Moving from anti-racism to pro-multiculturalism

Sam Smith – Although we have to keep fighting against racism, an aspect of this issue that gets lost is how to create a well functioning multi-cultural society in which our  relationships are considered assets and not just major problems to be solved. With considerable assistance from the media we have come to view ethnic relations by their negative aspects rather than as a better society for which to strive. 

As a anthropology major, jazz musician, uncle with four Puerto Rican nephews and nieces and as an activist who lived as part of DC’s white minority for five decades, this is not a major problem for me, but I’m conscious, especially in following the media, of how little attention is given to how multiculturalism makes folks lives better. So I thought I’d offer a few suggestions, not about ending racism, necessary as that is, but taking advantage of the multi-ethnicity that we are have. For example

Let’s hear more from and about bi-ethnic couples. The latest estimate is that 17% of new marriages are bi-ethnic. Black ethnicity, by contrast, makes up only 12% of the population.  But neither the media nor public seem pay much attention to inter-ethnic marriages. And what about the history of multi-ethnic effort. For example, one the things that helped DC blacks to power in the 1960s was their common support with whites for home rule and against freeways

Don’t just lecture your kids, tell them stories. What have been some of the happy cross-ethnic experiences in your life? We tend to forget that good tales can affect people as much as sad or bad ones. 

Let the kids tell their stories at school. One of the best assemblies I attended as head of the parents association for a DC public school was one in which a bunch of students got to describe their religion, ranging from Catholic to hippie Sikh. The same could be tried in class for students of different ethnicities describing how they were being raised in their culture. 

Offer courses in multiculturalism in grade and high school. How do we expect the young to understand other cultures if we don’t even explain them to them? I was blessed with what was then one of only two high school anthropology courses in the country and it helped greatly. 

Redesign the police. There are lots of things we could do to improve our police departments. For example we could get cops out of their cars a few days a week and have them work a neighborhood, and get to know people in it, while patrolling on foot. We could assign lawyers to every police precinct headquarters to train officers in legally acceptable approaches to their efforts. We could hire social workers to work with officers in handling mentally based problems. We could have neighborhood leaders meet with officers to discuss how best to handle folks in their ‘hood. In other words, we could bring police into our communities and not have them act like military overseers. 

Include black, latino and other cultures in high school history courses: And don’t forget to teach the multicultural history of your own town. It makes it more personal. For example, I became an even greater fan of Frederick Douglass when I visited his house and found he had a shed to which he escaped to write and think and called it his growlery. 

Emphasize the future over the past. One of the things that worries me these days is the emphasis on terrible things that happened in the past that tend to suggest we’re not going to do much better. It’s sort of like what you find in dysfunctional families where some of the children never overcome the bad things done to them when they were young. Yes, teach slavery but also teach about blacks who overcame bad times and what we could be doing now.

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These are just a few suggestions to help start redefining the tone and techniques .our approach to ethnicity.  There are lots more, but I just thought it was time to talk about making things better rather than just dealing with the evil resulting from our failure to do so. 

How to pay for Biden’s public works

 As President Biden prepares to launch of multi trillion dollar public works project – aka by the liberal gradocracy as “infrastructure” – the question arises: where will the money come from? Your editor addressed this in his 1997 book, The Great American Political Repair Manuel. A few excerpts:

 The national debt is really not the same as yours

 While there are similarities, the parallel between personal and public finances is often misleading. For example, when you borrow money from the bank, you owe it to someone else and you know there will be trouble if you don’t pay it back. But when America borrows money, it borrows mostly from itself. America is not about to foreclose on America. Besides, everyone  who owns a savings bond, has money in treasury bills or notes, or in publicly invested CDs is a creditor of the United States as well as a debtor. Most pension plans get at least some very secure income thanks to the federal government owing them money. This makes government debt quite different from yours. Abraham Lincoln thought this so clear that he over-optimistically concluded that citizens “can readily perceive that they cannot be much oppressed by a debt which they owe themselves.” 

 All debt is not the same

 When we talk about the national debt, we tend to make no distinction between types of national debt. There is an immense difference between going into debt for capital investments like schools and bridges and going into debt to pay current operating costs. That’s why a bank will lend you money to buy a house but not for dinner and a movie. Our national budget makes no distinction between buying schools and  buying doughnuts. It should.

 Revenues are part of budgets, too

 Lost in the great balanced budget mania of the 1990s was a fact obvious to anyone in business: a really good way  to improve your books is to increase your revenues. For government, this simple notion has gone out of style. The assumption has become that the only way to reduce the deficit is to cut expenses. But just as a business needs customers, our country needs thriving citizens and companies to keep it going. 

 Cutting the deficit only slows the growth of the national debt. It does not reduce it. To cut the debt, the government would have to create a surplus and apply it to the national debt. At which point politicians and citizens would start hollering for a tax cut — and everyone would probably forget about the national debt.

 Cutting the budget may not even cut waste

 Few of us like to see the government waste money. Yet while Americans have been sold on the notion that cutting the deficit will cut waste, it seldom does. In part this is because the same politicians who claim to be budget-slashers also have a bunch of pet projects they want funded. Multiply that instinct by the number of congressional members and you’ve got 535 big problems.

 Cutting budget deficits can be hazardous

 Cutting deficits can easily have unfortunate side effects. Investment manager Warren Mosler has closely studied the relationship between the economy and deficits. He finds that with remarkable consistency, reducing the deficit as a percentage of the gross domestic product leads shortly to a slowdown in economic growth or even to a  recession. Further, he could find no cases where cutting the deficit has increased the rate of economic growth. As Mosler explains it:

 “The noble attempt by Congress to balance the budget will result in a weaker economy. … Every time the budget deficit, as a percent of GDP, drops the growth rate drops a few quarters later. It is only after the deficit begins to expand again the economy recovers. The historical correlation is 100%. “

 Cutting the national debt can be disastrous

 History suggests that cutting the national debt can be even worse than slashing the deficit. Mosler notes that we have only had six periods of sustained debt reduction.  For example, the national debt was reduced by a third in the 1920s. Andrew Jackson even managed to produce a surplus of $440,000. Each time the national debt has been significantly reduced,  a major depression has followed. There are no contrary cases.

 Most money doesn’t exist

 The total federal state, local and private debt in this country in 1996 was around $14 trillion. The actual money supply was just under $6 trillion. So what happened to the rest of the money?  Most of it doesn’t exist and never did. We call this imaginary money debt. This debt is money that we (as individuals, companies and government)  have borrowed, primarily from private sources. As Bob Blain, a professor at Southern Illinois University, put it: “Most debt is not the result of people borrowing money; it is the result of people not being able to repay what they owed [to banks or individuals] at some earlier time. Instead of declaring them bankrupt, creditors just add more to their debt.”

 This new debt is called interest. Many people think the idea of  the government printing money is shameful, yet our laws permit private financial institutions to create money all the time. Every time you fail to pay off your credit card, you’re letting a banker print some more money.  

