From its inception, our nation has been traveling down a long, troubled road in need of racial reconciliation. With profound ramifications, we embraced a race-based, human-trafficking form of slavery that all Christians should have thoroughly condemned. It took 250 years and a bloody civil war, which President Abraham Lincoln viewed as God’s judgement against America, to end slavery.
However, although God humbled America over its sin of slavery, our country did not repent. Instead, we instituted Black Codes or Jim Crow Laws that continued to segregate our nation by color, White over Black. Even worse, we employed our judicial and police departments to enforce those unjust laws with inequitable cruel brutality. Furthermore, our citizenry formed White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan to keep Blacks from seeking their civil rights by terrorizing them with practices like lynching. So for the first 350 years of our nation’s journey, our need for racial reconciliation continued to grow.
This article will consider the impact of the next pivotal moment in America’s race-journey —the battle for African American Civil Rights. After one hundred years of Black Codes, countless arrests, brutal beatings, and literal martyrs, the peaceful protest movement of the 1950s and 1960s forced our nation to finally grant Blacks the legal rights of American citizens. On July 2, 1964 President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act, which ended laws that discriminated based on race, color, national origin, and sex. During the signing ceremony for the Civil Rights Act, President Johnson gave a charge to all Americans:
“[The purpose of the Civil Rights Act] is to end divisions which have lasted all too long… It is a challenge to all of us to go to work in our communities, in our states, in our homes, in our hearts to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country. So tonight, I urge every public official, every religious leader, every business, and professional man, every working man, every housewife, I urge every American to join in this effort to bring justice and hope to all our people and to bring peace to our land. My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail. Let us close the springs of racial poison, let us pray for wise and understanding hearts… and make our nation whole.”
Did the Civil Rights victory once and for all lay the basis for America to solve its race problem? My short answer is that it went a long way towards doing so. For my fuller answer, I will first consider the weightiness of the challenge President Johnson set before all Americans to end and undo the problems that 350 years of legalized systemic racism had caused. Second, I will analyze the efficacy of the solutions we have tried since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and their unintended consequences.
The Deep-Rooted Problems Caused By 350 years Of Legalized Systemic Racism
John Piper defines systemic or structural racism as follows: “Structural racism is the cumulative effect of racist feelings, beliefs, and practices that become embodied and expressed in the policies, rules, regulations, procedures, expectations, norms, assumptions, guidelines, plans, strategies, objectives, practices, values, standards, narratives, histories, records, and the like, which accordingly disadvantage the devalued race and privilege the valued race.”
“Implicit in this definition is the important fact that structural racism, therefore, may have its racist effects even if non-racist people now inhabit the institutions where the racist structures still hold sway.”
Since America legally instituted a ubiquitous form of racism for 350 years, it clearly qualifies as being systemic. President Johnson was wise to conclude that it would take all Americans working with all of our institutions to undo the resulting problems that racism created in our nation. He received and commissioned several key reports to diagnose the scope of the problem and to provide remedies to solve it.
The Moynihan Report Or “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action”
The highly debated report started by addressing the sentiment many government officials held, which was that since legal obstacles had been removed, no problem existed to any significant degree that would keep Black people from integrating into society. The report concluded otherwise:
“Three centuries of injustice have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American. At this point, the present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world. The cycle can be broken only if these distortions are set right. In a word, a national effort towards the problems of the Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure. . . . Such a national effort could be stated thus: The policy of the United States is to bring the Negro American to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship. To this end, the programs of the Federal government bearing on this objective shall be designed to have the effect, directly and indirectly, of the enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.”
Consider the cultural impact that 350 years of systemic racism made upon Black culture. Think of the results of the “Doll Test” used in the Brown v. Board of Education case: When Black children were asked which dolls (black or white) were smarter and better, they pointed to the white dolls. When asked which doll was most like them, they pointed to the black doll saying, with one even saying, “That’s the n-gger. I’m a n-gger.”
