| | 1. Race and the Problem of Civic Inclusion We, the faculty of this great university, are all specialists of one
kind or anothereconomists, physicists, historians, philosophers,
poets. Necessarily then, we are the masters of rarefied techniques of
inquiry and expression peculiar to our disciplines. But if we were no
more than that, we should have failed our students, and ourselves. We
are also intellectuals, and citizens. We bear the citizen's duty to engage
the problems of this society, and the intellectual's responsibility to
speak what truth he is given to know about them. If truth is not unproblematic, then neither is it inaccessible. And,
telling the truth is decidedly a political act. "From the viewpoint
of politics, truth has a despotic character," declared Hannah Arendt,
in her essay, "Truth and Politics." "Unwelcome opinion
can be argued with, rejected, or compromised upon," she goes on,
"but unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing
can move except plain lies." Moreover, at this late date in the twentieth
century, we know that social justice is impossible unless intellectuals
tell the truth. This is a lesson which Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright
turned politician, teaches as well as anyone. In "The Power of the
Powerless," his classic essay on the intellectual's role in opposing
totalitarianism, he observes that: "Under the orderly surface of
the life of lies... there slumbers the hidden sphere of life in its real
aims, of its hidden openness to truth." It is the intellectual's job to tap into this hidden sphere. Thus, while
I come to the subject of this lecture as an economist, I come also as
a citizen and, most pointedly, as an intellectual. Though the study of
race relations in the United States has been a scholarly preoccupation
of mine for many years now, it is much more than that. (Can I be forgiven
this inter-mingling of the personal and professional, of the head and
the heart?) When I speak of the "Divided Society", therefore,
I have principally in mind our own great and troubled nation. And, when
I refer to the "Democratic Idea," I mean to invoke the principles
of the American FoundingJefferson's self-evident truthsthose
noble ideals which, of necessity, have been only imperfectly realized
in practice. America was a slave society at the Founding. This fact, I suggest, is
of no small significance today. It would take another four score years
before the nation which had been, in Lincoln's immortal words, "conceived
in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,"
would, through the seismic convulsion of a great civil war, finally rid
itself of that most undemocratic of institutions. But, the abolition of
slavery did not resolve the conflict between the democratic idea and the
reality of social division. There remained the need to achieve an estate
of equal citizenship for the descendants of African slaves, not just in
theory but as a matter of political fact. Nearly a century more would
pass before significant progress toward this objective could occur. Even
today this process of democratization, though well advanced, remains incomplete. We have no need for a litany of statistics here. The plain fact is that
Blacks are vastly over-represented among those who suffer the maladies
and afflictions of social marginality in America, however measured. Some
districts in the middle of our great cities, occupied almost exclusively
by Blacks, are among the most miserable, violent, and despairing places
in the modern, industrial world. The prisons are filled to overflowing
with black men, and the welfare rolls are crowded with black women and
children. Rates of infection with the AIDS virus run five to ten times
higher among black than white populations. Black Americans as a group
experience lower life expectancies, higher infant mortality rates, lower
levels of academic achievement, higher poverty rates, greater unemployment,
and a higher incidence of mental illness than do white Americans. Historical
trends give us no reason to anticipate that these disparities will attenuate
in the foreseeable future. Nor is the racial divide discernible only in terms of the conditions
of the poor. The psychological and political rift separating Blacks and
Whites cuts across class lines. It is evidenced by divided public reaction
to events such as the O.J. Simpson trial and the Million Man March, and
by widely read books on the race issue which have appeared in recent years
under titles like The Scar of Race, Two Nations: Separate, Hostile and
Unequal and The Rage of a Privileged Class (the black middle class, that
is.) Weariness is discernible in the public conversations we Americans
now endure across the chasm of race. The idealists of an earlier era who
preached the interracial gospel of "the beloved community" look
in hindsight to have been naive dreamers. Thus, when we speak of racial matters in the United States, the words
dilemma, paradox, and tragedy abound. For, despite the civil rights revolution
in our law and politics which occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, the poisonous
legacy of slavery remains with us, as do many of the doubts about the
future of our political order to which that legacy has given rise. These
doubts have troubled every generation since the Founding. In the early
19th century Alexis De Tocqueville, assaying the future prospects for
race relations in the United States, prophesied that "the presence
of a black population upon its territory" would become "the
most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union."
He was particularly struck by how "the prejudice which repels the
Negroes (causes) inequality (to be) sanctioned by the manners while it
is effaced from the laws of the country." A century later, Gunnar
Myrdal rediscovered this fundamental conflict between the high ideals
of our political culture and those social customs which relegated Negroes
to a status of second class citizenship. His book, called simply An American
Dilemma came to define America's race problem in the post-WWII era. Now, as a new century dawns with the way forward toward racial reconciliation
decidedly unclear, we Americans will have to entertain the possibility
that the civil rights revolution, so welcome and so long overdue, did
not fully vindicate the legitimacy and virtue of our democratic traditions.
