By Dr. Andrew Manis
For much of the last forty years, ever since America "fixed"
its race problem in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, we white people
have been impatient with African Americans who continued to blame race for their
difficulties. Often we have heard whites ask, "When are African Americans
finally going to get over it?
Now I want to ask: "When are we White Americans going to get over
our ridiculous obsession with skin color?
Recent reports that "Election Spurs Hundreds' of Race Threats,
Crimes" should frighten and infuriate every one of us. Having grown up in
"Bombingham," Alabama in the 1960s, I remember overhearing an
avalanche of comments about what many white classmates and their parents wanted
to do to John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Eventually, as you may
recall, in all three cases, someone decided to do more than "talk the
talk."
Since our recent presidential election, to our eternal shame we are
once again hearing the same reprehensible talk I remember from my boyhood.
We white people have controlled political life in the disunited
colonies and United States for some 400 years on this continent. Conservative
whites have been in power 28 of the last 40 years. Even during the eight Clinton
years, conservatives in Congress blocked most of his agenda and pulled him to
the right. Yet never in that period did I read any headlines suggesting that
anyone was calling for the assassinations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or
either of the Bushes. Criticize them, yes. Call for their impeachment,
perhaps.
But there were no bounties on their heads. And even when someone did
try to kill Ronald Reagan, the perpetrator was non-political mental case who
wanted merely to impress Jody Foster.
But elect a liberal who happens to be Black and we're back in the
sixties again. At this point in our history, we should be proud that we've
proven what conservatives are always saying -that in America anything is
possible, EVEN electing a black man as president. But instead we now hear that
schoolchildren from Maine to California are talking about wanting to
"assassinate Obama."
Fighting the urge to throw up, I can only ask, "How long?"
How long before we white people realize we can't make our nation, much less
the whole world, look like us? How long until we white people can -once and for
all- get over this hell-conceived preoccupation with skin color? How long until
we white people get over the demonic conviction that white skin makes us
superior? How long before we white people get over our bitter resentments about
being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites?
How long before we get over our expectations that we should be at the
head of the line merely because of our white skin? How long until we white
people end our silence and call out our peers when they share the latest racist
jokes in the privacy of our white-only conversations?
I believe in free speech, but how long until we white people start
making racist loudmouths as socially uncomfortable as we do flag burners? How
long until we white people will stop insisting that blacks exercise personal
responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the
Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United
States, only to threaten to assassinate them when they do?
How long before we starting "living out the true meaning" of
our creeds, both civil and religious, that all men and women are created equal
and that "red and yellow, black and white" all are precious in
God's sight?
Until this past November 4, I didn't believe this country would
ever elect an African American to the presidency. I still don't believe
I'll live long enough to see us white people get over our racism problem.
But here's my three-point plan:
First, everyday that Barack Obama lives in the White House that Black
Slaves Built I'm going to pray that God (and the Secret Service) will
protect him and his family from us white people.
Second, I'm going to report to the FBI any white person I overhear
saying, in seriousness or in jest, anything of a threatening nature about
President Obama.
Third, I'm going to pray to live long enough to see America
surprise the world once again, when white people can "in spirit and in
truth" sing of our damnable color prejudice, "We HAVE overcome."
Andrew Manis is author of Macon Black and White and serves on the
steering committee of Macon's Center for Racial Understanding.
It takes a Village to protect our President!!!
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
When Are WE going to Get Over It?
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
F.D.R’s Example Offers Obama Cautionary Lessons
The New York Times
Chrysler workers in 1933, top, tried to cash their paychecks. IndyMac customers waited for answers after the bank was seized in July.
In 1933, as today, a new president stepped into the White House, vowing change and decisive action at a time when a banking crisis posed a grave threat to the nation’s economy.
The economic morass that confronted Franklin D. Roosevelt 76 years ago was undeniably deeper and more ominous than the trouble President Obama is facing. Yet, according to economists and historians, there are also some telling similarities and cautionary lessons to be drawn from the experience of the Roosevelt years in the 1930s.
Roosevelt had his triumphs. He stemmed panic and stabilized the banking system with a combination of deposit insurance, government investment in banks, restrictions on banking practices and his “fireside chat” radio addresses, which repeatedly steadied the national mood and bought Roosevelt time to make changes.
Still, even after the government assistance, the surviving banks were shaken and lending remained anemic — much as the nation’s banks today are reluctant to make loans again, despite receiving more than $300 billion of taxpayers’ money in Round 1 of the federal banking bailout.
So, throughout the 1930s, economic recovery remained frustratingly elusive and arrived only with the buildup for World War II in the 1940s.
