Synopsis
Book by Thernstrom Stephan Thernstrom Abigail
Extrait
Introduction
"An American Dilemma," Gunnar Myrdal called the problem of race in his classic 1944 book. He saw a painful choice between American ideals and American racial practices. But in 1944, ten years before Brown v. Board of Education, most white Americans were not actually in much pain. Indeed, when asked in a survey that same year whether "Negroes should have as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job," the majority of whites said that "white people should have the first chance at any kind of job." Blacks belonged at the back of the employment bus, most whites firmly believed.
"Are they relatives of yours?" a white asks the protagonist in Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, Invisible Man.
"Sure, we're both black," I said, beginning to laugh.
He smiled, his eyes intense upon my face.
"Seriously, are they your relatives?"
"Sure, we were burned in the same oven," I said.
Burned in the same Jim Crow oven, in the heat generated by overwhelming racial hostility. That brutal world is gone, but some of the scars remain. Both points are easy to forget but essential to remember. On both left and right, writers too often distort the picture for political ends, clouding our understanding of the nation's most important domestic issue. On the right, they frequently dismiss the persistence of racial animus, suggesting, indeed, that "those who look carefully for evidence of racism...are likely to come up short." On the left, critics such as Derrick Bell allude to the "bogus freedom checks" that "the Man" will never honor. An enslaved people remains enslaved.
There is no racism; there is nothing but racism. The issue of race sends people scurrying in extremist directions. And thus there is almost no overlap between opposing views, and little sympathy and understanding across the lines of political battle. In October 1994 the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down the University of Maryland's blacks-only Banneker Scholarship program. "I can't get over the irony of the rising African American jail population and then taking away a program like this that tries to bring African Americans into the university," the president of the university remarked. The Fourth Circuit had seen the issue quite differently: "Of all the criteria by which men and women can be judged," the court had said, "the most pernicious is that of race."
Americans committed to racial justice were not always so divided. In 1963, when the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., stood at the Lincoln Memorial and spoke of his dreams, blacks and whites marching together pictured the "beautiful symphony of brotherhood" that treating blacks and whites alike would surely create. But that shared vision quickly faded, as many came to believe that race consciousness was the road to racial equality. "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race," Justice Harry Blackmun said in the Bakke case in 1978. In the civil rights community, by the late 1970s, that much-quoted aphorism had come to seem indisputably right.
Today we argue without a common language. University of Pennsylvania law professor Lani Guinier, a much sought after presence in the media, has repeatedly called for "a national conversation on race." We have not exactly fallen silent on the subject. We talk endlessly, obsessively about the issue, but across linguistic barricades. "Equal opportunity" is a much-used phrase with a much-disputed meaning. In the battleground of ideas, language is part of the territory each side seeks to capture. And thus, while advocates of race-neutral policies equate such equality with basic access -- an absence of closed doors -- their critics look for outcomes. "As a general matter, increases in the numbers of employees, or students or entrepreneurs from historically underrepresented groups are a measure of increased opportunity," Christopher Edley and George Stephanopolous, advisors to President Clinton, argued in 1995. No opportunity without results.
Definitional quarrels are only the start of the problem. Opposing sides in the debate over race start from different premises, and see American society through very different lenses. The topic of race raises fundamental questions about who we are, where we're going, how we get there. To talk about race is to talk about America -- and vice versa. The question pops up everywhere; one can't escape it. Try to name a significant domestic issue that has nothing to do with the status of African Americans: it's a challenge. Crime, family, education, housing, the environment, even foreign military entanglements and border control. Immigration is a good example. Newcomers, immigration advocates say, are good for the country; they contribute to its economic vitality. But are they good for black America? And if not, how much does that matter? What do we owe those who arrived on our shores in 1619 and remained members of an oppressed caste for more than three centuries? A relatively narrow question -- immigration policy -- is hopelessly entangled with the central issue in American life.
