City Talk; Dr. Barbara Lawrence & Prof. Sonia R. Jarvis

Hello, I'm Doug Musio. This is City Talk. It's February. It's Black History Month. Black History isn't Black History, American History, and what of the present and future of Blacks in America? To adjust those questions and reflect on their own histories, or two colleagues of mine at Baruch College, Barbara Lawrence, and Sonia Jarvis. Barbara is the Associate Provost for Academic Administration at Baruch. She was a founding member of the School of Public Affairs at the College, serving as the Director of Administration. Barbara is one of my oldest and

dearest friends. We met in 1969 at NYU where we were both PhD students. We were fellows at NYU, Center for International Studies, in the early 70s, where we became friends with a man in the news these days, Mohammed El Barate. Sonia Jarvis is a distinguished lecturer at Baruch School of Public Affairs, and a more recent friend. Her research, writing and teaching, focus on race, politics, and the media. Sonia is a frequent commentator on public issues, for local and national news media. She is currently completing a book through a prism darkly, the media's impact on race and politics in America since the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Welcome, Barbara. Welcome, Sonia. It's a real pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Why Black History Month? Why did it start and does it have a contemporary relevance? Have you ever heard of Carter G. Woodson? Yes I have. It started. Dr. Woodson started the concept

of Negro History Week in 1926 because it was his view that the history of the contributions of Blacks to America needed to be understood. And it wasn't. It was not. Is it now? It is not. Despite the many, now we should just keep the record straight. That notion persisted from 1926 to 1976. And why was it in February? And why was it the second week in February? Because those, that week coincided with the births of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, two emancipaters. And the concept was that the knowledge would be freeing. Blacks needed the knowledge about themselves. And others needed it too so that there was not this vast void about the role of besides slavery, about the role of Americans who were Black.

Well even before Carter G. Woodson conceived of the idea of the Negro History Week, he had brought together his association. That's right for the study of Negro Life in History? Exactly. And the purpose of that was to not only combat the stereotypes about Black people which were horrendous during that time. But to also use education and information as a way of uplifting the race at a time when lynching was commonplace. And the federal government indicated it was not going to do anything about it. The Supreme Court had basically abandoned Black folks. And Jim Crow laws were prevalent not only in the South but throughout the United States. So this was a way for Carter G. Woodson to say you can claim your history. You can show our contributions to this country

in a way that I think was meaningful at the time and continues to be important today. Okay, let's get to that point. It was necessary in 1926. And it may have been even necessary in 1976. Is it necessary now? Of course. What does it do now? I'll let you go first. She's ready. We're both ready. Okay. Because we, the same myth persist. The same stereotypical notions persist. No matter. I'll give you, this you will appreciate from our graduate school days. There was a young woman in the library. The boat's library and why you who became a friend. And as you know, there were maybe one or two Blacks in the library. Right. Now here we were steeped in the whole intellectual tradition. Reason first. And Pat, this librarian, he's just a racist, racist. And I said, no, Pat, you can't say that. She looked at

me. Why not? She said, who's he? She was talking about somebody. Oh, okay. Some person. I said, you have to define what you mean by racism. You have to collect the evidence. You have to measure his behavior against the evidence. And then you have to conclude. She looked at me. And she said, no barper. Do you know what a racist is? A racist is a white person who, upon seeing you, no matter who they are, and no matter who you are, automatically puts themselves up to not just and you down to. I said, Pat, that is absolutely what we in the social sciences would call an elegant description. You have hit the nail on the head in few words. And that is still true today, Doug. Comment my dear. Well, we've heard a lot of discussion about how the election of the first black president has ushered in a new age of post-racial America. We're on a show, so I can't give

my full opinion on that. We can always be victims, but we will skip them for the time being. Absolutely not. It's just that until we get to a point where racism is significant in social life, in public life, then we can have that discussion. But we have not, we're nowhere close to that. And let me give you a close. A couple of examples. I think we all recall the incident in Cambridge when the Harvard professor, Gates, Henry Lewis Gates, was arrested in his own home when he had difficult to get again, and the police were called, and there was an incident, and he ended up being led from his own house in handcuffs. Well, created quite a bit of controversy for a number of reasons. And the president, as you recall, was chastised for making a comment about the police and their overreaction in this case in a way that was considered

