Blacks Debate Civil Rights Risk in Obama’s Rise

By RACHEL L. SWARNS
Published: August 24, 2008

WASHINGTON — On the night that Senator Barack Obama accepts the Democratic nomination for president, Roderick J. Harrison plans to pop open a bottle of Champagne and sit riveted before the television with his wife and 12-year-old son.
Mr. Harrison, a demographer who is black, says he expects to feel chills when Mr. Obama becomes the first black presidential candidate to lead a major party ticket. But as the Democratic convention gets under way, Mr. Harrison’s anticipation is tempered by uneasiness as he wonders: Will Mr. Obama’s success further the notion that the long struggle for racial equality has finally been won?

Mr. Obama has received overwhelming support from black voters, many of whom believe he will help bridge the nation’s racial divide. But even as they cheer him on, some black scholars, bloggers and others who closely follow the race worry that Mr. Obama’s historic achievements might make it harder to rally support for policies intended to combat racial discrimination, racial inequities and urban poverty.

They fear that growing numbers of white voters and policy makers will decide that eradicating racial discrimination and ensuring equal opportunity have largely been done.

“I worry that there is a segment of the population that might be harder to reach, average citizens who will say: ‘Come on. We might have a black president, so we must be over it,’ ” said Mr. Harrison, 59, a sociologist at Howard University and a consultant for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies here.

“That is the danger, that we declare victory,” said Mr. Harrison, who fears that poor blacks will increasingly be blamed for their troubles. “Historic as this moment is, it does not signify a major victory in the ongoing, daily battle.”

Such concerns have been percolating in black intellectual circles for months, on talk radio and blogs, in dinner conversations, academic meetings and flurries of e-mail messages crisscrossing the country.

It can be an awkward discussion for Obama supporters who argue that the success of the candidate — the man who might become America’s first black president — might make it somewhat more difficult to advance an ambitious public policy agenda that helps blacks. Some of Mr. Obama’s black supporters say that Mr. Obama himself, by rarely focusing on racial discrimination and urban poverty while campaigning, has often fueled the notion that the nation has transcended race.

Other supporters dismiss the idea that Mr. Obama’s success might undermine support for race-based policies. They say black voters should focus not on speculative debates but instead on helping him win the presidency, because his emphasis on solutions to problems like failing schools, unemployment and inadequate health insurance would benefit blacks.

Last month, the debate bubbled up when The Root, a Web journal of black politics and culture, published a provocative essay titled “President Obama: Monumental Success or Secret Setback?”

“If Obama becomes the president, every remaining, powerfully felt black grievance and every still deeply etched injustice will be cast out of the realm of polite discourse,” wrote Lawrence Bobo, a black sociologist at Harvard University, who supports Mr. Obama and was outlining in the essay the concerns of some friends and colleagues. “White folks will just stop listening.”

Bev Smith, a black talk radio host whose program is based in Pittsburgh and syndicated nationally, said some of her listeners echoed those worries.

“There’s an assumption now that we’ve made it,” Ms. Smith said. “Our concern is that we’ll get lost in the shuffle.”

The concerns have been driven in part by opponents of affirmative action who argue that race-based preferences in education and the workplace are increasingly irrelevant given the accomplishments of Mr. Obama and the growing black middle class.

Others, like Abigail Thernstrom, the vice chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, say the creation of minority voting districts should be reconsidered, too, given Mr. Obama’s success at wooing white voters in states like Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming.

Ms. Thernstrom, who is white, said black and white academics who worried about the impact of Mr. Obama’s achievement were engaging in “habits of pessimism.”

“People feel that there’s something callous, something racially indifferent in saying, ‘Wait a minute; we’ve come a long way,’ ” said Ms. Thernstrom, a longtime critic of affirmative action who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group.

“But whether he wins or loses, for a black man to become a standard-bearer for one of the two major parties, it does say something,” she said. “It says that the road we started down in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act has come to an end. We don’t need to talk about disfranchisement in the same way anymore.”

The fortunes of black Americans have certainly improved since the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. The number of educated, professional blacks has grown as poverty rates have declined. About 17 percent of blacks held bachelor’s degrees in 2004, compared with 5 percent in 1970, census data shows. (About 30 percent of whites held bachelor’s degrees that year.) In 2005, college-educated black women who worked full time earned more than their white female counterparts, census data shows.

