Third Set Perspectives

Starbucks

This piece ran in the Miami Herald on May 2, 2018

Starbucks’ response to last week’s debacle at its store in Philadelphia was swift and strong. Closing 8,000 stores for a half day of sensitivity training is a good public relations gesture that could change some of its employees’ attitudes toward black customers.

But there’s something else the company could do that would be much more impactful, and just might be the first step toward adding a powerful new weapon to the arsenal of black Americans’ struggle for equality in America. 

What Starbucks could do is the thing it does best—make money by building and operating coffee shops.  But instead of returning the profit from all of its shops to its shareholders, the company could dedicate, in perpetuity, the stream of profit from a small number of Starbucks locations—for the sake of example, let’s say 100 of them—to an organization with a strong track record of successfully addressing one of the critical challenges that face black Americans today.

Doing that would harness the future of the chosen organization—and by extension, its ability to make a real difference in peoples’ lives—to the most powerful force in American life: the free enterprise system. 

It may seem wildly counter-intuitive to suggest any kind of linkage between black America and free enterprise capitalism.  It’s as if they exist in non-intersecting universes, a black one dedicated to freedom and justice, and a capitalist one preoccupied with money and profits.

But the absence of a meaningful connection between the cause of black Americans and the workings of business is a problem, one that makes it impossible to use industry’s virtually unlimited political and economic power to our advantage.  The next step for black Americans is to find a way to align at least some of our key interests with businesses’ unwavering focus on making money.

One way to take that step is a concept called Social Business.  Social Business is the brainchild of  Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winning founder of Grameen Bank and creator of the concept of micro-finance.  Yunus defines social businesses as cause-driven enterprises that simultaneously make money and solve social problems.  His favorite example is Grameen Danone Co., a joint venture between Grameen Bank and Groupe Danone, the French multinational corporation that produces Dannon Yogurt and other dairy-based products.

The problem Yunus set out to solve when he began to work with Groupe Danone in 2007 is the malnourishment of children in Bangladesh.  The company they created is a for-profit venture.  It produces a product—a fortified sweet yogurt—that children like, and that provides much-needed nutrition.  It covers all of its costs, and makes a profit at the end of each year. The key difference between Grameen Danone Co. and Dannon’s traditional business is that the profit Grameen Danone creates is not returned to the company’s shareholders.  Instead, it is re-invested in the company’s mission—reducing the malnourishment of poor children in Bangladesh.

Social business is an idea that’s working in the developing world.  And it can work here as well. The path Muhammad Yunus has blazed is available to other entrepreneurs looking for ways to leverage the power of free enterprise for the benefit of black Americans:

1. Identify a problem;
2. Create a plan for a business whose products or services address the problem in a meaningful way;
3. Find investors who will be satisfied with getting their money back and foregoing any additional return on their capital;
4. Run your business, make a profit, pay back your investors, and invest any additional profit in expanding your ability to solve the problem your business was created around.

Starbucks is not a social business.  But like Groupe Danone, it could create a social business subsidiary.  If it put 100 Starbucks stores into that subsidiary, the subsidiary would generate, by my estimate, more than $27 million per year in after-tax income. That’s enough money to fund an organization that has shown it can make a meaningful contribution to educating black children, reducing housing segregation, addressing health care disparities, or addressing one of the other major ills that affect black Americans.

And that would have a much more long-lasting and powerful impact than a half day of sensitivity training.

The NAACP has as much of a chance of transforming itself into the Dream Defenders or Black Youth Project 100 as a 108-year old man has of writing the next #1 song on the rap music charts. The target that Melissa Harris-Perry sets out in her thought-provoking piece is an unrealistic—and inappropriate—one for the venerable civil rights organization.

But that’s not to say that there’s not a critical role for the NAACP in today’s social justice environment. In fact, Harris-Perry identifies that role, albeit in passing, in the middle of her article, when she points to the success of the North Carolina chapter and notes that, “along with its legal partners, the branch successfully challenged the state’s monster voter-suppression law.”

That’s exactly what the NAACP, and the Legal Defense Fund, should be doing—defending the victories black Americans won during the Civil Rights movement. Those victories—the right to vote, the right to live in any community where you can afford to pay the rent, the right to decent health care via Medicaid—are under vicious assault by the forces of reaction that have coalesced within the Republican Party. Black people need organizations like the NAACP to use their connections and expertise in the legal, political and business worlds to defend those rights with the same vigor, passion and determination as the reactionaries are bringing to their campaign to undermine them.

