The Working Catholic: Race Relations by Bill Droel

 

Efforts these days to improve race relations are of related types. There is virtue signaling, as in ubiquitous TV ads featuring a mixed-race couple or the obligatory progressive statements from businesses and national religious denominations. There is social therapy, as when church-sponsored groups examine and then admit to their racism. Thirdly, justifiable racial grievances are expressed through marches and rallies that unfortunately lack any specific goal.

Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), considered the dean of community organizing, was known for his confrontational yet non-violent tactics, his sharp-edged comments and his exaggerated personality. Alinsky was a person of “keen sociological imagination” and “thoughtful action,” as Mark Santow details in Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race (University of Chicago Press, 2023).  Alinsky never wavered from a commitment to equal dignity, regardless of race or ethnicity. Yet he was not ideological. He did not crusade for integration per se. He believed that if people have confidence in their own agency and in the democratic process, they will usually make better choices and support true pluralism. The problem, as Alinsky saw it, was the lack of power at the local level. There were too few viable mediating institutions through which people could effectively engage others. Thus, Alinsky dedicated his career to forming peoples’ organizations.

In 1938 Alinsky (then 29-years old) left his job at a university institute to, with Joseph Meegan (1912-1994), organize Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (www.bync.org) in Chicago’s stockyards area. This is the first of Santow’s case studies. BNYC had a promising beginning. However, BYNC feared a possible influx of Black residents. The declining stockyards weakened the neighborhood economy. The older housing stock might appeal to Blacks. Thus, BYNC launched a conservation program. On the surface its beautification theme and its opposition to panic peddling and its campaign to upgrade infrastructure was constructive. The unspoken premise, however, was retaining white families in the area and prohibiting integration. Those white families and their institutions (principally churches) felt their defensiveness “was sanctioned by public opinion, economic sense and the law.” Many of those whites, Santow explains, did not realize how government housing programs were designed to “resist integration [through] subsidized suburban home ownership for whites while consigning Blacks to segregated urban neighborhoods.” (See The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein, W.W. Norton, 2017.)

A disappointed Alinsky avoided public criticism of BYNC. He only slowly admitted that, in Santow’s words, his effort “contributed to both the ability and willingness of [BYNC] to engage in racial containment…to protect and preserve an island of segregation.” Today BYNC says it “substituted an emphasis on community and economic development for Alinsky’s confrontational methods.”

In 1940 Alinsky formed his Industrial Areas Foundation. About 20 years later IAF returned to Chicago’s neighborhoods, starting with Organization for Southwest Community (Santow’s second case study).

Though OSC is overlooked in most chronicles of Alinsky, including the website of his foundation, the section on OSC in Saul Alinsky and the Dilemmas of Race is the most interesting. The area in 1959 was white with some upwardly mobile Black residents around its perimeter. IAF never said that integration was a goal of OSC. In fact, its organizers patiently and persistently solicited those mistrustful of Blacks. But many of those active in OSC were at best ambivalent, suspecting the goal was to move Blacks into the neighborhood.

OSC unraveled. Member groups exited. First, over an internal proposal to abolish term limits for officers. It was opposed by a faction who thought the hidden reason for the proposal was the retention of racially tolerant clergy officers. More groups quit OSC when its leadership drafted a letter to support an Illinois State bill on open occupancy. The measure could help neighborhood stabilization by giving Blacks more housing choices, particularly in the suburbs. But again, some OSC groups wanted nothing to do with racial improvements.

To judge by the Chicago neighborhood examples, Alinsky’s success was quite limited. Yet his moral stature, now 50 plus years since his death, remains high. Alinsky was consistently willing to risk failure in order to act in the real world. For Alinsky, too many people are “dismissive of messy compromises and far too enamored of the power and sufficiency of legislation and goodwill,” Santow concludes. Moralizing from the sidelines about race (or other issues) is cowardly.

