![[David Hamilton Golland]](http://www.davidgolland.com/images/portrait.jpg)
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David Hamilton Golland, Ph.D.
Born and raised in New York City, Golland pursued an acting career before returning to college and settling on a career in academia. His love of history comes from his mother's passion for the subject, claiming relation to test pilot Chuck Yeager and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton; his choice of African-American Labor history as a scholarly specialty comes from his sense as a secular jew that his people and African-Americans share a tradition of slavery, discrimination, and victimization, and his heritage as the grandson (on his father's side) of a union organizer. A graduate of the City University of New York (Ph.D., M.Phil., B.A.), the University of Virginia (M.A.), and the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of the Arts (depicited in the 1978 major motion picture Fame and subsequent television series of the same name), he served in the U.S. Army during the Gulf War and has taught throughout CUNY, at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, and in the Albemarle County (Virginia) Public School System. He married Svetlana Rogachevskaya in 2004 and they have two children: Zelda (b. 2008) and Jerry (b. 2010, and named after the aformentioned union organizer).
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Present Positions:
Full-Time Substitute Assistant Professor of History (replacement faculty), Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY
Co-Chair, General Meeting; Chair, Special Committee on Rules Revision; Park Slope Food Coop
Publisher, The Journey Zone
President, David Golland Memorial Association
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Constructing Affirmative Action: The Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, forthcoming 2011)
The federal government's Philadelphia Plan for affirmative action in the building construction trades was an attempt by the Department of Labor to tackle the racial discrimination pervasive in skilled construction employment in the 1960s. The skilled construction unions were notorious throughout the United States for excluding skilled Black workers from their membership rolls and thus from the more lucrative construction jobs. Originally a Johnson-administration program, the Nixon administration revised and implemented it in 1969 and 1970, earning Nixon historical standing as a "Civil Rights President."
Except that he wasn't. In telling the story of the background, development, implementation, and results of the Philadelphia Plan, Constructing Affirmative Action demonstrates that Nixon cared about civil rights for racial minorities only as far as they could maintain and enlarge his own power. Despite their desire to win over a wary Black community, his administration repeatedly fumbled on civil rights, from the nomination of unreconstructed southerners to the Supreme Court to the appointment of a Secretary of Labor who advocated segregated skills-training centers in northern cities. The Philadelphia Plan—a Johnson-era program revised by Nixon's senior Black official, Assistant Secretary Arthur Fletcher—presented an opportunity not to help Black people so much as to split two core Democratic constituencies—the civil rights movement and organized labor. As soon as the Plan had served its political purposes, he abandoned it in favor of the very people it was trying to rein in—racist white construction workers.
In addition, by analyzing the development and implementation of the Philadelphia Plan, Constructing Affirmative Action presents two further arguments: that the federal bureaucracy has a history of effective work in the furtherance of democracy and equal rights, and that affirmative action—as it was historically conceived, and as it can be again—is equal employment opportunity, not a system of unfair preferences.
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Latest Blog Entry:
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August 13, 2009:
On Gates, Crowley, and Race
It was only a matter of time before I blogged on this. I am a historian of African-American history, after all. But so far I've been content to let people like Bob Herbert cover it. Having had a month to mull it over, this seemed like an apt time to weigh in.
Some background. On the night of July 16th, Harvard scholar, activist, and TV personality Henry Louis Gates, Jr.--who is Black--returned to his home to find that he couldn't get in through the front door. And so he entered through the rear, prompting a concerned neighbor to call 911. Sergeant Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department--who is white--arrived on the scene with another officer, who is Black, and possibly other officers. Gates came to the door, produced ID to prove that it was his own residence, and was arrested for disorderly conduct. The charges were dropped. President Obama, asked about the incident at a press conference on health care, called it "stupid." The president later apologized and invited Gates and Crowley to a beer at the White House.
First, Gates. Gates is incredibly smart. He knows that as a Black man he is in more danger of unwanted police attention in America than a white man, and he has used this knowledge to avoid angering law enforcement officials in the past. He does this, like other smart men, by engaging in some variation of the humiliating "shuck, jive, and grin" routine that puts racist whites at ease--the whites move the unknown Black man from the "possible dangerous criminal" category to the "happy slave" category. Smart Blacks do this because they know that statistically they are more likely to be targeted by police officers than whites. They do this because they'd rather be humiliated in the short term than endure the treatment of Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, or Sean Bell. But after proving that he was the lawful resident of his home--and having endured a lifetime of occasional humiliation because of his race, Gates got angry and apparently insulted Sergeant Crowley (he may have said something about the sergeant's mother). Excusable? perfectly. Legal? That too.
