Was Booker T. Washington on to something?

[PN-G bamatex]

This thread is less a political discussion than it is a historical and social discussion. Hence why you find it on this board and not the political forum. Mods, feel free to move it if you feel it necessary.

 

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/39/

 

The link above leads to the text of the address delivered by Booker T. Washington to the Cotton States & International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 18, 1895. The overall point of the address is summed up in two paragraphs in particular:

 

 

Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third [of] its intelligence and progress; we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.

 

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The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.

 

Washington essentially states in the address that the black population of the South can never truly achieve equality via artificial means - that in order for blacks and whites to truly be equal, blacks must achieve parity in their skills, vocations and abilities as a means of achieving economic equality first, and then social equality thereafter. In essence, Washington is advocating for the black population of the south to develop itself via education and vocational training with white assistance, as a means of earning social and economic equality for itself, rather than being given it via legislation after continued white oppression.

 

This, of course, never came to be. Rather than take a proactive step toward the building of a better South, Southern whites made Jim Crow the norm, which led to continued notions of racial superiority, the perpetuation of stereotypes and a social, educational and economic gap between the black and white populations arguably as large at the end of Jim Crow as it was at the beginning.

 

When the end of that oppression finally came, just as Washington suggested, many tried to find the solution to the inequality it engendered. However, they did not follow Washington's advice; indeed, they did the exact opposite. Rather than seeking to improve black education and vocational training, they sought to create parity through the exact artificial means that Washington clearly stated would never work. Instead of providing blacks in the South with the means to attain the same skills as whites entering the workforce, affirmative action legislation sought to give blacks special consideration in the hiring process to make up for previous oppression. Instead of providing black communities with a better quality of primary and secondary education as a means of making higher education, and thus professional careers with higher wages, a more attainable goal, legislators and university officials alike sought to, often unconstitutionally, make under-represented minority status an objective credential in the application process.

 

These measures did not eliminate the disadvantages blacks faced as Washington sought to do, they merely compensated for them, and arguably perpetuated them by accident in the process.

 

Indeed, five decades after the "Great Society" legislation was passed, what do we have to show for it? The black population in particular suffers the worst rates of high school and college graduation, unemployment, incarceration and social disintegration of any demographic in the country's population. This comes after trillions of dollars spent through countless legislative efforts on more social programs than could be listed at a single sitting to eliminate these statistical gaps.

 

This presents us with a question: is the "new Jim Crow" really the set of policies put in place to deal with the effects of the old Jim Crow? Was the fundamental mistake in the "Great Society" its paternalistic approach? That is, would the "Great Society" goal of achieving economic and social equality across racial lines be better served by an approach that focused on the development of the black population economically and educationally to eliminate that inequality, as opposed to the mere provision of sustenance to compensate for that inequality? Could it not be said that this paternalism is the direct result of the racial superiority complex mentioned earlier, rather than a solution presented by a white Congress that truly considered black citizens their equals? And further, is that provision of sustenance, which has obviously only served to stagnate or undermine the black demographic in every statistical category over half a century, not a new form of oppression carried out through pacification instead of forced servitude?

[NorthoftheBorder]

Bamakid, you are a deep thinker and you are trying to tackle an issue that more than one great thinker before you have spent considerable time and effort to come up with solutions.  I personally think that there are very "powerful forces", both black and white, who profit greatly from the current situation as you so clearly laid out that have and will prevent the real solution and change that is necessary.  Booker T. Washington himself recognized the potential for those "forces" at the turn of the century.