Harry Jaffe
Integration: Can it happen here?
By: Harry Jaffe
Examiner Columnist
January 25, 2009
So, we have a black president and a black mayor of the nation’s capital, and to the north in Montgomery County an African-American county executive in Ike Leggett.
Can we check off “integration” as a goal achieved in this allegedly post-racial moment?
Short answer: No way.
“It’s hard to find anyone who will say they are against integration,” says Lawrence Guyot, a civil rights stalwart who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and headed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Mother and apple pie and integration.
“But,” says Guyot, “it is a dream sought but not realized. In Washington, D.C., we can have vibrant dialogue on everything but race. We find a way to not talk about it at all.”
Perhaps we don’t talk about it because Marion Barry used race so often as a means to promote and protect himself during four mayoral terms. Granted, he employed race in positive ways, by opening the city government to African-Americans; but he also played the race card so often it poisoned relations between blacks and whites.
In my view, Barry’s racism delayed integration. Let me take you back to the summer of 1990, when Barry was on trial after being busted smoking crack. Racial tension was so intense that blacks and whites could hardly look one another in the eye.
We have come a long way. Mayor Anthony Williams, accused of not being black enough, ran a government based on merit rather than race for eight years. Mayor Adrian Fenty took heat for appointing Cathy Lanier, a white woman, to run the police department, but he was unfazed.
“Adrian has broken barriers,” says Terry Lynch, executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Churches. “He is color blind, and he acts that way.”
Agreed. But does that mean we are an integrated community beyond politics and government?
In business, African-Americans are moving up to leadership positions. Ernie Jarvis, a fifth-generation Washingtonian, is managing director of CBRE Richard Ellis, a major real estate firm. John Ray and A. Scott Bolden manage law firms. Fenty’s peers, like lawyer Matthew Cutts who chairs the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, are becoming leaders. But are African-Americans in ownership positions? Not really.
So if everyone is for integration, how do we promote it? Guyot advocates dialogue.
Says Lynch: “The children have to lead us forward. They have to break old customs, old habits, old attitudes.”
If we define integration as leveling the playing field between blacks and whites — and Asians and Hispanics — then we can make progress through government and, most effectively, through education. Fenty’s goal of improving D.C.’s public schools will bring us closer to integration.
But on a social level, I’m afraid we tend to seek the comfort of our own kind. At Wilson High, where my daughter is a senior, the students are free to hang with anyone, but they seem to self-segregate.
I’m not sure having Barack Obama in the White House can change that.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at hjaffe@washingtonian.com.
Can we check off “integration” as a goal achieved in this allegedly post-racial moment?
Short answer: No way.
“It’s hard to find anyone who will say they are against integration,” says Lawrence Guyot, a civil rights stalwart who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and headed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
Mother and apple pie and integration.
“But,” says Guyot, “it is a dream sought but not realized. In Washington, D.C., we can have vibrant dialogue on everything but race. We find a way to not talk about it at all.”
Perhaps we don’t talk about it because Marion Barry used race so often as a means to promote and protect himself during four mayoral terms. Granted, he employed race in positive ways, by opening the city government to African-Americans; but he also played the race card so often it poisoned relations between blacks and whites.
In my view, Barry’s racism delayed integration. Let me take you back to the summer of 1990, when Barry was on trial after being busted smoking crack. Racial tension was so intense that blacks and whites could hardly look one another in the eye.
We have come a long way. Mayor Anthony Williams, accused of not being black enough, ran a government based on merit rather than race for eight years. Mayor Adrian Fenty took heat for appointing Cathy Lanier, a white woman, to run the police department, but he was unfazed.
“Adrian has broken barriers,” says Terry Lynch, executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Churches. “He is color blind, and he acts that way.”
Agreed. But does that mean we are an integrated community beyond politics and government?
In business, African-Americans are moving up to leadership positions. Ernie Jarvis, a fifth-generation Washingtonian, is managing director of CBRE Richard Ellis, a major real estate firm. John Ray and A. Scott Bolden manage law firms. Fenty’s peers, like lawyer Matthew Cutts who chairs the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, are becoming leaders. But are African-Americans in ownership positions? Not really.
So if everyone is for integration, how do we promote it? Guyot advocates dialogue.
Says Lynch: “The children have to lead us forward. They have to break old customs, old habits, old attitudes.”
If we define integration as leveling the playing field between blacks and whites — and Asians and Hispanics — then we can make progress through government and, most effectively, through education. Fenty’s goal of improving D.C.’s public schools will bring us closer to integration.
But on a social level, I’m afraid we tend to seek the comfort of our own kind. At Wilson High, where my daughter is a senior, the students are free to hang with anyone, but they seem to self-segregate.
I’m not sure having Barack Obama in the White House can change that.
E-mail Harry Jaffe at hjaffe@washingtonian.com.
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