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Responses to Race as a Decoy for
Class
By Rodney D. Foxworth, Jr. and
Rudolph Lewis
Rudy, I
appreciate your response to the
Guinier interview. I
come from a stable, working class black family that
promoted education to the highest degree. I have been
lucky in this regard. Many of my peers have not been so.
Had I not had my parents or a "natural aptitude for
schooling," as Barack Obama terms it, I would have been
at a severe disadvantage in Baltimore.
I have always
questioned this idea of black progress, and I know this
is not the most popular thing to do. Yes, it is true
that some black families have entered into a life of
comfort and opportunity, but we also know that this is
certainly not the case for the majority. Only a minority
of blacks have accumulated such opportunities and
comfort, and they have brought up the rear for lack of a
better phrasing, when it comes to statiscal medians in
the like. This should be clear when one enters a
Detroit, or Baltimore, or D.C. or any number of other
U.S. cities.
As you recall, Skip
Gates and Guinier made headlines a few years back about
how Affirmative Action was being used. Elite
institutions (and not so elite) began to recruit
minorities from outside of the U.S., or, the students
were children of recent immigrants. The point being,
indigenious minorities were not benefiting from the
affirmative action policy, which is essentially what you
have pointed out. For example, a school like UMBC, where
I attend, has relatively high percentage of minorities.
But how many blacks from Baltimore city? Very few. The
indigenous minorities who do attend are not from poor or
working class families, by and large. And UMBC, as far
as the rankings go, is just a second-tier public
university. One can only imagine what occurs from more
elite institutions.
I went to
Washington and Lee University for one year, and I felt
alienated from both the blacks and whites. The blacks
weren't familiar with my working class background, and I
often had to pose as though I could relate to their
middle-class upbringing. It was expected that I might
not mesh well with the aristocratic Southern whites; it
was my strained relationship with the blacks that I
didn't expect. I recall one black peer, who had attended
the Baltimore private school McDonogh, telling me that
he was shocked that I was accepted to W & L because I
had attended City College, a public school. He then went
on to say, "I thought all you guys went on to Coppin or
Morgan." Here, we have a double-attack that speaks to
class. One, that I could not compete with him and those
of his class-group. The other was an attack on Coppin
and Morgan, which admittedly have lower admission
standards than the other Baltimore area colleges and
universities, but also service primarily working class
black students. I had turned down Harvard primarily
because WnL offered me more money and I didn't want to
be a financial burden to my family. All my advisors told
me not to attend. But hindsight is hindsight.
We must confront this class divide head on. We have to
acknowledge that policies have been developed that work
against working class minorities while supposedly
promoting the interests of the "race." Working class
minorities simply have diminished opportunities and
access. This is simply a reality. I'm happy that schools
like Towson University have developed Top Ten Percent
programs for Baltimore City Public School students. Is
it enough? Of course not. Every public university in the
country ought to do something similar. Of course, this
does nothing to heal the inequitable secondary education
system.
In any event, Rudy is correct. We
must begin thinking about future decades. We also need,
of course, to help alleviate the blight of the current
and upcoming generations. The Baltimore City schools
will be crap during the entirety of my sisters' tenure
within the public school system. This I know. Within a
few years they have less opportunities than even I had
while I was in the system. But we can't resort to
cynicism and defeatism, though I understand that the
temptation is great.
Rodney D. Foxworth, Jr.
Associate Editor, LiP magazine
www.lipmagazine.org
cultural journalist & freelance writer
Ronald E. McNair Scholar
Ph.: (410) 978-0045
rdfoxworth@gmail.com
"If we - and now I mean the relatively
conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks,
who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the
consciousness of the others - do not falter in our duty
now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the
racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change
the history of the world." - James Baldwin
* *
* * *
Children
are seldom as great as their parents, those so-called
self-made men and women who achieve greatness, like MLK
and Coretta King. We will be foolish to expect in their
children their intellectual genius, grace, and
willingness to sacrifice. That is the problem with the
privileges of aristocracy. Those special qualities that
we admire in the greats are not in the blood or in the
genes. But these children, as society is now organized,
profit by their parents history and achieved stature.
This kind
of corruption of the aristocrats we can read in the
plays of Shakespeare and in the writings of the
novelist D.H. Lawrence. Their responses, however, are not
adequate, for they wanted to substitute one hierarchy
for another. They believed in a natural aristocracy,
which they believed was repressed by a blood aristocracy
from assuming their rightful place of authority in
society.
