Beyond Quotas : A New Generation of Scholars Is Stressing Class, Not Race, in an Effort to Break the Civil-Rights Impasse

These are the years of Willie Horton and Tawana Brawley, of Louis Farrakhan and David Duke, of Rodney King and the Central Park jogger, of quotas and code words, of politics sharpened to a lethal edge on the adamantine differences between black and white. Not since the 1960s have racial questions been so vivid and dense with emotion. Books about the urban underclass are nestled between the self-help manuals on the national best-seller lists.

Escalating campus debates on affirmative action and the ideology of curriculum have moved out of the academic senate and onto the covers of national magazines. Almost 40 years after the Supreme Court began dismantling segregated education--partly on the grounds that it diminished self-esteem--parents in several major cities are debating the voluntary establishment of segregated schools in the hope of building self-esteem. In Washington, the Democratic Congress and President Bush have been at loggerheads in an explosive battle over a civil-rights bill that if unresolved could, as one nervous Democrat says, become “the Willie Horton of 1992.”

While that battle smolders, both sides are bracing for a searing Senate debate over President Bush’s Supreme Court nomination of U.S. Appeals Court Judge Clarence Thomas, a black conservative who ardently opposes affirmative action.

These issues concern Latinos and Asian-Americans and Native Americans. But they are sharpest when cast in the stark relief of black and white--in that harsh light, the divisions of race have always seemed most intractable and incendiary. Today, relations between white and black Americans present a paradox. In the interactions that govern daily life, the civil-rights revolution remade America. Racism stubbornly persists, but attitudes have, if imperfectly, bent toward the legal standard of equality, the way a rock molds to a river. In 1963, when the Gallup Poll asked whites what they would do if a black family moved in next door to them, nearly half said they would move. Last year, only 5% said they would move.

On political questions, though, blacks and whites face off across a growing divide. Blacks give their votes overwhelmingly to the Democratic Party, whites with hardening loyalty to the GOP. An emotional center of the conflict is affirmative action. In a recent Gallup Poll, nearly half of African-Americans said that “because of past discrimination,” a qualified black applicant should be given preference over an equally qualified white in hiring and college admissions; nearly three-fourths of whites said no preference should be granted.

In this collision of conflicting visions, a politics of confrontation has flourished--one that grows more militant almost by the week. It is on this terrain that a small but growing group of scholars, writers and policy analysts is making its mark, seeking a third path between the liberal politics of blame and the conservative politics of resentment.

Coming mostly from roots on the left, these thinkers differ on specifics but unite around one conviction: that minorities will gain more by finding common ground with whites than by winning concessions from them. With the belief that whites and blacks can coalesce behind a common agenda, these thinkers might be called the synthesis school of race relations.

Some believe this group could begin to reshape the way we think about the most imposing problems of race, not just because their arguments are so compelling but because the current path seems so unpromising. Both political parties have advanced racial posturing to the point where they are tripping over their own contradictions--a point visible in the Thomas nomination. Democrats find themselves questioning the appointment of a black man to the Supreme Court largely because he opposes affirmative-action policies that are supposed to encourage just such advancements; Republicans who have spent years attacking racial quotas are insisting that Thomas’ race had no bearing on his selection.

Some innovative officials in both political parties see the synthesis-school agenda as an opportunity to shift the civil-rights debate away from the legal anti-discrimination strategies that often sharpen the divides between whites and blacks toward an economic agenda that can bridge those gaps.

THE SYNTHESIS SCHOOL has no formal organization. It doesn’t have a think tank or a journal or a magazine specifically devoted to its concerns (the New Republic is generally sympathetic, and the Nation hostile). It lacks even a precise roster of club membership. But a representative list would include San Jose State University English professor Shelby Steele (the author of a best-selling book on race relations called “The Content of Our Character”); sociologist William Julius Wilson; Washington Post columnist William Raspberry; Cornel West, director of the Afro-American Studies program at Princeton University; historian David J. Garrow (author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr.); writer Jim Sleeper (the author of “The Closest of Strangers,” a recent book on race relations in New York City); sociologist Jonathan Rieder, and Robert Greenstein, director of The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. Steele, Wilson, Raspberry and West are black; Garrow, Sleeper, Rieder and Greenstein are white.

