Last night, viewers of the livestream of CBS’s Big Brother seemed to catch what has to be one of the grossest moments in the history of the already-pretty-gross show. As houseguests Jeff Weldon and Julia Nolan were chatting lazily in bed, Weldon suddenly seemed to start masturbating under the covers beside her. And then, as if that weren’t icky enough, he appeared to reach over and wipe his—ahem—end product on her back.

“You have a little stain right here,” he said, as he pawed at her. When Nolan asked him what it was, he creepily explained, “It’s darker grey, it actually feels kind of sticky,” he laughed. “I know what that could be.”

This is not the first controversy Big Brother has faced in its 17 seasons on air in the United States (the show started in the Netherlands in 1999 and has aired in the US since 2000). Houseguests often get a bit stir crazy, cut off from accessing the Internet, TV, magazines, or news, and forbidden from communicating with any friends or family in the outside world. Every move the contestants make is monitored 24-7 by cameras that feed directly to a livestream (the first week is free on CBS’s website, if you’re so inclined). Houseguests vote to eliminate one person off the show each week and the last person standing wins $500,000. 

Like most reality shows, Big Brother doesn’t exactly attract the crème of humanity, and the social experiment is notorious for bringing out the worst in people who are already racists, criminals and misogynists.

Just this past year, the child star Jeremy Jackson—of Baywatch fame—was kicked off Celebrity Big Brother in the UK for drunkenly groping his housemate, the model Chloe Goodman. Jackson was a self-confessed alcoholic and drug addict, so it’s not hugely shocking he acted out like he did when given access to booze. What is shocking is that producers allowed him on the show in the first place, where he could (and did) cause harm to his fellow houseguests.

Sexism runs rampant on the show, with women often getting eliminated before men, especially when they reject their advances. One of the most extreme examples happened in Season 16, when houseguest Caleb Reynolds formed a weird, stalkerish obsession with his fellow houseguest Amber Borzotra. Though Borzotra made it clear over and over again that she was not interested in him, he grew resentful, lashing out and acting like he was entitled to her. “She’s just taking it all for granted, just taking it in and doesn’t appreciate anything,” he whined.

Eventually, he tried to “scare” her into submission by putting her up on the chopping block, with the intention that she would beg him for help, but his strategy failed when Borzotra was eliminated—not that she minded, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “I'm very relieved to be out because of Caleb.”

Season 15, which aired in 2013, was chock-full of controversy, particularly concerning one cast member, Aaryn Gries (a.k.a. “Aaryn the Aryan”), who offended pretty much everyone on the show. To give just a small selection of her lovely comments: “be careful what you say in the dark, might not be able to see the bitch” about her black houseguest, Candice; “shut up, go make some rice” she said referring to Asian houseguest, Helen; and about her houseguest Andy, she said “no one’s going to vote for whoever that queer puts up.”

The unpleasantness was a leftover from Season 14, when Willie Hantz (brother of notorious Survivor villain Brandon Hantz) got kicked off the show for head-butting houseguest Joe Arvin and calling everyone around him obscene names.

Two days after being his expulsion, Hantz was arrested for OWI (operating a vehicle while intoxicated) in Louisiana. Yes, Big Brother may not cause people to act terrible, but what it does do is throw together a bunch of people who are terrible to begin with and let us watch what happens as they're pushed to their limits. And sadly, women are often the ones left victimized.

Big Brother executives constantly label the reality competition series a “social experiment.” Well, it’s safe to say that the experiment has failed.

In June, the South Carolina Highway Patrol honor guard carried the mortal remains of the murdered Sen. Clementa Pinckney up the State House steps and into the rotunda.

Members of the honor guard flanked the open coffin, spit polished and erect, eyes straight ahead in a silent show of respect as thousands of mourners filed past. A black cloth had been draped over one of the windows to spare anyone who might be offended by the Confederate battle flag flying out front. 

A bill called the Heritage Act passed in this very building prevented the flag from being lowered even to half-staff, much less taken down without a two-thirds vote of the legislature.

But on Thursday, the legislature voted to do just that and set a 24-hour deadline on having it done.