 You’re not the first, of course. For example, when the Congress met in February 1790 to figure out how to pay off the Revolutionary War debt of $75 million, Alexander Hamilton strongly advocated issuing debt certificates and using them as money. Congressman James Jackson of Georgia warned that this would “settle upon our posterity a burden which [citizens] can neither bear nor relieve themselves from.  …Though our present debt be but a few millions, in the course of a single century it may be multiplied to an extent we dare not think of.”

 It’s really okay  for the government to print money

 An alternative to Congress borrowing money to pay off its debt would have been to have created the $75 million, using Congress’s constitutional power to “coin money and regulate the value thereof.” Instead Congress began a long tradition of borrowing the money that — five trillion dollars of debt later — many believe we can neither bear nor relieve ourselves from.

 In the early 19th century, the little British Channel island of Guernsey faced a smaller but similar problem. Its sea walls were crumbling. its roads were too narrow, and it was already heavily in debt. There was little employment and people were leaving for elsewhere.

Instead of going still further into debt,  the island government simply issued 4,000 pounds in state notes to start repairs on the sea walls as well as for other needed public works. More issues followed and twenty years later the island had, in effect, printed nearly 50,000 pounds. Guernsey had more than doubled its money supply without inflation.

 A report of the island’s States Office in June 1946 notes that island leaders frequently commented that these public works … had been accomplished without interest costs, and that as a result “the influx of visitors was increased, commerce was stimulated, and the prosperity of the Island vastly improved.” By 1943, nearly a half million pounds worth of notes belonged to the public and was so valued that much of it was being hoarded in people’s homes, awaiting  the island’s liberation from the Germans.

 About the same time that Guernsey started to fix its sea walls the town of Glasgow, Scotland, borrowed 60,000 pounds to build a fruit market. The Guernsey sea walls were repaid in ten years, the fruit market loan took 139. In the first part of the the 20th century, Glasgow paid over a quarter million pounds in interest alone on this ancient project.

How did Guernsey avoid the fiscal disaster that conventional economics prescribed for it? First and foremost by understanding that when you build roads or sea walls or colleges or houses, you are not reducing your society’s wealth. In fact, if you do it right, you are creating something that will add to its wealth. The money that was created was simply backed by public works rather than gold or “full faith and credit.” It was, in fact, based on something more solid than the dollar bills in our wallets today. In contrast, tacking on an interest charge to public works — as we do in the US — creates no new wealth, but merely transfers claims on existing wealth from debtors to creditors.

The quiet revolution of the young

Sam Smith – In a curious way, the defection from British tradition by Prince Harry is right in step with things happening in America as well. A 36 year old royal doesn’t want to play by the old rules any more. And as with today’s American young he didn’t quit in a noisy, revolutionary way but with uncertainty and polite confusion.

Having come of age in the rebellious 1950s –the warm up band for the 1960s – I find the lack of direction and determination among today’s young a bit frustrating. There’s no political music, no counterculture, no noisy demands. But that doesn’t mean something isn’t happening. It’s just happening more quietly. And age has a lot to do with it, as does ethnic change.

It is likely, for example, that Donald Trump was the last of the aged right to run the show. His bizarre behavior had more to do with proto-dementia than with well examined policy.

Part of his efforts was to block an inevitable change that was taking place in the country, namely that whites were becoming less important.  In fact, as Brookings pointed out several years ago, “The new statistics project that the nation will become “minority white” in 2045. During that year, whites will comprise 49.7 percent of the population in contrast to 24.6 percent for Hispanics, 13.1 percent for blacks, 7.9 percent for Asians, and 3.8 percent for multiracial populations.”

As someone who lived happily in a majority black Washington DC for some fifty years, I don’t see this as a problem, but then I’m not an old Republican.

How big is the age difference? Well one exit poll found that 65% of those aged 18-24 voted for Biden while only 47% of those over 65 did.

But age was not the only factor. The rise of minority populations made a big difference. Actually 53% of whites 18-29 voted for Trump while only 10% of young blacks and 28% of young latinos did.

What’s missing in this shift is a young agenda as well as young angst. And that agenda could be aided by young blacks and latinos seeing themselves not just as ethnic victims but as leaders of a new majority in about 25 years.

For the young and for ethnic minorities, the numbers are on their side. Now they have to figure out what to do about it.

The rise of puritanical politics

Sam Smith – I was introduced to politics in Philadelphia and Massachusetts as a teenager. I recall an FBI agent coming to our house to interview my father about a member of the Philadelphia city council and I still remember a Cambridge city council member arguing with another one and saying, “We’re all Christian gentleman here” and his target – the council’s only Jew – just grinning back.

It was a time when politics was not only imperfect, but most people understood that it was. In the over 50 years that I’ve been in journalism I never thought of politicians as role models, but rather as a lake to be crossed to get where you’re going, a battlefield, or another in a never ending list of hassles. When I think of politicians I really admire, I can’t come up with much more than Gene McCarthy and Gaylord Nelson. I’m not shocked or upset; it’s just the way it is.

So when the Andrew Cuomo controversy came up, I kept my mouth shut. I knew we were in a different time, one in which politicians and other public figures were increasingly held to new puritanical values in which a few sins makes one evil whatever else you’ve done with your life.

Increasingly, we call it a “cancel culture” but it’s not a culture at all. A culture includes both the good and the bad, but in the cancel version you need only make a few mistakes to get written off.

I was no fan of Cuomo. I preferred his father and his brother. I sensed there was more than a little amount of bully in him. But before I wrote about him, I thought I better do what few in the public or press have thought about. First, I went to the great web site, On The Issues, and checked out what he had actually done over the years. There was some bad stuff, but on the whole he came out pretty good.

But could he win if he ran again?  Well, one recent poll found 64% saying he shouldn’t run again. And what about a replacement? There’s no good answer except that Democrats comprise 60% of the state’s voters. For a take on possible alternatives, check this out.

Given his mistreatment of several women and misstatements on covid nursing home facts, why even worry about this? For the simple reason we should have learned from Trump. You elect the wrong politician and instead of a handful of women and stats being mistreated, you could have many people dead and many more suffering.. As I noted years ago, Lyndon Johnson and Adam Clayton Powell got more good legislation through than just about anyone, but you wouldn’t want either one near your daughter.

Morality in politics doesn’t lend itself to the puritanical approach. It is a count of virtues against sins, not the nearly inevitable presence of the latter. In fact, it’s the way the rest of us humans are as well. Let’s hope someone remembers our good side.

Making multiculturalism an asset and not just a problem

Sam Smith – Drastically missing from our talk about ethnic relationships is discussion about positive ethnic relations. We treat the matter as a huge problem to be solved by things like changes in law, improved policing, social guilt and pressure. In fact, good relations exist because they work for all those involved.

You can’t define this in legislation because each experience is different. But what we can do is to look at ways various ethnic groups can work and play together better.

It begins with children. We don’t typically introduce the young to the ethnic variety of the world which they will grow into. They learn about other ethnicities from older children or from adults many of whom have strong biases. Combating this with positive education about the variety of humans out there and how to get along with them would be greatly useful.

