Volume 7 Issue 34…Dedicated to the Dialogue on Race…August 27, 2004

By J. Rudyard Kipling

Take up the White Man's burden--

Send forth the best ye breed--

Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait, in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild--

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden--

In patience to abide,

To veil the threat of terror

And check the show of pride;

By open speech and simple,

An hundred times made plain,

To seek another's profit

And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--

The savage wars of peace--

Fill full the mouth of Famine,

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

(The end for others sought)

Watch sloth and heathen folly

Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--

No iron rule of kings,

But toil of serf and sweeper--

The tale of common things.

The ports ye shall not enter,

The roads ye shall not tread,

Go, make them with your living

And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden,

And reap his old reward--

The blame of those ye better

The hate of those ye guard--

The cry of hosts ye humour

(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--

"Why brought ye us from bondage,

Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--

Ye dare not stoop to less--

Nor call too loud on Freedom

To cloak your weariness.

By all ye will or whisper,

By all ye leave or do,

The silent sullen peoples

Shall weigh your God and you.

Take up the White Man's burden!

Have done with childish days--

The lightly-proffered laurel,

The easy ungrudged praise:

Comes now, to search your manhood

Through all the thankless years,

Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,

The judgment of your peers.

The Dark Knight-Batman/White Ninja/Zorro is continually being encouraged to think outside the box, be responsible for his actions, respect and treat others, as he would like to be treated, and make his family proud. Surprisingly, when asked to identify his first priority, the Dark One/Ninja/Zorro declared, "My number one goal is to get an education to..." We continue to work on the "things" that followed that declaration.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

On December 30, 1865, Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India into a family of artists, clergymen and civil servants. Both of his grandfathers were clergymen and his father was an arts and crafts teacher. At the age of five, Kipling's parents took him to England where he boarded for six unhappy years with a retired sea captain and his wife, a religious fanatic.

Following a short period with his parents in India, Kipling spent four years (1878 -1882) at United Services College, a boarding school in North Devon, which served as a prep school for military academies. Kipling's poor eyesight and academic performance made him unsuitable for a military career.

Returning to India (1882), Kipling worked as a journalist for the Civil and Military Gazette (1882-87) and assistant editor and overseas correspondent for the Pioneer (1887-89). His collection of stories, written during this period, were published in The Phantom Rickshaw (1888) and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888).

In 1889, Kipling returned to England. His short stories and poems, which celebrated British imperialism and heroism in India and Burma, became popular reading. His work appealed to the European spirit of adventure and feelings of superiority. Early in his career, Kipling saw imperialism as a noble mission to civilize inferior non-Europeans, a sentiment expressed in "The White Man's Burden." From 1889 to 1892, Kipling published Life's Handicap (1891), a collection of Indian stories and Barrack-Room Ballads, a collection of poems, include Mandalay and Gunga Din.

In collaboration with American Charles Wolcott Balestier, Kipling wrote the romance novel The Naulakha (1892). He married Balestier's sister Caroline and the couple moved to the United States, where he wrote Many Inventions (1893), The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), The Seven Seas (1896) and Captains Courageous (1897). Kipling returned his family to England after the death of his daughter, Josephine (1899). He wrote Stalky & Co (1899), about his years at boarding school, the children's classic Kim (1901), Just So Stories (1902), Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) and its sequel Rewards and Fairies (1910).

In 1907, Kipling became the first English winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. While his early work glorified European imperialism, which altered life on every continent, his later writing sounded a note of caution, moral intensity and gloomy prophecies of world disaster. These themes, along with humility, shattered hopes and frustrated lives, are found in The Recessional (1897), The Recall (1909) and A Diversity of Creatures (1917). His work grew more somber after his only son, 18 year-old John, was killed in World War I (1915). Kipling published The Irish Guards In The Great War, a history of his son's regiment (1923), Debits and Credits (1926) and Limits and Renewals (1932).

Kipling died on January 18, 1936 in London; he is buried at Westminster Abbey. (Sources: Encyclopedia Britannica and www.online-literature.com/kipling/)

Keyes on Reparations

Many generations of non-whites on every continent were forced to bear the white man's burden. European imperialism and racism denied non-whites the fruits of their labor. In the United States, generations of blacks were enslaved, indoctrinated to be subservient and to accept laws defining them as second class citizens.

