new level.

But quietly or periodically condemning certain behaviors while insisting the problem is externally imposed never really works.  Counter narratives also don’t require airing “dirty laundry,” so to speak.

Granted, with today’s news feeding frenzies, it is hard for groups to hear themselves think and openly discussing shared responsibility when anecdotal news turns agenda-like, focused only, it seems, on “he said-she said” dialogue which quickly forces binary conclusions.

In the words of Steele,  this ends up pandering to those who “want to make a movement out of an anomaly.”  One activist recently wrote that the grand juries in Ferguson and Staten Island had “refused to indict.”

Really?  Refused?  Or maybe their conclusion after seeing all of the evidence was just not convenient to some people’s master narrative.

One of the books I’ve mentioned reading for a few minutes each morning to get centered is A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.

You can’t turn a page without reading a counter narrative.

If he were alive, I believe he may have joined the recent protests but he would have also pointedly shed light on the responsibilities on both sides of the tragedies and directed attention not just to institutional change but individual, family, neighborhood and community behavior.

In doing so, he gradually enlisted support from unlikely groups that he would have alienated with only the master narrative.

Newtown, Ferguson, Staten Island and Paris deserve more.

Risk Factor Ruminations on the Road to Casper

By the time the events surrounding the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri began to dominate news reports last month, Mugsy and I had just turned onto a segment on the return leg of our most recent cross-country road trip that was new to us.

As it almost always does during a feeding frenzy when far too many news outlets resort to speculation and grasping at anecdotes and dichotomies such as saint and sinner, those with agendas tend to usurp attention.

Running Durham’s organization responsible for serving the news media at the time, I had a front row seat to this formulaic pattern during the the now infamous claims of a stripper against some Duke Lacrosse players.

The police and the local newspaper had rightly closed the case, but the paper in nearby Raleigh threw gasoline on the embers, inflaming listserv advocates in Durham anew and within a day, a similar national frenzy ensued making it very difficult year to be in the “calm down business.”

Predictably, racism had become the storyline in Ferguson and I wondered as we cut southeast from Dubois, Wyoming along the Wind River Range if any of those producing stereotypical reports that day had ever read the report I did before I left home entitled Being Black Is Not A Risk Factor.

It’s being poor but it is even more complicated than that, which came to me the next day when my thoughts turned to another study on the stretch from Lincoln to Nashville including an unexpected stop.

The report is the kind of analysis of African-Americans by African-Americans that seems to quickly divide those eager to show progress in the struggle to overcome stereotypes from those who won’t let them go for fear of losing leverage to continue the struggle.

I first witnessed this in the early 1990s when an African-American, Dr. Shelby Steele, now a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, first published a remarkable book entitled The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America.

It was also made apparent a few years later when a series of essays were published entitled, The House That Race Built, including a favorite of mine by Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison.

There is a coarseness in news coverage surrounding race that for me is at the root of why 80% of blacks think Ferguson raises important issues about race while nearly 50% of whites think it got more attention than it deserved.

It isn’t because these whites are all racist, although plenty of both blacks and whites are.  It is due to the fatigue that stereotypical and anecdotally-frenetic news coverage creates reminding me somehow of a verse in Paul Simon’s Me and Julio Down by the School Yard:

In a couple of days they're gonna take me away
But the press let the story leak
When the radical priest come to get me released
We was all on the cover of Newsweek

Apparently the BBC refused to lay it because it mentioned Newsweek by name.

That stretch I was driving that day of US Route 26 crosses the reservation for Eastern Shoshone and Arapaho people along its way to Casper near where two of my great-great grandfathers and a great (x3) stopped to build a ferry across the North Platte River in 1847.

This is Longmire country for fans of the acclaimed A&E series and/or the Craig Johnson novels upon which it is based (although the area around Santa Fe is used as a stand-in.)

When I watch television, it is entirely via streaming now and I find I am drawn to shows and movies where the landscape also serves as a character such as Longmire, The Killing, Wallander, Endeavor, Night Train to Lisbon, etc.

This part of Wyoming is a gently rolling sagebrush steppe of the Great Plains filling a gap between the fingers of the Middle and Southern ranges of the Rockies.

I have always been on the least intolerant end of that spectrum but still within a few hours that afternoon, I was able to catch fleeting glimpses of my own prejudice, one while crossing the reservation and one during dinner that night during a layover in Casper.

Until the end of the 1850s, a decade or so after all but two of my sixteen fifth generation ancestors had made the cross-country trek from various parts of America to settle along the western slopes of the Rockies, news coverage simply reported events.

Oh, there was plenty of vitriol and opinion too, but in July 1859, a new dimension was added when the first-ever news “interview” was conducted by Horace Greeley of Brigham Young during a stop in Salt Lake City by the New York Tribune publisher.

In Manhattan, Kansas, in route from New York to San Francisco, the then 48-year-old Greeley had caught up with Tribune journalist Albert Richardson to take a new, quicker route just opened with partners by the founder of the Pony Express.

