R O O M S
The Classic Creations barber shop sits empty, surrounded by drunks and shuttered storefronts just two blocks from the manicured lawns of
"What's already understood," he says without looking up from his Ebony magazine, "don't need to be explained."
But when it comes to race, what is understood? And what is misunderstood?
And how can it be that in 2008 — 143 years after slavery was abolished, decades after the civil rights movement — an AP-Yahoo News poll could find that racial misgivings could cost Sen. Barack Obama the election?
In search of explanations, two Associated Press reporters — one black, one white — listened to people of both races along Detroit's divides: Alter Road, which separates the city from the tony Grosse Pointes near Lake St. Clair, and 8 Mile Road, the vast northern border between a mostly black Detroit and its mostly white suburbs.
They found people of both races living just blocks apart who nonetheless spoke of each other like strangers. There was suspicion, contempt — and yet, for many, a desperate hope that Obama's candidacy might be the final step in America's long path to racial equality. For whites, their support of Democratic economic policies forces them to confront their racial prejudices.
It is here you meet decent people with much in common — both sides of 8 Mile Road are populated by blue-collar Democratic families. But many still can't get past their racial differences.
Whites say their neighbors consider blacks to be violent and solely responsible for problems in the black community.
Blacks say many of their own consider whites to be spoiled and condescending.
But nobody — well, hardly anybody — acknowledged their own prejudices. Both blacks and whites instead blamed "they," a vague and unaccountable surrogate for their own racial attitudes.
"They" are whites who say Obama is unqualified when they really mean he's black.
"They" are blacks who say all whites are bigots.
Anthony knows who "they" are.
"It's understood that there's still a lot of racism that goes on out there," the barber says with a nod out his window and a wisdom beyond his 30 years. "A lot of white people look down on blacks as being lazy or whatever."
Perched on a ragged leather barber chair closest to the door, his knees pulled to his chest, Anthony fixes his gaze on a white journalist visiting his shop. "The stereotype against whites is that they have all the advantages," he says. "They all look down on us. They're snobs."
___
Four of every 10 white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, calling them "lazy," or "violent" or blaming them for the ills of black America, according to the AP-Yahoo poll. Such surveys draw criticism from whites who say the numbers are exaggerated and from blacks who say the numbers are too low.
Let others argue about the math. Listen while the people of Detroit explain.
"My kids have been called nigger babies. ... That was from a white family," says Cherlonda Hampton, a black woman shopping at an outdoor mall on 8 Mile Road.
A petite mother of nine who looks half her 37 years, Hampton says she was harassed by whites while living in suburban Detroit. Feces were smeared on her car. A dead bird was left on a tire. When her child was bitten by a white classmate, the white principal didn't seem to care.
After a year, Hampton returned to her segregated Detroit neighborhood.
This is an apt place to talk about race in America. Detroit's population peaked at nearly 2 million in the 1950s and has been on the decline ever since, dropping to less than 1 million in the latest Census figures. Although racial tension isn't the only cause, the 1967 race riots hastened Detroit's decline and mandatory school busing a decade later stoked unrest.
Coleman A. Young, the city's first black mayor and a racially polarizing figure, said before his 1997 death, "No other city in America, no other city in the Western world has lost the population at that rate. And what's at the root cause of that loss? Economics and race. Or should I say, race and economics?"
White working-class Detroiters fled the city in droves, many to Macomb County and its working-class suburbs north of 8 Mile Road. Detroit's white-flighters were among the first to be dubbed "Reagan Democrats" — socially conservative, economically progressive, mostly Catholic voters who abandoned the Democratic Party for the GOP, in part because Republicans exploited their racial fears.
Their children and grandchildren are just as politically independent — swing voters in a swing county that both Obama and Republican John McCain hope to carry en route to winning Michigan.
And, like the Reagan Democrats of a generation ago, whites in Macomb County today aren't sure whether to vote their pocketbooks or their prejudices.
"I work at a grocery store and I know a lot of people who are not going to vote for (Obama) because of the racial thing," says Colleen Mullins, a white woman who lives with her husband Daniel in a black neighborhood south of 8 Mile Road.
"I'm hoping Obama wins because he's for the middle class," says Mark Coccia, 48, outside a suburban post office just north of Detroit. He's white, a laid-off factory worker and lifelong Democrat who's about to declare bankruptcy.
