Ask the Scholar
Document scope · 1 page
Scholar
Ask about this object, its catalog metadata, its source description, or the page inventory.
For page-specific OCR and visual context, open one of the page chats.
Scholar Source Context
Document identity
localId
26080735
label
Rockefeller Foundation Conference Feb. 12-13, 1996
core
doc
dtoType
document
citationUrl
pageCount
1
Source metadata
id
26080735
sourceUrl
contentType
document
title
Rockefeller Foundation Conference Feb. 12-13, 1996
citationUrl
collections
Records of the First Lady's Office (Clinton Administration)
Margaret “Maggie” Williams' Subject Files
imageCount
1
hasImages
yes
source
import
hasTranscription
no
Source extras
naId
26080735
levelOfDescription
fileUnit
otherTitles
42-t-2194630-20130359S-Seg2-029-006-2015
recordType
description
ocrSource
nara-archive
Single page context
seq
1
pageIndex
0
type
document
mediaId
9470b5ca8e46c33f
ocrText
Please FiLE
-
February 12, 1996
Dayna Cunningham
The Rockefeller Foundation
420 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York
10018-2702
Dear Dayna:
I'm sorry that last minute events made it impossible for me
to attend your conference today and tomorrow. I'm certainly
interested in the topic and would like to receive any conference
notes or summaries that may be produced.
Enclosed please find unused shuttle tickets.
Sincerely,
Margaret A. Williams
Chief of Staff
to the First Lady
FEB 04 '96 16:09 FR
212 852 8273 TO 912024566244
P.01/01
THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
WCB
420 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10018-2702
Fax No.'s (212) 764-3468 & 398-1858
Telephone (212) 869-8500
Telex 224862ROCKFEL(RCA)
If you have not received all of this transmission or have encountered difficulties with it, please contact the sender.
DATE:
February 4, 1996
TO FAX NUMBER: As dialed 202-456-6244
CITY AND COUNTRY:
USA
NUMBER OF PAGES, including cover sheet:
1
TO:
Deborah Both for Maggie
FROM:
Michael Damian, Assistant to Dayna Cunningham
TELEPHONE NUMBER:
(212) 852-8353
SUBJECT:
Your travel plans - A Reminder
MESSAGE:
We have yet to hear from you regarding your travel plans for the Feb 12-13th conference at
Pocantico Conference Center, Tarrytown, New York.
Please contact RUSSELL CLARK at (212) 852-8250 to arrange your air or rail tickets by
Wednesday, February 7th, to assure your place on flights and trains.
Please contact me, MICHAEL DAMIAN at (212) 852-8353 so I can arrange ground
transportation and additional lodging, if necessary. I can also be reached by fax at (212) 852-8203.
Please get in touch with me by Thursday, February 8th, so 1 can make the necessary arrangements.
Thanks for your cooperation. We are looking forward to seeing you.
Debovale, I can get shuttle TKR to you, 1- but need to
know NY arrival time and which airport (or anival
time if ThE Motroliner is custon), 80 I can arrougt
ground transport.
Thanks,
AM
Michael
TADE
4:00
Town 7.00 Monthy 12th
HAS clock
Pain
will werve oil Efinht
Insta Data
TOTAL PAGE. 01
JAN 02 '96 10:11 FR
212 852 8203 TO 912024566244
P.01/02
THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
>Draft ays Debby I'm
something
Pressure
that
December 29, 1995
Chief of Staff to the First Lady
Office of the First Lady
very that control issues name beyond do
sayprested where d
Ms. Maggie Williams
Old Executive Office Building
Room 100
Washington, D.C. 20500
Will
my up. to
Via Fax: (202) 456-6244
consurviank
Dear Ms. Williams:
with so could
We are at an historical turning point not unlike the post-civil war period, the New Deal, not
or the civil rights movement. Profound economic and social destabilization, political
volatility, renegotiation of major portions of the social contract - common characteristics
of each of these periods - are dominant trends today as well. At these historical turning
the nation's course for several generations. What about today?
Conl thence
of The to-
points, leadership was the decisive factor in responsibly facing questions that determined
For African Americans, these are particularly momentous times. The issues are well-
known, chronic and entrenched: deepening African American poverty despite gains
please
among the black middle class; stagnation of gains within the black middle class,
criminalization of African American youth on a scale that destroys whole communities
keeported
and that is unparalleled worldwide; profound African American disenchantment with the
ineffectiveness of traditional means of participation and redress; Congress's new social
compact intensifying the assault on black communities; the federal courts dismantling
remaining protections against racial discrimination; rising dislocation and despair among
Magge
white Americans making them more susceptible to scapegoating tactics; growing
400 Fifth Avenue
intellectual legitimacy for crass racial stereotypes and sharply increasing racial
New York. New York
polarization of public discourse, popular opinion, and even daily personal interactions.
10018-2701
At the same time, one million men from around the country joined a march to the Capital
Telephone: 21a.869.8300
- despite disagreements with the convener demonstrating that there is a deep. untapped
Facsimile: 212.764.3468
reserve of energy and purpose among African Americans.
Facsimile: 212.398.1858
During the height of the civil rights movement, African Americans built a broad array of
Cable: ROCKFOUND NEW YORK
vehicles to carry on the struggle. Many of those have ceased to exist or no longer are
Telex: 234862 ROCKFEL (RCA)
effective in facing the challenges of this period. There is a critical leadership void for
African Americans: few sustained discussions of policy occur at either the local or
national level and African American perspectives are lacking in public discourse. There
are no major African American communications networks or organs comparable to those
of the Right A frican Americans have suffered strategic political losses with the defeat of
black mayors in several major cities and the threatened loss of seats in Congress. How
My into NYC
Thesely
Cherry Cocantico CR
TOWN,
NY
JAN 02 '96 10:12 FR
212 852 8203 TO 912024566244
P.02/02
do we assess and respond to the problems and opportunities of this period? What are the
leadership tasks?
On January 8th and 9th, The Rockefeller Foundation is hosting a small and varied group
of activists, analysts, academics and others for an in-depth, two-day discussion to explore
these issues. It will be a working two days in which we seek to examine the current
public discourse about race in this country and explore the processes and organizational
structures needed to strengthen African American leadership for this period.
We ask you to roll up your sleeves and join us. Please call me at (212) 852-8490 to let me
know whether you will be able to attend.
We hope to see you on January 8th and 9th.
Sincerely,
Dayna Cunningham L. Sunningh
DLC.md
** TOTAL PAGE. 02 **
FEB 08 '96 14:47 FR
212 852 8273 TO 912024566244
P.01/03
THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
420 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10018-2702
Fax No.'s (212) 764-3468 & 398-1858 Telephone (212) 869-8500 Telex 224862ROCKFEL(RCA)
If you have not received all of this transmission or have encountered difficulties with it, please contact the sender.
DATE:
February 8, 1996
TO FAX NUMBER: 202-456-6244
CITY AND COUNTRY:
Various- USA
NUMBER OF PAGES, including cover sheet:
TO:
Maggie Williams- DEborah Both
Participant, Pocantico Conference, February 12-13
FROM:
Michael Damian for Dayna Cunningham Midial
TELEPHONE NUMBER: 212-852-8353
SUBJECT:
Itineraries, Tickets (if applicable)
MESSAGE: Following is a copy of your itinerary and agenda for the Rockefeller Conference being
held on February 12-13 at the Pocantico Conference Center in Tarrytown, New York.
If you have arranged with us for an airline ticket, your ticket is being FedEx'ed to you today, Thursday,
February 8, 1996 for tomorrow morning earliest delivery.
If you have not arranged your travel with Russell Clark at the Foundation travel desk, please do so at
once. He can be reached directly at (212) 852-8250.
Please note at the bottom of your itinerary the contact numbers in case of a change of plans or inclement
weather.
1 am here to help you until 6pm EST this evening, Thursday, and tomorrow, Friday.
Thanks for your cooperation.
Safe journey, see you at the conference!
FEB 08 '96 14:47 FR
212 852 8273 TO 912024566244
P.02/03
February 12-13, 1996 Rockefeller Foundation conference
Pocantico Conference Center
Travel Itinerary for: Ms. Maggie Williams
Fax to: 202-456-6244
Conference location:
Pocantico Conference Center
200 Lake Road
Tarrytown, NY 10591
Tel: 914-524-6500
Fax: 914-524-6550
Monday, February 12, 1996:
7:00 am
Leave National Airport; USAIR Shuttle
8:00 am
Arrival at LaGuardia
Pickup:
Car to Conference Center provided by County Limousine Service- 800-777-2689 if you have last
minute changes. Driver will meet you in the United baggage claim area, holding a sign reading
either "Rockefeller Foundation" or with your name on it.
9,30 am
Registration at Pocantico Conference Center
10:00 a.m.
Start of Conference (please check in at front desk before start of conference)
Meals provided: a.m. coffee and snack; lunch; dinner
Lodging provided at conference center.
Tuesday, February 13, 1996:
8:30 a.m.
Start of Day Two of conference.
Meals provided: breakfast; lunch; dinner
4:00 p.m.
End of conference
4:30 pm
Pickup by County Limousine Service from conference center, going to LaGuardia Airport,
UASAIR shuttle to Washington DC
Please note: All travel times assume fair weather conditions. In the case of inclement weather, as much as possible, adjustments
will be made in pick-up times for the car services, and you will be notified; however. we ask that you keep on eye on your own
schedule and make sure your flight times, etc., will be met. Thank you.
For Monday night's lodging: Gucst rooms are split between the Coach House at the Pocantico Conference Center and Kykuit. If
you are staying at Kykuit, you will be brought there to check in prior to the start of the conference, and you will be shuttled there
at the end of the day on Monday; on Tuesday morning, we ask that you check out and bring your luggage with you prior to the
start of Tuesday morning's discussion.
County Limousine Service 800-777-2689 Matt McCarthy Taxi (local) 914-631-0031
Russell Clark (RF travel agent) 212-852-8250 Direct Travel after hours #: 800-366-2100
FEB 08 '96 14:47 FR
212 852 8273 TO 912024566244
P.03/03
Rockefeller Foundation Conference
February 12-13, 1996 - Pocantico Conference Center
Proposed Agenda and Questions for Discussion
Monday, February 12
9:15 a.m.
Arrival and check-in (coffee)
10:00 a.m.
Introductions and opening
Morning discussion:
-
What has made African Americans so vulnerable in this period?
12:30 p.m.
Lunch
1:30 p.m.
Afternoon discussion:
Having analyzed the vulnerability, what has to change overall to strengthen the position
of the African American community?
In particular. what strategies are necessary to strengthen the African American
community as a player in the larger social movement?
3:30 p.m.
Break (refreshments)
6:00 p.m.
Dinner
7:30 p.m.
Cocktails, informal discussion
Tuesday, February 13:
8:30 a.m.
Breakfast
9:15 a.m.
Morning discussion:
What are the "levers" to pull to initiate the process of change right now?
noon
Lunch
1:00 p.m.
Afternoon discussion:
Continue discussion from the morning
Critique meeting.
4:00 p.m.
Close of meeting
Refreshments available
5:00 p.m.
Dinner for those participants who are able to stay
** TOTAL PAGE. 03 **
February 12-13, 1996 Rockefeller Foundation conference
Pocantico Conference Center
Travel Itinerary for: Ms. Maggie Williams
Fax to: 202-456-6244
Conference location:
Pocantico Conference Center
200 Lake Road
Tarrytown, NY 10591
Tel: 914-524-6500
Fax: 914-524-6550
Monday, February 12, 1996:
7:00 am
Leave National Airport; USAIR Shuttle
8:00 am
Arrival at LaGuardia
Pickup:
Car to Conference Center provided by County Limousine Service -- 800-777-2689 if you have last
minute changes. Driver will meet you in the United baggage claim area, holding a sign reading
either "Rockefeller Foundation" or with your name on it.
9,30 am
Registration at Pocantico Conference Center
10:00 a.m.
Start of Conference (please check in at front desk before start of conference)
Meals provided: a.m. coffee and snack; lunch; dinner
Lodging provided at conference center.
Tuesday, February 13, 1996:
8:30 a.m.
Start of Day Two of conference.
Meals provided: breakfast; lunch; dinner
4:00 p.m.
End of conference
4:30 pm
Pickup by County Limousine Service from conference center, going to LaGuardia Airport,
UASAIR shuttle to Washington DC
Please note: All travel times assume fair weather conditions. In the case of inclement weather, as much as possible, adjustments
will be made in pick-up times for the car services, and you will be notified; however, we ask that you keep an eye on your own
schedule and make sure your flight times, etc., will be met. Thank you
For Monday night's lodging: Guest rooms are split between the Coach House at the Pocantico Conference Center and Kykuit. If
you are staying at Kykuit, you will be brought there to check in prior to the start of the conference, and you will be shuttled there
at the end of the day on Monday; on Tuesday morning. we ask that you check out and bring your luggage with you prior to the
start of Tuesday morning's discussion.
County Limousine Service 800-777-2689
Matt McCarthy Taxi (local) 914-631-0031
Russell Clark (RF travel agent) 212-852-8250 Direct Travel after hours #: 800-366-2100
Rockefeller Foundation Conference
February 12-13, 1996 -- Pocantico Conference Center
Proposed Agenda and Questions for Discussion
Monday, February 12
9:15 a.m.
Arrival and check-in (coffee)
10:00 a.m.
Introductions and opening
Morning discussion:
What has made African Americans SO vulnerable in this period?
12:30 p.m.
Lunch
1:30 p.m.
Afternoon discussion:
Having analyzed the vulnerability, what has to change overall to strengthen the position
of the African American community?
In particular, what strategies are necessary to strengthen the African American
community as a player in the larger social movement?
3:30 p.m.
Break (refreshments)
6:00 p.m.
Dinner
7:30 p.m.
Cocktails, informal discussion
Tuesday, February 13:
8:30 a.m.
