Racism in My Experience

Race and Racism in My Experience Growing Up

Growing Up in Cincinnati

I grew up in an upper middle class family in an area of Cincinnati called Walnut Hills. Some streets were white, some mixed, and some black; at the end of our street and down the stairs was a bar and juke joint where all races mixed and danced. A couple of blocks away was a very large, well attended Catholic church; we often walked to church. We walked a block or so to our neighborhood elementary school. We learned that the Pope was infallible; we should love our neighbors, and that all non-Catholics were going to hell (unless they converted) – some very mixed messages for little kids.

Ohio was very proud of its Civil War heritage as the birthplace of Union Generals and Presidents; it was pretty solidly Republican. In Kentucky just across the Ohio River, there was a stronger identification with the Old South; Kentucky had been a slave owning state; you could feel the difference between the two cultures, separated by a broad river when you went from one state to the next. Kentucky and neighboring West Virginia were solidly Democratic back then. There was a reverence in Ohio for the Union, for the Civil War dead and a residual distaste for the Confederacy that seemed absent on the other side of the river.

In Cincinnati, there were two political parties: Republicans and Charter (comprised of moderate and liberal Republicans and Democrats). Dad ran on the Charter ticket for the City Council and finished 18th out of 18. Among those elected on the Charter ticket that year were Jack Gilligan (subsequently Ohio’s Governor), Dorothy Dolbey (first woman mayor of the Queen City) and Ted Berry (first black mayor of Cincinnati). Dad was on the Council of World Affairs, and as such he and Mom often hosted visitors of many different races from nations all over the world. The ones who still stick out in my memory were from the USSR and Brazil.

My first consciousness and memory about racism was in the 5th or 6th grade; we were playing football against a team bigger and faster than we were. We were an all white parochial school; they were a mostly black parochial school. One of the team’s leaders said “don’t worry, just kick them in the shins, they can’t stand the pain”. I thought to myself “well I couldn’t stand that pain either”, after all I’d just lost my front teeth to someone’s cleated foot in a football game a year earlier. No kicking was done. We were soundly beaten by a much better team.

The following year, I went to a public junior high; it was a highly competitive, college entrance preparatory school, drawing kids from all over the city, and located in what was then a poor black community. It was a couple of electric trolley bus rides away from where we lived; I remember the bus often losing connection with the electric trolley lines as we went around sharp corners. I don’t recall any racial conflict or any animus between whites and blacks; my recollections are that we all accepted each other and socialized together in class, in sports and during school hours. I don’t know what the experiences were like for our fellow black students; there were only a handful in a class of about 250. The Civil War and slavery and Ohio’s role was covered pretty extensively in our Ohio history class; we were exceedingly proud of our Generals like Grant and Sherman and of our state’s many Presidents (although some like Harding were quite corrupt), but not to my recollection the underground railway which ran through Cincinnati and up the state of Ohio and eventually to Canada. We were taught nothing about the City of Cincinnati’s long history of race and ethnic riots dating as far back as 1792, often with white mobs attacking black homes and businesses, other riots with the city’s Catholics and Protestants attacking each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cincinnati_riots  After school and after sports practice, we each went back to our own local neighborhoods where we hung out with friends and classmates who lived closest to us; for me there was not much social life around the school other than class and sports. That probably changed later when we had access to cars, but I left the school after the 9th grade. I was aware and conscious of my status as a Catholic kid from a broken home and not about to share all the feeling and emotion that entailed. I cannot remember much sharing on the emotional level with my classmates at the time on any issue (let alone race relations), after all I was a young boy entering puberty, and we were all trying to be “both tough and cool” with decidedly mixed success. I do have a very vague recollection from the 50’s of knife fights among white gangs at Withrow HS, close to my grandparents’ home, in the aftermath of football games – Cincinnati’s own version of West Side Story.

During this time period, we went to Arkansas with Dad on a family vacation combined with his work; he was serving as a lawyer investigating new manufacturing sites for Baldwin Pianos, and he was being courted to locate a new piano manufacturing plant in Arkansas. Little Rock had been the scene of crazy white parents screaming at little boys and girls going to school because of the color of their skins, of a crazy Governor defying the US government, of armed US troops protecting little children not much older than my brother, sisters and myself. This was beyond comprehension in what I had thought and was carefully taught was a great, civilized nation. We had learned of the evils of the recently defeated Nazis; we were in a cold war with the USSR, and now we were seeing another bleaker side to our own nation. We were being courted, and our hosts went out of their way to dismiss the naked racism as a fringe, not the real hospitable welcoming Arkansas.

I remember noticing and asking about the signs for colored and white drinking fountains. Dad explained the history and evils of segregation in the South. We drove down to an oxbow close to the Mississippi River; along the way we saw black laborers picking cotton with big sacks on their backs, and again I asked why was this still going on. Dad explained the history of slavery, sharecropping and tenant farming. Ultimately, Baldwin opened manufacturing plants in Conway and Fayetteville, Arkansas.

In the late 50’s and early 60’s, Dad was also negotiating the opening of a new Baldwin piano manufacturing plant in Greenwood, Miss. in the middle of the Mississippi delta. This was a town with an interesting history to put it gently – the community where Emmett Till was lynched and the area where SNCC was organizing Freedom Summers. https://www.propublica.org/article/ghosts-of-greenwood Dad was later full of memories and reminiscences about negotiating with the town leaders, as Baldwin would be operating with an integrated workforce and hiring local blacks in its factory. I never heard why they selected Greenwood, Miss. for the new Baldwin plant.

I think we were taught that racism was a Southern disease not applicable in the North. We were in for a shock.

Going to School Back East

Soon after, I went off to a small WASPy prep school back east. I heard more racist commentary from some of my fellow students in my three years there than I’ve heard in the rest of my life. Much of the commentary concerned the Portugese kitchen staff who prepared our meals. I was unable then and have never been able to comprehend it from such intelligent and well-educated, young soon-to-be men. It was painful; they were talking about my public high school friends from black, Asian, Jewish and Hispanic backgrounds, and my step mom, brothers and sisters who were Jewish. At the time, I thought the kids talking this hateful drivel were just poorly brought up, and this came from their parents and their home lives, and I looked down on them for it – not that I had any stature at all to do so. I think that Mom, Dad and our grandmother taught us that’s not how well brought up people think and talk; that was for uneducated bigots. Now I think and understand it was the norm for many of my classmates’ privileged and exclusive circumstances, their upper class WASP upbringings, and the particular time in their personal development. In reflection I wonder now what the Latin American students attending our school thought about all of this. I don’t think the teachers or the school leaders encouraged it, but certainly most did not do enough to educate and disapprove the pervasive racism and classism, and to model right behavior from the top. I went to visit with one of my classmates for a weekend, and we went out for the evening to hang out with some of his neighborhood pals. At the end they turned to petty vandalism of front yard ornaments in poor working class neighborhoods yelling “white trash” and “proles”. I still cannot believe or understand this from a fellow classmate who prior to that event I had always thought a good friend, and I do know he grew out of it in a big way once he was in college.

The education was excellent, but narrowed to the US and Europe, to Greece and Rome – a classical liberal arts education, very focused on “white” history, literature and culture. One class in Asian History has always stuck with me, as the only time I learned about Asia, which was about to play such a large part in our nation’s immediate future. I still vividly remember the Cuban missile crisis and wondering and waiting for the nuclear destruction about to rain down on us from Russia.

This was the period of two towering, charismatic figures -- JFK and MLK who in their shortened brilliant lives and early deaths inspired all of us of my generation and in so many ways marked all of us for the rest of our lives. We, as a generation, have fallen far short of the early idealism they inspired in us. The March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech was the bookend – the end of our high school and the start of college. It was riveting and inspirational, but in some ways it did not prepare and prefigure our nation for the horrors of the assassinations about to come and the war in Vietnam that would wrench our nation apart.

