Category Archives: Race

The cognitive divide between black and white

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By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
THE TIME of the week has arrived at which I look at some problem or other and confidently pronounce, as though I knew, just what we should do about it. But I have no solutions today.
    Today, I’m just sad, and solutions seem scarce. Part of it is personal. I just returned a few days ago from Pennsylvania, where my youngest daughter’s closest friend had died after a traffic accident. But there are other causes.
    As I write, my wife is on her way back from Memphis, where she had been, tending to family business, when the awful news came about David. She had to fly back there after the funeral to get her car, and drive it home.
    A few minutes ago, I checked on her by cell phone. I told her I was groping about for a column idea, and she said I should write about how lucky we were to be living in South Carolina rather than Memphis. She cited what she described as the painfully divisive victory speech Mayor Willie Herenton had delivered after his re-election a few days ago.
    I just saw the video, and she’s right. Lord knows we have our own demons here in the state that was first to secede, and would do it again if some had their way. But there is a rawness to racial tension in Memphis that is hard to describe if you haven’t been there.
    There was a time — 16 years ago, when he became the first black mayor of that city — when Willie Herenton was a sign of hope: a black man elected with both black and white support.
    It was the sort of thing we had wanted and expected to see for a long time. Back in 1974, when we were students at Memphis State, Harold Ford — senior, not the one who ran for the U.S. Senate last year — ran for Congress against incumbent Republican Dan Kuykendall. My wife and I were totally for Ford, even though Rep. Kuykendall was her Dad’s friend and business partner. He had been all very well and good for the folks his age, but our generation was going to change things. And that race thing? Our kids would only know about that from history books.
    So it was sad, here in the next century, to hear Mayor Herenton tell his supporters in his hour of victory that “I now know who is for me, and I also know who is against me,” and the overwhelmingly black crowd applauds, because they know just what he means.
    For a man just re-elected to an unprecedented fifth term, Mr. Herenton had a huge chip on his shoulder. “There are some mean, mean-spirited people in Memphis,” he said to much cheering. “There are some haters…. I know about haters, and I know about shaking ’em off.”
    He went on to tell about “two sad occasions” from the campaign. “I’m gonna let you know about the sickness in Memphis.”
    He spoke of a basketball game at which he had presented the key to the city during halftime, and “the fans showed so much disdain and hatred… and that place was full, 90 percent white.”
    Another time, while appearing live from Memphis on “Good Morning America” along with Justin Timberlake, “I get up on the stage, and it was 95 percent young white kids, they booed me on national television.”
    “But what they want to say is, can Willie Herenton bring us together? I didn’t separate us.”
    “Memphis got a lot of healing to do. But see, I don’t have that problem. They’ve got a problem.”
    We’ve all got a problem, and not just in Memphis. What is Memphis but a great, big Jena, Lousiana? Another town where there are no heroes, just a place full of people, black and white, all messed up over race.
    Mayor Herenton isn’t just some isolated megalomaniac. Judging by the reaction, every person in that room saw what he saw, just the way he saw it. And whites, watching on TV, saw a guy who was calling them racists.
    The Commercial Appeal, the newspaper the mayor dismisses as the voice of the white establishment, harrumphed that “contrary to the innuendoes he made during his speech, the 58 percent of voting population who opposed him can’t all simply be dismissed as racists.” No, they can’t, especially since one of the two candidates who split the anti-Herenton vote was also black. But Herenton supporters can stew over the fact that in the whitest precincts, his support was in single digits.
    It’s this cognitive divide between what white folks and black folks perceive, when both are looking at the very same thing, that keeps us from putting this mess behind us. And I didn’t just arrive at this conclusion.
    Somewhere — maybe in a box in my attic — is a manila folder containing a printout of a column I wrote in 1995, but never ran in the paper. I wrote it in a state of bewilderment on the day O.J. Simpson was acquitted. I hadn’t followed the trial and didn’t care much about it one way or the other, but I had found myself in a room with a television when the verdict came in, and a crowd had gathered to hear it. You know what happened next: The black folks watching cheered; the whites stared in silence. To me, another rich guy’s lawyers had gotten him off; big deal. But that wasn’t the way my black friends in the room saw it at all, and I was shocked at the contrast. But because I had no solution to offer, because the column just chronicled my shock, I didn’t deem it worthy of publication. I’d hold it until I could come up with an answer.
    I’m still holding it. And now, here we are. What’s my point? I don’t have one. I just think it’s sad. Don’t you?