On Friday, the honor guard returned, this this time to lower the Confederate battle flag, which had been designed by William Porcher Miles, a onetime mayor of Charleston who had been a prominent “fire-eater,” as the most ardent proponents of slavery and secession leading up to the Civil War were called.

The honor guard had performed countless other ceremonies, but this one was a little different. And they had not been given much time to work out exactly how it should go.

The flag was being taken down in the first place because it was seen by many people—African-Americans in particular—as a hateful symbol of slavery and oppression. Some rightly view it as a shameful banner of treason.

But it had been hoisted there in the first place because it is viewed by others—none of them African-Americans—as a symbol of an idealized heritage and history.

And the very fact that the honor guard had been chosen to lower it was an implicit nod to those people.

At the appointed time on Friday morning, the guard went about lowering the flag with the same ritualistic respect as it would with the Stars and Stripes.

Two of the officers took the lowered banner in their white gloved hands.

And for a moment, it seemed as if they might fold it as they would an American flag that had covered the coffin of a fellow cop or a U.S. solider who had made the supreme sacrifice.

Instead, they rolled it, presumably an echo of the way Confederate regiments furled their battle flags in surrender at the end of the Civil War.

A black sergeant was the one who then took the furled banner. He had done this at American flag ceremonies where race was not issue, but it was hard to believe that he had been chosen by chance in this instance.

He seemed to be an attempt to compensate for the bigotry associated with what he now carried so solemnly over to the State House steps. The director of the South Carolina Relic Room and Military Museum waited to receive it.

For a second, truly terrible moment, the ritual was too much like that performed when the flag from a hero’s coffin is presented to a grieving loved one along with the words, “On behalf of a grateful nation.…”

Thankfully, the sergeant uttered not a word. The director, Allen Roberson, was also silent as he took the furled flag.

“Nothing was said,” Roberson later told The Daily Beast. “I felt like that was appropriate.”

Roberson was escorted up into the State House.

“I just wanted to make sure I didn’t trip when I was carrying the flag,” he recalled.

He then descended to the basement, where an armored car was waiting to transport the flag to the museum.

Upon arriving, Robeson brought the flag in through a back door. The flag was unrolled, smoothed and carefully folded.

“So it wouldn’t crease,” Roberson said.

The museum’s registrar, Rachel Cockrell, and an intern named John Faulkenberry placed it in an “acid-free textile storage box, padded with acid-free tissue.” The box was stored in the museum’s “secure, climate-controlled Artifact Storage area.”

“Locked and alarmed,” Roberson said.

Roberson dismissed as not entirely accurate reports that there had been a tacit agreement as part of a legislative compromise to store the flag in a multimillion-dollar facility funded by the taxpayers—which would include, necessarily, the descendants of slaves.

He allowed that there had been some brainstorming with various architects and planners, but nothing had been decided and whatever was ultimately done would not likely be so grand.

He noted that he has not been able to get added funding for anything in recent years.

“Our budget has not increased at all,” he said.

Back at the State House, the flagpole where the banner had flown was now bare, but a monument to the Confederate dead remained. The inscription on the north side reads:

“This monument
perpetuates the memory,
of those who
true to the instincts of their birth,
faithful to the teachings of their fathers,
constant in their love for the State,
died in the performance of their duty:
Who
have glorified a fallen cause
by the simple manhood of their lives,
the patient endurance of suffering,
and the heroism of death,
and who,
in the dark house of imprisonment,
in the hopelessness of the hospital,
in the short, sharp agony of the field
found support and consolation
in the belief
that at home they would not be forgotten.
Unveiled May 13, 1879”

The fallen cause they glorified included sedition and slavery. The people at home included slaves who had suffered horrors that outdid even war.

There is also an inscription on the north side:

“Let the stranger,
who may in the future times
read this inscription,
recognize that these were men
whom power could not corrupt,
whom death could not terrify,
whom defeat could not dishonor
and let their virtues plead
for just judgment
of the cause in which they perished.
Let the South Carolinian
of another generation
remember
that the State taught them
how to live and how to die.
And that from her broken fortunes
she has preserved for her children
the priceless treasure of their memories,
teaching all who may claim
the same birthright
that truth, courage and patriotism
endure forever.”

