by Yvette Moore
"Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the 20th Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the 20th Century is the problem of the colorline."
So wrote W.E.B. DuBois, Ph.D., sociologist, premier architect of the Civil Rights Movement, and a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in his 1903 classic, The Soul of Black Folk.
If the colorline was the problem of the 20th century United States, then navigating a crisscrossing, superhighway of color-coded lines may well be the challenge of the 21st. The United States is a multiethnic nation. Always has been.
From American Indians who were invaded by Europeans, to Africans forced to come as slaves, to Asians recruited to work in gold mines and build railways, to Mexicans who became U.S. residents overnight when land was taken in war and annexed into the infant nation, the United States has grown on the sweat of many peoples.
But with demographic projections showing those currently considered nonwhite or minorities becoming the majority of the U.S. population by the middle of the 21st century, much attention is being paid to our Technicolor future.
Why?
In the words of theologian Cornell West: "Race matters."
From the nation’s earliest days, what we call race has done more than describe family history. It has designated class and standing, and what rights and privileges each person is afforded in society.
For example, Mexican landowners became white and became citizens upon California statehood in 1850. Not long after that, however, courts considered poorer Mexican workers Indian, which meant they were not white, not citizens and had no rights. Early immigrants from Asia were racially classified with Indians also.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s historic Dred Scott decision supported the "one-drop rule," which designated African Americans -- bond or free -- as Black, three-fifths persons with "no rights that the white man is bound to respect," no matter how many white relatives they had.
While Industrial-Age immigrants from Europe, such as the Irish, Italians and Jews, were not categorized with Indians or Blacks, neither they nor their U.S.-born children were initially counted "white" on U.S. Census reports. But the more they prospered, the whiter the got, until they became white, with rights to be honored and privileges to be expected.
U.S. national roots are colorful lines packed with meaning. And the United States is not alone in this. Colonialism left a trail of colorlines around the world.
Since 1952, United Methodist Women and its predecessor organizations have adopted three versions of the Charter for Racial Justice Policies, amending and adapting the document as members learned about racism -- how it operates, its effects and how to recognize it.
The Women’s Division’s handbook for implementing the Charter for Racial Justice Policies explains that racism is different from racial prejudice, hatred or discrimination because it involves the power to carry out systematic discriminatory practices through the major institutions of our society. It occurs at individual, interpersonal, institutional and cultural levels. It may be overt or covert, intentional or unintentional.
Racism today is not as blatant as a sign saying who is or isn’t welcome at a given venue, but it continues, and it has tangible consequences. Study after study cites race as a key factor in everything from economic level and quality and availability of medical care, to where people live and go to school, to the diseases they suffer, to projected life spans.
Racism factors into law enforcement, influencing who is and isn’t stopped for traffic violations; body searched in airports; charged with crimes; given warnings, acquitted, convicted, and sentenced harshly or leniently.
"Fighting racism is not something you can put a period at the end of," said Loretta J. Williams, Ph.D., director of the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America at Boston University. "We can chip away at it, but eliminating racism is very difficult because it goes to the basis of how power is structured."
The bad news is that we are entering the 21st century with a stratification of power still based on color, Ms. Williams said. The good news is that racism is not an act of God; it’s a human construction.
"The only way out of this is for human beings to structure power differently," Ms. Williams said.
For that to happen, everyone must come to the table and be heard.
Preserving the sovereignty and culture of American Indians are key issues the Rev. Alvin B. Deer, executive director of the Native American International Caucus, an organization that serves as liaison and interpreter of Native American needs and issues within The United Methodist Church, would bring to such a table. Since U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall’s tenure -- 1801-1835 -- Native American peoples have been declared "domestic dependent nations," a status similar to that of a state. Native Americans are citizens of their nations and the United States, just as a citizen of Iowa is also a U.S. citizen.
Sovereignty is under attack at the dawn of the 21st century, Mr. Deer said.
"The relationship with Indian tribes and the U.S. government is an unusual relationship because of the number of treaties that were signed over the last few hundred years," Mr. Deer said. "Some of those treaty rights are still valid today. But we have a U.S. Congress that is bent on eliminating those rights."
