What Would Malcolm Say?

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” -- Antonio Gramschi

Back in the early 1960’s, when nobody was doubting whether or not the socially-constructed, political notion of “race” “mattered,” a young African-American sociologist named Calvin Hernton, who had not yet written Sex and Racism in America, the landmark polemic that put him on the international map, took a job as a social worker in New York City to pay his rent. Entering the apartment of a woman whose 12-year-old son had been arrested, he found on the wall a painting by the boy. Using heavy oils – bright reds, greens, and blues, with large splotches of black – the youth had obviously been communicating his frustration and his rage in no uncertain terms.

The painting depicted fat grinning White men with money sticking out of their pockets, and even White police officers in blue uniforms with huge distorted silver badges, beating African-American men who lay on the ground, bleeding, with what looked like blood on the tips of stick-like plaited hair.

Circles with arrows pointed at the White men’s mouths read, “You niggers love us, don’ you?”

Turning to the boy’s mother, Hernton asked about the blood on the tips of the Black men’s plaits.

“That’s not hair with blood on it,” the woman replied without emotion. “That’s dynamite growing out of their skulls.”

Hernton went home, gave this some thought, and cranked out an essay about how, if we did not change the way things were being done in this country, we were ultimately going to produce an entire generation of young African-Americans suffering from a condition he called “the psychology of the damned”:

“As the collective mind, supraorganic, pitting itself against the mythologized odds of an unsurmountable monster, this demon will rise, for only demons can destroy demons and thereby become human again. The sense of fear will be wiped from their consciousness, reason will disappear, emotions will evaporate, fear of death will be meaningless, for they have been dead all their lives. Nor will they care about winning, not in any understandable sense of the word, for in and through the act of destroying and killing and dying, they shall be winning, a sense of life will be born anew within them…Their madness will no longer be attached to any identifiable norm, value or nonvalue – neither money, hate, freedom, or revenge. For, having been purged of faith in all human values, in all normal behavior, their madness will be the only god in whom they can put their fidelity without being deceived and betrayed. No doubt, according to the way America will look at them, they will appear as raving Blacks on a rampage of ruin and riot – nothing new, for America has always looked at them this way…[E]verything you might offer them will be irrelevent, for how do you give a people back their manhood, their souls?”*

Forty years after Hernton issued his warning, we stand uncorrected, having done as a society almost nothing to address the real issues at hand for people of color in the United States, let alone take responsibility for the damage done every U.S. citizen as a result of having our culture formed by, under, and within a 400-year system of unapologetic White supremacy. African-American men are nearly four times more likely to be unemployed than European-American men – at every educational level – with unemployment for young Black males pushing 50%. One out of every two African-American children is still growing up in abject poverty (while the Federal Poverty Guideline is considerably lower than what it really costs to live in this country). And at current rates, one of every three Black boys born in 2001 is headed for prison (thanks to a criminal “justice” system that marks them early and slams them ever so much more quickly and for substantially lesser “crimes” than their White counterparts).

In the meantime, the European-American middle class is disappearing more rapidly by the month as workers struggle to hold onto jobs that don’t pay enough any more to support even an individual, let alone a family. And with inflation going straight through the dwindling ozone layer, average White folks aren’t likely to be in the mood to share with or even be empathetic toward their Black fellow citizens – at least any time soon.

Highly respected European-Americans belly up to the psycho-social bar in the attempt to describe in painful detail the fixated brutality of their own and others’ infection with the virus of White supremacy, not to be confused with White superiority, which doesn’t exist. Yet even as Joe Feagin releases Racist America, Tim Wise pens White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, and Paula Rothenberg authors Invisible Privilege: A Memoir About Race, Class, and Gender, we still manage to find scholarly people of color such as Orlando Patterson appearing in The New York Times, holding forth that Black people’s problems are ultimately just caused by themselves. And, according to Columbia University professor Ronald Mincey’s “Black Males Left Behind” study that came out last year, even young Black men “admit” that they simply don’t “try hard enough,” ignoring (thanks to the Pattersons and the Minceys of this world) how they have been systematically turned into people who won't try hard enough. And indeed, even when they do try hard enough, damn few are allowed to succeed or to succeed at the level they would were “race” not in the equation.