Helping teenage values – The teen years are when childhood habits start to turn into more permanent adult values. It’s an excellent time for high school courses in the multiculturalism of society and how to be part of it, as well teaching the history of various ethnic cultures, including not just grim stories like slavery, but the tales of those who beat the system in the past.

Providing experiences – such as theater and music – where students work together to accomplish is something can change their perceptions of others.

Another useful idea: having the young describe positive experiences they’ve had with others of another ethnic background. This can also be done by adults in story telling sessions at their church or elsewhere.

Celebrate a locally diverse culture – There are all sorts of ways to do this. For example, an art show with the work of diverse local artists or a music festival. You can even have a parade as they have in Singapore. As Wikipedia notes:

[A] largely Chinese parade became a multi-cultural one from 1977 when Malay and Indian groups started joining in the performances, which was to mark a major precedent in the overall flavor of the parade into one which has become largely multi-cultural in character… The 2018 Chingay involved 2,000 parade volunteers and 6,500 parade performers, and also featured many examples of smart technology, including dancing robots and driverless cars.

Blacks and latinos should see themselves as among leaders of a new America. The problem with defining yourself only as a victim is that it’s a hard concept to change. But there are ways that blacks and latinos can lead. For example, there are more poor whites than there are blacks in total. Blacks and latinos could make organizing the working class – whatever its ethnicity – a high priority. I saw this work in the early days of the modern civil rights movement when in DC, a young activist named Marion Barry helped make a name for himself by organizing opposition to a rise in DC Transit fares. Similarly blacks and whites came together to fight (in large part successfully) a planned freeway expansion in the city. One problem with being in a minority is the numbers. Organize by issues rather than by identity and the numbers can improve significantly.   

Include a course in multiculturalism in journalism schools – One of the reasons we don’t see the positive side of multiculturalism is because our journalists treat it overwhelmingly as a crisis. Included in their coverage should be stories about examples of how ethnicities can get along. TV series could also help in this.

Stop ignoring mixed ethnicity – Some 17% of new marriages are now of mixed ethnicity, but following the media and other discussions you might imagine it doesn’t exist.  For example, the public and the media consistently referred to Barack Obama as black, when in fact he spent more time at Harvard Law School than he did with a black parent. And there’s a high probability that Frederick Douglass’ father was white.

Ironically, this habit of ignoring mixed ethnicity has some of its roots in an anti-black concept known as the one drop rule. Says Wikipedia:

The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States in the 20th century. It asserted that any person with even one ancestor of black ancestry (“one drop” of black blood) is considered black. . This concept became codified into the law of some states in the early 20th century. It was associated with the principle of “invisible blackness” that developed after the long history of racial interaction in the South, which had included the hardening of slavery as a racial caste and later segregation.

One reason to bring mixed ethnicity into the discussion is that the more complex people see our relations, the less likely they will use cruel cliches to describe it.

.Face the truth about race: Historically, the concept can be fairly described as a racist one. And it goes back a long way. Carolus Linnaeus declared in 1758 that there were four races: white, red, dark and black. Others made up their own races, applying the term to religions (Jewish), language groups (Aryan) or nationalities (Irish).

Modern science tells us something different. For example, writing in Harvard’s Science in the News, Vivian Chou explained:

In the biological and social sciences, the consensus is clear: race is a social construct, not a biological attribute . . .  The popular classifications of race are based chiefly on skin color, with other relevant features including height, eyes, and hair. Though these physical differences may appear, on a superficial level, to be very dramatic, they are determined by only a minute portion of the genome: we as a species have been estimated to share 99.9% of our DNA with each other. The few differences that do exist reflect differences in environments and external factors, not core biology.

Which is why I use the term ethnicity instead of race, the former a description of culture rather than biology or genetics.  

America: Trouble at the top

Sam Smith – They no longer build pyramids in Egypt, Mexico or Guatemala. The British royalty is beginning to fall apart. We elected someone like Donald Trump to lead us through the worst pandemic in a century. The US Senate was helpless to deal with Trump. The electric grid system in Texas couldn’t handle a bad snow storm. In short, cultures do decay. We just don’t like to talk about it.
To be sure, we have Joe Biden to brighten things up a bit, but it’s worth remembering that in the first hundred days of the Franklin Roosevelt administration, it passed an emergency relief act, an employment systems act, an industrial recovery act, an agricultural act and created the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and a the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. I’m not sure we could handle that sort of efficiency these days.
Given the congressional margins with which he has been cursed, we can’t expect Biden to match this, but he still stands out as a different sort of leader than we’ve become accustomed to. As someone who has covered presidents since Eisenhower, I think of Biden in a small class of presidents such as Jimmy Carter, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson who were good at getting things done – not just because the things were good but because they knew how to work with other people and the actual facts of the matter.
Sure, Obama was a nice guy but he quite a different training. As I wrote a couple of years ago:
Since LBJ, the party has increasingly deserted populist causes and been trapped between defeat and a tantalizing break-even division with the GOP. One unnoted factor in this: the liberal elite has become wealthier and better educated. For example, back in the 1950s we were turning out 5,000 MBAs a year, by 2005 the figure was 142,000. In 1970 we produced 65,000 Phds, last year the figure was 181,000. And in 2009 the Washingtonian Magazine estimated there were 80,000 lawyers in DC.
Barack Obama thus represents a new era in American politics: the ultimate triumph of the gradocracy. Here is Wikipedia’s summary of his early career:
“In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year and president of the journal in his second year. During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as an associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990. After graduating with a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago. In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book. He then taught at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years-as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004-teaching constitutional law. In 1993, he joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a 13-attorney law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development, where he was an associate for three years from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004. His law license became inactive in 2007.”
Key to such a career is intense attention to process, regulations, the manipulation of language and data. Applied to politics, this means the human factor can start to bring up the rear. Politics is then no longer like music in which soul and skill are melded; instead it becomes another bureaucracy. Good evidence of this in the Obama years would be Obamacare, a two thousand page hard to decipher collection of virtue, uncertain results, payoffs to the health industry, and excessive paper work. A good politician of another time would have led with something that everyone understood, such as lowering the age of Medicare, and then adding on their favorite sweetheart deals.
It is not that it is wrong to study or practice the law, economics, business or education. But to usurp other skills, behavior, empirical knowledge and types of wisdom makes no more sense than for a dentist to attempt to instruct an attorney on how to address the court because he’s an expert on teeth.
I covered my first Washington story back in the 1950s and one of the things that fascinated me about politicians back then was their ability to talk United States. Public works were public works, not infrastructure. And racism didn’t need “systemic” attached to it. One of the problems with the liberal elite these days that it no longer knows how to talk to those who haven’t been as successful as they. And so we have a con artist like Donald Trump pretending to be a friend of the working class and getting away with it because liberals don’t even know how to talk to those who used to form the liberal base. Whether liberalism can recover this former base is uncertain at best. But it’s worth a try.
One way you can see how things have changed is to look at the childhood of a couple of the more effective politicians.
James Earl Carter was … the first child of farmer and small businessman James Earl Carter and former nurse Lillian Gordy Carter. At five, Jimmy already showed a talent for business: he began to sell peanuts on the streets of Plains. At the age of nine, Carter invested his earnings in five bales of cotton, which he stored for several years and then sold at a profit. With this money he was able to purchase five old houses in Plains… Following his father’s death from cancer, he returned to Plains to manage the family-owned farm and peanut warehouses. In order to keep up with modern farming methods, he studied at the Agricultural Experimental Station in Tifton, Georgia. During these years in Plains, Carter was active in a number of civic organizations.
[Harry Truman’s father John] Truman was a farmer and livestock dealer… When Truman was six, his parents moved to Independence, Missouri, so he could attend the Presbyterian Church Sunday School. He did not attend a conventional school until he was eight. While living in Independence, he served as a Shabbos goy for Jewish neighbors, doing tasks for them on Shabbat that their religion prevented them from doing on that day.
[Truman] rose at five every morning to practice the piano, which he studied more than twice a week until he was fifteen, becoming quite a skilled player…. After graduating from Independence High School in 1901, Truman enrolled in Spalding’s Commercial College, a Kansas City business school. He studied bookkeeping, shorthand, and typing…
Truman made use of his business college experience to obtain a job as a timekeeper on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, sleeping in hobo camps near the rail lines. He then took on a series of clerical jobs, and was employed briefly in the mail room of The Kansas City Star. Truman and his brother Vivian later worked as clerks at the National Bank of Commerce in Kansas City.
Now let’s look at Joe Biden:

Biden’s father had been wealthy, but suffered financial setbacks around the time Biden was born, and for several years the family lived with Biden’s maternal grandparents. Scranton fell into economic decline during the 1950s and Biden’s father could not find steady work. Beginning in 1953, the family lived in an apartment in Claymont, Delaware, before moving to a house in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden Sr. later became a successful used-car salesman, maintaining the family in a middle-class lifestyle

Biden credits his parents with instilling in him toughness, hard work and perseverance. He has recalled his father frequently saying, “Champ, the measure of a man is not how often he is knocked down, but how quickly he gets up.”.

As a child, Biden struggled with a stutter, and kids called him “Dash” and “Joe Impedimenta” to mock him. He eventually overcame his speech impediment by memorizing long passages of poetry and reciting them out loud in front of the mirror.

Now let’s go back to the pandemic and the Texas grid disaster. The fact is that folks like Biden, Carter and Truman don’t make it to the top so easily any more. Much better to become a really good lawyer, an MBA or well trained in public relations. A major part of our organizations are run by principles stemming from these sources, despite the fact that the ultimate purpose of these organizations may be electrical energy, health services or education. Those at the top have become less trained to deal with the real purpose of their job. And, unlike the Bidens, Carters and Trumans they are less trained or inclined to ask help from those who know something.

Hence we had a president treating the pandemic like it was just another Trump Tower operation.

I have a sense of this little discussed problem in part because when I entered journalism over half of the reporters in the country only had a high school education. What they knew was how to tell a story right.

I also learned it from youthful summers working in Maine where I heard an expression I still recall from time to time: “Fix it up-make it do-use it up -do without.”

It is this skill with the specific that we are losing as a culture so we can look forward to some more overlong pandemics and cities without power.

It was more fun when more at the top understood what they were doing.

The imperfection of history

 Sam Smith – The decision in San Francisco to rename over 40 schools – including ones named for George Washington and Abraham Lincoln – brings to the fore the arrogance with which we often view history.

If there is one consistent thing that history teaches us it is the imperfection of it and the people who create it. If there is one consistent thing that makes us feel better about this is that many of these imperfections are now past, which is why we call them history.

But the current trend to judge those in the past by current standards lends us little judgement for dealing with the present. What are the issues we are ignoring that some day will be considered essential?

And it is far more complicated than many would have us believe. For example, the properly praised Frederick Douglass supported women’s suffrage but, as Black Past notes,  “in 1869 he publicly disagreed with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony who called for women’s suffrage simultaneously with voting rights for black men, arguing that prejudice and violence against black men made their need for the franchise more pressing.” Do we take his name off all buildings for this?

A more sensible approach is to accept human imperfection and praise the occasional escape from it, despite the fact that the praised of the past may have ignored their children, lied on their tax returns or engaged in marital infidelity. We are not honoring the whole individual but specific good that they did.

As a long time activist. I’m conscious of how dramatically the status of an idea can change over time. For example, fifty years ago few supported DC statehood or legalized marijuana. Those of us who did were considered kooks at best.  I know some well known groups and politicians who opposed DC statehood long ago but now support it.

Politics is like that. You can’t be a successful politician without making some of the mistakes that the time you live in seems to demand. And goodness is rare enough that we should celebrate it even if it does not define a whole life or its viewpoints.

Bringing the police back home

Sam Smith – One of the problems with our problem solving these days is a tendency to legalize, institutionalize and formalize relationships that actually depend on wise social behavior. Consider, for example, how different our ethnic relations might be if we actually taught school children about the nature and virtues of cultural variety before their views got distorted by bigots and bullies.

The same is true these days in discussions about the police, where  the emphasis is on suppressing the most violent and unfair behavior, with hardly any talk about how to integrate police better into the lives of our communities.

This is something I have long followed, having edited a community newspaper in the mid 60s east of the US Capitol, a neighborhood that would include two the city’s four major riot strips in 1968. . I early came to realize that part of the trick was to get cops out of their patrol cars and having a neighborhood based relationship with some of the city’s citizens.

It early seemed clear that isolating cops in cars didn’t help matters. While on a 1960s panel that included a local police official and a representative of a national police organization, I made this argument. A columnist for the Washington Post turned to a friend of mine sitting next to him and asked, “Who is that nut?”

But there is something else I also remember from that time: a story I did on two young black cops patrolling a public housing project. One of them, Isaac Fulwood, told me that “they never check with us” before building such a place. Fulwood also lived on the Hill and a few years later, we attended a baptism class at a local church together.

It was just an ordinary story except for one thing. Fulwood would eventually become chief of the DC police and later chair of the US parole board.

And Fulwood was no ordinary chief. As the Washington Post wrote of his youth after his death:

In many ways, the family was the District in microcosm, engaged in a grim struggle with the hardships of poverty, drug abuse and crime. [His brother] Theodore Fulwood, known as Teddy, was locked up, accused of selling cocaine on a District street, when his brother was named police chief. Theodore’s long police record ranged from assault to bank robbery. “I loved him,” Mr. Fulwood said, “but hated his behavior.”

And Mr. Fulwood, though rarely in trouble as a youth, recalled his father’s encounters with unhelpful police officers and his own unpleasant interactions with them. “I had met very nasty policemen who would say anything to black people or do anything to them,” he told The Post in 1991. “Very rarely did you see black police officers.”

In another Post story, Fulwood faced the reality of his position:

Once, when Fulwood was chief, a riot broke out inside Lorton Correctional Facility. …. Fulwood helicoptered over. “I’m inside the jail, looking around. There are a couple thousand people in there. I swear, they all look black.”