If this divided society is to realize its democratic ideals, a great deal
of work remains to be done. Responsibility for doing this work falls upon
Blacks and Whites alike. This is the work of civic inclusionincorporating
the descendants of African slaves more fully into the commonwealth, completing
the process begun by the Emancipation. (Of course, America is not only
black and white; but, the alienation of Blacks from the body politic constitutes
a unique challenge to our democratic aspirations.) The fact is that, despite the historic achievements of the civil rights
movement, there remains a fundamental dualism at the heart of public ideals
about race in America. We harbor a glaring contradiction between the conviction
that a person's race is an irrelevancy, and the reflexive social practice
of attending assiduously to racial identity. We say people should be judged
by the content of their character and not the color of their skin; yet,
we sort, count, respond to, cavort with, and assess one another on the
basis of race. My writing has addressed both aspects of this dualism. I have argued
that explicit attention to inequality between Blacks and Whites, as distinct
from a purely color-blind concern about inequality among individuals,
is essential to the attainment of social justice. But I have also sought
to understandin both economic and political termsthe limits
of race-conscious public policy, ultimately arguing for the moral imperative
of racial transcendence. I see this as the central dilemma raised by the
problem of civic inclusion in American public life: We cannot ignore race,
but must not define ourselves mainly in racial terms. This dilemma is
similar to that which the Founding Fathers confronted regarding religion.
Their resolution, codified in the First Amendment to the Constitution,
was to protect religion's "free exercise" while prohibiting
its "establishment" by government. I will argue here that the
moral complexities of race in contemporary American life require comparably
subtle and flexible treatment. There is, however, reason to doubt that such subtlety will be forthcoming.
It is a tragic irony that, although realizing democratic ideals requires
effective civic dialogue across group lines, the very fact of social division
can profoundly undermine a polity's capacity for public deliberation.
Arguably, this is now the case in the American context. Debate on questions
of race in our society has been, by turns, hysterical, demagogic, angry,
guilt-ridden or simply inane. Our "race-talk" is too often freighted
with symbolic significance, laced with code words, devoid of candor, or
full of wishful thinking. Racial polarization has led many a politician
either to abandon straight talk altogether, or to pander to base sentiments.
And, the need of academic critics ever to stand "on the right side
of history" has deprived much of their reflection in this area of
its force and objectivity. Thus, a public lecture on this subject is never a straightforward exercise.
I engage here, of necessity, in two connected but distinct discourses,
practicing a kind of "double speak," if you will. On the one
hand, I speak as a public man, an American, to the whole nation, offering
advice on how "we"that is, all of usshould approach
questions of race. But, as a Black I will be seen (by Whites and Blacks)
to be addressing "my people" about how "we" should
endeavor to make progress. This dual role limits what I can say without
risk of misunderstanding by one or another audience. Both audiences may
extend to me a certain license because of race but, for the same reason,
may also demand a certain fealty: Each will search for evidence of disloyalty
to cherished values and for confirmation of strongly held convictions.
Yet, if I am true to my higher callingas an intellectual, passionately
engaged with the most compelling social problem of my dayit is inevitable,
and entirely proper, that some of you will be disappointed. 2. Social Segmentation and Economic Inequality But, then, what can one say as an economist about matters such as these? My scholarly work on the problem of race relations began with a more
general inquiry into the theory of economic inequality. Specifically,
my 1981 paper, "Intergenerational Transfers and the Distribution
of Earnings," which appeared in the journal Econometrica introduced
a model of economic achievement in which a person's earnings depended
on a random endowment of innate ability, and on skills acquired from formal
training. The key feature of this theory was that individuals had to rely
on their families to pay for their training. In this way, a person's economic
opportunities were influenced by his inherited social position. I showed
how, under these circumstances, the distribution of income in each generation
could be determined from that which had obtained in the previous generation.
My objective with the model was to illustrate how in the long run, when
people depend on resources available within families to finance their
acquisition of skills, economic inequality would come to reflect the inherited
advantages of birth. A disparity among persons in economic attainment
would bear no necessary connection to differences in their innate abilities. In other work, I applied this mode of reasoning to the problem of group,
as distinct from individual, inequality. That analysis began with two
observations. First, all societies exhibit significant social segmentation.
