The Start of My Political Activism

A Rational Approach to Race Relations Posted on 05/16/2010

Most of us want a better life, more political power to bring about the changes we want for ourselves and our families, and greater social benefits and services–good shopping, schools, families, housing, parks; safety, justice, the right to choose where we live and not have our neighborhoods destroyed. These desires transcend the biological fact of race, and in fact, are not related to race at all, nor gender, nor nationality. Our race has no bearing, nor should it, on most of what we want in our lives, though many believe that race impacts what we’re able to get and how we’re able to get it.

Race is evident when we look in the mirror. We all have it.

Some of us consider our race to be our identity, the single factor that makes us different from other races. We can choose to feel superior based on our race, inferior, or equal in how others in society value us. We can choose to feel proud about the accomplishments of others of our race or angry about poor treatment we or others who belong to our race receive or received in the past. We can celebrate the difference and the perceived exoticism of our race, and we can value the cultural diversity of many races coming together.

We can choose to believe, feel, and celebrate much about race for which there is no credible evidence or logical foundation.

We develop opinions based on associations we make with race–the culture and subculture of people belonging to a race as reported in the media and by our friends. Documented cultural attitudes prevalent among members of a race, including a culture’s valuation of education, work ethic, or family cohesion, in general lead people to incorrect generalizations about race. Cultural values as exhibited through clothing and hair style, walk and speech, vehicles and jewelry, tattoos and piercings, situations, religion, values, social mores, and geographic neighborhoods are confused with race.

Racism is a specific category of issue regarding race. Racial prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination present far more widespread and harmful problems than racism does. Often misapplied, however, the label of racism gets more attention and community action than allegations of other categories of racial injustice.

Racism is an active, overt, and irrational hatred based on the false general belief that a different race of people is inferior simply for being a different race, often with an underlying desire to eradicate the race. Racist beliefs often influence the racist’s decisions and actions, and sometimes these actions, though not the racist beliefs, are illegal, such as with job discrimination and verbal or physical assaults.

Calling acts racist when they aren’t is unfortunate because the real issues of race become obscured behind emotionally explosive rhetoric.

Few people hate based solely on the single immutable physical trait of a stranger’s race. Intimate knowledge of a specific person is assumed to precede hatred, which is a complex emotion, with multiple dimensions. The dictionary definition of racism applies to a very limited number of people.

People exhibit racism for practical reasons, most associated with succeeding in competition against another race. Currently, competition is a focus in the discussion about illegal immigrant Mexicans, who have recently become a larger minority class than blacks in the United States.

Discussions of logic errors regarding race, racial double standards and hypocrisy, and reasons for race resentment can be found on this site; bad laws made to appease narrowly focused activist groups who exert pressure on lawmakers are deconstructed; separatist and integrationist beliefs and how they affect race perceptions are examined; and the psychology of perpetuating and sustaining racial prejudice is also reviewed.

This site also offers reviews of deceptive social strategies based on the pretense that racism and discrimination exist where they don’t in order to suppress race competition and extort social or economic concessions. Flawed arguments to unfairly gain social and economic advantage based on race are a major component of such strategies, though many targets fail to confront their attackers about these logic flaws or for their deceptiveness.

For instance, anyone who states that all whites today have some kind of diluted personal responsibility for slavery that morally obligates them to make reparation is either lying or rote regurgitating the lies of others. People who make such allegations turn a white’s personal sense of honor against himself as a weapon. These race baiters very likely place little value on the concept of true personal responsibility, possibly live their lives shunning their own personal responsibilities, and publicly impugn their own integrity by uttering the allegation.

Quaint, metaphorical slogans are also lies. The assertion that denied equality for one is equality denied for all is a false metaphor based on the incorrect premise that all humans have the same degree of social connection to all other humans, or perceive equality the same way. A single factor, such as a perceived miscarriage of justice in a single instance, isn't equal to the injustice of systemic social, civic, and legal inequality. All blacks don’t belong to a symbolic family, and improving the circumstances of one doesn’t directly affect the circumstances of another. Altruist, socialist, liberal assertions of connectedness and assumed responsibility for others’ lives in the community based on similar race, age, and goals are complete socialistic…idealism.

Let’s be honest. But people aren’t. They don’t confront people who play for a race team, demanding that they examine individual issues impartially. They don’t confront people who use deceptive and deflective arguments based on racial irrelevancy: “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” They don’t voice their objections to deceptive campaigns based on race because others whose opinion in business and society matter might hear them being falsely accused of racism, or because they fear physical harm in reprisals.

Members of any race can be racist, even against others of their own race. The causes of racism are examined honestly. Race-baiting methods of gaining societal rewards counter capitalistic tenets.

Further education about race issues, which is often slanted toward social tolerance, acceptance, and compromise, won’t guarantee that people will think clearly and make good choices where race relations are concerned, but prejudice is within one’s psychological control to change.

It helps to see individuals, talk of individuals, and hold individuals responsible. The foundation of many of my observations are recorded in my study, "A Rational Approach to Race Relations: A Guide to Talking Straight about Contemporary Race Issues," available at Amazon.com.

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Gaffes of the IrrationalPosted on 07/05/2011

Race reparationist Henry “Skip” Louis Gates, in a special for PBS television, asked a black interview subject how life would be for blacks in 50 years. Such questions invite pure hopeful or despairing conjecture with little basis in reality, offering nothing to the understanding of race relationships. Gates also has a tendency to ask fraudulent, loaded, dichotomous questions that structure the response between two choices and presumes discrimination, such as, “Do you think you have been discriminated against more for your race or your gender.” The question does not address other factors, such as skill level and ability, experience, age, talent, education, determination, and professionalism as possible measures for failure or success. It also assumes as fact that a person feels, or should feel, discriminated against.

All projections, predictions, and speculation about race and racial advancement under hypothetical circumstances are ridiculous, considering that people move mountains and race is simply one of their attributes.

A Brief History of Racial DiscriminationPosted on 07/05/2011

In democratic systems, being in the minority’s a bitch. In a fight, you’ll likely get your ass kicked. In a fight for special interests rewards, you’re outvoted and outshouted. Work and money and opportunities are limited at any given moment. Fights are most often won by groups that have the greater number of members with the better weapons and resources. Majority populations consciously protect their advantages. They create laws that squash economic and social competition for resources, and impose tariffs to discourage foreign competition. The Ku Klux Klan preserved their way of segregated life and inserted their members into local government to enact laws that segregated by race, keeping minorities removed from the means of economic freedom. District rezoning keeps neighborhoods poor, so they receive only the levy funding that their poor districts can drum up.

Majorities looked the other way when the civil rights of minorities were oppressed, and continue to look the other way. In an editorial, George Will asserts that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights wouldn’t be missed if it folded (Will). Will goes on to state that civil rights rhetoric from the former chairperson, Mary Frances Berry, was unsubstantiated and designated racial problems as being related to civil rights, though they weren’t. “Not every need is a right, and…not every right is a civil right–one central to participation in civic life,” Will writes. The new chairperson, Gerald Reynolds, Will writes, “says that the core function of civil rights laws is to prevent discrimination, meaning ‘the distribution of benefits and burdens on the basis of race.’ But if so, today a…principal discriminator is government, with racial preferences and the rest of the reparations system that flows from the assumption that disparities in social outcomes must be caused by discrimination and should be remedied by government transfers of wealth.”

Whites who believe that equality has been attained also believe that they will be called on less often to make concessions to minorities. The belief that racism is no longer prevalent lets some whites deny involvement, support, and continued retribution of past injustices. “Not only are working-class whites rejecting civil rights goals, but African-American youth increasingly are rejecting the idea of racial reconciliation” (Muwakkil).