I went to a private college with a student body and a campus and orientation virtually the same as prep school. We had only one African American in our freshman class of 250; I cannot begin to imagine the loneliness he likely experienced. I did not know him well; he became a campus leader of SNCC and went on to become a bankruptcy judge in Detroit and Flint. Our freshman year, a senior named Ralph Allen gave a talk on his experience in Freedom Summer with SNCC; he had been registering voters in Americus, GA, was arrested, held without bail for three months, and charged with and convicted of sedition against the state of Georgia. The following year, Ivanhoe Donaldson, by then a prominent SNCC organizer, came to campus to recount efforts to register voters and feed starving sharecroppers in Mississippi. I was riveted by his ability to switch back and forth between the argots of the campus academic, the sharecropper, the college kid, and the ghetto kid as he told his tale and inspired me.

I spent my Junior Year in Paris, learning the history of the US, Europe, the Middle East, Russia and Africa from the very different perspectives of the French academie. The French were still fresh from their humiliating colonial defeats in Algeria and Vietnam, and they had much to teach us about the rest of the world. We not only failed to learn; we tore apart our nation in Vietnam, radicalized our youth and did indescribable and long lasting damage to our nation’s unity and the progress of LBJ’s Great Society programs. To my eyes, the French at the time seemed immune to the racism that infected the US and looked down on us as uncivilized Americans for it, much as we would much later look down on South Africa. Africans and African students seemed at ease in French society -- very little did I know or understand about either the French or the Africans living, working and studying there. When back at college for my senior year, I took a class in African History that began to fill an absolute void in my 16 years of education to that point and provided a start in understanding Pan-Africanism, the impacts of colonialism and the post colonial efforts to craft and create modern nation states in Africa, and the sharp divides by tribe and religion that made it so difficult. We learned the writings and thinking of Franz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure and the other great African thinkers and leaders of the age.

I returned to the US, enlightened, naïve, inspired and exceedingly self-righteous. While driving back home after college graduation, a friend asked me whether Cincinnati was likely to have a riot as Detroit and Newark had. I replied “no, not a chance, it’s a very conservative place”. Shortly after we arrived, riots broke out in Avondale, where some of my friends from junior high lived. The next day, we went down to City Hall; several black ministers were explaining to the City Council the conditions of life in the black community. The National Guard paraded outside the Council Chambers, and the ministers walked out saying they would not be intimidated by a show of military force. Dad and his friend Fred Lazarus became engaged at this time with many other local business and civic leaders to improve economic opportunities in the black community. Ann Bunis was the only one of my parents’ friends that I can remember who stayed deeply engaged with the black community and the struggle for economic opportunity in Cincinnati.

Later on that summer, I went to visit a friend from our year in Paris who lived in Jackson, Miss. We were discussing the future of the nation, the emerging Black Power movement and the ideas of Stokeley Carmichael and H. Rap Brown that blacks should organize in black communities and committed whites should organize and work in poor white communities. He suggested that we drive down to meet and talk with Charles Evers (whose brother had been murdered by the KKK) in Fayette to seek his insights and wisdom. When we arrived, we had no idea where his office was. So we screwed up our courage and went over to a white state trooper on the side of the road and asked for directions, me thinking that we might end up in a ditch. He politely pointed out where we could find Mr. Evers. He was in the middle of leading a local boycott of white merchants who were mistreating their black customers. He spoke to us of the importance of organizing first and foremost on the issues of direct impact to the local community – the issues that you could change locally.

Law School in Virginia

That fall, I entered UVa Law School. There was one African American law student in our 250 person law school class; she went on to a distinguished career with the Legal Defense Fund and helped lead me to a career in Legal Services. I ran into an old family friend, and as we passed the time, I asked what the undergrads thought of the law school. He replied “they think you’re a bunch of commies”; I responded “sounds like my kind of people, what do they mean by that”. He answered, “over at the law school, you believe in Brown v. Board of Education and school integration; many of the undergrads here are still stuck in Massive Resistance”. That made for an interesting introduction to a “public” university in the South. The next spring MLK was murdered, and RFK was assassinated. I’d been walking precincts for Kennedy’s presidential bid and was devastated. The nation burst into flames, especially Washington DC, not far away. I remember reading every word of the Kerner Commission report, trying to understand what was going on. Later that summer, anti-war protests at the Democratic Convention were disrupted by a police riot and running battles between the officers and the young white protestors throughout downtown Chicago. Nixon rode the white law and order backlash to electoral victory and proceeded to further enmesh US troops in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and slow and divert the nation’s progress towards the Great Society.

That summer I was driving a cab in Boston learning the city’s neighborhoods and communities, reading Dostoevsky and Malcolm X while waiting for passengers. One night I was driving my passenger and his guitar from the South End to Roxbury, there was a riot going on in Dudley Square after a Smokey Robinson concert in nearby Franklin Park. As we approached, I asked uncertainly “what do we do now”; he replied “keep your head down, your foot on the gas and don’t stop for anything”. In the smallest of small worlds, the next summer we remembered each other as we were working together in the Franklin Field legal services office – that night seared in both of our memories.

The next fall back at the law school, I began working with the local Community Action Project on what was for me a mind opening survey of food and nutrition needs in two nearby poor rural counties – Cumberland and Buckingham. This survey was to collect data in support of what would become the Commodity Foods and Food Stamps programs. Most of the community members I surveyed were black subsistence farmers who occasionally worked in a local saw mill for cash. Some were living in tarpaper shacks, and others lived in solid, hand-built wood homes. They had lived in these communities for generations. They often had no regular monthly income, and electricity use was limited, making it difficult for their children to read their school books in the winter evenings. I was advised to always leave the county before sundown as the Klan ruled the night, and my little VW was easy to spot and confirmed my outsider status. Nearby Farmville was the last community in the Commonwealth of Virginia to integrate its public schools, which happened while I was in law school (they had been closed for a decade due to Massive Resistance).

During this period, we often went to DC for anti-war protests and poor people’s campaign events. They drew very different crowds, but many of the same singers and performers from Richie Havens to Joan Baez. The high point in my memory was Richie Havens performing “Freedom” on the Washington Mall. There was a lot of tear gas afterwards as the police attacked the crowds they wanted to disperse.

My final year was marked by the killings of young unarmed student protestors at Kent State, Jackson State and the Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina. UVa students came out of their fraternity houses, their prized lodgings on the university’s Lawn to protest and were met with volleys of tear gas and indiscriminate mass arrests, from the head of the YAF to the head of the fraternity council. I had come to appreciate the enormous moral courage of Southerners black and white as they confronted segregation and the residues of Jim Crow in the South; I did not yet understand or comprehend how completely and just as badly racism infected the North.