People make choices about whom to befriend, whom to marry, where to live,
to which schools to send their children, and so on. Factors like race,
ethnicity, social class and religious affiliation influence these associational
choices. Second, the processes through which individuals develop their
productive capacities are shaped by custom, convention and social norms,
and are not fully responsive to market forces, or reflective of the innate
abilities of persons. Networks of social affiliation are not usually the
results of calculated economic decisions. They nevertheless help determine
how resources important to the development of the productive capacities
of human beings are made available to various persons. More concretely, one can say that an adult worker with a given degree
of personal efficacy has been "produced" from the "inputs"
of education, parenting skills, acculturation, nutrition, and socialization
to which he was exposed in his formative years. While some of these "inputs"
can be bought and sold, some of the most crucial "factors of production"
are only available as byproducts from activities of social affiliation.
Parenting services are not to be had for purchase on the market, but accrue
as the consequence of the social relations that obtain between the custodial
parents, and with the child. The allocation of parenting services among
a prospective generation of adults is thus the indirect consequence of
social activities undertaken by members of the preceding generation. An
adolescent's peer group is similarly a derivative consequence of some
complex processes of social networking. I concede that this is an artificial way of thinking about human development,
but the artifice is quite useful. For, it calls attention to the critical
role played by inalienable, non-marketed, social and cultural resources
in the production and reproduction of economic inequality. The relevance
of such factors, as an empirical matter, is beyond doubt. The importance
of networks, contacts, social background, family connections, and informal
associations of all kinds has been amply documented by students of social
stratification. In addition, values, attitudes, and beliefs of central
import for the attainment of success in life are shaped by the cultural
milieu in which a person develops. Whom one knows affects what one comes
to know and, ultimately, what one can do with one's God-given talents. While all of this may seem obvious, the fact is that, prior to my work,
formal theories of economic inequality had said little about the role
of social background. I was the first economist to use the term "social
capital" in reference to these processes by which the social relationships
that occur among persons promote or retard their acquisition of traits
valued in the market place. A large and growing literature has since emerged
in which allowance is taken of the myriad ways that a person's opportunities
to develop his natural gifts depend upon the economic achievements of
those with whom he is socially affiliated. This literature suggests that
unqualified confidence in the equity and efficiency of the income distribution
produced by the market is not justified. In particular, this analysis has an important ethical implication: Because
the creation of a skilled workforce is a social process, the meritocratic
idealthat in a free society individuals should be allowed to rise
to the level justified by their competenceshould be tempered with
the observation that no one travels that road alone. The facts that generations
overlap, that much of social life lies outside the reach of public regulation,
and that prevailing social affiliations influence the development of the
intellectual and personal skills of the young, imply that present patterns
of inequalityamong individuals and between groupsmust embody,
to some degree, social and economic disparities which have existed in
the past. To the extent that past disparities are illegitimate, the propriety
of the contemporary order is called into question. I have employed this framework to explore the legitimacy question in
regards to inequality between Blacks and Whites in America. In a theoretical
example I showed that, notwithstanding the establishment of a legal regime
of equal opportunity, historically engendered economic differences between
racial groups could well persist into the indefinite future. I concluded
that the pronounced racial disparities to be observed in American cities
are particularly problematic, since they are, at least in part, the product
of an unjust history, propagated across the generations by the segmented
social structures of our race-conscious society. Thus, I would argue as a matter of social ethics that there should be
some governmental policy whose effect is to mitigate the economic marginality
of those languishing in the ghettos of America. I stress that this is
not a reparations argument. When the developmental prospects of an individual
depend on the circumstances of those with whom he is socially affiliated,
even a minimal commitment to equality of opportunity requires such a policy.
In our divided society, given our tragic past, this implies that public
efforts intended to counter the effects of historical disadvantage among
Blacks are not only consistent with, but indeed are required by, widely
embraced democratic ideals. 3. The Affirmative Action Problem This argument leads naturally to the question of whether affirmative
action policies are necessary and justified. To emphasize that racial
group disparities can be transmitted across generations through subtle
and complex social processes is not necessarily to endorse employment
or educational preferences based on race. (I will offer in due course
a number of reasons to think that these policies should be curtailed.)
But recognizing the importance of social segmentation does cause one to
doubt the ethical viability, and indeed the logical coherence, of "color-blind
absolutism"the notion now abroad in the land that the Constitution
requires government agents to ignore the racial identity of citizens.
Ironically, recent claims by some conservatives to this effect bear an
eerie resemblance, in form and in substance, to the similarly absolute
claims of some card-carrying civil libertarians on behalf of a "wall
of separation" between church and state. Consider that, as a practical matter, the government cannot enforce
laws against employment discrimination without taking note of a gross
demographic imbalance in an employer's workforce. Yet, requiring that
employment data be reported by race is already a departure from pure color-blind
behavior. So too is the practice, nearly universal in the public and private
sectors, of targeted outreach efforts designed to increase the representation
of Blacks in the pool of persons considered for an employment opportunity.
