Race and Racism in My Experience Growing Up
Part 1: Growing up in Cincinnati
I was born just after the end of the Second World War; my dad was blown up in a Jeep going over a German land mine in France and survived. 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 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; that changed later to an eternity in Limbo) – 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 for the City Council and finished 18th out of 18 on the Charter ticket. 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 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 public junior high; it was a highly competitive college entrance preparatory public 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 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 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 between 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; social life was back in the neighborhood where we lived. 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 (a “no no” for good Catholics) 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; it was the time of James Dean and Elvis Presley. 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 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.
Until just very recently, I had never thought about the fact that the women who cooked and cleaned and provided child care and the men who ran the family farm and cared for the chickens, mules and horses, grew the corn, the beans and the berries, and raked the hay bales had no Social Security and later on Medicare to help them and ease their lives in retirement.
Part 2: Going Back East for School
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 Trinity 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.
Part 3: Going Somewhat South for Law School
That fall (1967), 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. 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 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 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.
Part 4: 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 as 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.
Part 5: California and the National Health Law Project
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 talk 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. Texas has been leading the efforts to derail the ACA.
Many Southern states with high percentages 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 straightforward solutions to help poor African Americans that would be equally 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 the region is 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.
Part 6: 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 had the impression 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 up 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 rights protestors on May Day of 2007.
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 bad tactical mistakes?
I’m not sympathetic to the calls to “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 and service industrial sectors in California and playing huge roles in our state’s political leadership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Mexican_Americans
When I moved here from Boston, 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 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 rather than treating the illness of addiction.
I’m told that California had a strong and effective public health system, public education system and public college system in the 1960s and 70s, before I moved here. 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 Ronald Reagan and his supporters.
Part 7: California Health Policies
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 public hospitals located in poor communities meant that the state’s uninsured lost their assured local access point to health care, to be discussed in greater detail later.
In 1982-3, California, then under the leadership of Governor Jerry Brown, eliminated Medicaid’s 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 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 shot up 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.
At the same time, 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 and Brown 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 now 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 in 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. However 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 that is becoming 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 MediCal managed care coverage, or could they evolve sufficiently and quickly enough? To date, their 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; 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/
I first heard that statistic presented by UC Davis researchers; I remembered back to 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 small recollection 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 of radically different ethnic, economic, educational, income, cultural and class backgrounds and the importance of diversity in all branches of government. There has been an effort to homogenize and Christianize the American experience, yet we have been diverse from our very beginnings.
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 towards 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 population, California unfortunately separates mental health from physical health and from addiction treatment, putting them into three different programs with different leadership. 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. Our public health systems have long languished, neglected by the more pressing needs; now we are paying a terrible price of that neglect in lives lost and economic suffering.
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 farmworkers and food processors are now being hard hit with heavy case and death rates from Bakersfield in Kern County to San Joaquin County. 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 net facilities that have been hardest hit by the virus. 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 extensively at the end of May coinciding with the Memorial Day holiday, and the spread then began 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 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, but the pandemic has not yet mercilessly spread among the homeless. 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 now dropped.
Part 8: California K-12 Public 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 and many other states, 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, state funding for local school districts was 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 local school district’s public schools 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 at the time, many higher income parents 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. 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 and their public support for local school systems was lost.
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 CEOs 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 to make up for the deficits in on line education – a financial challenge far too much for lower income families struggling to meet rent and food bills.
Part 9: California Public 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, 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 state 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.
Part 10: California’s Diversity and its Impacts on its Politics
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/
In the 1982 gubernatorial election, Attorney General George Deukmejian beat Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who was black, in a race, that was notably devoid of race baiting; Bradley’s 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, they spectacularly backfired politically, 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 representation from minority political leaders. The same cannot be said of the local LAUSD school board, with two out of seven minority representatives, compared to a student population of nearly 80% minority kids.
Part 11: National Politics on Race
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, Arizona Senator and presidential candidate 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. California 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 from the Great Depression and the Second World War.
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 his 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 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 reactionary challenges of Pat Buchanan to free trade 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 our post-war international dominance in manufacturing have reinforced the nativist and populist backlash to the US’ role in the world, and distracts from the urgent need to become more competitive rather than turning inward.
The racist dog whistles of Nixon and Reagan have become a full throated bull horn 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 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. The unfortunate answer is that 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 find nearly complete agreement in denouncing the unjustified murders of Breonna Taylor or George Floyd. They may part company on improving public educational opportunities for minorities or reducing health care disparities when it comes to increasing their taxes to help pay for it. We don’t yet know how much if at all attitudes towards redressing inequities have actually shifted, and Trump is hard at work trying to further divide and inflame with his crack Homeland Security and Justice Department troops during the lethal combination of a pandemic and the rise in demands for social justice.
Part 12: Organizing for Social Justice
When I was in Boston, I was involved with organizations for welfare rights, for tenant’s rights, for health care rights, for seniors, for the disabled and for peace. Later in CA, I was involved with organizations for immigrant rights, for the homeless, for child care providers, for gig workers, for clinics, for hospitals, for patients, for doctors, for kids, for pregnant women, and for small businesses.
The connective tissues among and between all the different interest groups who actually shared so much in common were too often missing. For example, the organizers working with the public housing tenants had different targets, issues and agendas from those working with tenants of 221(d)(3) private, but federally subsidized housing. The organizers associated with the elderly poor had different issues and constituencies and programmatic targets than those working with poor moms and their kids. Organizers affiliated with veterans were not working with the organizers working with those individuals seeking unemployment insurance. Divide and conquer strategies are deeply embedded in the very structure of our social safety net; they are reflected in the different agencies, the different budget allocations, the different Congressional Committees. Legislative priorities do change sometimes very dramatically when budget chairs or legislative leaders are black or Latino, but there was then (and is still not now) a consistent unifying set of beliefs or principles. Andrew Yang was the first Presidential candidate since George McGovern in 1972 to seek a universal basic income that unites rather than divides us.
There was nearly always a tension between highly educated white organizers and the poorer or less educated or minority groups whose lives, health and well-being were being impacted by the public or private policies at issue. Sometimes, it was over power and fame; other times it was personality, sometimes just basic respect, and occasionally strategy and tactics. Although these differences were oft expressed in racial terms, I don’t now perceive those differences as racist. Over time, the complexion of the organizers shifted from white to black and brown; I think that may have lessened tensions and internal organizational struggles but only to a degree.
Language use was a key issue. I can remember vividly one of my friends and clients in a tenant’s union explaining to me that my use of legal terminology and four syllable words and academic languages was a turn off for the tenants with whom we were working. Use clear and concise everyday English and short sentences -- his indelible message to me.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest community organizer of our lifetime; he brought the ministry and leadership of the church into the civil rights struggle. He expanded his organizing from civil rights into a mission for peace and against the war. He expanded his ministry from civil rights into the struggle against hunger and poverty. Our nation would be so much stronger if not for his assassination. Many of the organizers were faith-based and enormously effective as a result. The lessons of the Bible (both Old and New Testaments) are powerful and timeless sermons on the need for social justice. Religious organizations like the Quakers, the Catholics, the Anglicans, Reform Jews, Buddhists and Muslims were often leading or supportive and deeply involved in the drive for social justice.
Organizations like the Southern Baptists began as a reformist mixture of whites and blacks in the South believing in individual salvation and scriptural literalism. In the lead up to the Civil War, they became firmly identified with justifying Southern slavery and thereafter with embracing and defending segregation and racial bigotry. Only relatively recently (in the mid 90s) did the church recant its long time (over 150 years) support for segregation and white supremacy groups. They likewise viewed women as subordinate to their husbands. They allied with the Catholic Church in their opposition to reproductive rights. They condemned homosexuality and strongly opposed gay rights. As a result the Southern Baptists were on the opposite side of most of the social justice movements from the 60’s to the present day.
