Today is the 45th anniversary of the march on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I have a dream speech. I was 10 years old at the time.
I remember the Selma to Montgomery marches. I remember feeling outraged that anyone would discriminate against someone else because of the color of their skin. I remember going to the Unitarian church school (where I learned to be an atheist), and my mother coming out of the church service one day saying that Reverend Steiner had fired people up about civil rights so much that if he had said, “Go get on a bus to Alabama,” half the congregation would have done it. I remember feeling disappointed that he didn’t say it.
Then Congress passed the Civil Rights Act outlawing all forms of discrimination in 1964. The next year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act assuring blacks the right to vote. The civil rights movement had seemingly won.
Entering high school in 1966, I debated civil rights with students who still believed blacks did not deserve equality with whites. But the Vietnam war soon displaced civil rights as the issue of the day. I skipped school to walk in marches protesting the war and go door to door for Oregon Senator Wayne Morse, one of only two senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. With the help of Charlie Davis (chairman of the board of the First Unitarian Church), I persuaded my draft board to classify me as 1-O, conscientious objector.
By 1969, the war seemed to be winding down, and I read in Newsweek that a Wisconsin senator named Gaylord Nelson thought the environment would be the next big issue. I started an environmental group in my high school and, after graduating, went to forestry school on a mission to save the planet.
All this time, I presumed that the civil rights battles were over and that the good guys had won. Nobody discriminated against blacks anymore, did they? Blacks could vote, and people (at least in Oregon) hardly blinked at interracial dating or marriage.
I should have known better. When applying to college, I happened to notice that Portland’s Roosevelt High School, which was mainly black, didn’t even offer the minimum math and English courses required to get into a state college. Portland’s school board had simply written off a large segment of the city’s student population as not college material. But I put this out of my mind.
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Five years ago, on the 40th anniversary of the I have a dream speech, I read in the paper that, when King gave the speech, there were fewer than 50 black elected officials in the South. By 2003, there were 18,000. Politically, King’s dream seemed to have come true.
But the paper went on to say that, in 1963, black per-capita incomes were 57 percent of white incomes. By 2003, they were all the way up to 59 percent.
Fifty-nine percent. I had to read it twice for it to sink in. If you check the latest census data, black per-capita incomes are still just 59 percent of whites’. While 72 percent of white families own their own homes, only 46 percent of black families do. While 93 percent of white families own at least one car, only 76 percent of black families do. Economically, King’s dream is still just a dream.
If I had known this back in 1970, would I have spent the next 20 or so years trying to save wilderness? I am proud of the work I did during those 20 years, but was saving wilderness really the top priority when a large share of America’s population was slowly sinking into the underclass?
There are a lot of reasons why blacks remain poor. As Pat Moynihan warned in a 1965 report, America’s welfare rules encouraged poor women to raise children in single-parent households. Discrimination, often in subtle forms such as inadequate schools, continued to be a problem.
Nancy Reagan didn’t help when she started the war on drugs, which contributed to an extremely high imprisonment rate for young black males. And as linguist John McWhorter documented in his book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, from the 1960s on, some black students decided that being successful in school was too “white.”
What could I have done instead of save wilderness? Worked to improve schools? Fought the war on drugs? I don’t know for sure. But those of us who are not working directly to solve this problem should, at the very least, not put further obstacles in front of blacks, or anyone, trying to get out of poverty. I’ll leave it to the readers to decide what those obstacles might be.
Today is also the day that Senator Obama becomes the first black man to accept a major party’s nomination for president. My mind tells me McCain will be better for the country on fiscal and economic issues. But my heart tells me an Obama win may inspire young blacks into thinking that they too have a chance to succeed in America. If we can also fix our schools, end the inane war on drugs, and take a few other important steps, maybe we will finally be able to say that King’s dream has come true.
I find it interesting that when a local white majority in Montgomery prevents a local minority from doing what the white majority does (ride in the front of the bus in this case) the nation intervenes to uphold the minority’s rights. And rightfully so.
However when a local majority in Portland (a majority of people who already live on developed land) prevents a local minority from developing theirs, the nation seems to have no problem. And BTW that in spite of the fact that the protectionist goal of the local majority is to keep an even larger majority (all other Americans) out of their area.
I will always be amused by the pathetic ‘arguments’ of the Private Property Rightists. No wonder people’s noses wrinkle when their ‘arguments’ get wide play.
See, civil rights are part of the Constitution, and folk fought for everyone’s equal rights.
Developing your property as one wishes is not part of the Constitution, and folk fighting for this sort of idea are falling flat on their faces*.
So we must mischaracterize the situation into a false equivalency in order to have an argument. How sad must it be to resort to these tactics to maintain ones position?
Again, I have stated here and elsewhere that what WA state is trying to do with rural lands is the right thing to do. But eliminating zoning laws? No. Forget it. There will be changes and Euclidean zoning will eventually go away, but protection from crazy neighbors will never go away, especially if your home is your major investment. Non-starter.