Otherwise decent people, with full selfish rationality, discriminated when hiring employees as a way of reserving purchasing power and good lives for their racial group. Groups often form based on racial similarity, gender, age, and common interests assumed to be shared based on these demographic criteria. Within each group, most members want limited resources for themselves and others like them, not for other groups whose numbers in our democracy are too small to beat the majority in a fair fight.

Historically, majority races continued their treachery by believing and propagandizing that minorities had all sorts of inferiorities and infirmities. Majorities have tried to deceive minorities into believing that the treatment they received was for their own good, using violence, fear, psychological belittlement, and unfair laws to maintain a lower status for minorities.

Racial discrimination has been used consistently as a rational strategy to defeat competition for jobs and society’s limited resources. Trashing minority races as a survival goal secured greater freedoms for the majority and preserved of a way of life.

Some social commentators advocate the voluntary relinquishment of power as a response to shame in how predecessors had acquired it: “Whites must see the problem of race as one of giving up power. They have to acknowledge that our economic, political, and cultural systems have been designed in part for the benefit of whites.... [Whites] need to acknowledge the shame they feel, rather than reflexively blaming those who cause such feelings to come to consciousness. They need to know that their feelings of shame will begin to vanish only when they begin to take part in dismantling racism and redistributing power...” (Mura).

Though liberal socialists rebuke capitalism as being an economic system created by whites to benefit whites, capitalism is not a weapon of race-based exclusion. Power and economic rewards are the result of successful competition. Like any system, it is people within the capitalistic system who choose to act unfairly, unethically, and illegally, to the limits of capitalism’s government-regulated boundaries. Capitalism is a tool that can be misused by all people of all races. Those who refuse to work within the prevailing system should not logically expect others to migrate to other systems. Few whites feel shame and will not concede power based on feeling better for performing kind acts.

People who have little real economic or social power feel that any tactic, such as denouncing capitalism, is fair. If the powerful and wealthy continue to discriminate against minorities who play by capitalism’s rules, then unfair counter strategies are seen as justifiable. Many would suggest that two wrongs don’t make a right, and the indiscriminate application of unfair strategies against people who have always played fair definitely does not feel right. However unfair some strategies may seem for obtaining society’s rewards in the capitalistic system, they succeed because they play on emotion and a guilt-ridden sense of what is fair in general. One particular strategy, the overused charge of racial discrimination, succeeds because it throws the burden of providing proof upon those in power, thereby forcing members in power to concentrate time, energy, and money to disprove accusations.

Racial discrimination and active racism serve the self-promotional ends of human tribal systems. Humans group together based on some commonality to work as teams to acquire the limited rewards available in a society. Often these groups, which develop a secondary need to survive and thrive as a group, use repressive means to reduce the chances that other recognized groups will acquire the rewards. Societies throughout time have used class division to maintain group wealth and control of large quantities of material and power. Those in lower classes often have had little recourse but to revolt or accept the crumbs that came their way.

Worried that allowed to vote, a minority might be elected to political office and attempt to protect minority rights, majorities withheld the right of minorities to vote. The false public justification for refusing the vote was that political thugs would easily coerce minorities, forcing them to vote the way the thugs wanted them to vote.

Racial discrimination and racism are a part of white oppressive history in the United States. Originally, the belief that a single race can be intellectually, naturally, and culturally superior to all others was employed by Adolph Hitler in his quest to create a master “race,” and he led a highly civilized country to support the barbarism and atrocity of the holocaust. In Germany, Hitler carefully brainwashed a population through expert use of language, propaganda, and fear mongering. In the United States, racism stemmed from a convenient belief in superiority, which allowed white slave owners to justify their dehumanizing treatment of blacks, advancing their own financial position through enslavement prior to 1865. Overtly through the mid to late 20^th century, majority races protected their status and advantage by segregating social services and rights–public education, transportation, property ownership, permissible racial discrimination for business services and products–remaining physically and morally safe through segregative distancing. Attitudes ingrained by history can be seen in the continuing belief in negative racial stereotypes and in the easy false generalizing across populations from isolated negative instances. To sustain their attitudes, many whites cite minority crime, rioting, educational failure, out-of-wedlock teen births, regressive and mid-range pornographic values epitomized in rap music, unemployment, drug use, lower life expectancy, and poverty statistics.

Every measure used to describe one race can be applied to any race, providing a comparative basis.

Majority racial groups suppressed competition from minorities by denying freedom through slavery, then denying civil rights, and then giving lip service to civil rights to avoid legal punishments. Slaveholders worked the system, declaring their slaves as three-fifths human, allowing whites to both declare slaves as property and as full votes when added together, gaining a potential majority in the senate to vote for sustaining the system of slavery. Selfishly restricting others’ civil rights advanced and expanded the civil rights of the majority. It was hoped that the tyranny of the majority perceived by French historian Alexis de Tocqueville would be a benevolent, paternal one. Without equal power, which is arguably achieved by equal size and representation in democracies, minority groups were often unable to enforce their rights and promote their interests and entitlement to representation either equivalent to or greater than their percentage of the population. The utilitarian principle of the greatest good for the greatest number didn’t automatically apply and those in power weren’t constrained by law to behave magnanimously.

People have always known that owning human slaves was immoral, even before the cotton gin made slavery uneconomical. For two hundred years (prior to 1865 when slavery was outlawed in the United States by ratification of the 13^th amendment), white American slave owners justified their immorality by subhumanizing blacks and then taking steps, such as instituting rules against learning to read, to ensure that few exceptions could counter the prevailing view and conceptions. It would be difficult to reconcile profit if slaves were shown to be educable, not property but wholly human and worthy of federalized civil rights. The signers of the Declaration of Independence knew slavery was wrong, though a few notable signers held slaves. Abolitionists like Henry Highland Garnet, who in 1865 was the first black to speak in a chamber in the U.S. House of Representatives to urge ratification of the recently passed 13^th Amendment banning slavery, knew it.

The racist attitudes of slaveholders, reinforced by blacks who believed their status as property, reduced competition from blacks for limited societal rewards, competition that would have impacted the immorally attained lifestyles of the whites. When slavery was outlawed, racist reliance on the idea of white supremacy allowed whites to cognitively reconcile enforced segregation, with an emphasis on relegating blacks to inferior facilities in much the same way that western settlers forced Native Americans onto less desirable territories and reservations. Blacks were excluded from civic culture–voting, owning property, using public facilities, owning businesses, testifying against a white, going to public schools, protection by civic police forces, and restriction to undesirable jobs in the military. It allowed whites to withhold equal civil rights and to hand down unjust legal decisions, many founded on Jim Crow premises that required blacks to pass literacy tests, pay poll taxes, and own property to vote, qualifications that were considered facially neutral but constituted de facto racial discrimination. The pose of superiority was a sham for many whites that allowed them to hold and control wealth, property, and power. Blacks were enculturated with deference behavior and hopelessness and a sense of having a subordinate place in society.

When slavery was outlawed, many blacks left the south, suspicious that former slaveholders and southern adherents to the slavery system would never permit former slaves to exercise their recently acquired equal rights. Northerners were thought to be more accommodating of the exodus of unskilled blacks, though such trust was questionable. A stereotype was developed that painted northerners as insidious in their covert racism, while southerners didn’t bother keeping their racism secret.

An earlier influx of unskilled Chinese laborers offers a parallel in the lack of full social acceptance of great numbers of people. In America’s gold rush of 1849, there was a wave of immigration into America to seek fortune at Gold Mountain in Deadwood in the Black Hills area 50 miles northeast of Rapid City, South Dakota. About 66,000 Chinese immigrated to the U.S. between 1849 and 1860. Due to violence and overt racism against them in competition to find gold, most Chinese changed their plan to search for gold and worked on railroads or in service industries as cooks, merchants, and innkeepers and laundries. Chinese competitors were easily identifiable as outsiders, and pretended hatred of their foreign-ness bonded groups of other men, though members of all races who competed for gold were murdered out of greed to obtain land claims (Khatchadourian).