Boston and Legal Services

During summer of ‘69, I was lucky enough to be working as a summer intern in a two lawyer Boston Legal Assistance Project Office on Blue Hill Ave. and to begin a long and fulfilling career in Legal Services. I arrived shortly after one of the two lawyers left to take another job in DC, and I inherited her caseload of public assistance cases and learned to master the intricacies and complexities of the federal and state rules and regulations governing the lives of the poor in order to defend and represent my clients. At the time, Roxbury and that portion Dorchester along Blue Hill Ave. were the centers of the middle class, working class and poor African American community in Boston, the site of public housing projects and welfare offices for the poorest, the district courts where a steady stream of evictions and minor criminal cases were handled in nearly automatic fashion and of the small merchants and landlords who struggled to get by. My clients were predominantly African American women and their children, and I grew to learn their strength, warmth, courage and tenacity, and the resiliency of the extended black family support network. The police were mostly white, the judges mostly white, the social workers mostly white, the teachers mostly white, the legal services lawyers mostly white, the doctors mostly white, and our clients mostly black – hardly an ideal situation to provide equal justice. Many were allies; some were oppressors; some changed from allies to oppressors when they changed jobs and responsibilities. That complexion would change over time, but the underlying conditions of the poor did not. After a few years, our office was enveloped in a dispute between the older and more experienced white lawyers and the new black attorneys who wanted to force out the former and take over leadership of the office. Everyone lost, and especially the clients who lost both the experienced and dedicated white attorneys and promising young black attorneys. Later I worked in mostly Italian East Boston and the North End, and then in the South End, a melting pot undergoing rapid gentrification at that time. The conditions of the poor, their allies, and their oppressors were exactly the same. Racism added an extra dimension, however. When local white youth gangs harassed and tried to run blacks out of public housing in East Boston, the local police did not respond to protect them until one of the attorneys in our local office brought suit in federal court. http://bostonlocaltv.org/catalog/V_1CMKWJMRS5WDOYQ Segregation in Boston’s public housing projects continued well into the late 80’s. https://www.bostonfairhousing.org/timeline/1988-NAACP-v-BHA.html When I lived there, Boston was one of the most racially segregated in terms of housing patterns (with the single exception of the South End) and racist cities in the North; that was equally true whether you were a poor black kid or a famous black athlete. Racism was used to grind down poor black communities and affirmative action to uplift a few. Poor white communities benefited by the Great Society programs such as Medicaid, Medicare and community health centers or Head Start as much as the poor black communities. The poor white communities were dismantled by urban renewal projects, by the expansion of Massport, or the destruction of the West End, and nothing was put in to replace the affordable housing, and these working class neighborhoods were destroyed. It was systemic oppression of the poor in housing, education, jobs, criminal justice and daily subsistence, and the police were there as enforcers to keep it all running. The politics of busing and abortion were adroitly used as wedge issues to divide working class voters who had important economic issues in common.

Some oppressors were truly evil monsters; others were corrupt, but the system that had appointed them and selected them, then protected them at great cost, until finally it didn’t, and the dam broke. Judge Jerome Troy of the Dorchester District Court was one of them, and it took the concerted effort of many lawyers and countless hours before he was finally removed from the bench. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_P._Troy  His more benign successor as Presiding Justice of the Dorchester District Court had a checkered performance in dealing with African American defendants as well, and was eventually exiled to serve as a judge in white suburbia. https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/volumes/409/409mass590.html  

The Boston Housing Authority and Boston School Board were similarly bastions of long-standing patronage and highly parochial incompetence in delivering their vital services to the poor, and it took decades of litigation, protest and political pressure to improve public education and housing – an effort that continues to the present day. https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/26/archives/boston-housing-authority-is-placed-in-receivership-south-boston.html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_crisis and https://commonwealthmagazine.org/education/state-to-assert-new-oversight-of-boston-schools/

Boston then comprised a series of ethnically defined neighborhoods/enclaves for Irish, Italian, black, Chinese, Puerto Rican and Jewish residents. The best public schools at the time were out in the white suburbs like Wellesley, Lexington, Brookline or Newton and nationally renowned. Boston had examination schools like Boston Latin or Boston English with top-flight educations. However the high schools serving South Boston and Roxbury were uniformly poorly performing when school busing was ordered between them. You may ask why Judge Garrity did not order busing from the inner city to the excellent schools in the suburbs, which would have been a much better educational remedy. However, it was the Boston School Board who had committed the acts of intentional segregation that were at issue in the case, not the underlying and continuing patterns of residential segregation between working class Boston and its affluent white suburbs. The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts has signaled a full-scale retreat from voluntary busing and other race-based approaches used by school districts in Seattle and Louisville to achieve school integration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parents_Involved_in_Community_Schools_v._Seattle_School_District_No._1

The Boston Police and Fire Departments were then staffed by white officers because the standards and admission tests for getting hired were stacked in favor of whites and their relatives, and against blacks and Hispanics, such that less than 1% of firefighters were African-American when the litigation began in 1970. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Society_of_Vulcans During the worst of the Boston violence about mandatory busing, the Boston police held strong in enforcing the law and keeping the peace in South Boston, Charlestown and Roxbury whatever their personal views may have been. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/09/12/archives/the-men-in-the-middle-boston.html

In 1975, a liberal Democratic reformer, Michael Dukakis of Brookline, was elected Governor of Massachusetts. The state budget was in deficit, and he proceeded to slash programs for the poorest of the poor. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/01/archives/budget-fight-on-in-massachusetts-governor-and-legislature-at-odds.html He eliminated medical coverage and public assistance for the very poorest of the poor, who also happened to be disproportionately black. He cut most social programs by 10% across the board. He not only failed to protect the most vulnerable among us, many of whom were minorities; he utterly dismantled their safety net.

At the time, Massachusetts was beset by losses of local factories producing textiles, shoes and other staples of its manufacturing economy to Southern states with lower wages and new, modern more cost efficient factories. Towns like Fall River, New Bedford, Lawrence, Lowell, Springfield, Holyoke and Pittsfield were being decimated by factory closings. Laid off black and white factory workers depended on UI, AFDC, and GR to support their families and to pay for their medical care. Were there better alternatives than cutting their medical care and public assistance? Of course there were, and Dukakis and the legislature did increase some taxes as a part of the package. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/06/01/archives/budget-fight-on-in-massachusetts-governor-and-legislature-at-odds.html  As a result, after his first term, Governor Dukakis had equally offended both his more liberal supporters and his more conservative critics; he was defeated in the party primary by Ed King, a very conservative, business supported Democrat who had run the Mass Port Authority.

Representative Mel King (no relation), clad in his classic dashiki, said at the time, the most important anti-poverty program is a good job, with good wages and benefits; he promoted economic development in poor communities, like the South End and Roxbury. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_King  Dukakis made economic development in the old factory towns a high priority. Dukakis’ second and third term coincided with the Massachusetts Miracle – the growth of the high tech industry around Route 128, the circumferential highway encircling Boston and its inner suburbs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Miracle One could credit Mel King and Mike Dukakis with perspicacity and great economic foresight, or at the very least they were saying the right things at the right time when the Massachusetts’ economy was approaching the springboard for a technological transformation and rejuvenation. However the old factory jobs and opportunities were not so readily replaced or duplicated by the growth of the tech industry; these were very different kinds of jobs requiring a different skill set and higher educational achievement. Dukakis did later redeem himself at least in my eyes by pushing for and securing a far reaching health reform package.

California and NHELP

I moved to California in 1979 and worked all over the country helping legal services attorneys with health law litigation and legislation for the next four years. I worked for the National Health Law Project, headed by a civil rights attorney, Sylvia Drew Ivie, the daughter of Dr. Charles Drew. We had a contract with the Office of Civil Rights to research, write and train attorneys on discrimination in health care.

In Simkins v. Moses Cone Hospital, the court decided that segregated hospital facilities had to end. https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/simkins-v-cone-1963/ In Cook v. Ochsner Medical Foundation where New Orleans area private hospitals saw few or no Medicaid or uninsured patients, the court held that hospitals receiving federal hospital construction funds had to provide a reasonable volume of free care to the uninsured unable to pay and could not discriminate by refusing to serve Medicaid and Medicare patients. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/319/603/2135130/ and see discussion of Hill Burton and Cook v. Ochsner at https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3515&context=ilj

The Supreme Court in Washington v. Davis had moved from proof of disparate impacts to proof of intentional discrimination in assessing the constitutionality of a government’s discriminatory actions. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/426/229/ What did that mean? If, for example, the Boston City Council had proposed to close the neighborhood community health clinics in Roxbury but left open the clinics in South Boston and East Boston, that would show “disparate impact”. If they had expressed their reasoning in racial tones, that would show intent to discriminate.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, sex or national origin; it applied to schools and travel, voting and employment, education, health care and any other program or service funded in whole or in part by the federal government. So that meant a doctor or hospital receiving Medicare or Medicaid payments could not discriminate, and neither could the Medicaid agency. Under Title VI both intentional discrimination and disparate impacts are prohibited, according to the federal agencies responsible for implementing it. “This prohibition applies to intentional discrimination as well as to procedures, criteria or methods of administration that appear neutral but have a discriminatory effect on individuals because of their race, color, or national origin. Policies and practices that have such an effect must be eliminated unless a recipient can show that they were necessary to achieve a legitimate nondiscriminatory objective. Even if there is such a reason the practice cannot continue if there are alternatives that would achieve the same objectives but that would exclude fewer minorities.” https://www.hhs.gov/civil-rights/for-individuals/special-topics/needy-families/civil-rights-requirements/index.html The Supreme Court in Alexander v. Sandoval held that a private right of action under Title VI is not available for disparate impacts, but only for intentional discrimination. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/532/275/ That’s lawyer talk for you lose unless you have racist intent expressed by government policy makers on tape or in writing.

