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America's Prison Dilemma

Sept. 15, 2013

Article X of 11-part series on race in America - past and present.

America's Prison Dilemma
By Glenn C. Loury

Even if every convict were rightly sentenced, America's vast, racially skewed incarceration system would still be morally indefensible.

prisonersarms
PHOTO: Southern Poverty Law Center
glennloury
Glenn Loury

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Over the past four decades, the United States has become a vastly punitive nation, without historical precedent or international parallel. With roughly 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. currently confines about one-quarter of the world's prison inmates. In 2008, one in a hundred American adults was behind bars. Just what manner of people does our prison policy reveal us to be?

America, with great armies deployed abroad under a banner of freedom, nevertheless harbors the largest infrastructure for the mass deprivation of liberty on the planet. We imprison nearly as great a fraction of our population to a lifetime in jail (around 70 people for every 100,000 residents) than Sweden, Denmark, and Norway imprison for any duration whatsoever.

That America's prisoners are mainly minorities, particularly African-Americans, who come from the most disadvantaged corners of our unequal society, cannot be ignored. In 2006, one in nine Black men between the ages of 20 and 34 was serving time. The role of race in this drama is subtle and important, and the racial breakdown is not incidental: prisons both reflect and exacerbate existing racial and class inequalities.

Why are there so many African-Americans in prison? It is my belief that such racial disparity is not mainly due to overt discriminatory practices by the courts or the police. But that hardly exhausts the moral discussion. To begin with, let's remember the fact that the very definition of crime is socially constructed: as graphically illustrated by the so-called "war on drugs," much of what is criminal today was not criminal in the past and may not be tomorrow.

Let us also frankly admit that a massive, malign indifference to people of color is at work. I suspect strongly, though it is impossible to prove to the econometrician's satisfaction, that our criminal and penal policies would never have been allowed to expand to the extent that they have if most of the Americans being executed or locked away were White.

We must also frankly ask why so many African-American men are committing crimes. Many of the "root causes" have long been acknowledged. Disorganized childhoods, inadequate educations, child abuse, limited employability, and delinquent peers are just a few of the factors involved. In America, criminal justice has become a second line of defense, if you will, against individuals whose development has been neglected or undermined by other societal institutions like welfare, education, employment and job training, mental health programs, and other social initiatives. As a result, it is an arena in which social stratification, social stigmas, and uniquely American social and racial dramas are reinforced.

We should also remember that "punishment" and "inequality" are intimately linked-that causality runs in both directions. Disparities in punishment reflect socioeconomic inequalities, but they also help produce and reinforce them.

Is it not true, for example, that prisons create criminals? As the Rutgers criminologist Todd Clear concluded after a review of evidence, the ubiquity of the prison experience in some poor urban neighborhoods has had the effect of eliminating the stigma of serving time. On any given day, as many as one in five adult men in these neighborhoods is behind bars, and as Clear has written, "[T]he cycling of these young men through the prison system has become a central factor determining the social ecology of poor neighborhoods, where there is hardly a family without a son, an uncle or a father who has done time in prison."

For people who go to prison, time behind bars almost always also diminishes their odds of living crime-free lives when they get out, by lowering employability, severing ties to healthy communal supports, and hardening their own attitudes. When such individuals return to their communities, they join many others with the same harsh life experience, often forming or joining gangs. This, in turn, further diminishes the opportunities that law-abiding residents in those same neighborhoods have to escape poverty or preserve the often meager value of their property.

Huge racial disparities in the incidence of incarceration should therefore come as no surprise. The subordinate status of Black ghetto-dwellers-their social deprivation and spatial isolation in America's cities-puts them at greater risk of embracing dysfunctional behaviors that lead to incarceration, and then incarceration itself leads to more dysfunction.

Put it all together and look at what we have wrought. We have established what looks to the entire world like a racial caste system that leaves millions stigmatized as pariahs, either living behind bars or in conditions of concentrated crime and poverty that breed still more criminality. Why are we doing this?

The present American regime of hyper-incarceration is said to be necessary in order to secure public safety. But this is not a compelling argument. It is easy to overestimate how much crime is prevented by locking away a large fraction of the population. Often those who are incarcerated, particularly for selling drugs, are simply replaced by others. There is no shortage of people vying to enter illicit trades, particularly given how few legal paths to upward mobility exist for most young Black males.

The key empirical conclusion of the academic literature is that increasing the severity of punishment has little, if any, effect in deterring crime. But there is strong evidence that increasing the certainty of punishment has a large deterrent effect. One policy-relevant inference is that lengthy prison sentences, particularly in the form of mandatory minimum-type statutes such as California's Three Strikes Law, are difficult to justify.

