Are Liberal Policies Failing Black People?

Tanner Colby. Image via his web site

A great deal of the discourse about race in America can be broken down into two categories: (1) Boy, MLK sure was great, wasn’t he? and (2) Let’s point our fingers at how racist conservative whites can be. While MLK was great, and Republicans continue to say some awful shit (and advance a lot of shitty, racist policies), a lot of potentially interesting questions aren’t debated because we’re too busy shaming racists and extolling the Civil Rights Movement—questions like, Do the policies advocated by liberals actually help blacks?

Tanner Colby, the author of Some of My Best Friends Are Black, a book about the failure of racial integration in the US, says that the answer to that question is no. Though he’s an avowed liberal and voted for Obama, he found himself wondering why he didn’t have any black friends. This led him on a four-year-long rabbit hole of research and questioning the established narrative about busing, affirmative action, and other liberal policy standbys. In February, in honor of Black History Month, Tanner is writing a series of articles for Slate on how those policies have come up short. The first article deals with busing, and the second, which is up today, criticizes affirmative action.

“Fifty years after the March on Washington, America’s high school cafeterias are as racially divided as ever, income inequality is growing, and mass incarceration has hobbled an entire generation of young black men,” Tanner wrote in his first installment. “Do we really think this is entirely due to Republican obstruction? Or is it also possible that the party charged with taking black Americans to the Promised Land has been running around in circles?”

I called Tanner up to talk about his series and how liberals have failed black America.

VICE: In your first piece, you joked that you recently celebrated your one-year anniversary as an "official participant in the National Conversation About Race.” How does it feel to be a white guy who discusses race in public?
Tanner Colby: Outside of social media, it’s been great. When I started writing the book, I knew how much I didn’t know, and I worked on the book for three and a half years before it came out. Even in instances where people disagree with me on the substance of what I’ve said, the response I’ve generally gotten is, “Well, this guy has done his homework and is a valuable contribution to the conversation, and we should hear him out.” That’s in contrast to the recent xoJane piece where this white girl wrote about her experience with a black girl in her yoga class, and it was just full of all kinds of meandering white guilt. The black media jumped all over it as being the worst of white privilege, and I haven’t really gotten any of that. I think that’s because I approached the topic by giving it the respect that it deserves instead of just being offhand about it.

Why do you think Republican critiques of race generally fail?
When Republicans talk about race, they never acknowledge their own role in fighting integration in the suburbs, in stopping housing integration, and things like Nixon’s Southern strategy—how they exploited fears of racial violence in ’68 and ’72 to win elections—again all through the Reagan years with the demonization of welfare queen. They never acknowledge their own failings and concede, “Look, we screwed this up but we want to start over with a genuine outreach to understand how racial politics work." They never say, “We believe conservative policies are what’s best for black America, and here’s why.” In order to do that, you have to first admit to black America, “We did this over the last 40 years during Nixon and Reagan, and we want to change.”

Are there any Republican critiques of Democrats on race that you think are valid?
There is a great deal of taking the black vote for granted on the Democratic side. The Democrats were right there passing all the big mandatory minimums and mass-incarceration policies, and yet every year they go back to the black community and talk about how they’re the best choice. A fair criticism is to say, “Hey, the Democrats are taking you guys for granted, and you really should be considering some other options.” But do Republicans say it that way? No, they come out with “You’re brainwashed on the liberal plantation.” So of course that shuts down any intelligent discussion about where black conservatives and moderates should go if they want to have a different opinion.

What's one way liberal busing policies, which moved black students into white schools and vice versa, didn't work out?
There was a lot of hubris on the left in the late 1960s and the early 70s. The same hubris that got us into Vietnam. When the goernment tried to say, “Alright, white students are going to bus over here and black students are going to bus over there,” human nature got in the way and people said, “No, we’re not.”

The best solution I saw to racial integration was in Kansas City, where you had this integrated neighborhood called the 49/63 neighborhood. They set out to create local policies that encouraged home ownership and protected property rights for black and white homeowners, and in doing so, they didn’t go from the top down and say, “This area is going to be black, this area is going to be white, we’re going to put so much low-income housing here, etc.” They created a zone that protected everyone’s private property rights—black or white.

The irony is, the technocrats from the school busing program at the departments of health, education, and welfare came down and said, “We’re going to take your kids and we’re going to bus them over here, we’re going to bus them over there, and this is how we’re going to rearrange everything.” And they wound up destroying the heart of the neighborhood. They had built an integrated school with a black principal that was about 30-percent black in this integrated neighborhood, and that school wound up being closed down because the neighborhood got depopulated and fell on hard times.

The problem with the Republican Party today is they’ve taken the notion of individual responsibility and they’ve turned it into “every man for himself,” which is a very libertarian idea, as opposed to the idea of individual responsibility—meaning I have a responsibility to look out at my neighborhood and my neighbors and take the initiative to deal with the race problem myself. To welcome new neighbors. To understand people and so on.

What should the government have done in regard to busing?
I think if you look back, America was so emotionally and intellectually stunted in that we were always going to screw it up. People really didn’t know what they were doing. All these ideas—affirmative action, school busing—they weren’t really well-conceived. People were just throwing all this stuff at the wall to see what would stick. So there was really no coherent strategy that went into it; they just sort of figured that out as they went along.

Busing could have worked if it was done right. It was more the misuse of busing that caused the problems. Busing dragnets just swept up black children and redistributed them to white schools because white schools had this mandate to produce X amount of black students. It wasn’t exactly what the black community wanted. The black community wanted choice and agency. And even if you think it’s a good idea to send a white student into a majority black school in the inner city, white people aren’t going to do it. Unless you’re going to outlaw private schools and moving, which is not going to happen. White people just opted out of the social contract as far as public education was concerned, and they haven’t come back.

Read Tanner’s Slate series here and follow him on Twitter

@HCheadle