Racism in health care and coverage takes so many different forms. In Arizona, the state delayed implementing Medicaid from 1965  ‘til 1982-3, largely because they did not want to pay the costs to cover their very large Native American populations who often have little access to health care and live with many untreated medical conditions. When Arizona finally did so, it adopted mandatory managed care (HMOs) and competitive markets for its entire program. Public hospitals formed public HMOs and competed successfully. https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.6.4.46 When the Affordable Care Act passed, Arizona implemented the Medicaid expansion for the working poor and reduced its uninsured rates from over 17% to about 10%. Nearby Texas could readily do the same, but to this date has failed and refused to do so, leaving its public and rural hospitals, its counties and local property tax payers to shoulder the burdens of a system with highly inequitable access for the poor, whether Latino, Black, White or mixed race.

Many Southern states with lots of uninsured have very favorable federal matching rates and strong economic incentives to expand Medicaid for the poor; the ACA provides a 90/10 match to extend Medicaid to the working poor.  Those with Republican Governors and legislatures like Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina and Georgia failed and refused, thus denying care and coverage to large numbers of low income African Americans and Hispanics and Whites who would otherwise qualify. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/usc-brookings-schaeffer-on-health-policy/2020/02/19/there-are-clear-race-based-inequalities-in-health-insurance-and-health-outcomes/  This would improve health coverage and improve health outcomes. https://healthpayerintelligence.com/news/medicaid-expansion-may-impact-patient-outcomes-in-southern-states Sedentary lifestyles, poor access to health care, smoking, poverty and poor diets combine with a regional hostility to public programs for the poor (mostly paid for by taxes from the citizens of more affluent states). https://theconversation.com/5-charts-show-why-the-south-is-the-least-healthy-region-in-the-us-89729

There are some relatively straightforward solutions to help poor African Americans that would be highly beneficial to poor rural whites as well.

https://tcf.org/content/report/racism-inequality-health-care-african-americans/?agreed=1 Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, New Mexico and West Virginia are all comparably poor states that have expanded Medicaid to their working poor. There have been some truly exemplary Southern Governors and mayors leading the efforts to improve education, health status and incomes in the region, but it is still plagued by the racist reactions to civil rights for minorities and by a nearly implacable and hard to comprehend hostility to public programs so essential to the poor of all races and largely financed by the taxpayers of more affluent regions.

During these years, I burned with a white-hot anger at those who I perceived as oppressing the poor and was quite intolerant of any with opposing viewpoints. Only at sea did I find some surcease from the burning anger I felt towards those who were making life so tough for my clients and attacking the very basis of their subsistence – the Dukakis and the King Administrations in Massachusetts and the Reagan Administration nationally. The Reagan Administration began a decades long trend of Robin Hood in reverse – cutting programs for the poor to pay for vast tax cuts for the rich. These perverse economic policies have prevailed with intermittent intervals of forward progress for the last 40 years, creating a yawning gap between the very rich and the rest of us. In some states, the declining support for the safety net has been far worse while in others, significant progress has been made. Starting with Nixon, there has been a move to incarceration, particularly of brown and black men; this has been accompanied by a progressive abandonment of the nation’s commitment to civil rights and equal opportunity for every US citizen.

Los Angeles and California

But let’s start with California. When I moved here in 1979, the papers were filled with the story of Eulia Love who had been killed by the LA cops who were trying to discontinue her gas service for an unpaid gas bill. Shortly after I crossed (in the crosswalk, with the light) the street near where I had just moved in – excellent behavior by a Boston pedestrian’s standards --, the nearby armed and angry LAPD officer gave me holy hell because I didn't push the little yellow button and wait for the walk signal to cross. Welcome to LA. I felt that I was being welcomed to the Wild West and a nascent police state, not that I knew or understood much of anything about CA, just a first few striking impressions to counterbalance all the friendly smiles and “have a nice day” salutations so very different from buttoned down Boston.

In 1992, a large group of LAPD officers were filmed while brutally beating Rodney King at the end of a high-speed police chase for drunken driving and speeding. To the outrage of the citizenry, all four officers were acquitted; riots tore apart the city for six days, and many local businesses were burned. The National Guard and US Army were called in. This was the same scenario as the Watts Rebellion of 1965. After this, the process of reforming the LAPD into a much improved and more accountable police department proceeded in fits and starts for the next 28 years. There were notable backslides such as the police riot against peaceful immigrant riot protestors on May Day.

LAPD now considers itself a national model for police reform. So how did it perform during the 2020 protests? Early reports are that the local police focused too much on arresting curfew violations and dispersing large numbers of peaceful protesters with beatings and rubber bullets, and failed to adequately stop, catch and arrest the small number of actual looters. It’s too early to have a comprehensive report, but my impression is that they made serious mistakes. The looting that did occur was primarily in wealthy shopping areas like downtown Santa Monica, Melrose, Beverly Hills, the Grove and Fairfax; in other words it was highly targeted and opportunistic; it was operating in the chaos and considerable shadow of large peaceful protests. As distinct from the rage-filled burning rebellions of ’65 and ’92 that so damaged the South LA neighborhoods, the 2020 protests have been very large, multi-ethnic and largely peaceful. The National Guard was called in primarily to safeguard the local merchants in the higher income shopping districts this month, not to patrol LA’s poor communities as in ‘65 and ‘92.

We need a careful look at policing behavior in the 2020 protests; did they needlessly harass and beat peaceful protesters, did they miss the boat in stopping the looting of local merchants? Why did they do so, was it the police taking matters into their own hands, or were they taking their orders from our elected officials who made some bad tactical mistakes?

I’m not someone who would go around chanting “defund the police”; it's the wrong message, but it’s way past time to get guns off the streets, to get AR 15s and their like off the streets, to end open carry laws and casual gun violence in the home and to shift the police role from warriors to guardians of the peace. It’s also way past time to shift our efforts from criminalizing drug and alcohol addiction to treating addiction and mental illness. It’s time to get people out of state prisons and into treatment for drug crimes and out of county jails and into effective mental health care for mental illness. You have to take the racism out of law enforcement and the criminal justice system in which it is deeply embedded. Money should follow the policy shifts.