Breakfast
9:15 a.m.
Morning discussion:
What are the "levers" to pull to initiate the process of change right now?
noon
Lunch
1:00 p.m.
Afternoon discussion:
Continue discussion from the morning
Critique meeting.
4:00 p.m.
Close of meeting
Refreshments available
5:00 p.m.
Dinner for those participants who are able to stay
STATE
the
ON OWESSON ON ORD ONFORD MADOX MADOX FORD FORD
When the abject
", is is p reside politics,
crime
ectisity
the am saxe
rights," lues:
STATE 0 OF MERICA
When the official subject
is presidential politics, taxes, welfare,
crime, rights, or values
the real subject is
BY
THOMAS BYRNE EDSALL WITH MARY D. EDSALL
ACE IS NO LONGER A STRAIGHTFORWARD,
between rich and poor over the past fifteen years. Race-
R
morally unambiguous force in American
coded images and language changed the course of the
politics; instead, considerations of race are
1980, 1984, and 1988 presidential elections and the 1990
now deeply imbedded in the strategy and
elections for the governorships of California and Ala-
tactics of politics, in competing concepts of
bama, the U.S. Senate in North Carolina, and the post of
the function and responsibility of government. and in
Texas secretary of agriculture. The political role of race is
each voter's conceptual structure of moral and partisan
subtle and complex, requiring listening to those whose
identity. Race helps define liberal and conservative ide-
views are deeply repellent to some and deeply resonant
clogies, shapes the presidential coalitions of the Demo-
for others. The debate over racial policy has been skewed
cratic and Republican parties, provides a harsh new di-
and distorted by a profound failure to listen.
mension to concern over taxes and crime, drives a wedge
"You could classify me as a working-class Democrat. a
through alliances of the working classes and the poor, and
card-carrying union member," savs Dan Donahue, a Chi-
gives both momentum and vitality to the drive to estab-
cago carpenter who became active in the campaign of a
lish a national majority inclined by income and demogra-
Republican state senator in 1988. "I'm not a card-carry-
phy to support policies benefiting the affluent and the
ing Republican-yet. We have four or five generations of
upper-middle class. In terms of policy, race has played a
welfare mothers. And they Democrats I say the answer to
critical role in the creation of a political system that has
that is we need more programs. Come on. It's well and
tolerated, if not supported, the growth of the disparity
good we should have compassion for these people, but
MAY 1991
ILLUSTRATIONS BY IVAN CHERMAYEFF
53
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
your compassion goes only so far. I don't mind helping,
of specific groups; and, finally, whites against blacks.
but somebody has got to help themselves, you've got to
Public policies backed by liberals have driven these new
pull. When you try to pick somebody up. they have to
alignments. In particular, busing, affirmative action, and
help. Unfortunately, most of the people who need help
much of the rights revolution in behalf of criminal defen-
in this situation are black and most of the people who are
dants, prisoners. homosexuals, welfare recipients, and a
doing the helping are white. We [white Cook County
host of other previously marginalized groups have, for
voters) are tired of paying for the Chicago Housing Au-
many voters, converted the government from ally to ad-
thority, and for public housing and public transportation
versary. The simultaneous increase, over the past two
that we don't use. They [taxpayers] hate it [the school-
and a half decades, in crime, welfare dependency, illegic-
board tax) because they are paying for black schools that
imacy, and educational failure have established in the
aren't even educating kids, and the money is just going
aminds of many voters a numbing array of "costs"-per-
into the Board of Education and the teachers' union."
ceived and real-of liberalism.
Moderate-income voters like Donahue pose a central
Major elements of the Republican Party have exploit-
dilemma for the Democratic Party. They are essential if
ed and inflated the costs of liberal policies. Republican
the party is to have an economically coherent base, and if
strategists and ideologues have furthermore capitalized
the party is legitimately to claim to represent not only the
on these costs to establish a new and evolving ideology:
poor but also the average working man and woman.
conservative egalitarianism, opposed to special prefer-
These voters have, however, been caught up in an explo-
ences whether for blacks, unions, or any other liberal in-
sive chain reaction of race, rights, values, and taxes
terest. Liberal Democratic support for preferential hiring
which has propelled significant percentages of them out
on the shop floor and in the schoolroom-to make up for
of the Democratic Party in presidential elections and into
past discrimination-has enabled a conservative Repub-
the "unreliable" column in state and local contests. Rac-
lican Party to lay claim to the cause of equal opportunity,
The new polarization drives a wedge
right through the heart of the old Democratic
presidential coalition, and threatens to undermine
genuine advances in racial equality.
ism and racial prejudice fail to explain such voter defec-
once the rallying cry of the civil-rights movement. In the
tion adequately, and Democratic liberals' reliance on
wake of sustained group and individual conflicts over
charges of racism guarantees political defeat and, more
rights, preferences, and government benefits. an egali-
important, guarantees continued ignorance of the dy-
tarian populism of the right has emerged, one so strong
namics at the core of presidential politics.
that it was not only accessible to George C. Wallace in
1968 but remained available twenty years later to a scion
The Costs of Liberalism
of the old guard of the Northeast, George Herbert Walk-
er Bush. Conservative populism has permitted the Re-
HE PAST TWO DECADES HAVE SEEN A SIGNIFI-
publican Party to replace in the minds of many voters the
T
cant enlargement of the ideological and value-
idea of an "establishment" ruled by business interests
based underpinnings of political conservatism
with a hated new liberal establishment, adversarial to the
and, to a large extent, of the Republican Parry.
common man: an elite-of judges, bureaucrats, newspa-
Race, rights, and taxes have become key forces behind
per editors, ACLU lawyers, academics, Democratic poli-
this enlargement, helping to bring about a new polariza-
ticians, civil-rights and feminist leaders-determined to
tion of the electorate, a polarization that has effectively
enact racially and socially redistributive policies demand-
replaced the New Deal coalition structure of presidential
ing the largest sacrifices from the white working and low-
contests.
er-middle classes.
This polarization is built on mutually reinforcing divi-
This new polarization drives a wedge right through the
sions of the electorate: taxpayers against tax recipients:
heart of the old Democratic presidential coalition, and
those who emphasize responsibility against those who
threatens to undermine the genuine advances in racial
emphasize rights; proponents of deregulation and an un-
equality which have occurred in the years since the pas-
fettered free market against supporters of the regulatory
sage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Race relations in Amer-
state and of policies protecting or advancing the interests
ica are, in fact, moving on two tracks. On one there has
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
been in-extraordinary integration of the races, a striking
expansion of the black middle class, and a powerful con-
tribution from blacks to the mainstream culture.
American society is undergoing a
transformation that may ultimately
destroy many of the racial stereotypes
that drive prejudice. In the years
before the outbreak of
the Second World
War, 73 percent of
all black college
graduates became
ministers or teachers,
almost all serving ex-
clusively black con-
stituencies. In 1940 only
187,520 blacks held
white-collar jobs, and over
100,000 of them were
clergymen, teachers, or the
owners of generally small,
ghetto-based retail stores pro-
ducing marginal incomes. By
1990, 1.91 million blacks held
managerial and professional jobs.
From 1950 to 1990 the black popu-
the inherent distributional conflicts im-
lation doubled but the number of
bedded in liberal policies. After the 1984 election the
blacks holding white-collar jobs in-
Democratic National Committee commissioned a $250,000
creased by 920 percent.
voter study by CRG Communications, only to quash its
On the second track, racial progress has run into major
release because it made explicit controversial sources of
roadblocks: crime, welfare dependency, illegitimacy,
dissent from liberal orthodoxy. The study. drawn from a
drug abuse, and a generation-disproportionately
poll of 5,000 voters and thirty-three focus groups, found
black-of young men and women unwilling either to
that Democratic defectors among white urban ethnics
stay in school or to take on menial labor, a group that has
and white southern moderates believed that
collided with a restructuring of the American economy
and a dramatic loss of well-paid entry-level jobs. The
the Democratic Parcy has not stood with them as they
moved from the working to the middle class. They have a
worsening of the symptoms of social dysfunction over the
whole set of middle-class economic problems today,
past three decades has become a driving force in politics,
and their party is not helping them. Instead it is helping
for the symptoms are perceived as an unacceptable cost
the blacks, Hispanics and the poor. They feel be-
of liberalism not only in the neighborhoods of southwest
trayed
(These voters] view gays and feminists as
Chicago but also, increasingly, in the more affluent sec-
outside the orbit of acceptable social life. These groups
tions of suburbia and in the business cores of cities.
represent, in cheir view, a social underclass.
(White
urban ethnics] feel threatened by an economic under-
class that absorbs their taxes and even locks them out of
A New Lease on Prejudice
the job, in the case of affirmative action. They also fear
2 social underclass that threatens to violate or corrupt
IBERAL ELITES HAVE HAD MAJOR DIFFICULTY
L
their children. It is these underclasses that signify their
recognizing the costs both of racial conflict and
present image of the Democratic Party.
The
of the broader rights revolution in behalf of
Democrats are the giveaway party. Giveaway means too
groups as diverse as women, the mentally dis-
much middle-class money going to blacks and the poor.
abled, prison inmates, and immigrants from developing
countries. Liberal elites have in addition disregarded the
In some communities, such as the white working-class
effects of burdensome taxes on working-class and mid-
suburbs of Detroit, positive assessments of the Demo-
dle-class voters, who may see themselves as being forced
cratic Parry have been washed out altogether by anger
to finance a revolution challenging their own values and
and discontent that are open, unabashed, and extremely
often undermining their hard-won security. Democratic
harsh. Voters from such communities have been crucial
liberalism has shown a consistent reluctance to confront
to the outcome of presidential elections for the past two
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
decades-they are the silent majority of the 1970s and
related AIDs, crack babies, and inner-city joblessness.
the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s. Their votes expand-
"The stereotype is not a stereotype anymore," says
ed the Republican coalition to produce election-year ma-
Kenneth S. Tollett, a black professor of education at
jorities, and their abandonment of the Democratic Party
Howard University. "The behavior pattern in the under-
in presidential elections undermined the coalition of the
class is not stereotypical in the pejorative sense, but it is a
have-nots and affirmed the ascendancy of a coalition of
statement of fact A stereotype is an overgeneralization.
the haves, as disaffected moderate-income white voters
"This is the way people are,' and then we say all are like
joined forces with traditional Republicans. The views of
that. The behavior of black males in the underclass is
working-class defectors from the Democratic Party were
now beginning to look like the black stereotype. The
examined in a 1985 study of suburban Detroit by Stanley
statements we have called stereorypes in the past have
Greenberg, the president of the Analysis Group, a
become true."
Democratic polling firm. The study found that
Social dysfunction, and crime in particular, have trag-
these white Democratic defectors express a profound
ically served over the past two and a half decades to rein-
distaste for blacks; a sentiment that pervades almost ev-
force racial prejudice. Statistics suggest the widespread
crything they think about government and politics.
problems among the black underclass.
Blacks constitute the explanation for their [white defec-
In a nation that is 12 percent black and 84 percent
tors') vulnerability and for almost everything that has
white, there were in 1986, according to the Department
gone wrong in their lives;not.being-black is what consti-
of Justice, more black prison inmates than white or His-
tutes being middle class; not living with blacks is what
panic. There were in 1988, according to the Department
makes a neighborhood a decent place to lives
These
of Health and Human Services, more black welfare re-
sentiments have important implications for Democrats,
cipients than white. By the late 1980s, according to the
as virtually all progressive symbols and themes have
Bureau of the Census, a majority of black families were
been redefined in racial and pejorative terms.
The special status of blacks is perceived by almost all
headed by single or separated women. At the same time,
of these individuals as a serious obstacle to their person-
according to the National Center for Health Statistics,
al advancement. Indeed, discrimination against whites
more than 60 percent of all black children were born out
has become a well-assimilated and ready explanation
of wedlock. Among black male high school dropouts
for their status, vulnerability and failures.
aged twenty to twenty-four, according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, the proportion who had not worked at
The bitterness and anger of the white Detroit voters is
all during the previous year rose from 15.1 percent in
one consequence of a central tragedy of the past twenty-
1974 to a staggering 39.7 percent in 1986. The compara-
five years: the drive to achieve racial equality and the
bie figures for young white dropouts were 9.1 percent in
striking advances of the black middle class have coin-'
1974 and 11.8 percent in 1986, and for young Hispanic
cided with a significant worsening of social dysfunction
dropouts 8.8 percent and 9.6 percent. According to fig-
in the bottom third of the black community. Social dys-
ures compiled by the Department of Justice in criminal-
function-crime, welfare dependency, joblessness, and
victimization surveys from 1979 to 1986-the surveys
illegitimacy-wreaks havoc, crushing recognition of the
considered by law-enforcement professionals to contain
achievements of liberalism. When it is disproportionately
the most reliable data on race-an annual average of 44.3
associated with one group or race, social dysfunction as-
out of every 1,000 blacks were victims of a violent crime,
saults efforts to eliminate prejudice. Gordon W. Allport
with much higher rates in very poor areas, as compared
wrote in The Nature of Prejudice,
with 34.5 out of every 1,000 whites. At the same time,
Prejudice
may be reduced by equal status contact
however, 2 far higher percentage of the crimes commit-
between majority and minority groups in the pursuit of
ted by blacks than of the crimes committed by whites
common goals. The effect is greatly enhanced if this
were interracial. In 1986 and 1987 whites committing
contact is sanctioned by institutional supports
and
crimes of violence-robbery, rape, and assault-chose
provided it is of the sort that leads to the perception of
white victims 97.5 percent of the time and black victims
common interests and common humanity between
2.5 percent of the time in those incidents in which the
members of the two groups.
victim could identify the race of the offender. Blacks
The contact between whites and the black underclass
committing violent crimes chose white victims 51.2 per-
has routinely violated every standard necessary for the
cent of the time and black victims 48.8 percent of the
breakdown of racial stereotypes. Most white contact with
time. For the specific crime of robbery the figures are
the underclass is through personal experience of crime
similarly striking. In 1986-1987, of those robberies in
and urban squaior, through such experience related by
which the race of the offender was identified by the vic-
friends and family, or through the daily reports about
tim, 95.1 percent of robberies committed by whites had
crime, drugs, and violence which appear on television
white victims and 4.9 percent had black victims; 57.4
and in newspapers. The news includes, as well, periodic
percent of robberies committed by blacks had white vic.
reports on out-of-wedlock births, welfare fraud, drug-
tims and 42.6 percent had black victims.
