From a disgruntled student plotting to set bombs off throughout a community college campus in California, to a man in Pennsylvania wielding a machete and a baseball bat as he terrorized an elementary school, America is aflame with hatred and violence. And here, at the beginning of Black History Month, the San Francisco Chronicle, a newly acquired Hearst newspaper, insults the East Bay Black community with its full two- page story highlighting what they consider a Black Problem.

Although this nation has always been violent, the level of violence and the deadly nature of the weapons used to inflict that violence have increased and become exceedingly more dangerous. No nation can endure the intensity of hatred and violence America is permitting to go unaddressed. And as long as we fail to address this national pattern  in a significant way, the nation will become more fractured, and there will be racial violence, class violence, gender violence, and just abstract violence.

Yet, it doesn't seem as if America is going to address a major cause of its violence, even though the causes of that violence are clearly known. To address those causes, however, requires that Americans give up notions and positions of the privileged and the unprivileged.

As the struggle in the Middle East situation between the Palestinians and Jews continues, we see parallels to our own social malady. To secure peace in Israel, there must be justice for the Palestinians, and whenever there is no justice, peace is very tentative. In America, the condition is as stated by the prophet of old: "Justice has fallen in the streets." And as long as it lies prostrate, it will kindle an indifference and rage that will engulf any nation in violence and incivility. 

To address the problem of America is to address our White American Problem--a problem that White Americans do not admit exists, even while they waste print delineating a Black Problem. But while their media blares of a Black, Asian, and Hispanic problem, there is a deep moral and psychological problem that White America must face in this new age. Black History Month is an excellent time to start facing that problem because it affects not only their 200 million but our 42 million as well.

I have noticed that John Ashcroft and other White religious conservatives express a God whom I, one raised in the church from my youth up, do not recognize or understand. Their God allows them to have certain privileges beyond other, nonwhite Christians who supposedly serve the same God. In fact, they seem to have a brand of Christianity that is alien to sound Bible teaching. They are more nationalistically than theologically based, and although they are conservative, they are more politically conservative than morally conservative. 

This religious right is really the progenitor of this current American White Problem. And whether a White person is religious or non-religious, the White religious right has touted the idea that White privileges are God-sanctioned so much, that the idea resonates with non-religious Whites as well. Anyone would like to think that God is on his/her side more than the other person's--that would make him/her special. Having special favor with God is an idea that invites easy receptivity, and when the powerful White American media turns that idea into the standard paradigm through which all things are filtered, the religious right ethos becomes the White American ethos. And it is extremely difficult to break out of that boxed-in thinking, if indeed, anyone wants to break out.

This religious right paradigm perpetuates the notion that White privilege is God-sanctioned and meritorious; so, historically, White Americans have enjoyed more privileges than others and felt no guilt about illegally and unethically discriminating against others to get it.

This ethos works to blind Whites and some non-Whites to its unfairness and its very existence. That is because, any system that continues for long will begin to seem normal after a while. As a small kid in Louisiana, I grew up sitting in the back of the bus and thinking it normal, or certainly not abnormal. At 14 years old, my parents moved to California, and as I saw new realities, the old realities did not seem normal any longer. I came to realize that continuity of abnormality breeds its stability and its acceptance as normality. 

Over many years, White Americans have perpetuated an unethical system of social, legal, financial, economic, educational, and thorough societal inequity against non-Whites; it is an inequity that is so absolute it permeates the very fabric of American institutional society. And since it is so thorough and of such long standing, it is almost invisible to Whites themselves. And those Whites who do see it too often rationalize it or ignore it. Most White Americans seem to feel no crisis of conscience, such as John Brown who was tormented over slavery and did something about it. It is this absence of the John Browns in America and the ease with which most of those who see the problem use flawed reasoning to medicate themselves and their blind brothers that demonstrate the White American Problem more than anything else.

James Robinson, in his classic work on the ways we think, defined rationalization as the use of logic to justify an already preconceived opinion. He further suggested that rationalization is not true thinking, but merely the use of reasoning to support ideas already arrived at. Critical thinking, he argues, is thought that demands that a conclusion be arrived at from the facts. Rationalization is therefore used to assuage whatever guilt that may exist and to perpetuate the status quo by appealing to others to accept flawed reasoning.

