James Turner lecture, "The Political Economy of Structural Unemployment in the Black Community: Cultural and Social Consequences," at the University of Iowa, June 12, 1978

Speaker 1: The following was recorded June 12th, 1978, as part of the 10th annual Institute for Afro American Culture, held at the University of Iowa. The theme of the Institute was Black Culture in the Second Renaissance, A Study of Afro American Thought and Experience, 1954 to 1970. The political economy of structural unemployment in the Black community, cultural and social consequences, is the topic of this lecture by James Turner, Director of Africana Studies at Cornell University. To make the introduction, here is Darwin Turner, professor of English and Director of Afro American studies at the University of Iowa. Darwin Turner: Our speaker this morning is James Turner, who is associate professor of political sociology and Director of Africana studies and research center at Cornell University. Born in New York City, he was an undergraduate at Central Michigan University, graduating with honors in 1966. He attended Northwestern University, where in the African studies program that was set up by Herscovitz, he earned a masters and a PhD. He has served, while he was an undergraduate, as chairman of the Afro American student association of the National Black Youth Council. He's a founding member of the National Association of Black Educators. He served as a distinguished visiting professor in Afro, African, and Caribbean studies at Fisk University. He was the North American chairperson of the sixth Pan African conference. He has served as the president of the African Heritage Association, the group formed after the rather monumental conflict, I believe it took place in Canada- James Turner: That's right. Darwin Turner: ... when certain historians of America who felt that African history was their province in essence, told Black historians that African history was not their territory, and after that the African Heritage Association was established. As president of that association, he led the delegation to the ninth World Congress of Africaness in Ethiopia. He is now a member of the executive board. His publications are numerous, and this morning he will talk to us on the topic, the political economy of structural unemployment in the Black community, cultural and social consequence. It gives me great pleasure to introduce James Turner. James Turner: Thank you very much. I often think sometimes I need to apologize, but I don't run Allegheny, don't benefit from it, and in fact take a particular joy out of perhaps reflecting among some of the great myths in the country, and there's often a feeling that the only incompetent people in this country reside in the ghetto or the inner city, and it's incredible about how much of what's supposed to run us from one end of this place to another is run sometimes so inefficiently. I'm going to try this morning to condense, hopefully within I guess about a 40-minute period, a discussion which should obviously take much longer than that. Dr. Turner indicates that we will have a chance perhaps to come back and talk about your response to some of the things I'll have to say later on this afternoon. James Turner: It seems to me that one of the major issues in the country at this time, almost affecting all parts of the social and political life, both individually and collectively as a country is the present economic situation in the country. It is variously called a fiscal crisis. Others refer to it as the problems of economic slowdown or downturn in America, which is historic, right? We ought to be very clear that America's going through a historical stage in its economic development that's unprecedented. That is to say that problems of unemployment are at levels in this country only surpassed by the great crash in the 1930s. It gets the picture of the contrast, that the only thing in perhaps, in the recent memory and lives of most of us in this room that come anywhere near the extent of social problems in this country, is thought of commonly as having taken place during the Great Depression. James Turner: The Urban League has in fact been so struck by this problem, it has in fact made its major publication for the last three years something called The State of Black America, and I recommend it to you. It's an important document. I'm surprised how often I'm seeing it now quoted on all sorts of publications. Wall Street Journal, some recent issue of Time magazine. Newsweek. Because in fact what is perhaps the second most important, or in fact let me put it this way. If in effect the major problem affecting the country right now is a change in the nature of its capacity for economic growth, therefore affecting all sectors of its population, and affecting most crucially people who have to work for a living, right? Because they're the foundation of social organization in this society, right? James Turner: Then if that's the major national problem, the problem of the country, then perhaps the single most important social problem is unemployment, or recession. And what makes it all so important is that in fact we are experiencing a time in which recession and inflation are moving in parallel process. By classical economists, that's not supposed to take place. That recession should normally discipline inflation, right? Recession means simply large unemployment. You push more people out of work, you'll eventually supposedly, the classic economists say, bring down inflation, right? Because you will narrow the percentage of price increase, because there will be less people buying, right? Less people buying. And by the old laws of supply and demand, that's supposed to work. Well it's not working. James Turner: And literally everything you read about the economy in the country reflects the confusion. You