56
1001
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
The Races Polarize
get rid of it.
We cannot accept the fact that they
Over What's Gone Wrong
think black people have become a permanent under-
class
If we have become useless in a racist society,
IOLENCE, JOBLESSNESS, DRUG ABUSE, AND FAM-
then you must know that not public policy but 2 covert
V
ily disintegration have not only functioned to re-
policy is being already formulated to get rid of that
inforce racial prejudice; they have also led to
which is useless, since the economy is going down and
widely differing interpretations of what has
the world is going down. Follow me, brothers and sis-
gone wrong. Significant numbers of blacks, both middle-
ters. According to demographers, if the plummeting
birth rate of white people in America continues, in a
class and poor, see malevolent white power behind the
few years it will reach zero population growth. As for
disruption and dislocation in black neighborhoods. Take
blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans, if their pres-
drug abuse. "It's almost an accepted fact," says Andrew
ent birth rate continues, by the year 2080, demogra-
Cooper, the publisher of the City Sun, a black weekly
phers say, blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans will
Brooklyn newspaper, echoing ideas often heard on black
conceivably be 50 percent or more of the United States
radio talk shows and in other all-black forums. "It's a
population
If things continue just birthwise, we
deep-seated suspicion. I believe it. I can't open my desk
could control the Congress, we could control the Su-
drawer and say, 'Here it [the evidence] is.' But there is
preme Court, we could control state legislatures, and
just too much money in narcotics. People really believe
then 'Run, Jesse, run.' or 'Run, Jesse Junior, run,' or
'Run, Jesse the Third, run."
they are being victimized by The Man. If the govern-
ment wanted to stop it, it could stop it." Louis Farra-
The emergence of predominantly black underclass
khan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, brought an entire
neighborhoods rife with the worst symptoms of social
auditorium of black politicians, intellectuals, and orga-
pathology has proved to be one of the most disturbing de-
nizers-men and women on the left of the political spec-
velopments in the United States, both for city residents
trum, but by no means on the outer fringes-to their feet
and for residents of surrounding areas. In his book Canar-
during a 1989 speech in New Orleans which clearly cap-
sie, the Yale sociologist Jonathan Rieder described the
tured elements of a black world view, He said,
climate of opinion he found in the late seventies in one of
The black man and woman in America is of no further
Brooklyn's white urban ethnic enclaves:
use to the children of our former slavemasters and when
Canarsie's image of ghetto culture crystalized out of all
a thing loses its use or utility, it loses its value. If your
the visual gleanings, fleeting encounters, and racist
shoes wear out, you don't keep them around; if an old
presumptions. Lower-class blacks lacked industry,
dress becomes old, you don't keep it around. Once it
lived for momentary erotic pleasure, and, in their mys-
loses utility, you move to
tique of soul, glorified the fashions of a high-stepping
street life. The hundreds of thousands of female-head-
ed minority households in New York City, and the spi-
raling rate of illegitimate
births, reinforced the im-
pression that ghetto wom-
on were immoral.
When provincial Jews and
Italians recoiled from the
riven families of the gher-
to, they were prisoners of
ancient notions of right as
well as vituperative pas-
sion. "The blacks have
ten kids to a family," the
Italian wife of a city work-
or observed
"Bring
up a few, give them love
and education."
It
is
hard to exaggerate the be-
wilderment Canarsians
felt when they considered
the family patterns of the
ghetto. To be without a family
in southern Italy "was to be
truly a non-being, un saccu vacante (an
empty sack) as Sicilians say, un nuddu
miscatu CU nenti (a nobody mixed with nothing)."
58
MAY 1991
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
The Values Barrier
charged matters-ranging from crime to sexual responsi-
bility to welfare dependency to drug abuse to standards
HE INTENSITY OF PUBLIC REACTION TO THE
of social obligation-has for more than two decades cre-
T
world of the underclass has coincided with a
ated a values barrier between Democratic liberals and
larger conflict in America over values. This
much of the electorate. Insofar as many voters feel that
conflict has evolved, in complex ways, from
their cherished policies and practices have been routed,
one of the major struggles of the twentieth century: the
the values barrier has been a major factor in fracturing a
struggle between so-called traditional values and a com-
once deeply felt loyalty to a liberal economic agenda.
peting set of insurgent values. Traditional values general-
When rank-and-file white voters characterize the value
ly have been seen to revolve around commitments to the
structure of the underclass as aberrant, white liberals are
larger community-to the family, to parental responsibil-
not alone in their angry response. In segments of the
ity, to country, to the work ethic, to sexual restraint, to
black community the response is often a wounded out-
self-control, to rules, duty, authority, and a stable social
rage so extreme that it precludes all debate.
order The competing set of insurgent values, the focus
Bernard Boxill, a black scholar at the University of
of rights-oriented political ideologies, of the rights revo-
North Carolina, has, for example, argued that the grow-
lution, and of the civil-rights movement, has been largely
ing problems of the underclass may be used by the white
concerned with the rights of the individual-with free-
community as "an excuse to undo the legal, social and
dom from oppression, from confinement, from hierarchy,
economic advances made by the black middle class,
from authority, from stricture, from repression, from rigid
plunge the country into a race wat, and worst of all, be a
rule-making, and from the status quo.
pretext for genocide."
On a level essentially ignored by liberal elites-but a
Dr. Frances Weising, a black psychiatrist, was loudly
level, nonetheless, of stark reality to key voters-the val-
applauded at a predominantly black "town meeting" or-
Stigmatization as "racist" or as
"in bad faith" of open discussion of values-charged
matters has created a values barrier between
liberals and much of the electorate.
ues debate has become conflated with racial politics.
ganized and televised in 1989 by ABC-TV and Ted Kop-
Among Democrats and liberals the stigmatization of rac-
pel when she argued that whites bear responsibility for
ism in the 1960s had the unintended and paradoxical con-
whatever disorders there may be in black ghettos:
sequence of stigmatizing the allegiance of many voters to
Racism is a behavior system that is organized because
a whole range of fundamental moral values. In the late
white people are a minority on the planet.
If we un-
1960s and early 1970s the raising of the "traditional val-
derstand the white fear of genetic annihilation, which is
ues" banner over such issues as law and order. the family,
why Willie Horton [the Massachusetts prisoner who
sexual conduct, joblessness, welfare fraud, and patrio-
committed rape and assault while on furlough) could be
tism was seen by liberals and blacks-with some accura-
used as a very profound symbol by the Republican Par-
cy--as an appeal to racist, narrow-minded, repressive, or
ty to win this election, then we will understand what is
xenophobic instincts, designed to marshal support for re-
happening to the black male in this society. The black
actionary social policies. The conflation by the political
male is a threat to white genetic annihilation. And so he
right of values with attempts to resist racial integration, to
is profoundly attacked in this society.
exclude women from public life, and to discredit the ex-
tension of constitutional rights to minorities fueled an of-
The Roots of
ten bitter resistance by the left and by blacks to the
Our Race-Charged Politics
whole values package.
The result was that liberal Democrats often barred
N THE GULF BETWEEN FRANCES WELSING AND DAN
from consideration what are in fact legitimate issues for
political discourse, issues of fundamental social and mor-
I
Donahue one can sec evidence of a political struggle
chat goes back to the 1960s. When one looks at re-
al concern which must be forthrightly addressed by any
cent political history through the prism of our cur-
national candidate or party. This stigmatization as "rac-
rent race-charged politics, familiar events take on a new
ist" or as "in bad faith" of open discussion of values-
significance. From the perspective of 1991, for example,
MAY 1991
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
the presidential election of 1964 stands out as 3 turning
1967 there were 164 "disorders," eight of them ranked as
point in the politics of race in the United States. That
"major" on the grounds that they involved "many fires,
election forced race, already a volatile national issue, into
intensive loocing, and reports of sniping; violence lasting
the partisan competition between the Democratic and
more than two days; sizeable crowds; and use of National
Republican parties. The 1964 contest pitted the Demo-
Guard or federal forces as well as other control forces."
crat Lyndon Johnson, the leading supporter of the re-
More chan eighty people were killed, nearly 90 percent
cently passed Civil Rights Act (which granted full U.S.
of them black civilians and 10 percent policemen, fire-
citizenship rights to blacks for the first time in history),
men, and other public officials. More than three quarters
against the Republican Barry Goldwater, an ideological
of the deaths were in two cities, Detroit (forty-three) and
conservative and a strong opponent of the bill. By Elec-
Newark (twenty-three). During the five-year period
tion Day, 1964, an exceptional 75 percent of the elector-
1964-1968, according to one estimate, 329 significant
ate knew that Congress had that year passed the bill,
outbreaks of violence took place in 257 cities. Seventy-
with a striking 96 percent of those voters aware that John-
two percent of rioters in Newark surveyed by the Kemer
son had backed the measure and 84 percent aware that
Commission said they agreed with the statement "Some-
Goldwater had opposed it.
times I hate white pco-
The Democratic and Republican nominees' polarized
ple"-a finding painful to
positions on civil rights immediately transformed public
white liberals.
perceptions of the two parties. Two years before the 1964
The sea change in Ameri-
election, polls conducted by National Election Studies
can presidential politics-
showed virtually no difference in the public assessment
the replacement of a liberal
of whether the Democratic or the Republican Party
majority with a conserva-
would be "more likely to see to it that Negroes get fair
tive majority-involved
treatment in jobs and housing." Of those polled in the
the conversion of a rela-
1962 survey, 22.7 percent identified the Democrats as
tively small proportion of
more likely to protect black interests, 21.3 percent iden-
voters: the roughly five
tified the Republicans, and the remaining 56 percent
to ten percent of the
said either that there was no difference between the par-
electorate, made up pri-
ties or that they had no opinion. By 1964, however, fully
marily of white work-
60 percent identified the Democratic Party as more likely
ing-class voters, em-
to help blacks get fair treatment in seeking jobs, and only
powered to give ma-
seven percent identified the Republican Party-the par-
jority status to eicher
ty of Abraham Lincoin.
political party. Alaba-
By 1964 the Democrats had become the party of racial
ma Governor George
liberalism and the Republicans had become the party
C. Wallace was the
of racial conservatism. It was the first and last presi-
politician who showed
dential election in which racial liberalism was politically
the Republicans how to
advantageous.
seize lower-income white vot-
The event most strikingly associated with the decline
ers. Running as a third-party candi-
in political support for Democratic liberalism was the not
date in 1968, Wallace capitalized on the
that broke out on August 11, 1965, in the Watts section of
huge defection of white Democrats, par-
Los Angeles. Blacks throwing rocks and bottles at police-
ticularly in the South, as the Democratic Party formally
men shouted, "Burn, baby, burn!" as television cameras
repudiated segregation. He won just under 14 percent
rolled. By August 16, after the National Guard had been
of the vote. Wallace and Nixon together that year won
called in and order slowly restored, there were thirty-four
57 percent of the vote, however, establishing what would
dead. more than 1,000 injured, over 800 buildings dam-
become the conservative presidential majority. This
aged or destroyed, and nearly 4,000 arrests. Even Martin
majority carried every presidential election but one
Luther King, Jr. the leader of black protests since the
over the next twenty years-the exception being South-
Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, was unprepared for
em Baptist Jimmy Carter's victory in the wake of Water-
Watts. Stunned by the scope of anger among rioters, and
gate, the worst Republican scandal in history.
by their perception that the civil-rights movement had
The strength of Wallace's appeal in 1968 went beyond
been largely irrelevant to improving conditions in the
white backlash. Wallace defined a new right-wing popu-
ghetto, King "was absolutely undone" after visiting
lism, capitalizing on voter reaction to the emergence of
Watts, his close associate Bayard Rustin recalled.
racial, cultural, and moral liberalism. Wallace demonized
A succession of other violent eruptions followed over
an clite Democratic establishment, providing a desper-
the next three years. According to the Kerner Commis-
ately sought-after moral justification to those whites who
sion, appointed to investigate the causes of rioting, in
saw themselves as victimized and displaced by the black
62
MAY 1991
THE MONTHLY
struggle for civil rights and by broader social change. For
ica and the rich. Wallace effectively portrayed this
these voters, Wallace portrayed the civil-rights move-
Democratic establishment as bent on imposing a liberal,
ment not as the struggle of blacks to achieve equality-a
authoritarian, statist agenda on an unwilling electorate.
goal impossible to challenge on moral grounds-bur as
To voters resentful of the heavy hand of the new
the imposition of intrusive "social engineering" on work-
liberal establishment, Wallace said, "You are one man
ing men and women by a coercive federal government in
and one woman, and your thoughts are just as good as
the hands of a liberal cabal: lawyers, judges, editorial
theirs."
writers, government bureaucrats, and intellectuals.
Richard Nixon set out to win the Wallace vote. Nixon
"They have looked down their noses at the average man
was among the first Republicans to understand how
on the street too long," Wallace told disaffected voters.
the changing civil-rights agenda could be manipulated
"They've looked down ac the bus driver, the truck driver,
to construct a new conservative majority. His strategy
the beautician, the fireman, the policeman, and the
effectively straddled the conflict between increasing
steelworker, the plumber, and the communications work-
public support for the abstract principle of racial
CL, and the oil worker, and the little businessman, and
equality and intensified public opposition to govern-
they say, 'We've gotta write a guideline. We've gotta tell
ment-driven enforcement mechanisms. Nixon found a
you when to get up in the morning. We've gotta tell you
message that encompassed the position of the growing
when to go to bed at night.'" Wallace laid the ground-
majority of white Americans who had come to believe
work for the Republican assault
that the denial of basic citizenship rights to blacks was
wrong, but who were at the same time opposed to the
prospect of forced residential and educational integra-
tion, directed by the courts and the federal regulatory
bureaucracy.
