REAL Desegregation. By Choice, Not By Decree.

Booman’s latest post is titled This is Interesting. In it he bemoans the undeniable failure of the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

He writes:

Honestly, the Fair Housing Act of 1968’s mandate to forcibly reduce segregation in housing feels like it came from an entirely different country.

True dat.

But then he says…partisan politics forever on this site, I guess…

It never had a chance in the face of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the busing controversy and, especially, after the Reagan Revolution in 1980.

Now this is “interesting.”

Booman…have you read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article Letter To My Son in The Atlantic?

You should.

Read the whole thing.

We all should.

It is a cri de coeur from an immensely gifted black writer, one who grew up on the hard ghetto streets of Baltimore and made it out…the same streets that recently erupted in violence over yet another police murder. It is about the segregationist societal forces that shaped him as a child and his continuing fears for the safety of his young son. What he says is terrible. It is also moving, from the heart and completely true.

Read on for a decidedly non-partisan understanding of the real problem. The DemocRatic Clinton and Obama administrations couldn’t/wouldn’t/didn’t get anything much done either, and it was not simply because of RatPublican opposition although that’s the way it has been spun. Legislating attitude or belief on this level is impossible, especially when many on all sides of the racial divides have their own negative takes on the idea.

Read on for a personal view from someone who has lived smack in the middle of the racial/cultural divides since the middle `60s.

Read on.
Regulars here know that I am a whitish-colored musician (beige I guess, to be more precise) of mostly Celtic ascent who has had a long and quite successful career playing mostly Afro-American and Afro-Cuban/Puerto Rican/Pan-American idioms in NYC. (Long name short for the latter idiom? Sure. Nuyorican. Deal wid it. The Nuyoricans do.) I have confronted that combination of rage, fear, hope and distrust from people of color of which Mr. Coates writes all of my adult life. I’m talking up close and personal here, folks. For real.

For example…a black musician with whom I roomed for several years in my late teens/early twenties (We played together, traveled, ate, got high and even occasionally fucked in the same room. Like I said…up close and personal. It was a small apartment.) once turned to me completely unexpectedly and said that on some level he would never, ever be able to fully trust a white man. He meant it, and I understood his point. I don’t trust most of them either. On the historical evidence.

I never forget that moment when dealing with people of color. Never. Especially those who grew up in the U.S. Sometimes I get past that distrust to an appreciable degree, sometimes not so much and sometimes not a bit of it. So it goes. I understand and accept it as part of the ongoing heritage of slavery, America’s original sin. So that goes as well.

Given that understanding, I can appreciate it when someone like Mr. Coates says the things he says.

The opening paragraphs:

Son,

Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the Far West Side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.
The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she turned to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it specifically. But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.

There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. This defiance is not to be much dwelled upon. Democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies–torture, theft, enslavement–are specimens of sin, so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspirational. At the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your [his son’s] mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. As for now, it must be said that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land.

That Sunday, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of an 11-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.

—long snip to the final paragraph—

I am speaking to you as I always have–treating you as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

So here we are…the Booman crew. Mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly “liberal,” mostly in only peripheral contact with people of color who grew up in the ghettos of America that are essentially economically-enforced slave pens. And we are talking about…

Talking about what, really?

“Desegregation?”

What kind of desegregation?

Willing desegregation? Deeper desegregation than in the workplace, the media entertainments or walking down commercial streets during daylight hours? A total end to racial or cultural segregation in the United States of America in terms of housing and educational institutions up and down the line?

It takes two to tango, y’know. Maybe even three or four in this case because most members of the various Hispanic + Asian cultures kinda sorta seem to feel like living in their own neighborhoods as well. Like I said…on the evidence. It’s a good feeling stepping out of your dwelling and not immediately being perceived as an outsider. Bet on it. A little safety at home is a desirable state for most people.

The depth of distrust that led my friend (still a friend, by the way) to say what he said to me after years of laughter and mutual trust on any number of levels…that level of distrust still exists, and it is not a distrust that is lacking for plentiful historical and contemporary evidence. Not a bit of that, either.

And the people who still “think that they are white?” (We are really all of us “Black, Brown and Beige.” Duke Ellington knew the truth of that matter way back in 1943.) Until those people awaken from their own dream, the dream of whiteness (an awakening that the corporate takeover of America is unwittingly promoting by attempting to make slaves of us all in America’s first real attempt at economically-enforced “equality enforcement”), until that awakening happens, why would any people of color wish to live with their enemies…whether those enemies are conscious of that fact or simply living in a media-enforced dream world…on a cheek-to-cheek basis? I have quite consciously lived in NYC during most of my time here in “border” neighborhoods…areas where the white dream and the non-white reality abut and confront each other. When so-called “gentrification”…as if the people who have been segregated by economic means for well over 150 years are not as much (or even more) “gentlepeople” than are the white dreamers who fall for the real estate hype and force them out…when that happens, I simply move to another border neighborhood. I’m inna Bronx, now…the last surviving NYC bastion of resistance to the Giuliani/Bloomberg gentrification/real estate hype machine, because the hyped remain afraid that the entire borough is still Fort Apache…and i am proud of it. I am happy here. My neighborhood…Kingsbridge…is entirely multicultural and almost entirely unhyped. (Why would the hype machine point out that kind of successful, working class multiculturism? There’s no money to be made off of it. Money to be lost, actually.)

I get off the 1 train at W. 231st St. when I come back from working in midtown Manahatta and encounter a thriving neighborhood where people of all races intermingle on the streets with almost no friction. Ain’t no “majority” down in here, just various Hispanic cultures, what survives of the once thriving black middle and working class culture and about 10 different so-called white cultures, almost all of them “minorities” in their own rights. Mostly Central European immigrants, working class Irish, various Muslims fleeing the madness, old-school Jews, the upper middle class who live in Riverdale (Riverdale. Read “upper middle class/wealthy,” mostly.) using mass transit and shopping in one particularly good market, the occasional artist and so on.

I got yer “desegregation”…right here!!!