But significant gaps between blacks and whites remain. About a quarter of blacks lived below the poverty line in 2006, compared with 8 percent of whites, census data shows. The median income of blacks, $30,200, is less than two-thirds that of whites, $48,800. And studies suggest that employers often favor white job seekers over black applicants, even when their educational backgrounds and work experiences are nearly identical.

Such disparities might explain the differences in opinion that remain between blacks and whites.

In a New York Times/CBS News poll released last month, 53 percent of whites said that blacks and whites had about an equal chance of getting ahead in society. Only 30 percent of blacks agreed.

Blacks and whites were similarly divided over the state of race relations. Fifty-five percent of whites said race relations were generally good, compared with 29 percent of blacks. Nearly 60 percent of blacks said race relations were generally bad.

“A few of my white friends have asked me, ‘With Barack achieving all of this, will we be in a position where we can put race aside?’ ” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who is a co-chairman of Mr. Obama’s campaign in that state.

Mr. Cummings said he points them to statistics on lingering racial disparities in education, health and income. “I hope that progressive-minded people will not make a blanket conclusion that if Barack has made it, everybody can make it,” he said.

Mr. Obama has occasionally made that point himself, noting that his candidacy alone will not resolve the nation’s lingering racial inequities.

“I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy, particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own,” Mr. Obama said in his speech on race in March.

As part of his urban policy plan, Mr. Obama promises to increase the minimum wage, expand affordable housing, provide full financing for community block grants and create a White House office of urban affairs. Some of his black supporters argue that it would be foolhardy for Mr. Obama to focus more on racial issues, particularly given that he needs to appeal to white voters who can be alienated by such talk.

“He’s running for president of the United States, not president of the Urban League,” said Jabari Asim, editor of The Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P. magazine, reiterating comments made by a fellow writer and editor. “I think most people understand that he can’t go out and push this overtly African-American agenda.”

Mr. Harrison, the Howard University sociologist, worries that such political imperatives might make it less likely that an Obama administration would be inclined to confront entrenched racial divisions.

But he still plans to savor Mr. Obama’s historic moment. He hopes that the nomination will lead to a national conversation about race relations and that the shifting political landscape might give rise to new strategies to address the legacies of America’s color line.

“It will certainly shift the conversation,” Mr. Harrison said. “It might end up being another vehicle for people to press the same points. But it might also open a new chapter of the debate.”

Minorities Often a Majority of the Population Under 20

By SAM ROBERTS
Published: August 6, 2008

Foreshadowing the nation’s changing makeup, one in four American counties have passed or are approaching the tipping point where black, Hispanic and Asian children constitute a majority of the under-20 population, according to analyses of census figures released Thursday.

Racial and ethnic minorities now account for 43 percent of Americans under 20. Among people of all ages, minorities make up at least 40 percent of the population in more than one in six of the nation’s 3,141 counties.

The latest population changes by race, ethnicity and age, as of July 1, 2007, were generally marginal compared with the year before. But they confirm the breadth of the nation’s diversity, and suggest that minorities — now about a third of the population — might constitute a majority of all Americans even sooner than projected by census demographers, in 2050.

In 2000, black, Hispanic and Asian children under age 20 were at or near a majority in only about one-fifth of the counties and, over all, blacks, Hispanics and Asians accounted for 40 percent or more of the population in about one in seven counties.

Even with the growing diversity, all but one of the 82 counties where blacks make up a majority are in the South (except St. Louis), all but two of the 46 where Hispanics are in the majority are in the South or the West (except the Bronx and Seward, Kan., home to giant meatpacking plants), and four of the five counties with the largest proportion of Asians are in Hawaii (San Francisco rounds out the top five with 33 percent).

Except for two counties in New Mexico and South Dakota with large American Indian populations, the 10 counties with the highest proportion of minorities were along or near the Mexican border.

From 2006 to 2007, according to the bureau’s revised estimates, the counties that became majority-minority included Rockdale, near Atlanta.

An analysis by Kelvin Pollard and Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau found 489 counties where a majority among people younger than 20 are racial and ethnic minorities and another 274 where they account for 40 percent to 50 percent of people in that age group.

The latest figures confirm the sweep of America’s growing diversity, outside central cities and beyond black and white. In 109 of the 302 majority-minority counties, no single minority made up more than half the total population.

In the New York metropolitan area, the changes suggested that the city was experiencing a racial equilibrium while the suburbs were becoming more diverse.

