Jul 12, 2024 by Steve Brigham

“The American Negro has the great advantage of never having believed that collection of myths to which white America clings.” (from James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time)

The preface of my book opens with this incisive quote from Baldwin. In a single sentence, he calls out the White people who believe a wide-ranging set of myths about Black people, our national origin story, and why race does or doesn’t continue to matter in America.

The opening paragraphs of my Preface continue, in which I write:

“As a White man, I am embarrassed to say that it has taken me nearly six decades to understand fully the legacy of our nation’s White supremacist founding and the consequences of our ongoing, systemic racism. My initial awakening occurred upon meeting and marrying an African American woman twenty-plus years ago and parenting two biracial kids in a time of increased White racist threats, yet even that awakening was insufficient.

I grew up at a time in America—in the 1960s and 1970s—when it was very easy as a White person to absorb, mostly unconsciously, the message that Whites were better, Whites were superior, Whites should be on top, and that only Whites had the intellect and ability to lead and to manage, no matter what the industry, the field, the position.

This same belief system surely held true for White Americans from my parents’ generation and, perhaps with a little less potency, from the Gen X generation that succeeded my Boomer generation. White was the standard, the model, the centerpiece around which everything else in our society revolved. It, essentially, still does.”

And you may find yourself ready to argue, “But we’re not the same nation as we were when you were growing up, then coming of age in America, Steve.”

And you’d be right; our nation has changed to a degree. We have made progress, albeit painfully incremental, in most arenas.

Three years after I was born, Jim Crow laws across the land were finally terminated, although to many with great disappointment, if not ire. We were a profoundly segregated nation at that juncture. In our schools, in our towns, in our politics, in our economy. Changing the laws didn’t automatically pull African Americans out of 2^nd or 3^rd class citizenship. Nor did changing policies automatically change the condition of Black neighborhoods, Black schools, or Black economic prospects.

Given how profoundly our White-dominated nation had tyrannized, oppressed, and discriminated against African Americans since our inception in 1776, what should have been called for was not new laws and policies that effectively rearranged pieces on a chessboard. No, at that moment, we needed to enact a Marshall Plan for Negro Americans (how African Americans were still referred to in the 1960s).

For those who don’t remember, America enacted the Marshall Plan after World War II to “rehabilitate the economies of 17 western and southern European countries in order to create stable conditions in which democratic institutions could survive.” (https://www.britannica.com/event/Marshall-Plan)

The U.S. government dispatched $13 billion ($169 billion in today’s dollars) in economic aid to the likes of Germany, Austria, the U.K., Portugal, and France (among others) over four years to restore industrial production and ensure financial stability. All these Western European nations experienced an enormous rise in gross national product in those four years, rapidly renewing their collective industrial bases. $13 billion was more than 1/3 of the federal budget at that time; over four years, we spent more than 8% of the federal budget on rehabilitating more than a dozen European nations.

Alas, we did no such thing.  

We dallied along for several years, and then, in the aftermath of the racial protests and uprisings from 1965 to 1968, our nation cracked down on Black neighborhoods while urban-based manufacturers continued to leave American cities in droves, moving to the suburbs, where only White folks lived, leaving behind a greater economic and social mess than was there before.

Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, instead of listening to the collective wisdom of the 1968 Kerner Commission (officially, National Advisory Commission on Violence and Civil Disorders) after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., shunned the advice and embarked on a course that led not to the restoration and rehabilitation of Black neighborhoods and communities but to an effective ‘business as usual’ pathway and consequence.

What did the Kerner Commission propose?

• “To mount programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems:
• To aim these programs for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance;
• To undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society.”

They wrote: “[t]hese programs will require unprecedented levels of funding and performance, but they neither probe deeper nor demand more than the problems which called them forth. There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation's conscience.” (https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/FHEO/documents/kerner_commission_full_report.pdf) 

Our nation would have followed a dramatically different trajectory had we embraced this declaration.

Instead, the trajectory we have pursued has led to a continuous 2.5 steps forward, two steps back course that, in many cases, has done little to erase even a semblance of racial gaps and disparities we saw in the 1960s.

The premise of my book – It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field – is that we have fooled ourselves into believing we are a far more equal society where everyone now suits up and plays on a roughly even playing field. Yet, this is a mirage, a profound myth. Don’t believe me?

Just consider a single table that encapsulates how Whites continue to dominate in just about every sphere six decades after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Law.

The State of the Playing Field in the 21st Century: Who Leads, Who Controls in 2020
Ten richest Americans	100 % white
U.S. Congress	90% white
US governors	96% white
U.S. military, with 43% of 1.3 million personnel who are BIPOC	Of 41 most senior commanders: 2 Black men, 1 White woman
People who decide which TV shows we see	93% white
People who decide which books we read	90% white
People who decide which news is covered	85% white
People who decide which music is produced	95% white
State legislators across 50 states (2015)	85% white
Justices in State Supreme Courts	No Blacks in 24 states, no Latinos in 40 states
CEOs from Fortune 500	In 2020, 4 out of 500 (1.3%) were Black
Private Real Estate Development Firms	99% are White-owned
Foundations/Philanthropy	3% are led by a Black CEO
Nonprofit executive directors	90% White, 4% Black
Full-power TV stations	.6% are Black-owned
Black-owned FM radio stations	Less than 2%
Black-owned AM stations	Slightly more than 1%
CEOs of top publishing companies	All-White
From 1950-2018, the % of fiction books published by major publishing houses	95% written by Whites
Ownership of farmland in the U.S.	Whites > 98% Blacks < 1%

As I researched these stats, I was stunned.

How could all these industries still be so dominated by Whites? Some might want to argue that it just demonstrates White superiority and excellence. Despite tilting the playing field from a 45-degree angle to flat, Whites still somehow stayed on top, right?

Or, as we will learn in the months to come, is it that the systems, structures, and conditions that enabled the profoundly unlevel playing field of the 1960s were hardly altered at all?

Even before I explore how the profoundly unlevel playing field continues—in our neighborhoods, schools, economy, health systems, and policing and court systems—a scan of the chart above must undoubtedly indicate that something is still overwhelmingly wrong with our playing field. No?

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