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Wrong On Crime? Many Black Americans Agreed With Biden

Wrong On Crime? Many Black Americans Agreed With Biden

Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and other Democratic presidential candidates believe that Joe Biden was wrong in helping to craft and pass the 1994 crime bill, which they blame for the damage it wrought among African Americans.

They have a point. What they fail to grasp is that if they had been senators then, they likely would have been wrong right along with him.

It’s easy in retrospect to see that the legislation was deeply flawed. In fact, it was not impossible to see it even then. I wrote columns at the time criticizing the bill for expanding death penalty crimes, mandating life sentences for repeat offenders (“three strikes and you’re out”) and locking up more criminals for longer periods.

The increase in incarceration that occurred in the 1990s did have a lopsided racial impact. But it was not the product of the crime bill, because the vast majority of felons are prosecuted and imprisoned under state laws. The federal crackdown played only a minor role.

“The proud architect of a failed system is not the right person to fix it,” declares Booker. Most of the provisions in the 1994 bill, however, have already been “fixed,” by expiration or repeal.

The people who opposed the bill had the better of the argument. But to understand the legislation and its broad support in Congress, you have to understand the frightening climate in which it was passed.

Between 1983 and 1992, the violent crime rate jumped by 41 percent. New York City had 2,245 murders in 1990, or more than six per day. Chicago had 943 murders in 1992. (By comparison, New York had 289 homicides last year, and Chicago had 572.) The crack epidemic was in full, terrifying swing.

Americans were keenly aware of the growing danger, and they wanted something done about it — whatever it took to make them safer. There was “a fabulously intemperate and angry mood among Americans,” recalls Franklin Zimring, a criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Politicians had to respond.

The crime bill was one response to that mood. It was a big package, including not only the provisions I mentioned before but also money to add 100,000 police nationwide, a ban on “assault weapons,” and inducements for states to lengthen prison terms (“truth in sentencing”). It adopted many Republican policies while helping Democrats shed their soft-on-crime label.

At the time, the racial politics were not quite what you might assume. Prior to becoming mayor of Atlanta in 1990, Maynard Jackson offered a plan to confiscate the property of drug dealers called “Kick Their Assets.”

As for murderers, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry wanted police to “hunt them down like mad dogs.” Black leaders like these wanted stern action because it was African Americans who were most likely to be harmed by crime.

“At the height of the epidemic, black political and civic leaders often compared crack to the greatest evils that African Americans had ever suffered,” Yale Law professor James Forman Jr., who is black, wrote in his 2017 book Locking Up Our Own. One NAACP official called it “the worst thing to hit us since slavery.”

In his 1997 book, Race, Crime and the Law, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, an African American, argued that “blacks have suffered more from being left unprotected or under-protected by law enforcement authorities than from being mistreated as suspects or defendants.”

In many black neighborhoods, one thing scarier than having police around is not having them. The crime bill provided more of them.

Whites who favored punitive action may have been motivated partly by racial prejudice. But black sentiment also helped to produce these policies.

A 1994 Gallup survey found that 58 percent of African Americans supported the crime bill — compared with 49 percent of whites. The only black senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, supported it. Of the 40 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, just 12 voted against it.

It may seem plausible that black Americans would blame Biden for his role in bringing about the incarceration of so many of their brethren. But that assumes they actually object to this outcome. In a 2014 poll by the Sentencing Project, 64 percent of them said that courts were too lenient in punishing criminals.

A generation ago, Biden made his share of mistakes when it came to fighting crime. If they had been in his place, would Booker or Harris have done better? I wouldn’t bet on it.

Yellow Buses Weren’t The Problem, As Biden And Harris Know

Yellow Buses Weren’t The Problem, As Biden And Harris Know

Ed Sanders was both unique and ordinary. He became, in his own way, a hero just for doing his job.

When Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools integrated in North Carolina, if you can call it that, by allowing a handful of African American students to attend schools formerly reserved for whites only in September 1957, Sanders was principal of Central High. He had to smooth the way for Gus Roberts, its first black student, in a city still segregated in everything from housing to swimming pools to bathrooms.

As he told me when I interviewed him more than a decade ago, Sanders, a Simpsonville, South Carolina, native, had no particular desire to be a pioneer; all he knew was that he was principal. He prepared by enlisting the football team as protectors, using the threat of a canceled season as leverage and anointing a custodian as the young man’s unobtrusive guardian angel. When crowds gathered and one boy knocked the cap off the new kid’s head, Sanders threatened him and any other troublemaker with expulsion from his school and every other one in the city as he escorted Roberts through the front door.

It was a rocky time, especially hard on Roberts, who was not allowed to participate in clubs or social activities like the prom, and who endured a few physical attacks. “I don’t know if I would have had the strength he did,” Sanders said of the 16-year-old. But the school year ended without major incident.

The problem never was what vehicle Roberts rode in to get to Central.

In the words of those African Americans who viewed school desegregation through a realistic lens, the appropriate slogan was: “It’s not the bus, it’s us.”