This diverse group is fashioning an argument both principled and pragmatic. It rests on two central assumptions. The first is that the problems of blacks and other minorities are today more a function of class than race, and thus unlikely to be significantly improved by legal efforts to reduce racial discrimination. The second is that a political coalition capable of advancing a broader social-reform agenda is unlikely to develop as long as liberals stress policies, such as affirmative action, that drive low- and middle-income whites to the GOP.

In an article for the liberal journal “The American Prospect,” Wilson recently sketched out how liberals might reclaim white voters while offering more tangible assistance to the blacks most at need--the inner-city poor. To help minorities in the 1990s, Wilson wrote, liberals must move away “from court-ordered busing, affirmative-action programs and anti-discrimination lawsuits” toward “race-neutral programs such as full employment strategies, job-skills training, comprehensive health care, reforms in the public schools, child-care legislation and prevention of crime and drug abuse. . . .”

These arguments represent a direct challenge to the prevailing liberal approach to civil rights, which has focused on legal strategies constructed on distinctions between the interests of blacks and whites, such as affirmative action and minority set-asides. To the synthesis-school thinkers, that vision--if necessary to a point--has obscured opportunities to assemble interracial alliances around the larger problems.

Their analysis diverges just as decisively from the dominant conservative vision. While traditional conservatives, including black conservatives such as Clarence Thomas, call for minimal government initiatives to help the poor, the synthesis-school liberals support a strong government effort to assist the disadvantaged and bolster the struggling middle class,without regard to race.

“Racial discrimination continues to be a problem; I don’t want to minimize that,” Wilson says. “But you are going to have to overcome the effects of previous discrimination with race-neutral policies. You can’t rely on the strategies of the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s.”

No one in the synthesis school diminishes the magnitude of the 1960s civil-rights movement’s achievement in demolishing the legal structures of discrimination. But most of these thinkers came of age politically after these victories, in an era when economic limits oppressed blacks more than legal limits.

“Fighting upfront segregation and racism is not a formative experience for me,” says Garrow. “I view evils as being more often than not economic and bureaucratic.” “

MORE THAN ANYONE else it is William Julius Wilson who has laid the intellectual foundation for this movement. Born in Blairsville, Pa., Wilson grew up in rural poverty. On a church scholarship, he attended an all-black college in Ohio. Now a 55-year-old professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and director of its Center for the Study of Urban Inequality, Wilson made his reputation with two enormously controversial and influential books: “The Declining Significance of Race” and “The Truly Disadvantaged.” Like Wilson, they are academic, careful, understated and yet stoically passionate about inequality.

Wilson challenged assumptions of the left and the right about the cause of persistent poverty among African-Americans, setting aside both racism and moral failure and restoring to the center economics. Economics was stressed by such earlier thinkers as civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin, sociologist Kenneth B. Clark and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his famous 1965 Labor Department study on the “tangle of pathology” threatening the black family. Wilson’s seminal contribution was to reopen candid discussions of the urban underclass, or what he called the “truly disadvantaged.” Though prejudice has not been expunged in America, he argued, the deteriorating condition of the black ghetto poor could not be explained solely by racism, since their condition worsened even as opportunities improved for the growing black middle class.

Instead, Wilson believed the worsening condition of the truly disadvantaged was caused by changes in the economy--the decline of manufacturing, the rise of technological innovations that reduced the need for unskilled labor and the relocation of manufacturers out of cities into suburbia.

Racism had concentrated African-Americans in these low-wage jobs and made them vulnerable to these economic shifts. But these changes were not specifically motivated by racism, Wilson wrote, and could not be combated through the legal machinery built to extirpate discrimination. To combat them in court would be like suing a tornado for demolishing a trailer park.

Wilson concluded that the economic ravages on the inner-city poor were exacerbated by what he termed their “social isolation.” With that conclusion, he became the first prominent liberal intellectual since Moynihan to openly acknowledge that individual moral decisions deepened the problems of the ghetto poor.