After he and his men had Lorton under control, Fulwood took a walk around the place, bullhorn in hand. He heard a voice, a very loud whisper.

“Junior! Junior!”

Fulwood wheeled. He spotted an old family friend from the neighborhood around Kentucky Avenue SE where he grew up. “I said, ‘Come here. What you in here for?’ He said, ‘Robbery.’ “

The man asked Fulwood to visit his mother, tell her he was all right, which Fulwood did.

“I looked around that prison and said, ‘What a waste of human life,’ ” Fulwood recalls. “I came home and said to my wife, ‘Why can’t we break this cycle?’ It’s still a question I’m always struggling with.” ….

He says: “I believe communities have a right to be safe.”

He says: “You try to be tough. But at the same time you try to figure this damn thing out.”

One of the ways he handled this as head of the parole commission was to take someone on parole with him when he went to speak to high schoolers. In short, he could be tough but this didn’t mean he deserted his community. In fact, after leaving the force, he taught some courses at the University of DC on community policing.

There was an example of this sort of policing that sticks in my mind. When our sons were kids, they played baseball on teams run by the police boys club. I admit I sometimes felt a little nervous watching my son up to bat with an umpire wearing a pistol on his hip, but  it was a fine experience. Today these clubs, now merged with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington, reach some 35,000 youngsters annually and have seven club houses in the city.

These are just two little example of community policing at work

The incident floated back recently as I read a detective novel by the sainted Michael Connelly in which the following appeared:

Through political opportunism and ineptitude, the city had allowed the department to languish for years as an understaffed and underequipped paramilitary organization. Infected with political bacteria itself, the department was top-heavy with managers while the ranks below were so thin that the dog soldiers on the street rarely had the time or inclination to step out of their protective machines, their cars, to meet the people they served. They only ventured out to deal with the dirt bags and, consequently, [detective Hieronymus] Bosch knew, it had created a police culture in which everybody not in blue was seen as a dirt bag and was treated as such….You ended up with a riot the dog soldiers couldn’t control.

Part of the problem was expecting the police to do it alone. That’s why I’ve suggested that every police precinct have a civilian lawyer and a psychotherapist on hand to coach the officers, answer their questions, and – in the case of the therapists – accompany them on cases where their skills might be useful.

In DC, as the cops were taking to squad cars, the Recreation Department was sending “roving leaders” out on the street to work with kids and their gangs. Several decades later, Jim Myers in the Hill Rag described how they did it:

Dennis Homesley, principal of Payne Elementary School, often talks about Roving Leaders. He got his start working with kids as a Roving Leader from 1972 to 1981, and he still believes in the concept.

The program, run by the District’s Department of Parks and Recreation, was bigger in Homesley’s day. But the idea remains the same: You don’t wait for kids to cause trouble. You go out and find the kids who are heading in the wrong direction and help them.

The program seemed to founder in the late 1980s. By the 1990s, it was too easy to spot kids in the neighborhood that the system wasn’t reaching – the ones most susceptible to negative influences. Thereafter, you could watch them “progress” on corners and local playgrounds from alienation to car thefts and stick ups or drug selling.

Now, we have Darby Clark and Bridget Miller, the two Roving Leaders who are assigned to work the schools, recreation centers and playgrounds of eastern Capitol Hill. Clark, 37, has been a Roving Leader for seven years. Miller, 41, a gang worker for 20 years, joined Roving Leaders only last year. . .

I saw Clark take a dozen squirming, noisy kids with their attention flying all over the place and turn them into a cooperative, engaged group of youngsters who raised their hands to participate in discussions about having positive attitude.

Magic it wasn’t, but a serious change took place before my very eyes. “They want attention and structure – and consistency,” says Clark. “Like if I say I’m going to be there for them at a certain time, I’ve got to be there.” It sounds so basic, but these are missing elements in many kids’ lives. . .

At Eastern High, Clark picks up names of kids who are not showing up for school – eight or nine kids in some weeks, he says – and visits their homes.

Thinking about history

Sam Smith – Reading Colin Woodard’s remarkable book, Union, has led me to ponder about some of the failings and successes of history in our society and what we can do about it. A few thoughts:

• Stop shortchanging history in our schools: A 2014 study by the National Assessment of Educational Programs found that only 18% of high school student were proficient in history. Neither our schools nor our media care enough about history and we pay the price.
• Keep reading history. Along with Woodard’s book I’ve been reading new histories on Eleanor Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. They have all reminded me of how much I don’t know about some aspects of history and how useful it is to learn more.
• Learn from the past but don’t live it. Slavery was a terrible part of black history, but the tendency of some of today’s blacks to define their current state by it is similar to what you find in dysfunctional families where some live their life defined by their terrible childhood. The trick is to learn from the past but create a new present and future. All major change comes from rewriting the present and future – not reliving the past.
• Use history to tell how we’re doing today. For example, we don’t talk about it, but the American inclination to solve problems by warfare has dramatically changed in the past 75 years. The number of American military deaths in the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghan wars was roughly one quarter that of WWII. The Google Book Ngram viewer shows that even the mention of war in English language books has declined by over 85% since the early 19^th century. This doesn’t mean all trends are positive, witness climate change, or that you can’t have hopefully temporary retreats such as the Trump regime. But following the history of concepts such as war is as important as remembering actual events.

In short, we need to revive the importance of history in our lives and live not as its victims but as its recreators. And while we’re at it, let’s add civics and cultural studies to our to do list.

A few things I learned in DC

Sam Smith – On Thursday I take part in a zoom conference on the late DC civil rights leader Julius Hobson. If you don’t live in DC and haven’t heard of Julius Hobson don’t be surprised. What happens at the local level in America’s capital colony is of little interest to the media and, as a result, to the public in general.

In fact, Hobson should be considered one of the most admirable civil rights activists in modern America. He played a major role in desegregating the DC school system and hospitals, led 80 picket lines at retail stores resulting in 5,000 new black jobs, achieved the first hiring of black bus drivers and auto salesmen. And he launched the effort for DC statehood.. As he put it once, ““My experience leads me to the conclusion that discussion is not as effective as direct action.”

In preparing for the Hobson conference, I found my mind drifting off to questions such as how did I spend five decades as part of the white minority of Washington so comfortable with the ethnic character of the city given the current national angst about the topic? I  came up with no single answer that convinced me, but came up with some random notes that might be worth sharing:

Washington’s black history goes back to its beginning. And while it was part of the south, with slavery and later segregation, it was different than much of the south. For example, segregation did not apply in certain places such as libraries and public transit and, in fact, blacks had to move to the back of a streetcar when it crossed the river to the deeper southern state of Virginia. Black slaves in Washington were sometimes warned that if they misbehaved they could be sent further south.

Twenty percent of blacks in Washington were free as early as 1800. This percentage would grow with many free blacks getting government jobs. In the 1960s, working with Marion Barry, I became aware of the hostility of some older black residents towards young black activists who were threatening the status they had established with the white government. But if you studied this older subset you also found a remarkable heritage of cultural survival. 