Meanwhile, the job of the new generation of black organizations is to fight the battles we did not win 50 years ago—the battle against the rogue police officers who kill black men with impunity, the battle against mass incarceration, the battle against environmental pollution of black communities. Winning these battles will require new tactics, new coalitions and new approaches that are outside the realm of the NAACP.

Out of Failure, a New Opportunity

A test project at New York City’s notorious Riker’s Island jail ended last month without accomplishing its key objectives.  But behind the failure of the ambitious experiment lies a tantalizing glimpse of a force that could be a powerful component of a new civil rights strategy for the 21^st century.

The goal of the Adolescent Behavioral Learning Experience project was to reduce recidivism among young black and Latino inmates at Riker’s. It did not succeed.  What it did, however, was suggest that the power of the marketplace, and in particular the financial services industry’s insatiable drive to make money, can be introduced into the struggle to improve the lives of poor inner-city residents.

The ABLE project was not financed by taxpayers.  Instead, the money came from Goldman Sachs, the poster child for all that’s good—and all that’s bad—about Wall St. 

Goldman put up $7.2 million to finance the project.  The investment bank would have earned up to a 30% return on its investment if the recidivism rate among program participants at Riker’s had fallen by 10% or more.  Since the rate did not fall, Goldman will lose the money it invested—a loss cushioned by a $6 million guarantee from former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s foundation. 

The most interesting thing about the ABLE project is that it was an effort to harness a key interest of black Americans—keeping kids out of prison—with the key interest of Wall St.—making money.

Wall St. is the most powerful force in America’s economy and politics.  It accounts for about 40% of all of the profit earned by U. S. corporations.  Its excesses brought the world economy to the brink of collapse six years ago, yet its critical role forced U.S. policy-makers to rush to its rescue with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in their hands. 

I know it’s wildly counter-intuitive to suggest any kind of linkage between black America and Wall St.  It’s as if they exist in non-intersecting universes, a black one dedicated to freedom, justice and rights, and a Wall St. one preoccupied with stocks, bonds, and commodities.

But the absence of a meaningful connection between black Americans and Wall St. is a problem, and perhaps an opportunity.  The problem:  Black America’s irrelevance to the financial services industry makes it impossible to use the industry’s virtually unlimited political and economic power to our advantage.  The opportunity:  To reinvigorate our struggle for full participation in American society by finding a way to align at least some of our major interests with the Street’s singular and unwavering focus on making money.

If black America can link even a small part of its agenda to the Street’s self-interest, it could open a new front in our battle for a firmer foothold in the American mainstream.  So, baldly, my question is: Is there a way for Wall St. to make money—lots of money—on real progress for black Americans?

The answer should be a resounding Yes.  According to one estimate, http://www.popularresistance.org/incarceration-up-education-down-americas-cannibalistic-profiteering/ the lifetime cost to society of one high-risk youth who goes from juvenile detention to a juvenile correction facility to an adult prison is $3.8 million, while the lifetime tax contribution of that same youth if he goes from a high-quality after-school program to a publicly-funded university for four years is $1 million.  That’s a difference of $4.8 million PER YOUTH.  Multiply that by the 2.5 million Americans who are incarcerated at this moment, and you have a potential economic swing of $12 trillion.

That’s an arbitrage opportunity for Wall St.  The same creativity the Street used to invent collateralized debt obligations during the subprime mortgage frenzy could be channeled to developing financial instruments tied to the dollar benefits of getting children out of college instead of into prison. 

Over the long term, it is significantly less expensive to invest in the early education and child care programs that keep children out of the traps of crime, teen pregnancy and dropping out of high school, than it is to pay the downstream costs of incarceration, welfare and dependency. 

But our political system is unable to grasp the opportunity to lower those downstream costs.  In part, that’s because those costs are income to politically powerful entities—prison companies and their employees, local law enforcement agencies, and others.  And, in part, it’s because so many local and state legislatures, and half of Congress, are controlled by a Republican party that is actively hostile to the interests of black Americans.

Wall St., however, can do what the political system can’t.  It can invent financial instruments that enable it to profit from the difference between what governments plan to spend on incarceration, welfare and dependency, and what they’d actually spend if hundreds of thousands of young people went to college instead of prison. 

What Wall St. wants, Wall St. gets.  The challenge for everyone interested in progress for black Americans is to make Wall St. want what’s good for us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

14th and U

Black people are from Jupiter.  White people are from Saturn.