can't answer. It's been, and I've been watching all kinds of publications. Government publications to simply popular newspapers and magazines over the last 18 months/two years, and what you hear is continued confusion. One prediction is made that there's going to be a turndown. In fact we were just told last month that in fact prices are beginning to level off, and employment's going up. You know what they're saying now? A recession is down the road. Within a month it changes. Because? Never really answer. Why inflation and recession at the same time? And the only answer that the government planners seem to have is more recession. James Turner: President Carter's essential program as its evolved, as much of a program as he has at this point, is really a program of more recession. More unemployment. It's interesting, in most other societies the level of unemployment in America would cause serious instability politically. You couldn't have this kind of unemployment in Europe. The government would fall in France if you had bordering on 10% unemployment across the board, with the kind of inflation that's taking place in the country. You know what it is to buy a family-sized box of Cheerios these days? Seriously. You know what is to go and get some ground beef? I ain't talking about no sirloin. Some of that hamburger ground beef. No, really. James Turner: Sure, everything you look around here, simple stuff that's needed. Recent report says that what's happening in fact the inflation is higher on the things that we need, as opposed to the things that we would like. Very interesting. Higher on the things that we need. Food, hospital care, clothing, transportation, heating, electricity, home mortgage, clothing. I said clothing. The things that we need, and education, right? And education. Going up. Recent report from the college entrance board says that of the 50 private schools, top private schools in this country, all of them have combined tuition and board expenses of $8000 per year. James Turner: Try to stay with me, because I'm going somewhere. You say, "What does that have to do with anything?" It has a lot to do with affirmative action, doesn't it? It has a lot to do with the rise of the question of merit over need for young Black kids to go to college. Big thing at Cornell now. No more financial aid based on need, based on merit. Old scholarship notion. What is the capacity for people then to go to school? How many Black people send their kid to school at $8000. They ain't going to Cornell. But the sad thing is, it's all the way down the line, schools are raising. Which means though, objectively though the right for Blacks to go to Cornell is there, all right? In point of fact because of the nature of social circumstance, the right is empty. It don't mean nothing. James Turner: So in fact Cornell can in fact not go back to instituting a process of racial restriction in order to eliminate Blacks. The very hollowing out of economic circumstances will isolate Blacks from going to places like Cornell, if in fact important political advances made in the 1960s are overturned because of the economic crisis. Right? All right, maybe it's not all there yet but it will hopefully before we get finished. James Turner: And example is Proposition 13 in California. It is a reflection on the popular level of the problem in America we've been talking about, right? Spiraling inflation, so that who's being burdened are those people able to work, the working middle class and the working class, the stably employed working class. Clerks, people at industrial laboring jobs, unionized, who in fact have found themselves realizing the American dream, which is to be a homeowner. They find out that's a heavy burden indeed. You know at Cornell, I mean if you think around it, people have heating bills of $200 per month? The Lord help us if we have another winter like the last one, right? James Turner: Economic crisis is a thing affecting all aspects of American social life. In fact last year there was almost a popular rebellion in the area of Long Island bordering on La Guardia airport. These have been working class people. Postal workers, city employees, who have been working, finding out now that they're paying Con Edison more than any of their mortgage payments. And these are not Black, these are White people, working class, good bedrock people of the citizenry. And so Proposition 13 effectively relates, people said, "We cannot deal with this continuing assessment of tax burden, while at the same time we find ourselves in a position where everything we own becomes harder for us to maintain, in terms of our standard of living, all right? But in fact, though the people may not have intended their actions to be specifically racial, in fact they saw it as being self-interested, trying to advance and improve their own life circumstance. The consequence shakes itself out through the system in racially disproportionate consequences for Black people in California. And Chicanos, and Filipinos, and Native Americans, right? James Turner: Why? What happens if you cut back investment in transportation? To a great part of that state like Southern California, where the greatest percentage of Blacks are, you can't hardly move because of the sprawl, unless you own an automobile, or there's effective public transportation. Energy chief for this country, Secretary Salazar said on Meet the Nation, the end of the week, "By 1985 a gallon of gasoline is going to cost us $3. $3. No he did, just this weekend. James Turner: One-third of the Black families in this country are below the Bureau of Labor Statistics' criteria for the poverty line. One-third of the Black community is below the officially designated poverty line, which says that you can live off something like eight plus one or two hundred dollars for a family of four. 