Accordingly, the more intellectually consistent of the color-blind absolutists
now recommend, as logic would require, that we repeal the civil rights
laws, and abandon even those efforts to achieve racial diversity which
do not involve preferential treatment. But, is that stance consistent
with justice? More subtly, how can a college educator convey to students the lesson
that "not all Blacks think alike," with too few Blacks on campus
for this truth to become evident? Were an American president to assemble
a cabinet devoid or racial minority representation, would not the legitimacy
of his administration rightly be called into question? What prison warden
could afford to ignore the possibility that racial friction among his
inmates might threaten the maintenance of order within his institution.
Perhaps this is why presidents, prison wardens, and college educators
do not behave in a purely color-blind fashion in our divided society. Manufacturing hard cases which challenge the absolutist claim is a trivial
exercise. Can the police consider race when making undercover assignments?
Can a black public employee use health insurance benefits to choose a
black therapist with whom to discuss race-related anxieties? Can units
in a public housing project be let with an eye to sustaining a racially
integrated environment? What about a National Science Foundation effort
that encourages gifted Blacks to pursue careers in fields where few now
study? Clearly, there is no general rule which can resolve all of these
cases reasonably. I would venture to say that the study of affirmative action has been
too much the preserve of lawyers and philosophers, and has too little
engaged the interests of economist, and other social scientists. It is
as if, for this policy unlike all others, we could determine a prior the
wisdom of its applicationas if its practice were always either "right"
or "wrong", never simply "prudent" or "unwise."
I want to argue that, although departures from color-blind absolutism
are both legitimate and desirable in some circumstances, there are compelling
reasons to question the wisdom of relying as heavily as we now do on racial
preferences to bring about civic inclusion for black Americans. One such reason is that the widespread use of preferences can logically
be expected to erode the perception of black competence. This point is
often misunderstood, so it is worth spelling-out in some detail. The argument
is not a speculation about the feelings of persons who may or may not
be the beneficiaries of affirmative action. Rather, it turns on the rational,
statistical inferences which neutral observers are entitled to make about
the unknown qualifications of persons who may have been preferred, or
dispreferred, in a selection process. The main insight is not difficult to grasp. Let some employer use a
lower threshold of assessed productivity for the hiring of Blacks than
Whites. The preferential hiring policy defines three categories of individuals
within each of the two racial groups, which I will call marginals, successes
and failures Marginals are those whose hiring status is altered by the
policyeither Whites not hired who otherwise would have been, or
Blacks hired who otherwise would not have been. Successes are those who
would be hired with our without the policy, and failures are those who
would be passed-over with or without the preferential policy. Let us consider
how an outsider who can observe the hiring decision, but not the employer's
productivity assessment, would estimate the productivity of those subject
to this hiring process. Notice that a lower hiring threshold for Blacks causes the outside market
to reduce its estimate of the productivity of black successes, since on
average less is required to achieve that status. In addition, black failures,
seen to have been passed-over despite a lower hiring threshold, are thereby
revealed as especially unproductive. On the other hand, a hiring process
favoring Blacks must enhance the reputations of white failures, as seen
by outsiders, since they may have been artificially held-back. And, white
successes, who are hired despite being disfavored in selection, have thereby
been shown to be especially productive. We have thus reached the result that among Blacks, only marginals gain
in reputation from the establishment of a preferential hiring program;
both failures and successes are harmed by it. Moreover, among Whites only
marginals are harmed by the program; failures and successes must gain
from it! In practical terms, since marginals are typically a minority
of all workers, I am asserting that the outside reputations of most Blacks
will be lowered, and that of most Whites enhanced, by preferential hiring.