As Richardson had earlier passed by what would become Ferguson, Missouri, land had just been donated to the Wabash Railroad coming down from Toledo on the condition that a station be built there.

At the time, nearby St. Louis had a population of around 160,000.  But the surrounding county, including around Ferguson, was still very rural.

While Richardson notes that city streets there were filled with debates between pro and anti-slavery residents, out in the county, including where the Ferguson Train Depot would soon rise, there were still 1,156 slaveholders holding 3,346 African-Americans in slavery.

The Leavenworth and Pikes Peak Express Company ran its stagecoaches along part of the route one of my great-great grandfathers had captained a wagon train five years earlier, but then along a much faster route through just-founded Denver and then up and over the Southern Rockies.

Not only states, but towns within states such as Kansas, were divided as free or pro-slavery at the time and a fascinating read is the book entitled Beyond the Mississippi written by Richardson two decades later from notes in his journal.

Downloadable free including into a Kindle app, Richardson’s narrative, a first-hand snapshot of Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah and California in the pivotal years just before the Civil War, is a great cross country travel companion.

The news interview is rapidly becoming a thing of the past when it comes to news reports.  There are still quotes and sound bites but mostly anchors now interview other reporters who respond to questions by substituting opinion and conjecture as stand ins for others who were directly involved or with direct knowledge.

Tomorrow, more about those fleeting insights into my own stereotypes and the real risk factor.

Accepting Part Responsibility Brings Credibility

On cross country drives I mostly listen to music, switching between satellite radio and Pandora streaming stations created around favorite performers.

Periodically, I very briefly check in on news and sports, which during this just concluded road trip, brought to mind a book I was rereading, during overnight stops, about Francesco di Petrol di Bernardone, better known as Saint Francis of Assisi.

Outbound, the news was obsessed with the war instigated with Israel by Hamas, a Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is opposed to the two-state solution proposed in 1987 by Yasser Arafat and the PLO, less than a year before I moved to my adopted North Carolina.

As a college student, Arafat had also fought in Gaza during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War which resulted in the creation of the state of Israel on the same day I was born that year to fourth-generation ranchers Idaho ranchers.

While only 1% Jewish (Iberian) by ethnicity and descended from a namesake Knight who fought alongside Richard “the Lionheart” on the Third Crusade, I’ve always favored Arafat’s solution and social justice for Palestinians.

But a good friend, a naturalized Palestinian-American just back from a visit to his native East Jerusalem, has persuaded me that unfortunately it is doubtful this will ever happen.

Nor is it ever likely that Jerusalem will ever become the International “open” city that the United Nations resolved in 1947 when the issue of two states, bound by an economic union, was accepted by mainstream Jews but rejected by Arab states.

My view Hamas may also be biased, in part because according to Article 22 of its charter, as a former Rotary Club president I am targeted along with Lions Club members and Masons, all couched as part of a Zionist Conspiracy.

Arafat and the PLO were nationalistic in aim but Hamas is also neo-Jihadi, although given to terrorism today it seems more exclusively the latter.

Rarely, if ever, have I heard a representative of Hamas present a dispassionate, balanced and introspective rationale for its position, or accept responsibility for its part, a mistake many aggrieved parties often make, undermining their credibility.

African-American friends of mine have agreed on one of the reasons Americans approve of redress such as “affirmative action” (including 40% of Republicans), but don’t when it comes to its execution.

It may also be a clue as to why Americans overall view a tragedy such as the one in Ferguson, Missouri, which dominated news on the return leg of my trip, as a question of police going too far but disagree that it is racial.

Rarely, if ever it seems, do those in responsibility for management of affirmative action come out in conversation or in news reports against its abuse.

Unfortunately, this reluctance to be objective undermines the credibility and ultimately the usefulness of an excellent program.

I heard the mother of the victim in the Ferguson shooting decry those who used it as cover to infiltrate peaceful protests for the purpose of violence and criminal activity such as looting and throwing fire bombs.

Unfortunately, those using the tragedy to score points dominated news reports and seemed more interested in “them and us” agendas than critical thinking or the subtleties of mutual responsibility.

I often saw this when I served on a crime cabinet here in Durham.  Passionate observers who were African-American often undermined the validity of their concerns by refusing to acknowledge personal or parental accountability, while being equivocal when it came to reducing criminal behavior.

I had been home a day from my cross country trip before I heard an African-American who happened to be a social worker in Charlotte, North Carolina quoted by a reporter on statewide cable news outlet for North Carolina acknowledging mutual responsibility in Ferguson:

“I think it hits home because we have a lot of great people who may not know how to deal with a situation, when they approach a police officer, what's proper procedure. So I think we also need to educate our young people.”

It may seem obvious but more than any amount of street protest, his comment, if it had been picked up nationwide would have opened far more minds to understanding the social justice aspects being discussed.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. resonated with people of all races because he was as insistent in his opposition to violence and the responsibility of black leaders to curb it and for all individuals to be judged on the “content of our character” as he was insistent about social justice.

Hamas should take note, as we all could.