The shorthand verdict on Roosevelt, economists and historians say, is that he was an eloquent and skillful politician, and an innovator in jobs programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and in regulatory steps like the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission to police Wall Street. But Roosevelt, they say, while brilliant in many ways, did not have a sure grasp of how to guide the economy as a whole.
“Roosevelt had some successes, but we hope that Obama is going to do better,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard. “Otherwise, we’re in trouble.”
Roosevelt’s New Deal is often portrayed as an embrace of Keynesian economics, which advocates increased government spending to combat economic downturns and generate jobs.
Yet despite New Deal programs and some aid to the states, total government spending — federal, state and local — as a share of the economy throughout the 1930s remained at just under 20 percent. (Today, total government spending is more than 35 percent, a larger buffer against weakness in the private sector.)
During the 1930s, the unemployment rate fell somewhat under Roosevelt, but remained stubbornly high, averaging more than 17 percent for the decade.
In 1934, the British economist John Maynard Keynes visited Roosevelt in the White House to make his case for more deficit spending. But Roosevelt, it seems, was either unimpressed or uncomprehending. “He left a whole rigmarole of figures,” Roosevelt complained to his labor secretary, Frances Perkins, according to her memoir. “He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.”
Keynes left equally disenchanted, telling Ms. Perkins that he had “supposed the president was more literate, economically speaking.”
It would not be until the early 1940s, with the beginning of World War II, that a strong dose of Keynesian medicine was administered to the American economy. By 1942, total government spending as a share of the economy rose to 52 percent, and peaked at nearly 70 percent in 1944, when unemployment fell to 1 percent.
One lesson from the 1930s, economists say, is how difficult it is to engineer a recovery when an economy has spiraled down as far as it had by 1933. Swift and effective steps early in a downturn, they say, can enable an economy to avoid further slippage and joblessness. And Mr. Obama has the advantage of taking over far earlier in an economic descent than Roosevelt did.
In 1933, the United States economy had shrunk by one-third in real terms since 1929. Industrial production had fallen by 40 percent. Unemployment had soared to 25 percent, from 3 percent in 1929.
“Mute shoals of jobless men drifted through the streets of every American city in 1933,” wrote David M. Kennedy of Stanford, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Depression, “Freedom From Fear” (Oxford, 1999).
Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, amid a nationwide bank panic — the impetus of his memorable line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Roosevelt may have been lacking as an economist, but he was an extraordinary crisis manager. The next day, he declared a national bank holiday, and set the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to work on a phased program to sort good banks from bad ones, provide financing and restore confidence in the banking system.In his first fireside chat on March 12, Roosevelt addressed the nation to discuss the banking crisis. He started with a brief education in how banks work, with most money not held in their vaults but lent out. “The bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels of industry and of agriculture turning around,” he said.
Bank runs, by themselves, can bring commerce to a halt. He reassured his listeners, “It is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress.” And he appealed: “You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear.”
At the time, listeners had only Roosevelt’s word that his plans to stabilize the banking system would work. But he had an uncanny ability to communicate in simple and convincing terms. When the stock market reopened on March 15 after being closed for more than a week, the Dow Jones industrial average jumped more than 15 percent, the biggest percentage gain ever in one day.
“Roosevelt was a genius at using those fireside chats to calm the national mood and restore confidence,” said John Steele Gordon, an author and business historian. “Never underestimate the power of psychology in the economy. We’re seeing that now.”
Roosevelt deployed his persuasive powers to buy time for his programs to address the banking problem. Besides deposit insurance and a banking act that controlled competition and interest rates, Roosevelt drastically enlarged and expanded the role of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was established in 1932.
The agency made loans to troubled banks, and seized and sold off distressed assets at others. After government inspections, many small banks never reopened, with more than 4,000 closed in 1933. The agency also bought stock in 6,000 banks, at a cost of $1.3 billion. In proportion to today’s economy, the program would amount to about $200 billion.
That is nearly the size of the government capital injections so far in banks as part of the financial rescue package enacted by Congress in the fall. With new capital, Congress and the Bush administration hoped, banks would resume normal lending to businesses and consumers. But worried banks are holding onto the money, so there has been scant benefit to the economy from the government help to the banks.
Roosevelt, it seems, had the same problem. “He was much better at reassuring the public that the banks were safe than he was at persuading the banks to lend again,” said Richard Sylla, an economist and financial historian at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Throughout the 1930s, Mr. Sylla said, the amount banks lent for each dollar of reserves remained at about half the level of the 1920s.
Today, a range of steps is being examined by the Obama team to resolve the banking logjam. They include taking the toxic mortgage-backed assets from the banks in a separate agency and selling them off to partial and wholesale nationalization plans. Some of these echo tactics used by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the Roosevelt era.
“But the banking crisis today is more complex and more global, so we’ll have to do something bigger than the R.F.C.,” said Simon Johnson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.