For a very long time, white males controlled society’s rewards. But as more and more non-whites and females gain power, white males have had to relinquish it. Some have been beaten at their own manipulative games; others have been shown, through diverse insights provided by members in other cultures, that they can benefit by playing fair; others retreat from their racist positions because of a compulsion to be humanitarian and generous, for the sake of the survival of all races and sexes as a larger group; and still others have relented else face legal repercussions.

Through the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. in March 21, 1965, leading marchers 50 miles from Selma, Alabama to the capitol in Montgomery to protest and gain voting rights for blacks, a white public was made to realize that it was at least unwise, if not unethical, to oppress racial minorities. Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was signed in August by President Lyndon B. Johnson to outlaw race barring in voting, blacks were restricted from voting based on lower property tax payment limits and literacy. At a time when many blacks in the deep south were sharecroppers, in debt, kept from public schools by parents who needed help in the rented household, meeting property tax and literacy conditions preempted many blacks from the voting process.

"A key provision of the [Voting Rights Act of 1965] prevents ‘packing’–placing all black voters in one district. That would probably ensure a black candidate being elected from that district but would also prevent black voters from having a voice in other districts and thus give minorities reduced influence in relation to their numerical strength. The law also prevents spreading black voters thinly among several districts in such a way that they might have some influence but would be unlikely to elect a minority candidate” (Miller).

In 1982 “additional amendments to the Voting Rights Act were passed that made it possible for blacks or other minority plaintiffs to challenge any jurisdiction for engaging in electoral discrimination if election results showed that the number of blacks, Mexican-Americans, or other minorities elected were not commensurate with the overall population proportions in a city, country, or other jurisdiction” (Fuchs, p. 426). As a consequence of the Selma to Montgomery march and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its amendments, there is no credible evidence of blacks being kept from polling places in the late 20^th century, despite urban myths to the contrary.

Equal opportunity and civil rights legislation have attempted to give minorities a fair chance to succeed, though racial majorities still rule. Policy and federal law forced publicly supported colleges to favor minority admission applicants and forced employers to hire a quota of minorities. Minority set-asides for government contracts have been structured into law. Affirmative action policy has been instituted. Meritocracy, as an ideal criterion or predictor of good and fair governance, took a backseat to racial ethnicity as an overriding criterion for society’s rewards. Such reverse racism policies failed to reduce white racism, actually increasing white resentment against blacks and the government that permitted racially partial laws. Whites began to doubt the merit, integrity, and motives of people who were able to succeed by using racially discriminatory criterion.

Observation: Those who say “Don’t hate the playa, hate the game,” deny personal responsibility for unethically exploiting loopholes in a poorly designed system for personal gain while unfairly denying others what's rightfully theirs.

When the equal opportunity legislated through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the 1968 Open Housing Act failed to equalize socio-economic conditions between whites and blacks, America’s political leaders fashioned a new “compensatory justice” social order defined by new state and federal laws and administrative guidelines and regulations. The new order mandated racial preferences for non-whites and proportional distribution of benefits among ethnic groups.

Chief among these preference systems were the affirmative action policies enacted as law in 1962. The policies forced employers to favor ethnic minorities over other qualified–and often better qualified–whites, who may never have racially discriminated against anybody, as a way to redress the grievance of past racial discrimination against others. No time cap was instituted for phasing out the policies, no standard was set for determining when past discrimination would be adequately punished and minorities fairly recompensed, and no definition was offered for what constitutes fair restitution.

Affirmative action policies were a desperate and doomed attempt to meet a perceived need to pay restitution for the years of demoralization of the black race, to make up for the past injustices and slavery, and to somehow retroactively extract punitive damages from contemporaries for the sins of those who withheld services and rewards from blacks in the past.

Systematically basing a percentage of employment on race led to resentment. Incidents “of differential treatment evoke deep feelings of disappointment, even disillusionment, and a sense of grievance at the unfairness of double standards” (Blauner, p. 74) in whites, who were excluded from benefiting from affirmative action. Though some blacks may have been happy to have the tables turned and to be considered for employment, both whites and blacks, in general, understood that qualification to fill a position should be based on skills and experience and education. However, white employers were forced to pay full salary and additional funds to train underqualified people whom they were forced to hire: “‘And now competent people are having to stand on their heads trying to contain bosses who are incredibly incompetent’” (Blauner, quoting Virginia Lawrence, p. 208).

Many blacks feel that most whites are living well because black fathers and grandfathers were prevented by whites from getting equal opportunity to advance and get well-paying jobs. “‘You can’t break a man’s legs and blame him for limping. You have a moral responsibility to fix it. If you’ve been living off it, you can’t say you’re not part of it, that it was done by somebody else. If you want to be fair, you can’t have a head start and say, “catch up,” without doing something to make up that difference’” (Terkel, quoting C.T. Vivian, p. 342).

Blacks resent that whites who have lost their jobs to affirmative action programs grouse about the unfairness of blacks getting jobs. Cases of proven discrimination can be cited, but only people indicted in those cases can be held accountable for breaking a “man’s legs.” As for catching up, in competition, rarely do competitors who are winning help those they’re competing against; there is no moral responsibility except as it is subjectively defined by each competitor. It’s unreasonable to ask all whites to reduce their standard of living and slow their success.

Others criticize that affirmative action policies didn’t go far enough to correct past employment discrimination: “‘[Whites] got some slots for [blacks]. And once they’re filled, that’s it. That’s one of my criticisms of affirmative action. ...that creates hostilities’” (Blauner, quoting Len Davis, p. 307).

Affirmative action policy is humiliating, according to Charles Johnson: “A person, otherwise deserving, may be perceived as something special, having gotten a degree of help he didn’t need. But without affirmative action, the first step toward hiring blacks would never have been taken” (Terkel, p. 16). The stigmatism of benefiting from affirmative action policies isn’t punishing enough to keep minorities from accepting these benefits from employers who were forced to enforce the policies.

Failure to abide by affirmative action policies can lead to trouble for employers. David Rubin, a professor in CSU’s Department of Biology and chief negotiator of the American Association of University Professors union committee (AAUP), published a reasoned letter in a special edition of the AAUP-CSU Newsletter (July 15, 1992) in which he rebutted accusations that he is racist. The accusations were based on Professor Rubin’s opposition to the CSU senate’s willful violation of its own procedures and rules for approval of honorary degrees. The university’s attorney stated that “during bargaining...the Administration had been told that the AAUP-CSU negotiating team was being ‘tough’ at my direction and for racial reasons.” According to Rubin, the attorney also implied that “the Biology Department faculty (including me) were not concerned with affirmative action.” CSU, Rubin maintains, placed more priority on affirmative action hiring than on long-standing department policy for hiring.

“The person whose hiring I grieved is a former student and current friend of mine. I told him, before his hiring, that if he were hired I would have to grieve that action because proper departmental procedure was circumvented and provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement were blatantly violated. Our Department Chair refused to call in two top applicants because he ‘would not feel comfortable’ with their hiring. Since the University’s case revolved around affirmative action, it was obvious that the lack of comfort had to do with color.”

Rubin asserts that his actions are not based on race, and that he makes recommendations and grievances based on standards, institution policy, and qualifying criteria. He reports that he recommended a black for emeritus status and writes many letters of recommendation for both black and white students, fought to gain tenure for black and white faculty, and in 22 years never had a race-related problem with a student.

Rubin feels that the charges of racism are being used as “a means of dividing the faculty, and then to use that division to nullify growing faculty empowerment and subsequently to eradicate AAUP-CSU.” In closing, Rubins writes: “For an Administration to use claims of racism to its advantage is unconscionable at an institution such as ours. The issue of racism must be dealt with openly by this faculty if we are to function effectively as a cooperative body in teaching, research, service, and within AAUP-CSU.”