What is to be made of this schizoid U.S. culture? Is Feagin just selling books? Is Patterson’s perspective just a function of going straight from the Caribbean to Harvard? They can’t both be right. Can they? People with lesser credentials decide routinely to hold the perspective with which they have been socialized and to embrace whichever “expert” espouses their particular and sometimes peculiar belief. So a White youth sitting in a university classroom next to a Black youth wearing the same type of clothing, getting the same grades, even participating in class projects together, will nevertheless describe Black people in general as "lazy, violent, welfare frauds who want something for nothing," in spite of all the immediately visible evidence to the contrary.

This mindset has been demonstrated most recently and in a most graphic manner both before and even after the latest Presidential election. There’s no confusion among those who bother to review such matters at all that, despite a new President-elect of color, the political system in this country is still made up almost entirely of European-American men and that those women and people of color who finesse their way into legislative halls seldom get anywhere near the inner circle without selling their souls, at the very least. There is most assuredly a racial “party line” dictated by those who have always had the power to define in this nation. And even the most perfunctory review of the political arena demonstrates who those folks are.

Further, if one listens to politicians who are either women or people of color (or both), one will have no problem identifying which ones have any real power at all (the ones pushing the “party line” even against people who look like themselves) and those who are hard put to accomplish much when the rubber meets the road (those who truly attempt to represent or at least include the ranks of the politically powerless – of any skin tone). The political career of Cynthia McKinney serves as a classic example.

Even Barack Obama’s campaign was marked, many have noted, by almost no addressal of the blatant fact of racial privilege in the U.S. And with a national commitment to denial about the reality of what the Kerner Commission called “two Americas – one Black and one White” forty years ago, Obama’s choice to backburner such a crucial reality was seen as expedient rather than short-sighted or odd. The public kept waiting - and even expecting - to hear Obama declare how he was going to even the racial playing field because he is Black, yet considered it "smart politics" when he did not. The fact that it seemingly doesn't occur to us that the well-documented racial divide in this country belongs on any politician's list of issues to address is further proof of White Supremacy's insidious hold on our culture.

In this political context, unequal access to the market place is a no-brainer. Even college-educated African-American men who are allowed to be employed full-time still make only about 76% of a White man’s income, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In fact, a full-time Black male worker in 2003 made less in real dollar terms than a similar White man earned in 1967. And Black homebuyers with incomes above $100,000 per year are charged high interest rates on their mortgage loans more often than Whites with incomes below $40,000, regardless of credit history. The result? White families’ average net worth stands currently at eleven times that of Black families, with the gap remaining substantial even when comparing families of like size, composition, education, and income status. No wonder African-Americans can so often be heard to intone, “It’s always been this way and it’s always gonna be this way,” even though we didn't construct racial categories until a few hundred years ago.

Another masterminded aspect of the system of racial disparity in this country has been the development of an almost direct connection between one’s economic well-being and one’s level of academic achievement. Because of this, Jonathan Kozol has made a life's work out of producing book after book examining how the educational system in this country has utterly failed children of color to the point that while 80% of African-Americans over fourteen could read in 1930, one study estimated that this figure was reduced to 56% by 1990. Another source suggested that the latter figure was closer to 63%, but even that would substantially lower the much earlier figure. Are we to assume then, that African-Americans became less intelligent, less capable, and less motivated all by themselves over that sixty year period? Or would we want to consider the possibility that once Brown vs the Board of Education demanded that all children in the U.S. be equally prepared in this country to fulfill their potential as economically and socially successful citizens, a new sidestep was put in place?

Could it be that African-American teachers in front of their charges during segregation were actually teaching their students to value and respect themselves in ways that later lighter teachers might not always attempt or be able to do in the face of generalized anti-Black socialization? And reading levels aside, this might also help to explain the disparity between White high school graduation rates (at 78%) and Black high school graduation rates (at 56%), as reported by Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute. Further, this same dynamic would also ensure the lack of resources committed to reduce the level of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome and depression that has been identified as rife among poverty-stricken inner city youth, as demonstrated by the fact that suicide is now the number three cause of death among young Black American men.

As if all this wasn't enough, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that nearly 900 organized hate groups, most of them anti-Black, are currently operating in the United States, representing a substantial and continual rise over the past five years. Nevertheless, federal prosecutors declined to pursue federal civil rights charges in 98.7% of race-related matters referred to them from 1986 to 2003, while pursuing charges in about 40% of tax evasion cases and 51% of those related to sexual exploitation of minors. So it would appear that the government, charged with the responsibility to protect U.S. citizens from each other is simply abdicating that responsibility when it comes to people of color, even though a study in 2002 found that 75% of U.S. citizens polled did not believe everyone in the U.S. is treated equally.