The truth is they died fighting to deny fellow human beings the right to life and liberty. Their legacy is racism and hate.

The flowery falsehoods on the monument remain, now that the flag has been taken down in somber ceremony with white gloved hands and tucked safely away by a very nice museum director in an acid-free box, locked and alarmed.

In recent years, automotive engineers have developed ever-quieter—and, thankfully, more fuel efficient—internal combustion engines. But they’ve also grappled with the question of how to mimic the desirable thunder of gas-guzzling muscle cars, often turning to finely tuned exhaust systems and even piped-in electronic noise in the process. Electric vehicle owners, however, would prefer their ride stay silent.

Today, electric vehicles, or EVs, are enjoying a bit of a moment. Tesla now touts 445 “Supercharger” stations with more than 2,750 individual chargers across the US. Earlier this year, BMW used its Super Bowl ad slot to tout its new i3 EV. Even a rust-belt city like Indianapolis may get an EV-only rental business in the not-too-distant future.

To many owners, their popularity makes perfect sense.

“The endless stream of power an EV delivers is intoxicating,” says Chris Neff, Electric Auto Association board member and long-time EV driver. And the silent operation associated with the torque an EV motor produces, he says, is a major aspect of an EV’s true pleasure.

“A lot of us like cars, we all do, and [engine] noise is good for that type of car, but you do it all day long, it starts to wear on you,” Neff asserts. By comparison, the silence of an EV is relaxing.But the noiselessness of EVs also poses a potential hazard for pedestrians, especially the blind or vision-impaired, who may not realize an EV is rolling by until it’s too late.

Five years ago, Congress sought to remedy the problem with the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2010. Sponsored by then-Senator John Kerry (D-MA), the bill was overwhelmingly bipartisan—it passed unanimously in the Senate, and by a margin of 379-30 in the House—and mandated that electric and hybrid vehicles automatically generate a sound that “shall allow the pedestrian to reasonably detect a nearby electric or hybrid vehicle in critical operating scenarios.”

In January 2013, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration proposed Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 141, which would set the standard for EV noise as required by the PSEA. (More recently, the NHTSA delayed its final ruling until the end of this year in order to allow for more study and analysis.)

In working to set the minimum standards, the NHTSA also issued a series of sample sounds “that could be proposed for use as alerting sounds,” some of which “would meet the proposed specifications; some would not.” The sample noises include existing EV alerts, synthesized alerts based on ICEs, and digitally produced synthesized alerts. Chipping or chirping sounds, according to the NHTSA’s Notice of Preliminary Rulemaking, will not meet the PSEA’s standard, which mandates the noise be recognizable as a motor vehicle. The NHTSA also “tentatively” determined that EVs and hybrids would be required to produce a sound whenever the vehicle is operating at a speed under 30 kph (18.6 mph), since studies indicated that tire noise is a sufficient pedestrian warning above that speed.

Prior to the legislation, some EV manufacturers were already hard at work producing technology designed to warn pedestrians and cyclists of an oncoming EV.

“We’ve taken a very proactive position in this idea of pedestrian safety,” says Chevrolet Volt vehicle chief engineer Andrew Farah. Chevy recognized the pedestrian safety issues EVs might pose during the development of their EV1 model in the 1990s, Farah says. The first generation Volt has a pedestrian horn, a button located on the end of the turn signal stalk that, when activated, produces a less aggressive sound than the standard horn. However, as Chevy worked to develop its pedestrian alert system further, they discovered that the National Federation of the Blind felt strongly about the importance of having a passive alert system—one that didn’t require driver activation.

As a result, Chevy developed a humming noise similar to the kind of white noise machine many people use to lull themselves to sleep. That system would automatically engage any time the car was capable of motion and moving less than 30 mph. This model—available now in the Chevy Spark and later this year in the 2016 Second Generation Volt—goes a step further, actually shifting in frequency as the car accelerates.

