Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (7 page)

Obviously it is not the goal of ending racism that divides the former activists. It is their conflicting memories of the past and differing strategies for the future. How much racial progress has been made since the federal government embraced the civil rights agenda? What is the best way to overcome the racial inequalities that persist?

For those opposed to Proposition 209, the answer is simple: racism has not changed its substance, only its form. In their view, whatever gains blacks have made have been forced upon a recalcitrant white populace. If the government were to be race neutral, historic prejudice would reassert itself despite the existing anti-discrimination laws. Even without this resurgence of prejudice, existing inequalities themselves create injustice. The remedy, therefore, must be continued government intervention to ensure equality of results. For the nation to eliminate affirmative action policies, as both Jesse Jackson and President Clinton have warned, would be to invite the "re-segregation" of American life.

A scholarly study by two civil rights veterans has now been introduced into this debate. Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom's
America In Black and White
reconstructs the history of racial progress and conflict in the postwar era and examines the impact of affirmative action solutions. The authors cite a statement made in 1996 by Atlanta's black mayor articulating the view implicit in the position of Clinton and Jackson that every black person in America "has benefited from affirmative action. There's not been anybody who's gotten a job on their own, no one who's prospered as a businessman or businesswoman on their own."

Yet consider these unruly facts presented in the Thernstroms's book:

• In 1940, 87 percent of American blacks lived in poverty. By 1960-five years before the Civil Rights Acts and ten years before the first affirmative action policies-the figure was down to 47 percent. This twenty year drop was an even greater and more rapid decline in black poverty than the one that took place over the next thirty-five years, a period which saw the black poverty rate come down to 26 percent as of 1995
  
• In 1940, only 5 percent of black men and 6.4 percent of black women had middle class occupations. By 1970, the figures were 22 percent for black men (a nearly four-fold increase) and 36 percent for black women (a more than five-fold increase) — larger again than the increase that took place in the twenty years after affirmative action was put in place (roughly 1970) when the figures reached 32 percent and 59 percent.
  

The cause of black poverty, as the Thernstroms show (and the dramatic expansion of the black middle class should make self-evident), has little to do with race. Consequently, its solution will not be affected by affirmative action set-asides. Currently, 85 percent of all poor black children live in fatherless families. In other words, the poverty rate for black children without fathers is nearly six times that for black children with two parents. A far more effective antipoverty program would be to promote black marriages.

Even in higher education, affirmative action has not been the indispensable agent its advocates imply. The rate of gain for blacks in college enrollments was greater between 1960 and 1970, before affirmative action policies were instituted (enrollments for blacks increased from 4 percent to 7 percent of the total college population), than it was in the decades after, between 1970 and 1980, when black enrollment went from 7 percent to 9.9 percent and between 1980 and 1994, when it went from 9.9 percent to 10.7 percent.

Of course, before affirmative action, many of these students were attending all black colleges in the South. The really significant gain from affirmative action was greater "diversity." The proportion of black students enrolled in predominantly white schools quadrupled between 1960 and 1980. This made white liberals and — to be fair — whites generally, feel good. But was it as good for the blacks who were enrolled, particularly those who were accepted to schools because of affirmative action double standards?

In 1965 — before these policies were put in place — blacks were only about half as likely to actually graduate from college as whites. In 1995 — after affirmative action took effect — the figure was exactly the same. As of 1995, almost half of African-Americans in the twenty to twenty-five age bracket had been enrolled in college, but barely one in seven of them held a bachelor's degree.

In the economic sphere, affirmative action policies had the net effect not of employing greater numbers of blacks or raising their living standards, but of shifting black employment from small businesses to large corporations and to government. In higher education, the net effect of affirmative action has been more perverse. In a system organized as a hierarchy of merit, a good student who can get As at Boston University might flunk out at Harvard. In 1995, there were only 1,764 black students nationwide who scored as high as 600 on the verbal SATs (the math scores were even worse). But, under affirmative action guidelines, all those students were recruited to Berkeley,
Harvard
, and similar elite schools where the average white student (not to mention the average Asian) normally had scores at least 100 points (and more likely 200) higher.

In short, at every level of the university system, the net effect of affirmative action has been to place Arican-Americans in college programs that exceed their qualifications. As a result, affirmative action students have lower grade point averages and higher dropout rates (by fifty percent and more) than students who are admitted without benefit of racial preferences. At Berkeley, for example, the gap in SAT scores between blacks and whites is nearly three hundred points. As this disparity would predict, blacks drop out of Berkeley at nearly three times the rate of whites. This is the unspoken nightmare of affirmative action's impact on the very minorities it was designed to help.

It is a poignant irony that the college that comes closest to racial equality in actually
graduating
its students in the era of affirmative action is Ole Miss, once the last bastion of segregation in the South. Now integrated, Ole Miss has resisted the new racial duplicity in admissions standards. The result is that 49 percent of all whites who enter Ole Miss as freshman graduate, and so do 48 percent of all blacks.

On the basis of the actual results, it is clear that affirmative action based on racial preference is unnecessary to racial progress, damaging to its supposed beneficiaries, and ineffective in terms of closing the income and education gaps between blacks and whites. While it may create additional privilege for some members of an already privileged black elite — 86 percent of the affirmative action students at elite schools are from upper middle-class or wealthy backgrounds — its more durable effect is to create failure that is unnecessary. In addition, it aggrieves those whose achievements are real, but who become suspect because of the circumvention of standards. Finally, racial preferences incite the resentment of other groups, not only whites but also Asians, who see themselves displaced on the basis of race from their hard-won places of merit. In his book,
Liberal Racism
, veteran civil rights activist Jim Sleeper addresses the toxic effect of these good intentions. "Liberalism no longer curbs discrimination," he writes. "It invites it. It does not expose racism; it recapitulates and, sometimes, reinvents it."