As Frederick Gooding Jr argues in his book, American Dream Deferred, Washington blacks had not only gained a large number of jobs with the federal government, they were also involved in a long struggle for equity in pay and rights within that government. And he quotes Franklin Frazier as observing that due to the “large numbers of Negroes employed in the federal government, Negroes in the nation’s capital had incomes far above those in other parts of the country.” Yet it was still a struggle. Gooding reports that “The irony was that many blacks, after having migrated to the nation’s capital to escape abject poverty, constant social slights, and fear of instability, found themselves in curiously similar employment positions they would have occupied had they stayed in the South (e.g., janitorial service, lawn maintenance)—even though they had federal jobs.”

The 1960s DC activists – such as Hobson and Barry – were leaders of change, not just protesters. They had a clear agenda of what they wanted. Julius was a major example. The leaders organized by issues and were not unhappy to have whites in the effort. And whether it was statehood, an end to freeway construction, or some other cause, you knew what the goal was.. And the city was changing. By 1970 it was 71% black.

When DC finally got some home rule, nine of the first 13 city councilmembers were activists, a new establishment of former rebels. . Washington would have black mayors for the next 45 years.

I took part in Marion Barry’s  early boycott of the transit system because of a planned fare  raise. Tens of thousands stayed off trollies and buses that day. I was one of them, driving 75 folks, black and white, to their destinations.. After reading my article about the protest, Barry, head of the DC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, came to my apartment and asked me to help him on media issues. Which is how a young white guy who had never protested anything before started working with one of the town’s leading activists.

Even though the SNCC national head, Stokely Carmichael, came to town and announced that whites were no longer welcomed in the civil rights movement, locally it didn’t happen like that. Admittedly, Barry and I eventually fell apart over his positions and activities as mayor. He told a friend, “Sam’s a cynical cat” but coming from Barry I considered that an honor not a slap..

DC had a black college – now Howard University – in 1867. During segregation many Howard graduates couldn’t get teaching jobs and some ended up teaching in DC public schools. America’s soon to be first black vice president went to Howard as did Julius Hobson.

Barry had master’s degree in chemistry. Hobson was working on a masters in economics Barry was completing his doctoral studies at the University of Tennessee when he decided to leave and help start SNCC, where one early meeting included 126 student delegates from 19 colleges, They had the skills but lacked the opportunities that should have come with them and decided to do someeting about it.

Multiculturalism was not strange to DC. Both Julius Hobson and Hilda Mason, another key activist leader, had white spouses. The classic DC civil rights activist – Frederick Douglass – not only had a white wife, it is said  by a number of historians that he also had a white father and some native American blood. Further, as Wikipedia notes:

Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, be they white, black, female, Native American, or Chinese immigrants.  He was also a believer in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides… When radical abolitionists, under the motto “No Union with Slaveholders,” criticized Douglass’ willingness to engage in dialogue with slave owners, he replied: “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”

This spirit survived in DC, witness the big anti-freeway movement that was started by black and white middle class homeowners, unlikely sorts to become activists. During this effort I attended a rally that had only two speakers, a pin stripe suited white Grosvenor Chapman from Georgetown and Reginald Booker, who led a group called Niggers Incorporated. When I saw them, I said to myself, “We’re going to win” – and we did.

DC also has a large number of black Catholics. In 1949 – five years before Brown v. Board of Education – Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle integrated the city’s Catholic schools. One of my friends with Irish roots remembers that while he was there, his basketball team could only play Catholic schools or black public schools. According to one study, an “African-American eighth-grader in a D.C. Catholic school performs better in math than 72 percent of his or her public school peers.”

Part of the story of places like DC is that blacks and whites – even under segregation – lived close enough physically to learn each other’s sins and virtues. One example of this was Odessa Madre, the nearest DC ever had as a mob boss, a black woman who controlled drugs, prostitution and numbers. She also ran the Club Madre that featured performers like Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Count Basie.  Part of her success was that she had grown up near Irish kids some of whom became the city’s cops. The Washington Post reported that “Madre had even bragged to a reporter a few years ago that at one time she had so many police officers on her payroll that she ‘practically ran that damn police department.’”  And the Post quoted a retired vice squad police officer who said, “”She loaned a lot of needy people money, as well as provided contacts for gambling and drugs… She knew practically every big-time gangster nationwide. She was what they call a counselor in the mob. She mediated disputes between blacks and whites, a referee. She kept a lot of people from getting hurt.”

There were so many blacks in DC that the term meant less. Were you talking about blacks in Anacostia, Adams Morgan, or upper 16^th Street? A black lawyer, cab driver, or artist? Which brings to mind the story of the Washington Post black journalist who was mowing the lawn in front of his house. A white  guy drove by, stopped his car, and called out the window, ‘What do you get for mowing lawns?” Replied the journalist, “I get to sleep with the lady of the house.”

In DC there was no way to talk about ethnicity without someone saying, “Yes, but .” and telling you something different. I learned that over a half century ago when a black Howard University professor told me about integrating a bowling team. The problem was that now he felt he had to go bowling whether he wanted to or not. What he was really fighting for, he realized, was the right to be as bad a bowler as everyone else. He was seeking a decent normalcy.

These random notes suggest a place that has handled ethnic relations differently than many of the stories you read or hear today. There are other towns with similar tales, but together they don’t create enough of a crisis  to make the evening news. Still, in the end, good ethnic relations are not just about ending chokeholds but also about creating real communities…like DC.

What progressives can do now

 

Sam Smith – With the Trump tyranny almost over and the Biden years about to begin, it’s a good time for progressives to figure their new course. Here are a few suggestions:
— Presidents are not agents of change; they are reflections of change. From a progressive perspective, there is little doubt that Biden will be a disappointment, but attacking him for not being good enough will largely be a waste of time. The trick is to create a progressive environment that the White House feels it must respond to.
— This is not just a matter of issues; it is a matter of culture. America hasn’t had a thriving counterculture for years. There is a lack of alternative music, lifestyle, symbols and voices that strongly conflict with the establishment culture.
–Most change starts in small places, witness the spread of state and local environmental laws before the federal government got nto it, or the origins of the legalization of marijuana. Washington learns from change at the state and local level.
— Come up with police reform polices that go beyond how cops handle crises. One reason police do a bad job is because they have become increasingly separated from the communities they are meant to be serving. Banning choke holds is good but it won’t deal with the weak community connection in many police forces.
–Face the fact that in recent decades, as liberals have moved up educationally and economically, they have lost some of their interest in issues effecting the working class. This, combined with the collapse of labor unions, has allowed people like Trump to con this constituency without effective opposition. Liberals have also become increasingly urban and so have lost interest in rural America. This needs to change.
— The young need to do more than vote. They need to teach older America what they want and need and find colorful ways to demonstrate this.
— The same is true of blacks and latinos. They should see themselves as leaders of a new America, rather than just victims of the old one, and include in their priorities issues and solutions that will also benefit white working class voters. A black and latino led labor movement would dramatically change not only the status of issues, but improve ethnic relations as well.
–Teach the young how to get along with those who don’t look like them. The easiest time to teach good ethnic relations is before the young get a bunch of bad ideas from others.
–Create as well as solve. If we only look at issues like ethnicity, police and economics as problems to solve, we can actually miss a lot of the alternative, namely creating a society that enjoys what it is rather than just worrying and arguing about it.