A book I read just before I retired at the end of 2009 and again on this trip, as well as parallels in the lives of some my ancestors who experienced officially-endorsed persecution and social injustice was on my mind as I explored a route new to me up the verdant mile-high pastures of the San Pete Valley of central Utah on my outbound route.

At the request of an Ute Indian chief, the valley had been first settled in 1850 by one my great (x3) grandfathers, Charles Shumway who over the next two years also managed to serve as a member of the 1st Utah Territorial Legislature.

By then Charles was 44 years of age.  He had already helped create four settlements including three in the Midwest including Nauvoo, Illinois which was as large as Chicago at the time and served there as a police officer and on a governing council.

He had been a body guard for Mormon prophet and founder Joseph Smith and served a mission to the Cherokee Nation just as factions erupted there in civil war and then another back to his native Massachusetts.

He was driven from his home after the murder of Joseph Smith and led the Mormons across the Mississippi River toward sanctuary in the Rockies, lost his wife along the Missouri River to Diphtheria, and appointed a captain on the vanguard wagon train west from there as well as the first handful to scout Salt Lake Valley.

But he was also outspoken within the Mormon community.  Similar to Muslims after the death of their prophet Mohammed and Crusaders, Mormons had two types of leaders when creating settlements, some ecclesiastical and some secular and some like my great (x3) grandfather, both.

When they disagreed, local ecclesiastical leaders were often quick to trump any introspection or critical thinking by secular leaders with threats of “disfellowshipment”, a form of probation which happened to my great (x3) grandfather once or even excommunication.

No one in my lineage was a saint but The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of Assisi’s Mission of Peace by career journalist and SUNY-Brooklyn professor Paul Moses is the fascinating account of a peace mission during the Fifth Crusade by someone who would soon be.

Moses cuts through the agendas of various accounts and omissions over time with a journalist’s critical thinking.

Saint Francis, less than a decade from when he would be canonized, was the same age as my great (x3) grandfather when he was driven from his home by persecution when he traveled to the Egyptian front during the Fifth Crusade.

From a wealthy background and once a Knight himself in battle, he had been a prisoner of war for a year after a bloody battle instigated by merchants such as his father for economic  gain.

Ransomed, he set out to join the Fourth Crusade but an epiphany in his early 20s caused Francis to turn back and devote his life instead to living as Christ-like in every way possible including “love they enemy.”

The Pope at the time called for a Fifth Crusade, an attempt to conquer Egypt this time as a means to drive the Muslims from the Holy Land including Jerusalem.  This was the home of Abraham, the patriarch of three great religions, Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

I’m a life-long Christian but I can see the point that Crusaders such as my ancestor were also Jihadists of their time, even terrorists.

Ecclesiastical leaders were loath to ever admit responsibility, and as in the case of the Fifth Crusade, often pushed for violent win/lose solutions such as Hamas does even when peaceful compromises were on the table.

The ecclesiastical leader on the battlefield, in this case a power-hungry and prideful Cardinal, repeatedly trumped the judgment by military leaders that they should avoid bloodshed by accepting an offer of compromise that for several decades would give them control of Jerusalem.

On the Muslim side, there were also two sets of leaders, one religious - the Caliphate and one political/military - the Sultan, a dichotomy established after the Prophet Mohammad’s death.

A nephew of the great Saladin, Sultan Al-Kamil, also a Sunni of Kurdish descent was fighting increasing fragmentation of the unity the Prophet Mohammad had achieved with Islam.  He also practices tolerance of other faiths as his uncle and the Prophet had and calls for in the Qur’an.

Fed up with the slaughter, Saint Francis walked through the lines of both Crusaders and Muslim armies to spend several days in dialogue with Al-Malik who had been knighted as a boy by Richard the Lionheart during a compromise with his uncle..

Unarmed, Francis intended to convert the Sultan, but it was Francis who was deeply affected and converted to the importance of love and mutual respect and understanding to peace.

Francis must have sensed that Muslim leaders such as Al-Malik who had just survived a coup, feared even more than Crusaders the religious extremists among their ranks, something they prophetically saw as an end to the Golden Age of Islam.

In the end Francis achieved more mutual understanding and mutual respect than peace but his humility and courage set an example for the two military leaders who soon did.

It wasn’t the last Crusade and the Crusaders would have achieved far more by accepting any of the previous compromises authored by the Sultan including the one offered to the Pope that would have prevented any bloodshed at all.

The followers then of Islam were far more given to compromise than neo-Jihadists today.

It is an incredible book with deep insight into the issues of personal accountability, compromise, fairness and understanding faced both here in the West and in the Middle East today.

Because We Let Them

My memory was jogged when two residents of the Carolinas were charged with trafficking firearms last month in New York City’s biggest illegal gun bust.  One of the men lives in a town less than an hour southwest of where I live in North Carolina,

Soon after being recruited to Durham in 1989, I was called for jury duty in Federal Court in Greensboro, about an hour’s drive west.  The charge was illegal firearm trafficking, and the defendant may have had ties to the same town, if memory serves me.