California is a state carved from the territory taken from Mexico in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, and it’s a state where Native Americans were slaughtered and enslaved by the Spanish and then slaughtered some more by the American settlers. The Gold Rush of ‘49 quickly filled the state with fortune seekers and feverish gold dreams from all over the world -- its non-native population grew from 20,000 in 1848 to 380,000 in ten years, to 40 million today, many immigrants striving for the American dream. Over the past 160 years California has been a very racist and exclusionary state towards Asians, particularly the Chinese and Japanese, towards Mexicans and other Latinos while at the same time relying heavily on their hard manual labor. The Chinese in California helped build its farms and levees, gold mines and railroads starting with the Gold Rush; then in 1882 they were barred from immigrating to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act The Japanese immigrants played a key role in developing the state’s agriculture beginning in 1900; they were forbidden to buy land, to become citizens, to immigrate to the US in 1924, and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were then rounded up and detained as potential subversives without trial or judicial recourse during the Second World War. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/5views/5views4e.htm Asians in California now “succeed” in school and in incomes at far higher rates than non-Hispanic whites. Mexican Americans have been lynched, denied voting and citizenship rights, denied public education opportunities, illegally deported, and gerrymandered out of political influence; at the same time that they have become the state’s fast growing demographic, the backbones of the many agricultural, construction, service and industrial sectors in California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mexican_Americans

When I moved here, I loved the diversity of faces and color tones on the streets of LA, and it has ever become more so. California’s demography has greatly diversified over the past 40 years, and it has become a multi-ethnic melting pot of immigrant working families from all over the world, but particularly from Asia, Mexico and Central America. https://belonging.berkeley.edu/next-california Hiking on our local trails, you hear languages from all over the world and a willingness to swap stories. The voter backlash from older and whiter citizens to these demographic changes have included Proposition 13 to roll back and freeze the rising local property taxes that supported public schools, Proposition 187 to exclude undocumented immigrants from health services and public education, Prop 209 to eliminate any form of affirmative action to improve the opportunities of ethnic minorities, and Prop 227 to end bi-lingual education and require English only education in public schools. Beginning in the early 80’s, California’s tough on crime leaders at the state and local levels ousted the State Supreme Court’s liberal majority, and locked up a growing percent of the state’s black and brown population for increasingly long sentences that peaked in about 2005. https://www.vera.org/downloads/pdfdownloads/state-incarceration-trends-california.pdf  I remember visiting the medium security ward at San Quentin along with many black and brown family members seeing their loved ones, and asking why the ward was 95% black and brown and what crimes had they committed; the answer it was overwhelmingly drug crimes that they were serving time for. So we have been filling our prisons to beyond capacity rather than treating the illness of addiction.

In the 1970s before I moved here, I’m told that California had a strong and effective public health system, public education system and public college system. Two of the three have foundered although one (health care) has mostly recovered; the public college system by contrast has steadily flourished and expanded, reflecting the bi-partisan support it has enjoyed with California policy makers – very different from the 60’s when it was the convenient punching bag for the Governor Ronald Reagan and his supporters.

California Health Care

I’ll start with health care, which I know best. California once had a large and extensive system of public hospitals, which cared for the poor regardless of income or citizenship status, and many local district hospitals (public entities with taxing authority) that cared for all district residents. After the passage of Medicaid in 1965 and the state’s implementation, which covered many of California’s poor, public hospitals began to close – often then acquired by private hospitals. After the expansion of Medicaid to the working poor in the early 70s, many more public hospitals closed until by the early ’80s only about ten large counties still had them. The closure of these public hospitals located in poor communities meant that the state’s uninsured lost their assured local access to health care, to be discussed in greater detail later.

In 1982-3, California, then under the leadership of Governor Jerry Brown, eliminated health coverage for the working poor (the Medically Indigent Adults or MIAs), exactly as Massachusetts had done 7 years before. I still do not understand why Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and esteemed Department of Health Services Director Beverlee Myers allowed that to happen or what their vision was. Yes, the state was in a steep recession causing a big budget deficit, but it was short and succeeded by very rapid economic growth. This cut endured for the next thirty years, and it inflicted a lot of fully preventable pain on the poorest and most vulnerable Californians.

The state’s uninsured rate steadily increased from about 3 million in ‘83 until over 7 million Californians were uninsured (up to 20% of residents under age 65) at the peak. Hispanics were disproportionately represented among the uninsured due to their over representation in low wage jobs and in those sectors of the economy like agriculture or restaurants where employers typically did not offer coverage. Non Hispanic White and black Californians were uninsured at roughly equal rates.

California also embraced “price competition through selective contracting” to slow the rise in the costs of medical care. Many private hospitals then exited the Medicaid program (higher percentages of Hispanics and African American) and focused their care and services on the more highly paid private sector patients (higher percentage of non-Hispanic whites). This led to a sharply delineated, three tier system of medicine for Californians: tier 1 (the most expensive) for the privately insured, tier 2 (the most comprehensive) for the publicly insured, and tier 3 (primarily emergency care) for the uninsured, supplemented by local community clinics in those communities where they existed. Prior to California’s implementation of the ACA, tiers 2 and 3 were of roughly equivalent size – about 7 million each.

If you have any doubts about how segregated by race and class the health system has become and remains to this day in LA, I’d invite you to walk through the wards of St. Francis Hospital of Lynnwood and Martin Luther King Hospital in Willowbrook, and then go for a comparable walk through the wards of Cedars Sinai and UCLA Reagan (Westwood) and Santa Monica Hospitals. Then I’d suggest visiting MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston to see what a hospital system integrated by class and race looks like.

California’s 58 counties are responsible under state law for health care to their uninsured indigent residents. However each county sets its own eligibility standard, and some very large counties like Orange and San Diego take the position that they are not responsible for their undocumented uninsured residents because they are not lawful residents. My consistent impression is that the hostility and racism in California has been far more severe towards Latino immigrant communities than towards African Americans; it is a toxic witch’s brew of race, language and nationalist xenophobia towards a hard working, low wage, exploited minority, that seems to be pretty deeply engrained. State funding for county health is not equitably distributed among the counties based on reasonable and transparent criteria such as their numbers of uninsured in poverty, but rather are based on antiquated distribution formulas dating from 1979 and 1982-3 respectively, they bear little relevance to the numbers and distribution of California’s uninsured today. The net effects of the lack of coverage and of the state’s financing disparities is to disadvantage some of the poorest counties with lots of uninsured Hispanic farmworkers like Tulare or Imperial; it also disadvantages health care for undocumented immigrant workers in the large, heavily populated Southern California counties without public hospitals (i.e. San Diego and Orange).

After the passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in 2010, California, which had been trying to expand coverage for two and a half decades after the MIA dump, was well positioned and strongly financially incentivized to implement the ACA; it quickly and successfully did so under the leadership of the Schwarzenegger (R) and Brown (D) administrations. Public sector coverage expanded quite dramatically -- 5 million new eligibles in MediCal and up to 1.5 million newly enrolled in private individual (but publicly subsidized) coverage through Covered California. California’s uninsured numbers then fell precipitously (to less than 3 million uninsured Californians, about 7% of those under 65), and it demographically changed. About 60% of the remaining uninsured Californians are undocumented as opposed to less than 20% prior to the ACA. After a long, 15-year struggle in the state legislature and with successive Democratic and Republican Governors, California has begun to cover some of the younger (children and young adults) undocumented uninsured through MediCal.

Since the early 80’s, California has been changing its delivery system from fee for service, reasonable cost rates, open panel systems towards capitation, negotiated payment rates, and closed panel systems. That means less than nothing to most of you, but essentially it means moving from a traditional Medicare model with lots of choice of providers towards a Kaiser model with a much smaller and more tightly controlled panel of providers. The Kaiser delivery system is nimbler and more flexible, more coordinated and often more accountable for the care it delivers than the Medicare model is. Kaiser’s large size often impedes its rapid change, and in California it has been supplemented with mixed success by public HMOs and by private HMOs from both the non-profit and for profit sectors. Some deliver excellent care; others not so much.

In the process of California’s implementation of delivery system reforms, California hospital systems ended up closing their unprofitable, less competitive hospitals or selling them to large for profit and non-profit hospital chains, which then closed the money losing wards and services (like ERs and trauma centers for a time). These closures happen most commonly for those smaller community and district hospitals based in low-income communities with a payer mix that includes high percentages of publicly insured or uninsured patients. Closures and sales to large non-profit and for profit hospital chains also have occurred in the state’s rural communities which don’t have enough providers to begin with and lack the high percentages of patients with well-reimbursed private employment based coverage that undergird the large profitable hospital systems in the cities and the suburbs. In essence our state’s delivery system reforms have been hollowing out our vital delivery systems to minorities living in inner city and rural California. If one looks at the data, we are developing health care system ever more segregated by race and class without any explicit intent to do so.

