The View From Room 306
By DAVID BROOKS
Building the social fabric after the disruption of that period has been the work of the subsequent generations — weaving the invisible web of family, neighborhood and national obligations so that people stay in school, attend to their kids and have an opportunity to rise if they play by the rules.
Too bad Black folks were STILL left out of all that.
Martin Luther King Jr. at least left behind a model of how to repair the social fabric. He was scholarly, formal, assertive and meticulously self-controlled in public.
How's that working for you?
Not YOU, Brooks. We know you and your ilk like us passive. But realistically, you can't get WHITE people to act that way. And note your own words:
King was in crisis when he was gunned down.
"We've made progress! We've made progress!"
And without agitation we wouldn't have done a damn thing. White people have fought tooth and nail against every hint of a suggestion of programs to help Black people the same way The Greatest Generation was helped. Maybe because the only way the country could afford it was by shortchanging Black folks so people are afraid they will be shortchanged in return.
We've had motion, but I think "progress" is a bit of an overstatement. I think the passage of time has changed the ground we operate on.
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