A Few--a Very Few--Wise Voices Speak Out on Diversity

Listen hard.

Three current magazines feature packages of articles on diversity, the Los Angeles riot or both. And in the midst of the cacophony, a few people make sense.

Modern Maturity, the magazine of the American Assn. of Retired Persons, publishes so far in advance, it picked four cities other than Los Angeles to highlight in its “Dynamics of Diversity” stories.

So Ze’ev Chafets refers, in blissful ignorance, to Detroit’s 1967 riot as the worst in U. S. history.

There are, however, lessons for Los Angeles in Chafets’ story. He reports that a mass exodus of whites followed that riot, leaving behind a largely impoverished population of African-Americans, who faced a deeply eroded tax base.

As an aide to the city’s last white mayor says: “The riot never stopped.”

Mayor Coleman A. Young--now in his fifth term--and a coalition of activist groups fight to salvage the city from its economic plight.

“Today,” Chafets writes, “black Detroiters have a government that speaks their language, police recruited from among their sons and daughters, parks and playgrounds named for their heroes, and quite possibly more political control than African-Americans have ever had anywhere in North America.”

Meanwhile, the city is ringed with white suburbs, and with suburbanites who may still be scared of inner-city blacks, but who don’t lose much sleep over the fate of Motor City.

It’s a different story in Oklahoma City. In a dozen years, the compartmentalization of minorities has shattered. Now people of every color live everywhere.

The editor of the city’s black weekly newspaper laments the integration of his readers throughout the city. He worries that African-American culture will be lost.

Others insist that the city is working: that people live integrally in the wider, multicultural community, and get together with people of their own ethnic roots whenever they choose.

It’s not coincidental that Modern Maturity focuses its “Dynamics of Diversity” issue on cities. That’s where the wounds of racism still fester.

But contrary to what so many discussions of ethnic issues and the L. A. riot seem to assume, the issues of urban American may no longer define America, argues a stand-alone cover story on “the suburban century” in the July Atlantic Monthly.

William Schneider quotes Mayor Tom Bradley, speaking at the 1990 “Urban Summit” in New York: “If we do not save our cities, we shall not save this nation.”

But with nearly half the nation’s population now living in suburbs, with more exiles on the way, and with those citizens out-voting and out-spending their city cousins, the audience for such rhetoric is dwindling, Schneider says.

Planners and politicians (mainly liberal ones) don’t understand or won’t acknowledge the factors pushing people out of cities and pulling them to suburbs.

Until they face facts, until their efforts to save cities also directly benefit suburbanites, Schneider suggests, urban dwellers’ lives will continue to decline.

Readers of Utne Reader’s July/August package may find themselves more befuddled about the questions of diversity than before they opened up the issue. One page, for example, sports two articles: “Blacks--the Answer is Tribalism,” and “Blacks--the Answer Isn’t Tribalism.”

Given its biases, Utne leaves out most conservatives, intelligent and idiotic alike. But its left-wingers cover that spectrum nicely, thank you.

Take, for instance, David Mura, a Japanese-American who, in his sanctimonious preaching to “whites,” echoes the annoyingly banal voice of too many other self-sure (and almost certainly middle-class) “spokespeople.”

All sound as if they’re still under the influence of that generic, oh-so-radical, Poly-Sci prof who scolded them guilty about “ethnic awareness.”

Whites, Mura says weightily, “need to know that their feelings of shame will begin to vanish only when they begin to take part in dismantling racism and redistributing power. . . .”

He’s right about one thing: For anything to work, white people have to start listening. So do blacks. And Asians.

There are fresh, thoughtful, important ideas voiced in the din, but first you have to screen out the foppish posturing, the smug ignorance and the demagogy.

The influence of the tribe that is currently shouting loudest can be found in many of the separatist voices currently engaged in this debate.

But it is another tribe that emerges as the clear victor here--a tolerant, open-minded tribe led by a handful of individualist thinkers.

And as important as a united group may be, individualists have traditionally been the guiding forces of communities, Jim Ralson writes in Utne.

Mohandas Gandhi, for example, was successful because he refused to see Indians as a collective mass.

Rather, “He could only see them as individuals, with the same potential to grow and expand from within as he had, through his insight and courage.”

What courageous and insightful individuals are saying now is pretty much what Rodney King said a few weeks ago: “Can’t we get along?”

Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N. J.) would seem to fit that category, judging from a speech he gave a month before the Rodney King verdict and elaborated upon for the July Harper’s Magazine.

Expressing sadness, anger and resolve--rather than the deep shame Mura and others would like all whites to feel--Bradley looks the politically incorrect facts in the face.

He too focuses on the cities, where murder rates have doubled since the ‘60s, and where “fear covers the streets like a sheet of ice.”

It is young black men that most middle-class Americans fear most, he says. And that fear quickly turns to anger at the seeming refusal of anyone, black or white, to impose constraints on the minority of young black men who stir negative stereotypes.

” . . . And when they catch you--if they catch you--you cry racism. . ,” he says, bluntly voicing the mind-set of many white Americans.

“The white disdain grows when a frightened white politician convenes a commission to investigate charges of racism, and the anger swells when well-known black spokespersons fill the evening news with threats and bombast.”

Bradley doesn’t want to abandon the cities; he has a bunch of intriguing ideas for bringing about what he calls a “conversion” in this country.

His bottom line: “All of us advance together or each of us is diminished.”

In the same issue, Harper’s Editor Lewis Lapham offers an impassioned defense of the city.

More relevant, however, is an earlier piece by Lapham, which Utne excerpts.

There, Lapham confronts the notion that to have a real sense of identity, one must talk of being a gay American, a female American, a Senior American or an African-American.

This “subordination of the noun to the adjective,” he says, “makes a mockery of both the American premise and the Democratic spirit.”

It was Lapham, of course, who chose to publish Bradley, and here Lapham too seems sage:

“In America, we were always about becoming, not being; about the prospects for the future, not about the inheritance of the past. The man who rests his case on his color makes a claim to special privilege not unlike the divine right of kings. The pretensions might buttress the cathedrals of our self-esteem, but they run counter to the lessons of our history. . . .”

This sort of flag-waving does not come easily to liberals, even so close to the Fourth of July. But it rings true.

“Among all the nations of the earth,” Lapham writes, “America is the one that has come most triumphantly to terms with the mixtures of blood and caste, and maybe it is another of history’s ironic jokes that we should wish to repudiate our talent for assimilation at precisely the moment in time when so many other nations in the world (in Africa and Western Europe as well as the (former) Soviet Union) look to the promise of the American example.”

In her introduction to the Modern Maturity sampling, Associate Editor Karen Westerberg Reyes discusses the same dilemma in less lofty terms: She recalls enrolling her children in school and the form she was handed upon which to categorize them by ethnicity.

There were six possibilities, such as black, white and Pacific Islander. There was also a rejoinder: “Mark only one.”

But her kids fit into at least three of the categories, Reyes says. So, for 12 years, she jotted: “Not Applicable.”