When, in October of 1969, the Supreme Court re-
jected an Administration attempt to postpone
the desegregation of Mississippi's
schools, Nixon declared, "We
will carry out the law," but he
stressed that he did "not feel ob-
ligated to do any more than the
minimum the law required." The
Court ruling, Nixon warned, should
not be viewed by "the many young
liberal lawyers [in the Justice Depart-
ment]
as a carte blanche for them to
run wild through the South enforcing com-
pliance with extreme or punitive require-
ments they had formulated in Washington."
On the campaign trail in 1972 Nixon declared,
There is no reason to feel guilty about wanting
to enjoy what you get and get what you earn,
about wanting your children in good schools close
to home, or about wanting to be judged fairly
on your ability. Those are not values to be ashamed
on "reverse discrimination." "You
of; those are values to be proud of. Those are values
know who the biggest bigots in the world are-they're
that I shall always stand up for when they come under
the ones who call others bigots," he declared at a Mil-
attack.
waukee rally, as he struggled to be heard over the shouts
of protesters. In another campaign speech he said, "It's a
The Republican Racial Strategy
sad day in the country when you can't talk about law and
order unless they want to call you a racist. I tell you that's
CENTRAL IRONY OF THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION
not true."
A
was that the development of a Republican alter-
Perhaps most important for long-range Republican
native-"black capitalism"-to the traditional
strategy, Wallace brought into mainstream presidential
civil-rights agenda created a critical vulnerabil-
politics a new political symbol, a vilified Democratic CS-
ity for Democrats in the 1980s. Under black capitalism
tablishment that replaced as an enemy of lower-income
the federal government began actively to promote three
voters the Republican establishment of corporate Amer-
racial-preference programs that would soon become con-
MAY 1991
63
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
troversial: a minority contracting program known as
This scenario grew out of a seemingly minor develop-
"8-a," which set aside fixed percentages of federal con-
ment at the 1968 Democratic convention. As a token ges-
tracts for minority-owned businesses; the Office of Mi-
ture of appeasement to the forces of Eugene McCarthy
nority Business Enterprise, established within the De.
and Robert Kennedy, Democratic Party regulars allowed
partment of Commerce to assist minority business in
the creation of a special Commission on Party Structure
securing government contracts; and, most important, the
and Delegate Selection, to ensure that "all feasible ef-
so-called Philadelphia Plan, designed to increase black
forts have been made to assure chat delegates are select-
access to high-paying union jobs.
ed through party primary, convention, or committee pro-
The Philadelphia Plan established the authority of the
cedures open to public participation within the calendar
federal government to require companies doing business
year of the National Convention."
with the government to set up "goals and timetables" for
No one, neither Democratic Party regulars nor the
the hiring and promotion of minority members. The plan
press, had any notion of the scope of what had been set in
set specific percentage "ranges" for blacks and other mi-
motion. "There was not much attention to the Rules
nority groups for craft-union jobs. For example, plumb-
Committee reports," Max Kampelman, one of Hubert
ers and pipefitters, of whom only twelve out of 2,335 in
Humphrey's major strategists, recalled later. "Our objec-
Philadelphia were black (0.5 percent), were given a hir-
tive was to get a nominee. We said to ourselves, if
ing goal of five to eight percent in 1970, a range that
you are going to study it, you can control it. If you get the
would rise to 22 to 26 percent by 1973. The goals-and-
nomination, you'll have control of the DNC [Democratic
timetables mechanism was incorporated in 1970 into the
National Committee]. If you have the DNC, then you'll
regulations governing all federal procurement and con-
control any study. A study commission could be a way of
tracting-affecting a universe of corporations that em-
harmonizing the issue." Few political judgments have
ployed more than a third of the nation's work force.
proved more incorrect.
Nixon in 1969 did not anticipate that the affirmative-
The liberal-reform wing of the Democratic Party-in
action provisions of his Philadelphia Plan would become,
part made up of veterans of the civil-rights and student
in the course of the next twenty years, essential to a Re-
anti-war movements-dominated the party-structure
publican strategy of polarizing the electorate along lines
commission and achieved a radical alteration of the presi-
of race-and thus be vital to constructing a presidential
dential-delegate selection process. The new rules-shifted
partisan realignment. It did not take him long to learn,
the power to nominate presidential candidates from the
however: by the 1972 election Nixon was campaigning
loose alliance of state and local party structures, which
against the quota policies that his own Administration
had in the past been empowered to use their control of
had largely engendered.
the party to pick delegates, to the universe of activists,
It was Nixon's re-election campaign that developed a
often rights-oriented liberal reformers, who were now
relatively comprehensive Republican racial strategy
granted direct access to the machinery of delegate selec-
stressing whenever possible the costs of remedies for dis-
tion. "Before reform," Byron Shafer wrote in his book
crimination, especially in the cases of busing and affirma-
describing the party rules changes, Quiet Revolution,
tive action. On March 17, 1972, Nixon escalated his as-
there was an American party system in which one party,
sault on busing. The school bus, "once a symbol of
the Republicans, was primarily responsive to white-col-
hope," had become a "symbol of social engineering on
lar constituencies and in which another. the Democrats,
the basis of abstractions," he said. Seeking to reap politi-
was primarily responsive to blue-collar constituencies.
cal rewards from the growing stockpile of blue-collar rc-
After reform, there were two parties each responsive to
sentment, Nixon turned against his own Philadelphia
quite different white-collar coalitions, while the old
Plan: "When young people apply for jobs
and find
blue-collar majority within the Democratic Party was
the door closed because they don't fit into some numeri-
forced to try to squeeze back into the party once identi-
cal quota, despite their ability, and they object, I do not
fied predominantly with its needs.
think it is right to condemn those young people as insen-
In other words, those who unquestionably lost power
sitive or even racist."
in the Democratic presidential-nomination process were
the white working- and lower-middle-class voters who
The Democrats Become a
were already leaving the party in droves because they felt
White-Collar Party
the heaviest burdens of the civil-rights revolution had
been placed on their shoulders.
N DEVISING A POLITICAL STRATEGY FOR CAPTURING
Party reforms produced a substantive ideological up-
I
white working-class and southern voters, the Nixon
heaval. Before 1972, Democratic presidential delegates
Administration in 1972 would have had difficulty
were only slightly more liberal than the public at large,
designing a scenario more advantageous to the Re-
according to delegate surveys, while Republican dele-
publicans, and more damaging to the Democratic Party,
gates were considerably more conservative than the elec-
than the one the Democrats devised for themselves.
torate. Delegates to the 1972 Democratic convention,
66
MAY 1991
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
however, were significantly further to the political left of
form.
Anybody who would reform Chicago's Demo-
the electorate ac large than the Republican delegates that
cratic Party by dropping the white ethnic would prob-
year were to the right.
ably begin a diet by shooting himself in the stomach.
No development better summarizes the shift in incra-
party power than the decision by the McGovem forces at
After the credentials committee voted seventy-one to
the 1972 convention to oust the fifty-nine-member Cook
sixty-one to oust the Daley delegation, Frank Man-
County delegation under the control of Chicago Mayor
kiewicz, a spokesman for the McGovem campaign, dryly
Richard Daley. Since 1932 the Chicago organization had
noted, "I think we may have lost Illinois tonight."
been more important to the success or failure of Demo-
In the 1972 general election,
cratic presidential candidates chan any other city ma-
George McGovern lost not
chine. Without Daley in 1960, for example, John F. Ken-
only Illinois but forty-eight
nedy would not have carried Illinois by an 8,858-vote
other states, being defeated
margin.
by 61 percent to 38 per-
The Cook County delegation, elected in a March 21
Illinois primary, was vulnerable to
challenge because Daley's machine
had stated candidates in closed
meetings, and because the composi-
cion of the Chicago delegation did
not include the required proportions
of women and blacks.
Pro-McGovern reformers success-
fully voted out the Daley delegates
and replaced them with a slate "chosen
no one knew quite how," according to
Theodore H. White. White wrote,
In the 1st Congressional District of
Chicago, for example, a group of peo-
ple had met at the home of one James
Clement and decided that only ten of
those present might vote for an alter-
nate to Mayor Daley's slate; those ten
had chosen 7 delegates, including the
Reverend Jesse Jackson. This rival
hand-picked alternate slate offered the
exact proportion of women, blacks and
youth required by the McGovem reform
rules. Yet the elected siate in the 1st
Congressional had been voted in by the
people of Chicago, and these had not.
In an open letter to Alderman William
Singer, the leader of the Chicago reform-
ers, the Chicago Sun-Times columnist
Mike Royko wrote,
cent. or 18
I just don't see where your delegation is
million votes. For the long-
representative of Chicago's Demo-
run future of the capacity of the Democratic
crats.
About half of your delegates
Party to nominate and elect Presidents, the central issue
are women: About a third of your delegates are black.
was not just the magnitude of McGovem's defeat. It was
Many of them are young people. You even have a few
Latin Americans. But as I looked over the names of
the inability of the Democratic Party to absorb competing
factions and to mediate the differences among them.
your delegates, I saw something peculiar.
There's
only one Italian there. Are you saying that only one out
The new rules removed from the presidential-nomina-
of every 59 Democratic votes cast in a Chicago election
tion process those white elected and party officials who
is cast by an Italian? And only three of your 59 have Pol-
were closer to the racial and cultural conflicts plaguing
ish names.
Your reforms have disenfranchised Chi-
the party than the liberal reformers who dominated
cago's white echnic Democrats, which is a strange re-
the proceedings. Among those who did not attend the
68
MAY 1991
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
1972 convention were 225 of 255 Democratic congress-
The Civil Rights
men, the Democratic mayors of Los Angeles, Detroit,
Agenda Becomes Redistributive
Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, Mayor Daley
and his Chicago loyalists, and uncounted city council-
S THE WHITE WORKING-CLASS VOTERS WHO HAD
men, state legislators, and leaders of Democratic ward
A
formed the core of the New Deal coalition be-
organizations.
gan to lose clout within the Democratic Party,
These leaders represented white voters who were on
the economy began to falter. Steady economic
the front lines of urban housing integration; who were
growth, which had made redistributive government poli-
the subjects of busing orders; who were competitors for
cies tolerable to the majority electorate, came to a halt in
jobs as policemen and firemen
the mid-1970s. With stagnation the threat to Democratic
liberalism intensified. Just as the civil-rights movement
reached its height, high-paying union jobs and big-city
patronage-which had served to foster upward mobility
for each succeeding immigrant generation-began to dry
up. Many blacks lost even a toehold on the ladder, while
whites slipped down, sometimes just a rung, sometimes
all the way to the bottom.
The end of vigorous post-Second World War economic
growth came in 1973. Hourly earnings, which had grown
every year since 1951 in real, inflation-adjusted dollars,
fell by 0.1 percent in 1973, by 2.8 percent in 1974, and
by 0.7 percent in 1975. Weekly earnings fell more sharp-
ly, by 4.1 percent in 1974 and by 3.1 percent in 1975.
Median family income, which had grown from $20,415
(in 1985 inflation-adjusted dollars) in 1960 to $29,172 in
1973, began to decline; family income fell to $28,145 in
1974 and then to $27,421 in 1975.
In a whipsaw action the middle-class tax burden rose
with inflation while the economy and real income growth
slowed. The tax system was losing its progressivity, plac-
ing a steadily increasing share of the cost of government
on middle- and lower-middle-class voters, vital constitu-
encies for the Democratic Party. In 1953 a family making
the median family income was taxed at a rate of 11.8 per-
cent, while a family making four times the median was
taxed at 20.2 percent, nearly double. By 1975 the figures
had become 22.7 percent for the average family and 29.5
percent for the affluent family. In other words, for the af-
fluent family the tax burden increased by 46 percent
from .1953 to 1976, while for the average family it in-
and union crafts-
creased by 92.4 percent.
men which were governed by affirma-
As the job market, income patterns, and growing pres-
tive-action consent decrees; who regarded as incompre-
sure from many groups for spending on the poor created a
hensible many liberal Supreme Court decisions on
competition for government funds in which there were
criminals' rights, abortion, sexual privacy, school prayer,
more losers than winners, the civil-rights agenda itself
busing, and obscenity. These voters and their political
became increasingly redistributive. In order to remedy
representatives were, and still are, largely relegated to
past and present discrimination in both employment and
peripheral status in the Democratic presidential-primary
education, the courts and the federal regulatory structure
process. With the withdrawal of socially conservative
turned to tough affirmative-action policies. Federal direc-
white voters from the nomination process, Democratic
tives and regulations-developed in part by the Equal
presidential candidates have negotiated that process in
Employment Opportunity Commission and endorsed by
the context of an artificially liberal primary electorate
the Supreme Court in 1971 in Griggs V. Duke Power Co.
that puts the candidates outside the ideological main-
and in later decisions-sharply restricted hiring and pro-
stream and provides them with virtually no training in
motion procedures that adversely affected blacks.
the kinds of accommodation and bargaining essential to
The most aggressive efforts to provide jobs for blacks
general-election victory.
were directed at the most besieged white Democratic
MAY 1991
69
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
man was hired. Richard Arrington, Birmingham's first
black mayor, was elected in 1979, and two years
later the city agreed to a consent decree
providing that every white hire
or promotion would be
matched, one for
one, by a black hire
or promotion, as long
as blacks were avail-
able who had fulfilled
basic test requirements.