The number of Asians rose in every county in the New York area. Only Manhattan lost Hispanics. Non-Hispanic whites declined in every county except those that make up Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and in New Jersey, Monmouth.

An analysis by William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, found that since 2000 the top 10 gainers of non-Hispanic whites were all counties in the South or West, except for Manhattan and Will County, near Chicago.

Since 2000, Mr. Frey said, only one in six counties recorded an increase in the number of non-Hispanic white children under 15.

While half the counties recorded losses of non-Hispanic whites, Dr. Frey found, almost five times as many counties are losing white children as gaining them. A growing number of minority families with children are clustering in suburban and Sun Belt counties.

At the other extreme, he said, “are counties in the nation’s industrial heartland, inner suburbs and Great Plains that are losing their largely white child and young adult populations.”

Meanwhile, nine times as many counties are gaining mature adults as losing them.

People 65 or older made up 25 percent or more of the population in 24 counties, led by La Paz, Ariz., home to the Colorado River Indian Reservation, where they make up 32 percent. Most of the counties with disproportionately high populations 65 and older are in Florida, Texas and Michigan. Children under 5 make up 10 percent of the population in 26 counties, led by Webb County, Tex., on the Mexican border, where they constitute nearly 13 percent.

COLOR DOES MATTER!!!

Segregation Growing Among U.S. Children

Published: May 6, 2001

Most black and white children are living in increasingly segregated neighborhoods, especially in major metropolitan areas in the Midwest and Northeast, a new analysis of the latest census data shows.

Though, over all, blacks and whites live in slightly more integrated areas now than they did in 1990, the segregation of their children worsened in the decade, according to the analysis by researchers at the State University of New York at Albany.

The conflicting trends between children and the overall population reflect the continuing exodus of white families with children from cities to largely white suburbs, leaving more childless whites to live in more integrated neighborhoods, researchers said. They noted that settings that forced racial integration, like college dormitories, did not include children.

The findings carry unsettling implications for race relations in a nation that, while more racially and ethnically diverse than ever, still has several major urban areas where white and black children are interacting less frequently.

''It's a very big problem for white children who may think they're experiencing diversity in the country, but are only getting a taste of it,'' said John R. Logan, a sociologist at the university who also did a study last month on overall racial segregation trends in American neighborhoods.

''The problem for minority children is that, on average, they're growing up in neighborhoods where they are the majority, and that's not the world they will live in,'' he said.

Levels of black and white segregation of children under 18 are uneven across the country. In a swath of northern cities from Milwaukee to Detroit to New York, segregation levels of black and white children grew sharply in the last decade, largely as a result of white flight.

But a countertrend is mounting in Seattle, Portland, Ore., and other metropolitan areas in the Pacific Northwest, where white and black youngsters live in increasingly integrated neighborhoods, researchers found.

Many of the nation's largest public schools have been struggling for years to cope with growing black-white segregation among youths. In Milwaukee, blacks make up 61 percent of the city's 60,000 public school pupils, up from 46 percent of the city's 41,000 schoolchildren in 1980.

''It's white flight and it's increasingly difficult to have any kind of meaningful desegregation or integration,'' said Aquine Jackson, director of student services for the Milwaukee public school system.

To measure segregation levels, researchers at the state university used what they call a dissimilarity index, which captures the degree to which two racial groups are evenly spread among census tracts in a city. A neighborhood was defined as a census tract, which is 4,000 to 6,000 people.

The index ranges from 0 to 100, giving the percentage of one group who would have to move to achieve an even residential pattern -- one where every tract replicates the group composition of the city.

A value of 60 or above is considered very high segregation. Values of 40 to 50 are usually considered moderate levels of segregation, while values of 30 or less are considered low.

Nationally, the black-white segregation index rating for children was 68.3 in 2000, compared with 65.5 in 1990. Over all, the black-white segregation rating was 65.1 in 2000, compared with 69.4 in 1990.

Of the top 50 metropolitan areas, the 10 most segregated, by neighborhood, for black and white children were, in order: Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, Newark, Chicago, Cleveland, Miami, Cincinnati, Birmingham, Ala., and St. Louis. The segregation index ratings ranged from 86 in Detroit to 77 in St. Louis.

The 10 least segregated areas for black and white youths were, in order: Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.; Norfolk, Va.; Charleston, S.C.; Augusta, Ga.; Greenville, S.C.; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Columbia, S.C.; San Diego, and Sacramento. The segregation ratings ranged from Riverside's 47 to Sacramento's 58.

