Race, prosperity and the will to change

Last October, Partners for Livable Communities organized an excellent conference on regionalism called "Crossing the Lines: A National Leadership Forum on Regional Strategies." Conference attendees explored regional approaches to tough problems and promising opportunities amidst the real-life lessons of a reawakening downtown Memphis, Tenn.

Discussions covered downtown redevelopment, smart growth, transportation, arts and cultural heritage, and much more. But another theme is never far away in Memphis, where hundreds of millions of dollars in reinvestment are being poured into a downtown core surrounded by barren, rundown neighborhoods occupied by African- Americans.

The sponsoring chief executive of the event was not the black mayor of Memphis, but rather the white mayor of Shelby County, of which Memphis is a part.

Among Memphis attractions, few compare to Beale Street, touted today to tourists as the home of the blues. Beale Street was known during segregation days as the national center of the African-American community. (That's why the blues was born there.) Today, all the properties and all but one business on the street are white-owned.

It's also hard to miss the monument to Nathan Bedford Forrest, a grand statue in the center of a park that hosts an annual State of Tennessee commemoration of the great things this man did for the South. Forest, you may recall, was the founder of the Ku Klux HIan.

Back in New England. I'm walking in Memphis, trying to process longdistance information about New England, for around the same time, delegates to the New England Board of Higher Education instructed staff to craft a comprehensive 2000-2005 strategic plan targeting college access and affordability as the top priorities for the first years of the 21st century.

Why access and affordability? First, the limited supply of skilled workers for New England's technology companies demands that higher education's doors be flung open widely. Second, those still unemployed and underemployed in New England despite the unprecedented economic boom are falling farther behind. As they do, the quality of life in many New England cities and rural areas is in jeopardy.

Demographer Harold Hodgkinson has noted: "Many low-income, ethnic minority and immigrant children do not get exposed to the folklore of `how you get into college' in junior high years, while the `favored' have brothers and sisters in college, parents who are college graduates and lots of advice." CONNECTION Executive Editor John O. Harney noted: "Without a college education, [large groups of New England residents] are deprived of the fruits of the region's booming knowledge-based economy, which is paradoxically starved for workers. They have virtually no social mobilityno chance of the American Dream."

Higher education access and affordability is about aspirations: the realization that a college education is important in life, along with the will to work for it. It's about opportunity: the openness of institutional and community cultures to students from different backgrounds and preparation levels. And it's about money: perceived affordability and availability of financial support structures. That's the big picture-a picture that will increasingly become shaded by issues of race, ethnicity and cultural learning habits because of rapidly changing national and regional demographics.

"What is the most important educational challenge for the United States?" asks the College Board's National Task Force on Minority High Achievement. "Many would say that it is eliminating, once and for all, the still large educational achievement gaps among the nation's racial and ethnic groups."

The task force reports that the share of minority children among children in low-income families is projected to increase significantly from 49 percent in 1990 to 65 percent in 2015.

In 1990, Hispanic children were twice as likely as non-Hispanic white and Asian children to be raised in low-income families, and blacks were nearly three times as likely. These disparities among racial and ethnic groups are projected to increase by the year 2015. By that time, moreover, minorities will account for fully 85 percent of children raised by parents who are high school dropouts.

If current projections hold, by 2050 "the minority will no longer be the minority," Rhode Island Superior Court Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson recently told a NEBHE conference. "So it is in our national interest to keep after this."

New England is no exception. The Nellie Mae Foundation's Laying the Groundwork warns: "With the fastest growing minority population in the country proportionately, New England's cities, towns and school systems have become multicultural faster than the region has been able to adapt."

New England, meanwhile, has the highest annual tuition rates in the United States, averaging $4,472 in tuition and mandatory fees for state residents at public four-year institutions, compared with $3,356 at publics nationally, and $17,330 in average tuition and mandatory fees at four-year private institutions, compared with $15,380 nationally.

Furthermore, from 1990 to 2000, state higher education appropriations per $1,000 of personal income have declined in every New England state-by 9 percent in Connecticut, 23 percent in Maine, 22 percent in Massachusetts, 21 percent in New Hampshire, 34 percent in Rhode Island and 36 percent in Vermont.

The access equation is further complicated by the so-called Digital Divide or Internet Gap. "The Internet gap between blacks, Hispanics, rural and low-income folks versus middleto-upper class America-[is] not only deep but getting worse," notes syndicated columnist Neal Peirce. "The Commerce Department reported it also found the `cyber divide' between the highest and lowest income groups had widened 29 percent from 1997 to 1998."

Y2K road trip. It's amazing how prosperous America looks from its interstate highways, jammed with thousands upon thousands of truckers delivering the bounty of America from highway-hugging production facilities to economic hubs, booming suburbs and vibrant rural retirement communities.