To fire a minority can invite a bureaucratic and legal nightmare. The employer may be forced to consult lawyers, doctors, company benefits committees, unions, and various levels of management. If a manager’s decision to fire a minority is overturned based not on a review of the employee’s performance compared to expected performance in the position, but based on fear of the fuss that the employee may kick up making unfounded charges of racism, then the manager loses some credibility, and the employee may continue to perform poorly, having already proven the ability to win based on an implied threat. The employee playing race cards in the corporate kitchenette is assured a continued paycheck.

Real and pervasive racism within tight-knit employment settings, such as on police forces or in fire departments, can debilitate a team. The conflict starts when minorities get positions on local safety forces as a result of lawsuits alleging discriminatory hiring practices. Discriminatory hiring practices are presumed if the percentage of a work force in a profession and locality doesn’t reflect the percentage of racial composition of those who live in the locality. In a summary judgment in a case in which a fired black fireman alleged racial discrimination, Judge Pickering wrote, “The fact that a black employee is terminated doesn’t automatically indicate discrimination” (Charen, quoting Pickering, p. 47). In a similar case in Dayton, Ohio, U.S. District Judge Walter H. Rice dismissed a lawsuit filed in 1989 against the city by the Dayton Association of Black Professional Firefighters for not having enough blacks in the ranks of Dayton’s safety forces. In another case also brought by attorney Taylor Jones Jr., Rice determined that the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, in a bid to get more black police officers hired in Dayton, had failed to meet requirements to prove that some of its members had been directly affected by alleged racial discrimination (Hills).

Often, blacks who measure objectively better than whites cannot be found in sufficient numbers to fill the number of positions in a company to reflect the population of blacks in the community in which the company does business. To avoid charges of reverse racism from non-minorities citing lack of qualifications of minority hires, some employers used the practice of race norming. In race norming, every job applicant is given the same skills test, but failing minorities have points added to their scores equal to the difference between the average result for non-minorities and the average result for the minority group. Colleges and universities adopted race norming, whereby scores are reported only as a percentile within one’s minority grouping (defined as a minority based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin), thus allowing a hypothetical raw score of 50 to look better than one of 90. Race norming, often called dumbing-down standards, obscured the fact that qualified white students were being passed over for underqualified non-white students, thereby soothing the rancor that would have resulted had the injustice been publicized.

The Civil Rights Act of 1992 supposedly outlawed race norming by requiring the complaining party to show that a particular employment practice had a “disparate impact,” as defined in the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971), on blacks or others protected by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title VII section, which provided for “affirmative action” in some cases of discrimination. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, in conjunction with enforcement by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, served as an affirmative remedy for past and present discrimination in employment, restricting hiring and promotion procedures (ability tests with potentially discriminatory impact having to meet strict business necessity standards) where blacks were concerned, and requiring consent decrees (agreements to match every white hire or promotion with a black hire or promotion) for the hiring of policemen, firemen and union craftsmen.

Legal rulings are frequently revisited, amended, and overturned.

Up until June 1978 when “the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Allan Bakke’s contention that the admissions policy of the University of California at Davis had wrongly discriminated against white applicants,” (Blauner, p. 247) colleges were required to file affirmative action compliance reports. These reports showed that they had not turned away a percentage of black students determined by the college’s location, regardless of the black students’ SAT scores, which is one example of a criteria on which many colleges base acceptance of students. “The Court held that affirmative action plans could not mandate racial quotas, as the university had when it reserved 16 percent of the places in its entering class for nonwhites” (Blauner, p. 247).

Affirmative action policies forced corporations and colleges to resort to the deception of race norming (also termed within-group scoring and within-group adjustment) simply to appease government legislators and to maintain community support. Affirmative action fosters unequal and unfair treatment based on race, a concept that minorities readily recognize and disapprove. Whites who opposed the affirmative action laws went out of their way to ensure failure rather than work toward ensuring success. A big part of the opposition resulted from objection to the flawed idea of unjust racial preference. Secondary opposition was based in the psychology of resisting any new system that forces reevaluation of beliefs anchored in current systems. When people are ordered to do something that drastically changes the ways they currently do things, they want the new system to fail as a way to show that the new way is bad and that their way was better, hoping to get the status quo reinstated. Sometimes, objection is based on the fact that the suggested change is purely wrong-headed.

Whites, in general, resent and mourn the loss of their power and material, angry that the rules of capitalism have been perverted by affirmative action and racial quota systems, no longer favoring those who work hard or take aggressive risks, regardless of their race. They fight to ensure the failure of race-based systems on principle, and are joined by blacks who advocate for hiring on merit. They feel animosity, even though only small segments of the black population may be using unfair strategies that whites can’t use. This anger and frustration at being cheated by the law often manifests as racial prejudice.

Many important laws that focus on racial parity under the law involve desegregation, the premise being that non-minority neighborhoods, schools, and services offered quality that outshone the quality available in their minority counterparts. Busing white children to predominantly minority schools in poor districts and black children to non-minority schools was seen by educators; business, political, religious leaders, and community citizens as a method of reversing long-standing separate-but-equal dogma. The practice was as traumatic to white children as to black. In his Ghetto Snob tour in 1996, comedian Chris Rock described ghetto snobs as black parents who didn’t think their children belonged in the ghetto and bused them to white schools outside the ghetto, where the black children ended up isolated in white classrooms.

If better education was to be achieved, forcing more children to have a mediocre education was not the answer. One hoped for consequence of busing white children to minority schools was the spurring of concerned white parents to take initiate, donating more of their time and money to improve minority schools so that their bused children would receive as good an education as it was perceived they would get at a school in a predominantly white district. Instead, resources went to campaigns targeted to overturning the law of forced busing.

Language in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Kansas City Board of Education was interpreted to mean that no child has a right to attend a school near his or her home, allowing local governments to enforce busing in order to fulfill a social engineering agenda to integrate schools. Clarence Thomas, in a related opinion, did not challenge the intent of the Brown v. Board of Education language, but rather questioned arguments that suggested that black institutions were, by their very nature, inferior. Local governments invoked the corollary of the decision’s language, that parents had neither the right nor the choice to send their children to a school in their neighborhoods, and that the choice would be made by government. However, the “view that someone has a right to an integrated education comes from a misreading of the…decision” (Watras). A “poll of 500 likely voters found that more than two-thirds of those surveyed disapprove of busing children to schools to achieve racial balance. More than 81 percent of whites disapproved....Among blacks...43 percent disapproved” (Fisher).

Support for busing students for racial reasons eroded possibly because there is no proof that a more effective education is achieved when children go to school outside their neighborhoods. Solutions to busing include redistricting school districts to include higher income neighborhoods, reducing poverty in poor districts, and building better schools and hiring better teachers for all students. Busing lets children of parents who don’t pay their fair share of taxes to reap the benefit of attending better funded schools paid for by those who pay higher taxes for the right.

As recently as 1986, the NAACP was filing federal lawsuits on behalf of Dayton, Ohio residents to seek court-ordered desegregation of Dayton’s schools. “The NAACP produced evidence that Dayton’s school board had operated a dual system for blacks and whites for decades, through manipulation of attendance zones, staff assignments and other actions, and that those actions denied black students equal opportunity to education” (Fisher).

The Supreme Court ruled on March 31, 1992 to stop federal supervision of desegregation plans in local school districts in general and Dekalb County, GA schools in particular. The court also indicated that it is not necessarily unconstitutional if mostly black and mostly white schools exist in the same district if the same racial patterns occur in those school’s neighborhoods. “Racial balance is not to be achieved for its own sake,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court. If the racial imbalances are due to demographics rather than school policies, there is no racial discrimination. If integration is a private choice, it does not have constitutional implications. “A school district is under no duty to remedy imbalance that is caused by demographic factors,” the court wrote.