The relatively low segregation levels in these cities reflect their proximity to military bases, as well as a growing number of blacks who have moved to the South from other parts of the country in the last decade.

Memo Starbucks: next time try selling ice to Eskimos

Chris Berg
August 3, 2008


GLOBALISATION has pulled millions of people in developing countries out of poverty. It has sent goods, services and people around the world, linking humanity into a vast network of communications and commerce that has ultimately benefited everyone.

But, still. In the case of one American coffee giant, globalisation deserved to fail. Starbucks makes really bad coffee.

Starbucks is almost entirely pulling out of Australia — closing 61 of its 84 stores. In Melbourne, just five of the 16 stores are tipped to remain.

Sure, the company is closing stores across the world. But while the closure of 600 stores in the United States sounds like a big deal, it is trivial when you consider that there are nearly 12,000 Starbucks outlets in that country.

The demise of the coffee giant's Australian ventures speaks volumes about the challenge of globalisation.

The lesson of Starbucks' Down Under fiasco is simple. Globalisation is a bit overrated. It's much harder than everybody seems to think.

So why has Starbucks worked in the US but largely failed in Australia? The secret of the company's success in the American market wasn't that it sold coffee. It sold coffee culture.

It is remarkable how alien quality coffee was to US consumers. As late as the 1980s, the National Coffee Association was producing advertisements just trying to convince people that coffee could keep them awake. And what small prestige the drink held in the US was occupied by the old "cup of joe" — cheap, stale and reheated sludge poured from a pot.

No wonder that when Starbucks came on the scene in the 1990s, Americans eagerly embraced it. Starbucks coffees may be weak, poorly made and overly reliant on syrups to mask their flavour, but they are certainly better than what had previously been available.

The other aspect of Starbucks' appeal in the US has been its establishment of the cafe as a social hub. From a Melbourne perspective, the typical Starbucks may seem somewhat sterile and too over-eager to appear "comfortable". But it is one of the peculiarities of the US that the idea that a cafe could be a social venue was quite new, at least outside the circles inhabited by the cultural elite. Comfy chairs and pleasant, if bland, music have been just as important a part of the Starbucks product as its coffee.

But when Starbucks came to Australia to bring coffee and the cafe culture to the masses, it found that we already had it. Particularly in Melbourne, we have better coffee and more relaxing cafes than anything that Starbucks brought with it.

Undeterred, the firm simply dumped what seemed to work in America into this country. When Starbucks opened an outlet in Lygon Street — a store that has since sat empty surrounded by bustling cafes — it became an amazing example of just how comprehensively a company could fail to understand its target market.

The inability of Starbucks to adjust its product to local conditions is illustrated even more clearly when we compare it to the international strategy of that other evil American behemoth — McDonald's. Where Starbucks offers almost the same products around the world, McDonald's varies its menu depending on local culture and local tastes. In India, they sell the McCurry Pan. In Japan, the "Ebi Filet-O" is available — a shrimp burger. In Turkey, McDonald's offers kebabs. Some of these products may sound stupid — and Canada's "McLobster" sounds filthy — but their existence shows that McDonald's understands the importance of understanding its regional markets, and tries to understand the peculiarities of local culture.

The failure of Starbucks in Australia tells us a lot about globalisation too. It isn't enough — as some anti-globalisation activists seem to assume — for an American company just to blanket a foreign market with a mediocre product.

Multinational corporations actually have to offer something better than the local alternatives if they want to succeed.

This is true as much for products such as films and television as it is for syrupy coffee and fast food. Clearly, Hollywood films are better than Australian films on some level.

Audiences flock not just to the high-cost blockbusters but also to independent American movies well before they consider seeing a local production. Hollywood knows that a movie has to be entertaining before it can be successful.

If Starbucks can teach us anything, it is that in the global marketplace, turning up to compete just isn't enough. You have to be really good.

Chris Berg is a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs and editor of the IPA Review.

Welcome August

Folks,

I didn't realize that I have left July, or actually July left me without my notice. And now the new month comes suddenly. August has come and stood before my eyes! It is a moment of beginning and end altogether. Beginning a new day of my life, and the end of my yesterday. Beginning and end juxtapose each other with no rivalry and enmity like my shadow and my body. Only one hope is kept in my mind, the brightness of tomorrow will always glitter and shine upon my days.

