Christopher Edley, Jr. Harvard Law Professor, Presidential Advisor - Interview

Civil Rights Journal, Fall, 1999

CRJ: Would you say that is today's number one civil rights issue?

Yes. However there is no shortage of civil rights issues--from hate crimes to housing discrimination. But, in the longer run, we are going to have separate Americas unless we fix the schools.

CRJ: What civil rights issues will be at the forefront in the next 10-20 years?

Unequal education opportunity, language, gay rights, integration. I picked that list looking far ahead because I am looking at the long-term trends, the sources of strain and friction that we are going to have to grapple with. I mentioned integration, because at the moment, the integration idea is out of favor among people of all races. I think that in one or two decades it will be quite clear that without a concerted commitment to connect people across lines of class and color, our society will be in serious danger of falling apart.

CRJ: What are your thoughts on those who call for a color-blind society?

Different people have different motives in such a case. Some are doing it because they want to undermine the effectiveness of current strategies for creating opportunity for those that have been historically left out. I believe that we are still at a point at which we need to pay attention to color in order to get beyond it. There are other people who may be of good will, yet who believe that explicitly paying attention to race, or to gender for that matter, actually undermines the goal of tolerance and equality. I think they are wrong as an empirical matter, but I also think you need to be dearer about what the ultimate destination is. I don't want people taking away my blackness. It's a part of who I am. I don't want our differences to be invisible and I don't want them to be merely tolerated. Rather, I want them to be celebrated. Our religious differences are not things to which we are blind. We in fact recognize and celebrate the difference in our various religious practices and we understand that that is what helps to make America so unique and strong. Our goal should not be race blindness. It should be that we work to build an America in which the role of race is limited and is not the most important thing. So, it's a complicated answer because it's a complicated issue. The short response is that the color-blindness slogan has been appropriated by people who are opposed to virtually every effective strategy to close the opportunity gap.

CRJ: In an address you gave recently at Northeastern University you stated that your generation has failed. How has your generation failed and what is the best way for future generations to succeed?

I think my generation has failed to define for itself its responsibility for carrying the civil rights struggle forward. We grew up watching the successes of the older generation in knocking down barriers and advancing justice, but mistakenly concluded that progress is inevitable. We went about our own personal agendas and just assumed that justice would move forward as inevitably as the years rolled by. That was wrong--every generation has to decide how to pick up the burden and carry it forward. I think my generation has also failed because we have not done enough to teach the younger generation about history and the equal rights struggle. There are too many minorities and women in their twenties and thirties who are afraid of the burden of a little stigma and feel as though their burden is as oppressive as Jim Crow and police clubbings. I think that kind of self-centered analysis of justice is shameful.