A few years ago, I was present at a reception for new legislators at the Renaissance Center. New Detroit’s Shirley Stancato was on a panel, and a Republican lawmaker, in an apparent misguided attempt to be gallant, said that when he looked at her, she didn’t see color.
I don’t remember exactly what she said, but in a diplomatic and classy way, it was something to the effect that if he didn’t look at her and see color, there was something wrong with his vision. We aren’t going to get anywhere by pretending that race doesn’t exist.
We may have some hope if we face the issue as honestly as we can, and talk about it. Race is, “the American Dilemma,” as Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called it a lifetime ago.
Twenty-six years ago, political scientist Andrew Hacker said that we were indeed two nations – “black and white, separate, hostile, unequal,” Much of the book used statistics to sadly and convincingly demonstrate this. His research indicated that whatever else they did, or said, white people just will not live where a lot of black people do.
When the black population of a community reaches eight percent, white people start leaving. When it reaches 20 percent, all the whites leave. I thought this was an exaggeration, till I considered the city of Southfield. It was less than one percent black in 1970.
Ten years later, it was nine percent African American. The black population reached 29 percent in 1990, and 54 percent by the turn of the century.
By eight years ago, Southfield was 70 percent black. The city has not become a ghetto, however; it is still a city of substantially middle-class folks in single-family homes, with office towers and hotels near the freeways. Nor does there seem to be much hostility between the folks who live in Southfield today, or any great disparity in income.
There’s also some indication that millennials are much more inclined to live in mixed neighborhoods. That’s not to say, however that even young black folks and white folks understand each other, but they do seem to have more open minds.
My guess is that there is greater misunderstanding, and certainly greater hostility, between Christians, especially white Christians, and Muslims. That too will eventually change.
We are becoming steadily more diverse as a state, nation and a society. But the fundamental division in this country is between white people and black people.
It’s been that way since the first handful of slaves arrived at Jamestown three hundred and ninety-nine years ago. Our dilemma today is, simply put, this:
The United States of America needs to get to a point where blacks and whites can work as full partners in this society, accepting each other and trying our best to understand each other.
If we do this, our society and democracy should get steadily better and stronger. If we don’t, we will be weakened, and in the end, probably doomed.
And we can only get where we need to be by being honest, with each other and ourselves. By having conversations that sometimes may be difficult. That’s what New Detroit is all about. That’s what Shirley Stancato has been trying to get us to do.
That’s what we all need to do.
We will likely learn things about ourselves we didn’t know before. We’ll likely find that some things we thought were about race are really more about money and class.
Regardless, we have to have honest, open, and civil conversations about race, all of us.
I suggest we start today.
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