Evangelical Christianity started as a reformist religious movement with famous preachers and large, open air revivals. It emphasized the social justice messages of the Bible and individual, personal salvation by becoming “born again” and “good works”. They were strongly affiliated with the abolitionist movement in the lead up to the Civil War; read the excellent recent biography of Frederick Douglass. William Jennings Bryan, a famous evangelical, populist and progressive, was the frequent Democratic candidate for the Presidency at the end of the 19th and early 20th Century. He was a staunch liberal associated with women’s suffrage, direct election of Senators, the federal income tax, opposition to the First World War and opposition to the gold standard. He was, at the same time, a biblical conservative, famed for attacking Darwin’s theories of evolution in the Scopes trial. By the 70’s, evangelical Christianity had morphed into a conservative political movement in the US under the influence of preachers like James Falwell and Pat Robertson and political strategists like Ralph Reed. It became enmeshed with the Republican Party and became notable for its hostility to reproductive rights, immigration, and gay marriage, and for its opposition to religious freedoms for religions other than Christianity (“we are a Christian nation”). In counterpoint Jim Wallis, a noted evangelical, finds the social justice teachings of Jesus are the paramount message of the Bible. "I would suggest that the Bible is neither "conservative" nor "liberal" as we understand those terms in a political context today ... It is traditional or conservative on issues of family values, sexual integrity, and personal responsibility, while being progressive, populist, or even radical on issues like poverty and racial justice”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Wallis
Another animating principle was socialism and Marxism, political theories from the 19th Century that first examined and then sought to change the plight of the impoverished and exploited industrial worker. Socialism established utopian communal societies from Massachusetts to Indiana to Texas. Socialism sought social change in the workplace and seeded and influenced the growth of modern unions. Marx, one of the later and among the best known socialist thinkers, had been deeply interested in the American Civil War as a revolutionary moment. He analogized the breaking of the Southern slave state during the Civil War to the breaking of the serf state (in Russia for example). He saw each as struggles against feudal overlords. He was, however, far more interested in the advanced struggles between factory workers and the large industrialists in the advanced economic societies of Germany and England. His successors in thought were split between the Socialists (largely democratic and electoral in nature, Eugene Debs, also a noted pacifist was their perennial candidate for President, Bernie Sanders was a recent candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination) and the Communists (espousing violent overthrow of the state, followed by the dictatorship of the proletariat and influenced by the Russian Revolution and Vladimir Lenin).
During the depths of the Great Depression, the US Communist Party tried somewhat successfully to organize oppressed and impoverished workers in the South across racial lines; they tried to organize black and white Southerners for tenant sharecroppers’ rights, for worker’s rights in the Alabama steel mills and for civil rights. After World War One and again after World War Two, the Socialist Party and then the Communist Party respectively were smashed during post war Red Scares and periods of quiescent ferment overlaid with a climate of fear ensued. In the 1960’s, the New Left emerged; it was led by white student organizers such as Tom Hayden; they were influenced partly by Michael Harrington and his book “The Other America”, partly by Dr. King and SNCC, later by Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, and partly by pacifism, by opposition to the Vietnam War and the neo-colonial military adventures of the US around the world under the guise of anti-communism. The New Left was never very successful in joining or influencing either the worker’s rights movements or the civil rights movements, but it did animate an enduring middle class cultural revolution that transformed the staid, stolid and racist American nation of the 50’s into many of the vibrant and diverse cultures of today’s America, including the women’s movement, and LGBTQ movement.
The union movement emerged in response to the exploitation of powerless workers in three stages: 1) the craft workers union movement like the carpenters or plumbers or machinists epitomized by the AFL and the IWW (International Workers of the World) a broad-based worker organizing effort during the progressive era, 2) the industrial workers unions like the auto workers or steel workers during the Great Depression, and 3) the public employees unions like teachers and police and firefighters that emerged during the 60’s and 70’s. More recently, unions like SEIU have begun to organize the low-wage workers like childcare and home care, janitors and airport workers, and of course, the UFW has been organizing low wage farm workers since the 60’s.
The labor movement has been in significant and steady decline since the 50’s, with the growth in union membership concentrated in the public sector jobs, and the decline in private union membership coinciding with a massive rise in income inequality. https://www.epi.org/chart/union-fact-sheet-figure-a-union-membership-and-share-of-income-going-to-the-top-10-2-4-2-2 and https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/23/385843576/50-years-of-shrinking-union-membership-in-one-map Part of the decline paralleled the losses of American manufacturing jobs to automation and/or foreign competition; part due to the move of manufacturing from the unionized North to the non-unionized Southern states; part due to a huge growth in service sector jobs and economy which is less susceptible to unionization, and part due to the growth of the gig economy, flex workers or contract workers who often have none of the benefits and protections guaranteed for employees. https://qz.com/1542019/union-membership-in-the-us-keeps-on-falling-like-almost-everywhere-else/
The union movement in the 50’s and 60’s emerged as a key ally of civil rights groups in fighting segregation. However it was not always so. https://www.lib.umd.edu/unions/social/african-americans-rights and https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/american-labor-movement.html Some components of the early AFL had been segregated unions, and excluded skilled black workers as unwanted competition; whereas the CIO unions emerging during the Great Depression were explicitly opposed to segregation and that was built into their union charters. Some AFL unions had been used to exclude black workers from the better paying craft jobs and had a horrid early history of discrimination against Asian workers as well. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/herbert-hill/labor-unions-and-the-negrothe-record-of-discrimination/ Union’s racist internal practices began with their exclusionary apprenticeship programs, seniority and tenure rules, and restrictions on employing blacks in the better paid supervisorial positions, and these practices continued in many union locals, North and South, well into the civil rights era of the 50’s and 60s when the national AFL-CIO had become a key civil rights champion. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/herbert-hill/labor-unions-and-the-negrothe-record-of-discrimination/
I remember working closely over several years during the years of the Bush 2 Administration and the Davis Administration here in California with ACORN (at the time a premier and effective community organization) and SEIU (a large and effective union for service sector employees) on efforts to develop health coverage for family home childcare workers. There are at least three organizational structures of child care providers: Head Start, childcare centers and family home providers. Head Start is often a part of the pre-school public education system and federally funded and as a result has better pay and benefits for their workers. Childcare centers typically employ young women workers for very low wages (a national average of $10 an hour) and scanty health benefits. Family home providers more typically comprise middle-aged women who provide childcare in their own homes; they are self-employed or micro-businesses; many are minorities. In this instance, ACORN was working with the family home providers to get them health insurance, better education and training to deliver child educational services, and better compensation; our target was state government. SEIU joined the effort, believing it could advance their cause, as it had previously been successful in developing health care coverage breakthroughs for home health care workers. It proved an interesting dynamic; the providers thought of themselves as minority small business owners and wanted to be recognized and treated as such. SEIU thought of them as workers or employees to be unionized; they wanted to identify an employer who would pay for the costs of the benefits and better training, but the family home provider was the employer. When we approached the state legislature to fund a pilot program offering health benefits, better training and better educational outcomes for the children in childcare, another arm of SEIU sought to block funding for our pilot asking why these providers should get better access to health benefits. And as we approached local government, yet another different arm of SEIU was right there arguing that the new provider network should be limited to county hospitals and county clinics – a deal breaker for the family home providers “why am I paying a premium to go to the county facilities when I already pay my taxes for that; the waits are way too long and the quality (at that time the then infamous MLK Hospital in Willowbrook) is too dangerous”. The Affordable Care Act eventually solved the problems of availability and affordability of health insurance for many low and moderate income uninsured child care workers; it gave them a choice of plans, a choice of providers, assistance in paying the premium and guaranteed issuance even to those with pre-existing health conditions. Governor Newsom last year recognized family home childcare providers rights to organize and bargain with the state for better pay – the culmination of a twenty-year struggle and the beginning of the next phase of organizing and negotiating. https://laist.com/2019/09/13/ab_378_child_care_workers_union_seiu.php
A recent article in the New York Times highlights the promise of community organizing. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/opinion/2020-low-income-voters.html It recounts the efforts of Appalachian coal mining communities in Eastern Kentucky and low income workers from Louisville and Lexington, the joining of faith-based organizing from different religious communities to upend Matt Bevin in last year’s Kentucky gubernatorial election. The potential impacts for changing the political calculus for social justice in the 2020 elections are enormous. https://capitalandmain.com/mapping-electoral-power-of-low-income-voters-0814
Part 13: Native Americans
When I was a little boy, my dad took us quite regularly to Serpent Mound, a massive earth works built by Native Americans over 2000 years ago, not far from Cincinnati. My mom, a devout Catholic, was very observant of the rituals of Sunday mass; on the way to summer vacation, we would stop by the little Catholic Church in Garden River, an impoverished reserve of the Ojibway Indians, near the Sault Saint Marie. Dad read James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans to us, where we reveled and despaired in the exploits and travails of Hawkeye and Uncas and then read us to sleep with the rest of Cooper’s series of the North Woods and the Prairie. He had learned canoeing and woodsman skills from a Native American who worked for my grandparents in Canada.
The movies we watched on TV as little boys nearly always portrayed the whites as heroic and outnumbered defenders defending their lands, their families and their honor, and the Native Americans were portrayed as savage attackers, except of course for Jay Silverheels. In school, we learned about the kindness of the Indians in welcoming the Puritan immigrants to their shores and virtually nothing about the genocidal campaigns from the 1600’s to the 1890’s to exterminate them. The Battle of Little Big Horn and the Trail of Tears were all that I remember from our elementary and high schools. We learned of the steady push to move the Native Americans from their lands and confine them on reservations, but nothing about the efforts to deracinate them from their culture in English-only boarding schools and foster homes and forced adoptions.