Nissan has also incorporated safety noise into its EV, the Leaf. The Leaf, which began production in 2010, “has a sound generator called the Vehicle Sound for Pedestrians that operates at speeds up to about 17 mph,” Nissan spokesperson Brian Brockman explained in an email. “The system generates unique sounds both in forward gear and reverse,” and has been incorporated into the vehicle since Leaf’s launch, he added. However, Brockman said that he couldn’t comment on the proposed NHTSA rule or whether Nissan anticipates that its current sound would meet the proposed standard.

Engineers have also worked to strike a balance between making no noise and mimicking a Mack truck.

“The real question is: are we making too much noise? And the answer to that is no,” Farah states. “We haven’t had any complaints from use in the field.”

Still, some EV enthusiasts remain determined in their opposition. “In my opinion, making quiet cars noisier is trying to solve the wrong problem,” EAA historian Darryl McMahon wrote in an email. McMahon pointed to situations in which simply making quiet cars noisier won’t necessarily increase their safety for pedestrians. “Should we not outlaw headphones and earbuds for pedestrians, as these affect their ability to hear approaching vehicles?” he asked. “Instead of making the urban soundscape noisier, we can develop real solutions to enable those with hearing or vision challenges to better recognize all vehicular traffic (and other obstacles) when appropriate for them.”

Neff, the EAA board member, says that many EVs already make “a nice sound similar to a turbine under hard acceleration,” though such a noise is unlikely to meet NHTSA guidelines. Neff also alluded to existing radar technology that allows EVs to detect when pedestrians are in the vicinity of the car, and engage the passive sound warning system.

Farah agreed that such technology could theoretically be implemented. “All of those things can be done,” he said, “but we’re not sure that it’s a cost-effective solution.” And as many EV sticker prices stretch to the $30,000 mark and well beyond, cost is a very valid concern.

Of course, there’s always the ultra-low-cost, old-fashioned approach. “Sometimes I’ll roll my window down, poke my head out and say something,” Neff chuckles.

A late-life letter from Jack Kerouac will be featured in an upcoming auction from Boston-based RR Auction. The typed one-page letter, dated September 27, 1968, a year before Kerouac died at 47, was written to his literary agent, Sterling Lord, in New York concerning the premise for Kerouac’s never-completed final book, the working title of which was Spotlight.

The letter, here in its entirety, is reprinted with permission.

Here’s what I’ll do with SPOTLIGHT. I’ll use my public appearances on TV and lectures as rungs in the ladder of the narrative. In betwixt, I can throw in more private matters, such as my two physical beatings in bars (‘Spotlight’ indeed), and other things, but the main tale will be. I’ll start with when I’m living on that backporch in Florida with my Maw in 1957, broke, arguing about what to buy for dessert because we have no money for meat, and suddenly Time Magazine comes in to interview me about the upcoming publication of ON THE ROAD. At which time, also, I have the mumps, caught in the Mexico City earthquake of August 1957.

Then I saunter to the railroad station and sit in the warm dry air waiting for my train to New York, figuring, I’ll go up there and see how this new book makes out. When I arrive in New York City I look in a disposal trash basket in Penn Station to see what my review was like in the New York Times. But since someone’s spit on the only Times in the can, I dont touch it, and only walk up to the Viking Press to see what’s happened. When I get there they tell me I’m an overnight success. And I’m hungry for food. So we go to Schraft’s across the street and I order my lunch but everybody’s yakking so much around me I begin to realize right then and there that ‘success’ is when you can’t enjoy your food any more in peace. Ow. Then we go into my first public appearance with John Wingate on his Channel 7 show when the cameraman actually dollied up to my glass of water and spilled it and so Wingate, who was in cahoots with this trick, said ‘Whatsamatter, drunk?’ then I went on Wingate again later, then on Ben Hecht show, then the lecture at Brandeis University where I was roundly booed for arguing about peace with the editor of the New York Post, Wechsler, he saying America was complicated enough with having to have poetry and I telling him he was a son of a you know what, and then details in between. Leading up to the premiere of my movie PULL MY DAISY at the San Francisco film festival, where a lot of other things happened, like a funny meeting with David Niven and his asking me which girl at the party I really thought he should take home, knowing my expertise in such matters, (as tho I didnt know his), and then the moving about the country in cars and waiting in trucks, and the beatings I told you about. And then a trip to Montreal Canada to appear (in French language program) (1967), and finally this last appearance on the Wm. F. Buckley Jr. program (ABC) where Buckley kept kicking my shoes and telling me to shush so the other guests could demonstrate how dull they were, or stupid, and, as I say, all interspersed with the valid details of tale-telling: actually, Sterling, and enormous story and should be okay as local history.