California’s public hospitals have been facing immense evolutionary challenges as coverage expands and shifts towards better-coordinated delivery systems. Their historical model had been episodic and emergency room and inpatient centric care, and the new delivery system places a primacy on strong and effective primary care, strong outpatient delivery networks and on continuity of patient-physician care. When the state of California expanded coverage for prenatal care and deliveries in the late 80’s, public facilities lost their traditional roles in delivering babies for poor mothers to those private hospitals and doctors that offered more attractive and responsive maternity services in less crowded settings. Would public hospitals now close as so many of their previously uninsured and MediCal fee for service patients had moved into managed care coverage, or could they evolve sufficiently and quickly enough? To date, their necessary and important evolution has succeeded in keeping their doors open, their revenues flush, and their patients loyal. Covid 19 poses a new threat to their viability, and to date the Trump Administration has shown little capacity or interest in assuring the public hospitals and other safety net providers are kept open, with the Congressional largesse of $150 billion going primarily to large for profit hospital chains and those delivery systems with healthy bottom lines, not to the hospitals and doctors struggling with enormous caseloads of Covid 19 patients and disproportionate deaths of black and Latino patients.

Health coverage in and of itself does not equal, although it does contribute towards, good health outcomes, and those good and bad health outcomes vary widely by race and gender. For example Asian women in LA live on average to just short of 90 years of age; while African-American men in LA have a life expectancy of just over 72 years of age. https://usc.data.socrata.com/stories/s/Life-Expectancy-in-South-Los-Angeles/p3wg-4cc9/ Latinos live longer than do whites even though white incomes, wealth and education levels are far higher, probably due to the healthier lifestyles of new immigrants. 

Farm workers in California’s Central Valley have had a life expectancy of only 49 years of age; many are undocumented Hispanics. https://farmworkerfamily.org/information and California Institute for Rural Studies, In Their Own Words, Farm Worker Access to Health Care in Four California Regions (2002). Agricultural workers and food processors are particularly at risk from Covid 19 due to crowded living conditions, hazardous working conditions, low incomes, and little access to medical care. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/03042020/covid-farmworkers-california-climate-change-agriculture.  And it’s getting worse. https://abc7news.com/gavin-newsom-press-conference-today-coronavirus-in-california-covid-update-cases/6336809/

When I first heard that life expectancy statistic presented by UC Davis researchers, I remembered an oral argument I made before an appellate judge nearly 20 years earlier. We were challenging a Dukakis Administration policy limiting General Relief to individuals who were “unemployable” as evidenced by a medical finding, I was arguing for a broader definition of employability that included factors such as age, education, occupational status and training. The judge asked how old my client the plaintiff was and when I replied 50, he responded that wasn’t old after all he was 70 and rode horses early every morning. He was absolutely right for a distinguished jurist in excellent physical condition with a lifetime tenure on the state bench; he was wrong for a Spanish speaking woman of less than a sixth grade education who was worn down from working in the fields beginning at age 12. I wished that I had had that UC Davis study back 20 years earlier to back me up; the judge might have better understood and been more receptive to my oral argument. That little vignette really goes to the heart of the difficulty that law makers and policy makers and jurists encounter in setting and deciding social policy for people from radically different ethnic, economic, educational, income, cultural and class backgrounds and the importance of diversity in all branches of government.

What then happens for a population with entirely different and distinct mental abilities and capacities? The severely mentally ill (SMI) have far lower life expectancy than the general population – ranging from age 49 to age 6o depending on the state and its policies for the mentally ill. https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2006/apr/05_0180.htm They die of the very same diseases as the general population but at much more elevated rates and far sooner. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/directors/thomas-insel/blog/2011/no-health-without-mental-health.shtml

For its publicly insured, severely mentally ill population, California unfortunately separates mental health from physical health and from addiction treatment, and it creates barriers to practitioners from the three tri-furcated programs from readily communicating with each other about their common patient’s care. This siloed approach is exactly the wrong way to help those with serious mental illness. Too many mentally ill end up in county jails, state prisons or shot by the police when an approach by a mental health crisis counselor and consistent care and treatment from mental health counselors would be the right solution.

The state has embarked on pilot programs to coordinate and integrate these services into “whole person care” for some individuals with SMI; some pilots include law enforcement. https://www.aurrerahealth.com/publications/whole-person-care-mid-point-check-in/   The shift towards whole person care was moving too slowly to help people with multiple co-morbidities even before the arrival of Covid 19, which has now put anxiety levels for many into the stratosphere. Latinos, African Americans and Asians are far less likely than white Americans to seek and receive help for severe mental illness or addictions, partly due to cultural reasons, but also due to serious access issues for minorities and the lack of culturally appropriate care. https://www.calhealthreport.org/2018/07/26/minorities-much-less-likely-access-mental-health-care-state-data-suggests As a result, they end up with far higher rates of untreated mental illness. https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/covid19-behavioral-health-disparities-black-latino-communities.pdf

When Covid 19 hit in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, it appeared first in the highest income neighborhoods (exposure through international tourism on cruise ships and international plane flights), then it ravaged the state’s nursing homes (devastating patients and staff in the lowest quality settings most severely) and then the essential workers in the food industry (it has hit field workers and those in food processing the hardest). Imperial County, one of the state’s poorest and most agricultural counties was among the worst hit.  Central Valley farm workers and food processors are now being hard hit, Deaths have been concentrated among the low-income minorities with the worst health status, most crowded living conditions, and the least reliable access to vital medical services. Congress appropriated $150 billion to help providers dealing with the Covid crisis, specifically including reimbursements for care to the uninsured. To date, the Trump Administration has been far more focused on helping the largest for profit hospital chains than the safety nets. Its efforts to implement Congressional intent to assure the uninsured receive testing and follow up care at no cost to the patient have been largely invisible.

The Governor and California’s local public health authorities acted quickly and resolutely to halt the spread of the pandemic in its initial phases. California began reopening quite quickly extensively at the end of May coinciding with the Memorial Day holiday, and the spread is now increasing rapidly, particularly for those aged 18-40. Recently new Covid 19 cases at being detected at close to the truly alarming levels being seen in Arizona, Texas and Florida. State officials were quick to shut the economy down and allocate federal CARES Act funding to allay economic distress; they were slower and highly inefficient and ineffective, however, to process the deluge of UI applications and get checks out to laid off workers and their families, particularly those working in the gig economy, like the self employed, the nail salon workers, the barbers, the stylists, the musicians and artists.

State and local officials were rapid and proactive in sheltering and temporarily housing some of the most vulnerable homeless, a population that has been fast growing in California and is disproportionately comprised of African-Americans. However homeowner NIMBY-ism has reared its ugly head when counties tried to site the new shelters. Homelessness is rising fast due to the Covid 19 recession, and the local roads here in LA are filled at night with the newly homeless sleeping in their cars. State and local officials were far slower in protecting inmates and staff in some state prisons and county jails where outbreaks took hold, and the disease has spread widely, leading to deaths and releases of prisoners to mitigate the spreading infection. They were seemingly asleep at the switch in rapidly testing and protecting the most vulnerable in long term care settings, and assuring PPE for the low paid essential health staff who provide their daily care; recently they have markedly improved their performance and the state’s death rates in long term care have dropped.