I certainly was not aware until recently that Native Americans were denied citizenship in their own country until 1924, and were denied voting rights in many states until the 60’s with the passage and implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. https://www.history.com/news/native-american-voting-rights-citizenship Native Americans’ difficulties in registering and voting persist to the current day in some states still engaging in voter suppression of Native Americans. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/voting-rights/how-the-native-american-vote-continues-to-be-suppressed/
When I was living in Boston, I dated a woman from the Passamaquoddy tribe for a time in the late 60’s. She introduced me to the concept and protective shield of “invisibility” and its value in protecting members of tribes from rampant societal discrimination. She introduced me a bit to the unseen world of Native Americans living in and around Boston and Maine.
When I traveled west in the mid 70’s with a legal colleague and we met with an old friend then working as a lawyer with AIM for beers and dinner; she asked that we go across the Missouri River to a restaurant in the next state to avoid the expected surveillance and harassment from the local authorities – quite the flip side from invisibility.
When we drove down through New Mexico and Santa Fe, we saw the strong, proud, resilient Native American cultures that flourish there. I became enamored of the black on black pottery of Maria Martinez and over time learned of the many unspeakable tragedies her family experienced. During the 80’s and early 90’s, we spent a great deal of time in New Mexico, visiting and attending ceremonies in Native American pueblos in Arizona and New Mexico and learning a bit of the spiritual practices, the artistry, and the esthetics. I tried to get a job there, to no avail. We bought a vacant lot in the high desert, thinking to relocate. On the flip side, the poverty, the lack of resources, the alcoholism, the addiction, and the societal neglect, fraud and abuse from the majority are stunning, relegating the original residents of the America’s to third world living conditions in the middle of a first world nation. Gallup, New Mexico sticks in my memory as the worst examplar, and it was ravaged by Covid 19 earlier this year.
“Currently, the Navajo Nation has the highest infection rate in the country,1 greater than that of the worst-hit state, New York; it is even greater than that of Wuhan at the height of the outbreak in China.2 Native people make up only around one-tenth of New Mexico’s population but more than 55 percent of its coronavirus cases; in Wyoming, AI/AN people are less than 3 percent of the state population but make up more than one-third of its cases.3” https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/reports/2020/06/18/486480/covid-19-response-indian-country/
President Reagan signed the Indian Gaming law in the late 80’s assuring tribes their sovereignty over gambling on their own lands. In California, Native Americans have cornered the casino gambling trade due to their tribal sovereignty, and two thirds of the Indian tribes now own their own casinos. https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/gambling/GS98.pdf They have been able to maintain their franchise despite persistent efforts of out of state gambling interests to enter the lucrative California market by all means possible.
New Mexico has now elected a particularly able Native American woman to Congress; she gave a marvelous speech at the Democratic convention this year.
Part 14: Immigration
Immigrants to America came in succeeding waves from England, Holland, France, Spain, and Africa, then later from Germany, Ireland, Scotland and Scandinavia, from Eastern and Southern Europe, from China and Japan, from Vietnam and Korea, from Central and South America, from Ethiopia and Somalia, from the Philippines and El Salvador. They have created and recreated, woven and rewoven our nation’s fabric. They brought their languages, religions, cultures, skills and communities and enriched our own. German Catholic and German Jewish and Irish Catholic immigrants played key roles in the development and culture of Cincinnati where I grew up.
We have a national ethos, a guiding myth and vision about welcoming the tired, the poor and hungry from all over the world, yearning to breathe free. We have a proud history of welcoming those fleeing religious and political repression although we have not always been true to our principles, see the voyage of the St. Louis (Voyage of the Damned) trying to bring Jewish immigrants to the US just before World War Two. Despite our important national myth, virtually none were welcomed by the dominant group upon their arrival, and all -- from the Irish and German Catholics, to the Russian and Lithuanian Jews, from the Catholic Poles and Italians, to the Chinese and Japanese Buddhists, and most recently Middle Eastern Jews and Muslims – had to develop survival skills to protect themselves and their communities in the face of nativist hostility which too often met them.
Our immigration laws, which were adopted in the 1920’s, favored immigration by those of Northern European ancestry and barred many others on explicitly racist grounds, particularly those seeking to immigrate from China, Japan and other Asian communities. That immigration preference for Aryan dominance ended for good during the 60’s when immigration policies were changed to emphasize skills-based immigration and family reunification.
Candidate, now President Trump and his Administration ran on an explicitly anti-immigrant and racist platform in 2016 and has done all that he can to advance these views and turn them into policy and practice. He would like to return to a policy favoring immigration of Northern European, high skilled immigrants and preventing family reunification immigration.
Immigrants have been the engine of our economic growth, not a drag on it. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/economic-debate-immigration-reform/
Immigrants from Belgium and France were among my friends when I grew up in Cincinnati. We had students from Latin America in my high school and from Europe and Africa during college years. I was unaware that they experienced any forms of discrimination; in fact they seemed welcomed into the community.
As a young lawyer, I first represented Haitian immigrants during the early 70’s. Haiti may have been the country of origin for some of my ancestors. As I spoke reasonably good French at the time, they came to me to understand and decipher their legal documents and American law, both of which they were totally unfamiliar, making them easy prey for the unscrupulous. They came to the US fleeing the murderous Papa Doc Duvalier regime, supported by the US. They are now a very successful immigrant population. http://www.bostonplans.org/getattachment/63cf049b-f2b8-47a6-a81c-8a63dc8ca40b More recently 50,000 Haitian immigrants arrived after the devastating earthquake of 2010. President Trump is seeking to end their temporary or provisional refugee status and return them to Haiti, a nation, which he characterizes as a shithole country. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/haitian-immigrants-united-states-2018
I represented a wonderful young family who had fled a bloody Civil War in Africa, where their family and tribe had been targeted. They needed temporary assistance because the wife was sick and unable to continue her work as a nurse while she recovered. The local services office was of the opinion that as immigrants, they could not qualify for any help. I learned the ins and outs of the intersections between immigration and public coverage as we got their case resolved. We all became friends, and I learned of the great love and appreciation they had for our nation that had given them shelter from death in their homeland, and of the huge void of missing and longing they felt for family, village, tribe and their nation of origin (which was then in such murderous turmoil).
An American citizen who had previously lived in Peru for many years came to my office. She was taking care of her daughter in Boston and preparing to donate an organ to save her daughter’s life. The local hospital wanted $100,000 to perform the surgery unless she was eligible for the state’s Medicaid program. The local social services office had denied her coverage; they were of the opinion she was not a lawful resident of Massachusetts. The Supreme Court in Shapiro v. Thompson almost a decade earlier told states that the requisite residency for these programs was physical presence with intent to reside. After we got involved, she got the needed coverage.
In 1986, President Reagan signed immigration reform packages, known as IRCA and OBRA. IRCA provided a path to citizenship for long time undocumented residents of the US; OBRA provided federal funding and mandatory Medicaid coverage of emergency care and deliveries for undocumented otherwise eligible for Medicaid, but for their citizenship. In the fight for their implementation in California, we were able to increase covered benefits for prenatal care and for long-term care in nursing homes in addition to emergency care of the undocumented. About one million undocumented, low income, working families are now covered in California.
During the 90’s Congressional Republicans under the leadership of Newt Gingrich embraced a series of initiatives directed at minorities, women, and immigrants under the umbrella of tough on crime, tough on immigration, tough on reproductive rights, and tough on welfare. In 1996, President Clinton signed a welfare block grant bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Responsibility_and_Work_Opportunity_Act and an immigration reform package of legislation. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/illegal_immigration_reform_and_immigration_responsibility_act Earlier he signed a criminal justice measure with much tougher sentencing requirements for crimes involving drugs among many other provisions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violent_Crime_Control_and_Law_Enforcement_Act and https://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11515132/iirira-clinton-immigration
California’s then Governor Pete Wilson fathered three strikes laws for lifetime imprisonment, state ballot initiatives to deny education, health care and other publicly funded services for immigrants, a ban on affirmative action and the end of bi-lingual education as he positioned himself for a Presidential run in 1996 – a campaign that led with attacks on immigrants but never really got off the ground. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1995/11/california-schemer-what-you-need-know-about-pete-wilson/ While this approach went nowhere for Pete Wilson’s presidential campaign and may have damaged Republican branding in California; it proved golden for Candidate Trump thirty years later.