What Lani
Guinier
is talking about in her "meritocratic" argument is that
a democratic society ought to level and broaden the
field by law for a greater number to rise and compete
for resources available in society, as in the Texas Ten
Percent Plan. She goes farther and argues that those
from the lower and working classes tend to provide the
needed and necessary leadership for the communities from
which they rose. As a theorist of democracy, Guinier
advances the notion that support for the education of
the poorer and working classes advances democracy in our
society. The "meritocratic" standards now in place only
sustain and advance those classes that already have
wealth and power. They exclude white, black, and
Hispanic children of the poor and working classes.
We know it within the race that aristocracy is
problematic. We know it here in Baltimore in the
children of the great black families, e.g. Mitchells and
the Murphys, and others of such ilk. These descendants
of privilege do not take upon themselves the same
measure of racial and social responsibilities as their
great forbears. We find no Parren Mitchell, no Madeline
Murphy among them. Their children become just as greedy
and grasping as the white elites we accuse of those faults.
They, as the other racial elites whatever their color,
hide behind the mask of race and they are no more
interested in the advance of the poor and working class
communities than the whites with great social status,
and in some cases, less. For their use and abuse of race
strategies, these racial elites who use
race for self-promotion must be outed before we can move
forward.
What goes for "good
parenting"
has much to do with class. The point that
Guinier makes
is that elite educational institutions (whether private
or public) are presently set up to serve upper middle
and upper class kids, whether black or white or
Hispanic. She went farther and said that Affirmative
Action was not used fully to lift up the children of
poor and working class families but rather
those children of upper middle class and upper class
black families. In turning against Affirmative Action,
the courts got it wrong.
Some black parents can afford to raise their children in
a manner that they can compete in the way American society
is organize. But the problems most black kids have have much
more to do with class rather than race. That's the point Guinier is making. Successful parenting has everything
to do with class. But we got into the habit in the 80s
and 90s of saying, according to
Floyd Hayes,
of describing these working class kids as
“culturally deprived” or “culturally disadvantaged.”
Middle and upper class parents can
more afford the love and attention that poor parents
cannot who lack the leisure and resources of their
betters.
Highly
concerned with "standards" these elite institutions
achieve diversity in their schools by importing Latinos
and blacks (from the Caribbean and Africa), rather than
recruiting poor blacks and Hispanics from communities
within the USA. Their upward mobility is not on the
charts of their educational planning. The imported
minorities are alienated from these indigenous minority
communities and have little interest in providing
leadership for their cousins, the USA poor and working class communities
or in fighting for social justice in the USA. That is, the
interests, intentions, and energies of these imported minorities
are oriented toward their countries of origin, rather
than the expansion of democracy in the USA. In that
regard, they are more like those who have markers of
wealth, than those students who are from USA poor and
working class families.
I am against all defeatism, cynicism,
and pessimism. I do not speak of change coming from the
top, from Republicrats. The top is about money and
power, by any means necessary. I speak of the social
evils we experience and endure that have their source at
the top rather than the bottom. I am not for
doing a
Bill Cosby on the poor working classes. They have had
too much of that in the last three decades. Though I
don't personally care for
Michael Eric Dyson,
basically because I find him a little too glib, I
applaud Dyson for denouncing and outing Cosby, someone I
grew up admiring. Dyson got skills and was on the mark
and timely.
The Conservative revolution that
black kids now suffer under was not done in a day. And
some of our liberal black politicians signed onto it
when Clinton was in office. Read
Ron Walters. It took
decades and all their present policies are proving a
sham and now they desire the Democrats to take over the
House, to clean up and take responsibility for the mess
they made of things. But neither the Democrats nor the
Republicans have the answer for the Fourth World.
There's a need for fresh ideas and the black elites and
politicos will not provide them. They have been bought
off (and that includes the NAACP), and they gonna ride
that horse to their graves.
Today we must think in decades. Today
we must lay the ground work for a rapprochement of the
indigenous USA peoples black, white, and Latino working
classes. And we must indeed out the black elites for
their divisive use and abuse of race as a means to
sustain their class privileges. This is needed and
necessary work. Such concepts as Third World, Black
Nationalism, Pan Africanism, or any kind of racialisms
are anachronisms for a Fourth World that wants and
decides to move forward in the 21st century.
We need fresh ideas and we should be
encouraging rather than disparaging our young scholars
and activists (black, white, Latino; Christian, Muslim,
Buddhist, atheist, agnostic) to be about that work. We
do not need and must not bow and give credence to
"situations--corrupt, materialistic, capitalistic,
illegal, unethical--as we find them." We must use the
fullness of all our intellectual resources (cultural,
political, and social) and actively challenge
and undermine those notions that sustain and hold up
such situations. -- Rudy
Rudolph Lewis, Editor
ChickenBones:
A Journal
posted 12 March 2006 |