That’s why the current dueling discussion of busing as a tool to integrate schools — highlighted in a debate exchange between Democratic presidential hopefuls Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — was misdirection at its finest.

It makes sense, of course. Who wants to admit that the issue of successfully integrating schools — because of the lack of political and personal will to make more than incremental progress — is an American dilemma that is as relevant as ever, rooted in attitudes that extend far beyond the classroom?

But to make an inanimate yellow vehicle the villain of the piece is to ignore the racism that made some school systems, such as the one in Prince Edward County in Virginia, shut down rather than integrate, as it poured tax credits into private academies for whites only, a model for other locations.

The hypocrisy of the revisionist history is embodied in the case of Linda Brown, the African American student from Kansas whose name graces the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, who only wanted to attend her neighborhood school — the one she could walk to — rather than travel to the all-black one.

It wasn’t about buses. When it comes to dismantling segregation — in schools, housing, and employment, or laws that governed who American citizens of different races could and could not marry — it has always been about the “us.”

What was and is called government overreach really meant the feds stepping in when cities and states dug in their heels to resist every effort to achieve a just society. The social engineering came not from the federal government but from the redlining, poll taxes, restrictions and separate and unequal rules that translated into some all-American, tax-paying citizens being denied.

Too many fought, often violently, against change instead of leaning into what was unfamiliar, like Sanders, who put his head down and did the work.

In contrast, leaders at Harding High in Charlotte in 1957 stood by as black student Dorothy Counts, dressed in the beautiful dress her grandmother had made for the first day of school, was met by jeering, abusive crowds of adults and teens, who spit on her and threatened her, in a startling image seen around the world.

Again, no bus in sight, and this time no protection from the school’s leaders. In fact, a brick that smashed the window of her brother’s car a few days later convinced her parents, for their daughter’s safety, to send her elsewhere.

It’s ironic that a few years later, in 1971, Charlotte’s court-ordered busing plan, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, was supported by white and black citizens and used as a contrast to the violent and racist response to school integration in Boston, the buses the stand-ins for the black children they carried.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s plan worked until 1999, when a judge who had opposed the original order ruled against using race in student assignment. Since then, schools have resegregated, a pattern repeated and reinforced across the country, reflecting neighborhoods that have also been slow to integrate.

Though studies have proven that diverse classrooms benefit all students, you would not know it from actions — not in 1957, but in 2019.

Schools with majority black and brown students are seen as “bad” by parents, studies show, even when their tests scores or facilities are superior to majority-white schools. Some majority-white communities have split from adjoining black-majority districts, taking students and resources with them. Just as white families didn’t have to move out of neighborhoods when black families moved in, “gentrifying” families who move into diverse areas — in a phenomenon seen in the North, South and all over — don’t have to opt out of sending their children to those neighborhood schools they could walk to.

In schools that are integrated, faculties often do not reflect the student body, suspensions are disproportionately doled out to black students for minor infractions their white classmates get a pass for, and it’s all too easy to spot who is and is not tagged for inclusion in gifted and talented programs.

As the Biden-Harris dustup revealed, there is little appetite for debating the value of an integrated and equitable education as the 2020 presidential race looms. Though few would take seriously the declaration of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that racism is in the past, proven by the election of the black president he opposed at every turn, it’s a comforting fairy tale for an America fatigued by the struggle, especially when it comes to your kid and your classroom.

But what is the cost, for the country and its children, of that benign neglect?

These days I think more and more of Ed Sanders, who went on to hire his next high school’s first black teacher in 1965. We stayed in touch until his death in 2010. The once reluctant leader told me integration was “the most sensible thing they ever did,” worth the hard work it takes to change behavior and attitudes.

But it’s much easier to blame a bus.

Are The Racists On Viral Videos Mentally Ill?

Are The Racists On Viral Videos Mentally Ill?

Most everyone who spends time on social media has come across videos in which a white person is screaming racial insults, usually at a Latino or African-American. A recent example shows a woman at a ShopRite in East Haven, Connecticut, barraging a black man with racist invective.

But look more closely at these videos and eyewitness accounts for a fuller idea of what forces are at work. Comments on these videos tend to condemn the perpetrators as evil racists and nothing else. But what should be blazingly obvious to those who watch them carefully is that the assailants are almost always mentally unwell.

In the ShopRite incident, the black man was on a motorized shopping cart and had unintentionally cut the woman off, a white male observer told WPLR-FM. “She wasn’t looking where she was going.”

The white woman said, “Jesus Christ,” and the black man responded, “You talking to me, b——?” The woman then unleashed a tirade full of the N-word.

At that point, however, the dynamics changed. The black man started exhibiting great restraint, according to the witness. Other than the original B-word remark, he didn’t get verbally confrontational. It had become clear to all that the woman was unhinged.

Other shoppers tried to reason with her and worried what the two children at her side were experiencing. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God, man, Mom’s psycho,'” the eyewitness said.