Trump: The beneficiary as well as the creator of evil

Sam Smith – Seventeen years ago I wrote “An Apology to Younger Americans” in which I noted that, “Even members of Confederacy had the grace to secede from the union; my generation has remained within like a deadly virus, subverting it, shaming it, screwing it, stealing from it, and finally strangling it. It will likely be known as the worst generation – the one that brought the First American Republic down – unmatched in the damage it has done to the Constitution, the environment, and a two century struggle to create a society democratic and decent in its politics, economics, and social concourse.”

In understanding the Trump disaster it is important to realize that he was not only a creator of our troubles but a major beneficiary of them as well. We tend to overrate both the evils and successes of our political leaders when, in fact, they are often the results of actions and events that long preceded them. Trump is no exception.

Here are some examples of things that made someone as awful at Trump possible:

[] In 1981 Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who were members of the PATCO union. As David Schultz wrote a couple of decades later, “The firing of PATCO employees not only demonstrated a clear resolve by the president to take control of the bureaucracy, but it also sent a clear message to the private sector that unions no longer needed to be feared.” This was only a particularly dramatic example of an anti-union trend that produced a two-third drop in their membership. And one thing not noted about unions as that they are educational institutions for workers. With their decline it became much easier for those like Trump to pretend they were on the side of workers.

[] You can’t have a decent democracy without an educational system that introduces the young to its nature and standards. In recent decades there was been a stunning decline in civics education and a far less informed citizenry has been one of its biggest prices with people like Trump its beneficiary.

[] When I started out as a journalist, only about half of the trade had a college degree. As late as 1976, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that journalism was not a profession. When I started covering Capitol Hill in 1959, I hid the fact that I had gone to Harvard because it would have worked against me. Today Washington journalists are part of what I call the gradocracy – a huge increase in MBAs, lawyers and journalists whose degrees and culture puts them far further apart from ordinary citizens and made it easier for con men like Trump to get into the action.

Back in the 1950s we were turning out 5,000 MBAs a year, by 2005 the figure was 142,000. In 1970 we produced 65,000 Phds, last year the figure was 181,000.  And in 2009 the Washingtonian Magazine estimated there were  80,000 lawyers in DC.alone. The gap between the liberal elite and the people it was trying to reach had grown enormously.

[] As this gradocracy grew in power its amoral basis spread throughout the country and people like Donald Trump became among those to be admired and not criticized. Business school became in charge of our theology.

[] While I call myself a Seventh Day Agnostic I have always appreciated the role of organized religion in teaching and encouraging moral behavior. Obviously this doesn’t apply to all sects but it is significant that while, according to one study, 85% of members of the Silent Generation like myself are religiously affiliated, that figure is only 56% for younger Millennials. Combine the decline in religious involvement with the lack of civics education and you see the Trump gap opening.

[] As America became more urbanized the values of smaller communities was replaced by an increasing emphasis on individual success and contentment. Fewer Americans were part of something that could be called a community and were making it on their own, causing a decline in the value placed on community.

[] [] []

Donald Trump is a terrible human but we need to bear in mind the factors that made it so easy for him to get where he got. He didn’t invent the mindless acceptance of his sort of evil; he just figured out how to take advantage of it.

Some positive approaches to ethnic relations

Sam Smith

Because of the cruel  history of ethnic relations there is an emphasis on problems, crises and outrageous examples, but far less attention to the positive results of improved relations and how to reach them. Here are just a few suggestions that I’ve gathered from my own life.

Treat multicultural relations as an asset rather than just as a problem to be solved: Being involved with those of another culture or studying these cultures can easily be both educational and enjoyable. Among the facts we ignore is that about 17% of marriages are bi-ethnic. This is more than the percent of Americans who are black or latino yet we seldom talk about cross cultural relationships in the way we do individual ethnicity. In politics we sometimes just ignore it. As with Barack Obama, who is universally described as black even though he had a white mother and who spent more time at Harvard Law School than he did with a black parent. And did you know that Kamila Harris was the daughter of a mother from India and a father from Jamaica? Or that key Senate candidate Sarah Gideon also had a father from India and a mother from Armenia? This is real America, folks.

Among the places where we find multiculturalism working are shopping malls, sports arenas and ethnic restaurants. Why? Because most think they’re getting a decent deal.

Use the term ethnicity rather than race: As an anthropology major I learned early that the term race was not only a bad definition, it had racist roots. That’s why I use the word ethnicity  reflecting a culture rather than an immutable genetic stature. Here’s how I descrbied it in my 1997 book, Sam Smith’s  Great Political Repair Manual:

Give or take a few thousand years, it’s unlikely that those of a Nordic skin complexion would stay that way living under the African sun. Similarly, the effects of a US diet are strong enough that the first generations of both European and Asian Americans found themselves looking up at their grandchildren. In such ways adaptation mimics what many think of as race.

But who needs science when we have our own eyes? If it looks like race, that’s good enough for us. Further, we are obsessed with the subject even as we say we wish to ignore it.  A few years back, a study of urban elections coverage found five times as many stories about race as about taxes. We can’t even agree on what race is. In the 1990 census, Americans said they belonged to some 300 different races or ethnic groups. American Indians divided themselves into 600 tribes and Latinos into 70 categories..

Teach the young about ethnic diversity: Does your elementary or junior high school teach about our different ethnicities?  Why do we leave the task to Fox News and MSNBC, or worse to Donald Trump, when it’s such an important part of our lives? Why do we leave only its problems in clear view?

Even if your school system doesn’t allow for cultural civics, student assemblies, churches and public libraries can be used to introduce folks to a variety of ethnicities. .

The key is to teach the world as it exists not just as a moral issue but as reality. How do students learn to adapt to and enjoy this real world? You start by learning how varied the world really is and that you are just a small part of it.

Don’t let ethnicity overwhelm all our other differences: In the half century that I was part of the white minority in DC I learned how little terms like black and white really told you about someone. Better was which neighborhood did you live in? What sort of work did you do? What is your religion? What’s your job and your politics?

DC, for example, is one of the leading cities for black Catholicism. DC also had a large free black population going back to the early 19^th century. And blacks on upper 16^th Street are much better off than those in Anacostia. And that’s just for starters.

Bring the police back to our communities: Police departments don’t need to be defunded, they need to be retrained, and reabsorbed into the communities that they serve. Along with other government agencies they have increasingly become absorbed into their own values and procedures. A Department of Justice report in 1988 expressed part of this:

Police have tried in the past to control neighborhoods plagued by predators without involving residents. Concerned, for example, about serious street crime, police made youths, especially minority youths, the targets of aggressive field interrogations. The results, in the United States during the 1960’s and more recently in England during the early 1980’s, were disastrous. Crime was largely unaffected. Youths already hostile to police became even more so. Worst of all, good citizens became estranged from police. Citizens in neighborhoods plagued by crime and disorder were disaffected because they simply would not have police they neither knew nor authorized whizzing in and out of their neighborhoods “takin’ names and kickin’ ass.” Community relations programs were beside the point. Citizens were in no mood to surrender control of their neighborhoods to remote and officious police who showed them little respect. Police are the first line of defense in a neighborhood? Wrong – citizens are!