James Baldwin once said, “You can learn everything you need to know about race in this country by asking a White person would they like to be Black.” This was true in 1960 and it’s true now. The question is: will it still be true in 2060? We seem to be counting on Calvin Hernton’s prediction to be wrong. But what if it isn’t? Would it matter? We act as if locking up vast numbers of young - and not so young - Black males for ridiculous periods of time is going to save this society from itself. But no people ever allowed themselves to be oppressed forever. And wherever you find oppression in history, you will find social conflict.

African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans want nothing more than what European-Americans want: safety, opportunity, respect. Acting as if they don’t understand this makes White people look stupid, mean-spirited, and even, perhaps, dangerous to an ever increasing percentage of the U.S. population. Some White people – whether they’re willing to admit it or not – fear that “sharing” the basic rights of full citizenship with people of color will result in Whites losing privilege and economic benefits. I would argue that not doing so will ultimately cost us both and maybe much, much more.

Though a cadre of disgruntled racists have reared their ugly heads in response to the election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, many in this country – Black and White – have touted the election as a symbol of change, as proof positive that, at least in very important ways, race no longer matters here. I would argue, however, that this perspective is not only badly mistaken, but will be used to further entrench and intensify institutionalized oppression against ordinary people of color in the U.S., and most particularly African-Americans. Wholesale denial of the real problems I have discussed in this post will now be masked by a ready appropriation of this one man’s remarkable achievement to mean that, if a Black man can be elected President, then there are no differences between us. Thus racism will morph into yet another incarnation of neo-racism so that, even with a Black President in the White House, we can continue to face the world as a nation marked by its refusal to honor the Constitutionally-guaranteed rights of millions of its citizens.

Can the European-American power structure maintain its strangle-hold over the entire population of the United States, many of whom it has never appropriately served or even considered? Can we continue to pretend that all is well because those with the power to define keep saying it is? Do we really believe that a nation divided against itself can long endure just because we have somehow survived thus far? And if not, what practical and comprehensive social changes are we prepared to implement immediately in the best interests of our nation, our children, and ourselves? Until we sit down together and draft that list, the socially-constructed, political notion of “race” will continue to matter to all of us in further reaching ways than we can possibly know or dare to risk.

___________________________________________________________

*Quote from "Dynamite Growing Out of Their Skulls," pp. 78-104, Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro American Writing, Leroi Jones and Larry Neal, eds.,1968, NY: William Morrow.

The So-Called "Downside" of "Diversity"

Once folks know you pay a rather inordinate amount of attention to the socially-constructed political notion of race, you can run, but you can't hide. You can get rid of your television. You can refuse to read a newspaper. You can ignore the headlines on your rss feed page. And you can steer clear of blogs. But somebody at some point will find you and drop something on you they know you won't be able to ignore.

For those of you who are new to these parts, I made a major move six weeks ago to a different state, a different school, and a different culture. The move, as moves always are, was beyond exhausting, but the transition, while requiring tons of work, has been much, much easier than I could possibly have hoped. One can only assume that this was a move that was supposed to happen. But there was anxiety, I guess, on levels I wasn't prepared to entertain. And the upshot of it all is that I haven't really been in a blogging mode for two months or so. The blog stats bear this out in a pretty forlorn fashion.

In any case, right after I moved, one of my colleagues at my old school, a man with whom I'd had enough conversations that he had learned exactly how to rattle my cage or, if not that, at least what bait I'm most likely to rise to, emailed me a copy of an article from The Boston Globe. He wrote only: "You've probably seen this. It's all over the internet. But I wondered what you think about it."

I dodged the bullet for the moment, but printed out the article and started shuffling it around on my desk. This corner. That corner. Underneath a stack of other stuff. And into the "to do" basket (which was mostly just filled with things I didn't know what to do with yet).

Then, a few days ago, I was having trouble with my internet connection on my office computer and I was stuck in what academics call Office Hours, during which you are supposed to be readily available to see students without an appointment, and I became so bored, I finally read the piece. I knew the die was cast when I broke out a hot pink highlighter and as I loaded up my briefcase yesterday afternoon, the article jumped in and rode home with me.

