Zapping ‘Terrible Virus’ of Racism

Civil rights activist and Georgetown University Prof. Roger Wilkins walks out of a neighborhood restaurant. A homeless black woman with a child in a stroller approaches.

The father bailed on them, Wilkins learns. When her extended family stopped helping with child care, she had to stop working. Now she’s on the streets.

“If drastic change does not occur,” Wilkins writes in the November/December Mother Jones, “that doleful predicament may someday claim the child I saw in the stroller that night.”

How to affect that change? Given the way Americans think about race, Wilkins isn’t optimistic.

He thinks change begins with individuals and tells his students to be morally courageous in their mundane dealings. Following that suggestion, one white student tells him how she stood up to her grandfather at dinner, telling him his nightly racist tirades made her lose her appetite.

But America’s racist mind-set isn’t so simply solved. As an example, Wilkins says many of his white students’ families discuss issues such as homelessness--which to them is a racial issue--regularly. But their discussions, particularly in the last decade or so, are less than enlightening.

To many, “the problem is not economics, it is sex,” Wilkins says--too many poor women having babies.

His classroom response is this:

“People are always going to act like people. When sex and economics clash, sex will win every time. People will not refrain from having sex simply because they have no economic opportunities. If they do have real economic opportunities, they’re more apt to be careful to protect their future. And, with jobs, they’re more apt to be good parents. . . .

“Good income doesn’t guarantee that people will be good parents, but lack of income almost assuredly cripples the capacity to be a good parent.”

About 40% of African-Americans are now middle class or upwardly mobile working class, Wilkins quotes Newsweek as reporting. But that doesn’t mitigate the fact that the country has essentially abandoned its impoverished urban population, he adds.

Wilkins argues passionately against solutions to poverty that are less traditionally liberal than his own. But to write off such efforts as mere attempts by whites to define, and thus further disempower, blacks--as Wilkins does--denies the possibility that some whites truly believe that we’re all in this mess together and are honestly seeking new solutions.

To sneer that “politics 1992 were sculpted for suburbanites” is to discount the hard fact that most people make political decisions based on self-interest.

“Racism,” Wilkins writes, “is a terrible virus in our society, passed on from generation to generation, and when the country is badly led, as it has been over the past dozen years, the virus spreads.”

One does not have to agree with Wilkins’ assessment of how the country was led during the last 12 years, or with his belief in the power of government, to agree that the virus of racism must be stamped out.

There may even be folks who disagree with Wilkins’ solutions but embrace the famous Edmund Burke quote, to which Wilkins refers: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

REQUIRED READING

Marian Wright Edelman calls her best-selling book, “The Measure of Our Success,” a “motherly nag.” There’s no doubt that she has the President-elect’s ear. But what is she likely to nag him about?

In the Dec. 10-24 Rolling Stone, Norman Atkins coaxes the president of the Children’s Defense Fund to wax philosophical on white and black flight from the inner city, on middle-class entitlement, on the dilemma of homeless women and, naturally, on children--a word she concedes she uses as a surrogate for all poor people, the majority of whom are white.

“We impose on the children our judgment about the parents and carry over all of our baggage from olden times about welfare, race and poverty onto the children of these folk,” Edelman says. “We’re going to have to confront the immorality of the fact that we punish children because of our views, legitimate or not legitimate, about their parents.”

* The modern mind seems to come hard-wired with a system that screens out the emotional impact of much media input. Every now and then, though, images appear that are so powerful they short circuit this defense system.

Such images have been trickling out of Somalia for a while. But the photographs in Time’s “Landscape of Death” portfolio this week are so potent they make every less-than-tragic image in magazines this week seem frivolous, callous.

Gianni Giansanti’s shot of a child at its mother’s shriveled breast may change lives, here and there.

* Peggy Say was heroic in her efforts to get her brother, journalist Terry Anderson, freed after he was taken hostage in Beirut. Yet there was something unsettling about her high-profile righteousness during the ordeal.

In the December Redbook, Say reveals what has happened since Anderson’s release. “The Dream That Died” is a strange, sad tale. It explains a lot about its obsessively needy author, who, when Anderson is released after 2,455 days of brutal captivity, wonders: “What about me? . . . When are you (Anderson) going to have time for me?”

* Hillary Clinton won’t sit in on Cabinet meetings. She won’t accept an appointment. And she hasn’t had plastic surgery.

What she is likely to do, according to the January Good Housekeeping, is “serve as unpaid chair of a presidential commission to draft ideas for what she terms ‘a sensible national family policy.’ ” And it was Margaret Thatcher who suggested that Clinton give her hair a lighter tint.

Clinton had better get ready for conflicted stories like this, which contort themselves to hit the traditional girl-talk issues of fashion and hairstyles while also noting that National Law Journal has called her one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America.

ESOTERICA

India Currents is a monthly magazine aimed at California’s large East Indian population.

A recent issue features news stories on events in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal; articles on travel and Indian music, dance and art; a calendar of events; a crossword; fiction, and a piece on Artesia’s booming “Little India” area.

Professionally written and edited, with Northern and Southern California editions, this would seem to be essential reading for Indian expatriates.

($9.95 a year; P.O. Box 21285, San Jose, Calif., 95151; (714) 523-8788)