by Tom Wicker
This report is a picture of one nation, divided. It is a picture that derives its most devastating validity from the fact that it was drawn by representatives of the moderate and "responsible" establishment -- not by black radicals, militant youth or even academic leftists. From it rises not merely a cry of outrage; it is also an expression of shocked intelligence and violated faith.
President Johnson, in appointing his Commission on Civil Disorders on July 27, 1967, was severely criticized for its moderate character. Where, the critics demanded, were Stokely Carmichael, Floyd McKissick, Martin Luther King, such white radicals as Tom Hayden or such fiery evangelists as James Baldwin?
How could the Commission's report be comprehensive or acceptable without the participation of such men? The inclusion of Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP hardly answered the question; they represented inter-racial moderation, not radical militance.
But just as it sometimes takes a Hawk to settle a war -- Eisenhower in Korea, De Gaulle in Algeria -- so did it take bona fide moderates to validate the case that had to be made. A commission made up of militants, or even influenced by them, could not conceivably have spoken with a voice so effective, so sure to be heard in white, moderate, responsible America. And the importance of this report is that it makes plain that white, moderate, responsible America is where the trouble lies.
The Commission seemed an unpromising group, when it was first convened in the Indian treaty room of the Old State, War and Navy Building -- the room where Dwight Eisenhower held his news conferences and steadfastly insisted that it was none of the business of the President of the United States to endorse the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision. Even the staff director chosen by President Johnson, David Ginsburg, was a prosperous Washington attorney without visible qualifications for understanding the uneasy ghetto.
Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, the designated chairman, had done much to integrate his state's National Guard and a tenuous racial peace had generally been maintained in Chicago during his administration; but he was not a nationally renowned figure. John Lindsay, the Republican-Liberal Mayor of New York had exhibited a deep interest in civil rights matters during his several terms in Congress, and had worked long and hard to keep his city quiet; he was clearly an asset to the Commission, and its most glamorous member.
Senator Fred Harris, Democrat of Oklahoma; Rep. James Corman, Democrat of California; Rep. William M. McCulloch, Republican of Ohio; Mrs. Katherine G. Peden, the former Commissioner of Commerce of Kentucky; I. W. Abel, President of the United Steel Workers of America; Herbert Jenkins, Chief of Police in Atlanta, Ga.; Charles B. Thornton, the Chairman of Litton Industries, Inc.; Brooke and Wilkins -- this did not seem to be a group likely to break new social ground. What, for instance, was Harris of Oklahoma likely to know of urban affairs?
The Invisible Government, by Tara Carreon [VENKMAN BURN IN HELL]
But those acquainted with the Commission's work say that Harris of Oklahoma -- who had served earlier in Senator Abraham Ribicoff's inquiry into the problems of cities -- proved one of the ablest, most sensitive members. His long experience with underprivileged and ill-treated Indians in his home state gave him a depth of understanding that not all the other members reached.
On the other hand, Corman of California and McCulloch of Ohio, both of whom had excellent civil rights records in Congress, proved more conservative when discussion moved beyond civil rights to the social and economic questions into which the Commission inevitably intruded. Jenkins, the policeman, surprised other members with his acute sensitivity to such matters, and his progressive and compassionate approach.
The Commission broke into a rough six-five division on most questions -- Kerner, Lindsay, Harris, Jenkins, Wilkins and Brooke on the one hand, and Corman, McCulloch, Thornton, Abel and Mrs. Peden on the other.
This division went to the root of the Commission's problem. It was not that any member was against "civil rights" or "integration" as white moderates conceive of those ideas; it was rather that the six sensed somewhat earlier, more strongly and on more issues than the five, that it was necessary to go beyond these concepts to the root question of white racism -- of white refusal to accept Negroes as human beings, social and economic equals, no matter how they might feel about Negro "civil rights."
Thus, one member of the Commission steadfastly resisted advocacy of Federal "open housing" legislation. Why, he kept asking, "Can't a man sell his own house to whomever he pleases?" Ultimately, he supported the open housing section because it was softened somewhat, not because he had really changed his view. In such ways, the Commission itself reflected the inability of American society, dominantly white, to see and treat its Negro citizens fairly.