A racial Rorschach test

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Help me with a little experiment. Go watch this video footage of the mayor of Memphis, Willie Herenton, giving his victory speech upon being elected to an unprecedented fifth term.

For added data, here’s an editorial about his speech in The Commercial Appeal, a newspaper he mentions. Here also is a story showing how the vote broke down along racial lines, and here’s an item about election night from an alternative paper.

What I’m wondering is: Based on this speech, what is your impression of the city of Memphis, and of its mayor?

My Sunday column is a sort of funky one, as it gropes around the problem of the dramatically different ways that black and white Americans see things around them. It’s a question I’ve been pondering anew ever since the Jena Six thing hit the headlines — I was struck by all the well-meaning black folks who were willing to suspend their lives to go march in behalf of some kids who, basically beat up another kid. Yeah, it looked like the justice system overreacted, but how could a person looking at it from afar see such moral clarity in a situation in which I saw no heroes.

This case from Memphis seems another illustration.

If you can, get someone who is not of the same skin color as you to look at the same stuff I’m asking you to look at. I’m guessing that would mean recruiting a black friend, since I have this image — which is in itself probably an unjustified racial assumption — of most of y’all as being way white. If I’m wrong about that, forgive me.

Anyway, please share your thoughts.

Those experts are FAST, man!

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Ordinary folks just can’t react as quickly as the experts. That’s proven time and again by the "experts" who keep responding to every policy position Barack Obama sets forth.

Today is a typical example.

At 11:48 a.m., I received an e-mail announcing that "EXPERTS PRAISE BARACK OBAMA’S PLAN TO CREATE EQUAL OPPORTUNITY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL."

But it wasn’t until four minutes later, at 11:52, that the plan was actually released. That’s when I got this e-mail, anyway: "Obama Outlines Plan to Address Disparities in America’s Justice System."

These experts must have ol’ Doc Brown helping them out. He’s sort of an expert, too, I guess.

The Little Rock Nine, 50 years on

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Last week, I happened to mention what happened in Little Rock 50 years ago in the course of asking the successor of Orval Faubus about his thoughts on race relations today, in Arkansas and the nation.

Mike Huckabee noted that today — Sept. 25 — would be the 50th anniversary of the day that the 101st Airborne Division escorted nine black kids to class at Central High School, to get them past the mob of white racists outside.

To mark that day, I edited a short video clip of the former governor talking about the meaning of those events. He mentions two items of note: First, that his daughter Sarah — seated behind him in the photo below — was attending Central High at the time when the 40th anniversary was marked (which raises yet another point of contrast with a certain other governor); and second, that he takes great pride as a Republican in having won 48 percent of the black vote in one of his elections.

Huckabeesarah

Making friends, of a sort

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I received this missive today, and while it’s hardly a welcome development to have someone turn his back on you, he did it in a civil way:

Mr. Warthen,
       This will be my last note to your newspaper. We’re not getting anywhere so I will bow out.
       I do thank you for communicating . . . . That is more than some newspaper folk do and even if we disagree, that’s our right, OK?

Thanks,
Irvin Shuler

I was just about to write back and say, sure, that’s cool; different strokes and all that … when I decided, just on a whim, to see what this correspondent had most recently had to say to me. I found that among my yet-unread e-mail was one he sent yesterday:

Why would "you" not want to talk about those n_____s brought across the
Atlantic by the damn yankee, money gruggers?    Were they "your" ancestors
and just how much did YOUR family make off of us?????? AGAIN ?????
Please,
Mr. Warthen……just get the hell out of our state….yes, b___h, leave this
state and YOUR
State Paper should be forgotten.
Remember……there was a "State Paper"
editor once that pushed a little too far and
got…..well….just what he
deserved.     He spoke against Southern Folk and got just what he
deserved.    He was killed………thank goodness !!!!

Irvin
Shuler……………..NEVER ANOTHER APPOMATTOX   !!!!!

You will now, no doubt, remember this gentleman from previous correspondence.

At least, as we parted, he was in a better mood. That’s something.

How was your Confederate Memorial Day?

