One Nation, Under God

One evening some 30 years ago, the Smothers Brothers sang “The Lord is Colorblind” to a nationwide television audience. The movement for black equality had not completely passed beyond its early, epic phase; racial integration remained a shining ideal in many Americans’ minds. It was a long time ago. Imagine the reactions that song might evoke today--bafflement, embarrassment, derision. We have entered an era when awareness of race seems inescapable, part of the atmosphere we breathe. Notions of colorblindness seem a remnant of liberal sentimentality.

The decline of integration was part of a broader transformation of American political culture, a shift from a universalist vocabulary of justice and freedom to a particularist language of identity and self-esteem. All the social movements of the 1960s were affected by this sea-change, but none as profoundly as the struggle for racial equality. The turn from colorblindness to black power was an understandable response to assimilationist orthodoxy, a necessary rejection of the assumption that the majority white culture epitomized everything admirable and desirable in American life. Yet the long-term results of this rejection have been more problematic. Race controversy has produced the longest-running psychodrama in town; substantive reform has given way to rituals of expiation; racial politics has turned into an awkward amalgam of bureaucratic mandates and group therapy.

Amid this confusion, the integrationist vision becomes all the more appealing. These authors share it. Shelby Steele, Tamar Jacoby and Jim Sleeper want to rescue it from sensitivity trainers, diversity managers, affirmative action activists--the whole “race industry” (in Sleeper’s phrase) which has acquired a major stake in the color-coding of American society. Howard Kohn is less concerned with policy than with the intermingling of public and personal lives in a single community: Prince George’s County, Md., a rapidly integrating suburb of Washington. The stories Kohn tells suggest that Americans of various hues may be finding their own ways out of the morass of race-consciousness. The most hopeful evidence lies beyond the rancor and posturing of the public debate, beyond the bureaucratic formulas. The integrationist vision is being realized--however imperfectly--in the private realm of love and marriage.

These books, whatever their various flaws, constitute an encouraging resurgence of integrationist thought. Steele’s “A Dream Deferred” is the most sweeping in its formulations, the least attached to detailed evidence. Still he makes some perceptive observations. His sharpest is that interventionist programs often serve to establish white virtue as much as to aid black development. He wonders what would have happened if the young Charlie Parker had been the target of affirmative action aimed at improving black musical performance: His tutor secretly believes the boy is too damaged ever to master the saxophone or read music; Charlie himself senses his tutor’s pity and fears his own inadequacy; both parties suspect that the saxophone, a European instrument, should probably not be imposed on an African American child; ultimately Charlie quits, but the tutor’s father tells his son: “What pleases me most is how YOU are developing as a human being.” Solicitous interventions sometimes damage the object of solicitude.

Steele is a clever critic of therapeutic cant, but his polemic suffers from its uncritical attachment to certain neoconservative assumptions. He assumes without citing evidence that affirmative action has been “obviously ineffective,” but if the aim of the program was professional advancement for women and minorities, then it was effective. He accepts SAT scores as evidence of achievement, without questioning the pernicious influence of the Educational Testing Service in promoting a class-bound, narrowly technocratic model of education. Like other would-be meritocrats who embrace the ETS model, Steele fails to see its connection to a narrowly managerial position of personal achievement.

The bland sterility of this ETS model makes African American culture seem a sensuous, spontaneous and sociable alternative for white kids seeking some vitality outside the mainstream. Steele overlooks the complex significance of crossover styles (rap music, baggy jeans and the like), relying on a familiar litany, invoking familiar values of self-reliance, hard work and moral responsibility. These values are central to American ideals of citizenship and character; it would be frivolous to deny their importance. But they are not a full prescription for a satisfying life nor an antidote to contemporary racial injustice.

Tamar Jacoby is less interested in prescribing solutions than in finding out what went wrong. “What ever happened to integration?” she asks. The answers lie in her abundantly detailed accounts of race relations in three cities: New York, Detroit and Atlanta. To oversimplify: In New York, integration was inadvertently done in by a coalition of black nationalists and guilt-ridden white liberals; in Detroit, by busing; in Atlanta, by suspicions and scandals arising from affirmative action. Jacoby shows how, in each city, blindness to class issues undermined liberal reforms. In a familiar American pattern, talking about racial privilege became a way of not talking about economic privilege.