In 1983 James Henson,
a white fireman, and Carl
Cook, a black fireman, both
took the Birmingham Fire De-
partment test for lieutenant.
Both passed, but Henson ranked
sixth among all who took the test,
with a score of 192, while Cook
constituencies:
ranked eighty-fifch, with a score of
the building-trades un-
122. Under the consent decree Cook
ions and police and fire de-
was promoted to licutenant and Hen-
partments. White men working as
son was not.
carpenters, plumbers, sheet-metal work-
Henson became part of a group of
crs, iron workers, steamfitters, cops, and firemen
whites attempting to challenge the consent degree. He
became the focus of the anti-discrimination drive waged
argued, "I can understand that blacks had been histori-
by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.
cally discriminated against. I can also understand why
The dilemma inherent in using racial preference to
people would want to be punitive in correcting it. Some-
remedy past discrimination is sharply reflected in Justice
body needs to pay for this. But they want me to pay for it,
William Brennan's 1976 majority opinion upholding the
and I didn't have anything to do with it. I was a kid when
award of retroactive seniority to blacks in Franks V. Bow-
all this went on."
man Transportation Co., Inc., and in the dissenting opin-
Cook countered, "Say your father robs a bank, takes
ion of Justice Lewis Powell.
the money and buys his daughter a Mercedes. and then
Brennan wrote that retroactive seniority was essential
buys his son a Porsche and his wife a home in the high-
for the victim of discrimination, because without it he
rent district. Then they discover he has embezzied the
will never obtain his rightful place in the hierarchy of
money. He has to give the cars and house back. And the
seniority according to which these various employment
family starts to cry: 'We didn't do anything.' The same
benefits are distributed. He will perpetually remain
thing applies to what the whites have to say. The fact is,
subordinate to persons who, but for the illegal discrimi-
sometimes you have to pay up. If a wrong has been com-
nation, would have been, in respect to entidement to
mitted, you have to right that wrong."
these benefits, his inferiors.
The Birmingham case represents an extreme: pitting
Powell. on the other hand. contended that the award of
whice and black workers against each other in a competi-
retroactive seniority would penalize "the rights and ex-
cion for government-controlled jobs and employment
pectations of perfectly innocent employees. The eco-
benefits. Over time these racial divisions reverberated in
nomic benefits awarded discrimination victims would be
Birmingham's political system. Once, every elected offi-
derived not at the expense of the employer but at the ex-
cial in this city was a Democrat; now racial conflict has
pense of other workers."
begun to translate into a local partisan realignment. By
The intensity of the conflict over affirmative action can
the end of the 1980s Jefferson County, which encom-
be seen in less abstract terms in Birmingham, Alabama.
passes Birmingham, had its eighteen seats in the state
Not until 1968-103 years after the end of the Civil
House of Representatives split between blacks and
War-did the Birmingham fire department hire its first
whites. In partisan terms there were eight black Demo-
black fireman. Throughout all those years blacks were
crats, one white Democrat, and nine white Republicans.
systematically denied the opportunity not only of em-
Among the white Republican state representatives
ployment but also of building seniority and learning the
was Billy Gray, a former president of the Firefighters
promotional ropes. Legal proceedings were initiated
Union. Race had become central to establishing partisar
against the city in 1974, the year the second black fire-
difference.
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
The same zero-sum element of affirmative action in
ty"-the original clarion call of the civil-rights move-
employment is applicable to higher education. "We are
ment-became the center-right position, the core of the
committed to a program of affirmative action, and we
new conservative egalitarian populism. Republican and
want to make the university representative of the popula-
Democratic differences over what "equal opportunity"
tion of the state as a whole," James A. Blackbum, the
meant reflected, in part, differences in the opinions of
dean of admissions at the University of Virginia, said in
whites and blacks. By the 1980 election the ideological
1988. "That means fewer spaces for the traditional main-
divergence had extended beyond issues of civil rights to
stream white students who have come here from around
basic questions about the role and responsibilities of the
the country.
If you were looking at the academic cre-
federal government. In 1980 blacks who believed that it
dentials, you would say Virginia has it upside down. We
was the responsibility of government to provide jobs out-
take more in the groups with weaker credentials and
numbered those who contended that "government
make it harder for those with stronger credentials."
should just let every person get ahead on his own" by a
margin of 70-30, according to National Election Studies
Reagan and Race
poll data. Whites, however, split in the opposite direc-
tion, contending by a 62-38 margin that government
XPLOSIVE FORCES-STAGNANT INCOMES, DECLIN-
should just let "everyone get ahead on his own" rather
E
ing numbers of manufacturing jobs, inflation-
than guaranteeing work.
driven increases in marginal tax rates, sharply
Responses to this question also revealed the extent to
accelerating welfare dependency, skyrocketing
which ideology, vocing patterns, and race had become
crime, soaring illegitimacy, and affirmative-action com-
commingled. In addition to polarizing blacks and whites,
petition for jobs and college placement-began to reach
the question was found to polarize Reagan and Carter
the point of combustion in the mid-to-late 1970s. Demo-
voters, with Carter getting 80 percent of those who most
Nixon's re-election campaign
developed a relatively comprehensive Republican
racial strategy stressing whenever possible the
costs of remedies for discrimination.
crats failed to recognize the threat these forces represent-
strongly supported government intervention to provide
ed; leaders of the party were given false comfort by the
work, and Reagan winning 79 percent of those most
belief that Watergate had done irreparable harm to the
strongly opposed to such intervention.
Republicans.
In a parallel split, Carter received 93 percent of the
The importance of race in the chain of events that
vote from those citizens, white and black, who most
brought Ronald Reagan to the White House-from the
strongly supported government efforts "to improve the
Great Inflation of the 1970s to the California tax revolt-
social and economic position of blacks," while Reagan
cannot be overestimated. Reagan, echoing Goldwater
got 71 percent of those who felt most adamantly that "the
from sixteen years before, strengthened the image of the
government should not make any special effort to help
Republicans as the party of racial conservatism. Under
because they should help themselves."
Reagan in 1980 the percentage of voters who said the Re-
Race, ideology, and partisanship had become inex-
publican Party was "not likely" to help minorities shot up
tricably linked, a linkage that empowered the Republi-
to 66 percent (from 40 percent in 1976), while those who
can Party in its new populism. Lee Atwater, who ran
said that the party would help minorities collapsed to 11
southern operations for the 1980 campaign and managed
percent (from 33 percent). Unlike Goldwater in 1964,
George Bush's 1988 campaign, has argued, "In the 1980
however, Reagan in 1980 demonstrated that racial con-
campaign we were able to make the establishment, inso-
servatism was no longer a liability-that in fact it was a
far as it is bad, the government. In other words, big gov-
clear asset-as his party made gains at every level of
emment was the enemy, not big business. If the people
electoral competition from state legislative seats to the
are thinking that the problem is that taxes are too high
White House.
and government interferes too much, then we are doing
Under Reagan the Republican Party in 1980 was able
our job. But if they get to the point where they say the
to stake out a conservative civil-rights stand that won
real problem is that rich people aren't paying taxes, that
strong majority support. Advocacy of "equal opportuni-
Republicans are protecting the realtors and $0 forth, then
MAY 1991
73
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
I think the Democrats are going to be in pretty good
conventional Democratic themes, like opportunity and
shape. The National Enquirer readership is the exact voc-
fairness, are now invested with all the cynicism and rac-
er I'm talking about. There are always some stories in
ism that has come to characterize these sessions (focus
there about some multimillionaire that has five Cadillacs
groups]. In effect, the themes and Party symbols have
and hasn't paid taxes since 1974, or so-and-so Republican
been robbed of any meaning for these Democratic dc-
fectors. On hearing the term "fairness," these voters re-
congressman hasn't paid taxes since he got into Congress.
call, on the one hand, "racial minorities" or "some
And they'll have another set of stories of a guy sitting
blacks kicking up a storm," and on the other hand,
around in a big den with liquor saying so-and-so fills his
"only politics" or politicians who are "lying." It never
den with liquor using food stamps." So what determines
occurred to these voters that the Democrats were refer-
whether conservative or liberal egalitarianism is ascen-
ring to the middle class.
dant, Atwater says, is "which one of those establishments
the public sees as a bad guy."
Similar views abound among white voters in such com-
Reagan focused on the right-wing populist strategy de-
munities as Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chica-
scribed by Atwater, playing on the combustible mix of
go, and rural East Texas. These views are particularly
race. big government, and white working-class anger.
devastating to the Democratic Party because fairness has
One of Reagan's favorite anecdotes was the inflated story
become a central Democratic theme. The 1980 Demo-
of a Chicago "welfare queen" with "eighty names, thirty
cratic platform declared, "In all of our economic pro-
addresses, twelve Social Security cards" whose "tax-free
grams, the one overriding principle must be fairness." The
income alone is over $150,000." The food-stamp pro-
platform of four years later asserted, "A nation is only as
gram, in turn, was a vehicle to let "some young fellow
strong as its commitment to justice and equality. Today, a
ahead of you buy T-bone steak" while "you were stand-
corrosive unfairness cats at the underpinnings of our soci-
ing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger"
ety." (Emphases added.)
Such implicitly race-laden images, and the values con-
In addition, fairness remains a strong and legitimate is-
flict associated with welfare and food stamps, furthered
sue for the legions of black Democratic voters. "The is-
the Republican Party's efforts to expand beyond its tradi-
sues that concern working-class minorities comprise the
tional base and establish a sustained policy majority-
traditional 'fairness' agenda of jobs, housing, welfare,
which supported the first major retrenchment of the lib-
and education," the vocer study by CRG Communica-
cral government policies of the 1930s and the 1960s,
tions found. "They want more
ranging from assaults on labor to a broad attempt to dis-
benefits for themselves and
mantle che civil-rights regulatory structure and to over-
their children. [They] strongly
turn court rulings favoring minorities. In direct contrast
assert the validity of the 'fair-
to the "bottom-up" coalition of the New Deal Democrat-
ness' theme. They believe
ic Party, the new Republican presidential majority was--
that they are entitled to cer-
and is-a "top-down" coalition.
tain governmental benefits
and view the diminishment
What "Fairness"-to Whom?
of those benefits as a be-
trayal of a trust."
HILE THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION REPEAT-
The association in the
W
edly stressed the costs to white America of
minds of many white voc-
civil-rights enforcement, especially affirma-
tive-action remedies, the Democratic Party,
deliberately or inadvertently, continued to find itself
identified with those costs. Throughout the 1984 cam-
paign Walter Mondale was repeatedly enmeshed in nego-
tiations with Jesse Jackson, with organized labor, with
feminist groups, and, most damaging of all, with those
seeking to raise taxes to fuel what many voters saw as an
intrusive federal government. The vulnerability of the
Democratic Party was reflected in the deeply hostile
public reaction to Mondale's proposal to raise $30 billion
FI
in new revenues to "promote fairness."
The Democratic "fairness" message in 1984 was
viewed by a crucial sector of the white electorate through
the prism of race. The Analysis Group, reporting on the
views of white Democratic defectors in Macomb County,
Michigan, found that
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
ers of "fairness" with "fairness to minorities" has made it
and got sent back to the neighborhood and told, 'Get on
very difficult for the Democratic Party to capitalize on
unemployment.' All it takes is two or three of them.
the striking increase in the disparity of income over the
Would you define them as Republican precinct captains?
past decade not only between rich and poor but also be-
No. Is it advantageous for the Republicans to watch a
tween the working and lower-middle classes and the rich.
guy like that sitting in a tavent drinking his beer and tell-
During the 1980s the top one percent saw after-tax family
ing the story about how he got bumped? And then all of a
income grow by 87 percent, from $213,675 in 1980 to
sudden it's six o'clock and [on TV] it's Jesse. It's bad and
$399,697 in 1990 (both figures in 1990 dollars); families
it ain't going to get better."
just above the median, in the sixth decile, saw their after-
tax income grow by only three percent, from $25,964 in
The Signal of "Crime"
1980 to $26,741 in 1990.
In the 1988 election no one knew better than Michael
1988 THE BUSH CAMPAIGN ASSEMBLED AND DE-
Caccitolo, the Republican committeeman of Chicago's
23rd Ward, the difficulty of the Democratic Party's strug-
I
ployed a range of symbols and images designed to
tap into voters' submerged anxieties about race, cul-
gle to revive the issue of fairness among the once-Demo-
ture, rights, and values-the anxieties that had
cratic voters of southwest Chicago. "Every night I sit at
helped to fuel the conservative politics of the post-civil-
home and watch the news," he said. "I see Jesse [Jack-
rights cra. The symbols of the Bush campaign-Willie
son) up there calking about 'black empowerment, our
Horton, the ACLU, the death penalty, the Pledge of Al-
people,' and that's sending a message out there that no
legiance, the flag-and rhetoric such as "no new taxes."
Democratic precinct captain can possibly overcome.
the "L-word," and "Harvard boutique liberal" conjured
When the Dan Ryan [Expressway] was being built, the
up the criminal defendants'- and prisoners'-rights move-
old lady from Operation Push [Rev. Willie Barrow, at that
ments, black crime, permissive liberal elites, a revenue-
time the president of Jackson's Operation Push] comes
hungry state, eroding traditional values, tattered patrio-
out and says, 'We are going to close the Dan Ryan down
tism, and declining American prestige.
unless we get more blacks on construction.' The people
Willie Horton represented, for crucial sectors of the
in the neighborhood remember that. Nobody threatened
electorate, the consequences of an aggressively expan-
to close the Dan Ryan down to get Polish people on. And
sive liberalism-a liberalism running up against majority
they [city and state officials] backed down and they gave
public opinion, against traditional values, and, to a cer-
a bunch of black guys
tain degree, against common sense. Horton came to
entry-level jobs. And
stand for liberalism's blurring of legitimate goals, such as
helping prisoners judged suitable for rehabilitation (pris-
oners, for example, without long records of violence),
look LESS who they threw off
with the illegitimate goal, in the majority view, of "cod-
dling" violent and dangerous criminals whom much of
society judges irredeemable.