Wilson contended that once housing discrimination eased enough to allow more of the black middle class to escape the ghetto, the inner-city communities were stripped of many of the “mainstream role models” who embodied alternatives to crime, welfare and life on the street. Without these models, Wilson maintained, mores eroded with results visible nightly in hospitals and police stations.

Wilson saw economic deprivation reinforcing these problems. He argued, for example, that the growth of black families headed by women was the hidden hand’s way of responding to the declining numbers of employed men capable of supporting a wife and family. And he rejected the idea that a “culture of poverty” anesthetized inner-city blacks to opportunity. Provide the opportunity, he wrote, and the culture would gradually change.

Wilson maintained that affirmative action, while easing the path into the middle class for better-educated blacks, “did not really open up broad avenues of upward mobility for the masses.” That could be accomplished only by economic reforms and social measures such as job training and educational improvements--the race-neutral agenda.

Parts of Wilson’s theories have been challenged. Subsequent research suggests that only about 20% of the increasing black-female-headed households can be explained by joblessness for black males; other analysts stress the importance of cultural factors, noting that the problem has increased throughout the entire society. Most important, opinions sharply diverge on the extent to which affirmative action is an effective way to help all African-Americans.

Over the past 20 years, affirmative-action programs have pushed open creaking doors for blacks and other minorities--the number of minorites and women employed by federal contractors with affirmative-action requirements has increased faster than at other companies. As William L. Taylor, vice chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, points out, affirmative-action requirements have opened up many government jobs, including positions in such historic bastions of segregation as police and fire departments. And affirmative-action programs have created space for minorities at colleges and universities, as both students and faculty.

Overall, the legal revolution of the past quarter-century helped create a sizable black middle class; the percentage of black families earning $25,000 or more annually more than doubled between the 1960s and the early 1980s, according to Wilson’s research.

Despite these gains, the gaps between white and black America remain dispiritingly vast. In 1989, the median income for black families was only 59.4% that of whites--a slightly lower percentage than in 1970. The share of blacks living in poverty--just over 30%--is no lower than in the early 1970s and remains triple that of whites. Despite aggressive affirmative-action efforts, the percentage of young blacks enrolled in college actually declined from 1976 through 1988.

Alternately encouraging and frustrating, these numbers reinforce Wilson’s central point: Blacks no longer share monolithic experiences, nor can all of their problems be solved by more aggressive rooting-out of discrimination. That notion was once seen as intellectual subterfuge against civil-rights. Today it is “almost conventional wisdom,” Wilson says.

THE SYNTHESIS-SCHOOL thinkers differ in the relative emphasis they place on economic and cultural factors. If Wilson represents the pole that puts primary focus on economic issues, at the other end of the spectrum is Shelby Steele. In his ruminative personal essays, Steele mentions economics hardly at all and, though sympathetic to much of Wilson’s work, he believes Wilson leans too heavily on economic explanations. “If I had to say anything, it would be that he overrelies on the lack of jobs for too many social ills, “ Steele says. “It doesn’t address the cultural factors, the psychological factors.”

Which Steele does with gusto, at every opportunity. Since the publication of his book last September, he has been at the center of the national tempest over race. Steele is an unlikely flash point. He grew up in a black suburb of Chicago, the son of a truck driver and a social worker who were active in civil-rights causes and believed passionately in education. Their injunctions set Steele toward a career as an academic; he has taught English at San Jose State since 1974. His academic pedigree shows: In a tattered safari jacket and a profligately stained red tie, with gray flecks in his hair and a well-worn briefcase at his feet, he looks less like an agitator than a suburbanized Oxford don.

Steele is an elegant, precise writer, but as a polemicist he is firing live rounds. Steele maintains that blacks have become psychologically locked into viewing themselves as victims, overestimating the constraints of racism and underestimating their ability to succeed without government help. Steele argues that blacks must abandon the idea that their success depends on collective action to win more government assistance and commit themselves to “traditional American values--individual initiative, self-sufficiency, strong families. . . .”