It wasn't the kind of issue I wanted my first real post in two months to be about. There's much more flashy, emotional, and dramatic stuff to rant...er...write about currently. But that's exactly why the study described in the Globe article is so important. It's flying under the radar. Nobody screamed or even said the N-word on coast-to-coast television. Nobody shot an elderly or mentally-challenged person of color, accusing them of going for a gun. In fact, the study sounds so low-key as to be downright boring unless you happen to be in academe or it's your job to set public policy. But this study could fuel endless processes further entrenching what some of us call "neo-racism" for decades to come. No billy clubs. No nooses. Just Power smiling congenially in blue suits and relegating people of color to the back of the societal bus -- again -- by declaring the "downside of diversity."

The study was done by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, made famous by his book, "Bowling Alone," in 2000, about how people in the United States are becoming more and more isolated from each other. This later study, which examines this idea further, is large by social scientific standards. Detailed interviews of 30,000 Black, White, Hispanic and Asian people in 41 communities from coast-to-coast is an impressive sample of the population and certainly offers the ability to generalize from the data and draw conclusions with major implications.

What Putnam was trying to determine was does diversity make a community stronger? In other words, when a neighborhood is multi-cultural, that is, made up of individuals and groups representing a diverse range of cultures, are the results as positive as many liberals have suggested? I use the word "liberals" here the way many "liberals" use it, to mean "not conservatives." In point of fact, many, if not most, liberals are not at heart vastly different from many conservatives. That is to say, conservatives want to maintain the status quo. They want to keep the power in the hands of those who have so far always had it in this country. You don't need to have a Ph.D. in history to know that White men of means wrote the constitution, putting only themselves in it, and if raw statistics are any indicator, they still hold by far and away the predominance of the power. Conservatives have no problem with this. And when push comes to shove, many so-called liberals are pretty comfortable with this, as well. Using slightly different words or selecting women and people of color who can be included without really upsetting the apple cart doesn't necessarily represent a desire for change.

Nevertheless, while many conservatives are quick to cut minorities no slack (except during election years), liberals in general have tended to purport for some time to believe that "diversity" (also called "integration" or "multiculturalism") was a good thing. A warm fuzzy, if you will. One result has been what is sometimes perceived by people of color as appropriation of their traditions by White folks with no actual appreciation for the meaning of what they feel so entitled to adopt. Another result was the implementation of programs supposedly intended to expose diverse populations to each other, especially in work settings.

The principle, apparently, was that questions such as "Why can't we all just get along?" or "Why can't we be friends?" were only problematic because different cultures hadn't gotten to know each other, had never been able to "walk a mile in the other person's shoes," so they didn't understand each other. Exposure, it was thought, would bring about understanding and then, everything would be all right.

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that people of color in the Western Hemisphere have long since had a bellyful of understanding European-American cultural traditions, a number of which are predicated on the idea of their own supremacy and the reasonable nature of their dominance over everyone else. This idea, needless to say, is patently unappealing and even ridiculous to people of color, but when you don't have the power to change the norms (norms being the accepted beliefs and practices of a given society), you're stuck until you either get the power or those with the power decide voluntarily to give it up. Riiiiiight. It's White folks who lack the "understanding" about what they continue to put those they consider "others" through.

Workplace training went from being about "diversity" to being about "multiculturalism" to being about "cultural competency," but there was no change in the norms with which U.S. citizens are socialized. And understand this: not only are European-Americans taught that they are better, smarter, more beautiful, and more deserving of not only the power positions, but all the good things offered by the society. People of color are taught this, as well. From babyhood. So that even when Momma, Grandma, Uncle Junior or some teacher says, "You're as good as anybody. You can be whatever you want to be," they know when they say it that while the first statement is true, the second one may not be. And more importantly, the child will not be treated as if he or she is as good as anybody. At least, not by people in general in the United States, including other people of color. And anyway, people of color, with the most of the worst and the least of the best, inundated daily with reminders that they will be seen as less than their lighter-skinned counterparts, and feeling after five hundred years that it's always going to be this way, may understandably and often do give up trying to fight the power and either get sick, give up, or get mean.

So when the famous Robert Putnam marched his social scientific troops into 41 "diverse," "multicultural" communities, which he admits tend to be larger, have greater income ranges, higher crime rates, and more mobility among their residents, everything I've written here was already glued in place. Putnam admits that the factors I just named -- that he admits are typical characteristics of the communities involved in the study -- could, according to the Globe article, "depress social capital independent of any impact ethnic diversity might have." That is, a large, disproportionately poor and therefore crime-ridden neighborhood where the residents move often would tend to make people isolate, distrust each other more, and lack a sense that community involvement (such as voting) would make any difference. Still, they brushed all that aside, saying that the so-called "diversity" is The Problem in these communities.

