COLUMN ONE : Beneath the Bitterness Over Race : To many, the intense debate on civil rights is proof of stalled progress in the nation’s push for equality. But there are also abundant signs of progress and acceptance.

The 390 firefighters of Jackson, Miss., have learned to stand shoulder to shoulder to fight common danger--except the danger some see in affirmative action.

For 17 years, Jackson’s black and white firefighters have been bitterly split by the 50% black city’s effort to enforce a court-ordered hiring plan on a department that remains two-thirds white. On Aug 2., after three years of legal jousting by firefighter groups, a federal judge ordered the city to come up with a new, race-neutral plan.

The order has not doused the firefighters’ passions. “A status quo that conveniently favors the powerful must go,” insists firefighter Rod Phillips, 38, who is black. Counters firefighter Allen Sandifer, 47, who is white: “We’ve suffered enough. It’s time merit alone decides.”

Their differences are symbolic of an American debate on racial issues that is today louder, more strident, and to many, disturbing proof of stalled progress in America’s push for racial equality.

A quarter-century after the glory days of the civil rights era, racial harmony is today threatened on many sides: by knotty conflicts over the need for race-based preferences in schools and work; by blacks’ perception that civil rights efforts are making no headway; by economic decline that pits blacks versus whites for fewer good jobs; by inner-city ills of poverty, crime and disease; and by the growth of immigrant minorities competing with blacks for power and prosperity.

The new conflicts have been painfully visible in recent months in the fight over the civil rights bill that aimed to reduce discrimination in hiring, but was attacked as a measure that would force employers to rely on numerical goals to avoid lawsuits. The frictions are apparent in arguments over Judge Clarence Thomas, the conservative black Supreme Court nominee.

And they are expected to be inflamed anew in the upcoming national election campaign, when, experts predict, politicians will try to exploit the race issue more boldly than ever for political advantage.

Yet amid these troubles, there are also abundant signs that the country is making progress, albeit slowly, toward integration and mutual acceptance by blacks and whites.

Many analysts contend that on a simple interpersonal level, as Christopher Jencks of Northwestern University puts it, “It’s not at all clear that the guy sitting on the El in Chicago is any more likely to take a poke at the black guy sitting next to him than he was a few years ago.”

At the heart of the new conflicts is a gulf between the way whites and blacks view racial discrimination, and what they think government ought to do about it.

Polls consistently show that blacks feel the nation has made great strides toward racial equality. But huge majorities also believe racism remains pervasive and destructive, and that government needs to move forcefully to offset the effects of past discrimination.

In the third term of Republican administrations, blacks feel the federal executive branch has little commitment to using the law and powers of moral suasion to fight discrimination. Many are alarmed at the shift in the U.S. Supreme Court--an institution blacks have considered a special advocate of their interests since the 1960s.

Many blacks see a country that is increasingly unwilling to undertake ambitious and costly new social welfare programs on the Great Society model. Instead, public policy debates now seem to focus on such less-expensive solutions as “enterprise zones,” which seek to redevelop inner cities through tax breaks; public housing schemes that seek to shift ownership to the poor; and “workfare” plans that require the poor to work for their assistance checks.

‘Dashed Hopes’

“Blacks are going through a period of dashed hopes,” says Edwin Dorn, senior staff member at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

The one-third of blacks who live in poverty have a special reason to be discouraged. In real terms, financial assistance for the poor has been dwindling for years. The gap between black and white infant mortality is rising, and a growing share of prison inmates--now 44%--are black.

Blacks have been hit hard, too, by two decades of decline in lower-skilled, high-paying manufacturing jobs--a trend that has sharpened competition between black and white workers, heightening tensions in many cities. Overall, African-Americans as a group have been losing ground to whites: Black median income is about 55% of whites’, down from about 60% in 1970, Dorn says.

There are signs that some blacks are drawing dire conclusions about these trends. A survey in 1988 by the University of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies showed 40% of blacks believed African-Americans would never achieve full equality with whites.

The most extreme suspicions about whites are reflected in the views of some blacks that there is a secret white “plan” to oppress them. Many blacks subscribe to a view that white prosecutors have selectively pursued black officials, from Mayor Tom Bradley and former Washington Mayor Marion Barry to Cleveland Mayor Michael R. White, who was subpoenaed last spring even as he chaired a gathering of black mayors.

On the other side of the chasm is a white majority that is not eager to make further sacrifices to heal the injuries of past discrimination.