That conclusion leads Steele to a much sharper critique of affirmative action than, for example, Wilson. (In general, Steele--who maintains he has never voted for a Republican presidential candidate and supported Jesse Jackson in 1988--is more open to conservative ideas than most of the synthesis thinkers.) If, to Wilson, affirmative action is a political impediment, to Steele it is another form of psychic oppression, “a paternalism that makes it difficult for blacks to develop a faith in their own capacity. “

To many critics, Steele’s work represents nothing more than a cynical attempt to validate the worst white stereotypes about blacks. “His rise is only the newest act in the perverse carnival,” wrote one hostile reviewer in the Nation. “A black person seizes the public stage by ratifying the social prejudices of the wealthy and powerful.” Others have criticized Steele for failing to test his conclusions with any systematic research. His book is sprinkled with buzzwords such as “integration shock,” “anti-self” and the “enemy-memory.” Steele draws sweeping general conclusions from fleeting anecdotal experiences faster than anyone since Ronald Reagan. (On these counts, Steele pleads no contest: “I am not presuming, as a social scientist would, to have anything other than my own thoughts,” he says.)

But Steele has spirited defenders who agree with his argument that many blacks have grown to see individual success as almost a betrayal of the collective African-American cause--a cause that needs evidence of failure to produce political gains. “Taking pride in being weak, ignorant and in need of a handout may get you an equal-rights bill or a couple of quarters, but it will not achieve equality in education and accomplishment for a race of people,” wrote Juan Williams, a Washington Post reporter and author of a history of the civil-rights movement, in a review of the book.

Steele’s arguments are, in fact, more subtle than he is often given credit for. He objects to affirmative action not only for its alleged psychological effects but on the practical grounds that it frees whites from the responsibility to support educational and training programs that would allow blacks to better compete. Like Wilson, Steele ultimately advocates a race-neutral agenda to attack poverty and “instill those values that make for self-reliance.” But Steele doubts there will ever be enough money to meet the need; progress, he asserts, will come only from renewal within the black community.

Steele believes that the traditional bootstrap routes to success are open to blacks trapped in poverty if they are willing to accept the rules of behavior--hard work, individual responsibility--that attend them. That is, of course, an extremely debatable proposition, even for most of the synthesis-school thinkers. “When you read his book, it kind of reinforces the dominant American belief system that poverty and welfare are a function of individual inadequacies,” says Wilson.

But Steele’s emphasis on individual responsibility illuminates a cornerstone of the synthesis argument: Programs to help the poor will not win public support unless they demand initiative from the recipients. “Any social policy that ignores that issue, because it is afraid to be seen as blaming the victim, is doomed,” he says.

THE REMAINING MEMBERS of this network fall somewhere between Wilson and Steele in theory. One of the most important attempts to reconcile the two is the recent book “The Closest of Strangers,” a fervent look at race relations in New York City written by Jim Sleeper, a 44-year-old editorial writer at New York Newsday. Sleeper’s concern is what inspires community, both in neighborhoods and in broader political coalitions. His book, planted in the streets of New York, is heavy with the city’s accumulated racial antagonisms.

Sleeper’s book is a cry for a return to the concept of civic community and a rejection of politics built on polarization--whether practiced by Louisiana’s David Duke or New York’s trio of black racial provocateurs--militant community activists Al Sharpton and Sonny Carson and attorney Alton Maddox. Sleeper’s greatest fear is that the hysterical charges of black racists--such as the claim that the Central Park jogger really was attacked by her boyfriend--will widen the audience for white racists such as Duke, whose ascent in turn will be taken by even mainstream black leaders as proof of white malevolence toward blacks.

Sleeper presents himself as a Massachusetts liberal who earned degrees at Yale and Harvard but was drawn toward the frenetic energy of New York’s neighborhoods. He arrived in Brooklyn bearing “the standard college lefty’s basic roster of readings” about racism. But a decade of close observation--as a teacher of remedial writing at Queens College, as a reporter and later an editor at weekly newspapers in raw Brooklyn neighborhoods and as an aide to the City Council president--frayed his book-bred assumptions.

