Race Scholar Takes Test of Wills With Clinton in Stride

She had never even met the president of the United States, and suddenly there was William Jefferson Clinton, in her face.

“Abigail, do you favor the United States Army abolishing the affirmative action program that produced Colin Powell--yes or no? Yes or no?” the president demanded. The Akron, Ohio, audience at last week’s TV talk-show-style dialogue on race roared.

For prominent social scientist Abigail Thernstrom, “an old-fashioned integrationist” who came of age during the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the encounter before a nationwide television audience was anything but pleasant. The president was forceful--some would say fierce--and persistent in his grilling of the co-author of the new book “America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible.”

But Thernstrom, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a think tank in New York, accepted the mantle of presidential antagonist with equanimity. “I’m a grown-up,” she said in an interview late Friday. “If I can’t stand the heat, I should get out of the kitchen.”

Thernstrom said she believes that she was singled out for what looked to much of the world like presidential wrath “because I was the only one there who was known as an opponent of racial preferences.”

She uses that term carefully. According to Thernstrom and her husband and co-author, Stephan Thernstrom, a Harvard University history professor, social policy analysts--Clinton included--are wrong to use the more widely embraced expression “affirmative action.” That phrase, the Thernstroms maintain, implies “outreach, widening the net, looking for the best possible person.”

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By contrast, Abigail Thernstrom explained, “preference involves racial double standards, picking people on the basis of the color of their skin.”

Just in case there was any question about the distinction, Thernstrom grabbed a microphone from an audience member in Akron and challenged the president.

“It’s not affirmative action that’s the issue, it’s racial preferences, Mr. President,” she called out.

She later conceded that “it was definitely an aggressive action on my part.”

It was also roughly equivalent to waving a red cape in front of a bull. The president was off, chewing at Thernstrom’s philosophy. He began by dismissing the phrase “racial preferences” as “loaded.” To Thernstrom, that was actually a positive sign, because it meant he had read the book she and her husband spent seven years researching and writing--”or at least some of it.”

Replete with charts, including 76 tables of data, the 700-page tome attempts to pick up where the late Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish sociologist, left off in “An American Dilemma,” his landmark 1944 study of race in this country. The Thernstroms’ book examines what has happened to the status of African Americans since then, and explores the state of race relations.

Its conclusion is “very optimistic,” Thernstrom said. “We saw an enormous amount of progress, and we saw that process starting much earlier than we had previously dreamed. We found that already in the 1940s, change was in the air.”

But because they are outspoken in denouncing affirmative action, the Thernstroms’ position has been seized by conservative factions. Reviews of “America in Black and White” often brand the Lexington, Mass., couple as neoconservatives, an annoyance to Abigail Thernstrom. Labels are irrelevant, she maintains, even if “you can’t control what people say about you.”

If she had to adopt a brand name, however, it would be “an old-fashioned integrationist. I want people looked at as individuals. I don’t think all blacks or all whites are alike.” Growing up with the civil rights movement, “I believed then and I believe now that skin color should be irrelevant in public policy. Period. End of discussion.”

Thernstrom said she tries to ignore polarization in discussions of race because “what matters at the end of the day is the substance of the issues.” Still, she acknowledged that her opinions made her something of a sacrificial lamb at the Akron symposium. Several other authors who have written about race were present, and the president had clearly been briefed on all of them. But Thernstrom bore the brunt.

“It’s fine,” she said. “I have very strong views and a very hot-button issue. People are very emotional about it. And I’m not talking about the president.”

But even if she were, Thernstrom said she lauds Clinton for convening the race meeting in the first place. “What I really think it helps to do--and I applaud the president for this--it helps to legitimize a variety of voices on very different race-related issues. And I think that is an enormously important thing to happen because there is such a lack of public candor and such incivility when we talk about race. So much of it is behind closed doors.”

By engaging her in a conversation, even in an occasionally abrasive discussion, “he was saying, ‘It’s OK to disagree. People of enormous goodwill can disagree,’ ” she said.

No one likes to be put on the spot, she said. “I don’t think it’s fun at all.” But the meeting in Akron clearly advanced awareness about race in this country, Thernstrom said.

“That conversation said to the American people, it’s all right to talk about this out loud, and there are goodwilled people on both sides--and we all have the same end in mind, which is racial equality,” she said.