California Education

A free public school education including elementary and high schools has been long enshrined and guaranteed by the Constitution of the State of California, and state funding for sectarian and doctrinal schools and religious doctrine is explicitly forbidden. http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb409nb2hr;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00001&toc.id=0&brand=calisphere California was nationally renowned for its excellent elementary and secondary public school education during the 50s, 60s and 70s. That is no longer the case. We have fallen to mid ranks in funding and to the lowest ranks in student achievement (we rank 38th). https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/study-california-schools-earn-low-grades-compared-to-nation  In another study, we rank 28th in school quality in preparing our students for their future success. http://blog.csba.org/quality-counts19/

So what happened? Like Massachusetts, California funded public education primarily with local property taxes. In Serrano v. Priest, the California Supreme Court required the state to equalize school funding among school districts. “For example, in Los Angeles County, where plaintiff children attend school, the Baldwin Park Unified School District expended only $577.49 to educate each of its pupils in 1968-1969; during the same year the Pasadena Unified School District spent $840.19 on every student; and the Beverly Hills Unified School District paid out $1,231.72 per child. (Cal. Dept. of Ed., Cal. Public Schools, Selected Statistics 1968-1969 (1970) Table IV-11, pp. 90-91.) The source of these disparities is unmistakable: in Baldwin Park the assessed valuation per child totaled only $3,706; in Pasadena, assessed valuation was $13,706; while in Beverly Hills, the corresponding figure was $50,885 -- a ratio of 1 to 4 to 13. (Id.)” https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/3d/18/728.html

Shortly after, Howard Jarvis, an apartment owner and conservative gadfly, seized on the issues of voter discontent about rising local property taxes to roll back and freeze the growth in local property taxes; this reduced local property taxes by about 57%. https://www.californiataxdata.com/pdf/Prop13.pdf  The state bailed out the cities, the counties and the school districts with block grants, and this essentially made local public education a state funded program – losing some important features of local accountability and flexibility. https://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/op/OP_998JCOP.pdf

As state revenues tightened, local school districts were squeezed, and school leaders responded with Prop 98, which guarantees a minimum share of the state’s General Fund to local schools, whether or not the state’s public school systems are doing an excellent job or a terrible job of educating the children in their care. This has backfired, setting a ceiling rather than a floor on state funding and detaching state funding from local school performance, dealing yet another blow to local school system accountability.

During the same time frame, Crawford v. LAUSD required the LA school district to desegregate its schools. Although its overall student body was 50/50 enrollment of white and minority children, the schools were typically either 90% white or 90% minority due to a variety of LAUSD policies on school siting and student school transfers.  https://law.justia.com/cases/california/supreme-court/3d/17/280.html In response to the court’s mandatory busing plan, many higher income parents at the time engaged in white flight to enroll their children to private schools – very much like the Southern segregation academies. This created havoc with public school financing dependent on average daily attendance, with measures of student performance, and with public support for local school systems. Well to do parents had served as an important check and goad on public school quality in Los Angeles; they now left the public schools.

Several years later, LAUSD’s teachers union (UTLA) went on strike for higher wages. One of the important non-salary concessions they negotiated was that teachers with longer tenure and greater experience could transfer from inner city to suburban schools. In other words, the better teachers could if they chose transfer away from teaching the students who most needed their better-developed teaching skills.

So the schools with the poorer minority students ended up with the less experienced teachers with less tenure and therefore more prone to layoffs, and a revolving door ensued as new teachers were either laid off in hard times or they transferred out as they gained greater teaching experience. Not surprisingly then, these poorer and minority students did not fare particularly well on achievement tests and had a harder time getting into college – an increasingly important passport to economic success.

Philanthropists and especially those leaders from industries highly dependent on a well-educated workforce, like Silicon Valley, began to invest in public charter schools. In California, these are public non-profits typically located in poor communities, often with an excellent record of success in graduating students who are well-prepared for college. Successful charters have grown like wildfire in Los Angeles and generally throughout California. Rather than seeking to emulate the keys to their success (more class time and greater flexibility and higher accountability for principals and teachers to promote students’ success), the public school teacher’s unions have tried to eliminate their charter competitors -- the very schools, which have recently offered the best opportunities to help children of color escape poverty.

Over the past six to seven years, California has been increasing school funding at the same time as student enrollment has been declining due to the baby bust. So California’s per student school funding has been increasing, and student performance has been inching up. We now have a crazy quilt mix of some excellent educational opportunities and some absolutely terribly performing schools with little to no accountability for school districts, school teachers and school principals and accompanied by particularly big educational challenges for black and brown students. https://gettingdowntofacts.com/sites/default/files/2018-09/GDTFII_Brief_OutcomesandDemographics.pdf  School leaders and state policy makers need to dramatically improve schools’ performance in educating students of color, and they need to do it now. They need to stop falling back on the excuse that in California we do not have enough funding, which is still at least partially true, but not a sufficient excuse. Covid 19 has in turn worsened the educational opportunities for students of color because of the gaping digital divide in their families access to computers and the technology needed for on line learning. The higher income families are resorting to in person teaching pods for their children – a financial challenge far too high for lower income families struggling to meet rent and food bills.

California Higher Education

College is now seen as and becoming the ever more necessary step and passport to a prosperous life, and thus ever more important to today’s high school students. There has been strong bi-partisan legislative support for the UC system, the CSU system and the community college system in California.

A very large percentage (63%) of California students are now attending college, and most (90%) go to the public colleges. College going has not been color blind, even in public institutions; it is influenced by your elementary and high school education, by the expectations of the parents and the aspirations of the students. College going rates are highest for Asians (83%), then for white non Hispanics (72%), and a good bit lower (in the high 50’s) for Hispanics and African American students. https://www.cde.ca.gov/nr/ne/yr19/yr19rel53.asp

Most high school graduates going on to college, go to the state’s community college system. “In 2017–18, more than 35 percent of all California high school completers enrolled at a community college, while approximately 12 percent enrolled at a CSU campus from high school and approximately 7 percent enrolled at a UC campus.” College attendance is highly variable by county, and students from inland California and from rural counties are the least likely to attend college at all, and the most likely to enroll in two-year community colleges if they do so. https://edpolicyinca.org/sites/default/files/Statewide%20NSC%20Report%20Final%20Online.pdf

Latinos and African Americans are under-represented in the prestigious UC system. White non-Hispanic students who have more access to accumulated parental wealth are more likely than all others to go to out-of-state schools. The most common out-of-state destinations are neighboring Arizona and Oregon universities.

College tuitions at both public and private institutions have been rising at alarming rates, making college ever less affordable for low, median and middle-income students and particularly impacting students of color who are the students most likely to come from lower income households. https://calmatters.org/explainers/california-cost-of-college-explained/ Pell grants and Cal Grants (a state only program) do help those who are able to complete all the forms and then qualify, but only to the extent that federal and state funds are actually available, and the student qualifies for the program. Over 400,000 California college students qualified but did not receive grants in 2018-19. California is far more generous in providing financial assistance to its college bound low income students than virtually any other state; interestingly Wyoming is next. https://calmatters.org/explainers/california-cost-of-college-explained/#2261b650-978e-11e9-ba5b-973f7e0484f8 Less surprisingly, the states of Georgia and South Dakota are at the very bottom.