My memory is that the defendant’s attorneys in the trial, where I was serving two decades ago, argued that the purpose for crates of grenade launchers kept in his mother’s basement were merely collector’s items.

Fortunately, a plea bargain was reached before the trial actually began.

When voters turned control of North Carolina lawmaking over to Republicans in 2010, its leaders quickly used some unorthodox ways to propose and pass a constitutional amendment designed to ban same-sex marriages, a measure that overwhelmingly failed in diverse and accepting cities such as Durham, where I live.

Through the lens of many subsequent actions in the General Assembly such as those designed to overturn prohibitions on billboards and guidelines to protect neighborhoods and sense of place,  thin buffers along streams, strip local governance of airports etc. their actions seem quite anti-city.

In the 1970s, more than 50% of North Carolinians lived in rural areas. Today only about a third do.  Two-thirds live in urban areas and 43% live in the ten most populous counties alone.  It seems Republican strategists are adopting anti-urban policies using a coalition around issues like tolerance.

One way to describe the divide by workforce is a hierarchy defined last year by Dr. Richard Florida.  Rural means more machinists and makers while urban means more executives, scientists and engineers.

But Journalist Emily Badger wrote this month for The Atlantic Cities that across the nation, “The rural-urban divide is increasingly a point of political conflict.”  Badger had previously written about why cities are growing more democratic.

How ironic if the Republicans exploiting this divide actually have the last word on the “class warfare” they decry.  I missed it but apparently they put it in their party platform during their national convention in Tampa.

Before federal emergency crews helped rescue it from devastating flash floods earlier this month, officials in the northern Colorado’s Weld County placed a Tea Party-backed resolution on the ballot for this fall to secede and form a new state.

South of Denver, in the hours before floods devastated El Paso County and Colorado Springs, rural voter turnout narrowly recalled the Colorado Senate leader and former law enforcement officer who had introduced successful gun control legislation.

If not humbled by the storm, those obsessed with gun-rights at all costs may be sobered to know that a recent analysis of hospital costs associated with injuries due to firearms shows that 52% falls on the general public, most of which is then passed on as a hidden tax on premiums those who are insured.

The study also finds that regionally, a higher rate of household gun ownership correlates with a higher rate of visits to hospital emergency rooms, costs that should be borne by gun enthusiasts and manufacturers, not unsuspecting tax payers.

From personal experience, many gun-rights hardliners tell themselves a story that gun violence is all about black people and that accidents involving children 12 years old and younger (which happens at a rate of one every two days) are also somehow a reflection of socio-economic issues.

I assume they mean poor people.

Those I know who feel strongly about gun control are distracted by the absurd, such as large magazines for rifles, when the real problem has always been handguns, especially those sold without background checks.

There needs to be a balance, but in my opinion, gun rights are way out of balance with public health concerns.

Stigmatization around issues such as this may be what inspired a Montana Kleagle of the United Klans of America and former hotelier to recently call for five Pacific Northwest states including, I assume, my native state of Idaho, to be set aside exclusively for white people.

Of course, I can only assume he means only non-Hispanic white people.

Remember, the UKA has its roots in the resurgence of KKK activity in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision.  KKK membership quickly grew to 50,000 when I was a teenager in the early 1960s.

Racism today is far more subtle, not just because racists of every color are more subtle, but because so many use claims to justify a bad attitude or a sense of entitlement, possibly including being anti-city

More persuasive to me that it is still prevalent is in a study published last year.  It reveals a bias among those in the medical field that Blacks and Hispanics feel less pain and therefore require less pain medication.

Representative democracy doesn’t seem very representative these days, when a small faction of the country controls nearly half or more of the representatives.  But I agree with Badger that re-segregation isn’t the answer nor is dividing the country up in tiny pieces where we only live with people who look and think just like us.

We live in a time when we are letting tiny groups with extreme opinions on isolated issues control public policy.  They do because they can, and they can only because the rest of us let them.

Affirmative Fairness

I was astonished to learn from a public opinion survey last month for CBS News that 7% of whites and 6% of blacks believe that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t make a difference for blacks in this country, in fact, 2% of whites and 1% of blacks believe he actually made things worse.

Since 1986, a huge anthology of his writings and speeches has been a favorite of mine whenever I need a respite for my soul, but I didn’t learn until yesterday that the soaring “I Have A Dream” segment at the end of his speech in 1963, 50-years ago last week, was improvised.

Like me, Dr. King was a political Independent and a moderate.  I was an adherent to “affirmative action” when in 1989 I was recruited to Durham, North Carolina to jump-start the community’s official marketing agency.  But I was quickly disillusioned by the way many obsessively used or more often misused it.

Today, nearly 6-in-10 Americans still favor the concept but when it comes to college admissions, nearly 7-in-10 believe they should be based solely on merit, including 44% of blacks and 59% of Hispanics.  The percentage has been remarkably consistent over the last dozen years, with “solely merit” at 87% in 2001 and 84% in 2003.

I believe the college experience is more productive for all students if they are exposed to a broad cross-section of ethnicities and cultures but reluctantly, I’ve come to agree that rigging admission process, however well-intended, isn’t the way to achieve that.