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S.C. political culture
keeps flag up,
DOT unreformed

By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
RECENTLY, I said state lawmakers refuse to find the time to deal with the Confederate flag’s implications for our state.
    I was wrong. They’ve saved so much time by not reforming the Department of Transportation this session that they managed to take off a whole day Thursday to honor the flag and all that it stands for. They also paid state employees several million dollars to do the same.
    They know just what they’re doing. They don’t declare state holidays for every failed insurrection that comes along. There’s no Stono Rebellion Day, for instance. That was when some black South Carolina slaves rose up violently to assert their right to live as they chose, and lots of people died horribly, and the rebels suffered much and gained nothing. Whereas the War Between the States was when a bunch of white South Carolina slave owners rose up violently to… OK, well, the rest of it’s just the same.
    But you see, we have a Confederate Memorial Day holiday because the General Assembly had to do something for white people after it gave black folks Martin Luther King Day.
    It was a tradeoff. Our leaders think in those terms. Something for you people in exchange for something for us people. The idea that Martin Luther King might be worth a nod from all of us just didn’t wash.
    The Legislature’s refusal to reform the Department of Transportation is actually related. That agency is governed according to the principle of something for you people in exchange for something for us people, leaving out the needs of the state as a whole.
    The power lies in the Transportation Commission. The governor appoints the chairman; the other members are chosen by legislators. Not by the Legislature as a whole: Each member represents a congressional district, and only the legislators who live in that district have a say in choosing that commissioner. Therefore the people in a position to set priorities on road-building have parochial notions of what roads need to be built — all except the chairman, who can’t vote unless there’s a tie.
So how are priorities set? Something for you people in exchange for something for us people — the balancing of narrow interests, rather than a statewide strategy.
    Lawmakers as a whole aren’t even seriously considering giving up that commission. Even the idea of giving greater power over the commission to the governor — who in almost any other state would be running that executive agency outright — is utterly shocking to some of the most powerful legislative leaders.
    “This Senate would rue the day that you turn that billion-dollar agency over to one person,” said Sen. John Land, who represents a rural district.
    The scandal at the Transportation Department didn’t arise from former Director Elizabeth Mabry being a bad administrator. She was a bad administrator, but she was part of a system. A job for your relative, commissioner, in return for indulging the way I run my fiefdom ….
    Something for you in exchange for something for me. It didn’t even have to be stated.
    When I say the “Legislature” is like this, it doesn’t apply to all lawmakers — just to the decisions they make collectively.
    There are some who want to fix the agency, and others who want to take down the Confederate flag. But the status quo runs right over them without breaking stride.
    Sen. John Courson proposed to do away with the commission and put the governor in charge. He got support, but not enough; the idea was dropped.
    After I wrote about “the Legislature” not wanting to talk about the flag recently, Rep. Chris Hart called to say he wants to talk about it, and that he and Reps. Todd Rutherford, Bakari Sellers and Terry Alexander have a bill that would take the flag down — H.3588. But it’s sat in committee since Feb. 27.
    My grand unifying theory is not a simple matter of good guys and bad guys. Sen. Glenn McConnell is a champion of the monument for you, flag for me system. But he’s pushing the plan to give the governor more say over the Transportation Department.
    What  matters is how it comes out, after everybody votes. This legislative session will end soon. Significant reform of the Transportation Department is looking doubtful, while action on the flag is politically impossible.
    Rep. Rutherford has some hope for next year on the flag, especially after recent comments from football coach Steve Spurrier, and the protest by United Methodist clergy. If that blossoms into a movement of the breadth of the one that moved the flag in 2000, H.3588 could have a chance.
    But he warns that if it does start to gain support, a moribund proposal to declare a Confederate Heritage Month will likely be revived. Something for you people, something for us people.
    The Transportation Department won’t be reformed until the culture changes, until the notion that there is such a thing as statewide priorities replaces the traditional balancing of the interests of narrow constituencies.
    The flag won’t come down unconditionally until the notion sinks in that it’s not about whether your ancestors were slaves, or slaveholders, or neither. This is the 21st century, and the Confederacy hasn’t existed since 1865. “I’m not trying to disrespect anybody’s heritage,” Rep. Rutherford said on Confederate Memorial Day. “It just shouldn’t be there.”
    That’s true no matter who your kinfolk were, and no matter what day it is in the year 2007.

Confederate Flag: The Ugly Underbelly

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OK, so you’ve read, along with lots of encouraging remarks, some of those ridiculous rationalizations that some otherwise decent folk use to justify continuing to fly a Confederate flag on the State House grounds. You know, Heritage not Hate, etc.