The ruling didn’t fit well in Cincinnati, where eight public school teachers and the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers sued to overturn the race-conscious policies of the Board of Education. The Board’s policies state that teachers can be transferred based on their race to help reach a racial balance of the teaching staff within the entire system.

Desegregation efforts aren’t limited to grades K through 12. In response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Mississippi state courts hadn’t done enough to desegregate its public universities, the Mississippi state College Board considered closing Mississippi Valley State University and demoting Alcorn State University to college status. These institutions are two of the three predominantly black universities in Mississippi. The College Board hoped to force the students enrolled in the two institutions to enroll in the five predominantly white universities in Mississippi. Black politicians and university officials for the two affected institutions rebelled: “‘Mississippi traditionally follows that role where you take the victims and make them victims again,” said Ed Blackmon. “‘[I]t’s something that we as black institutions have to defend ourselves against,”’ said Mississippi Valley President William Sutton. Alcorn State President Walter Washington added, “‘These institutions extended a ladder to the basement and helped blacks climb out for years’” (Dayton Daily News).

Integration was against the law in some places up to the 1940s, when there was essentially a walking around tax for blacks in the deep south and in Georgia. Churches were, by law, segregated. By law, blacks sat on the back of buses, had separate public drinking fountains, and had to enter theaters from the side, not the front, and were forced to sit in the back rows. They had to sit in the back in eateries and not at the counter. White church pastors, social organizers, and other community service providers drummed up purportedly nonracial reasons to obtain legal injunctions against integration in churches, child camps, white country clubs, etc.

A white sitting down for a meal with a black was also illegal in certain jurisdictions. Which was why there was a culture shock on the integrated commune of Koinonia Farms in Georgia in the late 1940s when black farmers in the commune were paid the same as whites. That raised the expected asking price of blacks employed by other farm owners. Farmers were forced to raise the level of pay. Local blacks and whites were denied enrollment by the Americus High School Board of Education because their children lived at Koinonia Farms. In 1968 in Memphis, TN, there were still colored-only hospitals.

Blacks had to fight economic boycotts of black businesses and rebuild when white racist coalitions destroyed their means of business. Whites in integrated groups of boycott strikers faced retaliation by bombings, violence, and destruction of white-owned properties. Sometimes destruction of property wasn’t enough to halt the advancement of minority successes; minorities were murdered. In Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, four white supremacists bombed the all-black 16^th Street Baptist Church, killing four black girls who were inside; in May 2002, a man was finally convicted of the bombing. Recent fires in black churches, 64 set between 1995 and 2004, however, showed “no evidence of a white racist conspiracy” (Charen, p. 67), and only 4 of those fires were conclusively shown to be racially motivated, and set by the same group of people.

Under President Truman, the military services were commanded to be racially integrated. Institutions could be legally bound to desegregate and demonstrate their intolerance of racial separateness, but individuals within the institution could retain and promote their racist attitudes and behaviors, though personnel were censured for saying the N-word in the U.S. military services. Prior to military desegregation, blacks served in segregated platoons and on troopships in WWII, and were housed in separate barracks. According to Gates, in 2003 26 percent of the Army was black–commanders, sergeants, leadership command positions. Promotions gradually began to be based on merit and demonstrated capability, and excellence is rewarded regardless of race, color, or creed.

Americans are confronted with a long history of taking part in the undoing of racist institutions around the world. In 1986, “Duke University students protesting the investments in apartheid South Africa erected shanties in front of the university chapel” (Tifft, p. 102). Duke was whites-only until 1961, and some 250 of the campuses’ buildings were codesigned by Julian Abel, a black architect in the otherwise all-white Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer.

In 1962, James Meredith was the first black to enroll at the University of Mississippi, causing campus riots that resulted in 2 dead and 160 wounded. In 1966, Meredith started on a walk of 220 miles from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi “to prove that a black man could walk free in the South. [His]…goal was to inspire African-Americans to register and go to the polls” (Butler, p. 23). His goal was not realized: “Shotgun blasts rang out across the highway, striking Meredith in the head, neck, back and legs” (Butler, p. 24). On Highway 51 near Hernando, Mississippi, Meredith lay alone in the street in agony. “The civil rights movement had lately been strained by internal dissent, with leaders such as King calling for nonviolence and integration and others, such as [Stokely] Carmichael promoting a more radical black power stance” (Butler, p. 24). In support of Meredith’s goal, King, Carmichael, and Floyd McKissick led marchers for 3 weeks, registering thousands of black voters on the way to Jackson.

In May of 1966, National Guardsmen blocked blacks from crossing the Third Street bridge in Dayton, Ohio. An annual March for Racial Harmony in Dayton commemorates the event, with the pledge to encourage racial unity and equality. Freedom Riders in 1961, largely college students of both races, defied segregation laws to ride on interstate buses across the South, encountering violent beatings by local citizens for their disobedience (Johnson).

Progress in civil rights caused violent reaction and aggressive responses by whites, who resisted and counter punched. As recently as July 8, 2003, Doug Williams, an armed white coworker with a documented history of racism, killed six blacks at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Meridian, Mississippi in a hate crime. Williams had made threats to kill “niggers.” The massacre prompted black civil rights groups to demand that the U.S. Federal government cancel all contracts with Lockheed as punishment for Lockheed not taking greater preventive steps when it was made aware of Williams’ death threats and racial slurs.

Siler City, North Carolina has seen racist rallies against illegal Mexican immigrants, whose numbers have increased 274% in the 1990s. The INS says 2 million people sneaked across the border in 2004.

Two important businesses that have a tremendous impact on public life are ripe for racial discrimination abuse–real estate and banking. Though laws like the Fair Housing Act (FHA) and the anti-discrimination enforcement mechanisms established in amendments to the FHA in 1988 prevent realtors and landlords from discriminating against buyers and tenants based on race, realtors and landlords may continue to discriminate based on applicants’ inability to pay rent, pet ownership, poor references from former landlords, poor credit history, and unavailability of properties that fit special disability needs, etc. Realtors are prohibited from falsely declaring that the property isn’t for sale, because such availability is public record and prospective buyers can sue for racial discrimination, whether or not racial discrimination is the reason behind the false declaration.

Few cases have come to light in which a realty firm’s code of ethics explicitly directs its associate realtors not to sell property to minorities. Discrimination is covert. Residential and commercial property owners have been alleged to reward realtors not to show adjacent neighborhood/business park structure properties to minorities, though few cases of monetary incentive to keep areas minority-free have been proven. One prominent exception of revealed illegality is demonstrated by the case of the Rosemoor Association of businessmen in Chicago. The Association made contracts with whites that gave the organization first shot at buying the properties of whites who were relocating out of targeted neighborhoods. The purpose was to prevent the properties from going on the open market where they might be sold to blacks, integrating the neighborhood. Realtors have built-in incentives to protect the value of properties in their listings. Realtors who have several property listings in a high value white neighborhood don’t want to risk depressing those values and their commissions by selling to minorities.

Neighborhoods undergoing integration frequently suffer from a phenomenon called white flight. Flight is often encouraged by realtors who practice another illegal tactic called block busting, in which realtors represent to white homeowners that all their fears of deteriorating housing prices due to integration are valid. With this fear in place, realtors are able to charge white home sellers up to 18 or more points on the transaction, or pay less than market value for the house, thus realizing greater profit by convincing more white home owners in the changing neighborhood to list and sell their properties. Block busting is prohibited under federal anti-block busting law, 42 United States Code §3604.