It is the latest chronological part of the Duluoz Legend, and of course I wont go into 1960 BIG SUR experiences or 1965 SATORI IN PARIS, but just mention them in passing. It will complete the ‘Legend’ up to now and may very well be my most exhausting writing experience, since the story is so fraught with eminent peril, men, women, dogs, cats, cornpones, agents, publishers, poolsharks, TV directors, calling me a ‘drunken moron,’ celebrities, boozers, bookies, phew, wait till you see it. But I cant do it without some money to live on, so show this letter to the prospective publisher and let’s get at it.

p.s. I’m using the title SPOTLIGHT because that was the name of my father’s old theatrical newspaper in Lowell, when he used to play cards with W.C. Fields, George Arliss and George Burns backstage at the old B.F. Keith’s theater (of the Keith’s circuit) in Lowell. The title will honor the memory of his own work. I really dont think we have to say BEAT SPOTLIGHT, as I originally proposed, unless the publishers think different, just as long as spotlight is in there. And of course no changes in the prose. “

Enclosed find my signature to the Marshall A. Best Viking contract. Your advice suits me, and has suited me, and my wife; Elle travaille en racuillon, i.e., backwards, backwards toward the angle and not onward with our friendly neighborhood agent. (I think she oughta mind her own business and wash her dishes.) Give my regards to Cindy and Rebecca.”

Lord was Kerouac’s agent and was responsible for shopping On the Road to Viking, who published it in 1957.

"Excellent content in a letter that is quintessentially Kerouac,” said Bobby Livingston, executive VP at RR Auction.

Among other items related in the auction, a matte-finish gelatin silver photo of Jack Kerouac originally taken by Allen Ginsberg in 1953.  The photo includes a lengthy description by Ginsberg of Kerouac and the setting of the picture.

The Fine Autographs and Artifacts auction from RR Auction features more than 1,000 items. The auction began on June 26 and will end on July 15 at 7 p.m. More details can be found online at rrauction.com.

After the race-related events of the past few weeks and months, it’s clear that the people who speak for black America Have a Dream, in the wake of the one Dr. King so resonantly expressed.

The idea is that the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s wasn’t enough, that a shoe still has yet to drop. Today’s Dream is that white America will somehow wake up and understand that racism makes black America’s problems insurmountable. Not in-your-face racism, of course, but structural racism—sometimes termed White Privilege or white supremacy. Racism of a kind that America must get down on its knees and “understand” before we can move forward.

The problem is that this Dream qualifies more as a fantasy. If we are really interested in helping poor black people in America, it’s time to hit Reset.

The Dream I refer to has been expressed with a certain frequency over the past few weeks, after a succession of events that neatly illustrated the chance element in social history. First, a white woman, Rachel Dolezal, bemused the nation with her assertion that she “identifies” as black. Everyone had a grand time objecting that one can’t be black without having grown up suffering the pain of racist discrimination, upon which Dylann Roof’s murder of nine black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church put a gruesome point on the issue. Dolezal was instantly and justifiably forgotten, after which the shootings motivated the banning of the Confederate flag from the American public sphere.

However, practically before the flags were halfway down their poles, the good-thinking take on things was that this, while welcome, was mere symbolism, and that what we really need to be thinking about is how to get America to finally wake up to—here comes the Dream—structural racism. A typical expression of the Dream is this one, from Maya Dukmasova at Slate: “There is little hope for a meaningful solution to the problem of concentrated poverty until the liberal establishment decides to focus on untangling a different set a pathologies—those inherent in concentrated power, concentrated whiteness, and concentrated wealth.”

Statements like this meet with nods and applause. But since the ’60s, the space between the statements and real life has become ever vaster. What are we really talking about when we speak of a “liberal establishment” making a “decision” to “untangle” notoriously impregnable things such as power, whiteness and wealth?

