October 19, 2008
"the dead bell, the dead bell, somebody's done for..." Sylvia Plath
Jason L. Riley -- to my knowledge, the only black member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board -- wrote a column in Friday's paper about the historic conflict of vision within Black America.
I admit to a years-long fascination with the fundamental disagreement between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, with its college and vocational schools; DuBois wrote books.
Washington believed that the way out of second-class citizenship or, UP FROM SLAVERY, as his autobiography is title, is hard work, education, success in business and the professions. For DuBois it was almost exclusively a matter of political struggle.
Dr. Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute has researched and written for decades about what he calls "a conflict of visions." (Dr. Sowell's personal story is one Washington would have admired; a poor boy from the black south who moves to Harlem in the 1940s to better himself. I recommend his memoirs to everyone.) By comparing Black Americans to immigrant groups -- Germans and Irish for example -- Sowell discovered that Washington was essentially correct. Germans -- and, for that matter, German Jews -- established themselves as a powerful economic group of business people, professionals and as a middle class before entering the world of politics. In JEWISH CONFEDERATES, Rosenbaum echoes that theme as he tells of the Jewish success story in the South -- German Jews greater acceptance among the southern upper classes, as compared to the harsher anti-semitism of the north and north east. Hoover and Eisenhower were two of the more notable German-American political success stories. But only after decades of hard work and upward mobility. The Irish, by contrast, worked in low paying and low status jobs for decades as they concentrated on cracking the urban political machines.
That obsession with the world of the political handout -- in exchange for unthinking loyalty and the mediocrity that follows -- is one my mother and father would understand. In their world of Depression Appalachia, it was called "bein' beholden." And for the independent Scots Irish, that had nothing to do with Christian charity and everything to do with the moral bleakness of the modern bureaucracy. Although Riley does not address it, obviously civics is more than party politics. There is no American prosperity, no "spontaneous order," without rule of law, the Constitution, and the moral groundings of religion.
Urban Irish economic ascendance, according to Sowell, was significantly slowed by this focus of political agility Louis Auchincloss's memoir, A WRITERS CAPITAL, notes that one metric of status in 1920s and 1930s Manhattan was who you hired as domestic servants. Black American servants put you a few class-conscious hash marks above families who employed the Irish.
This conflict of visions is at the heart of the Obama/McCain campaigns as well. As I've written earlier, Black Detroiters have an angry hope that a President Obama will Change Everything. Jason Riley makes the obvious point that he will not because he cannot. Or as Phill Gramm has written, Obama's future Change is Michigan's demoralizing present. Which brings me back to Detroit.
On the same day Riley's essay was published, Sam Riddle, a black political consultant, appeared on AM I RIGHT?, a local PBS public affairs show with Nolan Finley of the Detroit News and Debbie Dingell (wife of Democratic congressman John Dingell). Riddle is controversial in his own right. In the summer he was involved in a physical confrontation with the editor of the black newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle. The Chronicle, as opposed to the Free Press or the Metro Times (whose editor is also black), tilts editorially toward Washington and away from DuBois. The Chronicle editor is, by the way, an African immigrant.
The Riddle interview focussed on his evaluation of a few of the 18 (!) candidates for mayor of Detroit. Riddle dismisses Dave Bing as someone with a "sketchy understanding of the intricacies of Detroit's government." While Freeman Hendrix and the mayor pro tem, Ken Cockerel, Jr (son of a 70s radical city councilman) know how the government works, and who the government is ("la cite est moi"), according to Riddle.
Riddle is one of those men who literally glows (something -- and the only thing -- he has in common with the Rev. Billy Graham). He feeds off the camera which feeds off of him as it nourishes his ego. The personification of the inbred feedback loop that is southeastern Michigan politics. It is not always pretty. The Detroit media, especially Fox Channel 2, gives him frequent bloviating time. He's an insider, a "playa" as they say here.
The dismissal of Dave Bing is another dead bell for Detroit and southeast Michigan. Dave Bing is a sports legend who played for the Pistons in the 1960s. He is also, in the Tuskegee tradition, a successful businessman. And therein lies the superstition that he is unfit to lead. News that he was considering running for mayor was greeted with approval in the suburbs. When I mentioned my own enthusiasm at a local bookstore as I read the headline, I noticed a black woman's stoned-faced and silent response. (Surpising, because we both live in the suburbs.) Suburban approval was also an expression of relief as embarassing as it was pubic. Relief after yet another scandal, another failed mayor, another "race man", another "playa," another foot soldier in the post-opportunity Struggle.
Detroit is in a death spiral. That cannot be said often enough. The city council is hounding yet another school chancellor out of town. It is almost impossible to imagine anyone applying for the job now. The schools continue to hemorrhage students as the city's crime and economy drive away thousands of residents every year.
Dave Bing has complained loud and long about Detroit applicants to his company who read and write at elementary school levels. The literacy rate in Detroit is now 47%. High school graduation rates stumble along between 25% and 40%, depending on whether or not you belong to a union or have a government job.
I would contradict Riddle on Dave Bing. Bing, as a businessman, is intimately familiar with the "intricacies of Detroit government" whose policies and politics force him to hire from the suburbs.
Riddle and the politicians to whom he will sell his expertise follow the fashion of early and mid-20th century Irish political hacks. Riley quotes Sowell: "The Irish were fiercely loyal to each other, electing, appointing, and promoting their own kind..."
Sound familiar? It's the sound of dying hope and the impossiblity of change.
Sam Macomb
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