8000, say roughly two or three hundred dollars with a family of four. I wonder, that means the wife and the husband and two children. Most Black people have more than the national average of, what is it? 3.1 and a half children? I don't know how you have three and a half children, but no it's of course a statistical average. James Turner: The question is that in fact to live in New York City, to live in the urban sectors, with families roughly of five and six in size, $8000 is a hard way, given the rises of prices in the country, given the impact of recession. One of the immediate ground-level impacts of recession on the Black community, particularly in the urban areas, first of all obviously, is a rising number of people unemployed, right? Because one of the major impacts of the recession has been on unemployment. But Blacks share disproportionately in the burden. By government statistics, they say that Blacks are somewhere roughly within, adult Blacks in something close to 20%, 22% unemployed, and the Urban League says that when you take out the hidden index factor, that is those people who you never counted anyway. James Turner: No come on, let's imagine yourself. You're a census taker and you get to Harlem, right? 116th Street and Atlantic's Avenue on a hot summer day, and all the bloods is out there with their purple underwear on, and stuff hanging out, and their hat's turned around, and you happen to be White. You know what you do? You look down that block and guesstimate everything and keep on going. Just keep on going. You aint going up in those buildings, knocking on doors. Come on. Some of y'all are Black in this room, ain't going to want to do that. Creeping up in those windows, up in those doors, up in that alley, lights hanging out the ceiling. You'd be there banging on the door, somebody'll think you're a bill collector, you can get hurt. Or more than that, you're the welfare worker come to check if their old man is there. That's another reality. James Turner: Those are realities, that people are not going up there, in most censuses. So what the Urban League says is that most Blacks, is there's an imbalance in the count in the first place. Anyway, they call it hidden index factor. And the other thing is that of course we know that unemployment figures only indicates those people who was in a more recent strand, or at the lines in the state unemployment offices. Doesn't talk about people who are forgotten, given up and tired or looking. Right? It doesn't talk about people who are working in part-time jobs, but who need and want full-time jobs. So they say when you correct for these distortions in the government figures, the reality is closer to the fact that something like 30% of the Black adult population is unemployed. Right? So your talking to something like one-third of the community is unemployed. I don't care where you go, one-third, all right? James Turner: Then in fact when you look at a very important factor, which is youth unemployment, okay? Youth unemployment. That in age ranges of 16 to 23, unemployment is scaling at the level of 60%. 60% unemployed. Important when you consider another very important demographic fact about Black people, that something close to, the statistics vary from 48 to 51% of the overall Black population is below the age of 25. All right? So what are you talking, you're talking about not just youth. You're talking close to half of the black community is unemployed. James Turner: What are we talking about even further? You're talking about the major part of the next generation. There are people who have grown up over the last five years in the Black community, who have not never known what it is to have a job. There are people talking about and trying to think about getting married, and don't have much of an aspiration or view for a job. What kinds of marriages take place if you don't have any sense of an aspiration for a job, any kind of hope for a job? How does a normal, natural, human relationship between a man and a woman, what kinds of changes must that go through? What kinds of adjustments must you make in order to keep on getting up, as we say? To cope, right? To cope. James Turner: Well the data has hardly begun to come through on that. Sociologists have hardly begun to deal with that. That's going to be, we talk about family forms. So the next impact on the Black community is in fact that families become more extended, right? Because the one way in which unemployed people survive is that they share with those members of their families who are working, right? And if you have a high number who are unemployed in the Black community, you have a high number of families that are feeling the pressure and the tension of that burden, which means that even the resources of working Blacks are being stretched, right? Really being stretched out, so people are not even... The Black community does not even recognize or realize the standard of living that would normally come from the income of those who were working, because it is being further depressed by having to be shared. Do you understand? See the point I'm driving at? James Turner: While at the same time we find that there's a mounting political reaction coming out of the White community that would in the 1960s term be called a White backlash. Remember that term? But it isn't called that today, interestingly enough. I don't know why, but it isn't. It is certainly, maybe it's not seen as a direct backlash against the civil rights movement. In a sense, it's not. There are people for an example, who are arguing that in a position of job scarcity and increasing competition for jobs, the social values become brutalized by this kind of brutish condition that people have to be put in. So people say, "I don't care about affirmative action." Same people who a decade ago would've said, "Okay, I understand