The Racial Divide Gets Deeper

When I was growing up, white racism was a powerful and ubiquitous force in American life. It was impossible to ignore and nearly impossible to remain untouched, even if one consciously believed that skin color had nothing to do with human worth.

The outburst of civil protest about racism in the 1960s was a sign of American optimism: our democracy had severe flaws with deep historical roots, but they could be overcome through peaceful political action. The intransigence of openly racist politicians from the South and covertly racist politicians from everywhere else would yield to massive popular dissent. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, among many other legislative victories for racial equality, introduced a new era in American history.

It was comforting to believe that over time America would no longer be divided unequally into black and white, that the effects of racism would gradually disappear as legal racism itself became a thing of the past. Viewed from today, that idea appears hopelessly optimistic, the dream of political Pollyannas, who ignored the long history and crude reality of American racism. Every survey and social scientific study demonstrates the continuing power of racism to distort and impoverish the lives of black Americans. What is relatively new is the congruence of the partisan and racial splits.

Much has changed for the better, as evidenced, for example, by the ability of black politicians to win races in every state. The ceiling on black political success has been lifted a bit, but not broken. Until 2013, there was never more than one black Senator in office. Although about half of US Senators had first been elected to the House of Representatives, that only works for white politicians: only one black, Republican Tim Scott, has moved from the House to the Senate. There have been only two black governors in our history.

Donald Trump has certainly exacerbated racism in America, but the racist attitudes that he plays on never disappeared. While the openly racist public displays of ideological white supremacists have become more common, the much larger undercurrent of racist beliefs has finally found a comfortable home in the Republican Party base.

Only 15% of Republicans say that our country has not gone far enough in giving blacks equal rights. The number of Republicans who say that American politics has already gone too far in giving blacks equal rights is twice as large. Three-quarters of Republicans say that a major racial problem is that people see discrimination where it doesn’t exist and that too much attention is paid to racial issues. One out of 5 Republicans say being white hurts people’s ability to get ahead, and one out of 3 say that being black helps. Nearly half of Republicans say that “lack of motivation to work hard” is a major reason why blacks have a hard time getting ahead, and more than half blame “family instability” and “lack of good role models”. One third of Republicans say that racial and ethnic diversity is not good for our country. Among white Republicans who live in the least diverse American communities, 80% wish for their communities to stay the same and 6% want even less diversity. Half of Republicans say that it would bother them to hear a language other than English in a public place.

While racist Americans have congregated in the Republican Party, white Democrats appear to be moving away from racial resentment. Between 2014 and 2017, the proportion of white Democrats who said that the “country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights”, has grown from 57% to 80%. A different study offers even stronger numbers. In both 2012 and 2016, about half of Republicans displayed “racially resentful” attitudes toward blacks, and only 3% expressed a positive view. Among Democrats, the proportions shifted: the proportion who were positive about blacks doubled and those who felt most resentful fell by nearly half.

Apparently, college-educated whites had long known that the Democratic Party was more likely to be sympathetic to blacks on racial issues, and thus sorted themselves politically according to their own racial attitudes. But less educated whites came to recognize this partisan difference more recently, especially during the Obama presidency, and those with racial resentments who had been Democrats moved to the Republican Party.

While white Americans who feel negatively about blacks and believe that too much has been done to redress centuries of discrimination are collecting in the Republican Party, Democrats, both politicians and voters, are openly discussing reparations. 80% of Democrats believe that the legacy of slavery still affects the position of black Americans. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held an unprecedented hearing on slavery reparations last week. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas has proposed a bill “To address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery ... between 1619 and 1865  and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations”. Such a bill had been stalled in the House for 30 years. Now Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she supports it. The four Democratic Senators who are candidates, Sanders, Booker, Warren and Harris, all co-signed a Senate bill to study reparations. Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand and Beto O’Rourke also support such a study. Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden have been circumspect, but not dismissive. I couldn’t find any Republican political figure who supports even a study of the issue.

Reparations are already being considered: Georgetown University students voted 2 to 1 to impose a $27.20 fee on themselves to compensate the descendants of the 272 slaves sold in the 1830s by Georgetown’s founders.

One of the big arguments that Republicans, like Mitch McConnell, have used against even thinking about reparations is that slavery is 150 years in the past. But government discrimination against African Americans deliberately deprived them of financial resources in my lifetime.

Returning black veterans could not take advantage of the GI Bill because of racist tactics in North and South. Blacks were excluded from getting home loans in the newly expanding suburbs.