Martin Luther King has said: the privileged seldom give up their privileged positions voluntarily; it must be demanded of them. Therefore, most Whites will never acknowledge their problem because it is a problem of unearned privilege, and as a general rule, all systems seek to perpetuate themselves and will do whatever they can to continue. The continuity of social inequity is a cause of much of the violence and incivility that plague our nation.

Without thought, White Americans assume that privilege is theirs, and when it is disallowed or not honored by others, some have turned to violence, which, historically, has been America’s default drive to resolving conflict. And the violence of our television, movies, and sports reflects and becomes our social reality.

America, by and large, pays a type of lip-service to ending discrimination against non-Whites; because they enjoy the benefits of discrimination, it is almost impossible to get them to acknowledge that discrimination as practiced in America is, at least, White affirmative action. At its worst, it is fraud. If all pay taxes and offer services of citizenship so that all may equally share the privileges of America, but privileges accrue in greater proportion to certain among us (that is what discrimination does) that is theft of property and services under pretense. 

The idea that affirmative action is reverse discrimination used by Blacks is a popular notion that Black and White conservatives fancy, yet those who will admit that discrimination is preferential treatment for Whites do so while claiming that it does not exist to any noticeable or significant degree today. However, at any time objective tests can be administered and will show that discrimination is still alive and well in every system of American society.

Some years ago, I was surprised to be asked by the University of Kansas to examine college entrance tests to see if there was racial or gender bias in them. My surprise was that the university would be honest enough to actually seek an objective Black view rather than the same old eyes used for years. Of course, there was racial and gender bias in the tests. But later, when I discussed some of the findings with a number of students, the White students, especially the males, saw very few advantages they enjoyed in structure and content of the tests. The tests seemed fair to them--a conclusion I expected. The men saw nothing inherently unfair in asking a mathematics question to both females and males using symbols more familiar to males than females--a basketball or football with a certain weight is much more easily handled on a test when one is familiar with it, and the percentage of males more familiar with those symbols is much greater than females. These are subtleties built into just about every American test used to rank individuals.

When I administered treatment centers for juveniles, as a standard of fairness, I instructed our psychologists and social workers to add an additional 15 points to any IQ score a Black or Hispanic youth received from a county-administered test. The biased nature of the IQ tests inordinately categorized our youths as low achievers and morons. Almost every Black youth entering our facilities with a state or county administered IQ test had scored at or near the moron level, a very harmful tag to place on a child.

To demonstrate our point, we picked one of these young Black males to work with in order to show the flawed nature of categorizing based on those test scores. After a few months, teachers at the school sent notes extolling his intelligence and asking how he had ever been categorized as slow. As a result of his achievement, the young Black male had more confidence in himself and his environment; the young girls at the school found him more attractive; and things were starting to become normal for him. But it had been a structurally biased, White-tilted test that had placed him into an abnormal category. Fortunately, we had some experience in understanding that the tests were subtly unfair to Blacks, and we were able to reverse some harmful effects. Yet, across America, these tests are administered to Black youths, they score poorly on them, and are labeled as slow and even retarded. That label becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy—these young men and women start, and often continue, behaving as the test has categorized them. Their behavior does not demonstrate the accuracy of the test, but the harm of the test.

When I attended UC Berkeley for my undergraduate work, an interesting, but typical incident occurred that further highlights the blindness of too many White Americans to their own deceptions. At the end of a particular English course I had taken, I happened to meet and talk with a certain White male classmate. In talking, he acknowledged that he hadn't done too well in the course because the instructor was too intellectual for him and he had needed to work 20 hours a week and carry 15 units that quarter. That, in his own words, was too much for him. Consequently, he handed in a late paper that was more of style than substance, and he was hoping for a C as his course grade. 

He made the assumption that I had done no better, and operating on that assumption, he ventured a query of my grade in the course. When I stated that I had taken an A, he probed my activities and course load. After discovering that I was working 40-hours a week and carrying a course load of 32 units (by special permission), he illogically and self-deceptively stated, "You must be a fool; I value my education more than that." 

Whether he believed his statement or not, it was a typical response to Black excellence--a denial of its existence and recasting it as something else, because it does not comport with a White privileged paradigm. Of course, were the shoe on the other foot, he would expect accolades of brilliance, genius, studious, etc., heaped upon him, but those accolades were not suitable for one of my hue and mindset. He saw himself academically above me, although using White objective standards that he implicitly knew favored him, our scores said something quite different from his utterance. Furthermore, he felt it perfectly reasonable to justify his lack of achievement.