The ideological justification for the present American prison system also ignores the fact that the broader society is implicated in the existence of these damaged, neglected, feared, and despised communities. People who live in these places are aware that outsiders view them with suspicion and contempt. (I know whereof I speak in this regard, because I am myself a child of the Black ghetto, connected intimately to ghetto-dwellers by the bond of social and psychic affiliation. While in general I am not much given to advertising this fact, it seems appropriate to do so here.)

The plain historical truth of the matter is that neighborhoods like North Philadelphia, the West Side of Chicago, the East Side of Detroit, and South Central Los Angeles did not come into being by an accident of nature. As the sociologist Loïc Wacquant has argued, these ghettos are man-made, coming into existence and then persisting because the concentration of their residents in such urban enclaves serves the interests of others. As such, the desperate and vile behaviors of some ghetto-dwellers reflect not merely their personal moral deviance, but also the shortcomings of our society as a whole. "Justice" operates at multiple levels, both individual and social.

Defenders of the current regime put the onus on law-breakers: "If they didn't do the crimes, they wouldn't have to do the time." Yet a pure ethic of personal responsibility does not and could never justify the current situation. Missing from such an argument is any acknowledgment of social responsibility even for the wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons.

This is not to imply that a criminal has no agency in his behavior. Rather, the larger society is implicated in a criminal's choices because we have acquiesced to social arrangements that work to our benefit and to his detriment-that shape his consciousness and his sense of identity in a way that the choices he makes (and that we must condemn) are nevertheless compelling to him.

Put simply, the structure of our cities with their massive ghettos is a causal factor in the deviancy among those living there. Recognition of this fact has far-reaching implications for the conduct of public policy. What goals are our prisons trying to achieve, and how should we weigh the enormous costs they impose on our fellow, innocent citizens?

In short, we must think of justice as a complex feedback loop. The way in which we distribute justice-putting people in prison-has consequences, which raise more questions of justice, like how to deal with convicts' families and communities, who are also punished, though they themselves have done nothing wrong. Even if every sentence handed out to every prisoner were itself perfectly fair (an eminently dubious proposition), our system would still be amoral, because it punishes innocents.

Those who claim on principled arguments that "a man deserves his punishment" are missing the larger picture. A million criminal cases, each rightly decided-each distributing justice to a man who deserves his sentence-still add up to a great and historic wrong.

Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. He is the author of, among other works, "Race, Incarceration, and American Values: The Tanner Lectures." This article, the 10th of an 11-part series on race, is sponsored by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and was originally published by the Washington Monthly Magazine.

'Baby-Friendly' Hospitals Bypass Black Communities By Rita Henley Jensen

Sept. 15, 2013

'Baby-Friendly' Hospitals Bypass Black Communities
By Rita Henley Jensen
baby-in-hospital
Baby in a hospital
PHOTO: Crystal Marie Lopez/LaBellaVida on Flickr, under Creative Commons

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from Women's eNews.

(TriceEdneyWire.com)-Very few of the maternity wards that have won a seal of approval for providing breastfeeding support are located in communities with a significant population of African-Americans, a Women's eNews analysis finds.

Breast milk is the most local of all foods and one that can have an outsized impact on the health of mothers and infants.

However, for many African-American parents, finding a maternity ward that supports the process immediately after birth can be extremely difficult.

That's the finding of Women's eNews' review of the U.S. locations of so-called Baby-Friendly hospitals, maternity hospitals that have passed a set of stringent standards established by the World Health Organization to assist brand-new parents to begin breastfeeding.

A Women's eNews analysis finds that 45 percent of U.S. Baby-Friendly hospitals are in cities and towns that have African-American populations of 3 percent or less.

A full 83 percent of U.S. Baby-Friendly hospitals are in communities where the African-American portion of the population is 13 percent or less.

This geographic segregation of breastfeeding care and support may play a significant role in the lower breastfeeding rates among African-American mothers, which in turn means the mothers and the infants do not enjoy the health benefits of breastfeeding.

Moreover, despite their potential role in improving the nation's health, the "Baby- Friendly" designation is not widely understood, even in the highest public health circles, anecdotal evidence suggests.

At a recent conference on medical issues surrounding breastfeeding, one questioner asked Dr. Ana Pujol McGee, chief medical officer and executive vice president of the Joint Commission, the agency that sets standards for hospitals nationwide, about the lack of support for Baby-Friendly hospitals at the highest levels of the health system.

"Why is there no leadership from the commission on Baby-Friendly hospitals?" McGee was asked.

"What's a Baby-Friendly hospital?" McGee replied.

