The Living Consequences

Why don’t black Americans swim?

This is the provocative headline of a BBC News story, and it would be easy to misinterpret the BBC’s meaning. This is, after all, a sweeping  generalization, and one which has been a racial stereotype in the United States for many generations.

However, the BBC reporter cites credible statistics to support the widely-held belief that swimming is, in fact, nowhere near as common among black Americans as it is among white Americans.

More importantly, the article argues that this situation arises out of the nation’s painful legacy of slavery and race and has deadly consequences.

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This week marks the second anniversary of remarks by actor and activist Edward James Olmos on the subject of race as a social fiction on a panel at the United Nations.

For the third year in a row, and as I prepare to speak tonight on a similar panel at the United Nations, I’m reposting these remarks, because I have still never heard this idea expressed with more power and conviction: the emperor has no clothes. The notion that we as a people are divided into several different races is, and always has been, a dreadful lie.

Despite the danger inherent in advocating what we might call color-blindness, what Admiral Adama of the Battlestar Galactica says here is undeniably correct, both historically and sociologically, and remains true to this day:

There is only one race … that is the human race.

So say we all!

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Today is the first anniversary of remarks by actor and activist Edward James Olmos at the United Nations about the idea of race as a social fiction.

I posted about these remarks at the time, but I want to use this occasion  as an excuse to highlight once again what Olmos had to say that day, and I’m even going to take the unusual step for me of embedding the video of his remarks here.

The reason I’m doing this is that I’ve never heard this idea expressed with more power and conviction. Each time I see this, I’m reminded of just how powerful the myth of race is, and how important it is for those in the public eye to speak the plain truth that the emperor has no clothes:

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Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad have an op-ed in this morning’s New York Times in which they make the case, which I have explored previously, that the recession has been especially hard on black families.

In their essay, entitled “The Recession’s Racial Divide,” the authors are scrupulously fair towards those whites who, they argue, are engaged in “racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt” against what they perceive as unfair bias towards blacks and a socialist president hell-bent on implementing stealth reparations for slavery. As they say:

When you’re going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it’s all too easy to imagine that it’s because someone else is climbing up over your back.

In fact, however, black Americans have not gained any unfair advantage in recent decades, nor are they at risk of doing so now. Far from it. As Ehrenreich and Muhammad point out, “blacks are the ones who are taking the brunt of the recession.”

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My cousin Tom DeWolf has an essay up on his blog about race and health care. Tom is discussing health care reform this week, and this essay examines racial disparities in health care and health outcomes.

Tom reports that on average, white Americans are healthier and live longer than black Americans. They also receive considerably more health care, even when factors like income or health insurance are taken into account. Tom acknowledges that the causes are complicated, but he makes a powerful argument that when it comes to health and health care, race still matters in our society.

Check it out.

Do not blame me. I was not there. I did not do it.

At the height of the civil rights movement in 1965, the great American writer James Baldwin penned an essay for Ebony magazine entitled “White Man’s Guilt.”

Baldwin’s words are rooted in the struggles of a time different from our own, but he offers timeless reflections on history, memory, and inherited responsibility. His essay also resonates with our own era because it concerns the same history, the same racial inheritance, with which we struggle today as we seek to come closer to healing the racial divisions of his society and ours.

Here is an extended quotation from Baldwin’s essay, which brilliantly deconstructs a response from Americans to their own history which, unfortunately, is still all too common:

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CNN is reporting that President Obama has chosen Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his nominee to fill Associate Justice David Souter’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Judge Sotomayor’s nomination will inevitably raise the usual issues of politics and legal philosophy, as well as questions about “identity politics.” The latter, of course, refers in this context to the practice of taking into consideration the identity of potential nominees as members of historically disadvantaged groups, in order to compensate for the structural barriers which have caused these groups to be dramatically under-represented on the Court.

The issue of “identity politics” will probably be raised more sharply with this nominee than with others, for the simple reason that her selection involves multiple identities and another “first” for the Court: Judge Sotomayor, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, would be the first Hispanic justice and only the third female justice to serve on the Supreme Court.

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[Update: I’ve been reposting this inspirational video once a year, and I talk about the implications of what Olmos says here and especially here. If you want to read about his views or comment on them (and please do!), just follow one or both links.]

The United Nations hosted a panel on Tuesday about the television series Battlestar Galactica, covering such real-world themes as terrorism, human rights, religious conflict, and children in wartime.

The panel was moderated by Oscar-winning actress Whoopi Goldberg, and featured Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning Battlestar Galactica cast members Edward James Olmos (Admiral William Adama) and Mary McDonnell (President Laura Roslin), as well as executive producers Ronald D. Moore (of Star Trek fame) and David Eick.

What, exactly, did this panel have to do with race?

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The lead story in this morning’s L.A. Times provides another stark illustration of how the cumulative weight of centuries of racial discrimination continue to profoundly impact the lives of millions of black Americans.

The story, “Blacks lose ground in job slump,” reports that in February, while the national unemployment rate was 8.1%, for blacks that figure was 13.4% … and for black males, 16.3%.

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A new study came across my desk this week, which suggests that whites who have experience distinguishing the faces of individual black people may display less “implicit racial bias.”

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