December 1999 January 2000
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Patrica Watson, Editor Sara Burke, Assistant Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor
2161 Massachusetts Ave.
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Fax number: pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
Race: The Enduring Problem of the 20th Century Leon F. Litwack, a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for his book, Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. His latest book is Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. This editorial appeared in the San Jose Mercury, July 4, 1999. Nearly a century ago, W.E.B. DuBois wrote, "The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line, the relation of the darker to the lighter races in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea." The struggle for racial equality, culminating in the civil rights movement, was among the most important developments of this century. But even as that movement registered striking gains in political representation, in white-collar positions, in the entertainment industry, and in educational opportunities, it left behind a greater number of black Americans to endure lives of quiet despair and hopelessness, trapped in a mire of failing schools, bad housing, poor health care, inadequate incomes, meager prospects, and discrimination. Slavery was abolished more than a century ago, Jim Crow dismantled some two decades ago, but we continue to live with their consequences. White supremacy may be legally dead but racism remains the most debilitating virus in the American system. The victims threaten to become in the 21st century a large shadow population of interior exiles, aliens in their own land, empty of belief or hope, volatile and combustible. The "fire next time" may be impossible to contain. The problem of the 21st century will remain the color line and the ongoing struggle for racial equality, but it will be fought out and resolved in a strikingly different America (an America one-third black and Latino), and in a world in which the vast majority of people are non-white. Even as they acknowledge the West's role in shaping today's world, economically, culturally and politically, they are reminded all too often of the West's legacy of racism, colonialism, technological arrogance and programmed violence.
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