As authors, we have no easy answers to such policy questions. We offer instead a framework for debate -- a map. Or rather a book of maps, in the hope that if we understand the territory we can better decide the direction in which to head. Thus, we start with six historical chapters dealing with developments that climaxed in the 1960s and fundamentally altered the place of African Americans in American society and altered American society itself. We open with a detailed account of the development and nature of segregation in the Jim Crow South, drawing a dark picture too often forgotten. Until World War II three-quarters of the black population lived in the South, where they were a subordinate caste in a society dedicated to white supremacy. Chapter 2 traces the first Great Migration of blacks from South to North and describes the life blacks found upon arriving in Chicago and other northern cities. The contrast between the two regions was real, but not as stark as some have made it out to be. In the North, the pervasive threat of white violence that defined southern black lives was absent. But discrimination in the labor market and elsewhere was rampant.
In Chapter 3 we turn to the impact of World War II on the status of African Americans -- the major social, economic, and demographic changes that occurred in the 1940s and 1950s. Once again, in large numbers blacks boarded trains and buses for northern cities where the money was (relatively) good; in the war and immediate postwar years, black earnings rose dramatically -- more dramatically than they have in any subsequent two decades. The military was segregated, but southern and northern blacks served together, and the exposure of those from the South to northern racial attitudes was subversive. Ten years after the end of the war, the Montgomery bus boycott would begin -- a peaceful mass protest that led straight to the great civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s.
In Chapter 4 we trace the breakdown of that amazing patience that African Americans had so long displayed. We open with a discussion of Brown v. Board of Education, look at the quiet revolution in racial attitudes that began in the 1940s, and then go on to the opening chapters of the civil rights revolution itself: Montgomery; the rise of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; the use of federal troops to force the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School; and the sit-ins that began in 1960. Chapter 5 opens with a discussion of presidential politics and civil rights, and closes with the making of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; in the intervening pages it describes the Freedom Rides, the crashing failure of the demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, and the stunning success of those in Birmingham, Alabama; the revolution in white racial attitudes; the 1963 March on Washington; and the political timidity of President John F. Kennedy. In the last chapter of this first section, we treat the murder of student civil rights workers in Mississippi, the passage of the crucial Voting Rights Act of 1965, the emergence of the black power movement, and the eruption of race riots in the nation's cities.
We linger over what might seem, to some, ancient history (although within our lifetime, as authors) for two reasons. Much has changed, and we want to make that clear. Too often, the voices of racial pessimism depict a caste society in the 1990s not fundamentally different from that in which Richard Wright grew up in the Jim Crow South -- or that which he found in the North when he migrated at the end of the 1920s. The racial problems of today are in fact not the same as those of yesterday, and we cannot address them with a clear head unless we understand the difference.
There is another point to the historical chapters, however. We have not only come a long way; we began our travels well before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. As important as that movement was, led by Dr. King, it would not have succeeded if white racial attitudes had not already begun to change. By the time of the Montgomery bus boycott, at the end of 1955, a great many whites had already come to acknowledge the truth of Myrdal's charge that Americans did not practice what they preached.
From the historical section we move on to a group of chapters that examine social, economic, and political trends since the civil rights revolution. How many African Americans work in professional jobs? How many black families have middle-class incomes? How many now live in suburbia? How many black students are graduating from high school and attending college? Are whites voting for black politicians? We do a lot of counting in this book; how to measure social change reliably is one of our main concerns. We supply the reader with more than seventy statistical tables, making it possible to judge whether or not our conclusions are grounded in the evidence.
The third section is devoted to public policy and the changing racial climate. It's indisputably different to be black than white in America; race does matter. But how should Congress, federal agencies, courts, school boards, and others engaged in shaping our public life respond to the continuing importance of race? We trace the evolution of that response over the last thirty-five years and weigh the costs and benefits of race-conscious legislative districting, busing to integrate public schools, set-asides that reserve public dollars for minority-owned firms, affirmative action in university admissions, and related policies.
