Continued from page 10 are now doing the jobs that traditionally enabled blacks or other whites on the bottom to move up. It’s a much more complex world, and the complexity has tended to make the situation worse for the great mass of blacks who are still hoping to experience the promise that the Supreme Court incorporated in its Brown vs. Board of Education decision just a little bit more than 31 years ago. CSQ: Do you think that the 1984 election showed a gap between blacks and whites? Do you think a rainbow coalition is possible? How can this coalition be achieved? Bejl: I think a few people have been saying for a hundred years or more that it is a good idea that poor and working class whites and poor and working class blacks unite politically to further their mutual interests. And for at least a hundred years, white demagogues of one stripe or another have been able to convince whites that their real concern need be keeping ahead of blacks. For a hundred years most whites have bought that argument. I fear that as long as they do, it’s going to be difficult for the likes of the populist movement of the 1900s, or the efforts that Martin Luther King was starting to make, or Jesse Jackson’s rainbow coalition to be truly effective. Now I must say that my great hope for Ronald Reagan is that he is so consistently going to boot poor folk—not only blacks but also whites—in the behind that they will eventually wake up. I thought that the first few years after Reagan was elected would do the trick. The white workers standing in the unemployment lines said, I voted for Reagan because I thought he was going to get those welfare mothers off the public dole and what he’s doing is kicking us all in the behind. But it didn’t take. Now Reagan is in again and maybe we have another chance. What we really need is a white Jesse Jackson. We have some very articulate white ministers, but they are busy pointing their flock toward heaven for their relief, and toward the American way as the ideal, without really examining very carefully what the American way really is. It’s a fairly stratified, class-structured society in which most of these folks are never going to get out from under a position in which they are more or less exploited by those able to exploit them. The ministers don’t talk about that. Jesse Jackson does. So the Falwell’s and all prosper. Their flock is the great mass of working class, lower middle class Americans. The people they serve best would not be caught dead in their churches. One of the interesting things about being black is that you do have the gift of perception which most whites evidently don’t have. If the Democrats were really smart, We now find that equal opportunity is being used as a replacementjor segregation to maintain blacks in a subordinate, exploitable position in our society. Many of us who helped bring that about have an awful lot of debt to pay they would have perceived that it was going to be very difficult to beat Reagan. You certainly couldn’t out-Reagan Reagan as Mondale tried to do in the last couple of months of his campaign. And they would have looked around and said, “Hey, let’slet Jesse Jackson run.” First of all, it would have been a heck of a lot more exciting campaign, and if Jesse had lost by as big a margin as Mondale did—it’s hard for me to imagine that that could have happened—the Democrats could have said, “Gee, we tried. The country is just not ready for a black. ’’ As it turns out, it seems that the populace is saying the country is not ready for a Democrat. I keep hoping for a great awakening. And whatever whites are doing, I know that blacks recognize that not much is going to happen. And for that reason, a lot of organizations, old and new, are dedicated to the idea that we have to do it ourselves, that we have to expect that government is not going to do anything right. That they really have to be pressured. And I think there is a lot of evidence of that beginning to happen. CSQ: Can you cite some examples? Bell: One of the things is in the public schools. A lot of people have now awakened to what I’ve been trying to preach for the last decade—that Brown provided a good opportunity for improving the quality of education for black children, but not necessarily by simply racially balancing those children in schools with whites. There was a much better chance of improving the quality of education in black schools by gaining that character of involvement and control of what happens in those schools, which upper middle class people in their suburban schools take for granted. Nothing revolutionary. Just being able to do that which is essential to get a school to function for you. I think Portland is a good example— not total and not without problems. Ithink the young woman who wrote the series of articles in The Oregonian simply missed the boat. She saw as the goal to balance schools racially and she said that there are more non-racially balanced schools now than there were before. But that’s irrelevant to what’s happening in the schools. The concern is: do you have a school superintendent who is sensitive to the needs of everyone? Are parents in the local schools being able to participate in a more meaningful way in the important decisions as to who’s going to be principal, who are going to be teachers, what is going to be taught, what are the discipline standards going to be, what kind of cultural involvement is included in the educational curriculum? And all these things are happening. Results may not come quickly. The motivation for poor black children to work hard because they’re going to do better is not easily evidenced by the community around them. The schools really fight an uphill battle. But I see a lot of changes of that character hapening across the country. CSQ: So what you’re saying basically is that it doesn’t matter the ratio of blacks to whites in schools is, it’s the quality of the education. Bell: And the commitment of those who are in schools to having everyone who attends learn. The belief that everyone can learn even though they are black and poor. And that did not always happen in racially balanced school settings. Sometimes exceptional kids did well and had more opportunities than they would have back in their old schools. But those were the exceptions. The kids who were not extraordinarily gifted often did worse. You had an educational structure that was not set up to meet their needs. You had teachers who didn’t think they could learn. And from all the tests that have been done, if the teacher doesn’t think you can learn, the likelihood is that you are not going to learn very much. What I see in the schools—what I think is happening on the political level and the institutional level in black institutions—is a feeling that they really have to take hold. That they can’t just sit back and wait for government programs to do it. The government is now seen as hostile to black interests and not at all supportive. As is much of the populace. CSQ: I’m very interested in what you’ve said about how blacks were usually granted rights in order to further the interests of whites who set policy. Can you cite some of those historical examples and explain what they might mean for the fudo-it-yourself framing custom framing gallery 1822 BROADWAY 322-4455 ('/■ BLK. S. OF DENNY) open seven days a week FRAME-1T ON BROADWAY free parking FRESH • FAST • FRIENDLY 2305 EASTLAKE E. 324-1442 DINNER’TIL 10 TUES-SAT 20 Clinton St. Quarterly
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