Diversity and racism P

California’s population is large (40 million), diverse and comprised of many immigrant communities. “California’s population is diverse. No race or ethnic group constitutes a majority of California’s population: 39% of state residents are Latino, 37% are white, 15% are Asian American, 6% are African American, 3% are multiracial, and fewer than 1% are American Indian or Pacific Islander, according to the 2018 American Community Survey. Latinos surpassed whites as the state’s single largest ethnic group in 2014.” “According to 2018 estimates, 27% (or 10.6 million) of Californians are foreign born—this share is larger than that of any state (New York is second with 23%) and double the share nationwide (14%). The leading countries of origin for California immigrants are Mexico (4.0 million), the Philippines (848,000), China (798,000), Vietnam (515,000), India (532,000), El Salvador (462,000), and Korea (312,000). In recent years, immigration from Asia has outpaced immigration from Latin America by a two-to-one margin.” https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-population/

Politics and Race

In the 1982 gubernatorial election, Attorney General George Deukmejian beat LA Mayor Tom Bradley, who was black, in a race, that was notably devoid of race baiting; Bradley’s upset defeat was widely attributed to the “Bradley effect” – hidden white racism not expressed to California pollsters. Later research however suggested that the unexpected upset was likely due to more successful absentee balloting by Republicans and the backlash against Prop 15 – a gun control initiative -- combined with lower than expected turnout by African-American and other minority voters, which was particularly pronounced in the Bay Area. https://escholarship.org/content/qt3q90v38p/qt3q90v38p.pdf

During the 90’s, California’s GOP leaders led by then Governor Pete Wilson developed and passed a series of voter initiatives targeted at disadvantaging the state’s emerging minority and immigrant communities. These campaigns were explicitly anti-minority and anti-immigrant. While they passed muster with the state’s voters who were older and whiter than the state’s overall population, politically, they spectacularly backfired, changing California (the home of Reagan and Nixon and Deukmejian and Wilson) to its deep blue political hue today. In 1996, Republican Governor Pete Wilson led the successful effort to pass Prop 187, which denied public services like education and health care to undocumented working families. Governor Wilson also led the effort to pass Prop 209 to eliminate affirmative action in any publicly funded services. Two years later, frequent Republican candidate Ron Unz led a voter initiative, Prop 227 to eliminate bi-lingual education. https://kappanonline.org/a-new-era-for-bilingual-education-in-california/ Prop 187 was never implemented due to court challenges; Prop 227 was repealed two years ago by the state’s voters, and the repeal of Prop 209 is on the ballot for voters to decide in November 2020 as Prop 16. The state’s Hispanics and other minority voters moved decisively away from Republicans and into the Democratic column in response to the Wilson-backed initiatives. We now have a state legislature with strong minority representation and leadership. The same cannot be said of the local LAUSD school board with only two out of seven minority representatives, and a student population of nearly 80% minority kids.

From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act, Southern Democratic politicians were the architects of Jim Crow and the defenders of the de jure segregated South; their mantra was “state’s rights”. Northern Democrats and many Republicans formed the coalition that passed much of the 1960s Civil Rights legislation. Over time, Republican leaders at the national and state levels found it politically advantageous to play the “race card”. At the national level, Senator and Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater ran a state’s rights campaign in 1964 which would have allowed local and state governments to preserve their Jim Crow laws; he was soundly defeated. Alabama’s Governor George Wallace ran an even more explicitly racist campaign for President in 1968 and won several Southern states under the banner of the American Independence Party; Richard Nixon, who ran a “law and order” campaign with many racist dog whistles, was relative to George Wallace the moderate. Governor and Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan took racist dog whistling to the next level in his campaigning for state’s rights at Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the murders of civil rights organizers, and among white voters in the North with racist references to welfare queens and forced busing; his victory coined the new demographic of Reagan Democrats, working class Northern white voters who eventually became staunch Republicans. He beat Carter, a moderate Southern Democrat soundly, and proceeded to seek to roll back many of the social safety net programs so essential to economic survival for the poorest of the poor. He assembled a new, powerful, conservative coalition of defense hawks, economic conservatives, cultural conservatives, law and order hardliners, white evangelical Christians and some outright racists that has endured through the election of President Donald Trump. It captured the South from the Democrats and firmly cemented Republican control in the South, the rural farm states and among a segment of white working class Northern voters – a historic realignment that destroyed the FDR coalition that had endured from the Great Depression and the Second World War until the onset of Reagan Republicanism.

President Reagan reached across the political aisle in enacting the Immigration Reform Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/its-25th-anniversary-ircas-legacy-lives It combined toughened border enforcement, increased employer sanctions, and a path to citizenship for those who had initially entered the country without the requisite papers (undocumented workers and their families). The backlash to this historic achievement has animated and fractured elements of his conservative coalition ever since. President Obama, President Bush and President Clinton sought to reassemble bi-partisan coalitions in support of further immigration reform and were stymied time and again. While the business elements of the conservative coalition may support immigration reforms because it helps to grow the economy, an increasingly nativist and racist segment of the Reagan coalition is adamantly opposed to any legalization for the undocumented and, as embodied under President Trump’s leadership, wants to curtail and shut down legal immigration as well.

His successor, President George Bush the first, negotiated trade agreements with Mexico and Canada that became NAFTA – the free trade agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada, which was approved by Congress under the leadership of President Bill Clinton. The backlash to that agreement animated the challenges of Pat Buchanan and eventually the success of Donald Trump. Union leaders and progressives found common ground with many disaffected conservatives in blaming free trade and globalization for the declines in American worker’s wages and standards of living and the loss of US manufacturing dominance on the global stage. The tendencies to blame foreigners and free trade for the US economic woes and loss of its international competitiveness in manufacturing have reinforced the nativist and populist backlash to the US role in the world.

We all would have expected that with the twin electoral victories of Barack Obama that the old Reagan coalition was shattered and a new coalition comprising the young, women voters, minority voters, immigrant voters and progressive whites was emerging. The Republican party after the 2012 defeat sounded the alarm for a re-think of its path to building a new majority by embracing a bigger tent more accepting and embracing of minority voters’ interests. Instead candidate Trump confounded the pollsters and pundits and found electoral success by a full on verbal assault on minorities, immigrants and women and an embrace of the pugnacious populism of Patrick Buchanan, George Wallace and Joe McCarthy.

The racist dog whistles and undercurrents of Nixon and Reagan have become a full throated roar under President Trump – from defending the Confederate flag, the ultra rightists in Charlottesville and now Portland, the attacks on protesters asking for racial justice, the attacks on distinguished African American athletes and politicians and the unbridled use of federal force under the umbrella of “law and order”.

We are entering an era where America’s current President is doing his very best to make racism and white supremacy respectable and energizing right wing extremist groups and militias in the process. He did not create this toxic stew, but he is doing whatever he can to give it sustenance and strength, assessing that it did and will again increase his election and now re-election prospects. He is encountering white backlash to his overt racism, particularly in the suburbs and most strongly among college educated women voters. It is up to the American people in the polling booths and in their mail in ballots to decide whether Donald Trump’s view of America is the one they wish to share and how they want their children and grand children to live.

Most Americans now agree that blacks and Latinos face systemic racism and discrimination. https://www.wsj.com/articles/majority-of-voters-say-u-s-society-is-racist-as-support-grows-for-black-lives-matter-115953 The as yet unanswered question is whether they want to do anything about it. From 1975 to 2015, there was declining white voter support for government intervention in issues like job discrimination and segregated schools. https://igpa.uillinois.edu/sites/igpa.uillinois.edu/files/racial_attitudes/Fig2B.gif At the same time, the public’s fundamental attitudes showed steadily increasing support for black integration in neighborhoods, in schools and in inter-racial marriages. https://igpa.uillinois.edu/sites/igpa.uillinois.edu/files/racial_attitudes/Fig2B.gif  

In a very real sense Trump with his retrograde mindset is pedaling very hard against the winds of attitudinal change on the issues of race in the society. But in another very real sense he encapsulates the disinterest on the part of too many white voters in having government intervene to level the highly unequal playing field of economic and educational opportunity. The Reverend Al Sharpton in his eulogy for George Floyd summed it the best -- “just get your knee off our necks”. White, brown and black America found nearly complete agreement in denouncing the unjustified murders of Breonna Taylor or George Floyd — a departure from Trumpism. They must now decide on improving public educational opportunities, on reducing health care disparities, and on increasing taxes for wealthy Americans to help pay for it. We don’t yet know how much if at all attitudes towards redressing inequities have actually shifted, and President Trump meanwhile is trying to further inflame the nation’s festering racial and partisan divides with his deployment of crack Homeland Security and Justice Department troops to Democratic cities.

 Still to come:

Organizing for justice

Immigration

Native Americans

Mexico

South Africa

South America

The California legislature

Insure the Uninsured Project

The family stories

Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin

Dated: 7/28/20