Or so you’d think, after reading Courtland Milloy’s column this week in The Washington Post, and the outraged responses of the white readers who chose to comment on it.

Milloy’s column was a discourse on the gentrification of the neighborhood around 14^th and U St. in Northwest Washington.  Like any good gentrification story, it started with an acknowledgement that the neighborhood is a much more pleasant place than it was 10 or 20 years ago, and ended with a lament about what was lost in the area’s transformation. 

What touched the white readers’ nerves, though, was Milloy’s unadorned assertion that the people who have benefitted from the gentrification of 14^th and U are mostly white, while the people who suffered the loss are mostly black.

“Mr. Milloy’s rose-colored rear view mirror makes for at best misguided and at worst racist & dead-wrong longings for a past that was far worse than today,” wrote OrderedChaOs, in one of the more polite responses to the article. 

“Anyone who misses the blight, crime, screaming profanity, daily armed robberies of people just trying to walk from point A to B, creepy sexist comments shouted at women as they walk down the street (greetings I guess), jungles growing in backyards, parks converted to open air drug markets, etc. Just cross the anacostia river and bask in it,” opined HappyBoss.

If all these writers know about 14^th and U is the violence, crime, prostitution and the despair that characterized the area for most of the past 40 years, their sharp criticisms of Milloy’s article are completely understandable.  But if all they know about the history of 14^th and U is violence, crime, prostitution and despair, they don’t really know 14^th and U.

They don’t know about Annie Woodridge, known by all as Mother Dear, whose community center at 14th and R provided a much needed social safety net for otherwise neglected poor residents; or Theresa Davis' Free Evangelistic Church at 14th and T that helped many a resident recover from alcohol and drug addictions, or the tireless efforts of Rachel Beavens at Abarts Employment Services a block away to help residents find jobs.

They don’t know about Laura Murray, whose courageous stand against the Rayful Edmonds drug gang resulted in her home near Florida Avenue being firebombed.

What’s piercingly sad about this situation is that the courageous, heroic actions of people like Woodridge, Davis, Beavens and Murray are not what transformed 14^th and U.  The social and moral pressure they imposed on the criminals and the politicians in the District did not bear fruit. 

The change at 14^th and U was created by another group of people—the gays and lesbians, the young professionals, and the business interests who brought money, and the political influence money buys, into the neighborhood.  Some of those people indeed acted courageously when they put their money, and their families, into a dangerous but promising neighborhood.  Others were just following their financial interests.  But they all emerged as winners.

So for me, the real questions Milloy’s column raises are these:  Why didn’t Woodridge, Davis, Beavens and Murray get to benefit from the transformation of the neighborhood they lived in and fought for for decades?  Why does all of the benefit accrue only to people with enough money to afford the radically higher cost of living there now?  And why are almost all of those people white?

And, finally, what should we think about an economic system that rewards the heroism of one group of people—the well-heeled urban pioneers who drove the transformation of 14^th and U—with a lovely neighborhood and real estate whose value is skyrocketing, while responding to the heroism of another group of people—the decent, hard-working black residents who suffered the most from the violence and blight of the old 14^th and U—with a tax bill they could not afford to pay and the loss of everything they’d worked to build?

Goldman Sach's Solution for Black Youth

This piece ran in The Root in August, 2012

The barons of Wall Street don't wake up in the morning wondering whether the decisions they make before sundown will advance or hinder America's prison population. However, an experimental effort involving investment firm Goldman Sachs that will launch later this year may change all that.

Earlier this month, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the company will loan the city $9.6 million to finance a program designed to reduce recidivism -- the rate at which newly freed inmates return to jail -- among young men imprisoned at Rikers Island.

As part of Bloomberg's nascent Young Men's Initiative, the four-year program known as the Adolescent Behavioral Learning Experience will provide education and counseling that encourage responsible behavior for an estimated 3,400 Rikers inmates per year. The aim of the specialized training is to reduce the likelihood that they will return to prison, which New York officials say happens to 50 percent of young men within 12 months of their release from Rikers.

If the program reduces recidivism by 10 percent, Goldman will get its money back, according to reports. If there's a drop of more than 10 percent, the firm could earn as much as $2.1 million. But if the rate of reincarceration falls by less than 10 percent, it could lose up to $2.4 million.