derogatory by many. But I think what had demonstrated was the extra sensitivity that comes into play when the president attempts to talk about anything. He's been subjected to the kind of degree of criticism I don't think I've seen in my lifetime. Certainly, we're this week celebrating President Reagan's 100th birthday. A lot of people don't remember that during his time, he wasn't popular with 100% of the American public, although it'd be hard to show that today with all of the types of praises that you're going to hear. And that's fine. And that's fine. But even then, while people might not have respected his positions, they respected the office of the presidency, and would not in a joint address of the Congress shout out, you lie, or some other types of incidents that President Obama has had to face. So... Go ahead. I'm trying to...

No, no, go ahead, go ahead. I'm with you on this, so that when I hear so-called experts suggest that we no longer need the Voting Rights Act because of the election of Barack Obama, it makes me crazy, because that tries to ignore over 300 years of history, but it's what we like to do. We like as a nation to have amnesia and to pretend that our history is not our history. Okay. It seems to me that Americans have stopped talking about race when you and I became friends at first. I mean, it was in the aftermath and, in fact, during the great disturbances of the 60s to current a commission, et cetera. And there was a conversation. And then there was the conversation in the 80s about race, particularly the underclass, you know, the black underclass. Have we stopped really talking to one another about race and just talking codes words and euphemisms? Are we ever had an ominous conversation or are we about to ever?

You know, I think that we can't talk in these absolutes because obviously, at some points in time, there were real conversations. Not everybody contrary to Pat's definition. That shoot doesn't fit everybody, the definition of a race is not every white person is a racist. And there, I mean, as my mother used to remind us as we were growing up, we would not be here today had it not been for white people of goodwill and conscience who took up the struggle on our behalf when we were not able to do it for ourselves. Don't you ever forget that? That's an important thing to keep in mind as we go through these trying times, there have been, and there will continue to be trying times. But the point is now, people have become so sophisticated at obfuscation that we don't have to have the conversation because everybody says everything is just fine.

And what's the first thing? One, for example, let's take the fireman, the mechanical, the electrician who was suing the fire department because he found the nuisance in front of his locker. Oh, absolutely. We don't tolerate this. That's the first line of defense. We're not racist. We don't tolerate that. We have a zero tolerance policy. So everybody just denies it, sweeps it under the rug and goes on doing exactly what they've been doing. The fire department is still only 2% black or minority. Okay. Is there an element in this? You talked about the prevailing myths and stereotypes, not really changing that much. But to a certain extent, certain classes of blacks or certain black individuals sort of living up to the stereotype, like it'll always live up to the stereotype in the Jersey Shore. I mean, is there an element of that here? Yes. Talk about that. Well, we know that very often stereotypes might start off with some element base. Right. There's some indication that, say, a group of people live all together

in one place and certain behaviors then are observed. But all too often, the stereotypes are used as a mechanism of power to keep people down and to not have us look at what are those conditions. So, for example, we know that a lot of cities these days when they are trying to figure out how many prison beds they're going to need, look at the fourth grade reading levels in their communities and use that as the basis for those future projections. Instead of saying, well, why don't we look at those reading levels and improve them so we don't need prison beds. We're not even talking about that into things. We're just looking at this notion of, well, this is a good predictor for us. If these children don't learn to read, they're not going to graduate high school, they're going to get in trouble with the law and we're going to end up locking them up.

Okay. Now, it's the new Jim Crow. It's the new Jim Crow. Before, the whole community was painted with the same brush. Okay. And now you have folks who have through their hard work as well as good fortune have managed to have a different future for themselves and their families than perhaps my grandparents did. But wait a minute, so then things have changed or certain things have changed. Well, it's not, it's not, it's not 1926. Okay. Okay. But it's, it's also not post-racial marriage. Okay. So let's look at what's happened in between there. Both of my grandparents, my grandfathers were sharecroppers. No one in my family at that point had gone to college. And so for them, education was the way out. The same type of thing, Carter G. Woodson talked about. He was the second black to graduate from Harvard. I mean, think about that. And he died in 1950. So it's not as if we've had this long, long history of education when the nation prevented our folks from even receiving an education. So then you turn