In polls over the past 25 years, whites have by increasing majorities rejected old ideas about segregation and legal discrimination. In 1985, 93% of whites told pollsters they supported integration, compared to only 32% in 1942.

Yet while polls have shown increasing support for equal treatment of all Americans, they have never shown greater opposition to preferential treatment than today, specialists say. Only about 10% of whites support giving less-qualified minority applicants special treatment in hiring, polls have shown.

At the same time, polls suggest many whites cling to racial stereotypes of blacks.

A poll by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center earlier this year found that 56% of whites said blacks were likely to be less intelligent than whites. In another poll by the center, 78% of whites said blacks were more likely than whites to prefer living on welfare.

Reinforcing such views are perceptions among some whites that associate blacks with the crime, drugs, homelessness and AIDS that afflicted many cities in the 1980s, hastening white flight from some areas, analysts say.

Together, these views explain why whites believe the government should not shoulder a greater role on behalf of blacks--and in some cases bitterly resent such special breaks, says Lawrence Bobo, sociology professor at UCLA and a race relations specialist. Blacks, many whites believe, “are just not a deserving bunch,” he said.

Speaking Out

In a Los Angeles Times poll in June, 66% of whites said the civil rights movement had gone far enough or too far. Among blacks, 86% said the effort had not gone far enough.

As black and white views have remained dangerously split, there are signs that in recent years both races have become more willing to voice their opinions openly, sometimes bitterly, many analysts say.

Signs of this are evident throughout popular culture and society: In the lyrics of rock singers such as Axl Rose and the group Public Enemy that many consider racist, and in the routines of stand-up comics such as Andrew Dice Clay. Recently, they have been evident in a spate of “hate speech” confrontations across American college campuses.

Last spring, to demonstrate her independence from liberal pressure on her self-expression, a conservative Harvard University senior displayed a Confederate flag from her dorm window. When she refused entreaties to take it down, a black student draped a bedsheet spray-painted with a swastika from her own window, to illustrate how the Confederate flag had offended her.

Some analysts see a white male backlash underlying this year’s public assault on the “political correctness” movement, which tries to prevent disrespect for minorities and women.

Many have pointed out how a confrontational spirit is increasingly evident in the provocative speeches and advertising of politicians. They cite a TV ad Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) used in his 1988 campaign against Democrat Harvey Gantt, which showed the hand of a white job applicant crumpling a rejection slip he received because of an employer’s affirmative-action hiring plan.

Many political analysts predict more racial ads and appeals will be used in the 1992 campaign, because of the evident effectiveness of the Helms ad, as well as then-GOP presidential candidate George Bush’s celebrated 1988 ad about Willie Horton, the black Massachusetts convict who had been furloughed on weekends by then-Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic nominee.

Some analysts contend the more open airing of abrasive racial views has resulted from the nation’s conservative political turn. Others, quoting former First Lady Rosalynn Carter’s barb that Ronald Reagan made Americans comfortable with their prejudices, lay it directly at the door of the Reagan and Bush administrations.

But black leaders, too, are speaking harshly. “For every Jesse Helms there’s an Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan,” Brookings’ Dorn says. “The hatemongers are coming out of the woodwork.”

Only last week, a furor has erupted in New York over the public remarks of Dr. Leonard Jeffries Jr., an African-American studies professor at the City University of New York, that Russian Jews in Hollywood and their allies in the Mafia have conspired to destroy black people.

Some contend open hostility is more evident on a personal level. Roger Wilkins, law professor at George Mason University in Virginia, says he’s been called “nigger” on Washington-area streets three times this year. “That hasn’t happened in a long time,” he says.

Also complicating race relations is the growth of other minorities, including Latin American and Asian immigrants, who are challenging blacks for political and economic power.

These growing frictions are nowhere more evident than in California, where blacks, now 7% of the population, are a smaller group than Anglos (57.2%), Latinos (25.8%) or Asians (9.1%).

Minorities Clash

The conflicts have roiled black-dominated Compton, where city officials have resisted special efforts to hire more Latinos, South Gate, where Latino parents fought sending their children to largely black schools, and Watts, where black and Latino employees have squabbled over hiring and promotion at Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center.

New inter-ethnic frictions are now apparent around the country.

The past year alone has brought struggles between blacks, whites and Latinos over political redistricting in California and New York. There have been boycotts of Asian grocers by blacks in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, N.Y., and Washington, D.C.; and friction between Washington’s largely black police force and disaffected Central American immigrants during several nights of rioting.

