During the recent Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton said she was outraged upon hearing about the water crisis in Flint, Mich. She said every single American should be outraged. “We’ve had a city in the United States of America where the population which is poor in many ways and majority African-American has been drinking and bathing in lead contaminated water. And the governor of that state acted as though he didn’t really care.”
In her estimation, Gov. Rick Snyder “stonewalled” the requests for help. “I’ll tell you what, if the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would’ve been action.” (See our story on this issue.)
Clinton’s comments reminds us of an editorial we did two weeks ago about the situation in Burns, Ore., where a group of armed militiamen commandeered a wildlife refuge on the grounds that two ranchers were being persecuted unfairly in their fight against the government land grab. More than one Black commentator observed that if the marauders in Oregon were African-American, Hispanic or Native American there would have been no hesitancy by the law enforcement agency to raid the refuge and apprehend the invaders, if not totally take them out as they did the American Indian Movement activists in the early 1970s at Wounded Knee.
In other words, as we put to bed this year’s commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s holiday, we are reminded again that we are eons away from his dream of racial equality, and are ever the victims of interposition and nullification.
Even when things appear to be equal between Black and white Americans, when students competing to gain entry into the nation’s gifted programs have the same test scores, the Black students are less likely to gain access, especially when their teachers are white, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at Vanderbilt University.
“It is startling that two elementary school students, one Black and the other white, with identical math and reading achievement, will have substantially different probabilities of assignment to gifted services,” said Jason Grissom, the lead author. The study was based on data from more than 10,000 elementary school students across the nation.
We speculate that if the study was expanded to 10 times, the number the outcome would be the same. We’ve seen similar results in housing, where a Black couple seeking a decent home in an upscale neighborhood are told by realtors that nothing is available only to witness the same realtor escort a white couple to several possible homes.
There is no need to recount the disparity and racial discrimination that pervades the criminal justice system, and we were glad to hear all three Democratic candidates devote time and concern over the prevalence of this problem when it comes to Black Americans, particularly young African-American men.
Yes, we have stepped beyond the cusp of a new year and already we have early indications that the more things change, the more they remain the same. And if our civic leaders, our elected officials and our law enforcement agencies are still dragging their feet about pressing issues we face, then the coming months must find us not only with an intense vigilance, unarmed truth and unconditional love, but with a will to speak truth to power—and then assume some of it ourselves.