Republican strategists recognized that the furloughing
of Willie Horton epitomized an evolution of the far-
reaching rights movement, an evolution resented and
disapproved of by significant numbers of voters. These
voters saw crime as one of a number of social and moral
problems aggravated by liberalism. The evolving rights
movement was seen as extending First Amendment
privileges to hard-core pornography, as allowing welfare
recipients to avoid responsibility for supporting their
children, as fostering drug use, illegitimacy, homosexual
promiscuity, and an AIDS epidemic. All chese led, in
turn, to demands on taxpayers to foot skyrocketing so-
cial-service and health-care bills.
"Crime" became a shorthand signal, to a crucial group
of white voters, for broader issues of social disorder,
evoking powerful ideas about authority, status, morality,
self-control, and race. "On no other issue is the dividing
line 50 clear, and on no other issue is my opponent's phi-
losophy so completely at odds with mine, and I would say
with the common-sense attitudes of the American peo-
ple, than on the issue of crime," Bush declared in an Oc-
MAY 1991
77
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
tober 7, 1988, campaign speech to police officers in
courts treat whites and blacks evenhandedly, 56 percent
Xenia, Ohio, adding,
of white New Yorkers in a 1988 WCBS-New York Times
There are some-and I would list my opponent among
poll said they believed that the system was fair and 27
them-who have wandered far off the clear-cut path of
percent said the system favored one race over another,
common sense and have become lost in the thickets of
with that 27 percent evenly split between those who saw
liberal sociology. Just as when it comes to foreign poli-
black favoritism and those who saw white favoritism.
cy, they always "Blame America First," when it comes
Among black New Yorkers only 30 percent saw the sys-
to crime and criminals, they always seem to "Blame So-
tem as fair, and 49 percent saw it as unfair, with the over-
ciety
First." [Criminal justice under Dukakis is] a
whelming majority of those who perceived unfairness
"Twilight Zone" world where prisoners' "right of priva-
seeing a bias in favor of whites.
cy" has more weight than the citizen's right to safety.
Such highly controversial cases as the 1987 allegations
of rape by Tawana Brawley and the 1984 shooting by the
The Racial Chasm
"subway vigilante" Bernhard Goetz of four black teen-
agers provoked sharply divergent views from blacks and
HE DIVISIVE POWER OF RACE AND RACE-INFUSED
T
from whites. After a grand jury determined in 1988 that
preoccupations with values, class,. and social
Brawley had fabricated her story, 73 percent of white
disorder endured throughout the 1980s, rever-
New Yorkers polled by WCBS-News York Times said she
berating across the electorate. Differences of
lied, while only 33 percent of blacks were prepared to
opinion between blacks and whites intensified over the
make that judgment (18 percent said she told the truch,
decade. A 1989 voter study conducted by KRC Research
14 percent said she didn't know what happened to her,
and Consulting for Democrats For the 90's, a private or-
and 35 percent were unwilling to express an opinion). In
ganization affiliated with the Democratic Party, revealed
the case of Goetz, the WCBS-New York Times poll found
the extent to which key white Democratic voters "take
in 1985 that the proportion of whites describing them-
issue with the Democratic rhetoric of representing the
selves as supportive of the shooting, relative to those who
'middle class and the poor.' These [voters] perceive
were critical, was 50-37, as compared with 23-59-among
themselves to be neither rich nor poor, and they do not
blacks. Whites felt that Goetz was innocent of attempted
like being referred to in the same breath as 'the poor.'
murder by a margin of 47-18 (with the rest undecided),
They describe themselves as "working people.'" Black
while blacks said that he was guilty by a margin of 42-19.
urban Democratic voters, conversely, "feel that the coun-
(Hispanics sided more with whites than with blacks, fa-
try and the Democratic Party are increasingly racist and
voring innocence over guilt at 41-23.)
that the party cares little for their needs and interests."
Underlying these differences in public opinion is a pro-
Divisions between the races have emerged on a host of
found gulf between blacks and whites over the cause of
fronts. On the basic question of whether judges and
contemporary differences between the races. In seeking
to clarify these differences of opinion, Ron Walters, a
black political scientist at Howard University, has argued
BONSAI
chat the fundamental issue in the contemporary politics
of race is "Who is responsible for our condition?" He
says, "Once you draw the line on that, you draw the line
Old man, precarious
on a lot of other race-value issues. Whites see blacks as
on splayed feet,
generally responsible for their own situation, which
means that whites refuse to take responsibility. Blacks
leaning over the rim
see it differently. They believe there ought to be a con-
of the known world,
tinuing assumption of responsibility for their condition
by the government, in addition to what they do for them-
selves. And therein lies a lot of the difference."
gnarled, angled
This racially loaded confrontation over the issue of re-
(as we imagine age),
sponsibility, both historical and contemporary, is perhaps
best illustrated by the views of the political analysts Rog-
short of breadth,
cr Wilkins and Patrick Buchanan. Wilkins, a black pro-
he speaks of the past,
fessor of history at George Mason University and a well-
known commentator who served as an assistant attorney
general in the Johnson Administration and was an editori-
knowing in his roots
al writer for The New York Times and The Washington Post,
many call stories.
has written,
The issue isn't guilt. It's responsibility. Any fair reading
-Leonard Cochran
of history will find that since the mid-seventeenth cen-
MAY 1991
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
tury whites have oppressed some blacks so completely
Can America Afford Affirmative Action?
as to disfigure their humanity. Too many whites point
to the debased state of black culture and institutions
HE CONFLICT REPRESENTED BY WILKINS AND
as proof of the inferiority of the blacks they have man-
gled
[The logical implication] is simple: black
people simply need to pull up their socks. That idea is
T
Buchanan is driven not only by a fundamental
difference over values and responsibility but
also by economic and demographic forces.
wrong and must be resisted.
Like it or
not, slavery, the damage from legalized
These forces are helping to make the political struggle
oppression during the century that fol-
for public resources and benefits increasingly
lowed emancipation. and the racism
bitter and increasingly irreconcilable. In
that still infects the entire nation
many respects these forces are
follow a direct line to ghetto life
working in candem to make
today.
the process of incorporating
new groups into the main-
On the other side, Buchan-
an, an Irish Catholic who was
stream of American society
more difficult. They include
a ranking conservative strat-
the globalization of the econ-
egist for the Nixon and
omy, the growing disparity
Reagan administrations
between the wages paid to the
and remains a widely fol-
college-educated and the
lowed political columnist
wages paid to those with a high
and television commen-
school diploma or less, the drop
cator of the hard right,
in college entry by blacks, and
has written,
the emergence of a
Why did liberalism fail
black America? Because
it was built on a myth,
the myth of the Kemer
Commission, that the
last great impediment
to equality in America
was 'white racism.
That myth was rooted
in one of the oldest of
self-delusions: It is be-
cause you are rich that
I am poor. My prob-
lems are your fault. You owe me!
There was a time when white rac-
ism did indeed block black progress in America, but by
the time of the Kemer Commission ours was a nation
committed to racial justice.
The real root causes of the crisis in the underclass are
twofold. First, the old character-forming, conscience-
forming institutions-family, church, and school-
have collapsed under relentless secular assault; sec-
suburban vot-
ond, as the internal constraines on behavior were lost
ing majority.
among the black poor, the external barriers-po-
The globalization of the
lice, prosecutors, and courts-were systematically
economy constitutes a
undermined
fundamental attack on the mechanisms
What the black poor need more than anything to-
traditionally relied upon to integrate
day is a dose of the truth. Slums are the products of the
new untrained and poorly educated groups into the
people who live there. Dignity and respect are not
mainstream of American life. Before the internationaliza-
handed out like food stamps; they are earned and
tion of manufacturing, policies and practices ranging
won
The first step to progress, for any group, lies in the
from widespread political patronage to legislation creat-
admission that its failures are, by and large. its own
ing the pro-union National Labor Relations Board forcec
fault, that success can come only through its own cf-
the incorporation of immigrant groups into the work
fosts, that, while the well-intentioned outsider may
force.
help. he or she is no substitute for personal sacrifice.
The threat represented by overseas competition ha
MAY 19<
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
thrust American companies into a battle for survival in
ployment prospects of blacks and Hispanics has been
which there is little or no room to accommodate the
documented in two book-length studies, Ability Testing
short-term costs of absorbing blacks and other previously
(1982) and Fairness in Employment Testing (1989), by the
excluded minority groups into the labor force. And while
National Research Council. On almost all ability tests
affirmative action performs for blacks and other minor-
studied, the council found (wichout engaging the unre-
ities the same function that patronage performed for
solved issue of causes), blacks scored substantially below
waves of immigrants from Ireland and southern Europe,
whites, and Hispanics scored somewhere in between.
it also imposes costs that place American companies at a
One study found, for example, that on average, if hiring
disadvantage in international competition.
were done strictly on the basis of ability-test scores, an
These costs lic at the core of the debate over the civil-
employer selecting from a pool of 100 whites and 100
rights bill of 1991. Although the issue of quotas has domi-
blacks would take only three blacks in the first twenty-
nated public discussion of the civil-rights bill, the real
three applicants chosen, and only six blacks in the first
bartle is over legislating the precise cost to companies
thirty-six. The differences in test-score results are (c-
that affirmative-action programs will involve. In an at-
duced, but remain substantial, for blacks and whites of
tempt to overtum recent conservative rulings by the Su-
similar income and education.
preme Court (now dominated by Republican appoin-
The contemporary conflict over affirmative action is root-
tees), the Democratic leadership of Congress has
ed in the issue of test scores. Everywhere from college ad-
proposed legislation strictly limiting the use of ability
missions to hiring for jobs, tests have become a primary
tests and other hiring procedures with potentially dis-
instrument for determining personal status, income, and
criminatory impact, even in the absence of discrimina-
security. On one side of the debate it is argued that the
tory intent. If hiring or promotion procedures are found
unrestricted use of ability tests imposes an extraordinary
to have "adverse impact" on blacks-that is, if dispro-
burden on blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities; on
portionately more blacks (or other minorities) chan
the other that prohibiting ability testing imposes costs on
whites are rejected-employers must demonstrate that
the economy in terms of lost productivity and efficiency.
such tests are essential for business operation and meet a
stringent "business necessity" standard. The legislation
The New Segregation
would in effect overtum a 1989 Supreme Court decision,
Wards Cove Packing Co. V. Atonio, that allowed companies
HILE LOW-SKILL, ENTRY-LEVEL JOBS HAVE
to use ability tests and other hiring criteria that ad-
W
moved overseas to low-wage countries, the
versely affect blacks and Hispanics if such
domestic job market has changed in ways
criteria met the far less stringent
that work to enlarge, rather chan to lessen.
standard of "business jus-
disparities in the incomes of whites and of blacks. The
tification." Wards
growing demand for college-educated workers and the
Cove explicitly de-
decline in demand for low-skill manual workers have in
clared that "there is
recent years substantially changed wage patterns.
no requirement that
From 1975 to 1988 the average earnings of entry-level
the challenged practice
workers with college or more-advanced degrees rose from
be 'essential' or 'indis-
about 130 percent to about 180 percent of the earnings of
pensable' to the employ-
workers with high school diplomas. This shift was inher-
er's business."
ently damaging to blacks: in 1988, 13.1 percent of blacks
Such seemingly arcane
between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four had col-
and legalistic phrases as
lege degrees, as compared with 24.5 percent of whites.
"business necessity" and
Compounding this disparity is a second development:
"business justification" can
just as the value of a college education has skyrocketed,
have profound consequences.
the percentage of blacks between the ages of eighteen
If, for example, companies were
and twenty-four who go on to college and get a degree
permitted to use scores on ability
has fallen. From 1976 to 1988 the percentage of blacks
tests as a hiring criterion, it would
aged eighteen to twenty-four enrolled in college fell from
at present be a major setback to the
22.6 to 21.1, while the percentage of whites rose from
hiring of blacks and Hispanics-un-
27.1 to 31.3.
less scores were adjusted for differ-
The effect of these two trends has been to undermine
ences among whites, blacks, Hispan-
what was a powerful drive toward economic and educa-
ics, and other groups (a scoring process
tional equality between the races. In the ten years imme-
termed "within-group scoring," "within-group adjust-
diately following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights
ment," or "race-norming").
Act, the economy pushed the earnings of both blacks and
The importance of restricted ability testing for the em-
whites who were in the work force steadily upward.
MAY 1991
81
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
There was a strong convergence of shared prosperity
The 1992 election will be the first in which the subur-
and growing racial equality. From 1963 to 1973 average
ban vote, as determined from U.S. Census data, will be
weekly earnings for everyone grew from $175.17 to
an absolute majority of the total electorate. From 1968 to
$198.35, in 1977 inflation-adjusted dollars. As wages rose
1988 the percentage of the presidential vote cast in sub-
for whites and blacks, income differentials were sharply
urbs grew from 35.6 percent to 48.3 percent, and there
reduced: from 1963 to 1977-1978 the difference between
will be a gain of at least two percent by 1992 under cur-
black and white wages dropped from the 45 percent
rent trends.
range down to the 30 percent range, a drop of about one
Suburban growth will in all likelihood profoundly
percentage point a year. For younger, well-educated work-
change national politics, and will further deepen schisms
ers the gap had almost disappeared by the mid-1970s.
between the public-policy interests of the two races. AI-
Starting in the late 1970s and continuing into the early,
though opinion polls show increasing support for govern-
1980s, however, the situation began to change radically.
ment expenditures on education, health, recreation, and
While the income of college graduates continued to rise,
a range of other desired public services, a growing per-
the income of high school graduates began to fall. At the
centage of white voters are discovering that they can be-
same time that the so-called "college wage premium"
come fiscal liberals at the local suburban level while re-
rose, the wage levels for job categories that employ dis-
maining conservative about federal spending. These
proportionately more whites (professionals, managers,
voters can satisfy their need for government services
and sales personnel) grew substantially faster than wage
through increased local expenditures, guaranteeing the
levels for those categories employing disproportionate
highest possible return to themselves on their tax dollars,
numbers of blacks (machine operatives and clerical, ser-
while continuing to demand austerity at the federal level.
vice, and household workers).
