Tuesday, May 27, 2008

"The Sixties": King and urban disorders in the 1960s

(I drafted this in early April but failed to post it then.)

The nightmares of our "culture warriors" are still haunted by the urban riots of the 1960s. They're even more terrifying than their visions about gay sex or abortion. Even many people who weren't even around or too young to notice at the time have inherited the fear from their parents and political mentors. And there was a riot in Los Angeles in 1992 that reminded everyone of what had happened and maybe could happen again.

The period of those riots were kicked off by the Watts riot of 1965. The time line is important, because in the "culture war" view of the 1960s, including the somewhat more urbane version favored by the Bobos, the early 1960s were a time of respectable and respectful dissent by well-mannered Negroes (the normal term then), while the later 1960s was marked by wild-eyed radicals who were totally irresponsible and destructive and dangerous.

In this version, Martin Luther King, Jr. functions as an icon of respectability against which in practice virtually all activists black leaders of that time and this are seen as distinctly suspect. One currently popular shorthand for that view is "Jeremiah Wright", or "Obama's Wright problem".

Often this view is used to justify in effect shrugging off the current dilemmas facing African Americans and other ethnic minorities in majority-white America. The African American columnist Eugene Robinson is not a Bobo exactly. But he articulates one common aspect of this view in Two Black Americas Washington Post 04/08/08:

Forty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, we sometimes talk about race in America as if nothing has changed. The truth is that everything has changed - mostly for the better - and that if we're ever going to see King's dream fulfilled, first we have to acknowledge that this is not an America he would have recognized. ...

For those who haven't made it into the middle class, however, things are different. Inner-city communities were hollowed out - a process accelerated by the riots that followed King's death - and left fallow for decades. Middle-class professionals fled, businesses closed, schools disintegrated, family structures fell apart. Drugs and crime were symptoms of the general rot; the gentrification of recent years has just shifted the pathology from one part of the city to another, or perhaps to a close-in suburb, sweeping it into a corner.

The African American poor are a smaller segment than they were 40 years ago, but arguably they are further from full participation in society than they were in King's era. It's not that they have no interest in climbing the ladder, it's that too many rungs are missing.
(my emphasis)
The situation of African Americans since 1968 has changed "mostly for the better", he writes soothingly (at least for white readers). Was this man vacationing on Mars during Hurricane Katrina?

But even Robinson's cautious mention of real, persistent, chronic problems for a large percentage of American blacks would be too much for good Christian Republican white folks these days. Although most of them won't be shaken too badly by the metaphorical idea that "too many rungs" are missing on the ladder leading to middle-class prosperity.

But start talking about more serious enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and spending considerably more money on the kinds of "middle class" basic services that black and other resident of our cities' poorest neighborhoods - effective law enforcement, top-quality schools, safe parks and playgrounds, well-stocked libraries, after-school programs for kids, drug treatment programs, job-training and even public-employment programs - that will send the Bobos to sputtering about the tax burden on our much-put-upon wealthy citizens. And the Christianists to war about how welfare subsidies "bad morals" among young women, whose whole sex is a source of much torment to them anyway. And the blowhards of OxyContin radio will blather endlessly about welfare queens and fraud and lazy poor people.

Certainly there has been progress in this area in the last 40 years. Many legal and practical barriers have been removed that blocked blacks from jobs and education. Despite the segregationist voter-suppression tactics that have now become standard operating procedure for the Republican Party, black voters in the South are enfranchised. The dismantling of the legal "de jure" segregation system in the South is a big achievement. The era of blacks being charged for crimes by all-white law enforcement, prosecuted by a white prosecutor before a white judge, and their fate being decided by an all-white juries is gone. Decades of anti-discrimination laws have persuaded most corporations to incorporate affirmative action hiring practices, more scrupulously practiced by some companies than by others.

The Bobos use their phony image of a tame Martin Luther King to justify ignoring the real problems around race that still exist. So do some liberals. But King's life and career as civil rights leader overlaps the period of 1960s riots by more than two years, if we take the Watts riot as a starting point. King was committed to addressing the issues facing urban black communities outside the South, as well.

Robinson's comment that the process of the decline of community institutions and common culture ties in black areas of big cities - I'm assuming that's what he means by hollowing-out - was "accelerated by the riots that followed King's death". While it's a sensible statement as far as it goes, the urban riots were a bigger phenomenon that an angry reaction to King's death.

It's also worth observing that urban blacks outside the South must have felt in some way that King represented their interests for there to be such a reaction after his murder. Those post-assassination riots were "overdetermined", as the psychologists say. But that was surely a significant factor, just as the event of his assassination became the flash-point that set off that historic round of disorders.

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