More government spending beyond the planned $825 billion economic recovery plan, economists say, is probably in the cards as well. Roosevelt is seen as the father of big-spending government, yet the judgment of history seems to be that in the 1930s he was too timid.
“The lesson from the 1930s and early 1940s is that the government has to do much more than it has done so far, both to end the financial crisis and to get us out of the recession,” said Mr. Sylla of N.Y.U. “I do think the Obama team knows this and seems prepared to act on the knowledge.”Sunday, February 01, 2009
My Sister’s Keeper
Angela Jimenez for The New York Times
THIS LAND Residents of Alapine, a lesbian community in Alabama, gathered at the home of Ellen Taylor, 75, right, for a potluck dinner, including Emily Greene, 62, left, and Jean Adele, 72, center.
THEY called it a lesbian paradise, the pioneering women who made their way to St. Augustine, Fla., in the 1970s to live together in cottages on the beach. Finding one another in the fever of the gay rights and women’s liberation movements, they built a matriarchal community, where no men were allowed, where even a male infant brought by visitors was cause for debate.
Emily Greene was one of those pioneers, and at 62 she still chooses to live in a separate lesbian world. She and 19 other women have built homes on 300 rural acres in northeast Alabama, where the founders of the Florida community, the Pagoda, relocated in 1997.
Behind a locked gate whose security code is changed frequently, the women pursue quiet lives in a community they call Alapine, largely unnoticed by their Bible Belt neighbors — a lost tribe from the early ’70s era of communes and radical feminism. “I came here because I wanted to be in nature, and I wanted to have lesbian neighbors,” said Ms. Greene, a retired nurse. She hopes the women, ages 50 to 75, will be able to raise enough money to build assisted-living facilities on the land and set up hospice care.
She walks each day in the woods with her two dogs, Lily, a border collie mix, and Rita Mae, a Jack Russell terrier and beagle mix named for Rita Mae Brown, the feminist activist and author of the lesbian classic “Rubyfruit Jungle.” Ms. Greene trims branches of oak, hickory and sassafras trees and stops by the grave of a deer she buried in the woods after it was hit by a car. She named it Miracle. “I talk to Miracle every day,” Ms. Greene said. “That is one of my joys of living here.”
These days, she and other members worry about the future of Alapine, which is one of about 100 below-the-radar lesbian communities in North America, known as womyn’s lands (their preferred spelling), whose guiding philosophies date from a mostly bygone era.
The communities, most in rural areas from Oregon to Florida, have as few as two members; Alapine is one of the largest. Many have steadily lost residents over the decades as members have moved on or died. As the impulse to withdraw from heterosexual society has lost its appeal to younger lesbians, womyn’s lands face some of the same challenges as Catholic convents that struggle to attract women to cloistered lives.
“The younger generation has not had to go through what we went through,” Ms. Greene said. She and other Alapine women described leading double lives when they were younger, playing the role of straight women in jobs and even marriages. “I came out in the middle ’60s, and we didn’t even have the word lesbian then,” Ms. Greene said.
“We are really going to have to work at how we carry this on,” she added. “In 20 to 25 years, we could be extinct.”
BEHIND the gate at Alapine, about five miles from the nearest town in the southern Appalachian mountains near Georgia, the women live in simple houses or double-wide trailers on roads they have named after goddesses, like Diana Drive. They meet for potluck dinners, movie and game nights and “community full moon circles” during which they sing, read poems and share thoughts on topics like “Mercury in retrograde — how is it affecting our communication?”
The women agreed to be interviewed on the condition that the exact location of their homes not be revealed because they fear harassment from outsiders. Many in the network of womyn’s lands have avoided publicity, living a sheltered existence for decades, advertising available homes and properties through word of mouth or in small newsletters and lesbian magazines.
But the women at Alapine were willing to be interviewed because of their concern that their female-centered community would disappear if they did not reach out to younger women.
Winnie Adams, 66, who describes herself as a “radical feminist separatist lesbian,” sold her house in Florida in 1999 to move to Alapine. Earlier in her life, she had been married and had two daughters (neither of whom would be permitted to live with her now because they are not lesbians). She worked as a management information systems consultant for government agencies, she said, but when she came out as a lesbian was driven from her job by stress and discrimination.
Ms. Adams’s partner, Barbara Moore, 63, was in the Army in the 1960s, when what she described as a “witch hunt” for gay men and lesbians in the military forced her out.
Both women, who like most of the others at Alapine were once married and had children, said they were deeply scarred by their experiences.
“I did everything I was supposed to do,” Ms. Adams said. “I went to college, I got my job, I got my man, I got my two kids. But it still didn’t feel right. I didn’t know that I was a lesbian because I didn’t know what that was. It was the ’50s and ’60s and nobody ever talked about it. It took me a long time to come to terms with it and come out.”
