[I]n this flawed world, we must all take our lessons wherever we can get them, no matter how foolishly they are conveyed.
Consider the flappette about Bernie Sanders’ “ghetto gaffe.”
No, Sanders was not the foolish one here. Maybe he didn’t express himself as clearly or as precisely as he should have. But it was in answer to a question at a debate (Sunday’s in Flint, Michigan, not Wednesday’s in Miami). That means it was an unrehearsed, improvised statement. They don’t always come out exactly the way they should. Big deal.
But such is the political culture these days, that what he said was immediately pounced on – shamelessly by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, inanely by assorted commentators and bloggers – as a “gaffe.”
Does every campaign and every commentator employ a full-time “gaffe-catcher” with no assignment but to scrutinize a candidate’s every word in the hope that one or a few of them can be interpreted to suggest that the candidate is a buffoon?
In this case, the candidate may have been the only one who was not a buffoon.
Let’s go back to the question that prompted the “gaffe.” It came from CNN anchor Don Lemon, who asked both Clinton and Sanders, “on a personal front, what racial blind spots do you have?”
How was this a dumb question?
Let us count the ways.
First, it assumes that everyone must have “racial blind spots,” which is plausible but debatable. By Lemon’s own account, the source for the question was the musical comedy show “Avenue Q,” which New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley described as a “’Sesame Street’-style musical for adults who can’t quite believe they’ve grown up.”
Not exactly a soaring endorsement of intellectual heft.
Besides, there is a no way a person can know what his or her blind spots are. One can not see one’s blind spots. That’s why they’re blind spots.
“When you’re white you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto,” Sanders said. “You don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street, or you get dragged out of a car.”
Wisely, neither candidate answered the question as asked. Instead, they both tried to explain how they were aware of and cared about racial discrimination.
“When you’re white you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto, “ Sanders said. “You don’t know what it’s like to be poor, you don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street, or you get dragged out of a car.”
Whereupon the gaffe-catchers pounced.
They had a point. Plenty of white people know exactly what it’s like to be poor. That’s because they are. In fact, more non-Hispanic white people (about 19.6 million) than African-Americans (about 10.7 million) live in households whose income is below the poverty line. (These data are from the Census Bureau’s “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2014”).
The percentage of poor blacks is higher, 26.2 percent compared to 10.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites. But there are a lot more white people, and some of them – especially the poor – get hassled by police (presumably what Sanders meant) when they walk down the street, too.
There are also roughly 13 million poor Hispanics (23.6 percent) so minorities do make up a majority of the poor. This study did not include the poverty numbers for American-Indians. It did note that there are 2.1 million poor Asian-Americans. That’s 12 percent of them, lower than the overall poverty rate of 14.8 percent.
So Sanders spoke too quickly and imprecisely, confusing being poor with being black though almost three-quarters of African-Americans are not poor and plenty of white people are. Criticism warranted, if overblown.
But then the commentators and tweeters went bonkers.
There are all kinds of ghettos, they proclaimed. On MSNBC that night, Lawrence O’Donnell claimed that he, too, had been raised in a ghetto, where almost everyone was Irish-Catholic. Another MSNBC commentator, the often perceptive Joy Reid, tweeted, “of course, many white Americans know exactly what it’s like to ‘live in the ghetto.’ Many, including immigrants have, do and did.” Others joined the fray, arguing that all kinds of Americans have been living in ghettos of their own.
Not really.
Granted, no law dictates the meaning of “ghetto.” Language changes with usage, and if someone wants to call any neighborhood filled with folks of a particular ethnicity a ghetto, he or she has the right to do so.
But it is misleading, and in a way that hides important truths about America’s past and present. It might be useful to recall where the word comes from.
The first ghetto was created in the early 16th century in Venice, where the authorities forced all the city’s Jews into one area. They could live nowhere else. They could leave the neighborhood during the day, but had to return to its walled confines at night, when the one gate in and out was locked. It wasn’t long before other European cities followed Venice’s example.
That’s not what happened to the Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish and other immigrants who came to America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They did congregate in certain city neighborhoods, where rents were low, where others spoke their language, where they could walk (few had cars) to their preferred church or synagogue.
And, yes, decades ago, because they often faced scorn if not outright discrimination if they tried to move elsewhere. But not much and not for long. For the most part, as soon as these people could afford to move out of the neighborhood, they did if they chose. Those neighborhoods were not ghettos.
African-American neighborhoods were, and perhaps still are. Long after slavery, in some cases even after passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, an array of federal, state and local policies – in housing, education, transportation, finance and more – deliberately included provisions designed to protect white supremacy and racial segregation. There wasn’t literally a wall with a locked gate. But there was redlining and other mortgage discrimination. For years, the Federal Housing Administration insisted on restrictive covenants banning holders of its mortgages from selling their homes to non-whites.
Where law left off, the private sector stepped in. Even after housing discrimination became illegal, developer William Levitt did his best to avoid selling any of his Levittown houses to African-Americans. Real estate agents “steered” black applicants only to houses in all-black neighborhoods. And if none of that worked, mob violence might. As late as the 1960s, some black families who moved into white neighborhoods had their windows smashed, their homes firebombed.
That doesn’t happen any more. Most of the redlining and realtor “steering” is a thing of the past. But not all of it, and at any rate the country still lives with the residue of the past.
Confusing an ethnic neighborhood with a ghetto is not a gaffe. It is an outrage.