None of what Sleeper saw shook his belief that the problems of the poor began with government and corporate disinvestment in their neighborhoods. But Sleeper found himself reluctantly rejecting the idea that racism alone explained the resistance of working-class whites to busing and integration; it was, he concluded, rooted also in legitimate fears of crime and neighborhood decay accelerated by calculated real estate speculation. Sleeper grew increasingly uncomfortable with the traditional liberal argument that ghetto crime was conditioned by oppression--that, he came to believe, insulted and condemned all of those trying to build stable lives in the inner-city. “People in these communities,” he says, “could survive only by holding each other to daily decencies.”

Sleeper’s book sometimes has the feel of a particularly tangled game of Twister, as he tries to keep his feet in the liberal corner while stretching toward conclusions profoundly unsettling to most liberals: He calls for government action built around class, not race (“The real issue in New York is not racism, it is economic decay,” he says) and a more open discussion of individual moral accountability among the underclass.

Sleeper applies the lessons of successful neighborhoods to successful political coalitions, and concludes that to retain credibility with the middle-class, liberals must hold black demagogues such as Maddox to the same critical standards to which they hold Duke. Liberals--blacks and whites--must demand “race-transcendent standards of public truth and civil order,” he wrote. “You cannot build a movement for social justice on lies, distortions, vilification of innocent parties and dehumanization of your opponents.”

To Sleeper, the model social movements are the gritty Saul Alinsky-inspired neighborhood organizations that link whites, blacks and Latinos around economic issues in cities such as New York, San Antonio and Los Angeles. His faith is not in politics centered on grievance but one constructed on persuasion and the search for common agendas.

IN THE TIGHT-KNIT AND passionate civil-rights community, the synthesis-school arguments have drawn a generally hostile response. Critics see several interlocked flaws in their case. Civil-rights leaders argue that Wilson and the others set up a false choice between race-neutral approaches and programs specifically targeted to minorities. “This is a multifront war,” says Ralph Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. “And they all have to be addressed.”

Even on their own terms, race-neutral policies are flawed, critics maintain, because they ignore the persistence of overt racism. “In a society where the people who have color don’t have power, if you write race-neutral laws, the majority race takes hold and most of the benefits flow to them,” maintains Ron Walters, chairman of the political science department at Howard University. Finally, civil-rights leaders believe that any effort to diminish affirmative action would encourage private employers to roll back efforts to recruit minorities.

The synthesis-school thinkers don’t reject all of these arguments. But they believe that a shift from the present course is inevitable. Their analysis--echoed by some key Democratic Party strategists--runs like this: Since the death of Martin Luther King, the major gains for minorities have been won not through mass political mobilization, but by convincing courts to order remedies, such as busing and affirmative action, that much of the white public has never accepted. Though it won immediate benefits, the backlash against those race-specific policies helped the GOP sunder the Democratic coalition and control the White House for 18 of the past 22 years. That, in turn, has allowed Republican presidents to appoint a majority of federal judges, and shift the judiciary to the right. As a result, the courts today are more likely to roll back the gains of the 1970s than to expand legal rights.

The loss of judicial support forced civil-rights advocates to turn back to Congress, hoping to recover earlier gains. The civil-rights bill now dividing congressional Democrats and the White House, for example, attempts to overturn six 1989 Supreme Court decisions that trimmed back earlier rulings on racial and sex discrimination in the workplace. To the synthesis school, this rear-guard fight in Congress represents another self-defeating strategy--the enormous public focus on the Democrats as defenders of special programs for minorities will only make it more difficult to capture the White House and reshape the judiciary.

In national campaigns, Democrats already have found themselves pinioned between black leaders, understandably vigilant against any signs of retreat from their agenda, and working-class whites, squeezed economically, who believe that liberals are sacrificing their interests to those of minorities. Over the past generation, Republicans have exploited those grievances to great effect in presidential elections. Among Democratic presidential candidates since World War II, only Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 has carried a majority of white votes. Last fall, after President Bush vetoed an earlier version of the civil-rights legislation as a “quota bill,” attacks against racial quotas helped Republican Sen. Jesse A. Helms win a Senate seat in North Carolina, Pete Wilson take the California governorship and David Duke attract a majority of white Louisiana voters in an unsuccessful bid for U.S. Senate.