Depending on the success of the ABLE model, New York and other cities may be encouraged to utilize more "social impact bonds" -- the investment vehicle through which Goldman is financing the program. Other areas that could benefit include novel educational efforts for inner-city children, programs that succeed in reducing teen pregnancy or solutions to the obesity epidemic.

It's quite intriguing to witness Goldman Sachs, a shining emblem of all that's good and all that's bad about Wall Street, getting involved with the criminal-justice system in a way that could be helpful to young incarcerated men.

The perceived inequity of that system -- and especially the impact that the war on drugs has had on conviction rates for African-American men -- is typically at the top of the list of critical issues facing black America. An entire generation of inner-city black youths has come to see prison as a rite of passage. And it's an especially pernicious rite, leading directly to second-class citizenship, with former prisoners unable to vote, get a decent job, live in public housing or take advantage of other basic rights that most citizens take for granted.

For the financial-services industry, though, the prison-industrial complex is often considered a boon. The industry makes money helping states and cities float bonds that pay for prison construction and operating costs -- guards' salaries, food and the other expenses that make the per-prisoner cost of incarceration higher than the per-student cost of education.

Wall Street exists in part to make money. Its success in doing so is the source of its almost unlimited political influence. But if segments of black America and other disenfranchised communities can benefit from aspects of the corporate world's self-interest, it could result in a firmer economic foothold for minorities in the American mainstream.

Of course, caveats are in order: The amount of the loan -- almost $10 million -- is not a lot of money for Goldman Sachs. The company earned more than $900 million just in the last quarter. Burnishing its beleaguered image is surely as big an incentive for the company as is the chance to earn a couple more million dollars. As the Libor scandal shows, the financial-services industry is not above outright cheating to obtain the results it wants.  

Today, New York City's new project is just an experiment. There is no guarantee that it will have a positive impact on the number of repeat incarcerations. But in an era when federal, state and local governments have run out of money to finance even the most effective social programs, perhaps we should be rooting for it to succeed.

Harold J. Logan is a business writer with a background as an Internet entrepreneur.

 

Harnessing Wall St's Greed

This piece ran in The Root on July 10, 2014

A few weeks ago, the NAACP announced that Cornell Brooks, a 53-year old lawyer, minister and civil rights activist, would become its 18^th president.  Somehow, that news did not cause a ripple on the Dow Jones Industrial Index, the NASDAQ, or the S&P 500.

Imagine Wall St.’s reaction if the NAACP had announced a new program that offered the financial services industry a slice of a $12 trillion opportunity.  That just might be enough to get the Street to pay attention—and that kind of attention just might make Cornell Brooks’ presidency matter. 

According to one estimate, http://www.popularresistance.org/incarceration-up-education-down-americas-cannibalistic-profiteering/ the lifetime cost to society of one high-risk youth who goes from juvenile detention to a juvenile correction facility to an adult prison is $3.8 million, while the lifetime tax contribution of that same youth if he goes from a high-quality after-school program to a publicly-funded university for four years is $1 million.  That’s a difference of $4.8 million PER YOUTH.  Multiply that by the 2.5 million Americans who are incarcerated at this moment, and you have a potential economic swing of $12 trillion.

That’s an arbitrage opportunity for Wall St.  The same creativity the Street used to invent collateralized debt obligations during the subprime mortgage frenzy could be channeled to developing financial instruments tied to the dollar benefits of getting children out of college instead of into prison. 

I know it’s wildly counter-intuitive to suggest any kind of link between black America and Wall St.  It’s as if they exist in non-intersecting universes, a black one dedicated to freedom, justice and rights, and a Wall St. one preoccupied with stocks, bonds, and commodities.

But the absence of a meaningful connection between black Americans and Wall St. is a problem, and perhaps an opportunity.  The problem:  Black America’s irrelevance to the financial services industry makes it impossible to use the industry’s virtually unlimited political and economic power to our advantage.  The opportunity:  To reinvigorate our struggle for full participation in American society by finding a way to align at least some of our major interests with the Street’s singular and unwavering focus on making money.

As we grapple with racism in its 21^st-century form, we need 21^st-century tactics to combat it.  And in this century, harnessing the power of the market, and the financial services industry that shapes and dominates it, should be a powerful weapon in a new arsenal of civil rights and economic empowerment strategies.