Suburbanization has permitted whites to satisfy liberal
The result has been a striking shift in racial wage pat-
ideals revolving around activist government while keep-
"Crime" became a shorthand
signal for broader issues of social disorder,
evoking powerful ideas about authority, status,
morality, self-control, and race.
terns. Starting at the end of the 1970s the convergence
ing to a minimum the number of blacks and poor people
between the incomes of working blacks and whites-a
who share in government largesse.
convergence that had the potential in the long run to en-
For example, the residents of Gwinnett County, Geor-
large the economic common ground between the races-
gia, which is one of the fastest-growing suburban juris-
came to a halt. In the late 1970s black wages abruptly
dictions in the United States, heavily Republican (76
stopped catching up to white wages, with the differential
percent for Bush), affluent. and predominantly white
scagnating at roughly 30 percent.
(93.6 percent)-have been willing to tax and spend on
For a Democratic Party seeking to build a majority co-
their own behalf as liberally as any Democrats. County
alition aligning the interests of blacks and whites, this
voters have in recent years approved a special recreation
was a grave blow. The failure of the trend toward wage
tax; all school, library, and road bond issues: and a one
equality to continue has encouraged the conflict between
percent local sales tax.
black and white world views, in which black gains are
The accelerated growth of the suburbs has made it
seen as a cost to whites, and white advantages are seen as
possible for many Americans to pursue certain civic
a manifestation of racism.
ideals (involvement in schools. cooperation in communi-
ty endeavors, a willingness to support and to pay for pub-
Race and the Suburbs
lic services) within a smaller universe, separate and apart
from the consuming failure (crime, welfarism, decay) of
UST AS WAGE AND EDUCATION PATTERNS ARE WORK-
the older cities.
J
ing to undermine what was a trend toward economic
If a part of the solution to the devastating problems of
equality between the races, the dominant demo-
the underclass involves investment in public services,
graphic trend in the nation-suburbanization-is
particularly in the public school systems of the nation's
working to intensify the geographic separation of the
major cities, the growing division between city and sub-
races, particularly of whites from poor blacks.
urb lessens white self-interest in making such an invest-
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
ment. In 1986 fully 27.5
percent of all black
schoolchildren. and 30
percent of all Hispanic
schoolchildren.
were enrolled in
the twenty-five
largest central-city
school districts.
Only 3.3 percent of
all white students
were in these same
twenty-five districts.
In other words, 96.7
percent of white chil-
dren are educated out-
side these decaying
school systems.
the Democratic Par-
Even within major cities
ty continues a pro-
there IS a growing diver-
cess damaging to the vitality of the
gence of interest between
American political system.
blacks and whites. Many of
Fissures resulting from racial conflict, and
the more affluent citizens in
fissures resulting from tensions over rights.
racially mixed cities are turn-
culture. and values, separate the national Democratic
ing to private service provid-
Party from many of its former constituents. Such fissures
ers. including independent and
have forced the party to increase its dependence on
parochial schools, private police and security services.
special interests in order to maintain its congressional
proliferating private recreational clubs, and private trans-
majority.
portation companies.
Wichout the resource of plurality voter loyalty, Demo-
cratic members of the House of Representatives-the
The End of the Democratic Party?
seemingly unshakable bastion of Democratic power in
Washington-have come to rely increasingly on an es-
N POLITICAL TERMS RACE CLEARLY REMAINS A RE-
sentially corrupt system of campaign finance, on the per-
I
publican trump card. while racial fissures within
quisites of incumbency. on pork-barrel spending, and on
the Democratic Party leave It weakened and
the gerrymandering of districts in order to thwart con-
vulnerable.
tinuing demographic and ideological shifts favoring their
On a broad strategic scale the Republican Party over
opponents.
the past two years has taken steps to capture the fairness
As recently as the mid-1970s the Democratic Parry was
issue and to defuse charges of Republican racism. initiat-
able to portrav itself as the party of political reform. bat-
ing an aggressive drive to win the support of affluent
thing a Republican Parry dominated by moneved inter-
blacks and even running, on occasion. fully competitive
ests Now Democrats in the House of Representatives
black candidates. Income trends in the black community
are more dependent on institutionalized special-interest
suggest a reservoir of prospective Republican support:
groups than are their Republican adversaries. In 1990 the
the income of the (op fifth of black families has over the
majontv-52.6 percent-of the campaign contributions
past two decades been growing at 1 significantly faster
received bv Democratic incumbent House members run-
rate than the income of the top fifth of white families.
ning for re-election came from political-action commit-
Trends among the well-to-do of both races have led to in-
tees. while the percentage of support from individual do-
creasing racial equality of income, in sharp contrast to
nors represented 3 steady decline, from 44.8 percent in
trends among the least affluent blacks and whites: the
1984 to 38.0 percent in 1990. Republican House incum-
bottom fifth of the black community is falling steadily
benes. in contrast, received 50.9 percent of their financial
further behind the bottom fifth of the white community.
support from individuals in 1988, and 41.1 percent from
Insofar as the Republican drive to win support among
PACs. in a pattern virtually the mirror image of the Demo-
affluent middle-class blacks is successful, and insofar 35
crats In 1988 not only did labor PACs follow tradition by
the party is able to insulate itself from charges of racism.
giving far more to Democratic House incumbents ($16.7
it will further isolate the national Democratic Party as the
million) than to Republican incumbents ($1.9 million).
party of poor, underclass black America. The isolation of
but corporate PACs-the contemporary version of "mon-
MAY 1991
85
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
eyed interests"-gave more money to Democratic
duce a strong labor movement, that extended basic rights
House incumbents ($15.7 million) than to their Republi-
to all citizens, and that has nurtured free political and ar-
can counterparts ($13.5 million). While helpful to incum-
tistic expression-has lost the capacity to represent ef-
bents in the short term. this kind of contribution pattern
fectively the allied interests of a biracial, cross-class coali-
weakens any claim the Democratic Party may make to
tion. Liberalism, discredited among key segments of the
provide popular representation.
electorate, is no longer a powerful agent of constructive
The Democratic reliance on special interests in fact
change. Instead, liberal values, policies, and allegiances
extends beyond Congress to a second party stronghold.
have become a source of bitter conflict among groups
the nation's major cities. The public's ability to direct cs-
that were once common beneficiaries of the progressive
sential services-most important, the public school sys-
state.
tem-has been lost in varying degrees to institutional-
The failures of Democratic liberalism pose a larger
ized bureaucracies. Within urban school systems faced
problem. With the decline of liberal hegemony, conser-
with declining tax bases and lessened federal support, as-
vatism has gained control over national elections and, to a
sociations and unions representing teachers, principals,
significant degree, over the national agenda. No matter
administrators, clerical staff, custodians, carpenters, and
what its claims, conservatism has served for much of the
security guards have become politically influential in pro-
twentieth century as the political and philosophical arm
tecting their members' tenure while carefully limiting
of the affluent. Entrusting the economic interests of the
their responsibility for meeting the larger goal-that of
poor and the working class to such a philosophy risks seri-
producing well-educated students.
ous damage to both groups.
Democratic vulnerability on this terrain is perhaps no-
That conservatism represents the interests of the well-
where better reflected than in Detroit-possibly the
to-do is to be expected-and even respected-as part of
most Democratic municipality in the nation, a city with
the system of representation in American democracy. A
one of the nation's worst school systems and perhaps the
far more threatening development is that as liberalism
worst delivery of public services. In recent years Detroit
fails to provide effective challenge, the country will lack
voters elected a black Republican school-board president
the dynamism that only a sustained and vibrant insurgen-
and a black Republican city councilman. Boch were
cy of those on the lower rungs can provide. Such an insur-
elected on platforms of promises to break through bu-
gency, legitimately claiming for its supporters an equal
reaucratic ossification and revive competitive market
opportunity to participate and to compete and to gain a
forces, through parental choice in school assignments,
measure of justice, is critical, not only to the politics and
through private alternatives to public services, and
the economics of the nation but also to the vitality of the
through the transfer of power and responsibility from ad-
broader culture and to democracy itself.
ministrators downtown to principals and teachers in the
Over the past twenty-five years liberalism has avoided
trenches.
confronting, and learning from, the experience of voter
The congressional wing of the Democratic Party has
rejection, as institutional power and a sequence of ex-
become locked into an alliance with the forces of reac-
trancous events-ranging from Watergate to the 1981-
tion-with interests and bureaucracies conducting large-
1982 recession-have worked to prop up the national
ly futile efforts to resist, among other things, the conse-
Democratic Party. For the current cycle to reach closure,
quences of international economic change. The
and for there to be a breakthrough in stagnant partisan
Democratic Party has, in many respects, discovered that
competition, the Democratic Party may have either to
survival depends on the creation of a congressional party
suffer a full-scale domestic defeat, including (to deal in
entrusted by the people to look after parochial inter-
the extremes of possibility) loss of control of the Senate
ests-from water projects to rice subsidies to highways to
and the House, or at the very least to go through the kind
health care for the elderiv. However, to the degree that
of nadir-intraparty conflict, challenge to ideological
presidential elections have become referenda on the nex-
orthodoxy, in short, a form of civil war-experienced by
us of social, moral, racial, and cultural issues in the broad-
the Republican Party and the right in the 1960s. The
est sense, the Democratic Party has in five of the past six
original strength of Democratic liberalism was its capac-
elections been at a competitive disadvantage.
ity to build majorities out of minorities-a strength that
The losers in this process are not only the Democratic
comes only from a real understanding of what it means to
Party and liberalism but also the constituencies and alli-
be out of power, from direct engagement in the struggle
ances they are obliged to represent. The fracturing of the
to build a majority, and from an understanding of what is
Democratic coalition has permitted the moral, social, and
worth fighting for in this struggle. Recapturing the ability
economic ascendance of the affluent in a nation with a
to build a winning alliance requires learning the full
strong egalitarian tradition. and has permitted a diminu-
meaning of defeat, and developing a conscious awareness
tion of economic reward and of social regard for those
of precisely what the electorate will support politically,
who simply work for a living, black and white. Democrat-
what it will not, and when-if ever-something more
ic liberalism-the political ideology that helped to pro-
important is at stake.
86
MAY 1991
Harper's Magazine, September 1995
ESSAY
PUT ON A
HAPPY FACE
Masking the differences between blacks and whites
By Benjamin DeMott
A
[ the movies these days, ques-
tions about racial injustice have been amicably resolved. Watch Pulp Fic-
tion or Congo or A Little Princess or any other recent film in which both
blacks and whites are primary characters and you can, if you want, forget
about race. Whites and blacks greet one another on the screen with lov-
ing candor, revealing their common humanity. In Pulp Fiction, an armed
black mobster (played by Samuel L. Jackson) looks deep into the eyes of
an armed white thief in the middle of a holdup (played by Tim Roth) and
shares his version of God's word in Ezekiel, whereupon the two men lay
aside their weapons, both more or less redeemed. The moment inverts an
earlier scene in which a white boxer (played by Bruce Willis) risks his life
to save another black mobster (played by Ving Rhames), who is being
sexually tortured as a prelude to his execution.
Pulp Fiction (gross through July: $107 million) is one of a series of films
suggesting that the beast of American racism is tamed and harmless. Close
to the start of Die Hard with a Vengeance (gross through July: $95 million)
the camera finds a white man wearing sandwich boards on the corner of
Amsterdam Avenue and 138th Street in Harlem. The boards carry a hor-
rific legend: [ HATE NIGGERS. A group of young blacks approach the man
with murderous intent, bearing guns and knives. They are figures straight
out of a national nightmare-ugly, enraged, terrifying. No problem. A
black man, again played by Jackson, appears and rescues the white man,
played by Willis. The black man and white man come to know each other
well. In time the white man declares flatly to the black, "I need you more
Benjamin DeMou's new books are The Trouble with Friendship: Why Americans
Can't Think Straight About Race (Grove/Atlantic), which will be published in Janu-
ary, and Created Equal: Reading and Writing About Class in America, out this
month from HarperCollins. His most recent article in Harper's Magazine was "Morali-
ty Plays," which appeared in the December 1994 issue.
ESSAY 11
than you need me." A
moment later he charges
the black with being a
racist-with not liking
whites as much as the
white man likes blacks-
and the two talk frankly
about their racial preju-
dices. Near the end of the
film, the men have grown
so close that each volun-
teers to die for the other.
Pulp Fiction and Die
Hard with a Vengeance fol-
low the pattern of Lethal
Weapon 1, 2, and 3, the
Danny Glover/Mel Gib-
son buddy vehicles that
collectively grossed $357
million, and White Men
Can't Jump, which, in the
year of the L.A. riots,
grossed $76 million. In
White Men Can't Jump, a
white dropout, played by
Woody Harrelson, ekes
out a living on black-dominated basketball courts in Los Angeles. He's ar-
rogant and aggressive but never in danger because he has a black protector
and friend, played by Wesley Snipes. At the movie's end, the white, flying
above the hoop like a stereotypical black player, scores the winning basket
in a two-on-two pickup game on an alley-oop pass from his black chum,
whereupon the two men fall into each other's arms in joy. Later, the black
friend agrees to find work for the white at the store he manages.
White (helpless): I gotta get a job. Can you get me a job?
Black (affectionately teasing): Got any references?
White (shy grin): You.