I feel obligated to inform those of you who have led sheltered lives as to one of the main reasons why the flag remains. It’s because lawmakers who would otherwise remove it fear getting messages such as the one I am about to share with you.

First I must warn you. This is something that I would never, ever put in the newspaper. We have standards in the newspaper. Nor would I mail anything like this to you. I am sharing this only so that you no longer entertain innocent thoughts about the flag or the purity of all its defenders. You may be really fond of your heritage and all that — the same heritage that I share, mind you, having had five great-great-grandfathers representing South Carolina in the War — but you must not blind yourself to the kind of evil with which you ally yourself when you insist on flying that flag.

I get anonymous messages like this frequently when we bring up the subject of the flag. Out of common decency and the love of, my yearning for, the kind of civility I keep writing about, I never share them. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. My delicacy on this point allows some of you to preserve precious illusions. But we don’t have time for such illusions any more.

This message is not only hateful, it is extremely obscene. But I’m not going to clean it up. I’m just warning you NOT to read it.

Only read it if you doubt me that ugly, hateful racial attitudes play a part in this debate. If you do doubt that, you should read on.

Again, this is highly offensive material! Do not read on if obscene words and sentiments will disturb you!

Its sad that bigots
such as yourself and the majority of your peers write for a publication known as
the state.  The views expressed in your pathetic publication certainly do
not represent the views of the majority of the voters in this state, and I plan
to wage war against the purchase of your product! Perhaps when your liberal
publication  is no longer in demand you can stand in the unemployment
line with the "fine" minorities you sarcasticly pretend to embrace! Hopefully
you will become impoverished to the point that you will be forced to commit
crime, therefore, being locked away in the jails and prisons with these animals
who represent the minority of the population but the majority of the criminals.
Then when they slap you around, take youe food, force you to do their
chores,like the little bitch you are mabe then you will be enlightened to your
ignorance in showing passion and empathy to the "poor" ol’ blacks, half breeds,
or what have you! You ,and those who share your views are a fucking disgrace and
should be forced to live with these sub-humans for the rest of your sickening
lives and at the end (which won’t be that long, for you will probally kill
yourselves) be ALLOWED to tell how wrong you were and apoligize to
your kids and others for forever fucking up the country and making the pure race
non-existant! Thanks asshole! Hopefully the spot in HELL you are sent to will be
full of these disease ridden criminal-minded animals who are the majority, and
then let us all know how fair you were treated !!!

It’s not signed, but the e-mail address is Cdavidcatoe@aol.com.

Welcome to my world. I’m sorry — sorry enough that I may think better of this before the day is out and take it down. For now, I’m just telling you that this is the sort of stuff I get, via e-mail, snail mail and phone message in connection with this subject. With me, it’s an occasional thing. With my colleague Warren Bolton, it’s much, much more frequent. Why? Well, Look at Warren. You figure it out.

Flag column

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Hey, let’s just get it over with

By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
TOMMY MOORE was right to refuse to go to Georgia for the annual meeting of the South Carolina chapter of the NAACP. By refusing to go, he sent the message that no one who wants to lead a state should participate in a boycott intended to hurt that state.
    Mark Sanford was right to go to Georgia to deliver the message he did — that if you think your boycott is going to get us any closer to moving the Confederate flag off the State House grounds, you’re deluding yourselves.
    What neither man said, but what anyone who would lead South Carolina should say — and to all South Carolinians, not just the NAACP — is this:
    “Yep, the NAACP should see that they’re going nowhere with this and drop it. But they probably won’t. So what you should do is ignore the boycott, and do what you would do if it didn’t exist, if it had never existed. That shouldn’t be hard; you’re ignoring it now.
    “That is, you ignore it until someone says, ‘Hey, why don’t we go ahead and move this flag; it’s got no business here.’ Then a loud bunch of you start howling, ‘No, we’ll never give in to the NAACP!’ As if the NAACP were the reason to remove it. That’s what the NAACP wants everybody to think — that it’s up to them. Well, it isn’t. Never was, never will be. It’s not up to any national organization. It’s up to us, the people of South Carolina — black and white, young and old. Or at least, the sensible ones.
    “We came together off and on for six years back in the ’90s to talk about getting the flag off the dome. It was a truly wonderful thing to see, as church after business group after civic organization, black and white, joined the effort. That process culminated in 2000, with a compromise that got the flag off the dome, but that created a new problem. Some think the flag came down because of this boycott, which was started right at the end of the process. But you know what I think? I think we would have come up with a better solution — a permanent solution — if the boycott hadn’t happened.
    “Sure, it created an additional urgency. People who already wanted the flag down thought, ‘this is getting crazy; let’s get something done now.’ But in that atmosphere, the only kind of plan that had any chance of passing was one that did not please the NAACP. So better ideas — such as replacing the actual flag with a bronze historical plaque or such — were shoved aside, and we got a nonsolution-solution. This had the desired effect — the NAACP was mad, and stayed mad. And all of the reasonable people walked away, leaving the NAACP and the Sons of Confederate Veterans in possession of the issue.
    “Well, we’ve let them have it long enough. Those State House grounds are ours, not theirs, and we have a lot of important issues that we need to come together there to solve. Hear that? Come together. We must do that, or we’ll always be last where we want to be first. A symbol such as this doesn’t bring us together; it achieves the precise opposite.
    “You tell me I should be talking about more important things — education, jobs, taxes and spending, reshaping our government, the Two South Carolinas? I agree, which is why those are the things I talk about most of the time. You say the flag is a distraction? You’re right. So let’s get it out of the way. Why not just ignore it? Because if we can’t get together to agree to move past something this pointless, we’ll never solve any of the hard stuff.
    “So let’s put this behind us, roll up our sleeves, and get to work.”
    Neither of them said that. But someone should have. So I did.