the need for..." so say, "I don't care about affirmative action now. I don't care about setting no jobs aside for those people to have, because we need them. I mean, that's just straight up. We need them. Now I don't mean them any harm, you understand. I wish them well out there. But it is rough out there, and I need a job." James Turner: And interestingly enough, and perhaps not so surprisingly, is that the tension is taking place at what level in the society? The old level it's always taken place. Those Blacks who are trying to move up and those Whites who are not far from the bottom of the structure, right? Same old problem used to be in the South, right? Wouldn't be the Blacks and the big plantation owners that would be fighting. It'd be the Blacks and the ones that the Whites would call the rednecks, who got up under the sheets. Thought themselves having the right. So Allan Bakke's case emerges essentially out of almost the kind of working class type of institution. You know the University of Davis medical school is working middle class. Didn't take place at UCLA, at Harvard or Yale. It is a place of which there is maximum competition for scarce opportunity, and somehow trying to maintain some kind of political policy, public policy, for relatively fair distribution, again among the racially excluded previously. James Turner: And I'll explain now. Allan Bakke was trying to go to medical school in a state where at least 25%, one-quarter of the population, are Blacks, Puerto Rican, I mean Mexican, so-called minorities. One of the highest ratios, perhaps with the exception of New Mexico, in the country. He was trying to go to a school that has a reputation of being more like a public, a school where kids who come out of not necessarily academic high school, or kids who've gone to Harvard and Yale. Who've gone to the middle range of colleges. Kids who come from working middle class families, not fathers and mothers who are high professionals, right? And so what you found for an example, and this is important, that in 1973 when Allan Bakke first applied to go to University of Davis medical school, there was something like 2600 people applying for 100 slots. Right? In 1973, there was 3300 people, roughly, applying for the same 100 slots. The numbers of people had expanded, right? James Turner: What is one of the consequences of unemployment? You either go to the Army or you go to school. The Black poor go to the Army, and the White middle class run to school and try to wait it out. Seriously, what percentage of the American infantry is Black right now? Have any idea that, what is it? The 85th Brigade that they were getting ready to sent out of Fort Bragg in North Carolina to Zaire, what is the percentage that is Black? It's another question I love to... Another interest of mine is the whole question of foreign policy, American foreign policy toward Africa, and the Afro American stake in that. But in any event, large numbers of Black poor go into the military. The other place they wind up is where? In jail, right. And that's no joke. If you were somehow to be flying across on your spaceship from some Black republic out in space and you develop engine trouble and parachuted out and dropped in any one of the federal prisons across this country by accident, or dropped into state prison you'd say, "Oh, I must have landed on another Black republic." Right? James Turner: America from inside of its prisons looks very Black, looks like very much like a Black republic. What I'm trying to say to you obviously, somewhat lighthearted turns, but seriously that the other consequence of that kind of unemployment in the community is a high indices of young man, and then women, who wind up in jail, trying to do what? Bust in somebody's place. Take somebody else's money. I remember Lerone Bennett. Is Lerone coming here? All right, then I can speak about him. No, he's a good friend. Lerone Bennett and Vincent Hardy and I were in a retreat a few years back at some place up in Michigan. I forget the name of it right offhand. La Guardia, Idlewild, somewhere, in Idlewild, in Michigan, and it was sponsored by the Institute of the Black World. James Turner: And one of the things, they had a couple of young Black man from Jackson prison, which is there. And so Lerone went over, in his very strongly idealistic but very positively Black man, he said, "Brother, really." He said, "Would you really, if you saw me in the street, try to jack me up?" And the guy turned around and said to him, he said, "Look man, if I'm looking outside looking in your window and you're sitting in there with a big plate of ham hocks and some baked chicken, and some macaroni," he said, "You run out for the newspaper and I say, 'Hey, looky here, let me have some of what you have.'" He said, "If you don't give it up," he said, "I think I have no recourse but to take it." He said, "because the one thing I've got to do is like you, I got to keep on living." James Turner: One thing people have to do is eat. They may not do much else, but they have to go on eating, and at that level, that normal understandable impulse in the absence of the ability to have currency in a market economy, will get involved in distorting itself in what becomes antisocial and criminal behavior. Let me try to explain. Do you have an idea of what it is to try to walk around in your normal course of your life with no money in your pocket for a week? No seriously, before you just chuckle at what I'm saying. I'd like you to do and send it to me, and do a term paper on it. The sociology of individual stress, right? James Turner: But I grew up hearing Black people say, "Look here, child." I heard a woman say it a month ago. I was at Northwestern, went up to the Black neighborhood there, was standing, got me a barbecue sandwich. A woman said, "Baby, I've got 75 cents to my