THE SAVAGE STRUGGLE FOR POWER / SPECIAL REPORT: CAMPAIGN ’92 : What’s the Unresolved Campaign Issue? Race--But We Can’t Really Talk About It : Politics: Concepts of integration and colorblind society have less and less resonance among voters. We’re at a rhetorical dead-end.

On the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, all the candidates paid ritualistic homage to King’s memory. President George Bush attended a celebration in Atlanta, where King’s youngest daughter noted the pervasiveness of poverty in America and asked, “What is there to celebrate?” The President listened stony-faced and, afterward, declined to answer her simple query. It is, after all, much easier to praise one dead man than to discuss the realities of race for 250 million living Americans.

Bush, who had little sympathy for King when he was alive, can claim the slain preacher was the champion of his vision of a “colorblind” America. (However, while running for U.S. Senate in Texas in 1964, Bush denounced his opponent for supporting a labor union so radical as to have donated $50 to King.) The President’s Democratic rivals, who need to maintain the allegiance of 85% of black voters to have any chance of winning the White House, can claim King as the champion of an integrated and tolerant America. What neither Bush nor his rivals seem able to do is discuss racial issues in terms that voters find honest or believable. Only David Duke is doing that.

The problem is that most politicians and opinion-makers feel obliged to embrace the twin ideals of racial integration and a “colorblind” America. They have no other vocabulary for publicly discussing race. But to many voters, these ideals sound increasingly irrelevant, if not disingenuous. On race, we are caught in a rhetorical dead-end.

America’s racial impasse goes back to the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954. The decision abolished the legal foundation of “separate but equal” school systems. Brown inspired the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, restaurant sit-ins in the early 1960s and led to passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964-65.

But the court, in its admirable willingness to abolish invidious racial distinctions, suggested the law should not recognize racial differences. The nine justices assumed--incorrectly--that integration would improve educational achievement of lower-class black children and gave short shrift to the notion that there might be social value in preserving black-run public school systems.

“From then (1954) on, the uncommon word ‘integration’ would be added to the common lexicon of daily discourse as the media synonym for optimum racial relations,” Harold Cruse wrote in his 1987 book, “Plural but Equal.”

The success of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s only deepened the confusion between racial integration and racial progress. King’s moral leadership and Lyndon B. Johnson’s parliamentary skills ensured passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in employment and public accommodations, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which gave the federal government control over Southern election laws. The racial composition of America’s offices and legislatures, as well as of public schools, became the index of national progress toward achievement of a “colorblind” society.

Both laws passed by huge congressional majorities, but the consensus behind racial redress was more apparent than real. The American people were deeply divided. The integration of blacks and whites outside of work and politics was--and is--a controversial proposition.

American society was unified, but only superficially, behind an ambitious campaign of racial redress. Opposition to the vogue of integration had been discredited by the lawlessness of segregationists in the South. At the same time, the federal courts and national government were taking on the task of monitoring, encouraging and sometimes requiring a degree of racial integration that most white Americans--and many black--had not sought.

Resistance was immediate and widespread. Fear of rising crime and urban rioting and the newly emergent Black Power movement fostered the white “backlash” in the 1966 congressional campaign. The GOP gained 47 seats. Blacks did not fail to recognize that they were simply expected to integrate into white institutions, adopt white values and so join the American “mainstream.” This was a far less attractive offer than many non-black Americans knew.

The purest expression of the new ideal of integration was the 1967 movie, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” starring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier. It depicted the romantic trials of a white woman and a black professional. They were modern heroes--a middle-class “colorblind” couple.

The film, notes Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, “did more to fuel the death of the civil-rights movement and the birth of black nationalism than any other, precisely because it suggested that the movement would achieve fulfillment in a new middle class--assimilated, desexualized, safe.” The response of black America to the integrational ideal was soul singer James Brown’s hit of 1968: “Say It Loud, I’m Black and Proud.”

Nobody recognized the emerging racial impasse more clearly than King. He noted, in particular, that a superficial notion of racial integration had taken hold among whites. In May, 1967, King said integration was not a matter of adding blacks to a white Establishment; it meant blacks and whites absorbing each others culture. Ten months later, King was dead. America had lost its ablest political intellectual, and racial discourse suffered.

Richard M. Nixon tried to frame the racial debate in Republican terms. The GOP’s resistance to civil rights had cost it among blacks, young and educated voters. The Nixon Administration signaled an end to this resistance by implementing busing plans for school districts that refused to comply with the Brown decision. At the same time Nixon promoted “black capitalism” as an alternative to Democratic social programs. In 1969, the Labor Department developed the Philadelphia Plan requiring labor unions doing business with the federal government to hire between 5% and 25% black workers in the next four years. It was, in contemporary political terms, a “racial quota scheme.”