The attendees moaned in response. Later, in the hallway outside the meeting, Trish MacEnroe, executive director of Baby-Friendly USA, gave McGee a quick briefing.

Local Champions

The location of Baby-Friendly hospitals depend on what many call "champions," someone within a hospital who has the leadership skills, time and determination to lead the change. Hospitals must volunteer to change their breastfeeding support practices and pass inspection by Baby-Friendly USA in order earn the Baby-Friendly status.

This dependence on local leadership has led to a haphazard distribution of breastfeeding support throughout the United States, affecting all parents. However, given that Black mothers are the least likely to breastfeed, the lack of assistance during the crucial hours after birth seems at least a major missed opportunity as well as a reflection of the cost of racial segregation that persists throughout most of the United States.

One of the key Baby-Friendly rules-designed to limit the influence of infant formula makers-requires the hospital buy its own infant formula and not provide free formula to departing parents, including the free diaper bags provided at no cost by formula companies with a handy six-pack of formula inside.

Few Baby-Friendly hospitals can be found in big urban centers with large African-American communities and other low-income residents.

New York City, for example, home to more than 2 million African-Americans-9 percent of all African- Americans nationwide-- has only two Baby-Friendly hospitals, but none in the areas outside Manhattan where most African Americans live.

Detroit, now seeking to avoid its pension obligations in bankruptcy court, has a population of 700,000 that is 83 percent African American and has no certified Baby-Friendly hospitals. A suburb does though; the affluent Grosse Point, with a community that is 3 percent African American.

Kiddada Green lives in Detroit and is founding director of the Black Mothers' Breastfeeding Association, a national organization that aims to eradicate the racial disparity in breastfeeding rates among African American women. Green is among the leaders of grassroots advocacy and service organizations declaring the week of Aug. 25 Black Breastfeeding Week.

Demographic Disparities

The geography of Baby-Friendly hospitals concerns Green.

"In order to increase the number of black babies who are breastfed, we must look specifically at the regional and racial demographics of the locations of Baby-Friendly hospitals and identify ways to increase the number of Baby-Friendly hospitals in areas that are highly populated with African American families," she said.

The cities other than New York and Detroit with the largest African American populations are, in order, Chicago, Philadelphia and Houston. None of these cities has a Baby-Friendly hospital and yet, combined, 1-in-8 African-Americans live in these five cities.

Based on births in 2009, the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported two years ago that, overall, Baby-Friendly hospitals were relatively scarce across the country.

Nebraska had the highest percentage of infants born in Baby-Friendly hospitals, with more than 20 percent. Nine states, mostly in the South and Midwest, had none.

For Nearly 1-in-5 Black Americans No 'Baby-Friendly' Hospital In-State

Less than 5 percent of the 166 U.S. hospitals meeting criteria for the WHO'S Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative are in the nine states plus District of Columbia with the highest concentrations of black Americans; areas home to one-third of the country's black population. Nationwide, almost one-fifth of Black Americans live in states without a single hospital meeting the WHO's 22 year-old standard of care.

Support for breastfeeding in all communities has increased dramatically during the administration of President Barack Obama.

Through a concerted effort of the former surgeon general, Regina M. Benjamin, and many others in the health community, U.S. breastfeeding rates have continued to rise. Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of mothers who said they breastfed their babies in the early postpartum period increased to nearly 77 percent from 71 percent, according to an August report from the CDC.

The CDC also reported in August that black mothers nationwide lag behind other racial and ethnic groups when it comes to breastfeeding. In a recent CDC study, 54 percent of black mothers initiated breastfeeding compared with 74 percent of white mothers and 80 percent of Hispanic mothers. The CDC reports this gap persists regardless of income and educational attainment.

Rise in Baby-Friendly Hospitals

Meanwhile, the number of Baby-Friendly hospitals certified by Baby-Friendly USA has increased by 12 this year, for a total of 166. Of the 12, however, only two are located in a community with a large African American population: St. Mary's Hospital in Decatur, Ill., where the African American population is 23 percent, and Georgetown. S.C., with a 57 percent African-American population.

The CDC has addressed the geography issue, said MacEnroe of Baby-Friendly USA, the organization that works with hospitals seeking the certification.

An initiative launched by the CDC, called Best Fed Beginnings, is working with 89 additional hospitals serving low-income patients that are willing to work toward becoming officially Baby-Friendly. Of those, two are in Houston, two are in Philadelphia and one is in Chicago. None are in New York City or Detroit, with a total of more than 3 million African-American residents.