name," and that was Thursday afternoon. I said, "Hmm," I hadn't heard that in a long time. Growing up as a kid I'd hear, "I have 75 cents to my name." Can't get more profound than that. "To my name, that's all I got to my name." And we have to try to imagine what it is to live like that. I was in Washington, DC, recently and one thing, you pull up to the gas stations, it's like everywhere else in the Black community, everybody's behind bulletproof glass. Got to have exact change. James Turner: I went in the grocery store and you got to push out a thing, and push it in. Everybody's behind glass. You ever try to buy a pair of shoes? You put one shoe in the thing and the guy pushes it out, and he pushes... No, I'm seriously. I was on 25th Street a week ago trying to buy some shoes in Harlem. Maybe y'all live out in Iowa City right now, and these places, and you think what I'm saying is somewhat drawn out of memory land, but I would... Maybe some of y'all don't, but you ever go by a McDonald's, and it's all behind plastic, and a little rotating thing? Speaker 4: Speaking through the thing there? James Turner: Yeah, speaking through the thing and ordering. What does that do to community? What does that do to us individually? To have to experience that kind of thing. So yes, you find that the way in which that distorts itself is in the higher criminal activity, right? Not because something wrong with the person necessarily, but the situation. So we're in DC and what happened is you have to get out exact change, and we pulled up. Three little young Black kids, ranged in age about six to 10 years of age, it was 10:30 at night, ran up. "Can I pump your gas for you, Mister?" I hadn't seen that, because I'm a [inaudible]. So seriously, I had not seen that. A new twist in the Black community. James Turner: Young Black kids running in these big, you know them stations. 59 cents for the gas, hi-test. No name on it or nothing. Everybody's pulling up there, and these kids were running from one to the next, asking could they pump the gas for you? And they would take your money up and pay the guy and bring you back cigarettes if you wanted it. All of the service the gasoline stations don't give you anymore, right? They don't wipe your... And they'll wipe your windshield for you. And I thought to myself, "Six-year-old kid out there with them," and of course what they doing? Trying to make some money. Now hold on, and some of you would say, "Where are their parents? How in the world? That's the trouble, the moral decay in the Black community." Parents? Look, if you ain't got but 75 cents to your name, and your son could come in there with $10.75, or $5.75, by 1:00 in the morning, what is your moral authority telling them not to be out there? James Turner: No, let's be realistic. Now talk about the condition of Black community, it has to come from the view of the inside. It's nice to stand back and look at it through a telescope. But always ask yourself, if you're going to talk about the nature of an experience, what is it like for those who are living it? Be much more to see the interior of the experience. These are the kinds of consequences that are acting themselves out at a very crucial time in America's history. Recently Henry Ford said that high, wide, and handsome growth is a thing of the past in America. He said, "We're not going to have growth like Americans have been used to it." Professor Fred Hirsch at Harvard University has written an important book called The Social Limits of Growth. That's another thing we hear about, the limitations on the capacity of things to expand. James Turner: The one thing the Black people have believed in is that history itself simply through the passing of time is progress, because things expand, and we're going to move up. A great body of race relations literature says that Black people are the newcomers, the new immigrants. Just a matter of time, and they'll work themselves up, just like everybody else, right? The Jewish people, the Polish people, the Italians, the Irish. All of those who've come up. Now you know what's happening? That's not taking place. And so you know they new argument developed? Black people don't seem to maximize opportunity like other people do. I said, "Oh boy, here we go." James Turner: When I was going to school they said, "Black people doesn't know how to defer gratification. They eat everything up right quick, that's why they have such hard times." How are you deferring something, when you don't know what is in tomorrow, or like what you're going to have, or there is no tomorrow in the sense of the expectation being that assured. But the important kind of thing the theory now develops is that Black people are in fact unable to maximize opportunity, and then we begin to come back to neo-racist ideas in social analysis. While at the same time politically is the rising climate of racist ideology in the political sphere. James Turner: Some of them, the recent opinion poll studies said that something like 65% of the people who voted for Proposition 13 did it because they felt that it would undermine and reduce welfare spending, right? Because they feel that the cause of their problems are welfare burdens, whom they identify with whom? Blacks, primarily. Understand that people are in fact, on one had I said when I began this lecture, honestly and understandably concerned. I said later on that the consequence shakes itself disproportionally through the system, in terms of its impact upon Black. It's a structural, systemic result. James Turner: And then we say we find in fact there's the rise of subtle but nonetheless real racist ideology and political behavior. There's some people feel also that the busing for school balance will be undermined. How are city government's going to pay for that, if they don't have the revenue. See? But the sad thing