A poll was conducted of parents of pre-college age children a few months ago by Gallup on behalf of Inside Higher Ed. When asked if Affirmative Action hurts their children’s chances of admission, 33% agreed or strongly agreed it would, including 36% of whites, 23% of blacks and 34% of Hispanics.

But more than a fifth were neutral including 15% of blacks.  Another 42% disagreed that it would hurt their children’s chances, including 40% of whites, 62% of blacks and 41% of Hispanics.  I have friends from varying ethnicities for whom it turned out to be “reverse discrimination” and others for whom it provided a “fair shot.”

King didn’t coin the term “affirmative action.”  That was done by President John F. Kennedy a decade before it was made into law under a conservative Republican President with bipartisan support.  But from what I read in his writings and speeches Dr. King viewed it as warranted in the sense that special treatment for GIs returning from WWII was warranted.

I tend to agree with Ethan Case, a young, moderate New Jersey Republican, who blogged an essay on Millennial-driven “PolicyMic” a few months back making the case that Dr. King (paragraph breaks added to make it easier to read in this format):

“…if he were alive today and given the opportunity to rewrite our affirmative action and social justice policies, would have championed all of the poor, equally.

He would not have seen a difference between a poor white kid, and a poor black kid, with the same low economic status, from the same rough inner-city neighborhood.

Nor would he have supported a law that gives preference to wealthy black students from the suburbs over a poorer white students from the inner city.”

Rather than wasting time playing offense and defense over “affirmative action” we need to retool it to enhance “best practices” and curb abuses.

Support among Americans has been remarkably stable over the past two decades with only a third being opposed, but opinions have been split since the new millennium about the program’s application to racial minorities.

The concept’s strength comes when it is applied to gender or socio-economic standards.  Overall, in this country, a slim majority of Americans believe that one of the biggest problems is that we do not give everyone an equal chance in life.

Less than half of whites think that, compared to nearly 8-in-10 blacks and six-in-ten Hispanics.  However, nearly 6-in-10 Republicans and the same ratio of Tea Party members disagree that it is a problem.

Where we definitely agree, across racial, educational and class distinctions is that the government has a responsibility and should do more to care for people who cannot take care of themselves and to reduce the gap between rich and poor.

But there is a 30-point partisan gap on these opinions between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to helping people in need and a 57-point gap regarding the need to address economic inequality.

In my experience, Democrats are often far too slow to experiment or jettison when programs don’t work or to continually tweak programs that do work.  Republican are often captives of a stale narrative that racially stereotypes poverty and further stigmatizes it in discussions as if it were a lifestyle choice or an absence of character.

It isn’t.

The Republican narrative is one conservatives used long before embracing the stereotyping the party found so effective in the 1980s.  This is also the 50th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four little girls, only weeks following the “I Have A Dream” speech.

In denial that it was the Ku Klux Klan, a month later conservatives opined that it must have been the work of a “Communist or a crazed Negro” in a story that ran in their national bi-weekly journal, views that conservatives disavow today.

But As Jonathan Chiat wrote last week, while they seem far less overtly racist today, back then “conservatives and libertarians didn’t just ‘miss’ the logic of the civil-rights movement, the way you might miss the housing bubble.  They got it wrong for reasons that continue to be blindingly obvious today.”

In the words of President Bill Clinton in 1995 – “A lot has changed, and it did not happen as some sort of random evolutionary drift.”  He didn’t and still doesn’t view affirmative action as “either/or.” In the speech, Clinton called for affirmative action to be “changed to take care of those things that are wrong, and retired when its job is done.”

Unfortunately, locked in partisan gridlock, it hasn’t been changed and improved often enough. The way it is executed on a day-to-day basis is often blunt and discriminatory, and can be as harmful as it is helpful.

To me, affirmative action is a tactic and we should be guided more by our overall strategy.  Americans should avoid “telling ourselves stories” and strive to live up to the vision of Dr. King when he exhorted us all 50 years ago to shape a nation that will “live out the true meaning of its creed…”

To paraphrase, the objective is to be a nation where we are all judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character.

Assessing Prejudices

Last month, on the last full day of our annual family rendezvous at a lakeside cabin in the Pacific Northwest, I took my brother-in-law a mile or so up a peninsula where he borrowed a jet ski to give my grandsons and their cousins one last treat.

On my short trip back to the cabin, I heard a comment on the radio that kept turning over and over in my mind as Mugs, my English Bulldog, and I made our return cross-country in the Jeep to our home in Durham, North Carolina.

“…if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?”  - President Barack Obama

I was moved by the eloquence of this comment.  As an exercise in introspection, I took stock during the trip of all of the ways I may stereotype people.  Even at the age of five, I was adamantly anti-racist, but as I drove I wondered in what ways I may still be stereotyping others.

The first group that came to mind is grossly obese people.  I also snap-judge slow drivers and those who seem to deliberately walk very slowly when they cross streets.  I snap-judge gang members, both those predatory to poor neighborhoods but also those who are fringe factions of political parties.