In the legislative process, Governor Wilson had to compromise with Democratic legislative leaders in implementing the new welfare reform and immigrant care measures. In California, the MediCal (Medicaid) program was significantly improved for the working poor and for legal immigrants, as it shifted from welfare program based eligibility to income based eligibility, and the five year waiting periods for full scope eligibility of legal immigrants were rejected. The federal courts enjoined implementation of Prop 187, holding that immigration is the purview of the federal government, not the states. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/cas-anti-immigrant-proposition-187-voided-ending-states-five-year-battle-aclu-rights?tab=case&redirect=immigrants-rights/cas-anti-immigrant-proposition-187-voided-ending-states-five-year-battle-aclu-righ
At the very same time, Los Angeles County was deeply in the red and proposing to close some of its public hospitals and clinics to meet its very large budget deficits. LA was both the epicenter of the nation’s uninsured, and operated one of the largest public hospital systems in the nation, open to the poor regardless of their immigration status. It operated three large trauma centers, five emergency rooms, six comprehensive health centers, six hospitals and about thirty health clinics. About 1/3rd of the public hospital patients were uninsured and about 2/3rds of the public outpatient clinics’ patients were uninsured. An estimated 15-20% of the system’s uninsured outpatient clinic patients were undocumented working families. So if you are LA County, what facilities do you close? Those serving low income African Americans, those serving low income Latinos, or those taking care of the most severely disabled? Congressional Republicans were on a mission of destruction for any funding of care to the undocumented, and the Wilson Administration would not contribute any new funds. Working with the Clinton Administration, we found a new way to thread the financing needle and keep the county hospitals intact, using a §1115 waiver to pay for outpatient care to the uninsured and shifting management of the clinics away from the county to the non-profit community clinics. https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/61626/410295-Medicaid-Demonstration-Project-in-Los-Angeles-County---.PDF
A county hospital in the High Desert was transformed into a specialty outpatient center. The nationally renowned rehabilitation center for those with severe injuries was designated for sale to a non-profit; that never happened. The county was supposed to increase its outpatient services to keep people out of hospital emergency rooms; that also never happened. The takeover of the county clinics by the community clinics was a major improvement in timely access to appropriate care and cost efficiency. Several years later the MLK hospital, located in the middle of the African American community, was closed by the federal government as the conditions at the hospital had become too dangerous for patient safety. It was rebuilt as a not for profit community hospital, and so far it has improved care, conditions and safety for the low-income patients being served. An earthquake badly damaged the County-USC hospital, located in the center of the Latino community. After much controversy about the size of the replacement facility, it was rebuilt as a much smaller facility with a very large ER and trauma center. The new facility also improved care to the surrounding minority community. Was there racism involved in these decisions? I didn’t and still don’t think so, and I think the care to the community improved by taking some of the decision-making authority away from the County Board of Supervisors and the LA County Department of Health and shifting it to community-based non-profits. The experience highlights the critical role public hospitals play in poor communities and the lack of adequate alternatives. Many of the large, financially strong, highly respected hospitals in Los Angeles were and simply are not that interested in expanding their services into poor immigrant communities.
The state of California began to shift its delivery system for low-income MediCal patients from a fee for service structure, just like Medicare. Each county negotiated with the state for the design of its new system. Counties with county hospitals preferred to operate their own public managed care plans. So the big question was what would happen to the minority doctors in these new systems. Would they be welcomed in the for-profit health plans like Blue Cross and Health Net? Would these plans open up their networks to the poor, the minorities, the immigrants? Would the facilities like UCLA or Cedars Sinai enthusiastically participate in or shun MediCal managed care. Would it destabilize the community clinics and community hospitals that saw and treated large volumes of minority patients, causing them to close their doors? How would the managed care plans, accustomed to the privately insured, respond to the large numbers of minority patients, how would they deal with immigrants, with those not conversant with the US medical system, with those whose primary language was other than English.
There were certainly many glitches and battles along the way and, while others will differ, I have felt it was a vast improvement. Many of the health plans, using their own financial resources, developed coverage for undocumented children. Some developed innovative cross-border coverage for Mexican immigrants working seasonally in California agriculture. Others developed pilots for mixed status immigrant families. There were no state legislative requirements or financial incentives for them to do so. In fact when we sought state funding for these initiatives, it took over 15 years of persistent advocacy before the California state legislature and Governor agreed to expand coverage for undocumented children and young adults. Over time and with pressure from advocates and the state legislature, the health plans developed better access to primary care, more translation services, and more culturally relevant and appropriate care for immigrant communities.
Part 15: Mexico
In 1975, I spent three months traveling and camping out in an old VW bus throughout Mexico – West Coast, central Mexico and East Coast, beginning in Nogales and ending at Tulum -- the first of many trips there. The Mexicans have historical reasons to detest us as we took Texas, California, New Mexico Arizona, Nevada and Utah from them by force of arms over 150 years ago. In Western and Central Mexico, we met and talked with people who had worked and lived in the US in agriculture and construction, and wanted to trade stories about their lives and experiences living in the US (they liked it) and to explain and show us the glories of Mexico (they loved and were very proud of it). Throughout Mexico, the magnificent churches, beautiful old colonial buildings and central plazas housed a wonderful, rich, festive and familial culture, so very different from our own Anglo-based culture. Partly it may be the profound difference between the Mediterranean, Catholic, Spanish and indigenous culture of Mexico and the Northern European, English, Protestant culture in many parts of the US. Partly it’s the difference between a highly developed first world nation and a next-door neighbor struggling to get there. And partly it's the difference between a proud mestizo nation and one still struggling with its history of slavery and racism.
The great sprawling, vibrant, revolutionary, murals of Siquieros, Riviera and Orozco in the Palacio de Bellas Artes completely captivated me, like a great Tolstoy novel. Who are our nation’s pictorial/visual equivalents? I’m not sure that I can identify them. Would it be Dorothea Lange and Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keefe during and after the Great Depression? Or would it be the luminescence of Church and Cole and Bierstadt during the opening of the nation? Or would it be the photography of Edward Curtis, Ansel Adams and Edward Weston? Or our Civil War as seen through the lens of Matthew Brady?
In Hermosillo, we visited the outdoor museum of Olmec sculptures; the massive carved heads seemed to be of strong African men, and I wondered whether some of their ancestors had come from West Africa, not so. The Olmecs were the first great Mexican civilization between 1200 and 400 years BC. Apparently their ancestors came from Asia across the Bering Sea and established a highly advanced civilization on the East Coast of Mexico. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmec_alternative_origin_speculations
I had always been curious about the Mayans who had advanced astronomy, architecture, mathematics, cities, roads, art and writings. They had many rises and falls of dominance by different city states in the region, dating back prior to 2000 BC, reaching a peak before 900 AD and then a renaissance and subsequent decline not long before the Spanish invasions of the late 1500’s. They were dominant and endured for over 3,000 years in their regions of Guatemala, Belize, the Yucatan and Quintana Roo. We visited Palenque, Chichen Itza, Uxmal, Tulum and Coba. The collapse(s) of the Mayans may have been due to the excessive warfare between the cities, the collapse of agriculture due to droughts and over-cultivation, or an overthrow of the priests and nobles by the common people who did all the labor to support these magnificent cities constructed for the elites. The Mayans continued to revolt against the occupation of their lands by Ladinos in Mexico as late as the 1840s, And in the Guatemalan highlands from 1965 until very recently, the US backed Guatemalan military was massacring Mayan peasant farmers with enormous loss of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide
During our travels, we met and talked with many young, professional and well educated men close to our ages in the cafes and plazas. We discussed the killings of demonstrating students at Tlateloco during the ’68 Olympics and the insurgency that developed in the high mountains of Southern Mexico afterwards.
On the East Coast, we became friendly with a highly educated young Mayan man; he looked as if he had walked out of one of the Mayan murals at Bonampak. The Maya have retained a vibrant independent ancestral culture despite the Spanish conquest.
Mexico is a Mestizo culture – a blend of Spanish and indigenous peoples; my impression was that they had avoided the racism that plagues the US through intermarriage. Intermarriage/miscegenation by contrast was a crime in parts of the US ‘til 1960s. During our travels in the 70’s, I was acutely aware of classism and sharp economic divides in Mexico, but I was completely unaware of the racism. But it apparently exists and is quite pronounced in Mexico. https://theconversation.com/study-reveals-racial-inequality-in-mexico-disproving-its-race-blind-rhetoric-87661
There are many distinct and vibrant indigenous cultures in Mexico, but we only got a chance to know the Maya in the Yucatan and Chiapas. In the 90’s, the indigenous peoples of Southern Mexico began a new Zapatista movement to redress the lack of education, health care, income and governing autonomy for indigenous peoples in Mexico. http://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/news-item/the-zapatista-movement-the-fight-for-indigenous-rights-in-mexico/
Mexico and the US are so deeply entwined along the US Southwest border states; it is hard to understand how the racial hatred for Mexicans that Donald Trump espouses and foments finds fertile roots here, yet this is where it originated and where it first found fecund political soil.