that these homeowners don't understand, that the great windfall, the profit to be made out of that is not going to be for them so much, but for the large landowners, the corporations. The realtors, who have all the housing developments, and the condominiums. These are the people who are going to pay such proportionally greater less in revenue to the state, that it's not just going to be simply the withdrawal of these individual homeowners' money, but in fact the reduction on revenues coming from the corporate sector, which hasn't yet been fully talked about. James Turner: And if this thing catches on across the country, what is likely to happen to social services in the areas in the country, the industrial centers in the country, where unemployment of Blacks is greatest? The need for aid to dependent children. The need for public assisted housing. The need for support to unwed mothers, and needs of people who want to work, but who can't. Not just simply people who haven't behaved. You got a situation just a month ago in the South Bronx. They had something like 400 jobs, right? And they were auctioning 90 on one day, they got 2000 young people showed up, climbing over the fences. You know what? The employment agent took the applications and just threw them, like that. Just couldn't deal with it. It's not that people don't want to work. James Turner: ABC did a story of a Black youth on one of those lines. She had gone out, girl ain't but 16 years old, had gone out the night before, go staying up all night til the next morning to be in line, and again we're coming back. They asked her mother, "How do you allow that? What do you do?" And the mother said, "How can I tell her not to, when that child needs a job?" All right? Another aspect of youth unemployment, the Black kids are not just working for extra pocket money. They are working, very often it's vital wage earners. Something like 14 to 20% of Black teenagers are in fact vital wage earners for their family. They are bringing in the money for the family. Very often they are supporting themselves, and the more difficult the situation becomes for the family, the more each person is expected at a young age to carry the weight for their own self, right or not. James Turner: So you know that. The more difficult it is, the quicker you're going to be told by people, "You're 16 child, you can't stay there 22, and we all out here scuffling and don't have no money. We'd like you to go to dance school and all that, and we'd like you to be in studying music and wanting to go to college, but baby, you know." So you begin to find that the social consequence, the pressure takes place, restricting opportunity for people to go to college. Don't have even a modicum of support. While at the same time, a popular developing movement among White middle class people is to reduce financial aid tied to disadvantaged minorities. James Turner: The Chronicle of Higher Education runs an article, what they're calling financial aid for families that make $60,000, right? Might be some of you who might knew that in this room, but $60,000. People are... But that's not far-fetched, right? Because if you moved out in the 1960s and bought yourself a $80,000 home, all right? For what seemed a reasonable mortgage at that time, with two-car garages, high ceilings, panoramic windows. You had no idea that the cost of heating your house was going to jump the way it has the last 10, 15 years. And so what they find, these people get caught in what they refer to as sibling squeeze. They been well-planned, their children are about a year apart. What does that mean if you're going to college? You have one going into senior year, and another one going into his freshman year, and one in between, at $8000 a throw per year. You're going to be heavily in debt. James Turner: So these people begin to say, "Oh, we need financial aid. We need financial aid," and then you say, "Well what about the Black family that doesn't make $18,000? Doesn't make $28,000, it makes $8000. What's their chances?" So we're trying to suggest to you is that there are in fact the context in which the major problem in the country must be seen. We must see it within a context that shows it in fact embedded in the process of the political economy in the country. That it is structural. That Allan Bakke is in fact significant, because it comes at a time in which the competition for increasingly limited opportunity is becoming more intense. James Turner: So Allan Bakke in fact says that, "I could not get into medical school because y'all was holding some space open for minorities." And he says, "In fact, that's reverse discrimination." Wait, let's look at that. He had one in 84 shots and didn't make it, all right? What is the ratio of advantage in one in 84, than if in fact you got one in 16 divided by four? Because that isn't one in 16 for Blacks. That's one in 16 for Blacks, one in 16 for Chicanos, one in 16 for Asians, and in California that's both Japanese and Chinese, and then Filipino and Native Americans. So that's one in 16 divided by five. And he's got one in 84. What is the ratio of advantage and privilege? White privilege that still obtains, even in periods of hardship. But that's not what's important, that's not what's persuasive to the Supreme Court, we're being told. James Turner: Allan Bakke says, "I want one in all 100 shots, if I got to stand up against the kind of competition for 3000 for 100 shots. And if that means pushing out the others who are disadvantaged, I can't deal with that. I want one out of all the shots possible." That's what's happening. Now on the other hand, Allan Bakke's saying, "Why is there only 100 slots, when there in fact are increasing numbers from the state population who want to go to school?" How do you justify Blacks being less that 2% of the doctors nationwide? In places