Yackety-yak about race - Column

Progressive, The, Dec, 1997 by Adolph Reed, Jr.

So what the heck is a "national conversation on race," anyway? Like so much in what passes for public discussion in America these days, the notion soothes and reassures, conveying a sense of gravitas, while at the same time having no clear, practical meaning whatsoever.

I remember hearing calls for this conversation a few years ago, first from former University of Pennsylvania President Sheldon Hackney, then from Lani Guinier and performance artist Anna Deveare Smith. At the time, it seemed to be just a well-intentioned soundbite, a way to express in newschat a concern with racial injustice and anger. As a mass-media metaphor, it seemed harmless enough: a way to evoke a national commitment to honesty and democracy. I couldn't imagine how this call could possibly translate into anything concrete, though. Who would participate in this conversation? Where would it be held? What would the ground rules be? And to what end?

I certainly didn't suspect that the notion would go anywhere; I presumed that it would have the shelf life of slogans from political ads. You know, like "Where's the beef?" or "It takes a village . . ." Well, I didn't take into account the significance of a New South, psychobabbling baby boomer whose political opportunism comes with cybertechie, New Age flourishes. As it turns out, this national-conversation idea is just Bill Clinton's cup of herbal tea.

Now that Clinton has glommed onto the national conversation, it won't just dissipate through the airwaves over time. He has decided to keep this strange idea alive by formalizing it into a Presidential race-relations advisory board. It just goes to show that Bipartisan Bill has the soul of a talk-show host. But the "conversation" also highlights the profound shift over the last generation in American liberals' ways of talking about racial inequality.

It's impossible, for instance, to imagine Lyndon Johnson using the Presidential bully pulpit to call for a national conversation on race in 1964 or 1965. For all his limitations--the Vietnam War chief among them--Johnson understood that the point in pursuing racial justice is not to stimulate conversation. When people like Everett Dirksen protested that the struggle for black civil rights should rely on efforts to change whites' individual attitudes rather than on changing laws. Johnson made it clear that he was less interested in changing people's hearts than their public behavior.

Johnson understood that assertive government action can define acceptable practices and behavior, and ultimately change the world in which attitudes are formed.

The transformation of the South's racial politics has been incomplete, as the electoral success of governors Kirk Fordice in Mississippi and Fob James in Alabama demonstrate. The region nonetheless has undergone changes that would have seemed unimaginable thirty years ago. Blacks and whites can share public space more or less routinely, interact publicly in ways marked by the civility that presumes social equality, share work stations, and maintain the casual conviviality that normally pertains among co-workers. More than at any point in this century, white elites take for granted the need to take some notion of black interests into account when making public policy.

What made these changes possible was civil-rights law, not attitude adjustment. Presenting white Southerners with a fait accompli was the only way to counter the cultural force of white-supremacist ideology. Prohibiting discrimination by law not only enforced blacks' civil and citizenship rights, though that certainly was its intent and most important consequence. It was also the only way to create an environment in which casual contact would occur between blacks and whites as presumptive equals. This interaction has begun to erode racist stereotypes and bigotry by establishing the basis for a shared mundane humanity in workplaces, schools, and other public venues.

In the current anti-statist, market-worshipping climate, it is fashionable to deny that public authority can influence behavior and attitudes. Economists and others who worship market theology contend that slavery and racial discrimination would have been eliminated by the natural workings of the market if abolitionists and civil-rights activists had just been a little more patient. Some even blame attempts to preempt those market forces--through the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments and 1964 Civil Rights Law and 1965 Voting Rights Law--for creating racism. Public intervention inevitably fails, so this twisted reasoning goes, because its artificiality breeds resentment. Civil-rights laws, and affirmative action in particular. just stir up white hostility, since they are coercive, and an affront to properly market-based notions of justice and equity.

Besides (and here's where this sophistry most clearly approximates religion), the white South would eventually have eliminated slavery on its own because the system was irrational economically. Segregation and other forms of discrimination were already on the decline after World War II for the same reason, say the market moralists. Their argument boils down to this: Had there been no legal abolition of slavery, there would have been no white-supremacist restoration in the South, and had there been no civil-rights legislation, there would be no white racism. If exuberant reformers hadn't gone mucking around with the larger rationality of the system of individual choices and transactions that drive market forces, everything would have turned out fine. Never mind that the Confederacy fought tooth and nail to preserve slavery and that white southerners fought nearly as hard to maintain Jim Crow.