Few things more powerfully influence who we become in life than our expectations of ourselves, and our expectations often come from our culture. Why did the Israelites make an idolatrous golden calf when they were at Mount Sinai? The Israelites made a golden calf because after being in Egypt for 400 years, God’s people had culturally become pagan sinners who made idols of their gods.
The Kerner Report
After more than 150 race riots or major disorders that occurred between 1965 and 1968, President John
son ordered an 11-person commission led by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner to uncover their causes and to recommend solutions. This Kerner commission released the Kerner Report.
Alice George, a scholar who specializes in American history during the 1960s, highlighted the following section of the report for Smithsonian magazine:
“White society,” the presidentially appointed panel reported, “is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” … “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” It warned that unless drastic and costly remedies were undertaken at once, the report said, “there would be a continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.”
As Black Americans migrated from the South to the cities, systemic pressures further shackled them. The very presence of predominantly Black communities evidence the systemic racism of redlining laws. Then when manufacturing jobs left the cities, they took hope with them. While slave and segregation sharecropping cultures equipped Blacks to survive in agrarian and industrial workforce, the anti-literacy culture that Blacks lived under left too many ill-equipped to thrive in the North’s technological information age.
Imagine playing a four-hour long monopoly game with several conditions: First, you are forced to stay in jail for the first two and a half hours, and second, while in jail you worked as hard, if not harder, than everyone else, but you accumulated zero wealth. That’s how my friend Matt Jones explains the significance of the economic injustice against African Americans from 1619 to 1964.
Political Solutions Offered For America’s Race Problem And Their Unintended Consequences
1. Social Safety Nets
The well-intended systemic programs of the Great Society (e.g., welfare) helped single mothers struggling to feed their children but some argue they were counterproductive to building strong stable families. For example, many programs used to help low-income households penalized marriages because the family would bring in two incomes, rather than one. This therefore incentivized parents not to marry and destabilized the primary stabilizing institution in Black life — the family.
2. School Busing
The vision to desegregate schools by busing Black children from their secure environments with teachers who both understood and cared for them into white schools with better resources, although well-intended, backfired. Because urban schools lost a large number of students to busing, their schools lost tax revenue. Eventually, they had to let their teachers go and even eventually closed their doors.
And tragically, many White parents and students resented integration, even in the North. Imagine mobs of White people spitting at and hurling curses at little Black children, with some being escorted into schools by the National Guard. In the end White parents took their children out of integrated schools and perpetuated segregation through new private or Christian school movements.
3. Affirmative Action
Affirmative action programs opened up doors to African Americans that had been systemically locked for centuries, but they didn’t always provide training or resources so that applicants could earn equal qualifications as their White counterparts.
The only bright spots were the Jackie Robinsons — people who had the skill to make it and the temperament to endure the persecution. When they were found and matched, the access they gained through affirmative action changed their families, and that changed communities.
My father was one such applicant. He used his newly gained civil rights to appeal through the Urban League, a civil rights organization, to become the first Black telephone installer for PacBell in the state of New Jersey. Back then, affirmative action laws were pressing the company to hire a Black person but employers said none were qualified.
But after passing the entrance exam, my father could not work because the telephone company refused to allow him to work as an installer. The company said Black people were lazy, drank on the weekends, and didn’t show up to work on time, therefore they wouldn’t waste money training him just to fire him.
PacBell made him work in the mailroom for a year, but my father persevered, was promoted, and retired from the telephone company after 35 years. I think he called in sick only one day in his entire career. His rare-and-legally-fought-for opportunity opened the door for our family to live with middle-class privileges in a safe neighborhood with excellent schools.