Cheers,
mp

Harvesting Money in a Hungry World

By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Published: August 1, 2008

THE latest round of global agricultural trade negotiations that began seven years ago in Doha, Qatar, collapsed in acrimony this week in Geneva. While India and China are getting the blame for refusing to reduce import tariffs and farm subsidies, you can assume that trade officials in Europe and the United States are breathing a sigh of relief that they aren’t going to have to limit their own protectionism.

Nothing new here. Nor is it a staggering blow to world trade: the aggregate loss caused by the trade barriers in question is probably no more than $70 billion in a global imported food market of more than a trillion dollars. But what is different this time is a backdrop of soaring food prices that makes all past assumptions seem ossified. It also makes the world’s poorest people even more vulnerable when trade bureaucrats in both the wealthy West and rising East make vapid arguments.

Usually trade in agricultural produce involves governments’ efforts to prop up farmers who claim they will go broke without subsidies and tariffs. Constant improvements in technology, mechanization, plant breeding and farm chemicals have steadily increased food production per acre, and for the last 30 years led to a world that we assumed would be awash in cheap food.

Yet world prices for wheat, corn, rice, soy, coffee, cotton, dairy products, meats, fruits and vegetables have suddenly reached record levels. Why now?

The answer starts with the half-billion new middle-class consumers in China and India who increasingly wish to emulate the rich diet that Westerners take for granted. And they have the cash to buy the food they want on the world market. Despite slowing growth rates, world population is nearing seven billion people and may reach nine billion mouths in less than 40 years.

In addition, increases in the cost of oil have sent diesel fuel, fertilizers and farm chemical prices sky-high. Those added costs are now being passed on to consumers. Environmental regulations, water scarcities and urban development continue to cut back arable acreage. Technology and machinery constantly improve, but now only marginally improve on past serial leaps in production. More than one-fifth of the American corn crop is now devoted to ethanol. In short, the era of cheap food, like the age of cheap gas, may be about over.

The result is a growing revolution in the way we envision the economics of agriculture, and it should be reflected in the efforts of all nations to ensure much freer trade in food.

Yet Europe — usually the self-appointed voice of global moral conscience on international human rights, climate change and poverty — remains committed to agricultural policies that protect its own farm sector while stymieing farmers abroad. It is past time that the European Union let the market determine what and how its farmers produce, while also allowing its consumers to buy the safest and cheapest food it can, regardless of its origins.

Here at home Congress recently overrode President Bush’s veto to approve a $300 billion, multiyear farm bill awash in subsidy payments regardless of current commodity prices. Yet we all know the tired refrain each time these indefensible farm bills come up for enactment.

First, they are transparent election-cycle harvests for farm-state politicians, who have small constituencies but exercise outsized national political clout.

Second, because such special-interest legislation wins little broad public support, its supporters rely on phony rationalizations if not outright deception. In 1996 the trick was to call billion-dollar subsides the Freedom to Farm Act and vow a phase-out in seven years, a promise that was quickly forgotten.

In 2002, the next farm bill piggybacked onto fears following Sept. 11. So the gimmick was to name it the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act — as if giving millions to corporate wheat farmers might protect us from Al Qaeda. Now with the public worried about gas prices, the latest bill was pushed as the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act.

Third, all the rationalizations of this Depression-era legislation have become risible. Family farmers — now less than 1 percent of the population — disappeared as the farm subsidy industry grew. Indeed the wealthiest corporations now receive the most federal largess. Political considerations, not scarcities or nutrition, explain why crops like sugar and rice are subsidized and lettuce and fresh fruit are not.

For decades there has been neither a national interest nor a moral need for farm subsidies. But now in times of soaring world food prices there is not even economic justification. As a brave new world fought it out at the Doha talks, it is growing hungrier by the day.

It is understandable that poorer nations are near paranoid in their fear for their own farmers’ livelihoods should they import a glut of imported American and European food that is a product of sophisticated economies of scale. But with food shortages looming, all countries should now support open trade in food to encourage as much supply as possible for a hungry planet.

The best thing that the United States, the beacon of world capitalism, could now do is to stop interfering with its own farmers, let markets and need determine what they grow and how they farm — and then by such a principled American example persuade the rest of the world to do the same.

Victor Davis Hanson, a former raisin farmer and a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the author of “Fields Without Dreams” and “The Land Was Everything.”