The Indian Removal Act of 1830, which promised Native Americans sovereignty west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their southeastern lands, resulted in the Trail of Tears and the death of tens of thousands of American Indians. It also resulted in Indian possession of what turned out to be mineral-rich, fertile lands in the West.
"Since then, there have been tons of U.S. laws written to abridge our rights, whether its water rights; rights to tax; fishing rights; rights over timber, oil, uranium -- whatever," Mr. Deer said.
For example, efforts to curtail casinos on Indian reservations is a violation of tribal sovereignty, Mr. Deer said. Among other things, Congress wants to use tribes’ gaming income to determine how much federal funding will go to the tribes.
Indian gaming accounts for about 3 percent of the U.S. gambling industry, which is dominated by the likes of Atlantic City and Las Vegas, states and cities around the country, Mr. Deer said.
Preservation of sovereign rights is key to preservation of Native American culture -- and that is key to preservation of Native Americans, he said. Mr. Deer rejects the notion of Indian peoples joining a U.S. melting pot.
"The melting pot is a myth," he said. "That’s why there are so many ethnic communities. If Indians became a part of a melting pot, there is no other place on earth where Indian culture can be perpetuated. If we become little brown Americans, there will be no place on earth for us. In the 21st century, I want my children to maintain their identity and place in the world."
The United Methodist Church’s Native American Comprehensive Plan emphasizes Native American spirituality and congregational and leadership development.
Shemeka Hemphill and Monty Hall are active in programs at United Methodist Bethlehem Center in Charlotte, N.C. Both take a bus to Myers Park High School in that city.
"It’s not that far," said Shemeka, a light-hearted hip-hop tune bopping in the background during an after-school telephone interview. The ninth grader also took a bus to her elementary school. While her home neighborhood is basic Black, Myers Park is racially mixed.
"Mostly Blacks and Whites, some Hispanics," explained Monty, a junior with hoop dreams of a basketball scholarship to Duke University or "any NCAA school."
"Everybody at school pretty much gets along," Monty said.
Shemeka and Monty said race doesn’t play a major role in their lives.
But it has.
If a recent federal-court ruling striking down school desegregation efforts in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system survives promised appeals, the two students will get a full view of just how much race has affected their lives.
School buses and classmates of other races are norms for Shemeka and Monty because of a 1969 federal-court order to desegregate schools in Charlotte and its surrounding suburbs of Davidson, Pineville, Cornelius and Huntersville. In September, U.S. District Judge Robert Potter said the school system was a unitary system that had removed all vestiges of segregation, and must now cease all the efforts it had taken to make that possible.
The school system has used busing to assemble the multiethnic student body at Shemeka and Monty’s school. The school board offered lotteries -- 60 percent of slots going to white children and 40 percent to racial-ethnic children -- to select students for its magnet schools. It also allowed parents to enroll their children in schools near their jobs.
The new court ruling says race cannot be used as a factor in assigning students to schools. It calls for sending children to schools in the neighborhoods where they live.
"To me, neighborhood schools mean `separate and unequal,’ like it was before Brown versus the Board of Education," said Lenny Springs, NAACP board member and resident of Charlotte. "The ruling said, `You all go back to school where you live.’ So what you’re going to have is segregation all over again."
The school system has the same concerns. Only one new school has been built in Charlotte in the last 20 years. Money has not been allocated to attempt to bring inner-city schools on par with those in the suburbs.
"We’ve built schools with the assumption we’d have to integrate them," said John Dean, director of public information for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system. "Now the rules have changed. One of the big concerns is equity and making sure if we return African American kids to schools in their neighborhoods, the schools meet the same standards as those in suburbs attended by white students."
John Powell, executive director of the Institute on Race and Poverty and professor of law at the University of Minnesota, said public schools are being resegregated around the country under the guise of suburban autonomy.
"We have used housing as a way to maintain and segregate schools," said Mr. Powell, who noted that Judge Potter as a lawyer 30 years ago argued in favor of busing. "Basically, at a federal constitutional level, cities and counties don’t exist. Only states. Now federal courts are starting to recognize the rights of localities without even acknowledging that a lot of localities were set up to segregate. There was `white flight’ from cities after court orders to desegregate schools.