Part 16: South Africa
I visited South Africa twice, and it had a profound effect on me – once in the lead up to Mandela’s release and election to the Presidency and once 15 years later. What an extraordinary difference in such a short period! After I arrived in the Capetown airport, I took a cab into town; there were posted armed guards with automatic rifles on every bridge over the freeway. I thought so this is what a police state looks like. I was meeting with AIDS activists and union leaders and academics and community members of every race; they were preparing their ideas for the expected transition from DeKlerk to Mandela which was in the very foreseeable future; I was there as an expert on health insurance reform. Towards the end of our two and a half days together, they asked me what policies in the US were comparable to South Africa’s apartheid. The best I could come up with was the undocumented workers who did so much hard physical labor in California, were paid very poorly (minimum wages and less), paid federal, state and local taxes, and got very few of the benefits available to US citizens and legal residents, had to live their lives in fear in the shadows of being asked for their papers, and had a hard time understanding both the language and the culture of those in positions of authority.
As I walked around Capetown in the morning before the meetings, the blacks were doing all of the hardest physical labor. It was hard for me as a first time visitor to know what anyone actually thought or felt. I just observed, smiled and said hello and tried to make small talk. I wondered if everyone had to mask their true feelings and emotions except with family or close friends. I was fascinated by the ability of people to converse in so many different languages -- English, Xhosa or Afrikaans – just to daily communicate with each other.
Afterwards I had two marvelous days to travel with the sister of dear friends and see the beauties and the wildlife of the Cape Region and try to understand a bit more about the intricate relations among whites, blacks and colored required by the racial laws of South Africa. My experience in South Africa woke me up like a sharp electric shock.
The local San people were nomads and hunter-gatherers. Over centuries, they were conquered and displaced by farmers from the northern and central parts of Africa. Beginning in the 1600’s Dutch established a colony in Capetown, as a way post to their East Indies trading empires. They fought to settle and dominate South Africa during the 17th and 18th Centuries; they brought Malays and Indonesians to South Africa as slaves. The English fought the Dutch (now the Boers) and took over South Africa as a British colony at the start of the 19th Century; Indians arrived as traders. The British outlawed slavery in all their territories, but South Africans retained it as indentured servitude and a series of laws to disenfranchise black and then mixed race South Africans. Gold and diamonds were discovered and exploited; this led to the 2nd Boer War between the British Empire and the two independent Boer republics at the start of the 20th Century for control of the gold and diamonds. The Boers won an election in 1948 as the National Party to take back control of South Africa from the British settlers; they instituted formal apartheid laws segregating, separating and defining racial hierarchies, declared independence from England and ruled ‘til 1994. Apartheid sought to create three groups: whites who had all the political and economic power, blacks who did almost all the low paid manual labor so essential to the economy and had no political or economic rights, and colored (mixed race and Indians) who were somewhere in between. Hard to believe this was occurring in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Second World War and harder still to fathom how the US, UK and Israel supported it. In response to growing international economic isolation and diplomatic condemnation and a strong guerilla war led by the ANC (African National Congress), South Africa’s National Party negotiated with the ANC, instituted universal suffrage, and the Nelson Mandela led ANC won the election in 1994. He led a government of national conciliation, a rainbow nation of all colors.
When we came as tourists in 2009, it was the same beautiful nation, but utterly transformed by Mandela’s leadership. In the posh Sandston area of Johannesburg, there were as many affluent black business and professional people as whites. In the Apartheid Museum in Jo’burg and the District 6 and Slave Lodge museums in Capetown, we learned the history of South Africa from the black African perspective. In the local restaurants, blacks and whites danced and ate together. There were wonderful musicians from all over the continent; the one band still seared in my memory was from the Zaire/Congo. One day, our guide might be an-ex policeman from the apartheid regime; the next day a black activist; they were united in praising the peaceful transition negotiated by DeKlerk and Mandela and the incredible healing leadership that Mandela provided for the new nation. One day, we’d be in a winery near Stellenbosch; the next in a nearby township learning to play the drums. New housing and schools were being built at a fast pace in the townships around Capetown, Johannesburg or Stellenbosch; we had the impression that education of new teachers was not keeping pace with the building of new schoolrooms. On the other hand in the countryside, the blacks were walking or traveling jam-packed into mini-buses while the whites were driving their cars. Political and economic conditions had improved a lot, but there was a very long way to go to make up for centuries of oppression. There is now a black elite and a black middle class; I’m not so sure there is a poor white working class toiling in the mines and in the other dirtiest, most dangerous and lowest paid jobs. Some people I met 15 years earlier ascended to positions or power and influence in the new governments and are making big differences in the decision-making. The new oppressed are the undocumented immigrants from failing governments like Zimbabwe living in illegal shantytowns. There is still a lot of government corruption in South Africa. So many languages and so many different tribes all jostling for their share of scarce public resources.
We crossed the Limpopo River in a cable car looking at hippos down below us and entered Botswana; it has a comparatively small population for its land mass and one dominant tribe, the Tswana. It was not conquered, colonized and subjugated, but was under a protectorate from the British to keep the expansionist South Africans at bay. It did not have to wage a battle for independence, and its mineral riches were not discovered until after its independence so control of its wealth was not in the hands of Britain or France and private corporations. The government is investing in health and education for its citizens. Each citizen is given a plot of land by the government and a timetable to build their own home. The building blocks are from the land adjacent to the village, mixed with clay and fired in a covered pit; then the home is built by the family. Cattle are kept at night in a nearby kraal of thorn trees to keep out the predators. Local teachers and nurse practitioners are paid by the government, and the government builds their homes in the village of cinderblock with metal roofs.
Part 17: South America
We traveled on separate trips to Peru and Argentina. We stayed for several days in the capitol cities and hiked in the Andes on both trips.
Peru is a mestizo nation (60%) with indigenous tribes (25%) living in the Andes and Amazon region, who primarily speak Quechua or Aymara. The Spanish invaders under Pizarro wiped out the Incas; a population of 5-8 million reduced within a century to 600,000 by disease, forced labor in the gold and silver mines and massacres by the invaders. They have now regrown to 6 million. The Incas were an extraordinary civilization that built roads, temples, cities, arts, irrigation, terracing, and architecture and governed about a third of South America. They were preceded by the Nazca, Moche, Chavin and Norte Chico civilizations dating back to 3,000 BC. They fell to the Spaniards due to a civil war of succession, combined with the ravages of smallpox and other diseases spread by the Spanish coming from Europe, and the technological advantages of guns and steel armor.
In Lima we saw a strong, vibrant, growing, multi-ethnic, middle class economy with pockets of truly dire poverty. We saw signs of vibrant Transpacific trading partnerships with Asian nations. We visited museums showing the pottery, art and artifacts of native populations. We saw subsistence farming and village life in the high Andes, that may be little changed in the last 450 years. Cuzco and the tourist places of the Sacred Valley down to Machu Picchu were prosperous, while the little Quechuan villages we visited up in the mountains were inconceivably destitute. The economic growth is centered in the coastal cities and tourist meccas, while the traditional indigenous villages in the Andes and the Amazon benefit very little. https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=honorscollege_theses The resultant migration to the cities of an indigenous population without an adequate education and other cultural tools to survive and prosper has been disastrous for the members of these ancient tribal societies. Indigenous rebellions to “Spanish” rule have continued to the present day in the form of a series of Tupac Amaru Revolutions and the Shining Path guerilla movement. There are still Stone Age tribes in the Amazon basin part of Peru that have had no contact with modern civilization.
I’d love to get back as there was so much of the wonderful nation we had no chance to explore.
Argentina was a nation of European immigrants where the indigenous tribes were slaughtered mercilessly to make room for “progress”; they now account for an estimated 1-2% of the population. One of our guides told us the tales of the Spanish slaughter of the Mapuche people in Patagonia. Our other guide, a young Mapuche biologist, knew very little about the history of his people; their past had become invisible.
The slaughter of Patagonia’s indigenous tribes in the 19th Century very much paralleled by our own nation’s slaughter of the Plains Indians. The Mapuche were seasonal nomads between the Atlantic Ocean and the Andes. The settlers brought sheep and cattle to graze in the nomadic territories of the Mapuche. As conflicts arose, the army came in and killed or enslaved them, putting them in concentration camps before assigning them to work in servitude on the cattle ranches of the north. In the words of a local Senator:
“We have taken families from the savages, we have brought them to this center of civilization, where every right seems to be guaranteed, and yet we have not respected for these families any of the rights that belong, not only to civilized men, but to humanity: we have enslaved the men, prostituted the women, we have torn the children away from their mothers, we have sent old men to work as slaves anywhere. In a word, we have turned our backs and broken all the laws that govern the moral actions of men.” https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1101&context=gsp
At the turn of the century, Argentina’s per capita GDP was 8th in the world. Buenos Aires is built to emulate Paris or Milan, and is a gorgeous city. Argentina’s economic growth rate has fallen far behind, many other nations, including neighboring Chile and Peru. http://www.luciensblog.com/blog/2019/3/14/reflections-on-argentina-part-three?rq=argentina I loved being in Argentina, and my heart breaks for its economic stagnation. I’d love to go back, and I’d love to figure out how to get their economic growth back on track.
