Richard Thompson Ford, The End of Civil Rights
Well, I do wonder if President Obama has seen the op ed piece by Richard Thompson Ford, The End of Civil Rights, in today’s Boston Globe. For Ford makes it clear that the problems confronting Blacks — poverty and unemployment, educational achievement gaps, drug addiction, children without fathers, high rates of imprisonment, and other such — are no longer the results of racial discrimination, but rather the results of the severely impoverished and otherwise disadvantaged situations in which too many Blacks are now living.
Ford correctly points out that the Civil Rights movement did much to severely diminish, if not do away with altogether, racial discrimination. But with all its laudatory emphasis on non discriminatory public policies it has done little to improve the living situations of too many Blacks, still heavily burdened with the emotional scars of earlier discriminatory eras.
Yes, inequality, meaning unequal life situations and opportunities, is still very much with us and yes, new policies and actions, something other than the civil rights movement of the past, are now needed.
But although we may agree with Ford we still do not know what to do. And if we have done little or nothing up until now it’s not because we have not been aware for a long time of the situation that Ford describes.
Busing was one failed attempt to change the actual “unequal” circumstances of the schooling of young Blacks. And we talk more and more about moving Blacks into desegregated, middle class suburban neighborhoods in order to improve the circumstances of their lives. But we don’t know how to make this happen, especially given the entrenched opposition on the ground, from both elected officials and neighborhood residents, to our doing so.
So is there anything that might we do? Make-work jobs? That which really means more government programs and more taxes? Inject more money into the inner city community centers, schools, and other organizations? But isn’t this the sort of thing we have been trying to do, at least since President Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s.
Ford is correct in his diagnosis. But so far, neither he nor anyone else has come up with a realistic treatment.