Next, Crowley. Sergeant Crowley is what we in race relations call an unconscious racist. That means when he thinks intellectually about race, he believes in equal rights, and in his better moments he demonstrates what President Obama might call a "post-racial" mentality. He has apparently led racial sensitivity seminars in the Cambridge Police Department. But as a white man in America he is the product of generations of racial conditioning which have not been erased in the half-century since Brown. (By this definition, everyone in America--including this author as well as Gates himself--is at least an unconscious racist--with some of us genuinely trying to overcome it and others, on the opposite end, who are conscious or overt racists--people who believe in segregation or white supremacy, for instance.) Statistically, Crowley was more likely to ignore Gates' anger and insults if Gates was white. But he didn't ignore it. As a small crowd began to gather, apparently Crowley decided that Gates' behavior, if left unanswered, would lower the respect of the community for the police. Or he took it personally and decided to get tough. Either way, he made an arrest that--while technically legal--was absolutely wrong. Because as a police officer, he's supposed to de-personalize the situation. He's supposed to be able to weather a few insults here and there. He's supposed to recognize that anger seemingly directed at him may actually be directed at the system he represents. In short, he's supposed to have a thick skin.
I am glad the police exist. I believe that a free society needs a strong constabulary to maintain peace. I served for nine years as an Auxiliary Police Officer with the NYPD. The police provide an essential service for which I am grateful. But that doesn't blind me to the institutional racism found throughout American police departments; nor does it blind me to the individual psychology which prompts youngsters to become police officers rather than, say, firefighters or emergency medical technicians. Further, police officers accept a certain degree of risk as part of their jobs. In exchange for that risk, we honor our police officers much the way we honor our military veterans. And police officers extend a professional courtesy to each other--far too much, I think--by not writing speeding tickets or, in more extreme cases, by protecting each other from criminal charges (the so-called thin blue line). Ultimately, however, regardless of how they (illegally) treat one another, police officers who arrest civilians for what amounts to disrespectful behavior are wrong to do so. Even if they are afraid for their own safety, their fear--especially when unsubstantiated--does not outweigh our rights.
Next, the Black officer. Apparently the Black officer or officers on the scene have backed up Sergeant Crowley's account of the incident and support his decision to arrest Gates. This is not surprising. There is a well known saying in Harlem: "fear the white cop, but fear the Black cop more." Black cops are, for the most part, incredibly self-conscious with white cops, constantly trying to prove themselves. And they usually do so by adopting the attitudes and behaviors of their white counterparts, in the extreme. In short, the Black cop will typically side with the white cop before he sides with the innocent Black civilian in order to avoid being labeled as untrustworthy by the white cops. He is leaving behind one community as fast as he can in order to be embraced by another community. He is often successful; today many Black police officers enjoy a tremendous amount of respect from their white colleagues. But the price is that they have turned their backs on an important aspect of justice: they have ignored institutional racism (except when it affects them personally).
Finally, President Obama. The president was right to label the incident "stupid." It was stupid. That's not the same as labeling Sergeant Crowley stupid--which he did not. Both the President and the American people know the difference between a stupid act (of which we have all been guilty) and a stupid person. When tensions get high, smart people do stupid things. They often immediately regret their behavior (although if the punishment for this one is a beer and a family tour at the white house, I doubt Crowley has any regrets). But the press, trying to sell the story, turned an accurate, honest comment into a scandal. Of course, that's what they do: they're trying to sell papers. Unfortunately, the President decided to play their game and apologized. Politics is politics, and that's what the "stupid" incident and beer moment were all about.
What we're left with, in the end, is what we began with: the continued refusal of the American people--even with a Black president--to have a serious discussion about race. Oh, from time to time we'll have a "town hall meeting"--and these are useful in that people can give voice to the way they feel, and viewers get to see different sides. But they tend to be dominated by the uneducated, with typical statements like "I don't see why I need to be held responsible for something that happened four hundred years ago" (Ted Koppel's Nightline Town Meeting following the lynching of James Byrd, Jr.). We, the educated, need to do a better job informing the public that slavery didn't end 400 years ago (about 146, actually) and has legacies that continue today, and that whites--even poor whites--continue to benefit from those legacies.
I guess it starts here.
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Last updated 25 August, 2010 (DHG)
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