Regarding Warren’s column today

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This is to lend my own perspective in support of what my colleague Warren Bolton has to say in his column today.

There are an awful lot of white folks out there who are by no means racist but who nevertheless get impatient with black folks seeming to talk about race "all the time." I’ll admit that while I don’t quite go that far, I have had a similar reaction: Sometimes it just seems odd to me that black writers or speakers will inject race into their comments on a subject that seemed — to me — to be totally unrelated.

But while I’m not the most empathetic person in the world, I have managed to figure out that the reason I have that reaction is that I’ve never had the regular experience that black folks have of race being thrown in their faces, and usually in an extremely unpleasant way. This usually happens out of the view of the kind of white folks who would never dream of doing, saying or thinking anything racist, and thus such well-meaning folk think it’s their black neighbors who have an unhealthy fixation.

Working with Warren has helped me see this. I’ll give you an example.

Sometime after Warren Bolton joined our editorial board, he wrote a column or two about the Confederate flag that was then atop our State House dome. At that point, I had already written on the subject — demanding that it come down — about 200 times since I had joined the board myself in 1994.

Warren’s style of writing about it was milder and more polite than mine. He objected to the flag’s presence in a kinder, gentler manner than was my wont. This was partly due to the difference in our personalities. But I suspect it was also because Warren knew, far better than I, what was coming.

You see, I thought I’d seen it all in the way of negative reactions from flag defenders. The editorial department secretary hated the days that one of my pieces on the subject ran, because it meant a day of fielding — and passing on to me — angry call after angry call, followed by a flood of letters.

But what I’d experienced was hugs and kisses compared to the slime that came bursting out of the woodwork from the very first moment that Warren dared to touch upon the subject. The vitriol, the pure hatred that was aimed at him was like nothing I had seen. And what was the difference between his columns and mine? Well, there were two: Mine were somewhat more provocative, and a picture of a black man ran with his.

I was already at that point tired of hearing the canard about how support for the flag never had a thing to do with race, but I really got fed up with it at that point. What provoked the hatred; what was Warren’s offense? Simple. He was guilty of having an opinion on the flag while being black.

This did not surprise Warren. He had, after all, been black all his life. But it was an eye-opener for me.

Warren quotes — with epithets blanked out — one of the worst recent phone messages he’s received. But reading about it doesn’t communicate it. You need to hear it to get the full impact (and sorry, but my attempts to convert the recording to a format that I could link to here have been unsuccessful). The caller starts out speaking VERY softly, so that Warren or anyone else listening would press the receiver more tightly to his ear, and turn up the volume on the phone. Then, without warning, he SCREAMS the really nasty parts at a volume intended to hurt the eardrum of the listener. That this stranger hated Warren could be in no doubt. Nor could the reason be obscure. He hated Warren simply because he was black, and he wanted to put that point across in as offensive and painful a manner as possible.

I’ve never had anything quite like that aimed at me. And if you’re white, you probably haven’t either. If you and I suspect black folks are just a little on the touchy side about race matters, that’s probably because they are. And they have reason to be.