The inferential logic which leads to this arresting conclusion is particularly
insidious, in that it can serve to legitimate otherwise indefensible negative
stereotypes about Blacks. Another set of reasons for being skeptical about the practice of affirmative
action is that it can undercut the incentives which Blacks have to develop
their competitive abilities. For instance, preferential treatment can
lead to the patronization of black workers and students. By "patronization"
I mean the setting of a lower standard of expected accomplishment for
Blacks than for Whites, because of the belief that Blacks are not as capable
of meeting a higher, common standard. In the 1993 paper, "Will Affirmative
Action Eliminate Negative Stereotypes," which appeared in The American
Economic Review, Stephen Coate and I show how behavior of this kind can
be based on a self-fulfilling prophesy. That is, observed performance
among Blacks may be lower precisely because Blacks are being patronized,
while the patronization is undertaken because of the need for an employer
or admissions officer to meet affirmative action guidelines. To illustrate, consider a workplace in which a supervisor operating
under some affirmative action guidelines must recommend subordinate workers
for promotion. Suppose he is keen to promote Blacks where possible, monitors
his subordinates' performance, and bases his recommendations on these
observations. Pressure to promote Blacks might lead him to de-emphasize
deficiencies in the performance of black subordinates, recommending them
for promotion when he would not have done so for Whites. But, this behavior
on his part could undermine the ability for black workers to identify
and correct their deficiencies. They are denied honest feedback from their
supervisor on their performance, and are encouraged to think that one
can get ahead without attaining the same degree of proficiency as Whites
are taught they must attain. Alternatively, consider a population of students applying to professional
schools for admissions. The schools, due to affirmative actions concerns,
are eager to admit a certain percentage of Blacks. They believe that to
do so they must accept black applicants with test scores and grades below
those of some Whites whom they reject. If most schools follow this policy,
the message sent out to black students is that the level of performance
needed to gain admission is lower than that which white students know
they must attain. If students are responsive to these incentive differences,
the result could be a difference between black and white students in the
actual level of grades and test scores obtained. In this way, the schools'
belief that different admissions standards are necessary becomes a self-fulfilling
prophecy. The common theme in these two examples is that the desire to see greater
black representation is pursued by using different criteria for the promotion
or admission of black and white candidates. But the use of different criteria
reduces the incentives which Blacks have for developing needed skills.
This argument does not presume that Blacks are less capable than Whites;
it is based on the fact that an individual's need to make use of his abilities
is undermined when that individual is patronized by the employer, or the
admissions committee. This problem could be avoided if, instead of using different criteria
of selection, the employers and schools in question sought to meet their
desired level of black participation through a concerted effort to enhance
performance, while maintaining common standards of evaluation. Such a
targeted effort at performance enhancement among black employees or students
is definitely not color-blind behavior. It presumes a direct concern about
racial inequality, and involves allocating benefits to people on the basis
of race. What distinguishes it from preferential treatment, though, is
that it takes seriously the fact of differential performance and seeks
to reverse it directly, rather than trying to hide from that fact by setting
a different threshold of expectation for the performance of Blacks. Unfortunately, economists seem to be the only people persuaded by, or
even interested in, this kind of technical argument about affirmative
action. Therefore, I turn now, in my capacity as an intellectual and a
citizen, to a range of moral and political considerations which may be
of broader interest, but which point in the same direction. Begin with
an obvious point: the plight of the inner-city underclass, the most intractable
aspect of the racial inequality problem today, is not mitigated by affirmative
action policies. Defenders of racial preferences answer by claiming this
was never the intent of such policies; but, this only leads to my second
point: The persistent demand for preferential treatment as necessary to
Black achievement amounts, over a period of time, to a concession of defeat
by middle class Blacks in our struggle for civic equality. The political discourse over affirmative action harbors a paradoxical
subtext: Middle class Blacks seek equality of status with Whites by calling
attention to their own limited achievements, thereby establishing the
need for preferential policies. At the same time, sympathetic white elites,
by granting black demands, thereby acknowledge that without their patronage
black penetration of the upper reaches of American society would be impossible.
The paradox is that, although equality is the goal of the enterprise,
this manifestly is not an exchange among equals and it never can be. Members of the black middle class who stress that without some special
dispensation they cannot compete with Whites are really flattering those
Whites, while exhibiting their own weakness. And Whites who think that,
because of societal wrongs, Blacks are owed the benefit of the doubt about
their qualifications are exercising a noblesse oblige available only to
the powerful. This exchange between black weakness and white power has
become a basic paradigm for "progressive" race relations in
contemporary America. Blacks from privileged backgrounds now routinely
engage in a kind of exhibitionism of non-achievement, mournfully citing
the higher success rates of Whites in one endeavor or another in order
to gain leverage for their advocacy on behalf of preferential treatment.
That Asians from more modest backgrounds often achieve even higher rates
of success is not mentioned. But the limited ability of these more fortunate
Blacks to make inroads on their own can hardly go unnoticed. It is morally unjustifiedand to this African-American, humiliatingthat
preferential treatment based on race should become institutionalized for
those of us now enjoying all of the advantages of middle class life. The
thought that my sons would come to see themselves as presumptively disadvantaged
because of their race is unbearable to me. They are in fact among the
richest young people of African descent anywhere on the globe. There is
no achievement to which they cannot legitimately aspire. And whatever
degree of success they may attain in life, the fact that some of their
ancestors were slaves and others faced outrageous bigotry will have little
to do with it. Indeed, those ancestors, with only a fraction of the opportunity and
with much of the power structure of the society arrayed against them,
managed to educate their children, acquire land, found communal institutions,
and mount a successful struggle for equal rights. The generation coming
of age during the 1960s, now ensconced in the burgeoning black middle
class, enjoy our status primarily because our parents and grandparents
faithfully discharged their responsibilities. The benefits of affirmative
action, whatever they may have been, pale in comparison to this inheritance. My grandparents, with their siblings and cousins, left rural Mississippi
for Chicago's mean streets in the years after World War I. Facing incredible
racial hostility, they nevertheless carved-out a place for their children,
who went on to acquire property and gain a toe-hold in the professions.