Alinsky was constantly evaluating: Maybe a single neighborhood lacks enough power to deal with larger divisive forces. In 1970 his IAF organized a metropolitan organization, Campaign Against Pollution, soon called Citizens’ Action Program. Today the IAF has 63 county-wide or metro-wide organizations in the United States. Each is multi-issue and, like Alinsky, each believes that racial and ethnic relations improve as its member groups strive for the widest public conversation possible.

 

Droel edits INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629), a newsletter on faith and work.

The Ideal Woman in Proverbs

 

Her husband, entrusting his heart to her,

    has an unfailing prize.

She brings him good, and not evil,

    all the days of her life.

She rises while it is still night,

    and distributes food to her household,

    (Proverbs 31:11-15)

This was the Scripture reading for Sunday, November 19, 2023; it was

 announced as the Word of God.  It seems that God is a ‘patriarchal

 monarch.’ 

 

My Aunt Helen did all that.

 

She had a husband and two children.

I still remember her Thanksgiving dinners, but, most of all, I remember her as a baseball player.  She was the best.  I can see her now, racing in to catch a short fly ball.  As a hitter, she had the form of Joe DiMaggio.  

She was the working matriarch of the family.  I remember her, despite her rather slight build, shoveling coal to keep a 4-apartment building warm.

As matriarch, she directed the family with understanding and humor.  

All respected Aunt Helen and her wisdom.

The Working Catholic: Social Doctrine #16, Imagination by Bill Droel

 

Catholics are, if you will, vaccinated with an analogical imagination. We assume that God’s creation, especially people, are made in God’s image and that therefore God is like creation in some way. Now, the vaccine does not last with all Catholics. It quickly wears off on a Catholic in an environment devoid of enchantment. And, some non-Catholics certainly have the analogical imagination.

Gay Talese, baptized Gaetano, (now in his mid-80s) is the son of Italian immigrants. He reported on sports for his high school paper, then wrote for his college paper, for an army newspaper and also filed stories for small newspapers. In the early 1950s he landed a job as a copyboy for the N.Y. Times, eventually getting a sports-themed column there. Magazine profiles, essays and more followed.

Stories and photographs of so-called newsmakers appear every day, says Talese in his memoir, Bartleby and Me (Harper Collins, 2023). However, he believes that the stories of ordinary people are worth attention. Here, in his words, are some of the “non-newsworthy people” he wrote about: “doormen, bootblacks, dog walkers, scissor grinders, the late-night tile cleaners in the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the clerks sitting in subway booths, the pushboys in the Garment Center, the carriage drivers in Central Park” and the like.  

That’s the Catholic social outlook. The ordinariness of each common person contains a spark of the extraordinary. Each person has dignity no matter one’s job, one’s wealth, or the size of one’s dwelling. Dignity, says Catholicism, is not given by one’s boss or by one’s fans or one’s friends at the country club or at the tavern. Dignity is not an achievement. It is innate, a gift from the Creator.

Those with a Catholic sensibility walk around with a disposition toward the divine. No, they don’t expect a miraculous apparition at the grocery. But maybe they initiate a friendly chat with a widower there. No, they don’t interrupt their normal routine for a mystical occurrence in the afternoon. But they pause each evening to reflect on the meaning that was lurking within and around the daily comings-and-goings.

God resides with each person, especially those who are overlooked. Should a forum allow for eliciting it, each person’s story reveals a piece of God’s grace to those who have ears to hear or have eyes to read. God revealed God’s mercy and love to shepherds, fishermen, tax collectors, widows, a thief, and pious benefactors and the curious. God is somewhere in the story of doormen, bootblacks, dog walkers, scissor grinders, tile cleaners, Uber drivers, mothers and curious young men.

If God is with each person, the Catholic imagination says that God is offended by oppression. This is why a Catholic imagination puts people on alert for opportunities to advance justice and peace. Normally, justice and peace come in small increments. There is the decision at the managers’ meeting to institute better training for new hires and to penalize any veteran employee who hazes a new hire. Improvement might mean bypassing Starbucks until the company respectfully deals with its legally organized employees. Improvement might be calling three or four neighbors to attend a community meeting. It might be the staff and leaders at a private school or a church who pledge to immediately involve the police in any instance of child endangerment.