The CDC also reported this month an unprecedented decline in U.S. obesity rates, attributed in part to increased breastfeeding. The obesity rate for school-age, low-income children in the United States dropped by as much as 1 percent, in what the CDC hopes might be a trend. At the current time, 1-in-5 Black children and 1-in-6 Hispanic children are obese, leading to lifetimes of poor health.

Increasing breastfeeding is seen as a major strategy on the national level for improving the health of African-American mothers and their children. For women, breastfeeding reduces the risks for breast and ovarian cancer, as well as obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

For infants, the health benefits are also significant. Babies who are breastfed have lower risks of ear and gastrointestinal infections, diabetes and obesity. Breast milk also contains antibodies that help babies fight off viruses, bacteria, allergies and asthma.

"This persistent gap in breastfeeding rates between black women and women of other races and ethnicities might indicate that black women are more likely to encounter unsupportive cultural norms: perceptions that breastfeeding is inferior to formula feeding, lack of partner support and an unsupportive work environment," said a 2002 report published by the Journal of the Black Nurses Association.

Green, the breastfeeding activist in Detroit, said she also wants a closer look at the impact of Baby-Friendly hospitals on these breastfeeding rates. She said, "It is my wish that there is an examination of how this initiative is positively impacting the breastfeeding disparity gap for black babies."

Rita Henley Jensen, a prize-winning investigative reporter, is founder and editor in chief of Women's eNews.

Households Headed by Single-Black Men Increased in 2012 By Frederick H. Lowe

Sept. 9, 2013

Households Headed by Single-Black Men Increased in 2012
By Frederick H. Lowe

fatherwithchild
The number of single-parent home
headed by black men increased
in 2012.

Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from TheNorthStarNews.com

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The number of single-black men heading households increased in 2012, compared to 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but the number is still much smaller than homes headed by single-black women.

Last year, 566,000 households were headed by single-black men, a 9.7 percent increase compared to the 511,000 households headed by single-black men in 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's Families and Living Arrangements.

The number of households headed by single-black men in 2011, however, was a drop compared to 2010, when 555,000 households were headed by single-black men. The number in 2010, however, is a major increase from 2009 when 466,000 households headed by single black fathers, according to the Census Bureau.

The number of households headed by single-black men, however, is small compared to households headed by single-black women.

In 2012, 3.782 million single black women headed homes, a 2.8 percent increase compared to 3.676 million households headed by single black women in 2011, according to the Census.

The growth in black fathers heading households is often overlooked, deliberately in some cases, because of claims--some justified, others unchallenged—that black men don't care about their children.

The Pew Research Social Change and Demographic Changes reported last July as did the Economic Policy Institute reported nearly a year earlier that there has been a rise in homes headed by single fathers.

In its study titled, "The Rise of Single Fathers," Pew reported that in 2011  15 percent of single fathers were black. Twenty-eight percent of single mothers are African-American.

The article, which is subtitled, "A Ninefold Increase [in single fathers] Since 1960," reported that in 1960, there were fewer than 300,000 households headed by single men and that the number increased to 2.6 million in 2011.

Television recognized the growth of single fathers by broadcasting popular situation comedies like "Bachelor Father" and "My Three Sons." In both cases the single men headed the households, sometimes with the help of a housekeeper or an elderly relative.

The growth in the number of single households headed by single women has been more dramatic, according to Pew Research. In 1960, 1.9 million households were headed by single women but by 2011, the number increased to 8.6 million.

Dr. Algernon Austin of the Economic Policy Institute, published a study in September 2012, which reported that in 2011, there were 5.7 million black families with children under 18 years old, and 8.5 percent, or 486,000 families of those families, were headed by single-black men.

The Census Bureau has since revised the 486,000 figure upward to 511,000.

Dr. Austin, who is director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, also noted the poverty rate for families headed by single-black fathers has declined since 2010 while the poverty rates for households headed by single-white and Asian men increased.

Jealous Resigns from NAACP, Pondering GOP Growth in Black Community

Sept. 9, 2013

Jealous Leaving NAACP, Pondering GOP Growth in Black Community
By Hazel Trice Edney

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NAACP Ben Jealous recently praised Va. Gov. Bob McDonnell (in background) for his position on the restoration of voting rights to convicted felons. PHOTO: Sandra Sellars/Richmond Free Press

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Benjamin Todd Jealous, announcing his resignation after five years as president of the NAACP this week, said he is leaving Dec. 31 in order to spend more time with his wife and two young children. But, he is also contemplating the leadership of another movement – to reconnect Blacks and the civil rights agenda with the Republican Party.