In telling the New York story, Jacoby recalls some key moments in the decline and fall of integration: Mayor John Lindsay’s painfully earnest efforts to placate militant black activists, the Ford Foundation’s early support for Afrocentrism in the classroom and the Kerner Commission Report on Civil Disorders, which according to Jacoby encouraged blacks “to lay every setback, no matter how personal, at the door of the white world.” The key episode was the confrontation between black community organizers and white teachers in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district in Brooklyn. Though the majority of blacks remained committed to integration, Lindsay and the Ford Foundation treated extremists as if they were the voice of the people and ignored the plight of the teachers, who were physically threatened and taunted with anti-Semitic abuse by self-appointed black leaders like Sonny Carson. Ultimately the controversy pitted Lindsay, the “armchair do-gooders” from Manhattan and the black militants against the teachers’ unions and their working-class sympathizers in the outer boroughs. No one emerged victorious.

The same muddle of class and race tensions characterized the situation in Detroit. The election of Mayor Coleman Young in 1974, after years of disorder and decline, was supposed to bring about a biracial renaissance. “Reach out and touch somebody’s hand,” Diana Ross sang at his inaugural, “Make this world a better place if you can.” Mere sentiment, it turned out. Under Young’s leadership, or lack of it, lawlessness continued to flourish, and white Detroiters continued to scurry for the suburbs. Their suburban safety was threatened, they thought, by the court-ordered plan to bus schoolchildren between the suburbs and the inner city. According to its critics, the busing plan was another example of elite reformers’ inattention to the needs of the people they claimed to be serving. The judge ordering the plan solicited much testimony from educational “experts,” but none from parents, black or white. Most came to distrust the busing plan, with good reason. It was a Rube Goldberg model of social engineering: Expensive and enormously complex, it did nothing to address the economic structures that reinforced the racial divisions in metropolitan Detroit.

Compared to Detroit, Atlanta is a success story, a city where American race relations are as good as they get--which turns out to be not so good after all. Even in Atlanta, Jacoby argues, integration has been achieved only fitfully--and then more in spite of federal programs than because of them. Under Mayor Maynard Jackson in the late 1970s, the city embarked on an ambitious program of affirmative action in the awarding of city construction contracts. Jacoby details the inefficiencies and scandals that arose as a part of the lumbering apparatus of minority set-asides, which (like the busing plan) depended on a statistical definition of racial justice. Far from encouraging new black businesses, affirmative action became an entitlement program for existing elites. The chief beneficiaries were wealthy and established contractors, white and black; smaller operators lacked the connections and could not afford the extra costs involved in biracial joint ventures. As for integration, by the early 1990s the races seemed further apart than ever. Hostility and suspicion had given way to apathy, a lack of concern and even curiosity about how the other half lived. “Race relations?” a onetime integrationist told Jacoby “We don’t have race relations in Atlanta anymore.”

Refusing to conclude on that bleak note, Jacoby strains to reaffirm her integrationist faith. She notices a growing pragmatism among black leaders--even Al Sharpton has cut his hair, put on a tie and run for mainstream office--and a persistent desire among whites, as well as blacks, to come together in a common civic culture. The path to that point is a key piece in the puzzle of American race relations. And, as Jacoby realizes, finding it will require more than moral exhortation or the undoing of misguided public policies.

Like Jacoby, Jim Sleeper emphasizes the importance of overcoming the impact of a fragmenting culture, but he has a keener sense of the role of market capitalism--as well as liberal ideology--in perpetuating that fragmentation. His “Liberal Racism” is the most intellectually sophisticated of these critiques, the most resistant to ideological formula. It is also the only one that treats race relations as something more than a crisis in black and white; Sleeper acknowledges the multitude of colors that make up a race-conscious multicultural society.

Though he takes a couple of cheap shots (at the black intellectuals Cornel West and Robin Kelley), Sleeper is thoughtful and fair. He makes an effective case against liberal race consciousness without resorting to conservative formulas or sacrificing his passion for racial justice. His opposition to race-consciousness springs in part from his appreciation for the full complexity of human experience and his reluctance to see it reduced to a single brittle category. “Americans don’t all see the world the same way,” he writes. “But neither do they like to think that differences run unerringly along racial and sexual group lines, as opposed to, say, individual, religious, class, or geographic lines.”