But white voters did not want statesmanship. They wanted protection from the perceived threat of blacks and from the federal government. Black voters were not persuaded by Republican economic development schemes. They wanted a historic commitment to racial justice.

In the early 1970s, Kevin Phillips and other Republican political strategists argued the party should concede the black vote to the Democrats and concentrate on uniting two voting blocs of European-Americans: white ethnics and white business elites. The poorer whites had traditionally voted Democratic but were locked in fierce competition with blacks for housing, jobs, educational opportunities and social respect. The richer whites, traditionally Republican, held commanding positions in business, finance and the professions. Among Republicans there was every incentive to play on racial resentments of whites, submerged since 1964, and no incentive to actually do something about them.

Over the next two decades, the GOP developed political rhetoric that would raise racial resentments of the poorer whites and drive them out of the Democratic Party while avoiding governmental policies that might improve the social conditions of blacks and ease white resentments. The culmination of this strategy was Bush’s ’88 campaign.

The key word in the Republican vocabulary became “colorblind.” It protected GOP elites from charges of racism while reassuring lower-class whites that blacks would not receive preferential treatment.

Democrats retreated to an equally rhetorical defense of “integration.” After 1964, the Democratic coalition consisted of an eroding bloc of lower-class whites who looked to the Democratic Party for economic security; a solid base of cosmopolitan liberals, and the overwhelming majority of blacks. As a matter of philosophy, the party was united behind philosophic integrationism. As a matter of practice, the party ceded the thankless task of implementing racial integration to the federal bureaucracy and the courts.

Like “colorblindness,” racial integration became less a matter of social and political practice than a form of rhetorical glue. It appealed to the Democratic cosmopolitans who remained faithful to King’s dream, while reassuring black voters that the party was still interested in advancing black interests. In fact, many cosmopolitans and many blacks were wary of integration when it came to their personal lives. But by the late 1970s, they needed each other to resist the resurgent conservative movement.

Theoretically, racial integration was salable to poorer white Democratic constituencies as part of a larger program of economic populism that could unite black and white workers against their common adversary--big business. But the 1970s and 1980s saw the decline of labor unions, the suburbanization of America and the globalization of the economy. The social and intellectual bases for economic nationalism to protect the interest of black and white workers atrophied.

In fact, the liberal ideal of integration had long since run aground on a reef of hard social fact: black people and white people are different. They have different values, different experiences, different expectations and different social customs. To most Americans, black and white, this is obvious.

Yet advocates of integration in the political world ask us to deny these differences. And advocates of a “colorblind society” ask us to pretend we do not see them. Why deny this?

One reason is the deification of King, which made it taboo to challenge the ideals of colorblindness and integration. In the 1976 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter defended ethnically pure neighborhoods. The use of the loaded term “purity” left Carter open to the inaccurate charge that he was pandering to ethnic chauvinism rather than encouraging group solidarity. Carter found himself in a political firestorm.

Another reason political leaders can’t talk about racial difference is the fear that such talk will inevitably focus on negative differences. This is a justifiable worry. David Duke, the former Nazi and klansman, can mount a plausible national political campaign because he is willing to get up in public and say young black males commit most of the street crime in America. They do. It could be said, with equal honesty, that Jewish Americans were charged with a disproportionate amount of the insider trading crime on Wall Street in the 1980s; they were. That Cuban-Americans were charged with a disproportionate amount of cocaine importation; they were. And so on. Rather than get into such a pointless discussion, most intelligent and responsible politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties avoid the subject entirely. In so doing, they give an irresponsible demagogue a monopoly on racial candor.

What the 1992 presidential campaign lacks is a discussion of positive racial differences, which must begin with the rethinking of our anachronistic notions of an integrated and colorblind society.

Integration is not a favor light-skinned Americans do their darker brethren. It does not depend on preferential treatment. It is not the right salt-and-pepper composition of the company’s staff photo. It cannot be mandatory. If an ethnic community wants to isolate itself from other groups without violating the rights of others, that’s their choice--and loss.

Integration is the task of incorporating the various cultural strengths of America’s major ethnic groupings--European-Americans, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latino-Americans, and Native Americans--into the fabric of national life. It is a way to make our lives more pleasurable and prosperous. It’s a favor we do ourselves. This philosophy of integration regards the diversity of the American people as our single greatest economic and social asset. It rejects the idea that the United States is, was or ever will be a “colorblind society.” It begins with the premise that America is a “color-rich” society.