Stephen B. Young, The Daily Record Newswire
Shakespeare has Marc Antony say about Julius Caesar that “the evil that men do lives after them.” That is certainly true in our country with respect to the evil done by those who upheld systems of racial slavery and Jim Crow segregation. We are still suffering as a nation from the after-effects of those social and cultural evils.
Yet, it is also true that the good that we do lives after us as well.
One such action for good was taken by all the justices of the United States Supreme Court on May 17, 1954, when they ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that separate schools for whites and for African-Americans violated the right of African-American children to equal protection of the law.
In the Brown and companion cases, “plaintiffs contend[ed] that segregated public schools are not ‘equal’ and cannot be made ‘equal,’ and that hence they are deprived of the equal protection of the laws.”
But the court acknowledged that there were “findings below that the Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized, with respect to buildings, curricula, qualifications and salaries of teachers, and other ‘tangible’ factors.”
The court’s judgment in the cases, therefore, could not “turn on merely a comparison of these tangible factors in the Negro and white schools involved in each of the cases. We must look instead to the effect of segregation itself on public education.” The Court looked to the impact of certain cultural determinants of selfhood for African-American children.
In its most important paragraph, the Brown opinion said that “Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to retard the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racially integrated school system.”
The evil of segregation that the Brown Court highlighted here was the cultural power that flows from legalization of norms. It was the authority of the law that gave really detrimental influence to separation by putting the moral force of the community behind a judgment about inherent inferiority of character and ability.
The Court held that laws — the official expression of public conscience — could not so stigmatize one group of citizens over another. There was present in the facts legal inequality of consideration between racial groups which had to fall under the constitutional provision for “equal protection of the laws.”
The Supreme Court thus aligned its thinking with the Declaration of Independence and rejected the continued cultural reach of the historic “peculiar institution” of southern white plantation owners. The evil of slavery — even in its attenuated form, segregation — was to live on no longer in the United States.
Previously, from1861 through 1865, hundreds of thousands of whites from mostly Anglo Saxon Protestant ethnic origins, along with many other European ethnic traditions present in the young American Republic (including Minnesota Germans), fought — and very many died — so that a system of racial slavery would no longer corrupt the American experiment in liberty. The good that they did has lived after them.
And from1962 through1965, other Americans — African-American but, importantly, a great many again from European heritages — made common cause in the civil rights movement to expunge Jim Crow segregation from all of American territory, in keeping with the Brown v. Board opinion.
For all the nasty carping that segregationists voiced about the form of the Brown opinion and for all the vitriol they spewed out against Chief Justice Earl Warren and the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in upholding the Constitution, it is necessary that we today express our thanks and admiration for those justices and for that opinion. It was a high-water mark of doing good for America.
I was young when the following exchange with my great-grandmother happened and don’t remember the year and never knew the occasion for her imperious command to me, but it must have been right after the Brown decision had been handed down, and so took place about 60 years ago.
My great-grandmother, Etta Belle Ross, had been born in Missouri right after the Civil War to a family of Confederate loyalists. Though she grew up to become a suffragette and feminist leader of the Democrats and a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, she never moved beyond her parents’ views on race.
Great-grandmother was not a nice, warm person, as I remember. She was the boss of the family — put there by her Calvinist God, I suppose she thought, to keep all of us (especially the men) on the straight and narrow road of rectitude.
One day in my grandmother’s house, I was walking in the hall past the living room where great-grandmother was sitting. I was trying to pass the door as quickly as possible in the hope that she would not see me. I failed. She spoke out sharply “Stephen, come here. I have something to tell you.”
With my eyes averted to avoid her gaze, I cautiously approached her. She reached out her right hand and grabbed my left arm above the elbow and squeezed it tight so it hurt, pulling me right up close to her face.
She said with memorable grim determination: “You may have to go to school with them, but you don’t have to like them.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but realized she was scared of something. My parents had become liberal Democrats and Unitarians to boot, influencing me rarely to value great-grandmother’s social norms. She then passed away before I participated in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, learning to sing movement songs with a passionate enthusiasm that would have shocked and angered her.
But neither the Brown opinion nor the civil rights movement nor even the historic civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 that capped the movement could put an end to our national trauma initiated by past injustices.
It is as if the biblical passage on sowing the seeds of division in your house is indeed a law of nature: Once the evil is abroad, you do inherit the wind for generations to come.
The curse of slavery is still with us indirectly, acting out in new, surprising, cultural forms of tension and alienation. New biases have been created to carry on racial and ethnic dysfunction, which, intentionally or not, keep us as a people away from a good equality of character. We have yet to live up to Martin Luther King’s injunction that character, not the color of our skins or the features of our faces, should mark us as persons fit for citizenship and equal opportunity to succeed.
I refer to the current fixation by some on what they take to be “white privilege” and “institutional racism” along with perceived “microaggressions, micro-inequalities and microaffirmations.” These fixations came into being in the early 1970s, when the success of the civil rights movement was overtaken by demands for new forms of remedial discrimination based on programs of affirmative action.
The equality affirmed by Brown v. Board was not supposed to lead to this new kind of categorizing people in ways that continue to legitimate race and gender as socially meaningful ways to separate one person from another.
Brown was about living equally under the rule of law; the post-Brown cultural turn that invented and seeks to impose on all of us ideas like “white privilege,” “institutional racism,” and “microaggressions” is something different.
Americans today, thanks to past struggles and sacrifices, are equal under the law. But the law can only go so far in bringing about satisfactory personal life outcomes. In reality, we have many inequalities in America, mostly inequalities of wealth. It is beyond the capacity of the law to make two people the same in fortune and happiness. The more we seek to make people the same in worldly experience, the more general rules of law fail to achieve good results.
When we try to use law to micro-manage economic and social outcomes, we end up only with “rule by law,” which is another name for the tyranny of bureaucrats — the dystopian world envisioned by Kafka and Orwell.
If we are to go beyond the legalities of Brown, we need to invoke the aid of personal equity, not regulatorily enforced sameness of socio-economic outcomes. Equity comes from ethics, which is the moral sense within our hearts and minds.
Equity is not about blaming others, or disparaging them, or demanding that they give in to our needs or heal our psychic wounds. Equity seeks a balance between individuals so that no one is put upon and each must respect the other. Equity binds both minorities and majorities alike. It transcends groups and looks at the character of individuals. It provides for justice through individual gifts of spirit and self-restraint.
Equity requires that each of us back off a bit from time to time in asserting our personal demands. Equity prefers a kind of hospitality in cultural and social relations where we have the presence of mind and courtesy to overlook minor lapses and shortcomings. It is being gracious to others.
Those who work within themselves to build their capacity for graciousness — it doesn’t necessarily come gifted from our parents or our peers — lead happier and more productive lives. And society is better off too.