This is a Dream indeed, and the only reason it even begins to sound plausible is because of the model of the Civil Rights victories of fifty years ago, which teaches us that when it comes to black people, dreaming of an almost unimaginable political and psychological revolution qualifies as progressivism. After all, it worked then, right? So why be so pessimistic as to deny that it could happen again?

But there are times when pessimism is pragmatic. There will be no second Civil Rights revolution. Its victories grew not only from the heroic efforts of our ancestors, but also from a chance confluence of circumstances. Think about it: why didn’t the Civil Rights victories happen in the 19th century, or the 18th, even—or in the 1920s or 1940s? It’s often said that black people were “fed up” by the ’60s, but we can be quite sure that black people in the centuries before were plenty fed up too.

What tipped things in the 1960s were chance factors, in the same way as recent ones led to a breakthrough on the Confederate flag. Segregation was bad P.R. during the Cold War. Television made abuses against black people more vividly apparent than ever before. Between the 1920s and the late 1960s, immigration to the U.S. had been severely curtailed, so black concerns, while so often ignored, still did not compete with those of other large groups as they do today.

There is no such combination of socio-historical factors today. No, the fact that Hillary Clinton is referring to structural racism in her speeches does not qualify this as a portentous “moment” for black concerns. Her heart is surely in the right place, but talking about structural racism has never gotten us anywhere significant. Hurricane Katrina was 10 years ago; there was a great deal of talk then about how that event could herald some serious movement on structural racism. Well, here we are. There was similar talk after the 1992 riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict and, well, here we are.

The old-time Civil Rights leaders did things; too often these days we think talking about things is doing something. But what, really, are we talking about in terms of doing?

Who among us genuinely supposes that our Congress, amidst its clear and implacable polarization, is really going to arrive at any “decisions” aimed at overturning America’s basic power structure in favor of poor black people?

The notion of low-skill factory jobs returning to sites a bus ride away from all of America’s poor black neighborhoods is science fiction.

In a country where aspiring teachers can consider it racist to be expected to articulately write about a text they read on a certification exam, what are the chances that all, or even most, black kids will have access to education as sterling as suburban white kids get?

Many say that we need to move black people away from poor neighborhoods to middle-class ones. However, the results of this kind of relocation are spotty, and how long will it be before the new word on the street is that such policies are racist in diluting black “communities”? This is one of Dukmasova’s points, and I myself have always been dismayed at the idea that when poor black people live together, we must expect social mayhem.

And, in a country where our schools can barely teach students to read unless they come from book-lined homes, what is the point of pretending that America will somehow learn a plangent lesson about how black people suffer from a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and therefore merit special treatment that no other groups in America do? Calls for reparations for slavery, or housing discrimination, resonate indeed—and have for years now. However, they result in nothing, and here we are.

Note: I’m not saying it wouldn’t be great if these things happened. However, I argue that they cannot happen. It was one thing to convince America that legalized segregation and disfranchisement were wrong. However, convincing America that black people now need the dismantling of “white privilege” is too enlightened a lesson to expect a vast, heterogeneous and modestly educated populace to ever accept.

How do I know? Because I think 50 years is long enough to wait.

Today’s impasse is the result of mission creep. The story of the Civil Rights movement from 1965 to 2015 started as a quest to allow black people the same opportunities others enjoy but has shrunken into a project to show that black people can’t excel unless racism basically ceases to exist at all. This is understandable. The concrete victories tearing down Jim Crow allowed have already happened. Smoking out the racism that remains lends a sense of purpose. And let’s face it: there’s less of a sense of electricity, urgency, importance in teaching people how to get past racism.

But the result is that we insist “What we really need to be talking about” is, say, psychological tests showing that whites have racist biases they aren’t aware of such as tending to associate black people with negative words, or white people owning up to their “Privilege,” or a television chef having said the N-word in a heated moment decades ago (or posing for a picture where her son is dressed as Desi Arnaz wearing brown make-up).

So, drama stands in for action. Follow-through is a minor concern. Too many people are reluctant to even admit signs of progress, out of a sense that their very role is to be the Cassandra rather than the problem-solver.