An American flag cracks in the wind as Coccia explains that he agrees with Obama's politics and admires the Illinois Democrat. But Coccia can't move beyond race.
"They can't blame the white man," he says of blacks. "Their own color sold them into slavery."
Coccia takes a seat at a picnic table and opines that McCain will die in office if elected and leave a woman, Sarah Palin, as president. "That," he says, "is not right."
Still, he may not back Obama.
"What kind of choice do guys like me have? A black guy or a woman," Coccia says. "It's a lesser of two evils."
He laughs, then turns serious — though it is never clear how serious he was all along.
"If Obama was a white candidate and gave the same convention speech," McCain wouldn't stand a chance. "But people are going to judge by the color of his skin."
"Not me, mind you," Coccia hastens to add, "But they will."
There's that pesky "they." You can talk for hours about "they" and "them" along 8 Mile Road. Though race relations are nowhere near as bad as they were in the 1960s, a white person can live for years in the suburbs without ever coming in contact with a black and, conversely, a Detroiter can grow up in the city without getting to know a white suburbanite.
Here, it's unfamiliarity that can breed contempt — or at least misunderstanding.
It would be a mistake to dismiss Coccia as a "bigot" or "redneck." Such labels turn him into a cartoon, somehow taking the edge off his racial views.
He exists, and so do his views, and they're shared by countless blacks and whites.
"They're everywhere," says Scott Flatt, 37, after stopping his bike just north of 8 Mile Road in Eastpointe to talk about blacks. "But I don't mind blacks as much as some of my neighbors. They're bigots."
Richard Mosely, a 35-year-old engineer working just west of Alter Road in Detroit, sets aside his blueprints to discuss the sentiments of fellow blacks. "They think whites are punks," he says. "I don't, necessarily."
Blacks are more generous in their description of whites than whites are of blacks, according to the AP-Yahoo News poll, but the two races see racial discrimination in starkly different terms.
When asked "how much discrimination against blacks" exists, just 10 percent of whites said "a lot" and 45 percent said "some."
Among blacks, 57 percent said "a lot" and all but a fraction of the rest said "some."
___
Two blocks from Anthony's barber shop in Detroit, James Turnbull of Grosse Pointe Park takes a break from his morning gardening to show off his prized blooms to a black journalist. Before long, the conversation turns to race, class and politics, subjects the 71-year-old white man encountered as a young man working in poor, black neighborhoods in the Jim Crow South.
While repossessing a family's kitchen appliances, "I would have a, pardon the expression, pickanniny on one arm," he recalls.
In one breath, Turnbull politely uses that long-passe pejorative for a black child. In the next, he says he's been around black politics for a long time and worked for former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer, who is black. He believes the poll results showing white Democrats are letting their prejudices affect their vote.
"It does surprise me that they admitted it," he says.
Separated by a short walk — from Anthony's barber shop to Turnbull's blooms — are two ways of life: Porsches north of Alter Road, busy bus stops to the south; canopied awnings decorating storefronts to the north; bars and steel sliding doors protecting shops to south; white and black drivers pumping gas across the street from one another at unofficially segregated stations.
Not that Turnbull minds. "You live here, you don't see it," he says.
But he does notice a group of young, black men walking west on Jefferson, headed out of the Grosse Pointes into Detroit.
"You see them?" he points. "Some folks would look at them and say, 'There go three potential gang members. They've got the black do-rags. Their pants are sagging. They don't look like your neighborhood kid here.'"
But to him?
Turnbull wipes the soil from soiled hands and thinks for a minute. "I would hope that I would see just a bunch of kids."
Almost 12 percent of the deaths among American Indians and Alaska Natives are alcohol-related — more than three times the percentage in the general population, a new federal report says. The report released Thursday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found 11.7 percent of deaths among American Indians and Alaska Natives between 2001 and 2005 were alcohol-related, compared with 3.3 percent for the
Dwayne Jarman, a CDC epidemiologist who works for the Indian Health Service and is one of the study's authors, said it is the first national survey that measures American Indian deaths due to alcohol. It should be a "call to action" for federal, state, local and tribal governments, he said.
The researchers obtained their statistics by analyzing death certificates over the four-year period.