Those campaigns have palpably changed the environment on Capitol Hill for civil-rights legislation, perhaps for years. Though the House this spring passed a modified version of the civil-rights bill that ostensibly bans hiring quotas, Bush has argued that the bill still would encourage employers to select by race. His vehemence highlights the new political reality: Republicans are increasingly confident they can attack affirmative action as quotas without being viewed as racist, and Democrats are more eager than ever to reach a compromise that will avoid a veto.

How far the GOP wants to press these attacks is unclear. Though Bush has roundly condemned the civil-rights legislation as a quota bill, he has left undisturbed the rules mandating that federal contractors establish goals and timetables to increase their hiring of minorities--a requirement much more like an actual quota than anything in the congressional bill. And the President is under pressure from a group of moderate Republican senators led by Missouri’s John C. Danforth trying to defuse the racially tinged confrontation over civil-rights legislation with a compromise bill of its own.

That same urge to lower the temperature on this combustible issue is also evident among many younger Democrats. In their search for ways to restore biracial alliances, these party leaders are increasingly embracing the synthesis-school arguments. “I am saying what William Raspberry is saying,” says Oklahoma Rep. Dave McCurdy, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. “We’re building this civil-rights bill up to be the Mike Tyson championship bout. It is a fight that should be made, but it should not be elevated to the degree it has been. We’re dealing with legalisms when we better be concerned about feeding children, “ If Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton seeks the Democratic presidential nomination, those arguments may be a major theme in his campaign.

No one underestimates the difficulty of constructing a political coalition behind greater government investment in housing, education, job training, health care or decaying cities. But Wilson and others argue that this only underlines the importance of building around issues that can unite whites and blacks. In fact, as poverty analyst Robert Greenstein has observed, this model has proven successful. Despite the budget constraints of the past decade, he noted in a recent essay, Washington has approved substantial expansions of Medicaid health coverage for pregnant women and children above the poverty line. Congress also expanded the earned-income tax credit, which reduces the tax burden on the working poor, without racial polarization.

Following the basic guidelines, Greenstein says, anti-poverty advocates are developing plans for two new major race- neutral initiatives. Congressional Democrats, led by Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (Tenn.) and Rep. Thomas J. Downey (N.Y.), recently introduced a bill to convert the personal exemption on income taxes for young children into a refundable tax credit that would make it more valuable to working poor families who pay little or no federal taxes. The second, even more ambitious, proposal would incorporate child support into the Social Security system. This plan, Greenstein notes, would help women all along the income ladder and encourage work because, unlike welfare benefits, these payments would not be reduced if the mother takes a job.

Though the moderate Progressive Policy Institute represents a different wing of the Democratic party than Greenstein, it is also developing policies reflecting these basic principles. One would establish a system of national service in which young people who volunteered for the military or civilian service would receive vouchers to pay for college or job training. Another would establish an apprenticeship system that would offer career training to young people not bound for college.

Except perhaps for Steele, no one in the synthesis school is proposing to abandon affirmative action. “Affirmative action should be there,” says Sleeper, “but it should be so overshadowed by the national rebuilding effort that people don’t talk about it much.”

Even many Republicans, uncomfortable with the racial tensions their electoral strategy encourages, find that prescription attractive. There are many in the GOP who wish the party would spend less time denouncing affirmative action and more developing its own anti-poverty agenda built around programs such as school-choice, privatizing public housing and enterprise zones. Many see the opportunity here for a compromise that resolves the dangerously polarizing civil-rights bill, followed by attempts to find common ground on festering domestic problems.

All sides may be closer than it appears to consensus on principles central to the synthesis-school argument: that social programs should be attractive to all races, reward work and demand individual responsibility. Moving toward these shared principles could yield substantial gains over the next decade without inflammatory charges of racism and reverse discrimination. That kind of rhetoric is like a drug: It provides an instant jolt and quickly becomes addictive. In the coming years, the question may not be whether black and white, left and right can reach a new synthesis on the oldest American dilemma but whether they truly want to.

Times researcher Joyce Sherwood contributed to this article.