For most middle class Blacks this is a familiar story. Our forebears,
from slavery onward, performed magnificently under harsh circumstances.
It is time now that we and our children begin to do the same. It desecrates
the memory of our enslaved ancestors to assert that with our far greater
freedoms we middle class Blacks should now look to Whites, of whatever
political persuasion, to ensure that our dreams are realized. The children of today's black middle class will live their lives in
an era of equal opportunity. I recognize that merely by stating this simple
fact I will enrage many people; and I do not mean to assert that racial
discrimination has disappeared. But I insist that the historic barriers
to black participation in the political, social and economic life of the
nation have been lowered dramatically over the past four decades, especially
for the wealthiest 20% of the black population. Arguably, the time has
now come for us to let go of the ready-made excuse which racism provides,
and to accept responsibility for what we and our children do, and do not,
achieve. 4. Transracial Humanism and the Black Underclass The same cannot be said, at least not in the same way, for the black
lower class, but even here much conventional, liberal rhetoric about racial
victimization is anachronistic and unproductive. As a matter of social
causation, the collapse of family life among the urban black poor and
the spread of behavioral pathologies of various kinds among them are far
more important than outright racial discrimination in creating and perpetuating
the black underclass. Moreover, an assertion of racial injury in the face of the underclass
crisis leads many into a political cull de sac. There are two points to
make in this regard. First, there are no politically feasible, racially
based solutions to the problems of the urban black poor. Indeed, it is
quite unclear how these marginalized, suffering masses might yet be integrated
into the commonwealth. Anyone professing to have the answer is either
a fool, or a liar. Every conceivable response to this social dilemmabe
it education and welfare reform, tax abatements, greater private philanthropy,
improved law enforcement, or massive public worksrequires significant
public (if not always governmental) involvement, a major infusion of resources,
and a fair amount of time. Progress depends on the creation of political
majorities willing to support some such undertakings. And, if recent American
electoral history teaches us anything, it is that such majorities cannot
be built in an explicitly racial manner. Second, discussing social dysfunction in racial terms plays right into
the hands of society's most reactionary forces, inviting the view that
"those people" in the ghettos are fundamentally different, that
"they" are, whether for biological or deep cultural reasons,
beyond hope of redemption. Arguably, some of the ugliest (and most sophisticated)
recent assaults on the proposition that "all men are created equal"
can be understood as conservative reactions to the efforts of racial egalitarians
to legislate their way out of the fact of lagging black achievement. The
era of jujitsu politicswhen blacks tried to use the relative strength
of whites against them, by holding up black under-achievement as proof
that whites had failed to extend equal rightshas definitely run
its course. The typical response to such advocacy nowadays is the baldly
stated "refutation" that, evidently, blacks do not have what
it takes to succeed in America, as so many non-white immigrants have done
and continue to do. Recalling the moral foundations of the original civil rights revolution
suggests a way out of this impasse. Martin Luther King, Jr. was fond of
saying that "every man is heir to a legacy of worthiness." If
the black inner-city poor do not now enjoy the basic human inheritance
of dignity and worthiness of which King (and Jefferson) spoke, this is
not primarily because they descend from slaves. Advocacy on their behalf
grounded solely in that historical fact will fail. Are they not better
served by invoking a trans-racial humanism, by urging a commitmentuniversally
appliedto engage the intractable problems of the socially marginalized?
Is it not wiser, ultimately, to present the problems of the black underclass
in their essential human terms, rather than on narrow racial ground? These questions give rise to the following argument: The fundamental
challenges any person faces in life arise not from his racial condition,
but from our common human condition. The social contingency of race is,
in itself, but one piece of the raw material from which an individual
must yet construct a life. For all of us, it is the engagement with this
project of construction that brings about our development as human beings
and the expression of our individual personalities. And, because we share
this existential problemidentical in essentials, different only
in details, we can hope to transcend racial difference, to gain a genuine,
mutual understanding of our respective experiences and travails, and ultimately,
to empathize with one another. As Jean-Paul Sartre might have said, Because
we all confront the challenge of discovering how to live in "good
faith," we are able to share love across the tribal boundaries. Empathy lies at the core of this trans-racial, humanistic argument.