“The reality is that, you’ve seen it with my outreach to [Newt] Gingrinch and [Grover] Norquist and [Virginia] Governor Bob McDonnell on criminal justice reform issues. The reality is that as a people, we were most affective in pushing our agenda when we had one agenda that was shared between Black members of both parties,” Jealous said in an exclusive interview with the Trice Edney News Wire this week.  “And so we’ve got to get back to civil rights having a beach head in both parties and there being a common civil rights agenda that is shared and is held in common by Black Democrats and Black Republicans.”

Listing a string of elected Republicans where he has found common ground, Jealous says he sees signs that this movement could be successful.

“It has been very hard sometimes in these partisan times, but we have found allies in unlikely places,” he said. “Governor Deal in Georgia is helping to downsize prisons. So is Rick Perry in Texas. Gov. Kasich in Ohio is a big proponent of affirmative action for the business sector. Gov. McDonnell of Virginia has been proponent of second chances, both in employment and in voting. And the question is, if a Republican can stand for any of this anywhere, then why can’t they stand for all of this everywhere? So, I think it’s important that we get back to doing what [Congresswoman] Shirley Chisholm admonished all of us and that is, ‘We have no permanent friends, we have no permanent enemies, we just have permanent interests.’”

Jealous, a Rhodes Scholar who, in 2007, became the youngest person to ever lead the NAACP, pointed to this agenda as one of the possible goals of a political action committee, (PAC), that he started with two friends six years ago in 2007 in order to help fund then Sen. Barack Obama in his primary stages. In addition to a new teaching job at a university, he and those friends – who he identified as Steven Phillips and Andrew Wong - will revisit that “Vote Hope” PAC with major questions in mind.

“We’re going to figure out whether or not now is the time that we can succeed in building a super PAC that will accelerate the breaking of state level glass ceilings of candidates of color across the South and South West,” he said. “Now is the time that we can finally create the equivalence of Emily’s List for People of Color candidates with a real eye toward transformations that we think are possible in the South and the South West…breaking glass ceilings in those states in the former Confederacy and on out to California, and with progressives retaking the South perhaps permanently.”

Emily’s list is a PAC founded in 1985 with a goal of electing pro-choice Democratic women to public office. Jealous says the PAC he envisions would include Republican and Democratic candidates. In recent history, the Democratic Party has been able to claim an overwhelming majority of the Black vote, consistently more than 90 percent in presidential elections. While Democrats are largely credited with civil rights gains, Jealous says many of the major gains of the 50s and 60s came about because of bi-partisan cooperation because of Blacks in both parties.

He recently expounded on his vision during an Aug. 26 forum sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s America Healing initiative, reflecting on the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington.

“We have to, as a civil rights community, really think deeply - not just about how we build bonds amongst each other - but how we, frankly, reintroduce civil rights to the Republican Party, which for a hundred years was the party of civil rights in many ways,” he told teh audience at the Washington, D.C.-based Newseum, where the forum was held. “And I believe that if we, in the next fifty years, would get a little bit more sophisticated about how we work our politics, if we in the next fifty years could be a little bit more inspired, quite frankly by our grandparents and lessons that they understood very well. If we can get back to a place where civil rights is a little bit less partisan; then we can move forward even faster than we think is possible.”

Although he believes civil rights must be universal, he says Blacks will have to initiate the movement.

“I think, quite frankly, the first courageous step is going to have to be with us saying that we’re going to have the hope to even talk to the other side of the aisle,” he told the forum audience. “Because right now we reinforce the isolation of our own agenda in ways that may be expedited in the short term, but detrimental in the long term.”

His fellow civil rights leaders, still basking in the aftermath of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, expressed shock at the announcement of his resignation Sunday afternoon.

“Ben Jealous has operated with integrity and a real sense of hands-on activism. Not only was he able to revive the NAACP and raise its budget to higher heights, he joined us in the streets in real civil rights activity on the ground. From the ‘suites to the streets’ he will be missed as head of the NAACP but I am sure he will not leave us in his contribution to the struggle,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton in a statement.

NAACP Chair Roslyn Brock praised Jealous for his successes in a telephone press conference on Monday. She also issued a statement saying, “Under his leadership, the NAACP has built a highly competent staff that will carry our mission forward and meet the civil rights challenges of the 21st century. Our board, staff and volunteer leaders throughout the country deeply appreciate his sacrifice, and will continue to implement our game-changing goals for the next half century that include the restoration of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, implementing Trayvon’s Law, bolstering civic engagement efforts and ensuring our community is enrolled in the Affordable Care Act exchanges.”

Jealous also said in the interview that he is pleased with his accomplishments. “What I’m most proud of is that I leave the organization bigger, stronger, more powerful and more financially sustainable and with a clear set of priorities for the next half century,” he said. “Yes, like every NAACP leader, I leave here passing a baton on to the next person to help finish a race that will go on for a very long time. But I leave here knowing that we are better prepared to finish that race than we have been in a very long time.”