The two leading causes of alcohol-related deaths among Indians were traffic accidents and alcoholic liver disease, each of which cause more than a quarter of the 1,514 alcohol-related deaths over the four-year period.
Also listed are homicide (6.6 percent of alcohol-related deaths), suicide (5.2 percent) and injuries in falls (2.2 percent).
There may be many more alcohol-related deaths than the study shows, in part because the CDC analysis did not count deaths related to some diseases for which alcohol is believed to be an important risk factor, such as tuberculosis, pneumonia and colon cancer.
The greatest number of tribal alcohol-related deaths — about a third of the total — occurred in the Northern Plains, where reservations are remote and often destitute, the study said. The lowest number of deaths were in
Jarman said the study did not look at why there may be more deaths in the Plains but said it is consistent with previous studies.
"It may be a function of social perceptions of alcohol in that particular region," he said. The report did not break down the numbers by tribe.
The study said more than 68 percent of the Indians whose deaths were attributed to alcohol were men, and 66 percent were people younger than 50 years old. Seven percent were less than 20 years old.
The study recommends "culturally appropriate clinical interventions" to reducing excessive drinking and better integration between tribal health care centers and tribal courts, which often deal with alcohol-related crimes.
Donovan Antelope, a spokesman for the Northern Arapaho Tribe, said alcoholism has been a problem for more than a century with many Indian populations.
"It has had a very negative impact on our day-to day life," he said, adding that the tribe has started promoting alcohol-free events.
In general, American Indians suffer much higher death rates of most leading causes than the rest of the country. Besides alcoholism, drug use, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and suicide also are high.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized today for a century of child abuse and assimilation policies at former government-run schools for aboriginals.
An estimated 150,000 children and youths were taken from their homes and forced to attend the schools, most of which closed in the 1970s. Survivors of the schools came from across
``The treatment of children in Indian residential schools is a sad chapter in our history,'' Harper said in a speech to Parliament in
The statement comes two years after the government and churches that helped run the schools settled the country's largest-ever class-action lawsuit. The apology follows one by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in February, to the ``Stolen Generation'' of Aborigines who were taken from their families and forced to blend into society.
Europeans who created settlements in
`New Dawn'
Harper was led into the legislature today by 104-year-old Marguerite Wabano, the oldest living former student to receive compensation from the government, and Phil Fontaine, national chief of the Ottawa-based Assembly of First Nations. Harper spoke for about 15 minutes, followed by opposition and aboriginal leaders.
``What happened today signified a new dawn in the relationship between us and the rest of
``I am sorry that
Class-Action Settlement
As of April there were 90,000 applications for compensation stemming from the class-action settlement, according to the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. The settlement allowed former students and their families to apply for a share of at least C$1.9 billion ($1.86 billion) that was awarded to victims.
``This is a historic event -- finally
Traumatic Memories
The memory of the schools still causes so much trauma for former students that the government's Web site includes a telephone hotline for people who break down when reading about or watching the apology. Grief has been passed on to children of former students, with 26 percent having suicidal thoughts by age 12 compared with 18 percent for other aboriginal youths, according to the Assembly of First Nations.
``Today is filled with incredibly strong emotions,'' said Shawn Atleo, British Columbia Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief, who came to Ottawa today with his father to help comfort survivors who attended the ceremony.
Atleo, 41, said his father was placed in a residential school where his tongue was pricked with a needle because he wouldn't speak English. The apology ``alludes to the promise of a better future,'' he said.
Harper's Conservative Party government is taking other steps to improve conditions. The Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, responsible for providing most government services on reserves, spent a record C$10.2 billion on programs in the fiscal year that ended March 31.
Honoring African American History Month, he says noose displays and lynching jokes 'have no place in
Responding to a rash of racial incidents in the last year, President Bush on Tuesday denounced displays of nooses and jokes about lynching, and said that as past racial injustice fades in memory, the nation risked forgetting the suffering it brought.
The president's remarks, at a White House program marking African American History Month, were among his most pointed in recent years on the subject of racial tensions.
They grew out of concern, his spokeswoman said, that even as the nation made progress toward overcoming racial inequality, symbols of past injustice still flared up.