Reparations would certainly be difficult to decide upon and to administer. The clean partisan split over whether to consider the issue demonstrates how Republicans and Democrats are moving away from each other. We’ll see whether that strengthens or weakens continuing American racism.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

June 25, 2019

Water

I don’t think about water very much. I turn faucets on and off every day many times, and use water for a variety of tasks that seem necessary to a good life – showers, cleaning hands, washing dishes, making coffee. When water is in the news, it’s about too much water, the floods of the century that seem to be happening every few years in the Midwest.

Lately, though, I have been doing experiments with water. What if I turn off the water in the shower several times when I don’t need the spray? Can I save water that I would normally dump down the drain by pouring some into a container? Can I use less water when I wash dishes?

In all the houses of friends and family I visit, in all the restaurants and workplaces I visit, an unending supply of clean, drinkable water is an unspoken assumption. But that is one of the great privileges of living in one of the world’s wealthiest countries.

It also is our great danger. America uses too much water. The Colorado River, which provides drinking water for 36 million Americans and irrigation for 15% of the nation’s crops, is so overused that the water level in Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam, the country’s largest reservoir, is dropping to emergency levels. Seven states that depend on Colorado River water have just agreed to voluntarily cut their water usage. The days of virtually free unlimited water in the Southwest are over.

Meanwhile, we have way too much water in the Midwest. Both changes are connected to climate change, and so might get worse for the next few decades. In neither region, in no region, are Americans prepared for the basic changes in our water systems that global warming has brought and will keep bringing.

Flushing the toilet represents the largest use of water in an average American household, about 30% of total daily usage. Older toilets use 3.6 gallons per flush, while the newer so-called ultra-low-flow toilets use 1.6 gallons and even newer “high efficiency toilets” use 1.3 gallons, multiplied by an average of more than 5 flushes per day per person. Showers last an average of 8 minutes at 2 gallons per minute.

It is possible to significantly reduce water usage by installing relatively cheap bits of equipment which create no inconvenience: aerators for faucets and low-flow shower heads. More expensive are modern toilets and high efficiency washers and dishwashers.

The Alliance for Water Efficiency makes further suggestions for reducing water usage. They recommend what they call the “navy shower”, in which you turn off the water while shampooing and washing, then turn it on again. I’ve never been in the Navy, but this is how I shower, probably saving about the half the water I would otherwise use. That’s easy. Another suggestion they make is to collect the cold water that comes out of the shower before it is hot enough to step into. Think about that: get a bucket, turn the shower on so that some of the spray goes into the bucket, take the bucket out when the shower is warm, use that water later for – what? Watering plants? Washing dishes?

That’s an example of how inconvenient it is to have limited water supply.

Two-thirds of people in sub-Saharan Africa have no water at all at home. In most of these countries, over 90% of the rural population has no water at home. For many people, the nearest water supply is more than 30 minutes away. One gallon of water weighs over 8 pounds. Imagine needing to carry all the water for your household for half an hour.

Great improvements have been made recently in providing access to water in poorer nations. The proportion of the world’s people with access to “improved drinking water” has risen from 76% in 1990 to 91% in 2015. One of the biggest improvements was in China, where the number jumped from 67% to 95% among over 1 billion people.

Nearly 2 million Americans do not have access to clean running water. Naturally it is poor minority communities who suffer most: Native Americans, rural blacks in the South, Latino communities along the border with Mexico. But every state has areas where people do not have indoor plumbing.

I have a small metal milk can on my kitchen counter that holds about a gallon. I often pour water I have already used into it. When it’s full, I use the water in my garden. That water would have gone down the drain. If pouring it into my garden replaces other water I would have used for that purpose, I might have saved money. Some months we don’t use more than 2000 gallons, so our charge is flat, whether I save a gallon here or there or not. When we use more than 2000, I’m reducing our payment about 7 cents for every 100 gallons I don’t use. Water is extraordinarily cheap for us.

My water saving experiment was not useless. It is no solution to our coming water problems, but it began to show me what water privilege means. Maybe it will help prepare me for a future when our water privilege runs out.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

June 18, 2019

Looted Art in America

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the controversy at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, provoked by racist comments made at a group of black 7^th-graders who were on an outing as reward for excellent school work. The Museum leadership proposed new procedures to be more welcoming. But the racial tensions that a visit to the MFA could arouse can’t be fixed by even the friendliest attitude toward African-American guests, because racism is embedded in the whole enterprise of international art collection.