Today, black baby boomers can recall sitting in the back of the bus. Jim Crow laws regulated every facet of black life, preventing them from eating at lunch counters or getting rooms in hotels and inns that catered to only whites. While bond slavery and segregation ended, they exacted an onerous toll. Blacks' demands for reparations were ignored. Consequently, blacks continue to suffer from the lingering vestiges of these injustices and ongoing institutionalized racism, legacies earned from bearing the white man's burden.

Over the last ten years, the call for reparations has grown. Alan Keyes, the Maryland resident recruited by the GOP to challenge Illinois' Democratic US Senate nominee Barack Obama, recently broadened the debate. The conservative Republican, known for making controversial statements to capture media attention, reaffirmed his position that descendants of slaves should be exempted from paying income taxes to help heal the wounds of past discrimination and segregation.

Keyes' comments before a bi-partisan group drew heat from conservatives. However, he insists tax breaks for slave descendants is a conservative market-oriented remedy. As Keyes comments suggest, it is hypocritical of conservatives that frequently support tax breaks for wealthy corporations to object to such a simple reparation strategy to right an historic wrong.

Legacy of Discrimination in Higher Education

Despite the Plessy v Ferguson (1896) "separate but equal " precedent, black schools were poorly funded, had few books, relatively untrained teachers and inferior facilities. Successful challenges to inequality between black and white colleges begin with Gaines v Canada (1938). Lloyd Gaines, a black American was refused admission to law school in Missouri because of his race. The Supreme Court ruled that a state offering legal education for whites must offer it to blacks as well.

Ada Sipuel (Sipuel v University of Oklahoma) was denied admission to the University of Oklahoma Law School because she was black. Oklahoma law made it a misdemeanor to teach blacks and whites in the same classroom. The Supreme Court held that the state had to provide equal education opportunities for blacks as soon as these facilities were available to whites.

Herman M. Sweatt (Sweatt v Painter) applied for admission to the University of Texas School of Law (1946). Although eligible, he was denied admission based on race. Sweatt filed suit, but Texas had six months to establish a separate law school for blacks. In addressing the issue of separate law schools, the Court found the faculty, variety of courses, opportunity for specialization, size of student body, scope of the library, availability of law review and similar activities made the University of Texas superior. More important, the University of Texas Law School possessed qualities that cannot be objectively measured but which make a great law school, such as the faculty's reputation, administration experience, position and influence of the alumni, standing in the community, traditions and prestige. Thus, the Court could not conclude that the education offered Sweatt at the black law school "substantially equal" to that which he would receive if admitted to the University of Texas Law School.

George W. McLaurin (McLaurin v University of Oklahoma Regents) held a master's degree and was admitted to University of Oklahoma Graduate School as a candidate for a doctorate in education. Permitted to use the same classrooms, library and cafeteria as white students, Oklahoma State law restricted him to seats specified for "Negro students." The Court held: The conditions under which McLaurin was required to receive his education deprived him of personal and present rights to the equal protection of the laws. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, states are precluded from such different treatments based on race.

Further the Court said, "Society grows increasingly complex, and the need for trained leaders increases correspondingly. Appellant's [McLaurin] case is perhaps, the epitome of that need, for he is attempting to obtain an advanced degree in education, to become, by definition, a leader and trainer of others. Those who will come under his guidance and influence will be directly affected by the education he receives. Their own education and development will necessarily suffer to the extent that his training is unequal to that of his classmates. There is a vast difference -a Constitutional difference- between restrictions imposed by the state which prohibits the intellectual commingling of students, and the refusal of individuals to commingle."

Fundamentally these cases concern rights which are personal and present. In Gaines v Canada, the Court declared that "petitioner's rights are personal ones. It is as an individual that he is entitled to the equal protection of the laws, and the state is bound to furnish him within its borders facilities for legal education substantially equal to those which the state afforded persons of the white race, whether or not other negroes seek the same opportunity."

Race Matters!

By Dot

Beyond noteworthy efforts to collapse all humans into a single race, with more similarities than differences, and focus on color discrimination as the culprit in our social relations, the historic injustice visited on people of color remains unchanged. It is impossible to dismiss.