Thus does the Cold War between the children of Martin Luther King beget ironies without end.

^*
For an account of these battles, see Lydia Chavez,
The Color Bind: Cahfornia's Battle to End Affirmative Action
(Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998).

A
REVEALING ASPECT of the White House crisis that engulfed President Clinton in 1998 was the racial gap in public opinion polls, which was almost as wide as after the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder case. When the world discovered in January that the president was having sex with a twenty-two-year-old intern, a
New York Times
poll found that 81 percent of blacks (as compared to 58 percent of whites) nonetheless approved the way the president was doing his job. When asked whether the president shared the moral values of most Americans, fully 77 percent of blacks (in contrast to less than half that fraction of whites) said yes. Nine months later, after the discovery of the stained dress and the release of the Starr report, 63 percent of blacks still thought the president-now a proven liar and philanderer — shared the nation's morality. It was
three times
the number of whites (22 percent) who did.

These are striking statistics, reflecting a unique community support of the president (even feminists were more ambivalent), and prompting attempts to explain it. According to a widely quoted comment by comedian Chris Rock, Clinton's African-American 56 support was inspired by the fact that he is "the first black president." Explained Rock: "It's very simple. Black people are used to being persecuted. Hence, they relate to Clinton." The comedian was not alone in these thoughts. In an article exploring African-American reactions to the Clinton investigation,
New York Times
reporter Kevin Sack quoted NAACP head Julian Bond saying "You just can't help but think that some of this [investigation of Clinton] is race based," while Harvard Professor Alvin Poussaint reported that rumors were circulating in the African-American community to the effect that "[Clinton] must have had black ancestry."

A full-blown expression of these attitudes was on display in the
New Yorker
, where Nobel laureate Toni Morrison wrote of the crisis: "African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetimes. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

Perhaps one has to be a lapsed leftist like myself to react to the loopy anti-white attitudes laced into these cadences from one of our most celebrated and rewarded national literary figures.
Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetimes?
Apparently, Colin Powell, the most popular presidential prospect in polls taken only two years before is not all that black, having been born into a two-parent household and, though poor in origins and familiar with discrimination, not known for his unhealthy food addictions or stereotypical musical tastes.

On the other hand, perhaps the liberal identification of blackness with victimization and social dysfunction is not so wide of the mark in explaining the sympathy of political leftists like Morrison and Bond or the support of the Congressional Black Caucus for the immoralist from Little Rock. Perhaps it reflects a resonance in the black community to the White House's cynical strategy of defining presidential deviancy down: "They all do it."
Roosevelt, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush — they all lie and cheat. So why shouldn't our guy?
This certainly seems to be the corrosive logic behind which some blacks have rallied to the defense of other criminal politicians, like the corrupt and crack-addicted former mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry. It could easily account for the undertones of racial paranoia ("they're out to get our guys") that surfaced when African-American members of the Clinton Administration, Ron Brown, Mike Espy and Hazel O'Leary came under investigation for irregularities in office.

Which is precisely the way Toni Morrison frames Clinton's problem: "When virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke?" According to Morrison the message from white America is clear: "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place." Or, to paraphrase the mantra of the late Malcolm X,
No matter how high you rise, you're ahvays gonna be a nigger to the man.

Putting aside the paranoid overtones of such attitudes in the era of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan — or Toni Morrison for that matter — one might still ask why Bill Clinton should be "our guy" from an African-American point of view. Isn't this the Bill Clinton who established his New Democrat credentials by delivering a verbal slap to Sister Souljah on the eve of his election in 1992 and by losing the phone number of Jesse Jackson for the next five years? Isn't this the Bill Clinton who betrayed old friend and political soul-mate Lani Guinier, and who, after nominating her as his civil rights chief, left her to the mercies of her political enemies, all the while pretending ignorance of who she was and what she believed? Isn't this the Bill Clinton whose vaunted "dialogue on race" — the centerpiece of his racial initiative — was immolated by his own sex scandal while the final report of his Race Commission ended up calling merely for . . . more dialogue? Reviewing the report, liberal columnist Frank Rich summed up the Clinton record on race as follows: "high ideals, beautiful show, one-night stand."

Indeed, isn't this the Bill Clinton who brought Jesse Jackson back into the fold and wrapped himself in the protective cloak of the black community and its historic symbols only when he himself was in terminal trouble? Only after Democrats had lost the Congress and he no longer had the power to seriously advance the black community's agendas? Surely there have been few more repellent demonstrations of Clinton's user-ethic than his pilgrimage of atonement to Africa, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal and after he had been trapped in his labyrinth of lies and become an international laughing-stock. With Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters and a delegation of African-Americans in tow, the President set off to wave the bloody flag, apologizing for slavery (to the wrong African country) in an attempt to wrap the sins of America around his own. Continuing his bid to hide his tarnished self under the mantle of black suffering, he went on to Martha's Vineyard to debase the memory of Martin Luther King's march on Washington, choosing the anniversary of that historic occasion for another unconvincing act of contrition. These are the kinds of gestures that give tokenism a bad name.