To say that the rapper 'Killer Mike' thinks there is something wrong with the way America's leaders treat the African American community would be a considerable understatement. On a recently released song titled "That's Life," Killer Mike, a graduate of Morehouse College, rips into a collection of political and cultural figures from Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby to the entire Bush family, for neglecting and misrepresenting African-American interests.
The song, easily obtainable by free download on the Internet, is both provocative and articulate. What really impressed me about it, however, were not the lyrics, but the extraordinarily intense alienation Killer Mike expresses.
A few decades ago, not many people, and certainly few blacks, would have questioned the existence of institutionalized racism in America. Recently in The Herald, however, a Brown student characterized the idea that "institutional racism still exists" as "bizarre" ("No one knows what happened Sunday," Sept. 15). While the student's comments were met with many objections, his ignorance was merely indicative of an increasingly prevalent attitude in America, among whites and blacks, that the only thing holding back black progress are blacks themselves.
While this may be a pleasant dream, such talk is far from reality. Rational people across the country must defend the proposition that systemic racism still exists in order to justify fighting it.
A media firestorm in Virginia demonstrates the way in which racism is still inherent in many American institutions, including institutions as significant as the U.S. Senate. The Virginia Senate race now features two men, Republican George Allen (a possible presidential candidate in 2008) and Democrat Jim Webb, both of whom have used racial slurs.
A former teammate of Allen's, who played football with him at the University of Virginia, has told the press that the Senator commonly used the "N word" to refer to blacks, and that he once stuffed a severed deer head into a black family's mailbox. Allen denies the charges, though he was caught on camera using similarly derogatory language to describe a man of Indian descent. Webb, meanwhile, recently responded to accusations that he too had used the "N word" in the past by stating, "I don't think that there's anyone who grew up around the South that hasn't had the word pass through their lips at one time or another in their life."
I doubt that in the eyes of Virginia blacks, saying that "everyone was doing it" is enough to get Webb off the hook. If you are a black person in Virginia, your choices for senator this year are either a Republican who has been accused of a hate crime or a weak-kneed Democrat who has admitted using racial slurs. Those may have been acceptable choices in 1906, but in 2006?
In his book "Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America," author Juan Williams argues that the solution to widespread black poverty and inequality is a self-help philosophy, similar to that of Booker T. Washington a century ago. Williams, who is also a political commentator for Fox News, has attacked prominent black figures, such as Al Sharpton, who he claims is blinded by his personal ambition, and Dave Chappelle, whose show he compares to the minstrel shows of the Jim Crow era.
He proposes that instead of blaming whites for their problems, blacks should take it upon themselves, through education, self-determination and individual responsibility, to reform the black culture that he insists is the main cause of black poverty. As Washington Post reviewer Peniel Joseph writes, "Occasionally the depth of historic and contemporary institutionalized racism faced by blacks creeps into Williams' discussion, but he is more concerned with what he perceives as black apathy and self-destructive behavior." Though they're coming from very different places, Williams in certain striking ways agrees with the author of the Herald letter who questioned the continued existence of "institutionalized racism" in our country.
Can individual responsibility really bridge a social gap between the races? In a 1999 book, New York University sociologist Dalton Conley argued that discrepancies in wealth between blacks and white Americans contribute to inequalities in education, jobs and family structure. As Conley writes, "motivation and achievement would be different if the fruits of the American Dream were equally accessible." Thus, while whites and blacks may seem on the surface to have equal opportunities, reality belies this assumption.
"The dream died on the balcony," raps Killer Mike, referring to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, and I hope that he is wrong. A dream of racial equality can be made a reality, but not by ignoring problems in the system that hurt minorities, and not by blaming victims. A solution to racial problems will never come if we fail to acknowledge the deep-rooted inequalities that still exist in American society.
Ben Bernstein '09 says he doesn't see "blacks" and "whites," just "Americans." We suspect he is from rural Iowa.
