Black and Tired

Essays on Race, Politics, Culture, and International Development

Anthony B. Bradley

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781608995967
  9781498257695
• eBook ISBN:
  9781621898733
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

African American scholar Anthony Bradley understands the growing interest in the intersections of theology and economics emerging in light of Christianity's commitment to loving the poor. Local and global disparities in human flourishing call for prudential judgments that wed good intentions with sound economic principles. This book tackles the issues of race, politics, contemporary culture, globalization, and education by wedding moral theology and economics. For readers who enjoy the writings of African-American intellectuals like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, this book will be a breath of fresh air in terms of economics and public policy but is unique because it also explicitly applies Christian moral teachings to today's global concerns.

Part One

Race

Human Dignity, Dark Skin, and Negro Dialect

Black History Month, a time to reflect on milestones, should also be a time to survey the road ahead and the journey yet unfinished. Why does the black underclass still struggle years after the civil-rights movement? Almost fifty years ago, Martin Luther King dreamed of a country that would value all of its men, women, and children, an America that would respect each of its citizens, regardless of skin color. Sadly, the civil rights movement and the dream of equal dignity lost focus and momentum, derailed by the pursuit of political power and “bling.” The goal of racial equality, measured by statistics and achieved through government mandates, overshadowed the crusade for true solidarity, for a unified belief in the innate dignity of all human beings.

Beginning in the 1980s, many civil-rights leaders began to equate justice with socioeconomic status, focusing on how much “stuff” blacks lacked compared to whites—size of homes, college degrees, income disparities, law school admissions rates, loan approvals, and the like—instead of whether or not blacks experienced parity in the American social structure. Unfortunately, equal treatment in the eyes of society and the legal system may yield surprising results; nonetheless, equal legal and social treatment remains a better measure of justice, rather than the superficial results obtained by creative governmental coercion.

When Democratic Senator Harry Reid spoke the truth about President Obama as electable because he neither had “dark skin” nor used “negro dialect,” he prophetically signaled that Americans still struggle to embrace the dignity of blacks. Reid’s comments exposed what many know but would not publically confess: namely, that a combination of dark skin and “negro dialect” is less than desirable and impede one’s prospects for social and economic mobility. After all, some would ask, are not the stereotypical dark-skinned folks (those with substandard English skills and illegitimate children) dropping out of high school, crowding America’s prison system, murdering each other, and producing materialistic and misogynistic rap music?

Civil-rights leaders would do well to resume fighting for black dignity in order to foster respect for dark skin and to encourage the use of standard English. Theologian Nonna Harrison in her 2008 essay, “The Human Person,” offers a clear framework for unlocking human dignity by stressing human freedom, responsibility, love for neighbor, excellence of character, stewardship of creation, and human rationality. Imagine an America where resurgent civil-rights leaders worked to create conditions supporting a life-long process of formation and transformation of citizens who know and love their neighbors, regardless of race or class. Imagine a resurgence of dignity that orders unruly passions, impulses, and reason to excel in moral character. Imagine a resurgence of good stewardship to the status of the social norm. Imagine a resurgence that promotes sustaining human life in terms of what is good for nature and human society—a resurgence committed to cultivating practical reason, creativity in the arts and sciences, economics, politics, business, and culture.

A movement dedicated to fostering dignity instead of self-sabotaging behavior would positively spill over everywhere, from homes to schools, from streets to the criminal justice system. For example, if freedom, responsibility, and dignity became the new platform for the “advancement of colored people,” black marriage rates might revert to their 1950s levels, when the percentages of white and African-American women who were currently married were roughly equal (67 and 64 per cent, respectively). Emphasizing practical reason would promote education—not sports and entertainment—as the “ticket” out of “da hood.” Imagine an America where being a black man meant being a morally formed, educated “brutha,” ready to contribute to improving the world.

Decades ago, when the black community revolved around the black church, these values descended from generation to generation. Today, in an era when “justice” means obsession with redistributing wealth rather than restoring dignity, character formation means nothing. Disadvantaged blacks, generationally doomed, wait for the acknowledgement that social mobility for the “dark skinned” speakers of “negro dialect” flows from the expansion of dignity and freedom, not from pursing the siren songs of riches and power.

Race Alarmists Hijack Black History Month

Black History Month must seem like Christmas for race alarmists. It presents the perfect time to unwrap statistics from racial disparity studies to imply some sort of institutional racism.

A good example is 2009 study titled, “Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge, by the Civil-Rights Project at UCLA.” The authors call on the Obama administration to take action against “resegregation.” The report sounds the alarm that “40 percent of Latinos and 39 percent of blacks now attend intensely segregated schools. The average black and Latino student is now in a school that has nearly 60 percent of students from families who are near or below the poverty line.”

High concentrations of blacks and Latinos pose a problem for critics who believe the myth that blacks and Latinos need white influence to achieve academic success. It is the New Racism: the concept that minorities cannot survive without whites. The report additionally confuses race with class. What ultimately matters is not that blacks and Latinos attend minority schools but that lower-income black and Latino parents sadly lack the freedom to send their children to whatever school will best educate them, a freedom exercised by many in higher income brackets, including middle-class minorities.

As a factor in low academic achievement scores, a predominantly black and Latino student demographic proves irrelevant. All-black schools have produced high achieving students in the past. Thomas Sowell tells of a segregated high school that, from 1870 to 1955, repeatedly equaled or exceeded national norms on standardized tests. During its eighty-five years in existence, the majority of Washington’s M Street/Dunbar High School’s 12,000 graduates went on to higher education, an unusual achievement for any school—white or black—during this era. Moreover, many of the M Street/Dunbar School graduates attended Harvard and other elite colleges in the early twentieth century.

Sowell notes that, as of 1916, nine black students from the entire country attended Amherst College, six of whom came from the M Street/Dunbar School. During the period from 1918 to 1923, the school’s graduates went on to earn twenty-five degrees from the Ivy League colleges Amherst, Williams, and Wesleyan. The first graduating blacks from West Point and Annapolis hailed from M Street/Dunbar, as did the first black full professor at a major university, the first black federal judge, the first black general, the first black Cabinet member, and the first black elected to the United States Senate since Reconstruction.

Segregated schools produced such notables as Mary McLeod Bethune, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The belief that racial diversity is the key to academic success has no empirical basis. If this myth were true, explaining academic success in more mono-racial societies such as Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands would be difficult. Devotees of the new racism cannot fathom black and Latino success without whites nearby, but the real problem is that black and Latino children lack educational options consonant with their dignity and potential.

Given the current achievement disparities between the middle class disadvantaged and the regardless of race, can social engineering be more important than increasing performance in lower income neighborhoods? Solutions for difficult lower income situations are beyond President Obama’s scope, for morally based problems require morally based solutions.

A prime example is the relationship between academic achievement and family structure. According to a Heritage Foundation study, children aged three to twelve from families with married, biological parents, performed, on average, better on a mathematical calculation test than did their peers from families with a biological mother and a stepfather, families with an unmarried biological mother and a cohabiting partner, or families with a biological father only. This study, one in a multitude of data, illustrates the influence of family character on academic accomplishment.

Nor can Obama’s administration do anything about the fact that free people choose to live in neighborhoods where they share similar income and values, regardless of race. The black and Latino middle-class do not live in “da hood” either. When choosing where to live, free people use different criteria than the elite, and thus live in different areas than the elite would prefer. Any alternative proposed by government planners, as demonstrated by the abysmal failure of school busing programs, usually makes matters worse.

What is best for low-income black and Latino students is what is best for all students: stable and supportive families, parental options, and high achieving schools with stellar teachers. These require local solutions that have nothing to do with shoddy “disparity” studies and the New Racism currently promoted in Washington.

The Enduring Foolishness of Racial Politics

During the 2008 presidential race, racial politics reared its pathetic head as pundits attempted to decipher poll numbers and audience comments at political rallies. It seems silly that adults in America may vote along racial lines but it should come as no surprise. Many people on the ideological margins of society vote irrationally. In fact, voting along racial lines says less about racism than it does about the lack of mature civic responsibility among voters indifferent to the nation’s common good.

When used as the ultimate criterion for supporting or rejecting a candidate, playing the race card is both indefensible and shallow—a trade-off, however, for freedom of choice. Exercising true freedom of choice entails a grave responsibility. One should consider a candidate’s position on important issues, such as abortion, the role of government in meeting the needs of the poor, foreign policy, and education. Living in a democracy that affords its citizens real liberty, rather than under a dictatorship’s regime, should make grateful Americans responsibly exercise their privilege to vote for their candidates of choice, a choice based upon more than skin color.

When African Americans, Latinos, and Asians lament, “It’s 2008 and racism still exists in America,” the temptation is to shout, “What fairytale were you reading that said racism would ever cease?” An historic tenet of Judeo-Christianity, along with many other religions, is that evil exists in the world. As long as people lack the moral development to escape it, there will always be racism.

What is most alarming about the media’s recent displays of racial politics is that many American voters do not possess the civic virtue to put their personal racial views aside for the sake of what is best for the nation. Race does not determine a person’s position on issues. Do Maxine Waters and Condoleezza Rice think alike simply because they are both black women? Shallow voting is the art of the imperceptive.

In light of the monumental problems facing the nation—the Middle East conflicts, the American banking crisis, transitions in energy use , new alliances among socialist regimes in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, and the complex issues in Africa—the United States should cringe when the rest of the world observes Americans reducing the presidential election to race and gender.

Americans must embrace their responsibility as virtuous citizens concerned about the common good. This means disregarding non-essential issues like race and choosing a candidate with the character and competence necessary to offer leadership on pressing current issues.

For example, which candidate demonstrates the wisdom to promote free market economics, historically the best method of creating wealth and lifting people out of poverty? Which candidate champions justice embedded in a rule of law that keeps corruption, power, and greed in check?

Which candidate has the humility to know that neither he, nor any other small group of central planners, has enough knowledge or expertise to use government to manage the lives of 300 million people? Which candidate has the courage to fight for human life? Which candidate has the personal integrity to encourage trust and cooperation? In light of these critical questions, who cares about the candidate’s race?

The term “Bradley Effect” (after 1980s California gubernatorial candidate Tom Bradley) describes the phenomenon whereby white voters actually cast ballots for white instead of black candidates in greater numbers than earlier polls indicate. As November approached, questions surrounding a potential Bradley Effect pale in comparison to the possibility that many people will vote according to irrational criteria in general, the potential “foolishness effect.”

At the time I wanted reason to prevail so that both campaigns and the media would keep in front of voters the candidates’ principles and policies—rather than talking points befitting high school yearbook senior superlatives.

A New Vision for America’s Black Men

Tens of thousands of black St. Louis residents gathered at the 2008 “Call to Oneness March” to protest against the rampant crime that continues to shackle generations to nihilism and self-destruction. An estimated 50,000 people marched. However, today the question remains, “now what?” The call for black men to embrace “individual responsibility” without defining “responsibility” makes matters worse. Black men need a more radical call to go beyond the individual self and demonstrate some concern for others.

As of last Thursday, St. Louis had 61 homicides so far this year, fifteen more than the same period last year. Of that swelling number, at least 43 victims were black males, according to the St. Louis American, the city’s black newspaper. One hundred thirty-eight homicides last year makes St. Louis one of the most dangerous cities in America.

While the Gateway City’s problems appear to be especially severe, they are not unique. Across America, black people long for a magic solution, for the next black messiah to come and unite “the community.” He is not coming. No single variable will solve this crisis. Confronting the issues of morality, education, family, marriage, job creation, and music complicate any solution matrix. At the heart of any solution, however, must be a move toward responsible service. Marching up and down every black neighborhood in America will change nothing until people hear the radical call sounded.

Previous calls for “individual responsibility” without virtue bred the kind of selfishness ...

Table of contents

• Title—Black and Tired
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Race
• Part Two: Politics / Economics
• Part Three: Culture
• Part Four: International
• Part Five: Education