Wall St. is the most powerful force in America’s economy and politics.  It accounts for about 40% of all of the profit earned by U. S. corporations.  Its excesses brought the world economy to the brink of collapse six years ago, yet its critical role forced U.S. policy-makers to rush to its rescue with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in their hands.  Republicans listen to oil and gas interests, Democrats to Hollywood, but both parties pay attention when Wall St. speaks.

And when Wall St. speaks, it’s always talking about one thing—money.  The Street exists to make money.  Money is the source of its almost unlimited political power.  And it is amoral—it does not care whether the things it does to make money are good for the greater society, or whether they create a once-in-a-generation catastrophe like the Great Recession. 

Aligning a financial behemoth that has no moral compass with a liberation struggle grounded in moral rights and wrongs is tricky at best.  But if black America can link even a small part of its agenda to the Street’s self-interest, it could open a new front in our battle for a firmer foothold in the American mainstream.  So, baldly, my question is: Is there a way for Wall St. to make money—lots of money—on real progress for black Americans?

There are good reasons to believe the answer is Yes.  It is significantly less expensive to invest in the early education and child care programs that keep children out of the traps of crime, teen pregnancy and dropping out of high school, than it is to pay the downstream costs of incarceration, welfare and dependency. 

But our political system is unable to grasp the opportunity to lower those downstream costs.  In part, that’s because those costs are income to politically powerful entities—prison companies and their employees, local law enforcement agencies, and others.  And, in part, it’s because so many local and state legislatures, and half of Congress, are controlled by a Republican party that is actively hostile to the interests of black Americans.

Wall St., however, can do what the political system can’t.  It can invent financial instruments that enable it to profit from the difference between what governments plan to spend on incarceration, welfare and dependency, and what they’d actually spend if hundreds of thousands of young people went to college instead of prison. 

What Wall St. wants, Wall St. gets.  The challenge for Cornell Brooks, the NAACP and everyone else interested in progress for black Americans is to make Wall St. want what’s good for us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling

This is a piece that ran in The Root in May, 2014

Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling have focused America’s attention on racism in a way we haven’t seen for many years.  But their racism is an echo from centuries past, and the outraged response to it, as good as it feels, does nothing to address the virulent strain of racism that assails black Americans today.

Bundy’s racism is the 19^th century variety, with its nostalgia for slavery and its sloppy generalizations about black Americans.  Sterling’s is the 20^th century kind, the kind that strove to keep black people away from the homes, stores, offices and sports arenas where whites gather. 

21^st century racism has little to do with the benighted attitudes of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling.  It is rooted instead in an interlocking complex of institutional practices that are largely immune to the strategies that won the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s.  Here’s what racism in the 21^st century looks like:

• A financial services industry that pushed toxic subprime mortgages into black communities, resulting in the destruction of most of the household wealth black Americans had accumulated in the past half century;
• An educational system that produces an achievement gap that leaves the average black high school graduate reading at the level of the average white eighth grader;
• A health care system leaves black Americans substantially worse off than other Americans in infant mortality, life expectancy, and the prevalence of almost every major, life-threatening disease;
• A mass incarceration program that has turned a generation of inner-city black youth into current or former wards of the criminal justice system, and contributed significantly to the crippling weakening of black family structures in this country;
• A vicious cycle of growing income inequality and an increasing imbalance in political power between the oligarchs and everyone else;
• The relentless commitment of one of our political parties to stoking the resentments of lower and middle-income white people in a desperate effort to hold on to its waning power.

In the context of 21^st century racism, Bundy and Sterling are unimportant people, one an unrepentant thief in a cowboy hat, the other a Viagra-stuffed slumlord trailing a history of unsavory business practices like slime behind a snail.

The battle against their kind of racism has already been fought and won.  That’s why Sean Hannity and Rand Paul abandoned Bundy the instant he opined about “the Negro,” why sponsors like State Farm and CarMax and Kia raced to distance themselves from the Clippers, why NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s decision to ban Sterling for life has been so roundly applauded. 

By contrast, the battle against 21^st century racism has not really begun.  How should black Americans push back against a financial services industry so powerful that it has incurred hardly any penalty for bringing the entire economy to its knees?  How can we influence drug manufacturers who earn massive profits by pricing life-saving medications far above the ability of ordinary people to pay for them?  How can we wield political power in an era when the Supreme Court is more committed to protecting the power of dollars than the power of voters?

Nothing more starkly illustrates how difficult it will be to fight the battle against 21^st century racism than the fact that the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP was on the precipice of giving Donald Sterling a second lifetime achievement award when the recording of his comments was made public. 

