A hard look at race in America

SALSIBURY — Gene Dattel, author of “Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure,” spent an hour contradicting much of what is currently written and spoken about race relations in the U.S. on Thursday evening, Nov. 9, at The White Hart in Salisbury.

Dattel was speaking as part of the White Hart Speaker Series, sponsored by Oblong Books in Millerton and Salisbury’s Scoville Memorial Library.

Dattel began by briefly recounting his childhood in Mississippi, where he quickly learned to adjust to differences between white and black, old and young, rich and poor.

Then he went back in time, to address the role of the “white North” in the period leading up to the Civil War.

Dattel said that while Northern abolitionists were against slavery, they were not necessarily pro-black.

It was often quite the opposite.

He cited Yale President Timothy Dwight, writing about free blacks in 1810, describing them as “generally neither able nor inclined to make their freedom a blessing to themselves.”

He mentioned the Oregon Black Exclusion Law of 1857, when there were about 100 black people in a population of 250,000. He said the law was an example of the desire to have neither free blacks nor slaves moving west.

And he said that during the Civil War, Massachusetts didn’t want free blacks — unless they could be put in the Union Army.

“It was a containment policy by the North to keep blacks in the South.”

And it worked until World War I, when labor shortages sparked the first wave of blacks moving north in search of jobs.

There were race riots, notably on July 27, 1919, in Chicago.

And riots have continued, intermittently, to the present day.

Dattel said the black people who went North for work found themselves in an “anonymous urban environment” and their descendants were the radicalized blacks of the 1940s and 1960s.

During the research for the book, Dattel spent a lot of time looking at old issues of the Chicago Defender, a prominent black newspaper, and at Ebony magazine (which was edited and published in Chicago).

He found a Defender piece about a tornado in a Midwestern town with a headline “Tornado Bypasses Negroes.”

“Once you start looking through racial eyes, you make mistakes.”

He noted that the Civil War to World War I period was a time of “enormous immigration of illiterate European peasants.” At one point Detroit had 300 company schools to teach immigrants English and assist in the assimilation process.

But blacks were excluded from this, and they increasingly found themselves stuck in a position of immobility — economic, physical and social.

As the civil rights movement began, notably in 1954 with the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision  ending segregation of public schools, American institutions struggled to follow the law.

He said that the pre-Brown curriculum was gradually rejected in favor of an ethnically oriented course of study, and by 1970 black leaders were advocating for “model schools,” rather than integration.

And he pointed out that the 1989 Sheff vs. O’Neill case in Connecticut, regarding the state’s obligation to fix inequities in public education, is still being litigated.

Dattel was fairly gloomy about the present day. He faulted black leaders who “will not talk about preparedness and responsibilities.”

He described the Black Lives Matter movement as the direct descendant of “nihilistic organizations” of the 1960s, such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party.

He said an enormous problem is the 70 percent of black children who live in single-parent households, and the strain that puts on society at all levels — especially schools.

And again he criticized black leadership for failing to even bring up the phenomenon as a topic for discussion.

He was also critical of the environment on today’s college campuses, where identity politics have resulted in a situation he described as “psychologically retarding and leading to a state of perpetual victimhood.”