Can America Really Be Colorblind?

Not long ago, I debated Rep. Tom Campbell (R-San Jose) on affirmative action. I argued for it, he against it. We were spirited but civil, even conciliatory at times. Still, before our conversation ended, we had reached a fault line in perspective that blocked our reconciliation that day.

That same fault line, I fear, threatens to block the racial reconciliation that President Clinton and his task force seek to encourage in the year-long conversation on race on which they are about to embark.

Campbell didn’t seem to disagree with my arguments that modest racial preferences are a counteraction to the more profound racial preferences against minorities. The aspirations of African Americans are disproportionately hampered by poorly funded and unequal schools; lower tracking in better schools; limited connections to professional and business networks; historically rooted lack of capital, loan discrimination and white flight that leaves blacks in lower-income communities with weaker tax bases.

Nor did Campbell show much resistance to my argument that institutions from school boards to the Supreme Court must have diversity of perspectives in order to have credible authority.

But then came the disconnect. Campbell appealed to a principle now much in vogue in California: that no matter the travesties of history or continuing racial discrimination, it is simply wrong to try to correct this set of injustices with another system of racial preferences. He wanted a “colorblind” society in which race carries no preference. Affirmative action--the legal insertion of counterracial preferences into the workings of society--he saw as a second wrong designed to make a right. And it scared him. How many whites would get displaced? For how long? He was concerned about racial discrimination, but he wanted the means of redressing it to be as moral as the end of achieving it.

I too want a clear path that reasonable Americans can follow to better race relations. But colorblindness? Is it possible? Desirable? To me, seeing color is a lesser problem than an endemic racial disadvantage rooted in society’s history and woven throughout its social and economic structures. Black people know from daily experience who gets assigned to the lower tracks in schools. Even middle-class black Americans sense the discomfort of white people around them in shopping malls, restaurants and neighborhoods. To stop seeing color now, after centuries of slavery and lingering racial disadvantage, would not eliminate that disadvantage--it would maintain and fortify it.

And while I believe that Campbell is an honorable man, the track record of concern for racial justice among many opponents of affirmative action is, frankly, less than inspiring. Can we really take their embracing of colorblindness and civil rights rhetoric in opposing affirmative action as evidence of a deeper commitment to racial justice, when many of them have tolerated that injustice for so long and offer no serious alternative?

To me, it is affirmative action, not the abstraction of a colorblind society, that is the real testament to Americans’ capacity for fairness. And despite its need for continual scrutiny and mending, it has worked. Because of affirmative action, minority groups and women have made educational and vocational progress. These policies have gradually created a conscionably diverse professional class without major displacement of other groups. To end it--especially in light of the unreliability of and cultural bias in our measures of merit--for the sake of an abstract purity, and with no realistic alternative, would be a history-reversing retreat from fairness.

The demoralizing first fruits of that retreat are already apparent. The news that the incoming classes at the UC Berkeley and University of Texas law schools are almost totally devoid of African American students--and the eerily similar yield revealed earlier this month at the UC Irvine and UC San Diego medical schools--is apt to be just the beginning of a legacy of following a principle to the extreme.

Like others in the national affirmative action debate, Campbell and I became mired in rhetorical point-making. Just out of sight were profoundly important questions that needed our energies: How can we achieve racial equity in education and foster the learning of all groups? How can we ease the socioeconomic realities that afflict our inner cities? How can we build trust in the racial commons of society from schools to the workplace to public spaces?

In 1962, James Baldwin shocked us into paying attention to the racial divide by quoting a slave song, “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!” We have made progress since then, in significant part due to affirmative action. I believe we should not drop it without a compelling alternative. But our problems go deeper than this policy. Regardless of what happens to affirmative action, if we want colorblindness to become more than an abstraction, we will have to confront the conditions that sustain color-coded inequalities in society, that make darker color a disadvantage.

Thus, after taking a position on affirmative action, we must move ahead to the questions that position begs: “What will I do to improve the racial commons of this society? How can I direct what I do--from teaching school to designing public spaces to working with children--toward bettering relations between groups?” In this year-long conversation on race, let the answer to these questions stand as the test of our commitment to racial and societal justice.

This is the common ground where my debate opponent and I--held to our own rhetoric--might come together. For surely we both know, as most Americans do, that while we may now live under the rainbow sign, the uneasy history of race relations in this country has never dwelt far from the dominion of fire.