This blindness is part of an American blindness that has given White Americans weighted privilege in all aspects of America. And a tragedy of this unfairness is that Whites, and some Blacks also, assume that the discriminatory privileges they enjoy are actually the result of merit. But when the privileged receive their privileges by unjust weights, that unfairness cannot but foster ill-will, incivility, and violence on the part of citizens discriminated against. This widespread American unfairness that has continued in the absence of the John Browns of conscience who rise up in organized opposition to end it, is our White American Problem that goes unspoken and untreated. Instead, White America wastes our time blaring out the problems of Blacks lagging behind in school, in computer skills, in test scores, and in every area they can imagine, as if they themselves had not played a major role in constructing those problems.

There is a certain perverse pride White Americans seem to take in citing the problems of other groups, when they have actually been the major architects in creating the problems, while claiming them as the sole shame of those others. A case in point is the Ted Fang-owned SF Examiner newspaper. When the Hearst Corporation owned the Examiner for many years, it would often seem like a foreign language newspaper in its first edition. The typos were unbelievably numerous for a rich, well staffed newspaper. Its poor news coverage always made it a second-rate newspaper--their coverage emphasized business and the rich, giving little attention to the average citizen, while offering vicious coverage of the ethnic minority communities. It made their newspaper good for the street-hustlers' window washing and nothing else. But when the Hearst Corporation bought the SF Chronicle and had to spin off the Examiner, they gave that dying newspaper to the Fang family (along with $63 million); immediately thereafter, they started writing excoriating attack articles to kill it. They demeaned the problems Ted Fang was having--even citing the many typos the paper had (what short memories they have). Yet the problems Fang has are problems structured by the Hearst Corporation--they planned the paper's death and embarked on their current campaign to kill it. This is a pattern they have engaged in without shame and called it news, just as they called their Blacks are Lagging Behind attack article news.

White Americans need to address their problem of structured and planned widespread inequity. And those Whites whose eyes are open and whose minds are fair need to get about the business of seriously socializing their masses to the fact that their structured and planned discrimination, which brings about this inequity, is, in fact, White affirmative action which has continued too long and must end; that socialization needs to become the new paradigm so that privilege and favoritism cease and we operate on a fair, merit based, level playing field. The new global economy can no longer afford White privilege as a currency.

Furthermore, instead of trotting out the tired faces and trite lines of the John McWhorters, Ward Connerlys, Shelby Steals, and other Black marionettes, White America would do well to socialize themselves to the fact that the past methods of acculturation and co-opting no longer work on Black masses. We have gone to the best schools, acquired the best educations, and have not, in the vast majority of cases, lost our wits. So we can see through the trumpeting of Black faces in drag, vocalizing White lines—this is old theater that will work only, by chance, on the 27% underclass of Black people, from which America takes its distorted ideas about all Black people. But the 73% that makes up the rest of us have grown weary of the familiar scenes, the acts, and this entire drama--away with the clowns.

Finally, the powerful White media, which has harmed so many of them and us, can no longer seduce the 73% of us into accepting their cultural normality as a model worthy of our emulation, as implied by McWhorters in the SF Chronicle's article. And the use of McWhorter, or any of his facsimiles, to suggest that Blacks emulate White culture, is received by Blacks as eagerly and attentively as a Strom Thurmond letter to the Black Muslims would be.

It is distressing that even here in the San Francisco Bay Area, with all of our universities, supposed liberalism, and vibrant Black intelligentsia, that at the start of Black History Month, the Hearst-owned SF Chronicle would run an extensive two-page story on naïve Black-spoken, but White-informed, views and insults to the Black community. Instead of this failed effort to create Black heroes who sing White songs, White America needs to look around and see the new structures under which we must work together.

The special, unearned privileged ride (racial discrimination that favors Whites) has to be ended. The White American Problem needs addressing, but, instead, the Hearst owned SF Chronicle and other White conservative media continue their attempts to manufacture news and hoist confused Black faces touting White machinations of a supposed self-induced Black American problem.

The truth is, most Whites see that justice has fallen in the streets and lain there too long, but they have hidden their faces from it. So the prophet's bell tolls for them. []

Frank A. Jones
2/05/01

...............................................Home