The Darker Side

There are those people in the world who object to against him and one cannon wholly blame them Agitation after all is unpleasant. It means that while you are going on peaceably and joyfully on your way some half-mud person insists upon saying things that you do not like to hear. They may be over but you do not like to hear them...it is not always pleasant to nice ears to hear a man ever coming with his dark facts and unpleasant conditions. Nevertheless it is the highest optimism to bring forward the dark side of any human picture. When a man does this he says to the world: "Things are had but it is worth-while to let the world know that things are bad in order that they may be become better." --W.E.B. DuBois, Class of 1890

A PERSON getting his head beat in while others stand by watching, soon stops pretending to believe that these are just innocent by standers. He realizes, in fact, that they are hardly innocent, and in a very real sense, are actively helping the ones who are carrying out the actual assault. As someone once put it, those who aren't part of the solution are part of the problem.

Here we are in America, 1984, and it seems that only by a powerful act of deliberate self-delusion could one imagine that Blacks in America and elsewhere, are not, as a group, getting beat in the head by various American institutions, chief among them the United States government. This is only one of many more dark facts and unpleasant observations that need to be brought to light. Given the gravity of the situation and the dogged determination of so many to deny or belittle the truth, the only remaining task is to make sure that no one can hide behind the excuse of ignorance and say they didn't know what was being done to Blacks from Detroit to South Africa.

Police brutality against Blacks in America is a continuing legacy of what, until recently, was perhaps the most grotesque aspect of Black life in America: the fact that one's life could at any time be snuffled out at the whim of a white police officer, or some terrorist from the Klan, or a bunch of people who might, just for the hell of it, decide to decorate their trees and telephone poles with Black bodies. This went on everywhere, not just in the South.

And yet, in 1984, you can pick up a paper and regularly--just about twice a month--read about a new case in which a Black community has begun protesting that, once again, a white cop has killed an unarmed Black, often a child. Moreover, justice system which in theory should be working to stop such killings is embarked on adventures of its own. Hence the case of Lennell Geter, a Black engineer sentenced to life in prison for robbing a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant of $600--despite Geter's lack of any criminal record.

Geter was saved by the efforts of his co-workers and, crucially, by the airing of the case on the CBS show 60 minutes. The authorities in Texas, clearly put on the spot by the national attention called to the Geter case, released him and promise to drop all charges and reverse the conviction if he passes a simple lie-detector test. At least one TV reporter has implied that this face-saving effort proves that "the system works." In fact, the opposite is true, unless "the system" of justice includes the opportune intervention of TV editors. Others in Geter's position may not be so fortunate.

Attention should also be called to the current attacks by the government on affirmative action programs designed to remedy and redress past wrongs. Affirmative action is not a new idea. Reparations were paid after the World Wars, and lawsuits brought against asbestos manufacturers 20 years after the original crime of exposing workers to the risk of cancer--these cases of redress are recognized as valid. Similarly, the idea of redressing 400 years of terror, brutality and economic discrimination against Blacks was gaining currency until just recently.

But Today, the entire concept of affirmative action is under attack, usually by Reagan administration officials who claim to the vitally interested in casting that "past discrimination must not be remedied by creating new injustice" against whites. They confuse setting up goals and timetables with filling quotas, presumably preferring that Blacks simply lodge individual lawsuits each time they find themselves victims of racial discriminations.

The absurdity of such a position is obvious. If Blacks had the resources to sue individually every racist in America, there probably wouldn't be much of a problem in the first place (although in such a "sue-'em-all scenario," the courts would undoubtedly become over-crowded to the point of collapse). Less amusing is the fact that "merit" is usually trumpeted as the supreme good which affirmative action undermines, while in reality, anyone can name a thousand and one instances in which factors other than merit were taken into acount in, for example, getting a job. There are too many people who get jobs through parents, friends, "old-boy" networks, or the workings of a political patronage system. Each example belies the notion that affirmative action tampers with cherished, purely "meritocratic" ideals. At Harvard, students and admissions officers have openly admitted that it helps one's admissions chances to be the child of an alumnus. But none of this is considered dangerous, or unjust. Affirmative action, which is based on the principle of redress, gets singled out for a special, vicious attack.

Racists and other anti affirmative action people will be pleased to note that, even with a decade or so of those programs now being excoriated, only a tiny dent has been made in traditional injustices. For all the talk about the evils of affirmative action on the college level, it is rarely mentioned that one source, Education Week, estimates that half of all Blacks in college are actually in two-year institutions. (The National Center for Education Statistics puts the estimate at 38 percent.) A study of Los Angles Junior Colleges has shown that only 1 in 20 graduates of such two-year community colleges transfers to a four-year college upon completing their programs--indeed, most never even get degrees from community colleges.

A whopping 4.5 percent of all law students Black, and American medical schools have been flooded with Blacks, who make up 5.8 percent of all doctors-to-be (this is a decrease from 7.5 percent in 1975). Out in the real world, affirmative action foes should rest assured that Blacks make up only three percent of all doctors, although perhaps even this is too much for some people.

In other news, the Boston Globe recently reported that the gap between Black and white infant mortality rates has widened, with the rate for Blacks lingering at the level found in many underdeveloped countries. This has a great deal to do with malnutrition and poverty, which the government is hell-bent on increasing by cutting back Food Stamps and other programs. On the question of unemployment, National Public Radio, like many other media outlets, a couple of weeks ago echoed the latest self-congratulations of the government, chirping happily about the "good economic news" that unemployment dropped slightly. A little later, they noted parenthetically that joblessness in fact increased among Blacks, although this did not seem to detract much attention from the overall "good news."

That's some of the bad news. Many people who hear it will still just mentally say "Oh well, the Blacks are still catching hell" and go have a nice day. They are not the people who should be appealed to in the first place, but part of the problem that must be dealt with. Unfortunately, the ones I should be addressing, the Black Americans themselves, are a little harder to reach. An estimated 44 percent of us are functionally illiterate.