The War On Drugs And Law And Order Policies
The Moynihan Report correctly noted that the best remedy for ridding criminal elements from the Black community was to invest in programs that would strengthen the Black family, and in particular, the Black father. This is how the American West was built under our Homestead Act, and this is how a White stable middle class was built through the GI Bill, which enabled soldiers to buy homes. However, America failed to stabilize the Black family, reneging first on Lincoln’s forty acres and a mule promise and then failing to heed the Moynihan Report’s plea. 1
But rejecting the passionate appeals of the Moynihan Report, President Richard Nixon ran for president after Johnson on a “Law and Order” platform and declared a “War On Drugs,” advocating for laws like mandatory prison sentencing for drug crimes.
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan chose to continue and expand Nixon’s “War on Drugs.” This policy criminalized drug use in the urban context the way it did in suburbia or more White communities. 2 Consider how the opioid crisis is seen as a health crisis requiring health intervention not criminalization.
In fact, criminalizing drug use does not rehabilitate the user. When criminalized, the incarcerated marijuana user isn’t reformed; he is educated by more hardened criminals and very likely enters a merry-go-round of jailed recidivism.
In addition, the criminal system functions in inequitable ways with Black and White offenders. Poor young Black Americans are often convinced by the overwhelmed court appointed public defenders to accept plea bargains with guilty verdicts instead of going to trial. Furthermore, harsh mandatory minimum sentencing ties the hands of judges, which results in many non-violent offenders serving lengthy sentences. The net result is that these systemic policy choices give America the largest prison population in the history of the world and with statistically the highest population coming from Black men of fatherless homes. 3
However, by far the greatest problem in the Black community is its Black-on-Black crime and homicide rates. The victims rarely receive justice because many of these cases remain unsolved. In pursuing solutions for the high crime rates in the Black community more than one answer can be true at the same time.
Yes, we need law and order. Yes, we need police reform (not literally defunding the police). Yes, Blacks experience physical abuse at the hands of police and at significantly higher rates than other Americans. And, yes, Moynihan’s call to invest more into strengthening the Black family and Black fathers cries louder and louder every day. Rather than building the most expensive criminal incarceration complex in the history of the world, which does not reform anyone, let’s be open to considering other solutions. 4
Concluding Thoughts
The passage of the Civil Rights Act delivered a critical blow to systemic racism. The Act armed those who had been oppressed under systemic racism with the legal power to overcome it.
Admittedly, changing laws don’t change hearts, but the attitude of our nation towards racism has radically changed. Great progress has been made. Yet it is still also true that the pockets of urban blight across our nation reminds us that 350 years of systemic racism has had an ugly effect on our nation. There continue to be aspects of systemic racism that have yet to be dismantled.
At the same times not all of the policies employed since 1964 have been helpful. Yet, now all Americans, especially Christian Americans, can work together and lawfully strive for a more united and racially reconciled nation. In a fourth and final article, I will consider what the church has done and how it can play an active role in pursuing racial reconciliation.
- I am indebted to Anthony Bradley work, Ending Overcriminalization and Mass Incarceration for my views expressed in this section.
- The Human Rights Watch Study found that among people sentenced to prison for drug crimes, the black rate (256.2 per 100,000 black adults) is ten times greater than the white rate (25.3 per 100,000 white adults). Disaggregating these rates by gender reveals that black men were sent to prison on drug charges at 11.8 the rate of white men,” “Arrests.” Crime in the United States 2008. Cited by Anthony Bradley, Ending Overcriminalization and Mass Incarceration, p. 137. Accessed Sept 14, 2020 https://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/arrests/.
- Robert Rector, “Children raised by single parents are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems; be physically abused; smoke, drink, use drugs; be aggressive; engage in violent, delinquent, and criminal behavior; have poor school performance; be expelled from school; and dropout of High School.” “How Welfare Undermines Marriage and What to Do About It.” The Heritage Foundation. November 14, 2014. Accessed Sept. 15, 2020. https://www.heritage.org/welfare/report/how-welfare-undermines-marriage-and-what-do-about-it
- Anthony Bradley cites studies to show that a twelve-month stay in a juvenile detention center costs $148,00 a year, while the average cost to educate the same student for a year in public school is only $10,259 and Harvard’s tuition cost of $59,959 a year.