From this point of view, however closely race may correlate with social
disability, citizens looking upon juvenile felons, welfare mothers or
slow learners, should consider that, "there but for the grace of
God go I, or my brother, or my child." In more practical terms, the
attainment of true democracy in our divided society requires that the
white middle class see the black underclass as consisting of people who,
in essence, are not so very different from themselvesall of us having
been created in the image of God. Rather than asking, "What manner
of people are they who languish in that way?" the public question
should become, "What manner of people are we who accept such degradation
in our midst?" 5. The Existential Challenge of Black Self-Development Unfortunately, we are a long way from achieving this democratic goal.
Dramatic, persistent economic and social disparities between the races
have, in the aftermath of the civil rights revolution, given rise to the
(usually unspoken) question, in the minds of Blacks and Whites alike,
as to whether Blacks are capable of gaining equal status, given equality
of opportunity. It is a peculiar mind which fails, in light of American
history, to fathom how poisonous a question this is. And, while I unequivocally
believe that Blacks are, indeed, so capable, any such assertion is an
hypothesis, or an axiom, not a fact. The fact is that Blacks have something
to prove, to ourselves and to what W.E.B. DuBois once called "a world
that looks on in amused contempt and pity." This is not fair or right;
it is simply the way things are. Things have been this way for quite some time now. In his treatise,
Slavery and Social Death, sociologist Orlando Patterson argues persuasively
that one cannot understand slavery without grasping the importance of
the concept of honor. Slavery, he says, is not simply property-in-people;
rather, it is "the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated
and generally dishonored persons." The ritualized, hierarchical relations
of respect and standing between the owner and the one owned are what distinguish
slavery from other systems of forced labor. As Patterson points out, this
is a parasitic relationship: the owner derives honor from his power over
the slave, who suffers an extreme marginality because he has no social
existence except for what is mediated by his master. But then, if slavery was not mainly a legal convention, but instead
an institution of ritualized hierarchy, how could emancipationthe
termination of the masters' legal claimsbe sufficient in itself
to make slaves (and their descendants) into genuinely equal citizens?
Must not the historically generated, and culturally reinforced dishonor
of the freedmen also be overcome? If the former slave, who just yesterday
stood before the nation without honor or the possibility of honor, is
to become a citizenthat is, a coequal participant in the national
enterprisethen must not the deeply entrenched presumptions of inferiority,
of intellectual and moral inadequacy, be extinguished? And, how is that
to be done? Perhaps it was the prompting of questions such as these which, over
a century ago, led Booker T. Washington to observe: It is a mistake to assume that the Negro, who had been a slave for two
hundred and fifty years, gained his freedom by the signing, on a certain
date, of a certain paper by the President of the United States. It is
a mistake to assume that one man can, in any true sense, give freedom
to another. Freedom, in the larger and higher sense every man must gain
for himself. This, in our current political discourse, is remembered as a conservative's
statement; and my citing it is taken as an embrace of laissez faire. Yet,
nothing could be further from the truth. My point here has little to do
with the transitory, partisan conflicts of our day, and everything to
do with a timeless, existential challenge which Blacks have confrontedcollectively,
and not just as individualsfrom the very beginning of our sojourn
in America. Jesse Jackson, Sr. (no Booker Washington, he!) teaches young Blacks
the exhortation: "I am somebody," and this is certainly true.
But the crucial question then becomes: "Just who are you?" Many
of our fellow citizens now look down upon the carnage playing itself out
on the streets of ghetto America and supply their own, dark answers. The
youngster's response should be: Because I am somebody, I waste no opportunity
to better myself. Because I am somebody, I respect my body by not polluting
it with drugs or promiscuous sex. Because I am somebodyin my home,
in my community, in my nationI comport myself responsibly, I am
accountable, I am available to serve others as well as myself. It is the
doing of these fine things, not the saying of any fine words, which teaches
oneself, and others, that one is somebody who has to be reckoned with. 6. The Ultimate Paradox But, who will show the many hundreds of thousands of black youngsters
now teetering on the brink of disaster how to be somebody? One finds a
precedent for the huge task we face in the Old Testament Book of Nehemiah,
which begins as follows: Hanani, one of my brethren came, he and certain men of Judah; and I
asked them concerning the Jews who had escaped, who were left of the captivity,
and concerning Jerusalem. And they said unto me, The remnant that are
left of the captivity there in the province are in great affliction and
reproach; the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and its gates are
burned with fire. And it came to pass when I heard these words, that I
sat down and wept, and mourned certain days, and fasted and prayed before
the God of heaven. [1:2-4 AV] "The wall is broken down and its gates are burned with fire."
This metaphor of decay and assault is an apt one for our current ills.