A Catholic imagination or Catholic social outlook (to which anyone is welcome) begins and ends with the belief that each and every person has equal, God-given dignity (imago Dei) and that all creation deserves proper reverence.

Droel edits INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629), a free newsletter on faith and work.

 

 

Grass-roots successes October 24, 2023 By David Leonhardt

Many Americans have come to see the political system as rigged. They worry that grass-roots political movements are powerless to overcome entrenched interests, whether those interests are self-serving politicians, large employers or dominant social media platforms. And I understand why this cynicism exists.

For most Americans, progress has slowed to a crawl in recent decades. Income and wealth inequality have both soared. The top 1 percent have pulled away from everyone else, while working-class Americans often struggle to afford the best health care and homes in good school districts.

The clearest sign of our problems is this statistic: In 1980, the U.S. had a typical life expectancy for an affluent country. Today, we have the lowest such life expectancy, worse than those of Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Japan or South Korea, as well as some less rich countries, like China or Chile. The main reason is the stagnation of life expectancy for working-class people.

Source: World Bank | By The New York Times

For nearly a half-century, our economy has failed to deliver on the basic promise of the American dream — that living standards meaningfully improve over time for most citizens.

These themes will probably sound familiar to regular readers of this newsletter. The Morning often covers them because I believe that they shape so many parts of American life, including our polarized politics and angry national dialogue. I have just written a book — my first, called “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream” — that tries to explain how we got here.

(For the New York Times Audio app, I read part of the introduction, including my own family’s story.)

In today’s newsletter, I want to tell you why I nonetheless emerged from writing the book with hope about the country’s future: In short, the American political system helped create today’s problems, and only the American political system can solve them.

When inequality fell

For all the cynicism about politics today, it is worth remembering how often grass-roots political movements in the U.S. have managed to succeed. In the 1920s and 1930s, the country had a highly unequal economy and a Supreme Court that threw out most policies to reduce inequality. But activists — like A. Philip Randolph, a preacher’s son from Jacksonville, Fla., who took on a powerful railroad company — didn’t respond by giving up on the system as hopelessly rigged.

They instead used the tools of democracy to create mass prosperity. They spent decades building a labor movement that, despite many short-term defeats, ultimately changed public opinion, won elections and remade federal policy to put workers and corporations on a more equal footing. The rise of the labor movement from the 1930s through the 1950s led to incomes rising even more rapidly for the poor and middle class than for the rich, and to the white-Black wage gap shrinking.

One big lesson I took from my research was the unparalleled role of labor unions in combating inequality (a role that more Americans seem to have recognized recently).

There are plenty of other examples of grass-roots movements remaking American life. The civil-rights and women’s movements of the 1960s also overcame long odds, as did the disability-rights movement of the 1970s and the marriage-equality movement of the 2000s.

Other examples come from the political right. In the 1950s and 1960s, a group of conservatives, including Milton Friedman and Robert Bork, began trying to sell the country on the virtues of a low-tax, light-regulation economy. For years, they struggled to do so and were frustrated by their failures. Friedman kept a list of newspapers and magazines that did not even review his first major book.

But the conservatives kept trying — and the oil crisis that began 50 years ago last week eventually helped them succeed. A politician who embraced their ideas, Ronald Reagan, won the presidency and moved the U.S. closer to the laissez-faire ideal than almost any other country.

The conservatives who sold this vision promised it would lead to a new prosperity for all. They were wrong about that, of course. Since 1980, the U.S. has become a grim outlier on many indicators of human well-being. But the conservatives were right that overhauling the country’s economic policy was possible.

This history does not suggest that the political system is hopelessly broken. It instead suggests that the U.S. doesn’t have a broadly prosperous economy largely because the country has no mass movement organized around the goal of lifting living standards for the middle class and the poor. If such a movement existed, it might well succeed. It has before.

The central lesson I took from immersing myself in the past century of the American economy is that it can change, sometimes much more quickly than people expect. When it has changed in a major way, it often has been because Americans have used the political system to change it. The future can be different from the past.