Between Christmas day and New Year's day, we drove two cars, connetted by walkie-talkes, from Boston to Colorado. The excuse was a son moving to a new job. The opportunity was for a family of four, including two adult ldds, to be together and see parts of America they knew little about. The weather was beautiful all the way. No snow fell, nor was there any on the ground until we reached 6,000 feet in New Mexico and Colorado. The America we saw-a sunny America of prosperity, an America at peace, an American Y2K economic juggernautseemed almost perfect. But the weather was too good.

Most of the workers in restaurants, gas stations and grocery stores were black or, most memorably at the Massachusetts Turnpike Burger King on Christmas morning, Hispanic. In fact, America appeared to be a globally warmed, racially divided country with no problems, except the ones we can't fix, don't want to talk about and try to forget.

Americans are problem-fixers and organizers. If something's wrong, Americans like to fix it quickly. If something can't be fixed - and fixed quickly! - people stop talking about it, somehow immobilized and embarrassed. Then the media do the same thing.

That's how America has dealt with race for a long time. Now, it's how we're dealing with climate change.

Now Africa. Many Americans, particularly African-Americans, contrast government, media and corporate perspectives on Africa with perspectives and policies toward Europe and Asia-and see more race-based preconceptions restricting forward movement. Nowhere was this more clear than at February's National Summit on Africa in Washington, D.C.

Leon Sullivan (father of the famed "Sullivan principles" that for a time guided America's investment policies with apartheid South Africa) asked how America could stand by while 11,000 Africans contract AIDS every day, after 11 million have already died from it. (In February, an official of the federal Centers for Disease Control told a Harvard conference that AIDS is turning into an epidemic of color, with African-Americans comprising half of all new HIV cases in the United States.)

Sullivan lambasted America's foreign aid of less than $l billion to the 54 nations of Africa just $2 per person-when we provide so much more elsewhere. He ridiculed America's non-response to African civil wars where mutilation and ritual murder have dwarfed the horrors of Central and Eastern Europe. There are two sets of U.S. rules: one for Europe ("billions for Bosnia, billions in Kosovo..."), another for Africa ("Liberia, the Congo, Sierra Leone ... we're afraid we're gonna hurt somebody.") "Fight back," bellowed Sullivan, after reciting each indignity against Africa and African-Americans. The litany lasted 45 minutes, each injustice worse than the last.

Jesse Jackson gave the final speech to the 5,000 summit attendees, painstakingly recounting connections between the struggle for racial equality in the United States and in Africa. He spoke with both pride and harshness about how black people had worked together to slay the Goliaths of slavery, segregation and apartheid.

Jackson decried an America in which "half of all public housing built in the past 10 years have been jail cells," producing an "American jailindustrial complex on the backs of young African-American males."

He pointed out that 55 percent of American jail and prison cells are today occupied by African-Americans. Then he linked civil rights setbacks of the Bush administration to candidate George W. Bush Jr.'s visit to Bob Jones University. "We knocked down Goliath with Clinton in '92. ... But you can't celebrate prematurely because Goliath had sons ... giants keep coming. Now here comes this son of a Goliath."

President Clinton left summit attendees with perhaps the most memorable comment. In an era of instantaneously available global information, he said, "We can no longer choose not to know; we can only choose not to act."

Sharing the wealth. Reflecting on all this brings to mind the name of the West African neighborhood where I lived for four years. It's called Brofuyedur and it sits adjacent to Ghana's 17th century Cape Coast Castle-simultaneously the center of operations for the British Gold Coast colony and a horrific slave-holding dungeon for hundreds of thousands of West Africans. Brofuyedur means "the white man is heavy!" So he is.

White America has pulled the wool over its eyes. The country is in the midst of an economic boom of unparalleled proportions and duration, featuring unemployment levels around 4 percent nationally and even lower in New England. Government coffers are overflowing with tax revenues-even after years of addressing budget deficits, the Social Security crisis and providing tax relief. Numerous good jobs go begging for lack of qualified applicants. Yet the gaps between participants in this boom and those who are not has widened greatly. Furthermore, the complexion of the non-participants has darkened and will darken further. At the same time, a tortuously deep-seated set of untalked-about, race-based preconceptions pervades America. New England is no exception.

There have been times like these when Americans pursued change vigorously, often at their own expense, simply because it was the right thing to do. Then there have been times when Americans pursued prosperity, often at the expense of others, simply because it was so alluring. IL is abundantly clear what time it is now: it's an Age of Prosperity. Yet it's gotten harder and harder for the have-nots-most especially those of color-to lock on to America's pathways to prosperity.

George Bernard Shaw said "progress is not possible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." We all need to do a one-eighty and begin committing a succession of non-random acts of resolve. Real cash and real incentives must be directed at the gap between New England's haves and have-nots. If not nowwhen the money is at hand in our pockets, Uncle Sam's pocket and in our state capitals-then when?

Nathaniel Bowditch is a senior fellow at the New England Board of Higher Education and author of "The Last Emerging Market: From Asian Tigers to African Lions? The Ghana File, " published by Praeger.

Copyright New England Board of Higher Education Summer 2000
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