The promises of racial equality offered by US Supreme Court decisions on public accommodation, voting and education, including the landmark Brown v Board of Education ruling, have been subsequently negated by an avalanche of delaying tactics and litigation against quotas and reversed discrimination.

Bottom line, nothing has changed. Affirmative action, which was advanced as a remedy for past discrimination, but mostly benefitted white women, is dead. Few blacks are getting advanced degrees, elementary and secondary schools remain segregated by color, and blacks are still last hired and first fired.

Regardless of how you slice it, the US remains a race-based society, where white is supreme.

By John Burl Smith

Family is the most powerful influence and predictor of success. If a child is born into a wealthy family, chances favor it attaining approximately the same affluence as its parents. By the same token, if a child is born to poor parents, odds are heavily weighed against it rising much above its parents' station in life. Unless fate intervenes with some providential deviation, these social dynamics hold like a universal law.

The best example is slavery and how it robbed generations of Africans of their labor and ability to amass wealth. Kidnapped and brought to America, slaves and their descendants were robbed of the opportunity to develop a legacy of competitiveness. Rooted in skin color, slavery's immutable legacy created a circumscribed mind-set; today it is the best predictor of success in America. Codified in Article 1 Section 2 of the US Constitution (3/5 Compromise), skin color made slaves and their descendants 3/5 of white men. All rights and privileges were allocated solely on the basis of skin color, which made America a race-based society.

The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) outlawed bond slavery by individuals, but it did not repeal the 3/5 rule that determined socioeconomic and political status. Creating a chasm of inequality, 141 years later the legacy of legal slavery is institutionalized racism, which maintains slave descendants as second class citizens.

Economist Dot M. Smith's research documented this fact by analyzing employment and median family income data compiled by US Department of Labor. Her research shows that when all factors are equal, blacks are twice as likely to suffer unemployment, thus white families consistently enjoy greater incomes relative to black families. In fact, the ratios of black to white median family incomes mimic the 3/5 Compromise as mandated by the US Constitution.

This legacy of institutionalized racism is what the US Supreme Court rejected in Brown v Board of Education (1954). The court recognized that blacks could never overcome inequality legally enforced by government unless states were legally forced to make up for maintaining unequal conditions during segregation. Ergo, the federal government and states that maintained "separate but equal" conditions, which amounted to institutionalized racism, were obligated to give blacks "substantially equal" opportunities denied them legally under segregation. Since the denial was race-based and advantaged all whites, the remedy had to be race-based to advantage all blacks.

Higher educational institutions use family legacy to unfairly advantage whites and discriminate against blacks. A kind of "grandfather clause," all white institutions, public and private, barred blacks from attending based solely on race, but admitted whites without racial restrictions. Ipso facto, the court reasoned that since the discrimination blacks faced was enforced by institutional law or the rule of law and not the arbitrary whim of individuals, institutions must take from whites the unfair legacy gained by discriminating against blacks. To allow individual whites to benefit from the legacy of segregation is tantamount to rewarding them for centuries of states using the law to discriminate against blacks as a class.

Efforts to remedy the historical disparities Smith called the chasm of inequality must be based on the same bar that kept blacks out, skin color. Using variables such as socioeconomic status or educational ranking and test scores changes what their discrimination was based on, skin color. Moreover, it allows any potential remedy to be expanded to include individuals or groups, such as white women, gays and immigrants, who were not discriminated against based on race or color, which made blacks a particular class.

Email cassavery@aol.com I just finished reading "The warlords of America," by John Pilger at www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6777.htm. It is a must read. I disagree with his suggestion that George W. Bush may be the lesser evil since Democrats started most recent wars. However, he offers a succinct overview of US imperialism. The vast majority of us have no idea the attack on Vietnam was unprovoked. And, with all the controversy about military service during that conflict, could you do an issue around it so your readers can better understand it? Thanks for all you do to advance the dialogue....Cass.

Email hotc4@hotmail.com There has been conversation in some quarters about suppressing the black vote in 2004. Some blacks claim the system is broken; so why bother? The next president will appoint two or three Supreme Court justices. This fact alone should spur more blacks to vote. We cannot afford to have a Court with nine Clarence Thomases!

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