around and say, well, what about these kids who say that getting involved in, getting a good education is acting white? What does that mean? It means a number of things and we can spend a whole, a whole period just talking about that. But when children, children are pretty smart, they figure it out relatively early if they matter or not. And when they think they don't matter, they're bailing. They're saying, well, why are we going to pretend when we know you don't care about us? You're more concerned about your prison beds than about our education. I think that there's several things that are happening. And I have to go back to ways. As you know, Doug, I have had many careers in my fairly long life. Yes. And we want it much longer, but go ahead. One of the things that I have observed is how the myth has become the reality. Circumstances are such that

things feed on themselves. Years ago, there was a television program on called Soul. So Ellis Hayes lip was the producer of Soul. And many people who were at the time and have subsequently survived as stars, celebrities got their break on Soul. Ellis was an icon in the black community. The program was on it some weird time like midnight. And he would be out on the street about two or three o'clock after the broadcast. It was broadcast on 56th street and a fabulous. And he would notice these gangs of kids, boys, on the street. They knew him. And because he was fearless and had a demeanor, he was not afraid and they knew he was not afraid and they knew who he was. So he said, little brothers, why aren't you, why aren't you home in bed?

He said, we don't have a home. Now they were 10 and 11 and 12 years old. He said, what do you mean, you don't have them? Our mom has put us out. Well, where do you live? Well, we'd sleep in this abandoned building with that a bit. This was a lord of the flies. Those kids grew up not having the structure of family, not having home and reproducing themselves and reproducing the context in which they grew up. I was doing social work when the whole notion of aid to families with dependent children became policy. And so what did we get? We got the whole single parent household and people who were overwhelmed by the responsibility. I had a client who was 29 years old and she had 16 children. And there was not a multiple birth in the group. There was no bringing up these kids. They had to bring up themselves. Now, when you multiply that over and over and over again, why is anyone

surprised when you get a group of a social dysfunctional people who perpetuate that behavior and reproduce them? And you're saying that this is part of the current reality? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So, okay. Our people, I mean, what their other elements is, as you know, all of life is a seamless web. So, certainly I credit the mayor for wanting to do something about gun control. Somebody else was a Chris Raccoon said, well, let's charge $5,000 a bullet and we may not need gun control. Why is the gun the solution? You have a disagreement and you shoot somebody and shoot up 11 people out of fraternity party. There's all kinds of stuff going on that feeds on itself and harms the community. And we're having an honest conversation about this, though. I mean, I don't hear this in my classes. I don't hear it with my colleagues. It's just because who I'm talking to. No, I think it's easier not to talk about it. It's not easier not to talk about it. People are

preoccupied. Remember what Mark Roldoff used to say. We are individuals. And we are ruthlessly pursuing our individual interests. So, people are aware of the kids at Baruch because they want to get good jobs. They're focused. They don't want to don't distract them with reality. And with the harshness of the world, they will inherit because they can insulate themselves from that harshness if they get a good enough job. Well, and we're always dealing with that tension between the individual and the group. The individuals write to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Whereas the group has been defined and sometimes constrained by the Constitution. What the Constitution will allow. So, for example, when I hear this discussion in Arizona about let's change birthright citizenship, that's another issue that causes me to lose my mind. Because that means you have a group of state lawmakers who have no appreciation for the

history of the 14th Amendment, which was required to bring African Americans back into the body politic after they had been removed by the Supreme Court's Dred Scott case. So, here we're now thinking about using apparent status once again to deprive young people of their rights of citizenship. And the fact that there isn't more of an uproar, troubles me greatly. Why? Why the lack of uproar? Well, it's self-interest. They are so very occupied. Yeah, well, it's that. And it's also immigration touches a nerve. And well, I don't want to get out too far in front on that issue. Let's see how it plays out. Let's let the courts kill it. And if they don't kill it, then I might have to do something. Okay. Okay. Eugene Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The Washington Post has written a new book called

