When Is A Change Gonna Come?

For once, some of the reaction to a racially charged case, that of Freddie Gray’s death in custody and the subsequent protest that turned ugly in Baltimore, was thoughtful. Much of the TV coverage was typically breathless, sensational and clueless, but a few observers, politicians and talking heads actually approached realism. It turns out race and class matter in American, no matter how much the official propaganda and happy talk seeks to deny it. Who knew?

One reporter, who has covered stories around the world, said she’d visited Baltimore to report on Gray and discover prosperous neighborhoods just blocks away from urban decay and segregated misery. She said it most closely resembled her experience of Soweto and other segregated townships of the apartheid era in South Africa. Separate and far from equal. That’s a pretty damming comparison.

Others spoke up to say the police are expected to manage a hopeless population that the rest of society just wants to ignore. A high percentage of this community’s men are absent, often behind bars or unemployable because they have been. Kids who have given up on school or whose schools have given up on them are equally without economic hope, at least on the right side of the law. Ill-educated and jobless they are trouble waiting to happen. Thus, in 2005, a zero tolerance policing policy that cracked down hard on even the most minor offense meant in a city of 600,000 there were 100,000 arrests.

Scholars weighed in to delineate how where you live correlates to what you will become, so ghetto kids who can’t get out early have little chance of ever getting out. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps is dandy advice unless you have been systematically denied access to boots and have no one in life to teach you how to get a pair or use its straps.

As usual, poets and historians and singers of songs have been telling us the visceral truth all along. In “The Time Between the Wars, Jonathan Daniels quotes a Southern employer complaining to a New Dealer about government intervention during The Great Depression. “I don’t like this welfare business. I can’t do a thing with my niggers. They aren’t beholden to me anymore. They know you all won’t let them perish.”

Then, at least, the employer who depended on exploiting poor, minority workers actually need them. Today, much of the exploitation has been outsourced to the Third World. No one needs the poor and poorly educated anymore, so they are worth too little to try to salvage in the cold calculus of dollars and cents. And as we know, faith, hope and charity are usually reserved for a scant hour a week, on Sunday.

In the Civil Rights era, Sam Cooke sang keeningly that “I go to my brother and I say, ‘Brother, help me please.’ But he winds up knocking me back down on my knees.” Still, though it has been a long, a long, long time coming, “I know a change gonna come.” And in a small way it has. There is more opportunity for those in a position to take advantage of it, but many in the troubled neighborhoods of inner cities have no ladder to climb out on.

In 1974, a period of economic stagnation, an oil crisis, the bitter end of the Vietnam War, and the implosion of the Nixon administration, Randy Newman’s “Rednecks” mocked the claim that the end of segregation had brought freedom at long last to African-Americans. They were free to be put in a cage in Harlem, he said, in the South Side of Chicago, in Hough in Cleveland, in East St. Louis, in Roxbury in Boston. “They’re gatherin’ ‘em up for miles around, keepin’ the niggers down.” That same year, the normally ebullient Stevie Wonder let loose a blast of invective on the same subject.

We would not care to wake up to the nightmare
That’s becoming real life,
But when mislead, who knows, a person’s mind
Can turn as cold as ice.
And we are sick and tired of hearing your song
Telling how you are gonna change right from wrong
Cause if you really want to hear our views
“You haven’t done nothing”!

A generation earlier in 1951, Langston Hughes warned that a dream deferred could shrivel up, fester, sag like a heavy load or explode. It keeps being deferred for too many, and the explosions have kept coming. In good times, we pretend inequality is slowly getting better. In hard times, it’s everyman for himself and the notion of America as a zero sum game. If you get more, maybe I’ll get less. If you get a job, maybe I’ll lose mine.

The result is a permanent underclass subjected to zero tolerance policing, rough rides and the shooting of unarmed citizens by the police in Missouri, Florida, Ohio, California, and Maryland. In such an environment, the black man stopped by the cops is all too likely to resist or run, because he knows that for him one strike is apt to mean he’s out for life. No wonder the anger, sooner or later, explodes.

And when the dust clears, the victims are worse off than ever, their neighborhoods scarred, the police expected to crack down even harder, and the polarization worse. The populace soon goes back to sleep, policy makers do little since there’s no political payoff for helping the helpless, and the cycle begins again.

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