#hal baron

[zwischenstadt]

It is conceivable that the Negro question-given the moral flabbiness of America-is incapable of solution.  Perhaps not all social problems are soluble. Indeed, it is only in America that one finds the imperative to assume that all social problems can be solved without conflict. To feel that a social problem cannot be solved peacefully is considered immoral.  Americans are required to appear cheerful and optimistic about a solution, regardless of evidence to the contrary. This is particularly difficult to Negroes, who at the same time must endure all the disadvantages of the Job Ceiling and the Black Ghetto, as well as other forms of subordination. The impersonal institutions of the great cities have been woven together into a web of urban racism that entraps Negroes much as the spider's net holds flies–they can wiggle but they cannot move very far. There is a carefully articulated interrelation of the barriers created by each institution. Whereas the single institutional strand standing atone might not be so strong, together the many strands form a powerful web. But here the analogy breaks down. In contrast to the spider's prey, the victim of urban racism has fed on stronger stuff and is on the threshold of tearing the web.

Harold M. Baron, The Web of Urban Racism 1968.

Let’s make it happen, 2020!

[zwischenstadt]

Dr. Hal Baron was one of the Civil Rights movements’ most important social scientists.  He was the head researcher for the Chicago Urban League in the 1960s, and was an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr. during his Chicago campaign (his research is thoroughly cited in MLK’s final book, Where Do We Go From Here?)  In 1985, he published his ultimate theorization of “racial formation” in the United States, and this thoughts on how to think strategically about achieving racial equality in the United States.  Here are some excerpts from “Racism Transformed,” published in 1985 in the Radical Review of Political Economy

[zwischenstadt]

But white society does not exist as a homogeneous mass.  It is highly structured, especially as regards the control of power and the ownership of productive wealth.  A relatively small number of corporations and bureaucracies have at their disposition the major share of the nation’s resources.  These dominant institutions of modern America are controlled by the propertied class and their increasingly necessary allies, the technocratic elites.  However, in a modern democratic state such institutional control is not transferrable directly into overall control of the society.  It is mediated through a very complex set of working relationships and concessions with other social strata and groupings- sometimes worked out informally and sometimes worked out explicitly through local, state or national politics.  The complicated social and political processes of the mediation exist in balance with the more structured aspects of basic control.  Sometimes one gives way to the other, but together they form a total system.  Given the fundamental racism of American society what we find that even though racial exploitation is no longer an essential element in terms of sustaining a sector of the ruling class, racial dominance has become so socially diffused that it has become an inextricable part of the mediating process through which much of the basic economic and political controls for the whole society are exercised.  In other words, the mechanisms for subjugating black people have become interlocked with the complex of mechanisms by which power is exercised over both white and black.  A root and branch abolition of racism, therefore, threatens the power order as we know it… Effective equality for blacks would require major rechanneling of public expenditures and shifts in power relationships.  In other words, massive changes for blacks cannot occur without massive changes for white

Hal Baron, The Web of Urban Racism, 1971.

[zwischenstadt]

it is assumed that the explanation of northern race relations can be made within a conceptual framework that emphasizes individual behavior and minimizes the role of institutions.Explanations of northern racial practices have stressed attitudes, values,and prejudices on the part of whites. On the part of Negroes, they have stressed problems of personal adjustment to the dominant white society as though access to the total society would be gained once these adjustments were made. These hidden assumptions have helped obscure the fact that the northern metropolis has developed its peculiar institutions of racial subjugation. While it is true that the basic features of American race relations had their historic origins in the rural southern plantation economy, it is equally true that in the latter half of the Twentieth Century the metropolitan North has fashioned its own institutions that are capable of maintain interracial subjugation without any further support from the South. And,unless there are drastic changes, the metropolis is capable of perpetuating these institutions.

Harold M. Baron, 1965. “Northern Segregation as a System”