"Federal courts are saying, `You can’t have racial segregation within the city, but if you can get outside the city limits, you don’t have to be bothered by them. We will protect your rights.’ As long as we have metropolitan areas that are fragmented along racial lines, it’s going to be very hard to achieve racial justice in education, housing and other areas."
Fragmentation of metropolitan areas into competing inner cities and suburbs isolates minorities and poorer people in the cities and older suburbs and sucks resources out of the cities as more affluent whites move farther away creating a seemingly endless suburban sprawl, he said. While environmentalists have challenged this coopting of the nation’s countryside, the civil-rights community has been quiet on the issue, he said.
The NAACP and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system are appealing the court decision.
"While we celebrate Brown versus the Board of Education, we have a system that is closer to Plessey versus Ferguson -- the case preceding Brown versus the Board of Education, which called for separate-but-equal facilities," Mr. Powell said. "Fragmentation of metropolitan areas, tracking, magnets schools and the use of color-blind language that disempowers people of color were all created after Brown. They are all doing the same thing -- consolidating white power."
The NAACP’s Mr. Springs said there needs to be a national summit of civil-rights groups to develop a strategy to respond to these actions.
The Charlotte ruling is evidence of the political climate that mandates the continued existence of organizations like Black Methodists for Church Renewal, a caucus within United Methodism, said the Rev. Tyrone Gordon, executive director of the caucus.
"Racism is alive and well, but people in political power are actually saying, ‘We don’t have racism anymore,’ or ‘I’m color blind,’" Mr. Gordon said. "But that’s a lie. Nobody is color blind in that respect.
"Instead of the church being a prophetic voice, the church often mirrors society. We can’t mirror society. We are the light of the world, the salt of the earth. We set the standard, not mirror the society."
By 2020, Hispanics, with roots in every Spanish-speaking nation in the hemisphere, are expected to be the largest racial-ethnic group in the United States. But numbers alone will not ensure voices and issues of that diverse community will be heard. That’s why empowerment is the key concern of the Methodists Associated to Represent the Cause of Hispanic Americans (MARCHA).
"The key issue is always the empowerment of Hispanic people at all levels of society," said the Rev. Jose Orlando Rivera, executive director of MARCHA. "We need to deal with the human and civil rights of Hispanics, especially those who are undocumented."
Mr. Rivera pointed to efforts like California’s Proposition 187, which sought to deny education, health and social services to immigrants and their children. The measure was approved by voters in a 1994 referendum, but later declared unconstitutional in federal court.
Actions against undocumented immigrants often affect the entire Hispanic community. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) raids on factories for undocumented workers or other dragnets in Hispanic communities snare everyone, Mr. Rivera said.
"INS assumes you are undocumented until you prove otherwise," he said. "There have been cases of documented or U.S.-born Hispanics arrested and kept in jail until family members could bring papers of proof. I cross the border all the time. It’s not enough for me to say I’m Puerto Rican. They have to send me some other place to prove that."
Efforts to end Affirmative Action in higher education and bilingual education in lower grades are also of great concern in the Hispanic community, he said.
"MARCHA has been on the record on the right of children to be educated in their first language until they have enough fluency in English to be mainstreamed," Mr. Rivera said. "If they are not, they will fall behind and not catch up with other children."
The struggle for Hispanic empowerment is not only an issue in society, it is an issue in the church, Mr. Rivera said. Continued General Conference support for the National Plan for Hispanic Ministries is key, as is affirmation of the ministry of the Rio Grande Conference and its self-determination. The church should support the autonomous Methodist Church of Puerto Rico, particularly in its stand against the U.S. Navy base and missile testing on the island of Vieques, he said.
The fastest growing ethnic group in the country is the Asian American community. It’s also one of the most diverse, including people from Far Eastern nations like Korea, China and Japan; those from Southeast Asian nations like Cambodia and Vietnam; Pacific Islanders from Tonga, Fiji, Samoa and the Philippines; and Near Eastern countries like India and Pakistan. The experiences, cultures and viewpoints of Asian Americas are as vast as that continent. Still, coalitions of organizations representing people from these countries share common concerns. One is anti-Asian violence.
"I think it’s a backlash to immigration," said Kathy Thomas-Sano, executive director of the National Federation of Asian Americans in The United Methodist Church. "There is a view that Asian Americans are better off than others, and that’s not necessarily the case."
While the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium 1997 report showed a 10 percent overall decline in incidents of anti-Asian violence, bias attacks increased dramatically in California and New Jersey, 20 percent and 106 percent, respectively. The consortium also noted that data was difficult to obtain, incomplete and limited by widespread underreporting and the fact that 11 states failed to collect hate-crime statistics.
The stereotype of Asians as the model minority can work against Asian Americans. Ms. Thomas-Sano pointed to the pressure to excel placed on Asian American students.
"There’s no such thing as a `model minority,’" she said. "Children are children. To get into the right school, Asian parents will sacrifice to the hilt to see that their children get the education they deserve. They move into areas where they know the schools are very good. A lot of pressure is placed on the children. We have a lot of suicides and attempted suicides."
The model-minority myth can also cause Asian Americans to be deprived of needed services. Many Asian Americans are new immigrants, poor and struggling to make a life in a new land. A recent student needs-assessment study at the City University of New York -- a school often attended by new immigrants and working adults -- showed 71 percent of Asian students had to take at least one remedial course upon entering the school. The university is phasing out remedial courses.
Asian Americans also benefit from Affirmative Action, said Margaret Sung, executive director of the Asian Legal Defense and Education Fund, a non-profit organization promoting civil rights of Asian Americans.
"Affirmative Action opens opportunities in the workplace," she said. "For example, there are fewer than 0.3 percent of Asian Americans in upper-management positions."
As the Asian American community grows, work to get Asian Americans to vote is taking on more importance, Ms. Sung said.
"After the year 2000, the Asian American population will have grown so that it will have a real voice," she said. "We’re continuing to support the Voting Rights Act."
The biggest concern of Arab Americans is being shown negatively in the media, said Hussein Ibish, spokesperson for the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Between entertainment outlets and network news organizations, the Arab Americans have been cast as the ultimate villains, he said.
"People say that we don’t want to see Arab villains, but that’s not true," he said. "Villains come in all ethnicities and races, but when there is only one kind of Arab -- a cruel and nasty one -- portrayed to the U.S. public, that’s a problem."
Arab Americans second most pressing concern is government discrimination against them, Mr. Ibish said. Currently there are at least 25 Arabs in U.S. jails awaiting deportation who have not been charged with any offense because the evidence against them is a secret, he said.
"No one knows what they are accused of," Mr. Ibish said. "These people are green-card holders with American children and American wives. And all of the people who are in jail on `secret evidence’ charges are Arabs. We consider this official discrimination against Arabs."
He believes this goes against basic U.S. justice premises and should alarm all U.S. citizens.
"We see ourselves as a wedge community the government is using to get through some of the greatest abridgements of U.S. civil rights," he said. "If this is not stopped, you’ll see people in criminal court unable to defend themselves because of evidence they cannot see."
Arab Americans are also subject to racial profiling by law enforcement, Mr. Ibish said. For example, Arab Americans were stopped in airports around the country after the bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Still, Mr. Ibish has confidence in the United.
"I am certain -- absolutely convinced -- that things will get better," he said. "It may be a painful process. It may be long. But we will succeed."
The Women’s Theological Center is Boston cosponsors an annual National Conference on Whiteness to help white people recognize the privileges that come with that racial designation and develop strategies to eliminate racism. The center believes race is not a biological category, but an economic, social and political construct to benefit Whites by disempowering people of color.
"Racism to me is spiritual disease," said Marian Groot, center co-chair. "I think we have to begin to look at the ways maintaining privilege and power damages us as humans. Something in our culture teaches us that there is not enough for everyone, and so we hoard."
White people often take for granted the privileges afforded them because of their racial designation, she said. They assume their life experiences are norms. The invisibility of whiteness to Whites helps lock racism in place, Ms. Groot said.
"As long as we do not have to see and acknowledge that we are given benefits and privileges simply because we are members of the dominant group, we can name racism as black people’s problem or Native American peoples’ problem," she said. "And as long as we assume an identity as an individual rather than a member of the white race, we do not have to take any responsibility for racism."