Arguing Over ‘Means,’ We Forget ‘Ends’

WASHINGTON — When Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) declared that his opposition to Bill Lann Lee’s nomination to be assistant attorney general for civil rights was “a matter of principle with me,” he was attempting to transform right-wing racial ideology into mainstream civil-rights orthodoxy. The essence of this position is that the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s left us with a degree of racism so negligible that the only things now threatening our racial tranquillity are race-conscious remedies, particularly affirmative action.

As a man once on intimate terms with segregation, I would be the last person to deny the enormity of racial progress in this century. I was born in a segregated hospital and had my first educational experience in a one-room segregated schoolhouse. My father, who died in Kansas City, is buried in a segregated cemetery because, in 1941, in Missouri, blacks weren’t good enough--even dead--to be around white people.

All that is over now, at least as a matter of legal principle. Constitutionalized segregation has been struck down and some federal protections erected for blacks, women and other minorities. Real education and economic gains have been made. Since the time I was a young man, in the late ‘50s, the black poverty rate has been cut by more than half, from 59% to 28%. But the struggle is far from over.

Some opponents of affirmative action, like James Q. Wilson, however, manipulate reality to make us think it’s so close to over that all that is required to cross the finish line are bracing doses of personal responsibility for the poor. In a recent article in the New York Times Book Review, Wilson first wrote an ode to our racial progress and then minimized current problems by suggesting the remaining difficulties are centered on an underclass “that numbers perhaps 900,000.” He opines that their problems arise solely from their personal behavior.

The truth about contemporary racial issues is far larger and far more complex. Real gaps in income, wealth, education, health, housing opportunities and employment still remain at all education levels, and are especially acute for the least skilled.

And, tragically, more than 40% of black children are growing up in poverty. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s economic policies require a pool of at least 6.5 million unemployed Americans to protect the value of wealthy people’s money. Blacks bear more than twice their share of this crippling national economic assignment, but nobody seems to notice. Since much public policy aimed at the poor discounts the human consequences of pervasive joblessness, cultural contempt and poverty, we look for ways to punish, not help them. For example, criminal-justice disparities between treatment of whites and minorities are so glaring that they shame our nation. To ignore such enormous social facts requires, it seems to me, a willful blindness.

But even the numbers don’t tell the whole story. The racism-is-negligible argument would be a hard sell to the black teenaged patron of an Eddie Bauer outlet in Prince George’s County, Md., forced by a security guard to strip off his day-old shirt because he could not produce a receipt to prove his purchase. It would be a hard sell to my white student who recently despaired because his parents were still trying to teach him racism by obsessing about “niggers” and how they “are ruining everything.”

And you couldn’t sell it to William Finnegan of the New Yorker, who wrote that his blood chilled when a 16-year-old girl linked with skinheads told him in a breathy voice how much she loved her hatred. Finnegan sensed the young woman felt her “marginal caste-class privilege” ebbing away and held onto her “hatred” as a last shred of self-respect.

Racism reared its head in Jamestown, at its founding, in 1607, as the Englishmen decided the inhabitants of the land where they had just squatted were inferior and began to build an ideology of hatred toward them. They also began to build a mythology about this new land as a white place. That deepened when blacks were introduced to the colony in 1619, and hardened when they were pushed into hereditary slavery by the 1650s.

During slavery, a lethal combination of contempt, fear and psychic and economic reliance on oppression of blacks seeped into the souls of many whites. Other minorities were fit into the “white America” mold as the country came to take serious notice of them. For blacks, those effects were carried through another century of constitutionalized and culturally sanctioned subordination.

During this period, there was one powerful preference that flowed into every nook and cranny of our national existence. That was a preference for whites, generally, and white men, in particular. Up through the middle of this century, except for the wealth held by white widows, white men owned and controlled virtually everything of monetary value in this society, including the power to pick those who would be privileged in the next generation.

In order for those who promote the idea that America is now almost colorblind to be right, the weight and momentum of more than three and a half centuries of American culture would have had to have been arrested and turned on a dime in the three short decades since the late ‘60s. That’s never happened in world history and it didn’t happen here.

Given the demographic realities the nation faces, those who seek to perpetuate entrenched white privilege are not only doing injury to our current quest for a more just and civilized society: They are seriously endangering the American future. The primitive hold the “white America” myth still has is deeply threatening to millions of citizens who sense the new America now being born.

In 1970, slightly more than 83% of Americans were white, but today, only about 73% are. Soon after the 1992 election, the New Yorker ran an item that recounted the growing distress of a working-class Manhattanite as he watched the election returns in a bar. He became more and more agitated as Bill Clinton’s successes mounted. Much of his concern centered on his expressed fear that Clinton’s affirmative-action inclinations would sweep Jesse Jackson and his friends into seats of power. Finally, when Clinton’s victory was proclaimed, the man threw his money on the bar and stormed out, shouting: “I’ll be damned if I’ll be a minority in my own country.”

Think how that man (or a daughter he has taught to think like him) will feel in the middle of the next century, when only about 52% of Americans will be white and 48% will be “minorities.”

We face a crisis of identity. As the American population changes, the psyche of America has to change if we are to avoid the risk of tearing ourselves apart. The fears and resentments of whites and the pain and rage of injured minorities have somehow to be taken into account as we navigate our way toward a different looking and sounding country just a half century hence.

The right has been entangling us for years in messy fights over “means,” using words designed to evoke white resentment and to create racial division; “quotas,” “forced busing” and “reverse discrimination” as a creator of crippled blacks and resentful whites. We don’t have time for that. We need rich vision and a beckoning goal. Thurgood Marshall and his allies--black and white--provided us with a wonderful American vision: a just and democratic society.

Somehow we have to summon the moral courage to understand that the lost and demonizing skinhead and the lost crack seller are both part of us. We have to come to terms with forces in American culture that have made some of our fellow Americans into people we want to deny. But these people are us and they are only the extreme embodiments of the damage we do to ourselves by our denials and by stubborn attempts to preserve the privileges racism has embedded in our nation.

Considering the demographic and psychic challenges our country faces, we must take race into account in preparing Americans for the civic and leadership roles required of them as our country experiences these profound changes. In these circumstances, educational excellence in America cannot be achieved without active diversity firmly embedded in the education process. Moreover, policy changes cannot be achieved if the seats of power and the voices of influence all belong to white men. In preparing people for the future, we must take our history and cultural realities into account.

We must also do everything we can to provide opportunity for the minority poor as well as for whites who feel left out of American opportunity structures and thus fall into deep resentments of “others” and become--in some cases--vulnerable to depraved ideologies. In all these cases, personal responsibility is an important element of the solution. But so is first-rate, diverse education and so are public policies fashioned by officials who reflect the broad human variety found in the American population.

Those are all means--like Marshall’s attack on segregated schools. My own vision is of a country of fully entitled Americans drawn from all corners of the globe, a substantial portion of whom are active citizens engaged in the maintenance of a humane and civilized democracy. The Founders of this nation knew democracy would always be a work in progress that could only be maintained over the generations by people who took citizenship as seriously as 18th-century Americans did. Reaching and maintaining a reasonable level of decency in a society requires dedication and sustained struggle. Only robust, broad-based democratic activity gives us a chance to reach with understanding for both the crack-head and the skinhead and the will to attempt to improve the lives of both--and all of us in between.