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Actual jobs for black americans. tanner, when i started reading this series, i thought, i don t know what to make about this. i felt a lot of angst about the sort of description of this period, which i think of as my lifetime, as a great failure of policy, because although we are not where we want to be, we are also not where we were. right. so tell me why you assess it as an era of failure. i think it comes down to, you go back to the argument of culture, we did a lot of, you know, legal changes and policy changes, without addressing the cultural problems that lie underneath it. and that s not to say a culture problem in black america, but an alienation between black and white america. unless you were going to deal with the social fabric angle of it, the policy issue was necessary but insufficient. but wasn t the presumption that addressing the structural would, in fact, generate the opportunities for the social fabric? so that if you put kids in school together, that they wou ....
Them, the whiplash can be worse. and you also write, and i want to ask you about this one, khalil, you write, in one of history s great ironies, the grand scale integration of scheme s embraced by liberals took place after it was underway, convulsed by spasms of white guilt, terrified by the prospect of more riots, so steps taken to dismantle the color line were accompanied by efforts to shore up the foundations of a separate black america and preserve its cultural norms. so, you know, as a you know, here you are at head of the shomberg, which is a separate institution, but also an institution as part of the new york public library system. and part of what i wondered, part of what gave me discomfort about that, tanner, was the idea that success could only constitute the sort of full integration. i want both. i want separate cultural spaces and equal access. well, here, i think there s one thing i want to take issue with. sure. and that is that housing was still a product of a ....
Professor at new york university, khalil mohammad, and tanner colby, author of, some of my best friends are black. let me start you here, khalil. when you look at the disinvestment in public goods that has occurred since 1964, do you read where we are right now, 50 years later, as the civil rights act having been successful or having failed? oh, well, from that vantage point, it s failed miserably, partly because the civil rights act, although it was about access, ultimately, underneath it, it was about equity. and at the end of the day, we department just gain access to the lunch counter, we needed money to eat there. that quip speaks volume about the idea that under nixon s new federalism, the next president after lbj, created the possibility for the federal government to put more control at the state level and at the state level, to ultimately be able to use political favors, as ....
To talk about the fact that we re all implicated in structures and we re all trying to navigate them. but instead, it becomes a way to say, i know i m a good person, so i don t have to listen to this critique. so, again, this theme of, not listening and hearing and engaging at the level of change, with what african-american folks are actually saying about the system, seems to be an enduring threat in this problem. okay, so part of what i hear yo you saying, you re not quite saying it, nor did mr. coates, but there is, tanner, a little bit of, if you are white and writing about blackness, you can, which no one is saying you can t, it s not like the n-word, which you re just not allowed to do. but that many african-americans are going to read with a suspicion about your writing, they re going to begin with a suspicion about your goals, and that you perhaps as a white writer, even if you see yourself as part of the multi-racial coalition of progressivism, will be held to a standard be ....
Beltran, associate professor at new york university. brittany cooper, assistant professor of women and gender s studies y ies at rutger univers and tanner kolbe. mr. coates, are you just depressed? it goes back to that water is wet thing. i feel like i talk to academics about this, and they re like, yeah, this is the world. but there s this american need to believe everything is going to get better. that we re going to triumph in the end. which is bizarre and i don t think is necessarily healthy. we might triumph in the end, but we won t triumph in the end by assuring ourselves that we will triumph in the end. we need to be really, really aware of the dangers we face. i want to give chait his language here about this notion of progress. let s look at what chait had to say and i want to ask you a bit about it, tanner. he writes, it s hard to describe how the united states has progressed from chattel slavery to emancipation to the end of ....