In October, a video went viral showing a white woman blocking a black man from entering his apartment building in St. Louis. She demanded proof that he lived there. If she had been afraid of him, she wouldn’t have gotten in his face.

The African-American gentleman no doubt saw the bizarre behavior for what it was. “Please move, ma’am,” he said patiently while recording the scene.

The same month, a white woman called the police on an African-American child she claimed had “sexually assaulted” her in a Brooklyn bodega. A security camera in the store showed what actually happened: The 9-year-old had turned around, causing his backpack to brush the woman’s rear end.

The boy’s mother made strenuous objections to her ranting, and that’s when the white woman called the police. When they arrived, the boy was outside crying.

The neighbors did not buy into the woman’s denial of racist motives. She did eventually apologize. But the locals, convinced that she wasn’t playing with a full deck, nicknamed her “Cornerstore Caroline.”

Another video, taken at an IHOP in Los Angeles, shows a white woman yelling at another woman for speaking Spanish to her son. In a calm voice, the son tried to reason with the verbal attacker. “She’s not perfect, but she speaks English,” he told her in flawless English. And the mother did demonstrate that she could speak some English, not that she had an obligation to.

But really, what do you say to someone hollering “Go back to Spain” to a Spanish speaker in LA and asking, “Do you want the Russians over here telling you what to do?” I would have offered less explanation than the son, but he wisely spoke to her more like a child than a miscreant.

Psychologists have written a great deal on whether racists are actually mentally ill. They tread gingerly on the subject so as not to give excuses for vile conduct.

And it’s well-known that exposure to racism can do great psychological damage to people of color. This subject deserves its own discussion.

 

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

IMAGE: Screenshot from The Daily Show of “Cornerstore Caroline,” calling police to report an imaginary assault by a nine year-old African-American boy, October 15 , 2018.

America Rarely Lets You Forget That You’re Black

America Rarely Lets You Forget That You’re Black

So I had myself an epiphany.

Actually, that’s not quite the right word. An epiphany is a moment of sudden clarity, but mine rolled in slowly, like dawn on a crystal morning.

I’m not sure when it began. Maybe it was in 2012 when Trayvon Martin was killed and much of America held him guilty of his own murder. Maybe it was in 2013 when the Voting Rights Act was eviscerated and states began hatching schemes to suppress the African-American vote. Maybe it was on Election Day. Maybe it was a few weeks later, when a South Carolina jury deadlocked because the panel — most of them white — could not agree that it was a crime for a police officer to shoot an unarmed black man in the back. Could not agree, even though they saw it on video.

I can’t say exactly when it was. All I know is that the dawn broke and I realized I had forgotten something.

I had forgotten that I am black.

Yes, I know what the mirror says. And yes, I’ve always known African Americans face challenges — discrimination in health, housing, hiring, and a racially biased system of “justice,” to name a few. But I think at some level, I had also grown comfortable in a nation paced by Oprah, LeBron, Beyonce, and Barack. The old mantra of black progress — two steps forward, one step back — had come to feel … abstract, something you said, but forgot to believe.

So when we hit this season of reversal, I was more surprised than I should have been. I had forgotten about being black. Meaning, I had forgotten that for us, setback is nothing new.

Right after the election, as I was grappling with this, I chanced to see this young black woman — Melissa “Lizzo” Jefferson — on “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” and she performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the “Negro National Anthem.” Something about that song always gets to me. Something about it always stirs unseen forces, shifts something heavy in my soul.

“Lift Every Voice” was written by James Weldon Johnson in 1900. That was 23 years after the Republicans sold out newly freed slaves, resolving a disputed election by striking a backroom deal that made Rutherford B. Hayes president on condition he withdraw from the South federal troops who had safeguarded African-American rights and lives since the end of the Civil War. It was five years after the first “grandfather clause” disenfranchised former slaves by denying the ballot to anyone whose grandfather did not vote. It was four years after the Supreme Court blessed segregation.

And it was a year in which 106 African Americans were lynched — a routine number for that era.

Yet in the midst of that American hell, here was Johnson, exhorting his people to joy.

“Lift every voice and sing

Till Earth and heaven ring

Ring with the harmonies of liberty

Let our rejoicing rise

High as the listening skies

Let it resound,

Loud as the rolling sea.”

Lord, what did it take to sing that song back then?

I pondered that as the year deepened into December, as Christmas came and went, as the ball dropped in Times Square. Now here it is Black History Month, and I know again what I had somehow forgotten.

I had forgotten that we’ve been here before, that our history is a litany of people pushing us back after every forward step. I had forgotten that it long ago taught us how to weave laughter from a moan of pain, make a meal out of the hog’s entrails, climb when you cannot see the stairs, and endure.

I had forgotten that America is still America — and I am still black.

But it won’t happen again.

IMAGE: U.S. President Barack Obama (R) is joined onstage by first lady Michelle Obama and daughter Malia, after his farewell address in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. January 10, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst