Yet there's been some insistence lately, regrettably helped by Herman Cain, a favorite of the Tea Party, that racism is on the wan, if it exists at all. Cain, a black man who grew up in the segregated south, said recently of the jobless hundreds occupying Zuccotti Park:
"Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself. It is not someone's fault if they succeeded, it is someone's fault if they failed," the ex-Godfather's Pizza CEO declared.Cain said this in the same week that CBS was reporting unemployment levels for African Americans at Depression-era levels: 16.2 overall, 17.5 percent for black males, close to 41 percent for black teens. Unemployment for the general population is about 9.1 percent. When we read about the hard scrabble life of Herman Cain, we learn that his father held three jobs, janitor, barber, and chauffeur, to help feed, cloth, and educate his children. Three jobs--Cain's father was fortunate, and so was Herman Cain, raised in a two-parent family, both holding jobs.
Apples and oranges, Cain might say, but the emphasis on the missing white children in contrast to the almost non-existent reporting of missing black children--Jhessye is just one example, is a clear record of the racism that exists in this country. Racism and its inevitable fallout in educational opportunities drives the huge disparity between white and black employment numbers and high school and college graduation levels, and is at least one reason for the large number of black youths rotting in our over crowded jails. Racism may be less virulent than when Cain was a young man growing up in the segregated south but it still exists. Good for Herman Cain that he's a successful business man, but one good chapter does not finish the story. We have a long way to go, and I hope Herman Cain is not the one who will lead us there.
Since I called this the Kitchen Sink, let me throw in another reminder of how racism permeates our society and its media coverage. Most of us probably remember the Central Park Jogger case but how many of us know that the five boys who were convicted and served years in prison had their sentences vacated by the New York Supreme Court. The man who raped and beat the jogger confessed thirteen years later while serving consecutive sentences in a New York prison for rape. The only semen ever collected at the scene was his, and his alone. Yet until today none of the police who extracted confessions from the five boys, or the prosecutor, have been charged with a crime or been reprimanded.
The media coverage on this case provides a sharp contrast to the coverage in this country of the Amanda Knox case. Knox, a grown-up blonde with blue eyes, was exonerated of the crime of murder after serving nearly four years in an Italian prison. The media coverage in this country was unrelenting in its disparagement of the Italian justice system, with Americans of all political views celebrating our justice system as superior. Most of the coverage focussed on the inexcusably lax collection of DNA evidence by the Italian police; much less attention was given to Knox's confession and even less to her false accusation of Patrick Lumumba, a black man and her former employer, of the crime. (Luckily Lumumba had an air-tight alibi and was released after three weeks in prison.) No doubt Knox made her confession under extreme duress after hours of interrogation, a similar duress experienced by the five black youths in the jogger case. But in the Knox case, the U.S. media assumed her innocence; in the jogger case, it assumed their guilt.
As one of the boy's supporters, the Rev. Calvin Butts of Harlem, told the New York times, "The first thing you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths . . . ."
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