I prejudge people who cluelessly or deliberately let their dogs urinate or defecate along other people’s yards or in parks.  I prejudge idiots who text when they drive.  Too often, I prejudge people who seem to talk but never listen as well as people who listen but never talk.

I’m not racist but that doesn’t mean I don’t prejudge in other ways or that I might be prejudiced at some level.  It has been reported that earlier this week, at the Teen Choice Awards, actor Ashton Kutcher, as part of his remarks noted that “I’ve never had a job in my life that I was better than.”

I am probably prejudiced toward those who do feel they are above doing some jobs.  I am also impatient with people who demean people who work in restaurants -particularly fast food places – as they are typically people who couldn’t do those jobs themselves, regardless of education level.

Being from Idaho, I probably have a chip on my shoulder when it comes to people from Utah, because I think they often seem to look down on Idaho.  Raised on a ranch, I am a bit prejudiced about potato farmers.  I am also prejudiced when it comes to blight such as roadside billboards.

I may not be racist but I know from this exercise that I also prejudge people who are or appear to be racist regardless of color, nationality and religion.  Prejudices of any kind eat away our judgment.

My adopted state of North Carolina has more than its share of hate groups.  Five are based in Raleigh where the General Assembly meets.  Some who belong may be members there.  One is even based in my hometown of Durham.  Some are white supremacists, some are black separatists.

They should not be our only concern.   Maybe the best antidote to hate and prejudice begins first with introspection.

Tracing the Roots of A Sensibility

I found a scribbled note of condolence recently written by my literature teacher during first semester of my high school sophomore year.

I had learned of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK) on November 22, 1963 from friends as I was walking up the hall from my biology class to the literature class where we were reading To Kill A Mockingbird and discussing its relationship to past and current events.

In my native Pacific Northwest it was still morning.

A month earlier, the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives had just passed the JFK’s Civil Rights Act (CRA) out of committee after a series of hearings, giving us plenty of context for class discussion around the prize-winning book that Alabama-native Harper Lee had published a few months before Kennedy’s election three years earlier.

It was in this literature class with its focus on “Mockingbird” that I first felt the powerful resonance from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream Speech,” delivered three months earlier, and a poignant contrast to the hate expressed during coverage of the debate of the CRA.

I can’t recall when the semester began if was aware that civil rights leader Medgar Evers had been gunned down in Jackson, Mississippi within hours of when President Kennedy had announced his intent to submit CRA legislation to Congress, or that federal marshals had integrated the University of Alabama only hours earlier.

Even without today’s hyperactive attention deficit fueled by 24/7 news at the time, these events seemed distant and siloed as we were coming of age in the Northwest when interspersed with rights of passage such as drivers training.

But we were all in shock following news of the assassination as we settled into our desks to pick up continued discussion of “Mockingbird” and the CRA, which even more personal from that day forward.

Then, very subtly, the grief expressed by a few whose parents opposed both Kennedy and the Act gave way to sickening relief-tinged inferences that the country had somehow been saved, similar to a few my conservative-Republican father made at dinner that night before being shushed by my equally conservative but more sensitive mom.

My Dad always had difficulty with grieving.

This is when my political ideology began a move toward the center, away my family’s and away from party affiliation.  Six weeks later and just 13 days after the U.S. release of “I Want To Hold Your Hand” by The Beatles,  the House passed the CRA.

People forget that while 96 representatives voted against it, only 34 were Republicans.  Racism and intolerance were far more open and blatant back then but they were also more bipartisan than they seem today.

By March of 1964, as the Senate moved the bill to the floor for debate, the rank of Eagle Scout was pinned to my uniform.  I remember being revolted by the racist rhetoric in the national news and how hollow it seemed to make the Scout Oath sound.

I didn’t feel comfortable with President Johnson, probably because I was still mourning JFK’s murder.  As the Senate voted to close off nearly three months of filibuster and then pass the CRA, I was high in the Rockies on a ten-day, 60-mile hike with friends using pack-horses to march through the Bob Marshall Wilderness in northwestern Montana.

As we heard the news on our return, conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater was wrapping up that party’s nomination for President.  I had been leaning toward Goldwater because he was a westerner but then I heard the rhetoric he used to appeal to southern states and learned he had been one of six Republicans along with 21 Democrats to vote against the CRA in the Senate.

Controversy raged for several years over the CRA, much as it has the Affordable Healthcare Act, because it applied to private businesses as well as public agencies.  Goldwater’s opposition was ostensibly not about race but about states’ rights, an argument that had also been used to justify more than 250 years of slavery, subsequently perpetuated by peonage and then Jim Crow laws.

His candidacy marked the beginning of the purge of liberal and moderate Republicans from that party to the degree that near the end of his life in 1998, Goldwater appeared very moderate, even liberal, by comparison.

His campaign loss launched Ronald Reagan’s political career.  The CRA and that party’s transformation also launched an exodus of entire neighborhoods from southern California up into Idaho, marking the beginning of the end of my native state’s progressive, moderate and bipartisan heritage.