Neo-conservatives are having a field day. What we need, they exult, is more gated communities where people of like-minds and similar interests can live in orderly fashion, without any of the difficulties attached to communities with those "other" people (not like them).

But liberals are off the hook, as well. They can stop feeling embarrassed that they secretly wonder why all that training never takes, why more than forty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1965 (which was supposed to fix everything, for goodness' sake), Black people are still poor, still going to jail, still depressed and angry and in our space with their problems.

I'm reminded of the results of a study I saw on a bulletin board years ago finding that young people are happier than old people, healthy people happier than sick people, and rich people happier than poor people. My thought as I walked away from the bulletin board was: "And they paid money to learn this?" To my mind, Putnam et al has "found" the same type of information. As long as people of color are kept disproportionately poor just because they are people of color (and this has been documented so resoundingly as to be hardly worthy of studying any further), then neighborhoods where they constitute a significant portion of the population will be marked by social problems and social unrest. I tell my students, "Wherever you find oppression, you will find social conflict." Putnam could have asked me and I'd have saved him all that work.

And the Baton Is Passed

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the fact that, when understood, statistics can only bear out the facts, that is, that they really can't "prove" what is not true, they can only appear to do so. Another difficulty with statistics and, therefore, studies, in general, is how they are interpreted and then presented to others, particularly for use in policy-setting. A case in point is the "Black Males Left Behind" study conducted by Dr. Ronald Mincy, formerly of the Ford Foundation and now a professor of social policy at Columbia University. Dr. Mincy was called to testify on his findings before a Joint Economic Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., this spring and, while I haven't seen a copy of the study report, the way Dr. Mincy was quoted in the media, it sounds as if he's missed some crucial considerations and made some rather typical and even stereotypical assumptions.

Now, on the surface, this would appear to be a silly statement. I mean, who am I to call into question the conclusions of a Ph.D. at Columbia who has clearly put enough work into his project and his career that he has wound up in front of the U.S. Congress, right? But my concerns are fairly simple and straight-forward.

I first started doing this kind of analysis fifteen years ago when I was neck-deep in a dissertation I didn't ultimately finish. The dissertation had to do with the way sociological writings about race can purport to be saying something fresh and even radical, but that the words and sentence structures chosen can actually deliver the same old message anyway. For example, if I write, "There are 365 churches in Cholula, Mexico," the statement reads without particular moral or historical impact. It reads as if the people of Cholula must surely be very religious people, especially if you understand that Cholula is not that big of a city. If, on the other hand, I write, "Spanish conquerors forced the indigenous people of the city to build a Catholic church on the site of each of 365 pyramids present when the Spaniards arrived," the reader is more likely to arrive at an entirely different understanding of the matter.

Dr. Mincy, at least according to the article I read, is making a number of problematic mistakes in interpreting the available data that will lead policy-setters awry, if allowed, in reference to a situation about which he is right to be massively passionate.

Census data is telling us that half of all young African-American men are unemployed and that roughly 30% of them will do time in prison. Further, these same statistics tell us that, of the 40% of African-American men who drop out of high school, 72% are jobless and they are twice as likely to go to prison as their high school graduate counterparts. These statements, as horrible as they sound, border on "ho-hum" for anybody who lives in a low income neighborhood. Driving down the street where I live, it seems as if there are more young Black men standing around every day and with an ever-increasing law enforcement presence accordingly. This is not new news.

So why is Dr. Mincy in Washington? Because of how he's interpreting the data, that's why. In other words, he is saying what the administration, leaders, academics, and social policy pundits want to hear. He's blaming the situation on single parent families, which are primarily headed by women.

"Living with a single mother increases the likelihood of dropping out of school," he is quoted as saying. "The effects of single parenting on dropping out of school are larger, the longer a child is in a single-parent home, and larger for boys than girls."