Yet, surely it must be a hopeful thing -- perhaps the one hopeful note in recent years -- that ultimately even such a divided and representative Commission could not and did not blink the fact that the single overriding cause of rioting in the cities was not any one thing commonly adduced -- unemployment, lack of education, poverty, exploitation -- but that it was all of those things and more, expressed in the insidious and pervasive white sense of the inferiority of black men. Here is the essence of the charge:
"What white Americans have never fully understood -- but what the Negro can never forget -- is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."
But if it is hopeful that a group of representatives of those institutions and that society could recognize unanimously this central and devastating fact, there is nothing hopeful at all about the fact itself. What kind of program can be advanced to cope with the sheer humanness of racism?
Conceivably the nation could continue its present failing efforts toward an integrated society, including the present proportion of its resources devoted to social and economic programs; or it could abandon integration as a goal and commit increased resources to "enrichment" of life in the ghetto -- thus presumably making it bearable without producing violence against white society.
The first of these is hopeless: not only will it tend to produce more and more ghetto violence but it is an obvious fraud, in terms of its ability to produce anything like integration. As the Commission points out, if achieving that goal is difficult now, what will it be when the Negro population of the central cities has risen from the present 12.5 million to the 21 million projected for 1985?
The second course is rejected here with equal frankness, as simply another method of producing a permanently divided society. For who can deny what is insisted upon in these pages: "In a country where the economy and particularly the resources of employment are predominantly white, a policy of separation can only relegate Negroes to a permanently inferior economic status."
Having thus disposed of both white "moderation" and black "separatism," the Commission concluded that the only possible course for a sensible and humane nation was "a policy which combines ghetto enrichment with programs designed to encourage integration of substantial numbers of Negroes into the society outside the ghetto."
But -- even with the best of will -- what a monumental prescription this is. In 1910, 91 percent of American Negroes lived in the old South; by 1966, while the Negro population had doubled to 21.5 million, the number living in metropolitan areas had risen to 14.6 million and the number living outside the South had increased eleven-fold to 9.7 million. That is what created the black ghetto but by now, natural increase has replaced migration as the major cause of Negro population growth in the cities -- and almost all Negro population growth is taking place in the cities.
In combination with an almost equally rapid white exodus from the cities, these statistics mean that one-third of American Negroes live in our 12 largest cities (two-thirds of non-Southern Negroes).
Obviously, this is not a situation that can be reversed or even substantially changed in a short period of time; one has only to contemplate the controversies over bussing students from the ghetto to white neighborhoods, and vice versa, and the not infrequent white violence that results when a Negro moves into white man's country.
While the slow process of dispersing the residents of the ghetto -- which, for all practical purposes, has not even been started -- goes on, therefore, something also is going to have to be done about the grinding life of the urban poor -- a life documented by this Report in terms both harsh and heartbreaking. Because the brutal fact is that for millions of Negroes now living, and perhaps for some unborn, the ghetto is all they are ever going to know.
What the Commission recommends -- from specifics on jobs, housing, schools, police procedures, newspaper practices, to large abstractions like community attitudes -- is best told in the Commission's own words, backed by its own accounts of its findings. But it is again of the highest importance that these recommendations come from the moderate establishment.
I have discussed a number of excluding – as well as including – practices within the political parties (Dahlstedt, 2005). I will here briefly outline three of these mechanisms and thereafter discuss the question of the representatives’ own agency in terms of “identity politics”.
• One of the aspects of exclusion involves the “rules of the game” and conventions that regulate political party life.
• Another aspect of exclusion involves access to the different kinds of contacts and networks within the parties.
• A third aspect involves a set of stereotyped representations of “immigrants”, which at times have discriminatory consequences.
Referring to Pierre Bourdieu (1991), political parties can be seen as parts of a broader “political field”, intersected by relationship- and conflict patterns between a number of forces and actors in distinct positions on the field. The actors are part of a struggle for space on the field as well as support from the electorate. Their conduct is governed by the structural conditions of the field and the specific “rules of the game”. That continuous and constant struggle on the field, however, also has a number of symbolic dimensions.