He hints at his desire to exacerbate the finish of that race – just from a new venue.

“Professionally, I’m very clear I’m going to go teach. Personally it’s very clear I need a lot more time at home to be Dad. Politically, I’m walking in with a question, which is can this be done? Can we create a big, robust PAC that is ultimately funded from the grassroots to help accelerate the careers of transformative candidates of color?”

 

 

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Lincoln Died for Our Sins by Jelani Cobb

Sept. 9, 2013

Lincoln Died for Our Sins
By Jelani Cobb

Article IX of 11-part series on race in America - past and present

kellogg story 10 - jelani cobb
Jelani Cobb

kellogg story 10 - cobb
Lincoln

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The opening scene of Steven Spielberg's cinemythic portrait of the sixteenth president features President Abraham Lincoln seated on a stage, half cloaked in darkness, and observing the Union forces he is sending into battle. It's an apt metaphor for the man himself-both visible and obscure, inside the tempest yet somehow above the fray. Lincoln was released in early November, just in time to shape our discussions of January 1, 2013, the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Yet with its themes of redemption and sacrifice, Spielberg's film could seem less suited for an anniversary celebration than an annual one. Here is a vision of a lone man, tested by betrayal, besieged by enemies whom he regards without malice, a man who is killed for his convictions only to be resurrected as a moral exemplar. Spielberg's Lincoln is perhaps less fitted to January 1st than it is to the holiday that precedes it by a week.

In fairness, this narrative of Lincoln's Civil War, equal parts cavalry and Calvary, did not originate with Spielberg. The legend of the Great Emancipator began even as Lincoln lay dying in a boardinghouse across from Ford's Theater that night in April 1865 in the same way that JFK's mythic standing as a civil rights stalwart was born at Dealey Plaza in November 1963.

In the wake of his assassination, Lincoln, the controversial and beleaguered president, was remade into Lincoln the Savior, an American Christ-figure who carried the nation's sins. Pulling off this transformation, this historical alchemy, has required that we as a nation redact the messier parts of Lincoln's story in favor of an untainted, morally unconflicted commander in chief who was untouched by the biases of the day and unyielding in his opposition to slavery. We have little use for tainted Christs. Through Lincoln the Union was "saved" in more than one sense of the word.

History is malleable. There is always the temptation to remake the past in the contours that are most comforting to us. In a nation tasked with reconciling its democratic ideals with the reality of slavery, Lincoln has become a Rorschach test of sorts. What we see when we look at him says as much about ourselves as it does about him. And what we see, or choose to see, most often is a figure of unimpeachable moral standing who allows Americans to gaze at ourselves in the mirror of history and smile.

If the half-life for this kind of unblemished heroism is limited-we've grown more cynical across the board-it has remained resonant enough for our politicians today to profit from their association with it. The signal achievement of Spielberg's Lincoln is the renovation of that vision of Lincoln, a makeover for a nation that had elected its first black president to a second term just three days before the film hit theaters.

In 2007 Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Ill., deliberately conjuring comparisons to that other lanky lawyer who spent time in the state legislature there. There is no shortage of politicians claiming an affinity with Lincoln-George W. Bush saw himself as a Lincolnesque figure when he was prosecuting the war on terror-but rarely have the parallels been as apparent as they are with Obama. The candidate played up that angle, visiting the Lincoln Memorial just before his inauguration, carrying a well-thumbed copy of Team of Rivals on the campaign trail, slipping sly riffs on Lincoln's second inaugural address into his own first one, and taking the oath of office on the Lincoln Bible.

Beyond the obvious, though, lies a deeper theme between Obama and Lincoln: the identities of both men are inextricably bound to questions of both disunity and progress in this country. It's worth recalling that Obama's rise to prominence was a product of his 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention, in which he offered a compelling, if Photoshopped, vision of a United States where there are no red states or blue states, where neither race nor religion nor ideology can undermine national unity.

Obama walked onto that stage an obscure state legislator; he left it a virtual avatar of American reconciliation, the most obvious brand of which was racial. Implicit within his subsequent campaign, particularly after the flashpoint of controversy over Jeremiah Wright's sermons, was the possibility of amnesty for the past. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia in March 2008. Delivered at a time when the campaign was virtually hemorrhaging hope, the speech was a deft manipulation of the very human aspiration to break with the messy past, to be reborn in an untainted present.

In the wake of the release of Spielberg's Lincoln it was common to see pundits remark with amazement on the enduring public fascination with the sixteenth president. The biopic grossed $84 million by the beginning of December-a grand haul for a historical drama with no special effects and an ending we've known since grade school.

