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postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous
postings. Of late, the blog has been
looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their
subject. It’s time to post a series of
such summary accounts. The advantage of
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Recent
postings have made a relationship between a sense of identity – how one places
oneself in a given group such as a race or an ethnicity or a Yankee fandom –
and the polarized politics the nation is experiencing. The journalist Ezra Klein[1] cites
the work of various social scientists that make that connection. At the center of this association is race.
There is a long history of such work,
but it probably began with the work of Gunnar Myrdal. His ground-breaking effort, An American
Dilemma in 1944, while based on extensive data collected in the South, unfortunately
seems to have left an inaccurate account of why blacks were being treated as
they were in those states.
In
a few words, that view attributed the maltreatment of African Americans to an
inability by vast numbers of Americans to live up to the prevailing beliefs of
an American Creed. That creed has upheld
the traditional views liberty, justice, and equality. The take-away was that Americans were basically
a moral people with a moral consciousness but that somehow, what existed was
behavior that was contrary to what millions of Americans believed to be moral.
The solution therefore was for those
Americans to just stop behaving as they had been doing. This oversimplified conclusion has been the subject
of extensive criticism. Center to this
criticism are questions about how Americans saw or see themselves. These critics agree that the problem is not
how people, mostly Southerners, don’t live up to their values; but rather, it is
based on people having counter values to the American Creed when it came to
others.
That
is, many – and not just Southerners, but Northerners and Westerners as well –
just did not or do not hold beliefs extending these democratic rights and
benefits to those who belong to other racial identities. In terms of federation theory, what this
blogger promotes, Americans in general did ascribe to federated beliefs but
only extending them to those who were/are white. They held on to what this writer calls parochial/traditional
federalism.
Historically,
any improvement in the treatment of nonwhite was not the product of redefining
federalist ideals, but due to the strengthening of natural rights ideals. This blog has described how natural rights,
in the years after World War II, became the dominant view of governance and
politics. One good consequence of that
shift has been the betterment of the treatment of African Americans, but as one
can readily see, that improvement has fallen way short of the standards the
American Creed established especially in the nation’s founding documents.
What
still remains is an ample set of ideals and values that prevailed before the
natural rights view took hold, i.e., discriminatory beliefs against nonwhites. Those anti or non-democratic views are
deep-seated among too many Americans. The
remnants of the segregated past still live in the hearts of whites who feel no
dissonance in how they view or treat blacks and other nonwhites.
Instead,
there exists a whole view of counter-norms that justify discriminatory
practices that still uphold segregation in many aspects of social life,
including living arrangements, employment practices, and social gatherings. Psychologically, people influenced by these
counter-norms are able to compartmentalize or re-interpret the American Creed. Or it is what one might judge to be an
extensive rationalization of what is taking place in terms of race relations.
This
initial paragraph of an overview article gets at what takes place,
At root, racism is “an ideology of
racial domination … in which the presumed biological or cultural superiority of
one or more racial groups is used to justify or prescribe the inferior treatment
or social position(s) of other racial groups.
Through the process of racialization … perceived patterns of physical
difference – such as skin color or eye shape – are used to differentiate groups
of people, thereby constituting them as “races”; racialization becomes racism
when it involves the hierarchical and socially consequently valuation of racial
groups.[2]
These
observations of what is taking place are supported by the work of various other
social scientists such as Maurice Davie, Ernest Campbell, Hubert M. Blalock and
it leads one to understand that the challenge of instituting a true American
Creed – true in the fashion Myrdal defined the term – is significantly more
difficult than what Myrdal judged the challenge to be.
Not
living up to a standard is dwarfed by the fact that the standard was not held or
not held to be moral as originally thought among too many Americans.
This
blog does not see the solution as giving up on the American Creed or its
supporting federalist beliefs, but on insisting that those beliefs need to be extended
to include fellow citizens whose ancestry goes beyond European origins. That means, not only turning away from restricting
inclusion to non-European based groups and individuals but to also reject radical
individualism of the natural rights view with its narcissistic baggage.
Instead,
Americans should extend what David Brooks calls “relationalism”[3] – or
what this writer calls liberated federalism.
As this blogger states in his book,
By calling upon civics educators
to adopt another perspective, this book asks educators to accept an alternative
view of governance and politics. This
other view aligns with the nation’s history but provides an updated version to
address its earlier shortcomings and to meet current realities. This other view can be called liberated
federalism.[4]
This language, standing
apart, does not communicate the difficulties associated with such a change. But given how extensive and undeniable the
related problems have become, perhaps the nation is disposed to making the
necessary changes it needs to make to approach Myrdal’s American Creed.
[1]
Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New
York, NY: Avid Reader Press, 2020).
[2] Matthew Clair and Jeffrey S. Denis, “Racism, Sociology
of,” Elsevier Ltd., 857, accessed December 15, 2020, https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/deib-explorer/files/sociology_of_racism.pdf
.
[3]
David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (New York,
NY: Random House). This term relates to a related theory in
sociological literature.
[4]
Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated
Nation: Implementation of National
Standards (Tallahassee, FL:
Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020), 16-17 – available through Amazon.
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