Disintegration, The Splintering of Black America, which in the sense triggered much of my thinking on this. Let me just read a little bit of his thesis and have you respond both sort of in an intellectual sense and responding from your own histories. Quote, page four, there was a time when there were agreed upon, quote, Black leaders. When there was a, quote, clear Black agenda, when we could talk confidently about, quote, the state of Black America, but not anymore. And what he argues is that instead of this unified community, you've got four separate Black Americas. You have mainstream middle-class majority, a large abandoned minority, which during the 80s was called the underclass, a transcendent elite, which opens the book with, you know, the Eric Holder's of the world and the Richard Parsons of the world. And he talks about two emergent groups, mixed race, heritage communities, and recent Black immigrants. Does this describe, at least from your vantage points now, blacks in the United States today and does it describe,

you're growing up in Chicago in the 50s and 60s, or you're growing up as an army brat all over the place? Well, when I, first of all, I have a lot of respect for Eugene Robinson. I think he's written an important book. But I would take on a couple of the issues he's chosen to raise in his book by first noting that the Black communities never been a monolith. Certainly, there has been a majority opinion. Certainly, there have been leaders that were more well regarded than others. But we've had a constant conflict over, should we be pushing first for economic rights, or should we be pushing for political and social rights first, and that tension has been with us since before Frederick Douglass. So, against that backdrop, we can certainly say within the last

40 or 50 years that while the civil rights movement was in its heyday and we're now in its aftermath, that those within the community who were willing to put their lives and their bodies on the line were granted a degree of leadership and authenticity that I think was deserved. It also helps to explain where we look at other institutions like the Black church, why so many of our leaders were ministers, because that was the oldest institution and one of the few that was Black controlled that might not necessarily be true today, but it was certainly true in the day. So, we look at that and we then look at these different categories that Eugene Robinson has raised. First of all, the transcendent elite, there's always been an elite. The difference was could they pass

were they light enough to pass and act as white people and then leave their darker skinned family members behind. There was the concern over the poor. We've clearly had that from the beginning, from slavery times. The middle class is a recent invention in terms of the Black community, largely after the Civil Rights Act and the federal government's willingness to hire Black people in large numbers between the military, federal and state government. That's the Black middle class and we're now seeing that those are exactly the institutions that are under assault because of the recession and those cuts will have an adverse impact on the Black community. We already have a higher unemployment rate and you add these budget cuts to that unemployment rate and then you have that persistent group of folks who never did make it out of the so-called

ghetto. Have a slightly different take on it, on the accuracy of the characterizations, but also on the description of the Black experience over time. Certainly from my perspective, there was always a fairly large Black middle class and I want to make one point. And your family was in fact, I know this personally, was part of that middle class. And in Chicago, where I come from, there had been a whole tradition of fairly successful Black people who had many things, insurance companies, funeral homes, they were lawyers, they were doctors, they were pharmacists, they ran their own businesses, they were restaurant tours, and I'm talking about my grandparents, peers. The doctor that I went to was my grandfather's college roommate. The dentist was some,

you know, they were there. There were Black millionaires, I think I mentioned this to you. I used to, I used to love to write in their limousines, Cadillac limousines. Nice! Nice! These were wealthy people. We never did this. These were wealthy people and then there was a whole range of firemen and school prints and what happened. And fired up, I don't know what happened, Doug. To the degree, came to 60s and the explosion of different kinds of opportunities. A lot of people were teachers and social workers and librarians and you know, policemen and firemen and police captains and they were all over the place and this was in Chicago. So they had been there a long time and in those positions and they were home ownership, PS. And the point that I wanted to make was I distinguished middle class. The term is used very casually these days to capture concepts that

don't belong in it. A term is only useful to the degree that it really defines something specifically. Many people are middle income. They are not middle class. Those are attitudes and behaviors. So when I talk about people in class, I refer to them by virtue of not just their income but their behavior, their attitude. Okay. We're already over time so they're screaming in the control room but 30 times. No, no, I'm stealing another 30 seconds. If we look back a year from now, next February, is it going to get it? You have to miss the computer, do it two February, so three February's, about the state of black America if you can speak so broadly? Well, I'm certainly optimistic that people under 35 have a very different view of race than people over 60 and that's cause for optimism. Okay, Barbara.

I would say that given the board global perspective, I'm not sure. Ooh, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Ooh, okay. My special thanks to my friends and colleagues, Barbara Lawrence and Sonya Jarvis for being on the show. Next week, my guest will be CUNY Graduate School of Journalism's Greg David. Hello, I'm Doug Musio. Let us know what you think about this show. You can reach us at cuny.tv. When you get there, click on the board that says contact us and send your email. Whatever it is.

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