But viewed from another angle, the question becomes not why we are still intrigued by Lincoln but how we could not be. His life contains epic themes: genius, war, personal loss, a narrative arc in which a barely schooled young man goes on to produce some of the most elegant prose in the American canon and a role in ending the wretchedness of slavery. The capacity of his life to inspire and intrigue is rivaled only by its capacity to exonerate. It is this last element that takes center stage in Spielberg's film.

The director's artistic choice to focus on the last four months of the president's life is simultaneously a choice to focus on his finest hour and to not focus on the troubled, torturous path he traveled to get there. There is no Frederick Douglass here goading the president toward the more humanitarian position, no Whites rioting at the prospect of being drafted to fight for Negro freedom.

On the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, we see unwitting testimony to our ongoing racial quagmire in the reductive ways we discuss the author of that document and the reasons for slavery's end. We speak volumes about our impasses in the glib, self-congratulatory way we discuss the election of the president most ostensibly tied to Lincoln's legacy.

It's important to note that Spielberg's film about the death of slavery all but ignores the Proclamation. That choice allowed the director-and his audience-to avoid both Lincoln's support for the mass colonization of free blacks and also the fact that the now-hallowed Proclamation left nearly a million slaves in chains. It also made unnecessary any discussion of the uncomfortable truth that the Proclamation was devised in part as a war measure to ensure the loyalties of border states and deprive the Confederacy of its labor force, while leaving open the question of the South getting those very slaves back, should they return to the Union.

Instead, Spielberg's Lincoln centers on the comparatively clean moral lines surrounding the Thirteenth Amendment. But like a great deal of the popular ideas about Lincoln, the film confuses the president's strategic ideas with his moral ones, and in so doing shifts the landscape toward redemption.

At issue here are not just Lincoln's actions, but the context for those actions and the motives behind them. The film highlights that Lincoln, in fighting for a constitutional amendment, freed four million enslaved Blacks, as well as untold generations yet to be born. The film does not highlight that by 1865, Lincoln would have known very well that permanently ending slavery would also deprive the readmitted Southern states of the labor force that had allowed it to nearly tear the country in half.

The amendment was no less strategically motivated than the Proclamation had been. Arguing that the end of the war gave Lincoln leeway to strike the blow against slavery he'd patiently waited for overlooks the fact that Congress had attempted to pass the amendment in the previous session-when the outcome of the war was far less certain. After the amendment passed Lincoln referred to it as a "king's cure for all the evils," but in his annual address given months earlier, in December 1864, he spoke of it as a prerogative of preserving the nation:

In a great national crisis like ours, unanimity of action among those seeking a common end is very desirable, almost indispensable. And yet no approach to such unanimity is attainable unless some deference shall be paid to the will of the majority simply because it is the will of the majority. In this case the common end is the maintenance of the Union, and among the means to secure the end such will, through the election, is more clearly declared in favor of such Constitutional amendment. (Emphasis added.)

The strategic and moral benefits of Lincoln's actions are not mutually exclusive, but the need for a redemption figure makes us behave as if they are. The fact that Black freedom occurred because a particular set of national interests aligned with ending slavery doesn't diminish the moral importance of it. Indeed, the moral high ground here is that Lincoln, unlike millions of Americans in both the South and the North, was able to recognize that slavery was not more important than the Union itself.

This seems somehow insufficient to the definition of heroism today, but it shouldn't. The by-product of our modern, mythical Lincoln is that he allows us to shift our gaze to one American who ended slavery rather than the millions who perpetuated and defended it. By lionizing Lincoln, we are able to concentrate on the death of an evil institution rather than its ongoing legacy. The paradox is that Lincoln's death enabled later generations to impatiently wonder when Black people would cease fixating on slavery and just get over it.

When Obama cast himself in the mold of Lincoln in 2007, he could not have known how deeply he would find himself mired in the metaphor. As a recent Pew Study revealed, our country is more divided along partisan lines today than at any point since they've been conducting studies. Basic demographic divisions-gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and class-do not predict differences in values more than they have in the past.

Men and women, Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, the highly religious and the less religious, and those with more and less education differ in many respects, but those differences have not grown in recent years, and for the most part they pale in comparison to the overwhelming partisan divide we see today. This is only partly because of the growth of cable news programs offering relentless blue-versus-red commentary and a la carte current events. It's also because party identity has become a stand-in for all the other distinctions the study explained.