Whites fear, based on experience, that if they don’t sell quickly when minorities start moving in, their homes will lose value. Lost value is based on instances of minorities allowing their properties to become shoddy and bringing teen crime and antisocial behavior, such as vandalism and intimidation, to the neighborhood. Minorities who buy upward in quality, attempting to position themselves in the middle class, may have overextended their capital ability to afford needed repairs on the property after making the mortgage down payment. The new owners may lose pride in the appearance of a declining property, thereby not performing even inexpensive maintenance and upkeep. If such minority owners also become unable to pay the monthly mortgage balance, the bank evicts them, boarding up the house or keeping it perpetually on the market, lowering its price to make it more attractive. The lowered value of one house in a neighborhood negatively affects the valuation of all of the houses in the neighborhood. The perception alone of this negative forecast, whether or not such an outcome will occur, compels white flight. Fleeing from cities like Chicago in the 1940s, affluent whites took with them the tax base that supported education systems, leaving poor country blacks behind in the inner city.

Moving from a neighborhood where blacks are moving in is not necessarily a racist response.

Conversely, some minorities feel that when whites move into predominantly black middle and upper middle class neighborhoods, whites get relative bargains compared to the amount of money they would pay to live in similar white neighborhoods. As more blacks sell out to the whites, the property values raise to white demographic levels, and these new prices prohibit less highly salaried blacks from purchasing in these formerly prestigious black communities. Departing minorities often take pure profit for their property. That profit is rolled over as higher valuation of the property. Small increments in property value entice others looking for undervalued investments to pay a little more to buy a property in a neighborhood whose valuation appears to be rising. As the property prices rise, people–both black and white–who don’t have enough money/credit to purchase the newly appraised property don’t purchase it, assuring that new buyers are more likely to have enough capital to maintain the property to high standards set by the local housing and neighborhood associations.

To ensure that the predominantly ethnic upper middle class neighborhoods whose property value is increasing remains populated primarily by minorities, current minority owners could refuse to sell. They would still benefit from the value that comes with higher demand for their properties–better police protection, better schools, more community activism, better public facilities, more bargaining power with city councils, etc.–and they can sell at any time in the future. Offers by whites that constitute a substantial amount over what the owners originally paid for their homes are very enticing, however. A conscious decision to let greed, materialism, and a need for immediate monetary gratification raises property values for everyone, not just the members of a particular race.

Linguistic profiling stings are intended to catch unethical realtors who may be consciously committing racial discrimination. In such stings, an investigator phones a realtor and mimics either black speech patterns and dialects or white speech patterns when inquiring about the same property. The number of times a black voice inquiry versus the white voice secures a promise to view the target property, with all other key components held constant, is tallied. A preponderance of promises to show to the white applicant leads investigators to conclude that the realtor may harbor racially discriminatory tendencies.

The results of such stings, based on linguistic stereotypes, are anecdotal; the sample size is too small to show statistical or legally actionable significance; there is no study control group; there is no control over consistency in statements made over the phone; and the realtors phoned may not be able to reliably distinguish a black voice from a white voice. Any conclusion of discrimination is suspect because a great number of valid economic associations can be made based on the education levels of people who use substandard English and grammar, which is often the approach taken by people who attempt to imitate typical ethnic speech. Realtors can’t be legitimately accused of discrimination if they base their decision not to show expensive property to those that they suspect don’t earn enough to acquire the required loans, thereby wasting the realtor’s time. However, the business practice of profiling potential buyers and leading blacks deemed to be poor earners to purchase homes in poorer, all black neighborhoods has been criticized as racist.

Financial lending practices are closely tied to property sales. The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), passed in 1977, is a measure meant to curtail discriminatory lending practices. The CRA is imposed on lending institutions and forces them to lend in

“all neighborhoods where they take deposits, particularly low-income communities…. Narrowly focused community activist groups and their lawyers use the regulatory process to force loan concessions from the banks. For these groups, the key to success is to keep the focus on racially disparate lending practices of banks” (Consumer Research, p. 21).

Activist groups use CRA as a legal weapon to leverage special concessions from banks that must specifically show compliance with the regulations to be permitted to conduct financial deals. Activist groups use the racially unbalanced CRA to unfairly leverage loans from banks that go to people and organizations that don’t qualify under the banks’ standard lending criteria. However, the compliance documentation clearly indicates the bank’s criteria for making loans, illuminating reasons unrelated to racial discrimination that banks frequently cite to decide not to lend to applicants who have bad credit histories, bare assets, and sketchy employment experience.

Prior to CRA, federal bank

“examiners generally looked at rejected mortgage loan applications from blacks and other minorities. If they found a reason for the rejection–such as a flawed credit history–the examiners would conclude no discrimination existed.

“To see if minority applicants receive different treatment, examiners now will look at the reasons minority applicants were rejected and then look at applications from whites to see if the same problems were overlooked or waived” (Dayton Daily News).

Legal costs to fight unfair lending practice allegations based on CRA requirements are passed on to other banking service consumers:

“By relying on faulty data to prove racial discrimination, the federal government and activist groups make it potentially dangerous and expensive for banks to open branches in low-income, minority neighborhoods in the first place. The potential cost of either riding out a legal challenge or making a deal to commit resources to more risky mortgage loans,” is a disincentive for smaller banks to attempt serving these neighborhoods, which deprives the neighborhood residents of banking services (Consumer Research, p. 24)

Though the “total number of bank branches increased by almost 50% from 1970 to 1989, the percentage of poor neighborhoods containing bank branches fell” (Consumer Research, p. 24). Successful suits citing violation of CRA stipulations may “actually discourage minorities from taking actions to strengthen their own financial solvency and improve their credit history, since the incentive to take those actions is reduced” (Consumer Research, p. 24) While waiting for the windfall from CRA lawsuits, minorities might work on becoming more creditworthy by pooling their assets and developing credit histories.

In one case in which an activist group calling itself a Community Reinvestment Steering Committee threatened to file a complaint based on raw lending data that suggested discrimination, a “proposed two-year $175-million lending agreement with area financial institutions to help redevelop areas of the community with heavy concentrations of black residents...” was made (Consumer Research, p. 24). The plan asked lenders to use their best efforts to lend $80 million over two years to black households and neighborhoods; increase the number of black people in upper management positions and lending institution board of directors, and consult with the Steering Committee prior to these appointments; aggressively purchase goods and services from black-owned businesses; earmark funds specifically for development of black-owned businesses; establish a $5 million loan pool for high-risk black borrowers and permit the National Business League to administer the loan pool; and set aside a $60 million economic development fund “to be used by (but not limited to) for profit and non-profit black developers to acquire, build and renovate real estate....” The loans “will be paid back if the project is economically feasible and bankable” (Consumer Research, p. 24).

By law, lenders must ask for racial identity information on loan forms so that minorities can be protected from racial discrimination, as indicated by the lending institutions’ loan denial trends. “‘It’s imperative that there is parity in terms of lending,’ said Eleanor Stocks, president of the Dayton Chapter of the National Business League. ‘We’re concerned about African-American business being undercapitalized, having just enough loans to fail’” (Beyerlein). Despite a resolution that asked lenders to reduce loan rejection rates for blacks by 50 percent within the year, George Brack, vice president of corporate compliance at Citizens Federal Bank in Dayton stated that

“‘lenders base their decisions on applicants’ ability to repay and credit histories. If your credit history is not good, it’s going to be hard to get the loan, no matter what color you are.’ In April [1992], a Dayton Daily News computer analysis of Federal Reserve Board data showed that almost half of all Montgomery County blacks who applied in 1990 for home loans from the area’s largest lenders were rejected. The rejection rate for blacks was 46 percent, compared with 20 percent for whites” (Beyerlein).

Rejection numbers don’t describe rejection reasons, so readers of such reports are expected to conclude that because the statistics are sliced by race, then racial discrimination is strongly suggested as the reason for the rejection. However, if race weren’t a demographic checkbox on the loan forms and loans were given strictly as bank loan officers say they are, then rejection would prove only that the loan applicant was, from all credit history, a bad credit risk. If rejections were based on race alone, there should be 100% rejection of black applicants and 0% rejection of whites. Amidst the statistics quoted in the news article was a curious absence of loan default statistics by either blacks or whites, paired with credit ratings of those defaulters.