My own ideology stayed center through graduation from high school and into college at BYU, which was much more moderate itself in those years.  I was initially hawkish on the war in Vietnam and leaned more progressive on issues such Civil Rights.

Through the late 1960s my support for the war waned and significant levels of student concern about civil rights and the war (even small protests) took hold even at BYU in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The CRA continued to be an issue through the 1968 Presidential election.  We know now from memoirs and other documents that the Republicans led by soon-to-be elected President Richard Nixon had learned to code images and appeals to those who were racially intolerant by racializing references and images as crime.

We know from his chief counsel’s 1970 book, Witness To Power, that the campaign “went after the racists” as supporters while Democratic candidate and CRA-spearhead Hubert Humphrey’s campaign was marginalized by “Yippie-led” protests at the Democratic Party convention in response and outrage to the tragic events of 1968.

It can be argued that this movement still haunts progressives more than 40 years later but America still underwent a major shift toward greater racial acceptance during the 1970s due to the CRA and subsequent voting rights act.

Maybe it is always less painful to view events through literature.  The writers of last year’s hit HBO TV-series The Newsroom gave an excellent and concise summary of the impact of the “Yippes” on Democratic Party politics in 1968.

More relevant to today, the clip contrasts this with the way ultra-conservatives and racists have coopted the Tea Party and its influence on Republicans today, only as the dialogue clarifies, Democrats wouldn’t have nominated or elected “Yippies.”

This literary analysis is an excellent lens through which to understand the zaniness of the Republican-led legislature in my adopted North Carolina today, where each day brings a new outrage, marginalizing legitimate issues.

Maybe literature has always had a tremendous influence on events.  Remember, President Lincoln’s quip in 1862 upon being introduced to Harriet Beecher Snow, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  He stated, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"

Similarly, in my opinion, the influence of the Academy Award-winning 1962 adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird on the passage of the CRA cannot be overstated.

My preferences for insight today are biographies and historical analysis. Two books have provided me a clearer lens through which to view how racism in this country has moved between bigotry by individuals and groups to structural racism still so evident today although much harder to detect.

Making it even harder, ironically I was at this point in writing this post when it was announced that in a 5 to 4 vote, the Supreme Court had struck down portions of the Voting Rights Act, which had stood since 1965 until they can be updated by our dysfunctional Congress, which is gridlocked by representatives of the offending states who make up half of the Republicans in congress.

The Man Who Saved the Union by H. W. Brands was published last year, at the time another great book published in 2010, The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander was updated.

They also provide a lens through which to see the realignment of today’s political parties through different eras.

The Democrats of that day were forced to compromise with Republicans on the issue of slavery to get the Constitution adopted.  By the time of the Civil War, southern Democrats defended slavery and Republicans opposed it.

After the Civil War, Republican-President Ulysses S. Grant  had to repeatedly send federal troops into the South to thwart attempts to intimidate blacks and find alternatives to slavery as a means to undermine civil rights, including amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

However, when he was succeeded by Republican-President Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republicans gave in to its business/financial wing of the party and withdrew troops from the South, abandoning it along with their support of civil rights to the so-called “redeemers” of the Democratic Party who were rabidly intent on finding alternative ways to enslave.

This enabled various surrogates for slavery that only began to give way after WWII, first to watered-down civil rights legislation passed after being proposed by Republican-President Dwight. D. Eisenhower and then the landmark legislation in 1964 and 1965, which unfortunately many in the Republican Party are trying to undermine today.

It is the World War II generation, shamed by our own country’s hypocrisy while defeating the Nazis, that came home passed those bills, not hippies or yippies and definitely not John Birchers.

Alexander’s book gives an excellent overview of attempts to undermine racial tolerance and equality from the advent of slavery through colonial times, and up to the CRA and after but its thesis supports the view that a form of structural racism was substituted by Republicans in the early 1980s through policies and racialized images of crime in a reiteration of another war on drugs.

More in a subsequent blog on my personal observation of Alexander’s thesis at work when I relocated to North Carolina in 1989 and how her book has helped me to audit my own stereotypes.

Infographic – Racist Stereotypes In Campaign Ads

Click here for related article in Newsweek.  Click here for the book upon which it is drawn.

“Power Without Love Is Reckless And Abusive”

Memories have a way of reweaving themselves so until recently all I recalled about standing on a roof-top balcony in the foothills of Altadena, California on the evening of April 4, 1968 was watching as nearby South Pasadena was set ablaze below in both anger and anguish over the cold-blooded murder a few hours earlier of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Having essential tremor in both hands, it has always been nearly impossible for me to keep a journal so my memories are often refreshed by scraps of mementos I’ve kept. I was reminded of one recently when my daughter and only child, a single-mom-healthcare lawyer, shared a poignant quote about power and love from a speech King delivered seven months prior to his death:

“…one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites - polar opposites so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love.

…What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

Deepening my memory of the night King was assassinated is an autobiographical sketch among my scraps that I penned just 48 months after that night as required by one of several senior college theses. It documents an epiphany I had on that rooftop.

