Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

Stephan Schwartz is editor of the Schwartzreport which he subtitles “trends that will affect your future.” He is also a scholar, a gifted author, a courageous explorer of psychic reality, and an insightful observer of contemporary trends. As the following piece demonstrates, he is courageous enough to say things that are important but unpopular. The initial anecdote from his past may suggest that this will be one more piece written to decry racism. You’ll find it’s more than that, and different.

If you read only one of my blog entries in full, make it this one.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

By the Numbers…

STEPHAN A. SCHWARTZ, Editor - Schwartzreport

He was a small black boy. About nine years of age. I was the same age give or take a year, and we had both been brought to the train station. I can no longer remember where, but somewhere in the deep south. It could have been Florida or, maybe, Georgia. Nor do I know, if I ever knew, what part of the year it was, although it was very hot, and the caged metal fans that stood sweeping the room moved air so hot it hurt to have it blow on my skin. I was with the black woman who took care of me, a doctor’s son. Her name is lost to me now, and no one living can tell it to me. He was with his grandmother. I watched him walk across the tiles of the station, as I sat in one of the worn wooden pews that lined the vaulted waiting room.

There were two drinking fountains jutting from the wall. One said ‘Whites Only.’ I was a compulsive reader of signs, proud of my ability to do so. Like many signs though I am not sure I understood what it meant. As I watched my black peer walk towards the fountains, a large white man in a rumpled seersucker suit pushed past him, reached over to push the brass button, polished to a soft patina by a thousand white fingers. He drank deeply from the fountain, wiped his hand across his mouth and walked on. By then the boy was at the fountain. There was a small wooden stool, its board battered and grimy from usage, and he pushed it over to the fountain. His grandmother suddenly rose quickly from her seat and lumbered over to him. She was heavy, her ankles were swollen, and she moved with pain.

Her black shoes were worn. Where the joint of the big toe of the right foot was she had cut away the leather to give her bunion space to move. She held a small paper fan with a religious picture on it in her right hand, which she transferred to her left, as she grabbed the little boy, just as he reached for the fountain. Still holding him by his shirt she took him over to the other fountain, pushing the stool with her foot.

The noise of its scrapping brought heads up from the passengers sitting around the room, and they watched the tableau of the grandmother and the little boy. He could not make the button on the second fountain work, and she leant in to help him. The problem lay not with the strength of his hands, but the fountain. It did not work. She fussed with it for a while, as the boy shifted from foot to foot, waiting for his drink. But the fountain would not yield up its water and, after a moment, the grand mother took the little boy back to the seat, half dragging him as he looked longingly back at the fountain labeled ‘Whites Only.’ I could see the rage and resignation on her face, but did not understand it. I turned to look at the woman who was caring for me, and could see this same expression on her face. I could not bring myself to ask.

We sat for several minutes, each of us in our own cocoon of thought. The station waiting room returned to its rhythm, but I could not get the image of the boy and his grandmother out of my mind. By seven one has had enough sand box fights to know what is fair, and as I sat there what I had seen seemed inexplicably, but incontestably unfair.

There was a counter with a few chrome red covered stools at one end of the room. A couple of the stools were occupied, but most were not. The people on the stools drank from coffee cups, or paper cones held in metal bases. A white woman was behind the counter, wiping it with a rag. On impulse I got up and ran across the room.

‘May I have a paper cup, please?’ I asked, assuming the respectful voice I knew adults responded well to.

‘Sure son,’ she said, and plucked a cup from the upside down stack that sat on the counter behind the counter where people sat.

I ran across to the fountain that worked and filled the cup with water, and walked across and handed to the boy, who took it without a word. He had almost finished it before his grand-mother could respond. She exchanged a look with the woman I was with, then said, ‘Say, thank you.’

‘Thank you,’ the boy said looking straight at me, the way children do.

