Black-White Divide Appears to Be Widening

Joe Melsha, a 33-year-old office manager for a heating and cooling company in Iowa, appears to be the voice of a new American majority.

And the sentiments he imparts clearly are getting the attention of legislators and politicians: Government efforts to improve the lot of minorities in the country have “gone too far.”

“I mean, I’m not a racist and I’m not going to go out and shoot anybody, but I don’t think (black Americans) deserve all the special programs that are offered to them,” Melsha said.

“All the special programs (the government has are) for everybody except the white male. I don’t think it’s right that they say you have to have so many blacks or so many women or so many Hispanics working in different factories.”

While a minority of whites have long expressed opposition to affirmative action and special programs aimed at helping blacks, recent polls indicate that that view is now held by a majority of white Americans.

At a time when they view their own economic futures with uncertainty, experts say, the nation’s “haves”--especially the white middle class--say they are increasingly less willing to help those farther down the socioeconomic ladder. The feelings are harbored not so much out of animus toward blacks as a concern that opportunities are lessening for everyone and only so many can succeed.

As a result, black and white Americans are glaring at each other across a racial divide that once promised to narrow but now appears to be widening. While whites have become more protective of their own status, blacks increasingly despair of ever achieving real equality.

The result, experts say, is that politicians--sensitive to the moods of the largest blocs of voters--may respond by rolling back government social programs. Specifically, they say, the fears are likely to fuel campaigns by politicians pledging to end welfare programs, eliminate health care benefits for the poor and repeal anti-discrimination laws.

“Congress will come back in January as a more conservative body, and that does not augur well for universal health care with protections for the poor and black segments of the population, nor does it speak well for the kind of meaningful civil rights protections that we feel are needed,” said Wade Henderson, Washington director for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

“The same is likely to be true for welfare reform, as we expect Congress will be urged by their constituents to adopt a plan that is punitive against the most helpless segments of our society.”

At the root of the problem, numerous recent surveys suggest, is a deep sense among whites that black Americans are getting breaks--in employment opportunities, education benefits and government programs--that are enabling them to surpass the living standards of whites.

“A lot of white people see that one in seven blacks have household income at $50,000 or above and conclude that too many black people are doing well,” said Bill Boyd, a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center of the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “That’s when white people seem to make the illogical leap. They think everybody is equal and point to those black people doing well and say, therefore, we don’t need to do any more to help any black people.”

Boyd, who is studying the relationship between public opinion and the social gains of black Americans during the past 40 years, notes that the feelings are not unlike those that arose during the peak of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, when whites felt threatened by black advancement, he says.

Boyd’s studies also suggest that a white backlash against the Great Society programs of the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration ultimately helped lead to the election of Ronald Reagan.

“The facts don’t mean a thing in opinion polling, and that’s what makes black people feel all the more uneasy about this current mood of the nation,” said Boyd, who is black. “They know that polls drive policy.”

But while responding to anti-black sentiments may get some politicians elected, the strategy could be shortsighted, says Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), who often speaks about the need for white Americans to embrace programs intended to assist black Americans.

“The economic future of the children of white Americans will increasingly depend on the talents of nonwhite Americans,” he said in an interview. “To the extent those talents are not developed, the prospects of all Americans, including whites, will be diminished. That’s not ideology or polling. That is demographics.” But that message appears unpersuasive to large numbers of whites.

Tom Wicker, the retired New York Times columnist, said that in the course of writing a book on the fate of racial integration in American society he has noticed a sense of creeping frustration among whites toward blacks’ social gains.

“Busing was a factor,” Wicker said. “Affirmative action was a factor. Crime is an enormous factor. I think also the advent of the Reagan-Bush Administration, which was the first time in 20 years the government began to side against blacks in certain cases, tended to validate hardening white people’s attitudes toward blacks.”

Wicker says that although the trend has been developing for some time, pollsters failed to monitor it because respondents often did not express their true feelings. “I think probably for a long time (white) people either didn’t want to admit how they felt or somehow thought their feelings were out of step with everybody else,” he said. “But I think over the last few years . . . people have become more willing to tell poll-takers what they actually think.”

