We Must Address the Resentments of the American Electorate through the Power of Knowledge

The discontent evident in much of the American electorate needs to be addressed via better public education, not assuaged with the political prescriptions proposed by the professed liberal Doug R. Berdie (“Seven ways liberals must realign with middle America,” Star Tribune, April 9, 2017).

 

Point by point, Berdie reveals faulty reasoning and failure to grasp key historical realities:

 

1)  Berdie maintains that “colleges and universities must bring back controversial speakers so all sides can be heard,” implying that institutions of higher education are not currently hosting articulators of all manner of political positions.  In fact, for all of the controversy attending the denial of speaking opportunities to flamboyant rightist Milo Yiannopoulos at Berkeley and to the controversial political scientist Charles Murray at Middlebury, committees involved in speaker selection regularly bring voices as disparate as Ann Coulter and Cornell West to campus podiums.

 

2)  Berdie argues for the repeal of “hate crimes” legislation, finding the search for ethnic bias misguided and even inscrutable.  In fact, convictions on the basis of “hate crimes” are difficult to obtain and require high standards of proof;  when litigators do succeed in gaining conviction, they do so because they have addressed particularly pernicious behavior associated with ethnic or religious hatred, creating a climate of fear in assault against the physical and emotional security of the victim.    

 

3)  The author of “Seven ways” labels as misleading the statement, “The percentage of blacks arrested is higher than the percentage of blacks in the population, and that is proof that police are not acting fairly.”  That loosely rendered paraphrase fails to recognize the shades of gray in views that African American citizens have with regard to the police.  African Americans in North Minneapolis tend toward a view recognizing the professionalism of many police officers but harboring resentments created when, for example, black motorists are no more likely to have illegal objects in their cars yet have their vehicles searched twice as often as their white counterparts (detailed in the 2004 and 2008 editions of The State of African Americans in Minnesota that I wrote for the Minneapolis Urban League).

 

4)  Berdie also contests the use of the term, “white privilege,” in referring to life outcomes.  In fact, race, gender, and economic position always matter in life and represent hurdles that many people have to confront that white men do not.  Berdie could read many a sociological study on the matter, but he would best sit down with someone who is not white, male, or both and listen carefully for the preponderance of experiences affecting people of certain demographic descriptors.

 

5), 6), and 7)    The author is most errant in his reasoning as revealed in his comments regarding “reparations,” “Black Lives Matter,” and the need to “slow down” in pushing for social change:

 

With regard to the latter, we should be amazed that transgender people had to wait so long to attain a higher profile in civil rights advocacy;  the surge in efforts to promote LBGTQ rights is long overdue after a protracted period of the “slow down” approach.

 

Any possessor of white privilege who fails to understand the need for reparations fails to comprehend American history.  We as a society should say with conviction that we are weighed down with guilt for having enslaved people to produce cotton, rice and tobacco for free;  reneged on Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877;  established the ‘”separate but equal” principle in 1896;  lynched at least 3,000 African American people from 1887 to 1965, sometimes displaying the grisly images on postcards;  induced a Northern Migration to urban centers where restrictive housing covenants were the rule;  and even after the legislative advances of the 1960s left an economically impoverished and ill-educated  African American contingent at the urban core that still awaits redress of grievances.

 

Failure to resolve the injustices that still abide from a brutal history explain why a new generation of African American activists are impelled to shout that “Black Lives Matter” amidst persistent evidence that much of American society thinks that those lives matter very little.

 

A poverty of knowledge, not errant electoral strategy, is the root cause of discontent in the United States. We are an abominably ignorant people.  We have a K-12 system that fails to provide sufficient information pertinent to economics, government, history, geography, and natural science necessary for the exercise of good citizenship;  and to impart an appreciation for literature and the fines arts that would give people a vision of life beyond the reality television show and morally debased websites.  Our university systems produce specialists who manifest gaping holes in their knowledge base as citizens.

 

Too many of our people live out their one earthly sojourn guessing and asserting their way through life in the absence of any factual basis for their beliefs and claims.  We paid a terrible price for that ignorance in November 2016.  Only by overhauling our K-12 and university systems of education so as to create broadly knowledgeable citizens will we become the democracy that we imagine ourselves to be.