Let's see if I can write this loudly enough for Dr. Mincy to hear it all the way inside his ivy-covered office at Columbia: "It's not the single-parenting...er...Doc-tor! It's the lack of income!!!" I'd like to see Dr. Mincy raise a child (or several) on the minimum wage -- or less -- in the year 2007 in the U.S.A. All the corroborating statistical data is available for this perspective, as well. Women make about 75 cents on the dollar as compared to men. In fact, if an African-American man can get a job, Census data tells us that he's going to make more, on average, against what White men make, than women do -- even European-American women. Additionally, the single-parent woman who receives anything, averages very little more in child support than $300 per month (not per child, but at all). About a quarter receive nothing. And the unemployment ocean in which Black men are drowning is certainly not helping this much.

Let's make this as clear as possible. If women -- all women, and most particularly all women of color -- were paid a living wage for the work they do and supported with the practical necessities of life (such as affordable housing, transportation, and day care); if all fathers were held fully responsible for their participation in the economic lives of their children -- and helped to accomplish that (regardless of whether or not they are presently "tapping that"); and if all children, and most particularly children of color, were supported with universal physical and mental health care, a fully-funded educational process, and a rich and enriching selection of activities outside of school, then Black men would not be flocking into jail, starting in their early teens. This is NOT -- hear me, now -- a function of their mothers being SINGLE. (He-llo!) If it was, we could just line folks up in two's, marry 'em off, and solve the problem.

Dr. Mincy does throw in the "secondary" issues of bad schools, institutionalized oppression in the form of racism, and the disappearance of millions of jobs as a result of a manufacturing economy that has been steadily shriveling since the 1970's, but ultimately he points to the "experience of welfare reform" as the light at the end of the tunnel. And there we have it: the reason he's the one who's testifying.

When Clinton shoved through his promised decimation of the welfare system in the U.S. on his way out the door, everybody in the field of social service knew the new policies were going to be disastrous in their repercussions. The so-called "principle" sounded good. Women -- who had become "dependent on the system," it was said -- would be "helped" and "encouraged" to get off welfare by having their assistance pulled. It was the equivalent of throwing a five-year-old in a pond and telling her to swim or die. Forget racism (which discriminates against her and has taught her to see herself as incapable and unworthy, in any case). Forget the lack of jobs and the fact that more -- at every level -- are exported daily. Forget the fact that we can afford billions of dollars a month to kill babies all over the world, but we can't afford to feed and educate them in our own communities. And forget that she cannot do anything about any of these things. Just throw her in the water and ignore the cries of the babies hanging on -- for dear life -- around her neck.

So, Dr. Ronald Mincy appears to be the new Dr. William Julius Wilson (the African-American academic who received a major Ford Foundation research grant and became in the early nineties the President of the American Sociological Association for holding that the destruction of the inner city was the fault of middle class African-Americans who moved out). Shame on you, Mincy. Enjoy the rarified atmosphere up there in Washington, but don't ever forget that, when the dust settled on the plantation, regardless of where he was living, even the House-Man was Black.

My Annual Post On Sports

It isn't very often that I read an article in Jet - or even the New York Times - and find myself reminded of my stats classes in grad school. There's a reason for that. Such articles are few and far between because most ordinary folks can't understand what statistical analysis really means, as a rule. This is one of the reasons people are so quick to say flatly, "You can prove anything using statistics." What they mean is that statistics can be used to "prove" anything - right or wrong. But the reality is that "statistics" can only "prove" "anything" to them. If you have a clue, statistics can only bear out the facts.

When I first read about the study conducted by Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, I knew there wouldn't be much flap over it, even though there ought to be. Then, when I saw the article in the Jet Magazine, I really winced. It was virtually unintelligible. That is, I read it twice, and I couldn't make heads nor tails of what it was supposed to be saying. I would have ignored it, if I hadn't already understood the first piece.

Wolfers and Price found that, during the course of the thirteen N.B.A. seasons from 1991 through 2004, White referees called fouls at a greater rate against Black players than they did against White players. In fact, they went so far as to say that the difference in the rates "is large enough that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game." Whoa!

The crunchy part read something like: "Across all specifications, we find that Black players receive around 0.12-0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played (an increase of 2-1/2 to 4-1/2 per cent) when the number of White referees officiating a game increases from zero to three." The bottom line: a difference of about two victories in an 82-game season.

The N.B.A. went ball-istic, of course (sorry I couldn't resist). The Commissioners rushed right out and had their own study done, which "found," needless to say, no such problem. Three independent experts hired by the Times to examine both studies, however, declared the Wolfers-Price work far more credible, though they may have been ham-strung somewhat by the fact that the N.B.A. refused to provide the underlying data they claimed to use to make their alternate conclusions.

