Debating the Future of Race and Class

Last Wednesday’s 5-4 decision in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education provided a powerful backdrop for Tavis Smiley’s All-American Presidential Forum at Howard University.

Founded through an 1867 Congressional Order, the historically black institution was home base for Thurgood Marshall’s case preparation in Brown v. Board of Education. Ruling that school diversity plans cannot use race in integration, these combined Supreme Court cases essentially undercut Brown’s — and Marshall’s — legacy.

Smiley, author of The Covenant with Black America and the host of Tavis Smiley Talks, moderated this forum. It examined the 2008 election issues which are believed to be of particular importance to the African American community. To a packed house, Democratic presidential contenders delivered their campaign trail positions on education, health care, economics, the war on drugs, and the state of race.

We’ve passed tons of civil rights laws, but economic disparity remains the continually ignored elephant in the room. Telling laid-off employees that they only needed to have worked harder is easier than questioning why American corporations are being allowed to send those jobs overseas for ever lower wages. We also ignore why businesses reap enormous tax breaks while everyday people have difficulty meeting the most basic of everyday needs.

Relief programs which could otherwise be utilized for that assistance get underfunded or defunded through tax cuts. After those cuts, the government and non-profits in line for programming grants lack enough money to adequately supply services to economically distressed communities.

Nodding back to you-know-when, Senator Hillary Clinton reminded audiences the Bush administration arrived in the throes of a budget surplus. Military spending in Iraq effectively depleted those funds, the same funds which should have — and could have — instead paid for running government programs and agencies. Because the night’s debate primarily focused on domestic issues, this brief exchange was the extent to which Iraq was discussed.

The personal story from former Senator and 2004 Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards kept the audience's attention. When the North Carolina mill his father worked at closed, Edwards received a first-hand education in poverty. Personal connection is easy with somebody whose life story is echoing portions of our own.

Declaring the ‘war on drugs’ a failure, former Alaskan Senator Mike Gravel wants it repealed. He believes policy efforts must instead focus on intervention and community revitalization. People in inner cities sell drugs for their own economic survival. The manufacturing businesses where they would have previously been employed have long since packed up and left for suburbs and overseas.

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson wants to give the youth community resources and jobs so they do not go looking for trouble — whether it is selling or using substances.

Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, Clinton, and Obama added that they want to eliminate sentencing disparity between crack and cocaine. The latter, primarily used by rich white people, carries a lighter criminal conviction sentence than the former, used by low-income minorities. African Americans and Latinos make up only 25% of the general population, but are 62% of the prison population. Mandatory minimum sentencing laws as they stand only assure that the more affluent and connected offenders get more lenient treatment.

For a truly equal society, democracy encompasses much more than mere access to resources. Full inclusion requires that all people must have equal access to the appropriate resources. We are all interconnected to each other.

People enthusiastically cheering for Obama at the beginning of the junior Illinois Senator’s introduction oddly grew silent during his answer on HIV/AIDS. In addition to implementing needle exchange and providing age-appropriate comprehensive sex education, he called upon the black community to have an internal dialog about and then end homophobia. According to the CDC, 7 out of 10 teenagers who are HIV positive are African American. Obama said honest and open communication is being inadvertently prevented through a lingering community perception that AIDS is only a "gay man’s disease."

Three of the presidential candidates are not demographically typical, and only two of those can be considered viable contenders. But will electing any one of those three people actually provide America with a different — and better — public policy direction because of who they are?

I desperately want to believe this year’s Democratic primary could produce real change, an atypical major-party candidate who would be more empathetic to ‘out groups’ because of their own personal and ultimately successful struggles against discrimination. But the recent and very-high profile examples of Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales prove that anybody is capable of ineffective public policymaking and corruption. There is no color or gender barrier.

All candidates concurred that the kind of victim of a policy problem influences the speed and efficacy of government aid response, as was graphically demonstrated by the disparate responses between New York City and New Orleans. The candidates pointedly agreed that a segregated system was well-entrenched prior to Hurricane Katrina's landfall and we just were able to ignore it.

I am curious if history will repeat itself through Texas’s unfolding flood recovery efforts.