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Angela Jimenez for The New York Times
Emily Greene, right in the ’80s in Florida.
Multimedia
Angela Jimenez for The New York Times
SENSE OF PLACE Winnie Adams, 66, at her Alapine home, where she has lived since 1999.
For Ms. Adams, every choice she makes today — which restaurant to go to, which contractor to hire, which music to listen to — is guided by a preference to be around women.
“To me, this is the real world,” she said. “And it’s a very peaceful world. I don’t hear anything except the leaves falling. I get up in the morning, I go out on my front deck and I dance and I say, ‘It’s another glorious day on the mountain.’ Men are violent. The minute a man walks in the dynamics change immediately, so I choose not to be around those dynamics.”
In addition to the 20 women living at Alapine, some single and some in couples, 15 more own property with plans to retire there or to build a second home. Two-acre plots cost $25,000, with seven still for sale. Some residents grow fruit and vegetables, and one couple, Ellen Taylor, 75, and her partner, Mary, 63, who did not want her last name used, keep four chickens they call the Golden Girls.
Residents keep a low profile among their neighbors, including many Baptists, and say there have been no hostile incidents, unlike at some other womyn’s lands.
“We just don’t announce our lesbianism,” said Morgana MacVicar, 61, one of the Alapine founders, who lives with her partner of 20 years. “People know who we are. We don’t want somebody who’s making a political statement here.”
The women said they sometimes heard references in town to “those women artists” or “those craftswomen.” At a recent dinner at a local restaurant, 15 Alapine members, speaking in hushed voices around a table, drew curious glances.
One obstacle to drawing younger women is employment. Many of the lesbian communities are located far from cities and other job sources. Only one Alapine resident has a full-time job, as a social worker in town. The others live on savings or income from consulting or piecemeal work.
There is strident debate within and across the womyn’s lands about who should be allowed to join. Many residents subscribe to strict lesbian separatism, meaning that men are permitted only as temporary visitors and that straight, bisexual and transsexual women are also excluded.
Recently when an Alapine resident received a visit from a 6-month-old grandson, an e-mail message went out to all residents, perhaps only partly in humor: “There’s a man on the land.”
JANE R. Dickie, a professor of women’s studies and psychology at Hope College in Michigan, who has studied one of the womyn’s lands, in Missouri, said she was struck by the differences between the residents — feminists of an earlier era — and her students.
“There was a real sense of the need to strongly identify as a woman and have women’s space,” Dr. Dickie, 62, said of the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s. “We really felt the need to be apart, to draw on our strength and our own empowerment. But young feminists today recoil at the idea of identity politics, of being in this one category.” Among the few younger women who are part of the movement, there is concern that the old-guard lesbians are too rigid at a time when they need to be more flexible, if for nothing else than self-preservation.
“I see the whole picture and the idea of a womyn’s land utopia, unless you have unlimited amounts of finances for yourself, I’ve watched one after another go belly up,” said Andrea Gibbs-Henson, 42, who lives at Camp Sister Spirit, a womyn’s land in Ovett, Miss., where she became executive director when her mother, one of the founders, died last year. “The bottom line is the world is too diverse. The whole idea of a feminist utopia, it’s just an ideal. We would not survive here if all we did was cater to lesbian separatists.”
Camp Sister Spirit has more flexible policies on who is allowed on the land; even at Alapine, some of the women do not believe in pure separatism.
But Rand Hall, 63, one of the newest Alapine residents, whose 50-year-old stepdaughter has joined her on the property, said separatism still makes sense today.
“Outside the gate, it’s still a man’s world,” said Ms. Hall, who retired as the publisher of a gay and lesbian newspaper in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Fla., and moved to Alapine in 2006. “And women are not safe, period. It’s just that simple.”
“I don’t have curtains,” she said. “I don’t have to worry about someone watching me dress or undress. There’s also a sense of community, a sense of supporting each other.”
Ms. Hall added: “It’s not as competitive. Women, when they’re together, tend to be more cooperative. They don’t look for one to succeed and all the others to fail. In the mainstream world that’s what it is. Somebody has to be on top so everyone else has to be on the bottom.”
At Alapine, the development corporation owned by three women who started the earlier women’s community in Florida sells plots to individual owners. If someone who owns decides to resell, the development corporation has the right to buy the property. The women at Alapine have agreed that they want to remain a lesbian-only community. They acknowledge that this could make them vulnerable to a legal challenge from a nonlesbian, but they say no such challenges have arisen.
“We don’t want to spend the last 20 years of our lives fighting about another big issue,” Ms. MacVicar said. “It was hard enough fighting for the last 30 years. But now it’s a family that wants to be here and die here.”
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