Ending Racism Can Never Be Just About Numbers : Social change: It requires people to engage each other, learn from each other’s history, absorb each other’s humanity.

The silence of good people in the face of continuing racism is often as harmful as the actions of bad people. Clearly, although in small number, there are white and black people in America who remain racists, spewing hostility toward another person simply because of race. There are white politicians who play the “race card” and there are black politicians who play the “racist card.” But the word “racist” is overused. Most people aren’t brimming over with hatred. To say that someone who opposes affirmative action is racist denies the possibility that the person may just be ignorant. If one hurls the epithet “racist,” a meaningful dialogue is unlikely to follow, and it is only out of candid conversations that whites will discover skin privilege, blacks will accept constructive criticism from whites and progress will come steadily.

But let us not abandon the quest to end racism. Let us root out what Harlon Dalton of Yale Law School calls those “culturally accepted beliefs that defend social advantage based on race.” To do that, however, takes individual initiative and involvement that begins with a president and doesn’t end until all of us as individuals become engaged. Ronald Reagan denied that there was any discrimination in America, much less racism. George Bush was a little better, but then he appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court who, in an odd twist, turned the clock back on the whole issue. And now Bill Clinton says: yes, there is racism; yes, we need affirmative action; and yes, I’ll give my own pedigree in terms of my own experience. He is strongest when he talks about conviction related to race because I do think he has that conviction. But the question we need him to answer is: What are we going to do about it? One would like to hear him talk about it more, to remind people of our history, to educate Americans about why it’s important that we get beyond these stupid divisions.

Affirmative action takes on such a disproportionate place in our national politics because many whites cannot conceive of white skin privilege and because discrimination, when it occurs, remains largely unaddressed. Why not deal with the underlying issue, which is discrimination, and facilitate remedies.

Affirmative action is a response to a discriminatory pattern over many years in institutions run by individuals who are confident that they don’t have to change. To the extent that you don’t remedy individual discrimination early and forcefully, then you are going to have thousands of judges making broad-brush rulings that often seem unfair to whites. And then you’re going to have other groups in the name of affirmative action asking for things that are not affirmative action. It’s beyond me, for example, how giving a tax subsidy in the purchase of a radio or television station to a group of investors who have an African American participant is affirmative action; it’s not. But it’s easier to say no if you can say yes to facilitating the battle against discrimination. You can’t say no unless you realize that in some places affirmative action is the only way we can balance white skin privilege.

For example, the U.S. military, even after President Truman’s desegregation order, remained a bastion of white, often Southern, officers. It took Jimmy Carter and his African American secretary of the Army, Clifford Alexander, to change the way promotions were granted so that black officers had a chance to become generals. Without Alexander, there would be no Colin Powell. If you don’t believe me, ask Powell. If you believe that that was then and this is now, and there is no need to look at other institutions, I refer you only to the report of the Glass Ceiling Commission. Why are there are no black CEOs of major corporations and why do major New York law firms still have only a minuscule number of black partners?

Finally, when it comes to attacks on affirmative action, it is important to see how similar they are to the legal justification for segregation in the 19th century. As UCLA professor Kimberle Crenshaw points out in a brilliant paper, treasured American values such as autonomy, freedom, individualism and federalism were deployed to support discrimination. For example, the Supreme Court ruled that a white person deciding to prohibit a black person from riding in a certain train car was exercising his individual freedom of contract. Decades later, Thurgood Marshall and other freedom fighters argued that even though the acts of individualdiscrimination might be protected as private rights of contract, the discriminatory practices were so widespread that they acted as an impediment to interstate commerce for black people as a group. Individual freedom yielded to group remedy for group discrimination.

Today, many of the people who oppose affirmative action and state a preference for color blindness and justify their position by reference to the American tradition of considering individuals equal before the law are often the same people who seldom have black friends and who will choose the white teacher over the black teacher for their children every time. When people shout reverse discrimination they ignore our history, the continuation of subtle white skin privilege and the fact that more white people lost their jobs in the 1982 recession than blacks have gained jobs from court-ordered affirmative action since its inception. When people diminish real, not imagined, black contributions to our society as if they were a threat to our historical canon, they diminish their own understanding of themselves and their country.

During the civil rights era, the message was that black Americans wanted to make something of themselves through hard work, religious devotion, political activism and educational attainment. White America had only to do what was in its own long-term interests anyway and remove the architecture of racial oppression. The movement had the high moral ground.

Today, with murder, AIDS and drugs running rampant through the black community, with many blacks unwilling to accept some of the responsibility for their predicament, white Americans seem more and more unwilling to make sacrifices to change the abysmal conditions. When black separatists come across more like George Wallace than Martin Luther King, they give those whites who are only marginally interested in black folks a reason to turn off.

To counter the human devastation in parts of urban America will take a heroic effort by thousands in the black and white communities working together. It will take police departments that do their jobs conscientiously and with adequate resources. It will take schools that are teaching institutions, not simply warehouses for children. It will take surrogate families who will express some small love for a kid without parents. Above all, it will take a new bi-racial political vision that acts, because to fail to act will stain our ideals, diminish our chances for long-term prosperity and shortchange our children--all our children.

In the 1960s, the civil rights movement thrived on the assumption that an America without racism would be a spiritually transformed America. That, after all, is what affirmative action affirms--that America can get over its racial nightmare; that few in America should be poor or dumb or violent because the rest of us have cared too little for them; that no one in America should have a racial limit set on where their talents can take them; and that the process of seeing beyond skin color and eye shape allows us not to ignore race but to elevate the individual. A new political vision requires people to engage each other, endure the pain of candor, learn from each other’s history, absorb each other’s humanity and move on to higher ground. It won’t happen overnight, nor will one person bring it, however illustrative his career, nor will one person destroy it, however heinous his crime or poisonous his rhetoric.

It can never be just about numbers. What will be built has its foundation in the individual interactions of individual Americans of different races who dialogue and then act together to do something so that something is transformed because of the common effort. Slowly, with acts of brotherhood transforming physical circumstances even as they bind the ties among the participants, we can say that racial progress has ceased retreating and is once again on the advance. Only together can we chart a brighter future.