That chasm is the stepchild of the sectionalism of Lincoln's era. Today, we are another House Divided, though the lines are now drawn more haphazardly. And this is where Obama and Lincoln part ways. In future feature films about the current era, it won't be the details of the president's life that will be redacted, but the details of our own. More specifically, it will be the details of those Americans who greeted Obama's reelection with secession petitions; those who reacted to the 2008 election by organizing themselves and parading racially inflammatory banners in the nation's capital; those who sought solace from demagogues and billionaire conspiracy theorists who demanded that a sitting president prove his own citizenship.

The heralded "Age of Obama" began with a sugar high of postracialism, but four years later the number of Whites subscribing to explicitly racist ideas about Blacks had increased, not diminished. The vision of a Black person executing the duties of the nation's highest office was supposed to become mundane; we were supposed to take his identity for granted. Somewhere there was a little-voiced hope among Black people that his simple existence as President would be a daily brief for our collective humanity, that we would be taken to be every bit as ordinary as the man occupying the Oval Office.

At points in the last four years, it seemed as if we could live in a poetic moment, as if our founding documents could be taken at face value. But the numbers tell us it's not true. Many Americans have reacted to the promise of the Obama era as a threat, as a harbinger of the devaluing currency of whiteness. The problem is not that these people want to take their country back, it's that they were loathe to share it in the first place. The recalcitrant racism of the Obama era will be as vexing to the story of American virtue as Lincoln's racial failings were to those of his era. Lincoln was not as flawless as we've been told, and we are not as virtuous as we've begun to tell ourselves.

To be clear, though, something in the nation has changed. At no point prior to 2008 could a presidential aspiration have been so effectively yoked to this yearning for a clear racial conscience. But beneath the high-blown, premature rhetoric of postracialism lies the less inspirational fact that those changes were as much about math as they were about morality.

Depending on your perspective, we have either reached a point of racial maturity that facilitated the election of an African-American president or we've reached a point where a supermajority of Black voters, a large majority of Latino and Asian ones, and a minority of White people are capable of winning a presidential election. Again, these ideas need not be mutually exclusive, but the need for clean lines and easy redemption makes us behave as if they are.

Lincoln's apotheosis inspired self-congratulation among Whites and a backlash of doubt and outright disdain among Blacks. Among many African-Americans, a justifiable skepticism of Lincoln as the original Friend of the Negro has morphed into a broader dismissal of him altogether. But however conservative and incrementalist his policies seemed to them, and to many of us today, they were still far too radical for John Wilkes Booth and the millions who sympathized with him.

Lincoln's death is further evidence that men who are ahead of their times have a tendency to die at the hands of men who are behind them. It is also proof that the simple sentiment that the Union was more important than slavery was, in its own right, radical. However far Lincoln was from advocating racial equality, his second inaugural address stands as a monument of national conscience:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bond-men's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether."

Indeed, the real problem is not that the nation has so consistently sought balm for its racial wounds, and drafted Lincoln-and Obama-for those purposes; it's the belief that we could be absolved from the past so cheaply. No Lincoln, not even an unfailingly moral one who was killed in service of a righteous cause, could serve as an antidote for ills that persisted, and continue to persist, for a century and a half after his demise. We find ourselves now in circumstances where actual elements of racial progress are jeopardized precisely because we've smugly accepted the idea of ourselves as racially progressive.

The Thirteenth Amendment states that "[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." We are a nation in which a Black president holds office while more than half a million duly convicted Black men populate the prisons and county and municipal jails hold hundreds of thousands more. The symbolic ideal of postracialism masks a Supreme Court that may undermine affirmative action in higher education and the preclearance clause of the Voting Rights Act.

Our most recent election saw both unprecedented Black turnout and efforts at Black voter suppression that resound with echoes of bad history. Black unemployment, even among the college educated, remains vastly higher than it is for Whites. (Among the more hideous hypocrisies of the recent election was Mitt Romney's cynical appeals to Black Americans, pointing out that Blacks have suffered disproportionately in the Obama economy. The Black president, we were to believe, is now also responsible for racism in the labor market.)

Obama himself was wise to these contrasts as far back as 2008, when he gave the speech in Philadelphia that saved his political career.

[W]ords on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part-through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk-to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

The election of an African-American president is a watershed in our history. But the takeaway is that what we do during these moments is somehow smaller than what we do between them, that our heroes are no better than we are, nor do they need to be. Harriet Tubman is often cited as saying she could have freed more blacks if only she'd been able to convince them they were slaves. In our own era, the only impediment to realizing the creed of "We Shall Overcome" is the narcotic belief that we already have.

Jelani Cobb is the author of "The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress" and the director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut. This article, the ninth of an 11-part series on race, is sponsored by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and was originally published by the Washington Monthly Magazine.

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