The NAACP was a courageous warrior in the battles against 19^th and 20^th century racism.  But, like the other mainline Civil Rights organizations, it is woefully unprepared for today’s fight.  The fight against 21^st century racism will require different tactics, and different organizational structures, than the battles of earlier centuries.

 

 

Educating Black Children Today

The statistics are mind-numbingly depressing:

• Only about one-half of African-American students graduate from high school in four years;
• African-American students who do graduate have test scores that, on average, are about the same as the test scores of white students just finishing the 8^th grade.

We are witnessing a crisis in the education of black students.  In a time when education is the clearest, and in many cases the only, path to the income, wealth and social mobility this country’s economy offers, our failure to educate black students successfully condemns them to a life of limited opportunity as surely as the Jim Crow laws did a half-century ago.

Two reports issued earlier this month offer clear and contrasting points of view about how to address this crisis.  One focuses on social and economic factors outside of schools that affect students’ performance in the classroom.  The other insists that the school and the classroom themselves must be the places where the battle is fought.  Each report is endorsed by a sterling group of educators and academics.  Yet only one of them would provide immediate help to today’s students.

 The first report is by the Economic Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank.  Arguing that school improvement strategies alone cannot close the academic achievement gap, the Institute’s report says “policies aimed directly at education-related social and economic disadvantages can improve school performance and student achievement.”

The EPI report does not ignore efforts to improve schools.  But it advocates a “broader, bolder approach” that puts more emphasis on three other factors:

• Investment in early-childhood, pre-school and kindergarten education;
• Investment in health services for children and their families;
• Investments in longer school days, after-school and summer programs, and school-to-work programs.

The EPI report was co-chaired by three academic stars, Helen Ladd of Duke University, Pedro Noguera of New York University, and Tom Payzant of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.  Its supporters include the school superintendents of Miami-Dade County, Chicago, and Atlanta.

The second report comes from the Education Equality Project, a group of elected officials, civil rights leaders, and education reformers that wants to help ensure equity in an educational system that, it says, continues to fail America’s highest needs students.  Its study stresses “changing the system so that it better meets the needs of students.”

Those changes, it insists, must begin in the classroom.  Key recommendations include:

• Paying educators more money, to ensure there is an effective teacher in every classroom and an effective principal in every school;
• Creating accountability for educational success (which includes carrots such as increased pay, and sticks such as the loss of a job) among teachers, principals and central office administrators;
• Making every decision about who is employed, how money is spent, and where resources are deployed with a single-minded focus on what’s best for students.

 The Education Equality Project’s report was co-chaired by Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City public schools, and the Rev. Al Sharpton.  Its supporters include the heads of the Washington, D. C., Baltimore and Chicago schools, and the mayor of Newark, NJ.

Both reports include reasonable arguments. Any serious examination of inner-city schools leads inevitably to the Education Equality Project’s conclusion that the system that undergirds them is broken, and needs to be fixed.

And it is incontrovertible that, as the EPI report argues, conditions outside the schoolhouse walls impact student performance.

No person of good will can oppose the EPI’s recommendations.  The next president should adopt them, and pursue them aggressively.  But even under the best of circumstances, it will be years before they have any real impact on real students.  And we owe it to the students sitting in inner-city schools today to seek more immediate solutions.

What the EPI report ignores is that even in the face of racism, poverty and the other social and economic factors it cites, low-income black children in inner-city classrooms can, and do, succeed.  In this space over the next few months, we will look at classrooms and schools where success is happening.

We know, as a society, what it takes to produce outstanding academic outcomes in the most disadvantaged schools in our cities.  It takes strong leadership from principals with the power to hire effective teachers and fire ineffective ones.  It takes dedicated teachers who live out their unshakeable belief that every student can learn.  It takes high expectations, strict discipline, long school days, and active involvement from parents.  We have the model for success; what we do not have is the political will to implement it. 

That political will is what the Education Equality Project report calls for.  While the next president is pursuing the longer-term solutions of the EPI report, he must simultaneously work with local and state education agencies to summon the willpower to implement the report’s recommendations and provide immediate solutions that will offer hope to today’s students.

Old School Bigotry? We Need To Fight 21st Century Racism

Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling have focused America’s attention on racism in a way we haven’t seen for many years. But their racism is an echo from centuries past, and the outraged response to it, as good as it feels, does nothing to address the virulent strain of racism that assails black Americans today.

