Many civil-rights leaders are observing Martin Luther King Jr. Day this year with rallies to lambaste hate crimes and other terrible things that white people have done to black people. I propose that we African-Americans also take a little time to talk about something else: the things we do to ourselves.
It is still true, for example, that despite our well-placed concern about “hate crimes,” a black person is far more likely to be murdered by another black than by anyone else.
According to the latest Department of Justice statistics, blacks were seven times more likely than whites to commit homicide in 1999 and six times more likely to be killed. Over the past quarter century, Justice reports, 86 percent of white victims were killed by whites while 94 percent of black victims were killed by blacks.
The good news is that the black homicide offender rate has dropped in half–from 50 per 100,000 black Americans to about 25 per 100,000–since the economic recovery, the cooling of crack cocaine wars and, it must be said, increased prison incarceration rates of the early 1990s.
But where, as King once asked, do we go from here?
I hang this dirty laundry on the line during this King Day season precisely because I think it would weigh heavily on King’s mind, too, if he were here today.
I don’t like to play the game of guessing what King would think, because I am reluctant to speak for those who are not around to speak for themselves.
But it is not hard to guess, based on his writings, that he now would be moving away from the old causes of the civil rights movement–after all, much of that landmark legislation was passed in the mid-1960s–and toward the economic issues of jobs, schools, housing and “economic justice.”
But what new agenda should we adopt in this century?
As Harvard black scholar Henry Louis Gates observed recently, “If someone had turned up at the Million Family March and handed over a check for $500 billion to heal the ills of the inner city, I wonder if anyone there would have known what to do with it.”
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Gates’ pointed observation appears in a timely new book titled, “How to Make Black America Better.” Compiled by BET talk-show host Tavis Smiley, it features prescriptive essays from black voices as diverse as Stanley Crouch, Marian Wright Edelman, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, Chuck D, C. Delores Tucker, Johnnie L. Cochran, Tyra Banks and Shaquille O’Neal.
Yet despite their diversity it does not take long to notice a little socio-cultural ESP was at work: Almost every essay has good things to say about one remedy more than any other: education.
Coincidence? I think not.
Black Americans who were polled about what needs fixing just before the presidential election by the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies ranked education (26 percent), health care (18 percent), crime (16 percent) and the economy (14 percent) way ahead of “race relations and racism” (2 percent).
Earlier polls have produced similar results. We black Americans traditionally lean to conservative self-help, family-oriented values in our community life, even when politically, as one black historian put it, “we vote like Swedish Social Democrats.”
So, if my friend Tavis had asked me for my prescription for black America’s ills, I would have said, first of all, that we need to invest in our kids. If you don’t have a kid of your own, help mentor somebody else’s. There are plenty of needy kids to go around.
Second, we need to close the black-white gap in test scores. “I am beginning to change my mind about the racial bias in standardized tests,” a black friend recently said after his daughter earned a perfect score on the SAT. He was partly joking but his daughter illustrates a valuable lesson. Culturally biased or not, we can achieve, if we believe.
Third, we must stress to our children that excellence not only is achievable, but essential. If our kids are going to make it they cannot afford to believe, as too many do, that academic excellence is a “white thing.”
Finally, as my dearly departed mother used to say, give to the world your best and the best will come back to you.
Achievement gaps and a devaluation of long-term goals may be a legacy of slavery. But that only means we have to struggle harder to catch up. It’s not fair, but as my Uncle James used to say, you play the card you are dealt.
In the absence of King, a new generation faces the task of improving black America. We must do it, as King implored, with a sense of “divine dissatisfaction.”
He wasn’t just talking to black people when he said that. After all, whatever improves black America also improves America.
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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune’s editorial board. E-mail: [email protected]