The president's focus on race coincides with the attention being devoted to the role of race in politics, with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in contention to be the first African American candidate to receive a major political party's presidential nomination. He is drawing the support of a cross section of voters and is finding a deep well of votes in states with large white populations.
"The era of rampant lynching is a shameful chapter in American history. The noose is not a symbol of prairie justice, but of gross injustice. Displaying one is not a harmless prank. And lynching is not a word to be mentioned in jest," Bush said.
"As a civil society, we must understand that noose displays and lynching jokes are deeply offensive," the president added. "They are wrong. And they have no place in
Bush, who leaves on Friday for his second trip as president to sub-Saharan Africa, saluted four African Americans: Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who was a leader of the civil rights movement in the 1960s; former Transportation Secretary William T. Coleman Jr., the first black to clerk on the Supreme Court and the first to hold a Cabinet post in a Republican administration; Ernest Green, who with eight other African American students integrated Little Rock, Ark.'s Central High School in 1957; and Otis Williams of The Temptations, the singers who drew fans across racial lines.
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, citing news accounts, said there had been more than 70 reports of nooses being displayed since December 2006.
The Justice Department said that the agency, along with state and local officials, had investigated "dozens" of noose displays and other racially motivated threats.
In perhaps the most infamous recent incident, the town of
Bush said the reports of such activities had heightened racial tensions and "revealed that some Americans do not understand why the sight of a noose causes such a visceral reaction among so many people."
He noted that for decades it had been a tool of murder and intimidation directed at African Americans, when "summary executions were held by torchlight in front of hateful crowds," with law enforcement officers who were responsible for protecting the victims instead being "complicit in . . . their deaths."
A police car pulled up outside Glennis Saunders' primary school 35 years ago and quite literally transported her to white
She was taken out of the care of loving Aboriginal relatives for a bed in an orphanage and a life as a ward of the state.
Saunders, 46, was among thousands of indigenous Australians in
'It will be sad because it will bring back memories of what happened to my family,' Saunders said. 'But it will also be a good day because I reckon we'll all feel relieved when the prime minister says sorry to us.'
Relieved, yes. But after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his longed-for apology to what are called the stolen generations, the realities of Aboriginal Australia remain depressingly the same.
Despite over 2 billion Australian dollars (1.9 billion US dollars) spent annually on special health and welfare projects, indigenous males die on average 17 years earlier than their white counterparts.
Infant mortality is four times as high among the 500,000 who identify as descendents of a 60,000-year-old culture. Suicide is twice the national rate, murder six times the rate, and blacks are 11 times more likely to be imprisoned than whites.
Professor Mick Dodson, director of Aboriginal studies at the
'The reality is that how you feel about yourself, and whether you feel your culture and history is acknowledged and respected, is a key part of facing your problems and being able to turn things around,' Dodson said.
In the crowds outside Parliament House to hear the apology there was a palpable feeling that a breakthrough in race relations had been made, that an impediment to progress had been removed.
'We've just had the most momentous thing happen in the history of this country as far as I'm concerned,' a joyous Christine King from the Stolen Generations Alliance said. 'We cry together, we laugh together, we hug one another, we say 'don't we have a wonderful country, that we can look forward to a greater future.''
Symbolic gestures are not new. A reconciliation walk across
In the Northern Territory, where a quarter of the population is Aboriginal, member of state parliament Terry Mills said black welfare had gone backwards since the apology to the stolen generations six years ago.
'We're going to put our hope in an apology resulting in some kind of positive action? We haven't seen that occur in the
John Howard, Rudd's predecessor as prime minister, was implacably opposed to an official apology. He put his faith not in political gestures but in practical measures like quarantining part of welfare payments so that dole money wasn't blown on alcohol and gambling but spent on food and rent.
Howard sent police, and even the army, into the
His guide in engineering 'practical reconciliation' was feisty magistrate Sue Gordon, who was taken from her parents when she was 4 years old.
'You've got to look at the issues which face aboriginal people today and the violence in aboriginal communities, the child abuse in aboriginal communities,' she said when named to head a panel advising Howard. 'All that sort of stuff far outweighs the stolen generation wanting to be said sorry to.'
But Gordon was in
Many are hoping that the absence of an apology by federal parliament to the stolen generations was a much bigger roadblock than they had thought. >>>>
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