That view is underscored by a nationwide survey recently released by the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press. The telephone poll of 3,800 adults, 18 years of age or older, revealed that white Americans’ views toward black Americans have hardened so much that 51% of the whites surveyed agree with a statement that equal rights had been pushed too far in this country. That figure represents the first time in the seven-year history of the center’s polling that a majority of white Americans said so; in 1992, 42% agreed that equal rights had gone too far, and in 1987, only 16% felt that way.

“These findings suggest that maybe the country is well on track toward a more polarized society than we are willing to admit,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Times Mirror polling center. “Clearly, there seems to be less concern on the part of whites toward blacks. They are feeling anxiety about their lives and less charitable toward those (blacks) less fortunate.”

Other polls are discovering similar attitudes. For example, a 1991 Los Angeles Times Poll found that whites tend to minimize the role of racial prejudice in the problems afflicting blacks, while blacks generally see discrimination as a barrier to their advancement. That poll revealed that 60% of the whites and 30% of the blacks surveyed rejected the idea that discrimination was the principle reason blacks “on average . . . have worse jobs, income and housing than white people.”

More recently, a poll conducted earlier this year by ICR Survey Research Group of Media, Pa., for the Associated Press found that 6 out of 10 whites think blacks and other minorities now have the same opportunities as whites, but that 7 out of 10 blacks disagree.

Kohut says the increased antagonism of white Americans toward African Americans is one manifestation of a pessimistic and despairing mood washing over the electorate. This mood is driven by economic fears and is most clearly evident among the demographic segment he labeled “new economy independents,” which makes up 18% of the adult population and 19% of registered voters.

They are mostly white middle-age working women with children and have at least a high school diploma. They feel underemployed, question their job prospects and doubt government’s ability to do anything to improve their lives. And they are characterized by their lack of sympathy for the problems of black Americans.

“Not anchored in either major party, these are the most important swing voters in the new electorate,” according to the poll. Although they voted for President Clinton in 1992, more than half consider themselves independents and express a willingness to vote for the GOP or a third party--a fact that makes their views toward blacks and other social issues pertinent to candidates sensitive to political winds.

“I’m not a very educated person,” said Ora Sears, 54, who operates a day-care center from her home in Carlton, La., “but . . . if I could get up there and tell (President Clinton) what to do, I’d tell him to put the schools back like they were. Everybody got along fine when I was back in school. The blacks had their schools and we did better in our schools.”

Sears, who is white, is quick to point out that she harbors no ill will toward black people, but she frets that blacks don’t want to work to get ahead in America. “It’s getting to the place now that the blacks are feeling we owe them something for their ancestors,” she said. “I just don’t think this is fair. We should try to live together in the time we were born, not back in history or some time like that.”

That opinion was seconded by Melsha, who admitted that it was wrong of whites to discriminate against blacks “back in the Martin Luther King days,” but that time had come and gone. “How long do they have to benefit from (social programs) before everybody is equal?” he asked.

Christa, who offered only her first name, is a 28-year-old white student working toward a master’s degree at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn. She says black Americans appear not to have pride in themselves because too often they are the beneficiaries of government programs.

“I think that sometimes if you’re just given things, you’ll resent it and you’ll resent the person that gave it to you as if you owed them something,” she said. “I feel as if I’m working very hard. I’m paying for my own education. But a lot of times I feel that African Americans don’t see me as a hard worker. They see me as someone with a silver spoon in my mouth.”

Jon Olsen, 28, who runs a chain of bookstores in New York City, says he believes that a “backlash against political correctness” is emboldening white Americans to speak out about their perceptions of the unfair advantages they believe blacks are getting.

“It’s so easy to overhear (white) people at the water cooler say things like ‘Is it Negro? Is it colored? Is it black? Is it African American? Aw, the hell with it. We’ve gone too far,” said Olsen, who is white.

Olsen says the hardening racial views of whites are reinforced by the popularity of talk shows on radio and television, where controversial racial views are encouraged to boost audiences.

“You’ve got the guys on the radio, like Rush Limbaugh, and on television, like Geraldo (Rivera), who can play all this stuff up in these nice little sound bites and sway public opinion,” he said.

So when and how does all this end?

“To tell you the truth,” Olsen said ruefully, “I don’t think there ever will be a point when (white and black) people will treat each other equally on a personal level.”