DS
* Tell us, please, how many PPR initiatives are on the ballot this cycle…anyone?
Developing your property as one wishes is not part of the Constitution. It is part of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment states that, if government doesn’t want you to develop your property as you wish, it can buy it from you — but only if it plans to use it for public purposes.
Developing your property as one wishes is not part of the Constitution. It is part of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment states that, if government doesn’t want you to develop your property as you wish, it can buy it from you  but only if it plans to use it for public purposes.
No it doesn’t. The Fifth doesn’t say that at all.
Stop trying to say that it does, as it makes your case weaker. People can read, you know.
Nowhere is private property defined (oh, Randal, you have a slave? Do write off his room in your Home Mortgage Interest Deduction?), nor is ‘just compensation’ defined anywhere in the Constitution, its Amendments, its footnotes, it’s scribbles in the margin, the pre-final drafts that ended up as kindling.
Please. Spare us this weak rhetoric and someone – anyone – try something new. This tired, debunked assertion of Constitutional imperative is as stale as the crust of bread underneath the car seat resting on the moldy sippy cup – all of which plus the forgotten egg McMuffin bake in the heat inside a ’77 Chevette.
This is why the PPR movement can’t gain traction in this country – because they must mischaracterize to have anyone listen to them. Too bad that as soon as people start thinking about it, all the PPR/anti-zoning ‘arguments’ fall over with a thud that sadly and finally sounds like ‘dud’.
Tell us, if this idea is so compelling, where is the flood of PPR ballot initiatives this cycle? Where have Leonard’s blueprints and instructions for exportation gone? Where are your benefactor’s checks to state organizations to incite fear to gather signatures? Someone? Anyone? Hello? Ballot initiatives? Uprisings? Um, anyone?
DS
Dan: “Developing your property as one wishes is not part of the Constitution, and folk fighting for this sort of idea are falling flat on their faces*.â€Â
Actually that is quite all right with me. I’ve already positioned myself to take advantage of the regulatory stranglehold. I just pointed out the moral inconsistency to suggest how hypocritical idealism can be. If I thought there was a substantial chance that the public was on the verge of reversing its stance on restrictive zoning I’d probably keep quiet.
Being in the process of transitioning into a very early retirement, financed mostly by real estate, I am growing accustomed – and sarcastic seems like – to making money out of zoning. It is not easy to find another activity where you do almost nothing (a few real estate transactions a year and rent collection, soon to be delegated to a part time manager I will hire) and simply let restriction induced appreciation finance my fun. So, God Forbid should the value of my real estate assets be diluted by Dorothys building and providing housing to the upcoming generation of aspiring productive people.
I’ll be thinking of the folk trying to make next month’s mortgage payment while I’m sailing! As you might imagine all this seems all the more amusing from a sailboat in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, don’t forget to support me by asking for more restrictive zoning and, of course, make your mortgage/ rent payments – But don’t get me wrong! Deep in my heart I do feel bad for Dorothy English.
…but protection from crazy neighbors will never go away, especially if your home is your major investment. …
[ha] this is an interesting characterization of protectionist zoning. A neighbor who wants to do on his property what was done on the very property that you live on is… crazy…[ha!]
…and of course for most folk their home is their only investment. What else have they money left for? They, themselves, have made their housing so expensive that once they have paid the mortgage there is not much left to invest in anything else.
Here are a list of reasons why black people are earning less than white people – in my opinion.
1. Even today in the UK, there is difficulty getting applicants to university from some sections of the community. There is a sense that people from that part of the community don’t go to university – they know their place. (Equally, some privliged people would be better off not slumming through university, they would be better off getting a job). Antiplanners observation suggests that this is happening in the USA, too.
2. Names and places. To employees, some names and places are too much like hard work. Experiments have shown that if the same CV was sent to the same employer, but with one name typically British, and one name typically foreign, an interview was more likely in the first instance. Even when an interview is forthcoming, problems can occur when the interviewer moves on to what area of town they come from. Black candidates may lose out on both counts.
3. Differences in income cover a whole multitude of things. For example, a white man and a black man may be hired at the same rate, but the white man may be promoted more often. What, by the way, does a black person look like? – as there seems to be, quite often, more difference in skin colour between two nominally black people, than between myself (white) and Barack Obama (for example). It seems that the ligher the skin colour of a black person the wealthier they are. Strangely, nobody seems to want to talk about this, and so all people with darker skin colour are just lumped together as black. It suggests that the discrepancy in income for some black people, with darker skins, is going to be much more distinct.
4. Black and white. It is ironic that, at a time when people want to move beyond segregation, that we are still using terms like ‘black’ and ‘white’, to refer to small differences in skin colour. The terms ‘black’ and ‘white’ suggest a greater difference between people than is really there – if the only thing we have to describe a person is the colour of their skin, how well do we know them? – but what terms do we use instead?
Transit/rail have a lot in common with M.L.King Jr. in that they have been oppressed/suppressed.