We are invited to think of a city without walls as one with no integrity,
no structure, subject to the vagaries of any passing fad or fancy. We
imagine the collapse of civil society; the absence of an internally derived
sense of what a people stand for, of what they must and must not do. With
the wall broken, and its gates burned, anything becomes possible. In the biblical account Nehemiah heroically led the Jews of Jerusalem
to renewal. He went to the Persian king whom he served as cup bearer,
secured provisions, and returned to Jerusalem, where he rolled up his
sleeves and went to work restoring the physical integrity of the environment,
but also presiding over a spiritual revival amongst the citizenry. (Even
an economist knows that "man does not live by bread alone.") Now, let me relate this to my overarching theme, lest you think you
are about to hear a sermon. (I am fully capable of sermonizing on this
subjectthat my second son's name is Nehemiah is no accidentbut
this is neither the time nor the place to begin a preaching career.) Nehemiah,
a Jew, was specifically concerned about his people. His work, the reconstruction
of civil society, could only be undertaken, as it were, "from the
inside-out." He dealt in the specific and concrete circumstances
confronting the Jews. He did not deal only in abstractions. He made himself
present among those for whom he had a special affection, toward whom he
felt a special loyalty. His is not so bad a model. In the inner-city ghettos today "the remnant there are in great
affliction and reproach." For the civic wound of black alienation
to be fully and finally bound, a great deal of work must be done on the
ground in these communities. We Blacks are connectedby bonds of
history, family, conscience, and common perception in the eyes of outsidersto
those who languish in the urban slums. Black politicians, clergy, intellectuals,
businessmen, and ordinary folk must therefore seek to create hope in these
desolate young lives; we must work to rebuild these communities; we must
become our brother's keeper. We arrive, then, at the ultimate racial paradox: Self-development, an
existential necessity for Blacks as an ethnic community, is in tension
with the moral requirement for Americans as a democratic polity of achieving
a humanism that transcends race. This tension is reflected in the dual
meaning of "we" implicit in the question, "What manner
of people are we who accept such degradation in our midst?" The two
implied imperatives, despite their common appeals to human empathy, rest
on very different grounds. One draws on ties of blood, shared history,
and common faith. The other endeavors to achieve an integration of the
most wretched, despised, and feared of our fellows along with the rest
of us into a single political community of mutual concern. One takes the
social fact of race as a given, even celebrating it. The other aims to
move beyond race altogether. This problem is closely related to an age-old conundrum in political
theorythat of reconciling individual and social responsibilities.
We humans, while undertaking our life projects, find ourselves constrained
by social and cultural influences beyond our control. Yet if we are to
live effective and dignified lives, we must behave as if we can indeed
determine our fates. A long-term welfare mother must be seen as responsible
for her plight and that of her children, even if it is also the case that
she is being acted on by economic and social forces larger than herself.
But, she is not an island; she does not have complete freedom to determine
her future. So, we must help herthat is our responsibility. Similarly,
Blacks as a group have been constrained by an ugly history of racism,
some effects of which continue to manifest themselves into the current
day. Yet seizing freedom "in the larger and higher sense" requires
that Blacks accept responsibility for our own fate, and for the values
embraced by our children, even though the effects of this immoral past
remain with us. But, this should not be an excuse for the rest of the nation to withdraw
into a posture of indifference, looking on in "amused contempt and
pity." It is a basic moral truth that "those people"who
now languish in the drug infested, economically depressed, crime ridden
central citiesare "our" people, and "we" must
be in relationship with them. America's democratic pretensionsto
being "a city on a hill," a beacon of hope and freedom to all
the worldseem fraudulent when set alongside the lives of haplessness
and despair lived by so many of those Americans who descend from slaves.
Thus, the citizens of this republic bear a responsibility to be actively
engaged in changing the structures that constrain the black poor, in such
a way that they can more effectively exercise their inherent and morally
required capacity to choose. That "those people"who now
languish in the drug-infested, economically depressed, crime-ridden central
citiesare "our" people, and that "we" must be
in relationship with them, are moral truths which transcend politics. Our situation resists pat, ideologically pure resolution. Those of us
committed to seeking true democracy in this divided society shall have
to engage in a fair amount of muddling-through. Our work will, however,
be aided enormously if all concerned can proceed with patience, wisdom,
and a spirit of generosity. Perhaps not every American is cut-out for
the hard civic task of sustained engagement with this problem. "The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of
a vast ocean of material prosperity," Martin Luther King said in
1963, in his prophetic "I Have a Dream" speech. This is still
true, in far too great a measure; and while it is by no means the only
truth, it is one that no political or intellectual movement aspiring to
lead our country should be allowed to forget. |