Happy 4th of July

DERRICK Z. JACKSON

Another era of willful white ignorance

By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist | July 4, 2007

ON THIS day of red, white, and blue, opportunity is black and blue. By throwing out the voluntary desegregation plans of Seattle and Louisville, the Reagan-Bush wing of the Supreme Court officially ended a second Reconstruction.

It ushered in a third era of willful white ignorance.

This is no surprise. This is what the majority of white America voted for by putting President Bush in the White House for two terms. For those of short memory, white men voted for Bush over John Kerry by 62 percent to 37 percent and white women voted for Bush 55 percent to 44 percent in the CNN and NBC exit polls.

They drowned out men of color, who voted against Bush 67 percent to 30 percent and women of color, who voted against Bush 75 to 24 percent.

They drowned out the minority voice on the racial divide, as if nothing more needs to be done. Last year, a Gallup poll found that a majority of white Americans, 53 percent, felt that people of color had equal job opportunities. Eighty-one percent of African-Americans and 62 percent of Latinos said they did not.

In 2003, when Bush sided with white students who tried to kill affirmative action at the University of Michigan, he took up the side of ahistorical white Americans who want to wish away a half-century of turbulent progress after 3 1/2 centuries of trenchant enforcement of slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Particularly telling was a USA Today/Gallup poll. When asked if affirmative action was OK for women in general, white Americans, by a 55- to-38 percent margin, favored it.

But when the same question was asked in terms of people of color, white Americans, by a 49-to- 44 percent margin, opposed affirmative action. Blind to all the racial disparities that continue to ensure that the average person of color has a starting line in life well behind the average white American, 75 percent of white Americans said "merit" should be the sole basis on admission to college, compared with 44 percent of African-Americans.

The Fourth of July is the holiday where Americans most claim to honor their history. Yet white Americans cannot collectively help themselves from betraying how they run from it. When a 2006 Associated Press poll asked Americans if they planned to do anything to commemorate Martin Luther King Day, 84 percent of white Americans said no, compared with 38 percent of African-Americans. When a 2002 USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll asked whether corporations that made profits from slavery should apologize to African-Americans, 68 percent of African-Americans said they should, while 62 percent of white Americans said they should not.

The denial of the continuing role of subtle and overt racism reached a ridiculous point after Hurricane Katrina. The Pew Research Center asked Americans if the government response to Hurricane Katrina would have been faster if the victims had been white. Of African-Americans, 66 percent said yes. Of white Americans, 77 percent said the response would have been the same.

At the end of the first Reconstruction, the Supreme Court approved segregation by saying in 1896 that African-Americans wrongly assumed that "social prejudices may be overcome by legislation and that equal rights cannot be secured to the Negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other's merits."

All that did was usher in nearly 60 years of lynching, race riots, and quiet daily oppression and humiliation of black people.

Showing that history can repeat itself, if written by people who refuse to study it, Chief Justice John Roberts said in the 5-to-4 majority against the Seattle and Louisville school plans: "Accepting racial balancing as a compelling state interest would justify the imposition of racial proportionality throughout American society."

Concurring with this, Justice Clarence Thomas asked in a footnote, "Can the government force racial mixing against the will of those being mixed?"

All that is a smokescreen for a collective white America that, despite whatever racial progress has been made, still resists voluntary integration. History also shows that the smoke cannot forever shield America from the fire. African-Americans staged a revolution for education a half-century ago. This Supreme Court has thrown down the gauntlet to black familes all across this land for another one.

Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.

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