This perspective leads Sleeper to a nuanced critique of some of the more egregious products of the “race industry,” from William Kuntsler’s defense of the Tawana Brawley hoax to the corruption of the Voting Rights Act into an instrument for racial redistricting. The tyranny of numbers mandated that district boundaries be redrawn to ensure that the number of nonwhite elected officials match their proportion in the population. The new districts “violated every notion of community except a racial one,” Sleeper observes.

Both Sleeper and Jacoby move beyond the moralizing mantras of self-reliance. They emphasize the importance of a shared civic culture, of a sense of belonging, as a base for integration. The question is: belonging to what? As Sleeper acknowledges, the unfettered capitalism of recent decades has been a powerfully centrifugal force in American culture. The worship of wealth and possessions--what he calls “anomic consumerism”--has corroded our sense of commonweal. The only myth we share is the myth of the bottom line.

Or so it seems on the evidence from established media. But on the ground, things look a little more encouraging. Prince George’s County, for example, has become the suburban home of black professionals living and working alongside whites. During the last decade or so, as the population tipped toward a black majority, the average household income also rose significantly. Could this be the racial “utopia” described by the New York Times Magazine in 1992?

Well, no, reports Howard Kohn in “We Had a Dream,” but good people are doing their best. He evokes the Byzantine complexity of race relations in Prince George’s County by interweaving the stories of a dozen or more characters, at once idiosyncratic and typical: Elvira White, an ambitious black public defender who wants to become a judge but is undone by her angry assaults on real and imagined white racism; Amy Smith, a white teenager and client of Elvira’s, who is accused of plotting with her black boyfriend, Derrick Jones, to murder her policeman father (Derrick ends up dead, shot by the father in what he claims was self-defense); Sue Mills, a flamboyant former anti-busing agitator with a blond beehive hairdo, now running for county executive against the black developer Wayne Curry; Bruce Gordon, a white financial analyst who marries a black woman despite his father’s wishes; the Stricklers and the Kirwins, elderly white liberals who fret about crime and ponder voting for Sue Mills while striving to keep their hopes for racial harmony intact.

Kohn skillfully orchestrates this soap opera. His writing is often flat, but his plotting is superb, and he brings most of his characters to life. The atmosphere is pure Prince George’s County: as humid as a July morning on the Patuxent River, as tacky as a strip mall anchored by a 7-Eleven. Under smoggy skies, amid suburban sprawl and clotted freeways, blacks and whites circle each other warily--mingling envy, distrust, admiration, resentment and erotic fascination.

This community is no utopia. The threat of resegregation looms. Few people on either side of the color line want to be part of an unwelcome minority, and the characters in Kohn’s book are no exception. Bruce Gordon moves to the white bread upscale suburb of Reston, Va., after he is surrounded and threatened by some well-dressed young black thugs in a mall parking lot. Merv Strickler celebrates Curry’s election victory as a vindication for the civil rights movement, then worries: “[W]e don’t want this place to become another Washington, with the black politicians totally in control and the white people skedaddled.” He and his wife are considering skedaddling themselves.

Yet signs of hope survive, more apparent in the interstices of personal lives than in election results and economic statistics. The key to real change, Kohn suggests, lies in the spread of romantic interracial relationships. He quotes Bruce Gordon: “Socioeconomics are hogwash. It’s the sex, and nothing wrong with that.” It may be the sex that gets things started, but more is required to keep them going. Kohn shows whites and blacks falling in love, getting married, connecting families and cultures. The steady rise in interracial marriages is the ultimate challenge to a color-coded society.

Sleeper and Jacoby share that view. Interracial couples and their offspring, by checking the “Other” box on official forms, are “fleeing the scripted solidarities of the past,” writes Sleeper. Jacoby concludes her Atlanta story by quoting Haywood Curry, a black North Carolina man, happily married for 20 years to Linda Bryant, a white woman from Virginia: “[W]e were people in love and the color of our skin didn’t make any difference.” The words may seem banal, but after 500 pages of Byzantine policy debate and rhetorical posturing, they come across as refreshing candor.

Married love, so long a target of radical disdain, could play a crucial role in revitalizing the integrationist vision. The personal may turn out to be political in ways that neither ideologues nor policymakers have imagined. If God is love, and love is colorblind, then maybe the Smothers Brothers were onto something after all.