Certain actors are always thought to have the preferential right of interpretation – the possibility to make “their” starting points and “their” jargon the norm within a certain organisation. Organisations are therefore not “neutral” fields, where individual actors are encountered on equal terms, but are structured according to principles that give them unequal starting positions. In that respect, the political field manifests a certain “mobilisation of bias”. “There is”, as James March and Johan Olsen (1989: 47) verify, “a tendency for large, powerful actors to be able to specify their environments, thus forcing other actors to adapt to them”. March and Olsen note that these unequal relationship patterns tend to have something of an ethnic dimension, as organisations are often formed by those ethnic groups that are present. It was clear from the discussions that I have conducted with political representatives in different parties and parts of Sweden that one crucial aspect of exclusion within the political parties involves the “rules of the game”, the particular set of taken for granted conventions that regulate political party life. In addition, the rules that are set up to be “impartial” can have definite ideological subtexts, in the sense that they are, in the main, judgements that are “coloured” according to who and what is and is not “suitable” or “acceptable” within the parties. For example, as a party representative your political profile should not be “too provocative” and you shouldn’t be too outspoken or “dogmatic” about issues such as racism and discrimination – certainly not within their own party. Otherwise you actually risk sharp opposition. The “rules of the game” are therefore symbolic or ideological, although at the same time they have a material dimension. They are a result of patterns of behaviour and routines that position the representatives according to the prevailing “rules of the game”.
A second aspect of exclusion involves access to the different kinds of contacts and networks that exist within the parties. Without a widespread network of contacts it is difficult to keep up with the competition that is prevalent within the parties. Here, “immigrant” representatives easily find themselves at a disadvantage in relation to native Swedes, because as a rule they don’t have the same network of contacts within the parties. However, widespread networks outside of the parties, involving for instance various immigrant associations, may in a number of respects be a quite valuable resource for “immigrant” representatives, in terms of lobbying and securing votes from different “ethnic communities” (cf. Solomos & Back, 1995;Schierenbeck & Schütt, 2004). Such “networking” has been shown to be crucial, for example, in the nominations processes within the parties (Khakee & Johansson, 2002).
A third aspect of exclusion, finally, involves a collection of stereotypes and racialised representations of “immigrants”, which at times legitimises the treatment of the Others as “deviations from the norm”. These representations seldom seem to involve open conflicts or clearly formulated preconceived thoughts and ideas, but rather ideas mentioned in passing, without being followed up and explained. These insinuations can be difficult to get a hold of and identify, but they can nevertheless accumulate and give rise to “structures of feelings” (Williams, 1965) that are both evident and highly unpleasant for those subjected to them. According to a prevalent party image, for instance, the issue of “integration” is associated with the “immigrants” themselves, and not with Swedish society as a whole, which in many cases means that “immigrant” representatives are associated with pursuing “integration issues”. “Immigrant-ship” and “integration perspective” thus tend to become something of a political reservation to which elected representatives with “foreign background” are referred.
In conclusion, many of the “immigrant” representatives I have interviewed feel that they are constantly perceived as in some way or another deviating from a rather exclusive Swedish norm. “Immigrant” representatives, their particular “ways of being”, are thereby often defined as a “problem” within the parties, something that has to be “handled” or “overcome”. Within the political parties, Swedish society is assumed to be characterised by a “democratic ethos”. Here, democracy is, though most often implicitly, associated with “swedishness”. To the extent that “immigrants” lack knowledge of the way politics is conducted in Sweden, this is seen as a consequence of their “different culture”, not being characterised by the same “democratic ethos”. According to this “cultural deficit paradigm” (Osman, 2005), there are strong demands for “immigrant” representatives to “adapt to the Swedish norm”, to what is referred to as the specific “Swedish way” of “doing politics”.
Within the framework of this particular paradigm, there is basically no acknowledgement of the representatives’ actual competences and qualifications. They are for instance assumed to be less “socially competent” than “Swedes”. Behind this wall of representations of a collective “lack of competence”, it is often difficult for the representatives to be seen and treated as individuals of their own. By means of the recurrent characterisation of democracy as something specifically Swedish, it becomes Our job as Swedes to “enlighten” Them, the “immigrants”, and not vice versa, and to educate them to become “good, Swedish democrats”. This way of conceptualising democracy is in fact founded on a nationalist ideal of an archaic national community, which in contemporary multi-ethnic Sweden is not capable of including the whole population on equal terms....