UCLA’s Bobo says these inevitable tensions will make race relations a much trickier issue. And he argues that the black-white conflict may worsen if the new immigrant groups that begin their American lives in inner cities rise to prosperity while their black neighbors are left behind.

As demographic changes have posed questions about the future of race relations, so, too, has the series of conflicts with racial overtones that have erupted over the past several years.

Among them have been the Rodney G. King beating, the shooting of black teen-ager Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst, N.Y.; the assault by a group of teen-agers on a white jogger in Manhattan’s Central Park; and the shooting of Charles and Carol Stuart in Boston, which was first erroneously blamed on a black.

Yet as shocking as these crimes have been, they may not have in themselves signified a decline in race relations, experts say, noting that reported bias-related crimes are not rising. “You could argue our sharp reaction to them shows a growing sensitivity,” says Randall Kennedy, a race relations specialist at Harvard Law School.

Still, in their own communities they inflict serious and lingering harm to race relations, because blacks and whites see racial problems through such different eyes, analysts say.

In a Times poll after the King beating, for example, 49% of blacks (as well as 50% of Latinos) said they thought Police Chief Daryl Gates was a racist. Twenty-two percent of Anglos said they felt this way.

“To blacks, these incidents immediately become a symbol of long-standing grievances that aren’t well understood by whites,” UCLA’s Bobo says.

Despite the seeming frequency of such upheavals, many researchers warn against too pessimistic a portrayal of race relations.

They say that if the clashes over national anti-discrimination policies, and the ugly local incidents are set aside, the picture of race relations on the ground floor of American society is far more hopeful. This is evident, they say, both in signs of the economic and social progress blacks have achieved, and in signs of improved personal relations between blacks and whites.

Two-thirds of Americans are now middle-class. There are far more integrated neighborhoods; average blacks and whites are more likely today to have friends of the opposite race than they were a decade ago, polls show.

And if blacks are not proportionally represented in professional schools and the highest-paying, most powerful jobs, their numbers are larger, and at least slowly increasing.

Blacks are steadily gaining political power: The number of black elected officials has edged to more than 7,300, from 300 when the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, and a number of black mayors have been elected in cities that are not mostly black, including Los Angeles, New York, Cleveland, Seattle, Kansas City and Denver.

“There is still a tremendous gulf between white and black; it remains the great American problem,” said Richard Alba, sociology professor at State University of New York at Albany. “But in some basic ways there is also progress.”

Race: Lingering Gaps

White Americans continue to fare better than minorities by various economic measures, a fact that has sharpened racial tensions in many communities. As the percentage of white families moves up the economic scale, blacks show increases in both the most wealthy and poorest family categories. Blacks also are least likely to live in two-parent families, another indicator of economic status. Educationally, blacks and Hispanics are falling behind in college enrollment while whites are gaining. Median annual family income (percent of families) Blacks: 1970: Less than $10,000: 23.0% $10,000 to 24,999: 38.4% $25,000 to 49,999: 30.7% $50,000 to 74,999: 6.7% Over $75,000: 1.3% Blacks: 1989: Less than $10,000: 25.9% $10,000 to 24,999: 32.1% $25,000 to 49,999: 28.1% $50,000 to 74,999: 10.2% Over $75,000: 3.6% Whites: 1970: Less than $10,000: 8.3% $10,000 to 24,999: 25.4% $25,000 to 49,999: 45.5% $50,000 to 74,999: 14.8% Over $75,000: 6.0% Whites: 1989: Less than $10,000: 7.7% $10,000 to 24,999: 23.9% $25,000 to 49,999: 37.5% $50,000 to 74,999: 18.7% Over $75,000: 12.2% Living Arrangements of Children under 18 by race and Ethnic Group, 1990

Living arrangements Blacks Whites Hispanics* Living with two parents 37.7% 79.0% 66.8% Living with one parent 54.8% 19.2% 30.0% Living with mother only 51.2% 16.2% 27.1% Living with father only 3.5% 3.0% 2.9% Living with other relative** 6.5% 1.4% 2.5% Living with non-relative 1.0% 0.4% 0.8

* Hispanics may be of any race ** 463,000 black children and 452,000 white children lived with a grandparent with neither parent present Source: Bureau of the Census

Source: National Center for Education Statistics