So little gets done. In a history of black America, it is sadly difficult to imagine what the chapter would be about after the 1960s, other than the election of Barack Obama, which our intelligentsia is ever anxious to tell us wasn’t really important anyway. Maybe we're getting somewhere on the police lately. But there’s a lot more to being black than the cops. There is much else to do.

This new Dream, seeking revolutionary change in how America works, is not only impossible, but based on the faulty assumption that black Americans are the world’s first group who can only excel under ideal conditions. We are perhaps the first people on earth taught to consider it insulting when someone suggests we try to cope with the system as it is—even when that person is black, or even the President.

But this “Yes, We Can’t!” assumption has never been demonstrated. No one has shown just why post-industrial conditions in the United States make achievement all but impossible for any black person not born middle-class or rich. What self-regarding group of people gives in to the idea that low-skill factory jobs moving to China spells the end of history for its own people but no one else’s?

To be sure, Bayard Rustin, Civil Rights hero and intellectual, famously argued in 1965 that automation and factory relocation left poor blacks uniquely bereft of opportunity, such that he called for the Civil Rights movement’s next step to be a call for job creation to a revolutionary degree. However, 50 years is a long time ago. Immigrants moving into black communities and forging decent existences—many of them black themselves—have shown that Rustin’s pessimism did not translate perfectly into later conditions. Today, community colleges offer a wider range of options to poor black people than they did 50 years ago. Books depicting black inner city communities such as Alice Goffman’s On the Run and Katherine Newman’s No Shame in My Game tiptoe around the awkward fact that there are always people in such communities who acquire and keep solid jobs—something even black activists often bring up in objection to “pathologizing” such communities.

I am calling neither for stasis nor patience. However, the claim that America must “wake up” and eliminate structural racism has become more of a religious incantation than a true call to action. We must forge solutions to black America’s problems that are feasible within reality—that is, a nation in which racism continues to exist, compassion for black people from the outside will be limited and mainly formulaic (i.e. getting rid of flags), and by and large, business continues as usual. Here are some ideas for real solutions:

1.    The War on Drugs must be eliminated. It creates a black market economy that tempts underserved black men from finishing school or seeking legal employment and imprisons them for long periods, removing them from their children and all but assuring them of lowly existences afterward.

2.    We have known for decades how to teach poor black children to read: phonics-based approaches called Direct Instruction, solidly proven to work in the ’60s by Siegfried Engelmann’s Project Follow Through study. School districts claiming that poor black children be taught to read via the whole-word method, or a combination of this and phonics, should be considered perpetrators of a kind of child abuse. Children with shaky reading skills are incapable of engaging any other school subject meaningfully, with predictable life results.

3.    Long-Acting Reproductive Contraceptives should be given free to poor black women (and other poor ones too). It is well known that people who finish high school, hold a job, and do not have children until they are 21and have a steady partner are almost never poor. We must make it so that more poor black women have the opportunity to follow that path. The data is in: studies in St. Louis and Colorado have shown that these devices sharply reduce unplanned pregnancies. Also, to reject this approach as “sterilizing” these women flies in the face of the fact that the women themselves rate these devices quite favorably.

4.    We must revise the notion that attending a four-year college is the mark of being a legitimate American, and return to truly valuing working-class jobs. Attending four years of college is a tough, expensive, and even unappealing proposition for many poor people (as well as middle class and rich ones). Yet poor people can, with up to two years’ training at a vocational institution, make solid livings as electricians, plumbers, hospital technicians, cable television installers, and many other jobs. Across America, we must instill a sense that vocational school—not “college” in the traditional sense—is a valued option for people who want to get beyond what they grew up in.

Note that none of these things involve white people “realizing” anything. These are the kinds of concrete policy goals that people genuinely interested in seeing change ought to espouse. If these things seem somehow less attractive than calling for revolutionary changes in how white people think and how the nation operates, then this is for emotional reasons, not political ones. A black identity founded on how other people think about us is a broken one indeed, and we will have more of a sense of victory in having won the game we’re in rather than insisting that for us and only us, the rules have to be rewritten.