Belated Press Acknowledgments of U.S. Racial Apartheid
Today’s edition of the San Francisco Chronicle contains an interesting column by Carl Nolte wherein he describes the manner in which racial apartheid was practiced in this city until relatively recent times.
“The whole world knows it now.” wrote Nolte, “and millions of people saw it with their own eyes. A black man is president of the United States. I am still amazed.
“I grew up in San Francisco, and it wasn’t that long ago when somebody like Barack Obama would have had a hard time getting a room in one of the good hotels in the city. Even if he went to Columbia and Harvard Law School, he couldn’t buy a house in a good neighborhood. Willie Mays couldn’t, and he was the toast of the town.”
Frank Rich provided an essentially identical account last week in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. His column described racial apartheid, as it was practiced for the past several decades in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capitol. In each case, the writer acknowledges that African Americans, and other people of color, were systematically excluded from participation in mainstream affairs via discriminatory practices supported by all major institutions, including banks, churches, real estate firms, the business community, schools, hospitals, police departments, local and state government, and every level of the courts, up to and including the U.S. Supreme Court
I am moved to comment on these rare, surprising, admissions for several reasons. The first one being the fact that Nolte and Rich validate comments I have been making for several decades, in print, and too many personal and professional settings to mention. Let it suffice at this moment to note that I have suffered severe personal and professional penalties for having the temerity to keep bringing racial apartheid up, and insisting that it be acknowledged, if not completely eliminated.
My most recent professional encounter with this issue took place just two days ago during a campus-based meeting when an irate white professor yelled at me during an angry tirade engendered in part by my pointing out that current hiring practices in Silicon Valley are clearly racist, and intentionally exercised in ways which purposely exclude a large percentage of the young men and women of color who graduate from our institution.
None of the faculty members who witnessed the loud, angry response to my allegation came to my defense. Moreover, they made it clear that they had no intention of discussing the matter. And they didn’t. Once it became apparent that I did not intend to yell back at my attacker, they quickly turned the discussion to other matters. This is their typical response whenever the system of racial apartheid that governs much of our lives, and virtually all of our hiring practices, is mentioned.
The response of my faculty colleagues was not surprising. Theirs was/is the common response in social and professional settings at each of the eight universities at which I have taught during the course of my career. On the one occasion when I managed to get a visibly tense Dean to engage in a one-on-one discussion of racial apartheid at U.S. universities, the exchange ended with his asserting that “some problems are endemic, and thereby can’t be addressed or eliminated.” His recommendation was that I simply ignore “the situation,” and “let it go.”
Given the fact that I am a person of color, it is impossible for me to ignore “the situation” or “let it go.” Thus, over the decades I have moved from job to job, and city to city, in an effort to find a place not governed by the corrupting influence of racial apartheid. I have been unsuccessful in that search. My first important professional effort to find such a place resulted in my walking away from a promising career in newspaper journalism because I could no longer go along with the comprehensive, collaborative relationship that the mainstream press maintains with racial apartheid.
Given all this, I must acknowledge that I was surprised last Sunday when I read Frank Rich’s matter-of-fact description of racial apartheid in Washington, D.C. during the past half century. That sense of confirmation and surprise was experienced more keenly this morning as I read Carl Nolte’s belated admission in the Chronicle. Something has obviously changed. It may be Barack Obama’s election, and it may be the emergent colored majority’s expanding influence on our collective consciousness.
Given the belated admissions of Nolte and Rich regarding organized racial apartheid, it seems safe to assert that recently some senior, white mainstream journalists nearing retirement are being permitted to narrowly discuss organized racism–as it existed in the past. Neither Nolte nor Rich commented on the broad, national dimensions of the racial discrimination previously practiced in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. And there is little reason to believe that similar freedom to acknowledge the obvious is being extended to the vast majority of rank and file mainstream journalists.
We will know that change of a definitive sort is underway when newspapers, and other organs of the mainstream press, acknowledge, and regularly report on, contemporary dimensions of the nation’s criminal, and highly destructive, system of racial apartheid. In the interim, serious, sustained, commentary and reportage that exposes the contemporary dimensions, and standard operating procedures, of the nation’s largely intact system of racial apartheid, will continue to be taboo.
August 28th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
The racial apartheid in the USA is well and alive and it is twice as strong as the racial apartheid of former South Africa. It breaks the mind and soul of the African-Americans and African immigrants in the USA. Getting the good qualification from the best universities in the US which a lot of these blacks have does not grant jobs to these folks. Where is the Christianity professed by the Conservative Americans and where is the tolerance of the so called liberals? When it comes to racial apartheid, there is a concensus amongst all white Americans – that blacks should not participate in the economy in the form of having job. This is the unwritten gentlemen’s agreement among the whites that blacks must be denied jobs. Having health care, owning a house and owning a car are related to having a job. Therefore, the blacks have no health care, no home and no form of mobility. If America condemned the former South African apartheid regime and even advocated its dismantle, what does America say to itself?