Among the ways to deal with this disconnect are these:

Get cops out of their cars to spend more time in neighborhoods and get to know the people there. Just answering calls won’t do it. As the report above noted, one study found that ten percent of addresses then were responsible for 60% of police calls. A black DC police chief, Isaac Fulwood, instituted more community based policing and, as the Washington Post reported, “is advocating a back-to-basics style of patrolling, which will include permanently assigning officers to a given neighborhood, and increasing foot and scooter patrols.” Back when my sons were growing up in DC we even had neighborhoood police boys clubs playing baseball against each other with cops as  coaches and umpires

Have officers visit schools and talk with students about dealing with their problems and following the law. When, later in his career, Fulwood was chair of the US Parole Commission, he would take inmates on parole to help him address public school students.

Offer a college course on the ethnicities of the community. The University of DC offers such a course for police officers.

Have a lawyer and one or more therapists assigned to every police precinct to provide education and assistance to police officers. Being a good officer is an immensely complicated job and continuing assistance would not only make them better officers, it would help them see themselves as more professional and less just  as tough guys. The therapists could also accompany the officers on family abuse calls.

There’s lots more but the aforementioned would be a start towards redefining policing so it is seen more generally as a community asset rather than another problem, especially for minorities.

Gatherings for the non-religious

Sam Smith – As a long time Seventh Day Agnostic who majored in anthropology I both ignore religion’s theology and respect its moral and ethical role in society. As Americans increasingly grow less interested in religion, moral and ethical matters are also losing their longtime home.

Consider, for example, the role that religions have played in our civil rights and peace movements. Did one have to become a Baptist to follow Martin Luther King? Of  course not.

As I wrote back in 2015:

“I’m a Seventh Day Agnostic and, as such, I don’t give a shit about what you believe, only what you do about it.

“The Quakers have a nice way of expressing it. One of their meetings, for example, explains, ‘Friends are people of strong religious views, but they are quite clear that these views must be tested by the way in which they are expressed in action… Friends are encouraged to seek for truth in all the opportunities that life presents to them. They are further encouraged to seek new light from whatever source it may arise. Their questing and open attitude to life has certainly contributed to the tolerance with which Friends try to approach people and problems of faith and conduct.’

“I went to a Quaker high school and attended meetings every Thursday for ix years. Only once can I recall a confrontation on theological matters, and that was quickly eased by a “weighty” Quaker elder who explained that a meeting was not the place for such debates.

“Later, I was introduced to existentialism – the notion, it has been said, that “faith don’t pay the cable” and the view that “even a condemned man has a choice of how to approach the gallows.” I came to realize that the Quakers had beat Jean Paul Sartre by several centuries in the realization that it is what one does and not what one believes that makes the real difference in life.

“So I was somewhat prepared for what I found as a journalist and community activist in 1960s DC – namely religious leaders who translated their varied beliefs into common action and left faith on the back seat.
I was, for example, pushed into starting a community newspaper in an ethnically mixed neighborhood east of the Capitol by a minister trained by Saul Alinsky and who even got me a grant from a local Lutheran Church to get going. Neither the minister nor the church questioned my faith because it was clear we were all on the same track..

“By the time the 1960s were over, I had worked with about a dozen preachers, most of whom would seem strikingly odd to many today. None of these ministers ever questioned my faith or lectured me on theirs. They ranged from the head of the Revolutionary Church of What’s Happening Now to past and present Catholic priests. Meanwhile in the larger capital, we had two Catholic priests in Congress, one as Assistant Secretary of Housing, and one elected to the DC school board.

“One of the assets these preachers had were basement meeting rooms in their churches. Among the scores of times I found myself in such rooms, we pressed anti-war protests, started the DC Statehood Party, began a mixed ethnicity pre-school, and upped the eventually successful battle against freeways in DC. And you didn’t have to recite a creed before the meetings began.”

When I try to figure out why this seems a bit strange today, one reason has been the huge influence of evangelical churches on the definition of religion, especially in the media. Until Pope Francis came along, think how rarely we’ve heard about non-evangelical religious activism in recent years. As I watched Francis is action, I felt strangely comfortable because I had known, and worked with priests, who would have done much the same if they had become Pope

With the most immoral and unethical president in history now running the place, it may well be time to bring back that existential link between religion and action that one found in the 1960s.

How you do this is uncertain. But one possibility would be to create regular non-religious gathering places for folks known, say, as Communal Friends or the Community of Decency. It doesn’t have to be complicated. After all the Quakers have lasted for centuries in some of the dullest large rooms you’ll find anywhere.

The Quakers are, in fact, not a bad model in other ways. Such as the idea of a meeting place without an agenda where people can arise and discuss what’s troubling them. Or you could have some in which one or two leaders give a brief talk to set off the larger discussions of the day. Or places and events created by a coalition of religions who agree to create havens for moral discussion without theological interference.

It’s not just traditional religion that has been in a down fall. There has been a noticeable decline in visible academic leadership and a media willing to take on issues more complicated than some politician’s lies.

The invitation for new gatherings might include this nice distinction between morals and ethics offered by the web page Daily Writing Tips:
:Although the words can be considered synonyms, morals are beliefs based on practices or teachings regarding how people conduct themselves in personal relationships and in society, while ethics refers to a set or system of principles, or a philosophy or theory behind them. … Morals are the tools by which one lives, and ethics constitute the manual that codifies them.”

When did you hear something like that on MSNBC? Yet aren’t morals and ethnics more important than which politician exaggerated the most today?
In short, we must find new ways to share beyond religion consideration of decent way of living. After all, you don’t have to take communion to realize what a mess we’re in and why we need to talk more about it with each other.

Another problem with the Proud Boys

Sam Smith – As I watch Proud Boys and other “white supremacists,” a question keeps arising in my mind: how come these guys think they can define what white guys like me are about? And if I were inclined to form a group of white supremacists would they look like Proud Boys?

According to BBC, “A Proud Boy must declare that he is ‘a Western chauvinist who refuses to apologize for creating the modern world.’ They want to end welfare, give everyone a gun and “glorify the entrepreneur.”

As I was growing into white manhood, I can’t remember any of these issues being of interest to me. In fact, if you were to take more normal standards of superiority, I suspect that I have weighed less, been better educated, had a more successful career, been married longer and bench pressed more than the average Proud Boy I’ve seen.

In short, if I actually believed in white supremacy, the Proud Boys would be among my least likely role models. In fact, what they demonstrate strongly is that whites can be as screwed up and incompetent as any culture.

And if I were to actually claim – as I never would – that whites are better than other ethnicities, I would certainly not use Proud Boys as part of my argument.