[T]he empirical findings of the report shows that democracy in contemporary Sweden is characterised in a number of respects by a Swedish “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983). Citizens that take their place in public life, whether they are native born or from overseas backgrounds, face a number of routines, conventions and more or less taken-for-granted ideas that categorise them according to their perceived “closeness” to an imagined Swedish “normality”....
There are a number of demands and conditions that at different times and in different respects serve to structure people’s participation and action in the context of Swedish democracy. Participation is subject to certain conditions. In the “everyday life” of political parties, for instance, there are numerous examples of how “immigrants” in different situations are required to “prove” both their belonging and loyalty to Swedish society and the Swedish imagined community. They are required to “prove” that they have learned “the right codes”, that they have a proper command of the Swedish language and the “rules of the game”, that they share the fundamental principles on which the imagined community is based....
Those who make demands for change in a fashion deemed to be inappropriate in terms of prevailing party conventions always risk being excluded or silenced on ethnic grounds. Those “structuring principles” (Giddens, 1984) operating within the political parties are often presented as being based on universal or neutral premises, despite the fact that they are often, in actual fact, ethnically particular (Hall, 2000). They include by means of stigmatising and subordinating (cf. Mulinari & Neergaard, 2004). In order to capture these processes of “inclusion by means of exclusion”, I have elsewhere referred to the concept of “reserved democracy”, which denotes a political order in which a set of normative ideals and practices of “Swedishness” constitute “Immigrantship” as deviancy (Dahlstedt, 2005). “Reserved democracy” is a concept that, on the one hand, designates the privileged space of political agency reserved to Swedes. At the same time, “reserved democracy” captures the role of exclusionary processes in inducing reticent attitudes towards “mainstream Swedish politics” by “immigrants”. Those who are subject to exclusion in various situations “are denied a position as subjects from which they can plead their own case” (de los Reyes & Kamali 2005: 18). Exclusionary mechanisms in themselves constitute an affront to the dignity of those who are subjected to them. Furthermore, the distrust and negation that those subject to such mechanisms commonly encounter, “not being trusted as a subject, as someone capable of putting their own experiences into words” (ibid.), is extremely painful for those whose rights and dignity as an equal have already been violated....
Urge for substantial changes
There is today an acute need for substantial political change. Over time, democracy as the reserve of an exclusive, culturally homogeneous We, undermines democracy itself, both as idea and practice. Democracy in present day, multi-ethnic Sweden is stratified along ethnic lines in several respects. This is a fundamental democratic problem, but is at the same time also a problem of democracy. If power, as is specified in the Swedish Instrument of Government (Regeringsformen), is to proceed from the People, democracy needs to become considerably more inclusive. The ethnic hierarchies in contemporary Swedish politics and society contain the seed of an immense problem of legitimacy. Why should those who are included by means of subordination support such a regime?
From a democratic point of view, it is thus necessary that ethnic minorities themselves, through democratically elected representatives and otherwise, have better opportunities to articulate political issues and insist on changes that would otherwise probably have been silenced, marginalised or even removed from the mainstream political agenda (Phillips, 1995). In the long term, the demands and political challenges raised by various “immigrant” representatives will gradually broaden or democratise the public debate (Young, 1997; Law &Harrison, 2001). A more “fair” representation of subordinated ethnic minorities in decision-making bodies could, moreover, foster more positive attitudes toward government as well as further encourage political participation among the minority electorate (Banducci, et al. 2004).
-- The Exclusion of "Immigrants" in Swedish Politics: The Case of Political Parties, by Magnus Dahlstedt
That is because, whatever the fate of its specific proposals, the Commission has minced no words about the prime necessity:
"Only a commitment to national action on an unprecedented scale can shape a future compatible with the historic ideals of American society ... The major need is to generate new will -- the will to tax ourselves to the extent necessary to meet the vital needs of the nation."
That kind of recommendation gets little attention when it comes from "liberals" and "radicals" and "intellectual bleeding hearts"; but when it comes from men like Thornton and McCulloch and Abel and Jenkins, it is not easy to doubt the urgency of the case, the shock of the findings, the truth of the need.
And still -- this report can only provide, as its profoundly disturbed authors concede, "an honest beginning" on a task that beggars any other planned social evolution known to human history.