Anthony W. Robinson, President of the MBELD&EF Inc. in 1992, stated that “‘the banking community has displayed a consistent and pervasive attitude of hostility toward practically any circumstance involving minority business interest and the minorities in general.’” Rhonda Robinson, founder and president of the Ohio Black Expo, states that for “black-owned businesses to succeed, they must be adequately capitalized–and that’s difficult because lenders often are unwilling to grant adequate loans to new minority businesses” (Beyerlein). However, a congressional inquiry in July 1992 to determine the validity of “allegations that blacks continue to be denied equal access to housing and business opportunities routinely accorded to white Americans,” amounted to nothing (Beyerlein).

The poor who are considered too financially unstable to qualify for a bank loan are often the willing victims of small and unregulated mortgage companies, like the Fleet Financial Group, who charge high interest rates. Poor whites don’t have the option of citing racial discrimination against mortgage companies when suing them under federal usury statutes. If blacks and other minorities are targeted by these unregulated mortgage companies, it is because these people are easier to coerce. Other associated traits make them attractive marks: inability to find money elsewhere, desperation, inability to secure legal counsel, and lack of sophistication when it comes to borrowing money.

If banks were less regulated, meaning they don’t have to comply with community reinvestment, loan disclosure, and other rules, such as those set forth in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), and they didn’t have to rely on CRA committees to choose feasible community redevelopment projects for them to finance, they could “make up to $30 billion in new loans” (Coorsh, p. 6).

There is a long history of minorities receiving abusive treatment from law enforcement officials, the most notable being the beat down of Rodney King. On March 3, 1991, four white Los Angeles Police Department officers clubbed, kicked, beat, and struck Rodney King 56 times, fracturing his skull in several places. The officers had converged in their cruisers on the scene after chasing King’s car for several miles under the suspicion that the car’s driver was under the influence of alcohol. The beating was caught on videotape by bystander George Holliday, and a selected emotionally inflammatory segment from the videotape was shown on local and national news broadcasts repeatedly over the span of a year, throughout the jury trial of the officers, who were charged for exerting excessive force to subdue King.

While King was in custody, one of the officers was overheard to refer to King as a gorilla. Many who later heard that this comment was made construed the comment as racist. The officer defended the comment as referring to King’s strength and ability to take punishment, refusing to remain lying on the ground, even after being tasered at 70,000 volts. A nurse in the hospital where King was taken after being beaten testified that Officer Lawrence Powell continued to taunt King: “‘We had a pretty good handball game tonight,’ she heard him say. ‘You lost and we won’” (Smith).

During the trial, defense attorney Michael Stone told the all-white jury in the Simi Valley, Ventura County courtroom that the police officers feared for their physical well-being, and had assumed that King was under the influence of PCP, a drug that can make people dangerous and impervious to pain. It also came out at trial that the two other passengers in the car driven by King that night, who were both black, complied with police orders, and were both unharmed by the police. King’s police record for armed robbery also came out at the trial, though this information wasn’t available to the officers when they were arresting King. Immediately following his arrest, King was also determined to have been driving while legally drunk. 56 witnesses were called during the trial, though neither the prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Terry White, a black man, nor the defense called Rodney King to testify at the trial.

By implication, the entire LAPD, headed by L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates, was on trial for creating a work environment that permitted and fostered brutality by L.A. police officers, in general. The videotape and trial showed L.A. police to be violent, authoritarian, and untrained in the appropriate mindset for protecting every member of its community.

The videotape of the Rodney King beating was impeachable as evidence against three of the four police officers–Theodore Briseno, Timothy Wind, and Sergeant Stacy Koon–and only officer Lawrence Powell was found guilty of one charge; this verdict was overturned when the trial was declared a mistrial. The “videotape alone could not resolve all the legal issues in the case, the critical issues of authority, participation, training, procedure, perception, and credibility. And the media was unable to communicate these issues from the courtroom to the living room, especially where the viewers clearly had preconceived notions of the facts of the case” (Rose).

Following the overturned verdict for Powell, Rodney King in a televised news conference asked, “Can we all get along?”

Three days of rioting, looting, burning down of business buildings, and social disruption in South Central L.A., primarily committed by poor inner city blacks, followed the verdict for the four police officers who beat King. President George Bush ordered federal troops to the city. At least 46 deaths and more than 2000 injuries have been connected to the violence. Other reports place the injury numbers between 700 and 1400. Various reports place the number of arrests during and after the riot between 378 and 4300. The damage to nearly 2,000 commercial and residential buildings across a largely impoverished section of Los Angeles was estimated at $550 million, maximum, and $200 million, minimum (Deans). Los Angeles County coroner officials said the dead (36 in early reports, in contrast to 46 reported in later sources) were nearly all men, mostly black, and ranged in age from the late teens to nearly 50. Three whites and three Hispanics also were killed. At least 28 died of gunshot wounds, six in encounters with police. Some were armed looters caught in the act. One man died defending a store from looters. Some died in crossfires of random shooting. A pedestrian was hit by a car. Three died in fires (Dayton Daily News).

Koreans were overwhelmingly targeted by blacks, possibly because Koreans had a stronger retail presence in South Central than whites. Relations between blacks in LA and Korean shop owners worsened in the spring of 1991 when Latasha Halins, a 15-year-old black, was shot to death by a Korean merchant in a dispute over a bottle of orange juice. Soon Ja Du, 54, received probation instead of prison, further raising the ire of the black community. Koreans interact from a different culture and speak very little English in an area that has high crime rates. Supporters of the LA rioters justified violence against the Koreans on the grounds that the Koreans’ prices were too high, and that they showed disrespect for black customers.

The rioting was seen, and justified by some social commentators, as a response to outrage at the injustice of a verdict for a crime that seemed from the videotape of the King beating to be a clear cut case of racist police brutality against a black man. Blacks were angry with America for not living up to the promise to treat black citizens as equals. Defending the riots as an indirect response to slavery, Rev. William W. Hannah, pastor of Faith United Christian Church, said “‘One of the real problems with America is that she has never repented for putting us into slavery’” (Lacy and Patterson).

However, outrage at the verdict transcended race, gender, and politics. When placed in a nonracial context, the actions of police were less motivated by race than by overzealous performance of duty. In Simi Valley, where the community is a very strong supporter of the police, the jury may have been influenced by predicted political outcomes of failing to support the instruments of law and order in a volatile situation.

One contributing factor to the riots may have been fear that the government specifically wasn’t protecting blacks. People riot out of a sense of fear, anger, lack of confidence in the administration of justice, and a sense of political impotence. The rioters were shocked, angered, resentful, hopeless, alienated, and frustrated. Perhaps to show whites how such absence of police protection felt, some blacks looted, rioted, beat and killed whites in multiple instances as retaliation, all out of proportion and incomparable to Rodney King’s beating by police, which certainly did not legitimize the violence. Killing and looting are inappropriate forms of social protest, and the rioters showed a lack of social restraint.

One reporter reminds readers that “upwards of 30 million African-Americans did not take to the streets [during the 1992 riots], and those who did are clearly part of a relatively small urban underclass...” (Morganthau,p. 28).

Perceived injustice overrides perceived cushions of community and personal safety.

Many blacks may have committed illegal acts following the King verdict because they wanted to exaggerate that when blacks commit crimes, they go to jail, whereas whites, like the officers who beat King, don’t. They wanted to emphasize the inherent unfairness of a “racist” justice system. However, the two situations are not comparable, one being force by officers to subdue a single suspect, while the rioting was done by many people wantonly destroying, stealing, maiming, and killing. Rational people can correctly analyze the unfair comparison and conclude that the protests are logically invalid as metaphoric propositions.

The Rodney King verdict was for some, “confirmation of the fall from grace black people have suffered in recent years. Blacks have lost the moral high ground. They are no longer the brave soldiers of conscience. In the span of a single generation, young black men like Rodney King have come to be seen as violent, predatory, out of control” (Minerbrook, p. 36).

Many looters were in the street simply for the free merchandise and lawless fun, not really caring about the injustice of the verdict.

Other rioters were more serious. White truck driver, Reginald Denny, was dragged from the cab of his truck by three black rioters, who then kicked and slammed Denny in the head with a brick. One of his attackers stood back and performed a happy dance of vindication while Denny lay beaten in the street. Later, the prosecuting attorney in the trial of the three black men charged in the televised beating of Denny exercised his right to challenge a sitting black judge. As a result, “a small group of demonstrators outside the court chanted ‘No justice, no peace’ and ‘Burn it down.’ Yolanda Madison, 21, shouted: ‘We want things to change.... If [Denny’s attackers] do get convicted, I suggest everyone burn the city down’” (Dayton Daily News). Such threats attempt to intimidate whites from applying society’s laws to blacks because one member of the minority race is perceived to have gotten a raw deal with the law. It is not okay to beat any man nearly to death. Normal laws against assault and battery apply to everyone when apprehended, and such attacks are not somehow justified, nor more horrible, because they are committed out of racial anger and hatred.

Many have conjectured about the social outcomes of the acquittal of the four LAPD officers. One of the ramifications of the Rodney King incident, according to author Joseph Wambaugh, is that “‘no white male currently on the [LAPD police] force is going to be named chief” (Dayton Daily News). The reality is that minorities generalize that all white police are racially insensitive, and to keep future peace in the populace, the police must turn over power to blacks or else appear racist.

Following the Rodney King incident, law enforcement agencies around the country became very sensitive to police violence against citizens based on the citizen’s race. In the case of an off-duty Kettering, Ohio police officer Dondi Marsh shooting an armed robber, the NAACP got involved to ensure that the shooting death was not racially motivated: “Police and the local NAACP branch quickly pointed out the shooting wasn’t racially motivated. They feared some people might construe it as racial in nature since Marsh works for Kettering, which is mostly white. But Marsh is one of two blacks on Kettering’s force of about 80 officers. ‘The officer was black, the female who was there was black and the person who was killed was black,’ Dayton Police Chief James Newby said” (Bray). The first concern wasn’t whether the off-duty police officer used unnecessary force against the armed robber, but whether the victim’s race was a factor in the decisions the officer made, and whether the officer was black or white. Clearly, priorities were misplaced in concerns regarding the shooting.

“New police officers in Ohio will have to be trained in handling race, gender and cultural problems under a requirement announced...by Attorney General Lee Fisher. Fisher said there is no question that racial minorities are treated differently than whites.” This conclusion was supported by LeRoy Martin, a retired Chicago Police Department superintendent: “‘Blacks in this country are just viewed, because of insensitivity on many people’s part, as being a potential threat,’ Martin said. ‘No evaluation is made of the individual and the circumstances. Police do pull over and mistreat black citizens at a much higher rate than it would occur to white citizens,’ he said.” 24 hours of basic training is now required to cover cultural sensitivity topics (Dayton Daily News).

Many advocates of strong police presence, fed up with lax penalties and punishment for criminals, entrust the police to do whatever they must to protect the community, and sanction harsh restraint. People are willing to look the other way when police use excessive force because they realize police work is tough and that if police aren’t supported, the community will be less well protected, since fewer people will go into police work and the current police will become lax in protecting communities for fear that they will be remonstrated for their actions.

Apologists agree that cops suffer from a siege mentality, which is set off more readily in some neighborhoods than in others. “‘A large black man is viewed as much more threatening by whites who live in the suburbs than by people who live in South Central Los Angeles’” said William Mellor, president of the Institute for Justice, a conservative Washington public-interest law firm (Williams, Dayton Daily News).

The all-white jury in the Rodney King case was seen to typify a deep-seated racial animosity in southern California. Simi Valley suburbia “in most cases [is] physically and emotionally distant from all blacks and certainly from the black poor. It is fearful and uncomprehending, politically disdainful of black concerns and contemptuous of black leadership, and it blames the increasingly isolated blacks of urban America for the inescapable traumas of their isolation” (Teepen). Had the same Simi Valley jury included blacks and come to the same conclusion, the riots may not have occurred, though it is illogical to conjecture such outcomes. Blacks may have trusted that someone of their own race had been looking out for their racial interests and had justifiably concluded from the trial evidence that the beating wasn’t racially motivated. Blacks would have felt that they were part of the justice process. Of course, what-ifs and what-might-have-beens fail the reality test. Conjectures of “what-if” and “if-I’d-been-white (or not black)” also can’t be reality. Things are as they are, not as they couldn’t be and weren’t. Speculation about impossible, hypothetical alternate treatment is pure fertilizer.

Inner-city blacks feel abandoned and alienated because the government has largely ignored high unemployment, racial injustice, inadequate education and insufficient health care. The arson, looting, and killing in Los Angeles was committed by people “who feel they have no stake in the civility of American society,” Jesse Jackson said. “That is not good for democracy....When people have been this much demeaned, when they have been deprived of their humanity, they do not act rationally.” Mayor Bradley felt that the rioters “chose the opportunity to steal, loot, vandalize and, indeed, to kill.” Many people felt that, because of economic inequalities, they are justified in taking back what would be theirs had they worked for it.

Kevin Phillips, a conservative political analyst, believes that the riots of the 60s were caused by rising expectations: “‘Blacks wanted more things more quickly.... Now we have outbreaks in a decade of diminished expectations. This time they are frustrated that prospects for a better life are disappearing, for blacks in particular.’ Increasingly [California] is populated by sharply contrasting classes of people: wealthy suburban communities growing richer but with populations shrinking as young people are driven out by the high real-estate costs; crowded cities full of poor people who strain local budgets and services; middle-income communities shaken by the job losses produced by upheavals in aerospace, real estate, banking and other once-steady growing industries” (Williams).

By contrast, the Kerner Commission advanced the idea that the urban riots by blacks in the mid and late 60s “were spontaneous manifestations of discontent arising from discrimination and prejudice” (Blauner, p. 15).

One incident of racism does not mean that all whites are racist.

People in this country live in far worse conditions than those in L.A. in 1992 did, and these impoverished people do not tolerate an ethos of random violence and looting as L.A.’s residents did. Looting for urbanites in L.A. was an easy and illegal way to get attention and to get material goods. The King verdict was just an excuse to loosen societal inhibitions. Michael Lerner writes that “it’s totally wrong to justify the rioting and looting as somehow ‘appropriate’ behavior. It is not a rational response to racism and it’s not a smart strategy for achieving economic redistribution” (Lerner).

Laws constrain in nearly every area of commerce and social service, virtually assuring equal application of civil rights to all races. The next frontier in free speech law where race is concerned may be the full constraint of speech by whites in criticism of blacks. A reporter for The New York Observer quoted Senator Joe Biden, commenting on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s character, calling Obama a “mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and, and, clean and a nice-looking guy.” Biden’s compliments were purposefully misinterpreted as a presumption that Biden believed that blacks in general weren’t articulate, the word, articulate, said to be a coded signifier for Biden’s low opinion of blacks. It was okay for Biden to call Obama a nice-looking guy, a compliment that hasn’t yet instigated the racial creativity of race baiters. The concept is that whites arrogantly exert the power to assign who is articulate and who isn’t, whereas blacks making the same comment say it from a sense of pride, since so many blacks had previously been deemed inarticulate.

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