Part 18: The California Legislature
I worked in the California legislature for over eight years from 1984 through ‘92. It was a period of split governance between a Democratic legislature and two different Republican Governors. There were intense debates on the floor and in the committees, but I never heard any racist commentary. I found it to be a place where progress could be made far faster and more thoughtfully than through litigation in the courts. I think the absence of overt racism was due to the powerful black political leaders of that era – people like Speaker Willie L. Brown and Assemblywoman Maxine Waters. The powers of the special interest lobbyists in corrupting people like Senator Alan Robbins, Assemblyman Pat Nolan and Assemblyman Frank Hill were undeniable, but there were so many more extraordinary and thoughtful politicians from both sides of the aisle.
The state legislature had a hard time doing the people’s business for several reasons – the super-majority requirements, the thin governing majorities and growing partisanship, the power of the initiative, and the power of the interest groups. The budget, taxes and spending bills required two-thirds majorities – a very tough and high hurdle. Legislative majorities were very narrow during this time frame, meaning if the minority Republican caucus stayed unified, they could block most taxes and spending. There were eminently reasonable Republicans such as Ken Maddy, Becky Morgan or Marian Bergeson and experienced, thoughtful Democrats like Byron Sher, Phil Isenberg or Patrick Johnston who were able to strike cross-party compromises on some important policy issues. Legislation had to be very centrist to attract and maintain the support of members of both parties and the Governor; that meant good ideas from the left or the right had a horrendous uphill hurdle; it was hard to rock the boat of conventional wisdom and establishment thinking.
Gerrymandering of legislative districts assured that they were either safely Democratic or Republican seats, and this promoted candidates from the extreme poles of each party who chafed at their inability to move their ideological opposites. California has since moved to a system where a Citizen’s Commission draws legislative districts and general elections are between the top two finishers, regardless of party affiliation. I think this has been a big improvement, but I’m not up there in the midst of the fray.
California’s initiative process was created as a way for voters to bypass a dysfunctional or corrupt legislature during the Progressive era of Hiram Johnson over a century ago. During and after the late 1970s, 80’s and early 90’s, it became a tool of interest groups (both good and bad) who could not otherwise secure legislative passage of their priorities. Since it only requires a majority vote to raise taxes by initiative, initiatives could more readily bypass the two-thirds vote requirements in the state legislature. The log rolling necessary to assemble a coalition broad and strong enough to persuade the state’s voters to pass a tax increase is done behind closed doors with no open committee hearings or debate or legislative analysis and oversight or transparency.
Racism was most obvious during the biennial political campaigns where short hand appeals to voter emotions replaced debate and dialogue. Speaker Brown, who was African American, was typically caricatured in opposition political campaigns. I have no idea whether this was effective, but the campaign consultants and the political candidates clearly thought so as they continued to do it.
Racial impacts were most evident in the crime bills; this was an era of high crime rates and a “lock them up and throw away the keys” response was autonomic. http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm Crime fears were projected onto racial minorities who were most often the victims of crimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States The political powers of local DA’s, sheriffs, corrections and police officers were paramount with the voters and state legislators. What could not be achieved in the state’s legislature was prime fodder for the California initiative process. The results were more and more black and brown males locked up for longer and longer terms and a huge growth in the prison industry and in correction and public safety spending in the state budget. Dangerous prison overcrowding and lack of access to medical care finally compelled the courts to intervene and put the system in receivership. It took more than 30 years before the mass incarceration cycle ran its course and began to fade. https://thecrimereport.org/2019/08/27/arrest-release-repeat-the-tragic-cycle-of-american-jails/ California has made some recent progress in improving its too often inadequate and poorly funded local mental health and substance abuse treatment systems for which jail and prison were a poor substitute.
Many of the senior legislative policy staff were white during the time period of the 80’s and early 90’s when I was there. Senator Dianne Watson stood out for hiring experienced and talented African American senior staff.
Part 19: Insure the Uninsured Project
I left the employ of the state legislature and in 1993 opened up my own law office and a project (Insure the Uninsured Project or ITUP) to seek health reform to cover California’s uninsured. I distilled my learning and thinking from eight years in Sacramento into a book on California’s choices for health reform. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Clinton health reform efforts, I convened a group of the leaders of the major interest groups. We met over the course of a year to see where there was agreement and common ground on the types of approaches to move forward; it turned out there was very little interest group agreement other than on very modest and incremental reforms, but the group wanted the coverage expansion issues pushed on by ITUP nevertheless; they would support when it was feasible, and so we did until I retired in 2016.
I practiced law representing doctors and dentists who provided care to the uninsured and those on MediCal, and working with county departments, small business associations, local unions, provider associations, public health plans and others who wanted to expand care and coverage of the uninsured. We used the proceeds to support our efforts to cover the uninsured.
Let’s discuss the coverage expansions first, then changes in the delivery system. There are three ways to get to universal coverage – the Canadian style (Medicare for All) of a government paying private doctors and hospitals; the Swiss style of an individual mandate that every citizen must buy private health insurance, and the German style of a hybrid public private approach building on coverage through employers to insuring everyone. Many advocates prefer the single payer Canadian style system, which eliminates private coverage. I have typically preferred to get to universal coverage by building on the existing private and public coverage models, because it is far less difficult and costly to finance, and because it is much more viable politically to advance. That was the bill I wrote for my old boss then Assemblyman Burt Margolin; it’s the legislation President Obama signed, and it's the foundation that candidate Joe Biden wants to improve with a goal of coverage for all. The disadvantage is that it relies on four or five very different and at times discordant systems: Medicare, Medicaid, private employment-based insurance and private individual insurance. There may be some back-up of county hospitals and county indigent programs to help some of the uninsured; these programs and facilities are highly variable from extensive to non-existent depending on the particular county or state.
The uninsured in California have been primarily low-wage and moderate-wage workers, often working for small business, and often working in the gig economy/flex workers. A small but very costly percentage of the uninsured are individuals with pre-existing conditions who are excluded by private insurers. In California a much higher proportion of Latinos were uninsured than any other ethnic group. Part of that was due to undocumented workers, and part was due to types of employment. Many of the uninsured work in the fields, in agriculture, landscaping, domestic employment, childcare, or home construction, where few employees are offered private employment-based coverage.
California state government made three big changes prior to its implementation of the ACA (Affordable Care Act or Obamacare). The first was delinking MediCal from welfare eligibility and covering working parents in families up to 100% of FPL as a part of its implementation of the Clinton welfare reforms. The second was establishing a separate Healthy Families program for children with family incomes up to 266% of FPL as part of its implementation of the Kennedy-Kassenbaum (CHIP expansion) legislation. The third was seeking and securing a federal §1115 waiver to allow willing counties to pioneer an early implementation of the ACA. California then chose to aggressively implement the federal Medicaid expansion (about 5 million newly covered) and the subsidized individual coverage through the Exchanges (Covered California, about 1.5 million covered).
As a result in California, we declined from about 6.5 to 7 million uninsured to fewer than 3 million remaining uninsured, of whom 60% are undocumented workers and their families because the ACA does not offer full scope coverage for the undocumented. California has begun over the past five years to extend full scope MediCal coverage to low income, undocumented uninsured workers and family members – first children, then young adults up to age 26, and most recently a gubernatorial proposal to cover those over 65 (this last proposal is delayed due to the state’s shrinking tax revenues as a result of Covid 19). California has also expanded the premium assistance and cost sharing reductions to help subscribers with higher incomes (600% of FPL in California’s Exchanges vs. 400% of FPL in other states). We have coverage available for nearly every pregnant woman and every child regardless of immigration status or income. Those newly unemployed due to the Covid 19 pandemic can access either MediCal or Covered California depending on their income levels.
President Trump seeks to undo California’s and the nation’s progress by legislative or judicial repeal of the ACA. This would return us to well over 7 million uninsured or over 20% of the state’s population under age 65, and would strip coverage and affordability protections from individuals with pre-existing medical conditions who can once again be denied coverage or charged exorbitant premiums. He would also make the long-standing Medicaid program for the poor into a capped block grant for state governments with no entitlements to coverage, services or access to health care. The Trump proposals would disproportionately impact Latinos as they have the lowest incomes among California residents and are disproportionately uninsured and reliant on the programs that will be decimated. They would disproportionately impact the poor and the sick, regardless of race, but would have disproportionately adverse impacts on racial minorities who have lower incomes and few assets.