It can only be a beginning because, patently, until the fact of white racism is admitted, it cannot conceivably be expunged; and until it is far more nearly eliminated than this Commission -- or any fair man -- could find today, how can that great commitment of money and effort here recommended even be approached, much less made?
And in the vicious circle in which the nation is so nearly trapped, how can the conditions of life in the ghetto be improved to the point -- not merely of preventing violence -- where its present and prospective victims can have the kind of education, housing, income and social experience that, practically speaking, are the prerequisites of equality? Only by the great commitment that -- even if there were no war in Vietnam, no gold drain, no Federal budgetary crisis -- seems now so remote.
But a journey of a thousand miles, President Kennedy used to say, must begin with a single step. And perhaps that step has been taken in this Report -- this indictment.
It is, at the least, an extraordinary document. We are not likely to get a better view of socially directed violence -- what underlies it, what sets it off, how it runs its course, what follows. There are novels here, hidden in the Commission's understated prose; there are a thousand doctoral theses germinating in its statistics, its interviews, its anecdotes and "profiles."
Myths, naturally, are exploded. There was not, after all, much evidence of Negro snipers in the 1967 rioting; most of the shooting came from scared guardsmen and policemen and some of it was only fireworks. Nor was there -- as President Johnson was inclined to believe when he appointed the Commission -- an organized conspiracy. The Commission staff even ran Stokely Carmichael's comings and goings through a computer in its effort to find conspiratorial traces; in the end, the staff found lots of "incitement" -- mostly oratorical -- and no conspiracy.
The report also disposes of white middle-class insistence that if immigrants from Europe could rise from the ghetto, so could today's Negroes. As that cliche is analyzed here, the unskilled labor the black immigrant from the cotton fields can offer is in nothing like the demand that once there was for the unskilled labor of the arriving Italian, Irishman or eastern European. Moreover, the power of the urban political machine has declined for many reasons, and today's ghetto resident can exert less organized political pressure than could yesterday's.
Above all, the ghetto today is black. Since white society is far more prejudiced against black men than against mere foreigners, jobs and social acceptance are harder for them to get. Thus, precisely because today's black immigrant has less chance to "get ahead" than his white predecessor, he also has less incentive to do so.
As for the rioters -- those ominous looters and arsonists whose eruption into violence precipitated this massive study -- they tended, curiously, to be somewhat more educated than the "brothers" who remained uninvolved. By and large, the rioters were young Negroes, natives of the ghetto (not of the South), hostile to the white society surrounding and repressing them, and equally hostile to the middle-class Negroes who accommodated themselves to that white dominance. The rioters were mistrustful of white politics, they hated the police, they were proud of their race, and acutely conscious of the discrimination they suffered. They were and they are a time-bomb ticking in the heart of the richest nation in the history of the world.
But more than that, the rioters are the personification of that nation's shame, of its deepest failure, of its greatest challenge. They will not go away. They can only be repressed or conceded their humanity, and the choice is not theirs to make. They can only force it upon the rest of us, and what this report insists upon is that they are already doing it, and intend to keep on.
Thus, there is not really in these pages a rebuke to any president, any administration, any political party, any state or group of states. There is no finger pointed in scorn. Save for a tacit insistence upon the enormous role the Federal government, of necessity, must have in raising and spending the sums required, there is no preference for any political philosophy.
The Commission's members insist that they had no guidance from the White House, and suffered no restrictions by it. They went out and saw for themselves; they heard the voices of the ghetto; in a basement in Cincinnati, Fred Harris and John Lindsay were spat upon. Through 24 full days of executive session, most of them from nine in the morning until ten at night, they worked on this document.
In the end, not without dispute and travail and misgiving, in the clash and spark of human conflict and human pride, against the pressures of time and ignorance, they produced not so much a report on the riots as a report on America -- one nation, divided.
Reading it is an ugly experience but one that brings, finally, something like the relief of beginning. What had to be said has been said at last, and by representatives of that white, moderate, responsible America that, alone, needed to say it.
March 1, 1968
***
.... The only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack -- mounted at every level -- upon the conditions that breed despair and violence. All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs. We should attack these conditions -- not because we are frightened by conflict, but because we are fired by conscience. We should attack them because there is simply no other way to achieve a decent and orderly society in America....
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson, Address to the Nation, July 27, 1967