We end Part III with a chapter that explores the current racial climate: the racial divide that the O. J. Simpson trial made so evident; the seeming alienation of the black middle class; the conspiracy theories that have a surprising life across the lines of social class in the black community; the beliefs and social interaction of ordinary blacks and whites (as revealed in survey data); and the politics of racial grievance. And finally, in a conclusion that wraps up the book, we consider the status of blacks today, compare the black experience with that of other racial and ethnic groups, consider the general question of group differences, and outline our hopes for the future. As two authors for whom the 1960s were formative years, we remain committed to race-neutral policies. Not simply because they are morally right; in a society already deeply divided along lines of race, we see divisive race-conscious programs as dangerous.
This is a long book that provides a great deal of information about a wide range of matters related to the problem of race. But we cannot pretend to have examined every important facet of this enormous topic. Both of the authors are social scientists with a strong interest in public policy, and we have naturally devoted much of our attention to the issues that social scientists and policymakers have argued about most. We have neglected other dimensions of race and race relations not because we think them unimportant but because we know too little about them to feel that we have something significant to add. For example, it would undoubtedly be illuminating to trace the changing role of African Americans in American popular culture over the span of years considered here, from the days when two white radio performers played Amos and Andy, stereotypical black characters, to the era of Oprah, Michael Jackson, and Magic Johnson. Today disproportionate numbers of blacks rank among the highest-paid entertainers and athletes. Although we do not analyze this remarkable shift here, we believe that central arguments of the book will help to explain it.
The picture we draw is both heartening and sobering. Heartening because real progress has been made -- more progress than those who put their lives on the line in the 1960s probably imagined. Sobering because some of that progress has had negative unintended consequences; because civil rights strategies have not ameliorated the problems that grip the rural poor and the urban underclass; because some of those problems have actually worsened over time; and because old worries have now been joined by new and unexpected ones.
The signs of progress are all around us, although we now take that progress for granted. "Thirty-three years ago, I could not have come in here to have a cup of coffee and talk with my friends," Franklin McCain, Jr., the son of a participant in the first Woolworth's sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, noted in 1993 on the occasion of the closing of that store. "Today, I know my money is as good as any other man's. This means a lot." Andrew Young, among others, has also marveled at the pace of change. Delivering a sermon in 1983, he recalled his fear when driving through Georgia in the early 1960s. "It was the worst place in the world," he said. "If someone had told me that I would be a congressman in Georgia, an ambassador to the United Nations, and a mayor of Atlanta, what I would have replied cannot be said in a church."
In 1940 there was not a single African-American policeman in the five Deep South states, although those states contained almost 5 million black people, close to 40 percent of the nation's total black population. In that year the poverty rate for black families was a staggering 87 percent. Traveling in the South at about that time, Gunnar Myrdal was appalled to learn that any white could "strike or beat a Negro, steal or destroy his property, cheat him in a transaction and even take his life, without much fear of legal reprisal." Black people, he discovered, were "excluded not only from the white man's society but also from the ordinary symbols of respect." It would have been a major violation of the social order to address a black woman as "Mrs. Washington" -- "Mrs." being a term reserved for whites. Few African Americans could vote, and blacks and whites were kept apart in all public places.
In the North, restaurants, hotels and other public accommodations were not segregated by law. Blacks could cast a ballot and run for office, use the local hospital and the public library, sit at the front of a bus, share a lunch counter -- and even shake hands -- with whites. Perhaps most important, they had rights that whites had to respect. But a color line kept them out of the best-paid and most desirable jobs, the better restaurants, most "white" neighborhoods, and therefore "white" schools. In fact, some states allowed local communities to operate dual educational systems; Brown v. Board of Education, it may be recalled, involved segregated schools in Topeka, Kansas.
The curtain came down on the Jim Crow South in the 1950s and 1960s. In the North, too, the status of blacks began to improve dramatically -- the consequence of judicial deci...
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