I grew into adulthood in the 1960s. I remember the spirit of optimism, hope, and possibility that filled the air during my college years. Those were the days of civil rights marches, sit-ins, and freedom rides to the South. Racism, it seemed to me, was on the run. Now I'm not so sure. The historical record is not reassuring.
When Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address on March 4, 1865, he was looking past his inauguration to the problems of securing domestic tranquility in an America freed of slavery. He asked Americans to “strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds...and...do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves.”
Sixty-one years later, an African-American athlete, Jesse Owens, won three gold medals at the Olympic Games in Berlin. In the mythology of American popular culture, Owens's accomplishment demonstrated the success of the “American Way” and the bankruptcy of the master-race ideology of Adolf Hitler. A strange myth in a society in which it was acceptable for the coach of the American Olympic team in Berlin to write in all seriousness five years later: The Negro excels in the events he does because he is closer to the primitive than the white man.... It was not that long ago that his ability to spring and jump was a life and death matter to him.
Seventy-nine years after Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, Gunnar Myrdal published his classic study of the role of race in American society, An American Dilemma. He wrote: the Negro problem is a moral issue both to Negroes and to whites in America...(however) ... practically all the economic, social, and political power is held by whites....It is thus the white majority group that naturally determines the Negro's place.
More than 100 years after Lincoln's address, the Kerner Commission asserted: What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it. The Commission went on to conclude that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
There have been positive changes since I was a college student. There is, for example, now a sizable African-American middle class that enjoys power, influence, and economic security that was unknown when I was growing up. Yet despite these changes, a report issued in March 1993 by the Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation—on the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Kerner Commission's recommendations—argued that the Commission's findings were more relevant than ever. Indeed, African-American inner-city neighborhoods are more brutally isolated, more desperately poor, and more cynically regarded by the white power-structure than at any time in my memory.
In the 1970s and 1980s it was widely argued that racism was not the reason for the intolerable conditions in America's urban ghettos. William Julius Wilson's books—for example, The Declining Significance of Race (1978) and The Truly Disadvantaged (1987)—helped shift public policy away from programs aimed at overcoming the effects of years of racial discrimination. At the same time conservative scholars such as Charles Murray (Losing Ground 1984) were arguing that it was a culture of poverty created by years of “welfare dependence” that was responsible for the ghetto.
Whatever its causes, racial isolation is social dynamite. The insurrection in South Central Los Angeles a little more than a year ago, when a jury found white police officers charged with beating an African-American man innocent, was a reminder of our past and a glimpse of our future if we don't solve this central dilemma of our collective existence.
In my judgment, the problems and destiny of America, and of American public education, cannot be separated from the fate of American cities, which, day by day, are becoming poorer, more violent, less socially cohesive, and more isolated. As Wilson has acknowledged in his most recent work, these problems cannot be understood or addressed without taking racism into account. It is, once more, time to take racism seriously. If we do not, it may yet destroy us.
Billy Mills, an American Indian who won the gold medal in the 10,000-meter run at the 1964 Olympic Games, and who became a successful businessman, captures the paradox that educators confront as they develop school programs: I'm 50 years old today and every day in my life, directly or indirectly, I'm led to feel different from society in general. Society also led me to feel inferior, and I struggled with a feeling of inferiority for five to six years of my life until I realized the strength and beauty of being different.
The task we face as educators is to ensure that school and classroom activities help all children understand the many ways in which racism has shaped their lives and affects their experiences and understanding of the world. Schools can help children learn about the strengths and contributions of minority group members and their cultures. Schools can help children recognize the wounds that racism inflicts on all of us and can help them learn to appreciate, instead of fear, people different from themselves. These are lessons worth teaching. Again.