like Harlem and the South Bronx there is for all intent and purposes no medical service. There are no practicing physicians. Let alone talk about somebody making house calls. There is no community clinic. In Chicago, where all those people in the Robert Taylor homes had to be served by Cook County Hospital. How do you get there in the middle of the night? What is its relationship to the high indice of infant mortality? James Turner: Young people die, not from the injury but from the shock. Most people suffer shock after an injury, and if not treated properly will die. People die en route to the emergency clinic. We laugh. We say, "The emergency clinic is so crowded, because Blacks are cutting and shooting." That's only part of it. It's so crowded because they're rushing from so many different places coming there. Although the violence of living under those circumstances are real. In the South Bronx they say something like 50% of the brain damage cases that they treat are from acts of violence, when across the nation, something like only 10% are brain damaged. Most hospitals that experience treatment for brain damage are doing it primarily as a result of car accidents, automobile-related accidents. Some house accidents, and then perhaps some kind of genetic or organic effect. James Turner: And so the significance of the Allan Bakke case is simply that if the courts rule in his favor, the thin reed of public policy as a result of political gain coming from the last decade will bite the dust, because of the increasing tension and contradiction created by the economic crisis, throughout every sector of American society. All right? Leaving Blacks in the historically vulnerable position that we've always had, as a result of having occupied the structurally bottom position in this society. James Turner: You see, Black people were the original source of development in America. Not only the labor, but the one that produced the early accumulation of capital. And while everything else was being advanced and expanded, Black people were being held obviously outside of that, in slavery. We've now begun to start dealing with this roughly within the last 40 years, and the public policy positions were meant to somehow modify the structural consequence of Black people having been held outside of the current of economic development. You see, because the important thing, as I want to try to draw this to a conclusion for you, understand that the major period of economic growth in American society within its national history was the 19th century. Not the 20th century. James Turner: And at that point, Black people were kept labor. Not only did they not participate in the marketplace, they didn't even own themselves. There can be no more than negative social value, I mean, negative economic value in your social relationship, than not even owning yourself. The consequence of that is what? There are not Black members of the economic ruling class in this country. But Black people have been here, there are no Black members own any of the cooperations in the commanding heights of the economy. Black people own no major sector of the industrial economy in the country. We virtually do not own. Family farming, which is all through Iowa and Illinois and these places, right? Was settled when? When the railroad helped encourage these people to come on out here. Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Montana, while Blacks were reserved. So you find these things have an interesting ethnic. Scandinavian, Dutch, some Huguenot, French Huguenot, all these communities. James Turner: Blacks are attempting now to try to establish themselves the last 50 years, in terms of some social base for a community within the context of the market economy, find themselves now coming at a time in which the country is in fact going through major economic transformation, and that the slight but important period in American history which was to produce a political momentum, to change some of the structural consequence of the previous centuries of history, now finds itself being squeezed by a lack of popular support within almost all sectors of the White community. James Turner: So where we are now, is that there are two things I think that have risen, that have become important among social scientists. That is, the study of a political economy. The relationship of politics and economics, just basic social organization. That we understand major social problems within the context of its political economy. And the second important thing is the relationship of race and class in American society, because what we understand is that though America has a class stratification, it also has a race stratification. It is a racially stratified society, within the context of its normal class stratifications, and that even if you don't talk about race, even if you can eliminate so-called discrimination, active individual prejudice tomorrow, the structural consequence of race will continue on to produce the magnitude of hardship that Black people are now experiencing, without having to have formal racial segregation. James Turner: Well what I've attempted to do, and see, I'm five or 10 minutes over my time, and Dr. Turner's getting nervous. You can clearly see the magnitude of the problem, and I just wish that we did have three hours to do this. But hopefully I've been able to suggest to you the important direction of this work, that more and more scholars and educators are going to have to be concerned with, that we are going to be confronted with, just in terms of everyday living situation. But though the subject is immense and important, I remember a very old and important piece of Black philosophy that was taught to me by a wise old man one day in Harlem. He said, "Boy, the head can only allow as much of the seat will stand." Thank you very much.