Was/is there racism involved in denying coverage to the uninsured? As far as I could tell it was more about ideology than racism. For example a then Assemblyman, now Representative Tom McClintock or a then Assemblyman and then Senator Ross Johnson did not want you to be covered through taxes and by the public sector whether your skin color was white, brown or black. It was also about interest group politics (and consequently political donations and re-election) more than about race – i.e. if you are a Republican, does the Chamber of Commerce support or oppose, does the Association of Health Plans support or oppose, if you are a Democrat does Health Access support or oppose, do the big unions support or oppose? It was a form of Social Darwinism in which you can get your health coverage and health care if you’re healthy and wealthy, regardless of your race, but not if you are poor and/or sick and desperately need it. Its ideology seems to have infected very large swaths of Republican lawmakers in Congress and the Trump Administration, but it has been on the wane, I think, among blue state Republican Governors like Hogan (MD), Scott (VT) and Baker (MA). Lack of consistent universal coverage in the US has had terrible impacts on infant and maternal mortality, life expectancy and the extent of preventable chronic conditions. 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 and http://www.publichealth.lacounty.gov/epi/docs/Life%20Expectancy%20Final_web.pdf
The Tea Party protests against the ACA, many of which I witnessed first hand, were very clearly animated and fueled by racial animosities of some older, better off whites with private insurance or Medicare towards those who were becoming insured by the ACA under the auspices and leadership of President Obama. I was never clear whether their animus was directed at the President who was bi-racial, or at the poor, moderate and middle-income individuals and families being helped by Obamacare, some of whom were minorities. Only a few years earlier, some conservative think tanks like Heritage or AEI (American Enterprise Institute) had embraced and put forward the very types of coverage expansions and payment reforms passed and signed by President Obama – reforms which they now detested.
California made some big changes in its delivery system: negotiated payment rates, mandatory HMOs for the poor and the development of public HMOs; we also had huge growth in non-profit FQHC community clinics. Thus in California, the delivery system can be either fee for service (PPO) or capitated (an HMO). Some patients can choose, and others, primarily the poor, have only one choice of delivery system (HMO). Providers can be either public or private, and either for profit or non-profit. Those individuals with certain types of coverage (like Medicare) have wider choices of providers while most others are limited to the providers in their health plan’s network. Insurers can be public or private, non-profit or for profit. Low income MediCal patients can choose among public or private HMO plans; the privately insured can typically only choose among private plans. Reimbursement rates can be negotiated or set by the state (MediCal) or federal government (Medicare).
During this period, the trend in public and private coverage was towards enrollment in capitated systems (HMOs) and towards negotiated rates. It was a time of growth of public health plans, of growth of non-profit community clinics, of financial difficulties and closures of non-profit hospitals in poor communities, of shifting the big health insurance plans from non-profit to for profit status, and of consolidation of the big provider systems and health plans into price-insensitive oligopolies. Both parties in California embraced the “managed competition” model with Republicans leaning towards higher patient out of pocket and Democrats wanting better accountability and more regulatory back-ups for the most obvious market failures.
Was there racism involved in the delivery system? Some of my colleagues reported that in the Central Valley, certain doctors would not see MediCal patients in their private offices due to the colors of their skin and their low-income status. I certainly experienced some health plans not willing to include some of my minority physician clients in their private insurance networks; would they have acknowledged it was due to skin color; “no”, they would not – “we just don't know and have no managed care experience or track records with your clients”. In Los Angeles and the Bay Area, there are abundances of practicing physicians and plenty of hospital beds; yet too many doctors and some hospitals closed their practices to MediCal patients who are disproportionately minority. Is this racism? They would say “no”, they simply prefer the higher reimbursements associated with employment-based coverage. All of this was certainly racist in its impacts if not in intent, as we would discover with inescapable shock when the pandemic of 2020 hit racial minorities the hardest, at three times the rates of whites in Los Angeles.
Facilities were closing and services were being curtailed in low income communities with insufficient access to begin with. Centinela, Daniel Freeman and MLK all closed in South Los Angeles. Were these just the casualties of market competition? Why weren’t the private hospitals in over-bedded Santa Monica closing, for example? MLK hospital serving South Central Los Angeles had a history of mismanagement and lack of accountability for poor patient outcomes – i.e. preventable deaths due to gross errors of hospital and medical staff. Finally, the federal government decertified it so they no longer qualified to receive Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/11/us/11hospital.html I visited many times while I was serving on the Hospital Commission, and to my mind, there was blame all around – the union, the management, the civil service, the county Health Department and the LA County Board of Supervisors. It was located in the middle of the poorest area of LA and served patients with the toughest medical conditions. In my observation, its demise was less a function of funding and far more a function of mismanagement since the adjacent county hospitals were doing much better with less per capita funding. After eight years, a brand new, smaller, technologically up to date, community run hospital was opened on the MLK site through the collaboration of UCLA and the County of Los Angeles. https://www.scpr.org/news/2015/07/07/52912/new-mlk-hospital-opens-in-south-la/ The adjacent Drew Medical School nearly went under in the undertow of the collapse of MLK hospital. It lost accreditation and was placed on probation for several years; the leadership, many Board members, and most of the faculty were terminated. Under the new leadership of Dr. David Carlisle, it is now growing and expanding into undergraduate education, nursing education, physician assistants and is also growing its traditional medical school.
The loss of hospital capacity in poor communities was somewhat offset by the very large growth of community health clinics and rural health clinics. They provide low-income patients access to primary care visits, but not the follow up specialty care and sophisticated services which are only available in hospital settings.
In rural California, there are simply not enough doctors to serve the population. Counties in California are not well funded to care for the high percentages of uninsured poor, particularly in rural farming counties with high percentage of uninsured farmworkers. Insurers charge exorbitantly high prices for their products. There are many rural areas where competition on prices and premiums is not even a possibility since there is only one hospital and one medical group in town. Furthermore organized medicine has been too reluctant and slow to expand the ability of nurse practitioners and physician assistants to help meet the needs in these communities. Telemedicine and locating specialty services as part of community clinics have helped somewhat in rural California.
What we really need is many more Latino and African American doctors, dentists, and behavioral health practitioners. That is going to require a sustained effort from the grade school levels, through high school, college and professional school – a pipeline from elementary school through medical school and then back into the community.
In California, behavioral health access and efficacy has been particularly problematic for minorities. Counties are responsible for these programs in our state, and while some like San Mateo or San Francisco have been pioneers, many others have not. Minorities are more reluctant to seek behavioral care and are more likely to be treated poorly by providers without the requisite cultural and linguistic skills to effectively care for them. Likewise, behavioral health providers have embraced fragmentation of care into separate departments without the necessary whole patient linkages to treat a patient with co-occurring mental illness, substance abuse disorders and physical conditions like hypertension or diabetes. Those who are untreated may end up in our county jails, in state prisons, or in fatal encounters with local law enforcement authorities not well trained to diagnose and treat behavioral health conditions in split-second street or home encounters.
Health reform will require both universal coverage and more affordable, more effective delivery systems. We can get there; we know how to do it, but there are very different coalitions that need to be assembled on each issue. For example, advocates, providers, unions and plans want to get to universal coverage, but employers do not want to pay any more than they already do and want to pay less if possible. Employers, advocates, and unions want to get to a more affordable, more effective delivery system, but providers and plans want to get paid more, not less for their services. The road to covering everyone in California requires much more affordable coverage in the Exchanges, auto enrollment, coverage for the undocumented, and taxes. The road to a more affordable, more effective delivery system requires payment reforms and accountability for improved patient outcomes paired with enforceable and actually enforced limits on the growth of health spending. The simpler answers offered by single payer are appealing, but in my opinion not reachable without a far reaching education and advocacy effort of, by and for American voters across the political spectrum and a wholesale change in the composition of Congress.
ITUP was based in Los Angeles, the epicenter of the state and nation’s uninsured. We worked all over the state helping local, philanthropic, state and federal programs and policies to cover the uninsured. We tried to bring together the divergent interest groups necessary to make progress; we brought together advocates and insurers, unions and small business, hospitals, doctors and clinics. My biggest disappointment was our inability to bring in sustained involvement of big business; this was not for lack of effort; we were able occasionally to attract some, but we could not sustain their participation.
We grew from a start up staff of one to about 15 at our largest during ACA implementation. At ITUP, we had a young, diverse and talented staff. We had staff whose families had immigrated to the US from India, Pakistan, South Korea, Vietnam, Iran/Persia, Eritrea, Kenya and Mexico. We had a multi-ethnic staff of Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans, Asians and Anglos. Professors Michael Cousineau and Jeff Oxendine played key and crucial roles in referring talented young persons to ITUP. We had a hard time retaining our staff due to the higher pay being offered by the county, the health plans, the consulting groups and state government, so one could say we developed and seeded well. We experienced only one instance of intra-office racism that I can recall -- towards our immigrant staff from Iran/Persia.
