Eating what you kill
I haven't posted much lately. My life is going great right now. I passed the bar, I have a great job, I love my wife, I have a great family. It's pretty hard to get angry about anything when everything is conspiring to make you happy.
But that's not to say I don't have a few gripes. Some are small. Like Bush giving the highest civilian honors to the worst screw-ups so far this millenium. Like Bush's housecleaning where any voice of dissent is asked to leave his cabinet. Like Congress passing that corporate welfare bill giving tax breaks to manufacturers (not bad in and of itself) but then defining manufacturing so broadly that a Starbuck's barista qualifies. No joke. Making coffee is now a manufacturing job.
But a recent comment really pissed me off. Gerald Reynolds is the Bush-appointed chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. This is the executive-branch organization that is supposed to help fight discrimination by identifying problems and making policy suggestions. What a great job! Identifying racism and finding ways of fighting it. But Mr. Reynolds has a serious problem because he doesn't understand the most basic principle of racism in this country - that past official discrimination has ramifications still being felt. He was on a local public radio show in Kansas City, where he is from, and was asked by a caller to address the issue of economic inequality among the races. The caller's point was that the racial divide is largely the continuing product of economic disparities between whites and blacks. The caller seemed to be suggesting that some sort of redistribution of wealth is in order.
Redistribution of wealth is what government is all about. We tax based on income and use that money to fund programs and projects. We take money from some people and give it to others. The government takes money from me and gives it to poor people in the form of welfare. It taxes you and gives that money to rich people in the form of incentives. So it shouldn't be shocking to hear someone suggest that redistribution of wealth might be an appropriate mechanism to consider in dealing with discrimination problems.
But Reynolds would hear nothing of it. In denying that redistribution of wealth is even worthy of consideration, he suggested that anti-discrimination policy should focus on levelling the playing field to give blacks an equal opportunity to compete with whites. Overt discrimination is the problem. Once overt discrimination is eliminated, blacks can compete based on their own merits. The analogy he used was: in this world, you eat what you kill.
Here's why he is wrong. In this country, we allow for the inheritance of wealth. We let parents leave the fruits of their labor to their children. We generally agree that this is a good system. But for 400 years, that system didn't apply to blacks in this country. Black people were the property of whites and the fruits of their labor didn't go to thier children; it went to their owners and their owners' children. For a very long time whites accumulated more wealth than their fair share. And since that time, whites have been able to pass that unfairly accumulated wealth along to their children. Even after slavery's end, official discrimination in the form of Jim Crow laws kept blacks from gaining power and accumulating wealth. We had a system that redistributed wealth from blacks to whites.
Levelling the playing field can't fix that. It doesn't fix the inherent inequality to resurface the playing field if one team hasn't been allowed to play for 3/4 of the game. If the Cowboys are allowed to rack up 100 points before the Packers are allowed to take the field, it won't do much good to make sure the football field is nice and smoothe. The Packers are going to lose.
Eating what you kill doesn't fix that. Whites didn't let blacks hunt for so long, all the good game is gone. There might be prairie dogs out there to shoot, but the bison are dead.
These trite cliches and analogies people use to justify eliminating affirmative action programs fall apart when you look at them square.
So my life is good. But Gerald Reynolds bugs me. How can he fix the problem if he doesn't see it?
But that's not to say I don't have a few gripes. Some are small. Like Bush giving the highest civilian honors to the worst screw-ups so far this millenium. Like Bush's housecleaning where any voice of dissent is asked to leave his cabinet. Like Congress passing that corporate welfare bill giving tax breaks to manufacturers (not bad in and of itself) but then defining manufacturing so broadly that a Starbuck's barista qualifies. No joke. Making coffee is now a manufacturing job.
But a recent comment really pissed me off. Gerald Reynolds is the Bush-appointed chairperson of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. This is the executive-branch organization that is supposed to help fight discrimination by identifying problems and making policy suggestions. What a great job! Identifying racism and finding ways of fighting it. But Mr. Reynolds has a serious problem because he doesn't understand the most basic principle of racism in this country - that past official discrimination has ramifications still being felt. He was on a local public radio show in Kansas City, where he is from, and was asked by a caller to address the issue of economic inequality among the races. The caller's point was that the racial divide is largely the continuing product of economic disparities between whites and blacks. The caller seemed to be suggesting that some sort of redistribution of wealth is in order.
Redistribution of wealth is what government is all about. We tax based on income and use that money to fund programs and projects. We take money from some people and give it to others. The government takes money from me and gives it to poor people in the form of welfare. It taxes you and gives that money to rich people in the form of incentives. So it shouldn't be shocking to hear someone suggest that redistribution of wealth might be an appropriate mechanism to consider in dealing with discrimination problems.
But Reynolds would hear nothing of it. In denying that redistribution of wealth is even worthy of consideration, he suggested that anti-discrimination policy should focus on levelling the playing field to give blacks an equal opportunity to compete with whites. Overt discrimination is the problem. Once overt discrimination is eliminated, blacks can compete based on their own merits. The analogy he used was: in this world, you eat what you kill.
Here's why he is wrong. In this country, we allow for the inheritance of wealth. We let parents leave the fruits of their labor to their children. We generally agree that this is a good system. But for 400 years, that system didn't apply to blacks in this country. Black people were the property of whites and the fruits of their labor didn't go to thier children; it went to their owners and their owners' children. For a very long time whites accumulated more wealth than their fair share. And since that time, whites have been able to pass that unfairly accumulated wealth along to their children. Even after slavery's end, official discrimination in the form of Jim Crow laws kept blacks from gaining power and accumulating wealth. We had a system that redistributed wealth from blacks to whites.
Levelling the playing field can't fix that. It doesn't fix the inherent inequality to resurface the playing field if one team hasn't been allowed to play for 3/4 of the game. If the Cowboys are allowed to rack up 100 points before the Packers are allowed to take the field, it won't do much good to make sure the football field is nice and smoothe. The Packers are going to lose.
Eating what you kill doesn't fix that. Whites didn't let blacks hunt for so long, all the good game is gone. There might be prairie dogs out there to shoot, but the bison are dead.
These trite cliches and analogies people use to justify eliminating affirmative action programs fall apart when you look at them square.
So my life is good. But Gerald Reynolds bugs me. How can he fix the problem if he doesn't see it?
posted by Charles S. Russell at 9:09 AM
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