The Wave

Are We Past This Race Thing Yet?

As I relax this Presidents’ Day weekend, I recall that a good friend of mine – a highly educated, politically savvy, conservative, straight white guy around my age – looked me in the eye last September and declared with total confidence that “America isn’t ready for a black President.” Obviously, he was wrong.  But I’m sure there were plenty of Americans – on both sides of the aisle - who were saying the same thing back then.

And when I saw him again a few days ago, I reminded him of his declaration and he cheerfully admitted he’d read the tea leaves incorrectly.  “The best candidate won,” he said with equal confidence.  And then he added, “Perhaps our country is finally past this 'race thing'.”  I think he’s wrong again.

One look at the statistics will tell you why.  Even though they comprise only 12% of the US population, according to the latest US Department of Justice statistics, blacks are almost three times more likely than Hispanics and five times more likely than whites to be in jail. Black unemployment is twice that of whites.

And according to the US Census Bureau, in 2007 black households had the lowest median income - $33,916 - while non-Hispanic white households had a median income of $54,920. Interestingly, Asian households had the highest median income ($66,103). All of these numbers are trending to worse under this economy.

It seems to me that although we are more than willing to accept a black man as President, and blacks have made significant gains in every part of our society, we are still very much a country divided along lines separating blacks and whites.  Why is this?

Well, part of it has to do with simply being human; it's a tribal thing.  Despite our technological advancement in social networking, and despite television shows and commercials depicting people of all races interacting without racial tension, humans still do tend to congregate along racial lines.  Whites hang out with whites and blacks hang out with blacks, even in very diverse environments like universities.

In his book, “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama attributed this very human tendency to a kind of mental exhaustion – a need to relax and “stop worrying” about what whites were thinking about them - by black students at Occidental College where he spent a year and a half as an undergraduate.  My sense is that that need to take a break from worrying what other races are thinking about each other is never going to go away.

As a white guy, I admit that sometimes when I am hanging out with people of color, I have to check myself; I think a little more carefully before I speak lest I say something that might be interpreted by them as offensive.  This takes effort, no question about it. Now, I like to think blacks do this self-regulation too, making sure they don’t spout something offensive about whites in front of me.  But somehow, perhaps because I am aware of America’s history of slavery, segregation and racial injustice wrought by whites upon blacks, it feels like the burden is much more on whites to clean up our proverbial act than it is on blacks.

I wonder what our greatest Presidents – Washington, Lincoln, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, would make of the current state of racial play in America.  Perhaps they would be shocked. Or perhaps they would say, “What took you so long to elect a black man President?” But I don’t think they’d be surprised by the continuing racial income, judicial and societal disparities that are still very much with us.

So, are we past this “race thing” yet?  Not by a long shot. But the good news is that by electing a black man President, we’ve made a very substantial leap forward.  And that’s something very positive to think about this President’s Day weekend during one of the most serious downturns in our economy ever.  We could sure use it.  So, happy Presidents’ Day!

Fair is Fair

When President Obama signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law last week, which essentially restores a woman’s right to challenge unequal pay, a whole lot of people muttered “It’s about time.”

Demographers had been tracking the disparity since the 1960’s. Early surveys showed that women earned 71 cents for every dollar earned by a man in the same job. Then it went up to somewhere around 80 cents under Clinton and then back down under “W”.  Ledbetter, who worked for Goodyear Tire and Rubber, sued her employer for back pay and had her case go all the way to the Supreme Court.

Dominated by a Republican "rules-are-rules" majority, they ruled against her on a technicality –because she’d filed her claim too late, not because they disagreed with a lower court’s finding that she was indeed wrongfully discriminated against by Goodyear.  Jeesh! This is like your newspaper editor saying he won’t run your exclusive story finally naming who killed Jimmy Hoffa because you didn’t submit your copy on time.

In any event, my sense is that this is somewhat of a Pyrrhic victory. I don’t imagine in today’s crappy economy that the nation’s employers are going to dive into wholesale compensation and benefits analysis to root out inequality just because of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.  I think we’re going to have pay disparity for a long, long time to come.

But, I do think that the Act will have a subtle educational impact on our society in general. Ordinary people who finally heard about it on the news last week probably grunted, “Jeeze, I didn’t know that women got paid less than men for the same work.  Hell, that’s not fair.”  And they’d be right.  But for too long it was only the National Organization for Women who was banging the drum on this.  And because of its perceived left-wing tilt, many of these same ordinary folks probably discounted the notion, chalking it up to “femi-nazi” rabble-rousing or some communist plot.

But it’s not; it’s just fair.  And as everyone knows, fair is fair, meaning paying women the same for the same job looks good and is good. I’m pretty sure everyone in the vast middle of American politics will get on board with that.