Bundy’s racism is the 19^th century variety, with its nostalgia for slavery and its sloppy generalizations about black Americans. Sterling’s is the 20^th century kind, the kind that strove to keep black people away from the homes, stores, offices and sports arenas where whites gather. 

Twenty-first century racism is a highly evolved variant on its historical antecedents.  As the 19^th-century racists who Bundy channels lost their grip, they adopted the 20^th-century tactics of people like Sterling.  Then, as 20^th-century racism became socially taboo, America’s peculiar phenomenon morphed again, into an interlocking complex of institutional practices that present a new set of extraordinary challenges for black Americans. Here’s what racism in the 21^st century looks like:

 

• A financial services industry that pushed toxic subprime mortgages into black communities, resulting in the destruction of most of the household wealth black Americans had accumulated in the past half century http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/;
• An educational system that produces an achievement gap that leaves the average black high school graduate reading at the level of the average white eighth grader http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2009455.aspx;
• A health care system leaves black Americans substantially worse off than other Americans in infant mortality, life expectancy, and the prevalence of almost every major, life-threatening disease http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/health-disparities-overview.aspx;
• A mass incarceration program that has turned a generation of inner-city black youth into current or former wards of the criminal justice system, and contributed significantly to the crippling weakening of black family structures in this country http://newjimcrow.com;
• A vicious cycle of growing income inequality and an increasing imbalance in political power between the oligarchs and everyone else;
• The relentless commitment of one of our political parties to stoking the resentments of lower and middle-income white people in a desperate effort to hold on to its waning power.

In the context of 21^st century racism, Bundy and Sterling are unimportant people, one an unrepentant thief in a cowboy hat, the other a Viagra-stuffed slumlord, whose history of unsavory business practices has left a trail like slime behind a snail .

The battle against their kind of racism has already been fought and won. That’s why Sean Hannity and Rand Paul abandoned Bundy the instant he began to opine about “the Negro,” why sponsors like State Farm and CarMax and Kia raced to distance themselves from the Clippers, why NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s decision to ban Sterling for life has been so roundly applauded.  

By contrast, the battle against 21^st century racism has not really begun. How should black Americans push back against a financial-services industry so powerful that it has incurred hardly any penalty for bringing the entire economy to its knees? How can we influence drug manufacturers who earn massive profits by pricing life-saving medications far above the ability of ordinary people to pay for them? How can we wield political power in an era when the Supreme Court is more committed to protecting the power of dollars than the power of voters?

Nothing more starkly illustrates how difficult it will be to fight the battle against 21^st century racism than the fact that the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP was on the precipice of giving Donald Sterling a second lifetime achievement award when the recording of his comments was made public. 

The NAACP was a courageous warrior in the battles against 19^th and 20^th century racism. But, like the other mainline civil rights organizations, it is woefully unprepared for today’s fight. The fight against 21^st century racism will require different tactics, and different organizational structures, than the battles of earlier centuries.

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Obama's Silence on Race

Courtland Milloy criticized President Obama strongly last month for his silence on the issue of race in America.  “There has never been a good reason why the nation’s first black president had to be so reticent about race — having uttered fewer words on the subject during his first two years in office than any Democratic president since 1961, according to a study by Daniel Gillion at the University of Pennsylvania,” Milloy wrote in his Washington Post column.

I think I understand why Obama has had so little to say about race.  I think his reticence reflects a preference for doing things that help black Americans over saying things about the state of race in America.  And, I think, his silence results from his understanding that the more he talks about race, the less he can get done.

 By almost any measure, Obama has done more to help black Americans than any president since Lyndon Johnson.  Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s excellent article in this month’s Washington Monthly details the impact of the stimulus, Obamacare, the rescue of the auto industry, Race to the Top and Obama’s other education programs, his Promise Neighborhoods program, and more, on the well-being of black people across the nation.

But every time he talks about race, Obama ends up dealing with a furor that distracts him from his political agenda for weeks.  Think of the aftermath of his casual statement about the Cambridge, MA police officer who arrested Skip Gates; Obama spent far more time managing the controversy than the incident deserved.  That’s time he could not spend working on education, jobs, health care, or any of the other issues that matter to black Americans.

So here are the questions:

1. Would you like to hear President Obama talk more about race?  If so, what would you like him to say?
2. Do you think more talk about race from Obama would detract from progress on substantive issues of critical concern to black Americans?

Thanks.