I turned around and saw people staring at me, some with intense and disturbing looks, and suddenly I got scared. I mumbled something, and ran back to my seat. Both woman rose immediately, took us boys in charge and left the waiting room. A teenage boy wearing jeans tried to trip me as I went by.

Times have changed.

Almost one-third of the most populous counties in the country have white minorities - nearly one in 10 of all 3,100 counties. According to a New York Times report, “from July 1, 2005, to July 1, 2006, metropolitan Chicago edged out Honolulu in Asian population, and Washington inched ahead of El Paso in the number of Hispanic residents. In black population, Houston overtook Los Angeles.

”The new wave of immigration, along with its continued dispersal to the suburbs and Sun Belt, is transforming the places which are now being classified as multiethnic and majority minority,’ says William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution.

“`The new melting pots are not large international gateways,’ Professor Frey said, adding, ‘Rather, many are fast-growing suburbs themselves.”

America, founded by whites on a white vision, is in the process of becoming numerically a non-white country. It is as pervasive and impactful as the religious conversion of a nation. Our cultural point of view is shifting and from that will flow a myriad of changes, great and small. It is an irony of cosmic nicety that this transformation is coincident with the beginning not only of a century, but a new millennium. California, unsurprisingly, leads the way, going majority non-white in the year 2000. Texas should make the changeover about 2025. America, in its entirety, will be majority non-white shortly after 2050 - just four decades from now.

To avoid terrible hurt and suffering on all sides, we must confront the challenge of the emerging white minority now; social movements measure in generations, as astronomers measure in light-years. What happens will depend, of course, on all the races but, since whites control the power structure today, the choices they make in the transition period will carry a special weight, and they will live or die, suffer or prosper, for decades based on the decisions of the next few years. What will such a country be like? It is time to begin the public conversation on this topic.

Even the idea that there could be an openly acknowledged white position, as such, makes liberal whites queasy and concerned as to whether they are becoming racists, and they are not alone in these concerns. The Hispanic, African-American, and Asiatic communities operate openly and proudly on the basis of their race yet, from historical experience, it will alarm many non-whites, when whites begin to do so. Yet, what is essentially a national negotiation must take place and, happily, we have a pattern we can follow. America will begin this new millennium, and this change, in a position much like the summer America, as we know it today, began.

In the summer of 1787 several dozen white men, faced with the reality of a government which was not working, closeted themselves in a hall in Philadelphia to hammer out the Constitution. They knew the convention would frame their lives, that what they did was serious, and that it demanded real honesty, even in the face of confrontation. Their interests broke them into blocs, large states and small, as they hammered at each other day after day. They learned that only compromise and negotiation could get them through, could create the critical consensus required to make an agreement all were willing to live by, day-to-day. They learned that compromise requires authenticity, honesty with self and others about where one stands. That process can serve us again, if the races can be honest with one another. If we do not tell the truth, we will commit an act of self-destructive moral error, and our country will suffer great loss.

As our racial make-up is changing so to is our place in the world. In these same years America will pass from world dominance to some form of partnerships because the world village is also undergoing transformation. The planet as a whole is still passing from the bipolar Soviet-American geopolitical reality that dominated the lives of most of those in power throughout the world. Economic, informational, cultural and ethnic blocs are arising: China, united Europe, Southeast Asia, Islam. The world is both globalizing and tribalizing. Non-white countries are embracing the technology and economics of the west, but not, as in colonial times, the West’s cultural values.

We need to begin a national dialogue about our racial nature and how, in accepting that, we can refound our country. We need to relearn, not legally but personally, the original bedrock value of public fairness embodied in our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

We need to talk about these subjects openly in our schools, in our churches and synagogues, and mosques, and prayer councils, on our television and radio talk shows - wherever people committed to American success, prosperity, and integrity gather. The discussion must be framed not in the old stereotypes of victimized minorities and victimizing whites. That plantation vista no longer serves. We need to figure out a strategy that will get us all through successfully together. Teams win or lose together, not individually. But they do so as the result of individual actions.