The N.B.A. shouldn't take it all so hard. First of all, the fact that the whole society is rampantly racist is easy to document. Are the N.B.A. Commissioners trying to claim that it and it alone stands above the socially institutionalized norms? I would hope not. Secondly, it's not as if someone is accusing them of intentional oppression. When they said the league does not consider race in the hiring process for referees, nobody (and certainly not Wolfers or Price) claimed otherwise.

When the referees are taken out of the equation, however, it's hard not to catch the differences. "Player-performance appears to deteriorate at every margin when officiated by a larger fraction of opposite-race referees," write Wolfers and Price, except for shooting free throws (when the referees are irrelevant). And there you have it.

The researchers have tried to reassure the N.B.A. Commissioners that they're not calling anyone racist, per se, but bias based on skin tone can be subconscious, they say. "You see two players [collide] on the floor and you have to call a block or a charge. Does the skin color of the players somehow shape how you interpret the signals your brain gives you?"

The numbers say they do. "Basically, [our research] suggests," says Wolfers, "that if you spray-painted one of your starters White, you'd win a few more games." Damn! No wonder the playing fields are still not level. Folks that look like me gotta win part of the time.

A Poverty of the Soul

Long before the RSS feed page, professors enjoyed a much more casual process: the continual service of students who see or hear something, think of their professor, and then bring the article or the book or the cd or the video or their notes on the event and present it as a gift. Which it is. Invariably. This extra attention is usually tendered by a student who is at least momentarily fascinated by the topic at hand (and sometimes by the professor, as well), so they're typically right on the money. Case in point: a heads-up on a New York Times Op-Ed Page contribution ("A Poverty of the Mind," 3/26/06) by sociologist and Harvard professor, Orlando Patterson. An essay that, as it turns out, is getting much attention, but which I had somehow missed as yet.

In a nutshell, Patterson is calling for a return to the good ole days of racial analysis when African-Americans were recognized as being their own worst problem, rather than paying attention to such irrelevant factors as "low incomes, joblessness, poor schools, and bad housing," all of which are a direct result of the European-American power structure's policy setting and none of which can be magically affected by African-American determination.

Joblessness, points out Patterson, for example, is rampant in Latin America and India, but the mass of the population does not turn to crime. Nooo...it simply dies of the effects of malnutrition or kills itself, a much preferred outcome, one must assume, as far as Patterson is concerned. Perhaps, if he could bring himself to grasp the insidious and effective nature of what continual socialization to perceive oneself as inferior accomplishes, he would recognize the difference between India, Latin America, and the United States. When one is poor in India, one is not, ipso facto, worthless or deserving of that status for some reason; one is simply poor. In the U.S., on the other hand, where we like to "blame the victim," poor people are seen as deserving of their fate (even if there are not enough jobs, even if they are highly skilled, even if they play by all the rules). It hurts. It makes people angry. And it increases the likelihood that they will go outside the lines. Oh, yes, and there's the matter of not wanting to be homeless, as well.

Other social scientists, not looking to roll us backward to an even more White-controlled and White-serving paradigm than is currently in use, tell us that poverty is about "relative deprivation" anyway. Maybe a greater percentage of U.S. citizens have food to eat than one might find in, say, India, but U.S. culture is such that money is more important than life here and what you have is more important than who you are. The first thing we identify about a person is their skin tone and the second entails asking, "What do you do?" Meaning where do you fall in the socio-economic class system.

Consequently, if you happen to be a dark-skinned male in the U.S. and you grew up without enough resources to expect to receive a decent education and the police started labeling you for the criminal justice system at the age of ten by taking your photo with a string of numbers across your chest against the day when you might do something illegal and your daily life is awash with input about how basketball and rap are your only hope (despite the occasional Jamaican professor, who after all was not born here and did not benefit from an invidious social rearrangement of his brain), you are infinitely more likely to go to prison than to college, whereupon you will be highly unlikely as a convicted felon to ever get a decent job in life. What part does Patterson see all this playing in the development of the African-American male mindset, I wonder? And how would the individual African-American boy-child go about avoiding the repercussions of this horrible reality?

Patterson admits that the jobs created in the "economic boom" of the 1990's (does this man never leave the hallowed halls?) do not offer a living wage, but he sees working for less than it takes to live on as an "opportunity to acquire basic work skills" that can later be transferred to "better" jobs. It would be interesting to know how Patterson thinks young Black men are supposed to live while being paid $150 per week. Further, Carol Stack's new research on how working at McDonald's prepares you only to work at McDonald's seems lost on the good doctor, who it would appear went straight from Jamaica to the London School of Economics to the University of the West Indies to Harvard (an impressive trajectory that raised the question for me of how a Black man could come to be chosen by Harvard in 1969 in the first place, but which is answered loudly and clearly by his perspective in this essay).

Poor schools, Patterson reminds us, do not explain why after 10 years of education a young man remains illiterate. But while social scientist after social scientist has pointed out the negativistic debilitation and labeling process that is slam-dunking young Black men in the U.S. on a daily basis--inside and outside of the public school system--Patterson doesn't get it. He sits in his ivory tower and remains blissfully oblivious, not to mention reeking of self-righteousness. Don't bother him with the information about the recent study describing how African-American youth compete respectably with European-Americans when they think an exam is just for practice, but then take a nose-dive on their scores when they believe that the score will be used to determine their placement. One has to wonder which "distinctive attitudes, values and predispositions" peculiar to Black youth Patterson would suggest result in this apparent lack of confidence in their ability to compete with those who look like me, especially considering that they'd already proven that they could hold their own. Whose best interest would their lackluster performance in the latter case be? And who, exactly, has been in continual control of the social institutions of this country from its inception to the present--institutions at whose doors youthful Black failure to thrive must surely be laid.

Unless, of course, you believe, as Professor Patterson apparently does, that Black kids (and I guess Black folks in general, then) are just like that. He acknowledges the ugly past (kind of him to bother), but holds firmly to the idea that it is nonetheless important to hold people responsible for their behavior (although that doesn't seem to mean holding European-Americans responsible for either that ugly past or the well-documented practices that continue to oppress people of color, since Patterson doesn't seem nearly as interested in holding White feet to the fire).

Now, I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't be responsible for their behavior. I'm suggesting that people living out their lives under nightmare conditions sometimes don't act right. And abject poverty (such as one out of two Black children in the U.S. grow up in--through no fault of their own) is a nightmare and garishly hard on self-image and self-esteem, which linger for life.

Additionally, after a full team of professionals descended on Columbine to work for a year with the students traumatized by a single event in a single school (heinous as it was), one study suggested that as many as forty percent of the young Black kids in Compton suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (the results of living in a war zone). The question was: why were those children not getting help and how were they supposed to deal with life while not getting it? Patterson suggests that these young people should have their needs "addressed" (a lick and a promise perhaps?), but that ultimately and in the meantime, of course, we must hold them responsible. And here I thought that's what the White power structure has been doing all along...?

Patterson admits that slavery (his specialty, apparently) had horrendous effects on Black culture, but he doesn't seem to buy that there is still trouble in what has undoubtedly been paradise for him. He points out that Jim Crow was dismantled in a single generation, as if the attempts to force that dismantling had not been introduced until the 1960's. But in using this type of reasoning, he falls into the Euro-centric perspective that now that people of color can come down out of the balconies at the movie theater or legally marry a White wife and rub shoulders with the pundits at Harvard, history has moved on and poor Black men should get over it.

He harangues young Black men for their "predatory sexuality and irresponsible fatherhood" (somehow blaming it on slavery) without imagining that whatever it is he's descibing has anything to do with the reality of Black life in general in the U.S. today--as prescribed by White power and privilege. It's a markedly short-sighted viewpoint for a supposedly erudite man. He's a sociologist, after all, and my understanding of the field would suggest that sociologists want to know the context in which social realities develop. To look back in the causal chain two hundred years, but leave out yesterday, while tidy, is not a very comprehensive explanatory analysis.

But this ignoring of the well-documented reality of White oppression against people of color and most particularly African-Americans in the present conveniently allows Patterson to pontificate that all young Black men need to do is "to turn off Fifty Cent and get out the SAT prep book." As if that would insure educated Black men a job and insulate them from racism in the workplace and protect them from police brutality and assure them that their children--male and female--will benefit from the equal playing field that Patterson seems to see, but African-Americans at every educational level know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, does not exist.

That this world-famous intellectual refers to "our racist past" as a tragedy and then goes on to write that "most Black Americans have by now, miraculously, escaped its consequences" makes me embarrassed to be in academe. But not surprised, never surprised, at what it produces in service to those with the power to define.