We visited the MFA last week to see their new exhibit on the Bauhaus, whose creativity, aesthetic, and politics we very much appreciate. The path to the exhibit led through a much larger display of African art objects.

The cultural context in which African bodies were represented in objects is strikingly different from what we call Western art, so African artifacts in museums inevitably appear exotic to the Western eye. Because European whites assumed that their civilization was superior to all others, the creations of African artists were long considered primitive. The MFA, like most museums now, makes an effort to counter the myth of white Western superiority by stressing the high levels of skill embodied in their collection of bronze and ivory sculptures made over six centuries in the independent Kingdom of Benin, now part of southern Nigeria. The Benin kings sponsored workshops to produce objects of the highest quality, often depicting religious rituals, veneration of ancestors, and kingly power. The introductory sign said these pieces “rank among the greatest artistic achievements of humankind.” Other commentators on Benin art agree that the artworks in the MFA represent the finest creations of African artists.

The MFA signage explains a little about how these objects came to be in Boston. The Benin Kingdom was invaded by the British in 1897, Benin city was razed and burned, the King overthrown, and about 4000 artworks were seized as “spoils of war”. They are now housed in museums in London and Oxford, Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden, Vienna, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Few remain in Nigeria. The Benin objects are a small part of the British Museum’s collection of 200,000 artworks from Africa. In what I assume is a relatively new wording, the exhibitors at the MFA ask, “What are the ethics of collecting and displaying works removed from their places of origin during periods of European colonialism?”

Other cases of the “collection” of foreign cultural creations are instructive in answering this question. The Nazi state and its representatives systematically collected the valuables of the people they conquered, considered inferior, and were killing. They stole everything valuable from Jews in the Third Reich and across Europe. They looted official collections from the nations they defeated.

Over 70 years later, the return of these objects to their owners continues to pit those currently in possession against their previous and rightful owners. Legal issues complicate these discussions, but nobody argues against the moral right of the victims and their descendants to their property. The universal belief that Nazi stealing was morally abhorrent is the foundation for every discussion of return.

When Soviet armies pushed into Germany, they took vast quantities of art from museum collections. The Russians made a persuasive claim – German armies waged a war of obliteration against the Soviet population and landscape. The German art works taken back to the Soviet Union were only a token compensation for property destroyed and millions of lives lost. Since then, some have been returned and some remain in Russian museums, objects of international argument. In 1998, Russia passed a law legitimizing their continued possession of what they termed “Cultural Valuables Displaced to the USSR”, with this justification: “partial compensation for the damage caused to the cultural property of the Russian Federation as a result of the plunder and destruction of its cultural valuables by Germany and its war allies during World War II.”

No such justification exists for the presence of African artifacts in Western museums. They were simply taken as part of a wider appropriation of value by Western colonial conquerers, who simply showed up in independent African nations and kingdoms, killed anyone who tried to defend themselves, and took whatever they wanted back home. Although the US was not part of the colonial scramble which divided up Africa in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, American collectors and collections now possess large quantities of the stolen objects.

Many white Americans, and other white Western peoples, see their relationships with Africans through a haze of patriotism and self-assurance. We were beneficent teachers about advanced human civilization, the unquestionable truths of Christianity, and the proper use of economic resources, earthly and human. The assumption that humans could also be property was no longer official national policy, but white supremacy still defined white, and thus US federal, policy. Ownership of property was changed through conquest.

We now share a significant debt with all the national looters by conquest, the Germans, the Russians, the British, the Portuguese, and other European nations. Our institutions, public and private, and many individuals, most of whom are very wealthy, owe reparations for organized theft. Difficulties in figuring out how it should be accomplished are no excuse for pretending the debt doesn’t exist.

The carefully worded acknowledgment that inhuman behavior lay behind the movement of African art into Western museums is new. But that’s too late and not enough. The middle schoolers from the Helen Y. Davis Leadership Academy did not need a guard to mention watermelons to experience racism at the MFA. The collections of African art proclaim the racism of the past, the white assumptions that they could take anything they wanted from blacks, including their labor and lives.

Now the MFA admits this is controversial. It isn’t. White colonial conquest of Africa was a holocaust before the Holocaust. The fruits of genocide lie in glass cases in Western museums.

African art belongs where it was created, where it is meaningful rather than merely exotic, where it could induce pride in its creation instead of shame in its looting.

Give it back.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

June 11, 2019