Still just 19 years old at the time, the cheers and taunts I had heard on the still-segregated streets that day brought about an apostasy as I watched the flames that night, a self-imposed excommunication from my ultra-conservative-Republican and seemingly racist upbringing in the upper Intermountain West as well as eventual alienation from my religious heritage.

Two decades removed from that rooftop epiphany, when I arrived in North Carolina to help jump-start the organization purposed to tell Durham’s story, I hadn’t yet heard the C.P. Ellis part of that story which was documented a few years later, first in a 1992 book about race by Studs Terkel and then in the 1996 The Best of Enemies by Osha Gray Davidson before Ellis passed away in 2005.

During my first business road trip through North Carolina, I was annoyed by Raleigh-centric-directions to Pinehurst that took me me far out of my way rather than the much more direct route south from Durham; and I was startled as I passed Sanford, North Carolina to see an official state highway sign welcoming me to the home of the head of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK.)

Just a decade before my arrival in Durham, C.P. Ellis had undergone a conversion of beliefs while head of the KKK here and turned in his keys to the local Klavern. Americans love conversion narratives and Mr. Ellis’s transformation from head of the KKK to working with Ann Atwater, an African-American activist to desegregate schools here is emblematic of many that are part of the remarkable Durham story.

A year after I arrived in Durham, the ultra-conservative United States Senator Jesse Helms, who had been a dedicated Raleigh pro-segregationist ran for re-election against Harvey Gantt, the African-American architect and former Mayor of Charlotte.

Two decades ago, from the vantage point of an already progressive and diverse Durham, it seemed that most North Carolinians hoped Helms had mellowed from the days of his nightly racist rants on a Raleigh TV station on a segment called “Viewpoint.” During one broadcast he called the 1964 Civil Rights Act, “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress.”

Asked later to explain, Senator Helms provided insight into how some people seem to construe the Constitutional provision granting equal rights as a “zero-sum” proposition. He justified his opposition with the view that the law was somehow taking rights from one group and giving them to another.

However, as the 1990 campaign demonstrated, Helms had not mellowed. When the race drew even closer during the final weeks, Helms launched the infamous and misleading “Hands” campaign ad overtly playing on the same fears he had more overtly used to help fuel KKK membership in the State during the 1960s including 112 chapters and approximately 9,000 members according to reformed former Exalted Cyclops C.P. Ellis.

I was reminded of Helms efforts to encourage homophobia when recently our Republican-dominated legislature placed a constitutional amendment on the “primary-election” ballot for next spring, probably hoping the lower turnout will ensure denial of the right to civil unions for same-sex couples.

Reflecting the humiliation so many North Carolinians feel about this proposed amendment, I’m reminded of a clipping among my mementos. It is an op-ed published by acclaimed-author Allan Gurganus the morning after the racially-charged “Hands” ads had helped Helms defeat Gantt in 1990.

As a metaphor for the election, Gurganus uses the story of North Carolina’s famed Siamese-twins, P.T. Barnum stars, Chang and Eng Bunker:

“One twin, Eng, was by nature temperate and
Christian and chess-loving; the other, Chang, proved
iII-tempered, raving, something of a self-destructive
drinker.

The mild twin daily endured the selfishness
and tantrums of a grouchy brother affixed to him by
a band of flesh and a mutual liver. This liver, after
decades of drunkard's abuse, became diseased. One
night, aged 63, Chang, the hard-living brother, died;
a doctor was summoned to finally separate the twins.

Before he arrived, Eng, the generous and thoughtful
survivor, opened his eyes, was told what had
happened, and died of fright. His independent heart
stopped because he found himself attached to a
corpse who had, via stubborn selfish vices, a life of
un-charity, committed suicide.

Now, imagine that the good brother constituted
only 35 percent of the total body weight of these fused
twins. In their annexed prime, imagine how he felt to
wake daily, to look directly at the person so nearby,
the death-loving 65 percent he knew would kill him,
against his will. Chang, violent and suspicious, was
greedily dying of pure hatefulness, of fear, and
without quite knowing why himself.

Chang hated what he called "outsiders"; but his own gentle
brother, as attached to him as anyone can ever be
attached, was he an outsider, too?

That's how I feel this morning. The phone keeps
ringing; the notes will soon arrive. Friends know I've
let myself hope I might bring my large, violent,
life-loathing brother to his senses. I hoped to save
both him, and incidentally, save me, save us. - I
have failed. Our state has.

I wake before my brother does and I look over at
him, snoring so close beside me, and I say, "Why?
Why? Why do you hate our life so much? What is it
you're so afraid of?"

As voters assess the proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex civil unions, hopefully they will consider the following words of Dr. King’s widow, the late Coretta Scott King:

• “I believe all Americans who believe in freedom, tolerance and human rights have a responsibility to oppose bigotry and prejudice based on sexual orientation.

• I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’

• I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.

• Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group.

• Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery, Selma, in Albany, Ga. and St. Augustine, Fla., and many other campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement. Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own, and I salute their contributions.”