Part 20: My Roots
In retirement, I have had a chance to look backwards in reflection and think forward towards a better America. I feel fortunate for the friends and family I have had and the opportunities to serve that I have enjoyed. Most people butcher my name, and it is rather unusual and the subject of much speculation within our family.
Most people think I’m of Scandinavian origin because I’m tall, long faced, blue eyed, and am now very white haired (it used to be quite dark); I’m definitely not Nordic. Our family name was invented and is unique to our close relatives.
We were mixed race creoles from the South. My dad’s ancestors, great grandfather and mother, migrated up the Mississippi River from New Orleans and settled in Cincinnati. http://www.angelfire.com/la/ancestors/Bacas.html Their origins and the reasons for their move are shrouded in mystery. So what I recount is part family lore, part what I found on the internet, and part research conducted by my cousins, uncle and grandfather. According to my grandfather’s research, our forebears lived on a large plantation, Saint Mary’s plantation, outside New Orleans. According to my uncle and cousins’ research, they lived in downtown New Orleans, on Saint Louis St. close to Bourbon St. According to my Dad, my great, great grandfather left New Orleans in a dispute with his father, Bathelemy Bacas, and my cousins report that all his then living brothers and sisters decamped and left town at the same time. According to my uncle and cousins, our family was mixed race in New Orleans; our great, great grandmother was a freed slave. One cousin reports we are listed in the city registry as LHDC, “libre home de couleur”. http://lawsonwulsin.com/blog/the-art-of-passing/ Another cousin reports a painting of our great, great grandfather, hanging in a New Orleans museum dedicated to free people of color. https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/southern-school-19th-c-portrait-of-a-855-c-2eed0f1d16 One cousin reports, our family lived in Haiti before immigrating to New Orleans; were they “free people of color” or “whites” in Haiti (then Sainte Domingue), and is the slaughter associated with the Haitian War of Independence what propelled their departure? They arrived in New Orleans, a French town, as a French speaking family from Haiti and fought with the US forces against the bloody British in the Battle of New Orleans. They left New Orleans in the 1840s’ and moved to Cincinnati dropping the last name of Bacas, changing their last name to Wulsin, and changing their identity to white. Three of the four Wulsin boys (the youngest Clarence was too young) fought for the Union in the Civil War and one died at the Andersonville, SC concentration camp. One cousin speculates that they left New Orleans because as a mixed race family, their ability to live and thrive was becoming increasingly precarious. For three generations, they married fair skinned brides, Greene, Hager and Tubman, and became Anglicized. According to my Dad, my great, grand-mother Katherine Greene Wulsin with her New England Revolutionary War heritage did not welcome her husband’s sisters into their home due to their skin color.
On my mother’s side we were early Catholic emigres and became slave owners on the Eastern Shore. My mother’s maiden name was Tubman, and her family lived close to Baltimore on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Tubman-252 and https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Tubman-241 As English Catholics, they had fled religious violence and persecution in the 1660s. They established a little church for their fellow Catholics on the Eastern Shore. https://www.secretsoftheeasternshore.com/backroads-chapel-and-michener/ and https://mht.maryland.gov/secure/medusa/PDF/Dorchester/D-18.pdf It is still standing, now known as Tubman Chapel and the adjacent St. Mary’s Star of the Sea is still holding mass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cut2GlS07SM
Walking down Columbus Ave. in the South End of Boston on my way to court one day, I looked up at the Harriet Tubman Settlement House and wondered about the coincidence of our shared names. I asked my Mom and she said “yes, her family had owned slaves, and her forebears had freed their slaves in the 1820’s”. They may have been part of the manumission efforts that were widespread in Maryland at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_Maryland Later I read the tale of Minty Ross who married John Tubman, a free man; she went on to become the famous Harriet Tubman who led slaves from Maryland on the Underground Railway to freedom in the North. https://allthatsinteresting.com/john-tubman They were both from Dorchester County where our Tubman forebears lived.
President William Tubman of Liberia was also a descendent of freed slaves, when I asked my mom about our shared family name, she thought that he too was related. A Tubman cousin vouches for the distant relationship with the Liberian Tubman’s as he heard the tale from his Dad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tubman Maryland had a very active “return to Africa” movement starting in the 1820’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_Maryland
Part 21: Next Steps
Donald Trump drives me to a volcanic red rage with his white supremacist sympathies and rhetoric. I have two little bi-racial grandchildren whom I adore; I fear for their future; I fear for our nation’s future. In my humble opinion, “President Trump is doing everything he can to inflame our nation’s unresolved and still festering racial tensions to the very greatest danger of all American citizens of every shade of color.”. http://www.luciensblog.com/blog/2020/9/16/donald-trumps-racism-has-no-place-in-our-america
He is a serious and present threat to our nation’s future and must be removed from office this November. His Administration’s enablers and his pliant, elected supporters need to go with him into the ignominious section of the dustbin of history. But he is merely a symptom and powerful symbol of the racism that has infected our great nation and our society for a very, very long time. He has done us all a big favor by displaying our failings to a now aroused citizenry and a disbelieving world.
We will need a “Truth and Reconciliation” Commission like South Africa to look at ourselves in an unflinching mirror. We need federal laws to prevent state voter suppression techniques and protect every American citizen’s right to vote. We ought to think about, consider, debate and enact a citizen’s duty to vote and to engage in some form of community service to help rebuild the nation; we need to build community and civic engagement across the divides of color and class, our regional differences, our urban, rural and suburban enclaves.
We have to purge the Republican party of its racist members and rebuild it along the models of Romney, Amash and Flake, Baker, Hogan and Scott. The Democratic Party went through a similar experience in the 70’s with members like Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina leaving the party and becoming Republicans. There should be no home for racism in American politics; people can be conservative without being racist, or liberal without being racist; it’s just not that hard to do, but the political parties really need to commit to it without the dog whistles that of late have become bullhorns or the whispering campaigns that become amplified anonymously via the internet chat rooms. Racism in politics is only there because it works to get candidates votes; we can dispel it when we remove its most odious practitioners.
Covid 19 woke up many to the failings of our educational system and the lack of effective online learning in cities and rural communities. We ought to commit to educational excellence and enact accountability, performance standards and better teacher training and compensation for local school boards, principals and teachers to educate poor and rural children who are being so badly shortchanged. Likewise, the public colleges and universities need to lower their tuitions and improve their accountability to educate college students from disadvantaged backgrounds to succeed in the economy of the future. We can’t continue to send our new graduates into the workforce saddled with mountains of student debt. We can’t compete in the global economy while denying so many of our nation’s children a decent education.
Covid 19 also highlighted the failures of our nation’s health system -- with minorities dying at three times the rates of whites. We can and must cover every person residing in the US, make their coverage affordable, and their delivery systems accessible and effective. This is doable, and we are much of the way there, with good foundations to build upon. Many (5 million) of the nation’s remaining 30 million uninsured are in the South and in Texas where too many state Governors have refused the 90/10 federal match to cover their state’s poor uninsured. A second group of uninsured are those individuals and families who are Exchange eligible but cannot afford it. The Biden plan would cover both groups; however, it does not cover undocumented workers and their families (including many, low wage essential workers not eligible for the nation’s safety net systems); they make up 60% of California’s uninsured and are typically in low wage employment or the informal economy. We could cover them through their employers and/or through Medicaid, most likely a careful combination of the two.
To make coverage more affordable for all Americans, we have to crack down on over-pricing of medicines, medical and hospital care and, as a result, health insurance premiums and patients’ out of pocket costs. That means setting caps on pricing and letting the markets negotiate better rates below the caps. We would need to apply that to all forms of insurance coverage where the government subsidizes coverage – whether directly or indirectly. To make delivery systems more effective, we have to pay for performance, and tie reimbursements to outcomes; we need to be able to measure and reliably compare. Obamacare made a smart start; there is much more to be done. We would need to tailor copays, deductibles and out of pocket to an individual’s income; we made a start on that concept through the Obamacare cost-sharing reductions. The concepts need to be applied more broadly to all other forms of coverage – particularly Medicare and employment-based insurance.
We have to strengthen our mental health system, build more affordable housing and take poor performing police officers out of the force. We have to replace our antiquated political leaders who persistently stand in the way of progress; Senator Mitch McConnell is a leading exemplar, but members of both parties share some responsibility for a dysfunctional Congress and divisive, unproductive national politics.
First, let’s get out there and VOTE!
Prepared: by Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 9/28/20