Such dialogue is the stuff of romance. What's dreamed of and gained is
a place where whites are unafraid of blacks, where blacks ask for and need
nothing from whites, and where the sameness of the races creates a com-
mon fund of sweet content.* The details of the dream matter less than
the force that makes it come true for both races, eliminating the con-
straints of objective reality and redistributing resources, status, and capa-
bilities. That cleansing social force supersedes political
Watch
and economic fact or policy; that force, improbably
enough, is friendship.
atching the beaming white men who know how to jump, we do
well to remind ourselves of what the camera shot leaves out. Black infants
die in America at twice the rate of white infants. (Despite the increased
* I could go on with examples of movies that deliver the good news of friendship: Re-
garding Henry, Driving Miss Daisy, Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption,
Philadelphia, The Last Boy Scout. 48 Hours I-II, Rising Sun, Iron Eagle I-II, Rudy,
Sister Act, Hearts of Dixie, Betrayed, The Power of One, White Nights, Clara's
Heart, Doc Hollywood, Cool Runnings, Places in the Heart, Trading Places, Fried
Green Tomatoes. Q & A, Platoon, A Mother's Courage: The Mary Thomas Story,
The Unforgiven, The Air Up There, The Pelican Brief, Losing Isaiah, Smoke,
Searching for Bobby Fischer, An Officer and a Gentleman. Speed, ctc.
32 HARPER'S MAGAZINE/SEPTEMBER 1995
Illustration by Edmund Guy
numbers of middle-class blacks, the rates are diverging, with black rates
DAY AFTER DAY THE NATION'S
actually rising.) One out of every two black children lives below the
poverty line (as compared with one out of seven white children). Nearly
CORPORATE MINISTRIES OF
four times as many black families exist below the poverty line as white
families. More than 50 percent of African American families have in-
CULTURE CHURN OUT IMAGES
comes below $25,000. Among black youths under age twenty, death by
OF RACIAL HARMONY
murder occurs nearly ten times as often as among whites. Over 60 percent
of births to black mothers occur out of wedlock, more than four times the
rate for white mothers. The net worth of the typical white household is
ten times that of the typical black household. In many states, five to ten
times as many blacks as whites age eighteen to thirty are in prison.
The good news at the movies obscures the bad news in the streets and
confirms the Supreme Court's recent decisions on busing, affirmative ac-
tion, and redistricting. Like the plot of White Men Can't Jump, the Court
postulates the existence of a society no longer troubled by racism. Because
black-white friendship is now understood to be the rule, there is no need
for integrated schools or a congressional Black Caucus or affirmative ac-
tion. The Congress and state governors can guiltlessly cut welfare, food as-
sistance, fuel assistance, Head Start, housing money, fellowship money,
vaccine money. Justice Anthony Kennedy can declare, speaking for the
Supreme Court majority last June, that creating a world of genuine equali-
ty and sameness requires only that "our political system and our society
cleanse themselves
of
discrimination."
The deep logic runs as follows: Yesterday white people didn't like black peo-
ple, and accordingly suffered guilt, knowing that the dislike was racist and know-
ing also that as moral persons they would have to atone for the guilt. They would
have to ante up for welfare and Head Start and halfway houses and free vaccine
and midnight basketball and summer jobs for schoolkids and graduate fellowships
for promising scholars and craft-union apprenticeships and so on, endlessly. A
considerable and wasteful expense. But at length came the realization that by
ending dislike or hatred it would be possible to end guilt, which in turn would
mean an end to redress: no more wasteful ransom money. There would be but
one requirement: the regular production and continuous showing forth of evi-
dence indisputably proving that hatred has totally vanished from the land.
1 cannot tell the reader how much I would like to believe in this sun-
shine world. After the theater lights brighten and I've found coins for a
black beggar on the way to my car and am driving home through down-
town Springfield, Massachusetts, the world invented by Die Hard with a
Vengeance and America's highest court gives way only slowly to the fa-
miliar urban vision in my windshield-homeless blacks on trash-strewn
streets, black prostitutes staked out on a corner, and signs of a not very
furtive drug trade. I know perfectly well that most African Americans
don't commit crimes or live in alleys. I also know that for
The
somebody like myself, downtown Springfield in the late
evening is not a good place to be.
he movies reflect the larger dynamic of wish and dream. Day af-
ter day the nation's corporate ministries of culture churn out images of
racial harmony. Millions awaken each morning to the friendly sight of
Katie Couric nudging a perky elbow into good buddy Bryant Gumbel's
side. My mailbox and millions of demographically similar others are
choked with flyers from companies (Wal-Mart, Victoria's Secret) bent on
publicizing both their wares and their social bona fides by displaying
black and white models at cordial ease with one another. A torrent of
goodwill messages about race arrives daily-revelations of corporate
largesse, commercials, news features, TV specials, all proclaiming that
whites like me feel strongly positive impulses of friendship for blacks and
that those same admirable impulses are effectively eradicating racial dif-
ferences, rendering blacks and whites the same. BellSouth TV commer-
cials present children singing "I am the keeper of the world"-first a
ESSAY
33
HESE MESSAGES AND
white child, then a black child, then a white child, then a black child.
Because Dow Chemical likes black America, it recruits young black col-
IMAGES ALLOW THE
lege grads for its research division and dramatizes, in TV commercials,
their tearful-joyful partings from home. ("Son, show 'em what you got,"
COMFORTABLE WHITE
says a black lad's father.) American Express shows an elegant black cou-
MAJORITY TO TELL ITSELF
ple and an elegant white couple sitting together in a theater, happy in
one another's company. (The couples share the box with an oversized
A FATUOUS UNTRUTH
Gold Card.) During the evening news 1 watch a black mom offer Robi-
tussin to a miserably coughing white mom. Here's People magazine pro-
moting itself under a photo of John Lee Hooker, the black bluesman.
"We're these kinds of people, too," People claims in the caption. In the
current production of Hamlet on Broadway, Horatio is played by a black
actor. On The 700 Club, Pat Robertson joshes Ben Kinchlow, his black
sidekick, about Ben's far-out ties.
What counts here is not the saccharine clumsiness of the interchanges
but the bulk of them-the ceaseless, self-validating gestures of friendship,
the humming, buzzing background theme: All decent Americans extend the
hand of friendship to African Americans; nothing but nothing is more auspicious
for the African American future than this extended hand. Faith in the miracle
cure of racism by change-of-heart turns out to be so familiar as to have be-
come unnoticeable. And yes, the faith has its benign aspect. Even as they
nudge me and others toward belief in magic (instant pals and no-money-
down equality), the images and messages of devoted relationships between
blacks and whites do exert a humanizing influence.
Nonetheless, through these same images and messages the comfortable
majority tells itself a fatuous untruth. Promoting the fantasy of painless
answers, inspiring groundless self-approval among whites, joining the
Supreme Court in treating "cleansing" as inevitable, the new orthodoxy of
friendship incites culture-wide evasion, justifies one political step back-
ward after another, and greases the skids along which, tomorrow, welfare
block grants will slide into state highway-resurfacing budgets. Whites are
part of the solution, says this orthodoxy, if we break out of the prison of
our skin color, say hello, as equals, one-on-one, to a black stranger, and
make a black friend. We're part of the problem if we have an aversion to
black people or are frightened of them, or if we feel that the more dis-
tance we put between them and us the better, or if we're in the habit of
asserting our superiority rather than acknowledging our common human-
ity. Thus we shift the problem away from politics-from black experience
and the history of slavery-and perceive it as a matter of the suspicion
and fear found within the white heart; solving the problem asks no more
of us than that we work on ourselves, scrubbing off the dirt of ill will.
The approach miniaturizes, personalizes, and moralizes; it removes the
large and complex dilemmas of race from the public sphere. It tempts au-
diences to see history as irrelevant and to regard feelings as decisive-to
believe that the fate of black Americans is shaped mainly by events occur-
ring in the hearts and minds of the privileged. And let's be frank: the or-
thodoxy of friendship feels nice. It practically consecrates self-flattery. The
"good" Bill Clinton who attends black churches and talks with likable
case to fellow worshipers was campaigning when Los Angeles rioted in '92.
"White Americans," he said, "are gripped by the isolation of their own ex-
perience. Too many still simply have no friends of other races and do not
know any differently." Few black youths of working age in South-Central
L.A. had been near enough to the idea of a job even to think of looking
for work before the Rodney King verdict, but the problem, according to
Clinton, was that whites need black friends.
Most of the country's leading voices of journalistic conscience (editorial
writers, television anchorpersons, syndicated columnists) roundly endorse
the doctrine of black-white friendship as a means of redressing the in-
equalities between the races. Roger Rosenblatt, editor of the Columbia
Journalism Review and an especially deft supplier of warm and fuzzy senti-
34 HARPER'S SEPTEMBER 1995
ment, published an essay in Family Circle arguing that white friendship
ACTS OF PRIVATE PIETY
and sympathy for blacks simultaneously make power differentials vanish
and create interracial identity between us, one by one. The author finds
SUBSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY
his exemplum in an episode revealing the personal sensitivity, to injured
blacks, of one of his children.
WHILE THE POSSIBILITY OF
"When our oldest child, Carl, was in high school," he writes, "he and
POLITICAL ACTION DISAPPEARS
two black friends were standing on a street corner in New York City one
spring evening, trying to hail a taxi. The three boys were dressed decently
INTO A SENTIMENTAL HAZE
and were doing nothing wild or threatening. Still, no taxi would pick
them up. If a driver spotted Carl first, he might slow down, but he would
take off again when he saw the others. Carl's two companions were famil-
iar with this sort of abuse. Carl, who had never observed it firsthand be-
fore, burned with anger and embarrassment that he was the color of a
world that would so mistreat his friends."
Rosenblatt notes that when his son "was applying to colleges, he wrote
his essay on that taxi incident with his two black friends. He was able
to articulate what he could not say at the time-how ashamed and impo-
tent he felt. He also wrote of the power of their friendship, which has
lasted to this day and has carried all three young men into the country
that belongs to them. To all of us."
In this homily white sympathy begets interracial sameness in several
ways. The three classmates are said to react identically to the cabdrivers'
snub; i.e., they feel humiliated. "[Carl] could not find the words to express
his humiliation and his friends would not express theirs."
The anger that inspires the younger Rosenblatt's college-admission essay
on racism is seen as identical with black anger. Friendship brings the class-
mates together as joint, equal owners of the land of their birth ("the coun-
try that belongs to [all of] them"). And Rosenblatt supplies a still larger vi-
sion of essential black-white sameness near the end of his essay: "Our
proper hearts tell the truth," he declares, "which is that we are all in the
same boat, rich and poor, black and white. We are helpless, wicked, heroic,
terrified, and we need one another. We need to give rides to one another."
Thus do acts of private piety substitute for public policy while the
possibility of urgent political action disappears into a sentimental haze.
"If we're looking for a formula to ease the tensions between the races,"
Rosenblatt observes, then we should "attack the disintegration of the
black community" and "the desperation of the poor." Without overtly
mocking civil rights activists who look toward the political arena "to
erase the tensions," Rosenblatt alludes to them in a throwaway man-
ner, implying that properly adjusted whites look elsewhere, that there
was a time for politicking for "equal rights" but we've passed through
it. Now is a time in which we should listen to our hearts at mo-
ments of epiphany and allow sympathy to work its wizardry, cleans-
ing and floating us, blacks and whites "all in the same boat," on a
mystical undercurrent of the New Age.
Blacks themselves aren't necessarily proof against this theme, as wit-
ness a recent essay by James Alan McPherson in the Harvard journal Re-
construction. McPherson, who received the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for fiction
for his collection of stories Elbow Room, says that "the only possible steps,
the safest steps small ones" in the movement "toward a universal cul-
ture" will be those built not on "ideologies and formulas and programs"
but on experiences of personal connectedness.
"Just this past spring," he writes, "when I was leaving a restaurant after
taking a [white] former student to dinner, a black [woman on the sidewalk]
said to my friend, in a rasping voice, 'Hello, girlfriend. Have you got any-
thing to spare?" The person speaking was a female crack addict
with a child who was also addicted. "But," writes McPher-
son, when the addict made her pitch to his dinner com-
panion, "I saw in my friend's face an understanding and
sympathy and a shining which transcended race and class.
WE DIMINISH HISTORICAL
Her face reflected one human soul's connection with another. The magnet-
ic field between the two women was charged with spiritual energy."
CATASTROPHES AFFECTING
The writer points the path to progress through interpersonal gestures by
people who "insist on remaining human, and having human responses.
MILLIONS OVER CENTURIES AND
Perhaps the best that can be done, now, is the offering of understanding
INFLATE THE SIGNIFICANCE OF
and support to the few out of many who are capable of such gestures, rather
than devising another plan to engineer the many into one."
BRIEF RACIAL TENDERNESSES
The elevated vocabulary ("soul," "spiritual") beatifies the impulse to turn
away from the real-life agenda of actions capable of reducing racial injustice.
Wherever that impulse dominates, the rhetoric of racial sameness thrives,
diminishing historical catastrophes affecting millions over centuries and in-
flating the significance of tremors of tenderness briefly troubling the heart or
conscience of a single individual-the boy waiting for a cab, the woman
leaving the restaurant. People forget the theoretically unforgettable-the
caste history of American blacks, the connection between no schools for
longer than a century and bad school performance now, be-
H
tween hateful social attitudes and zero employment opportu-
nities, between minority anguish and majority fear.
ow could this way of seeing have become conventional so
swiftly? How did the dogmas of instant equality insinuate themselves so
effortlessly into courts and mass audiences alike? How can a white man
like myself, who taught Southern blacks in the 1960s, find himself se-
duced-as I have been more than once-by the orthodoxy of friendship?
In the civil rights era, the experience for many millions of Americans
was one of discovery. A hitherto unimagined continent of human reality
and history came into view, inducing genuine concern and at least a
temporary setting aside of self-importance. 1 remember with utter clarity
what I felt at Mary Holmes College in West Point, Mississippi, when a
black student of mine was killed by tailgating rednecks; my fellow tutors
and I were overwhelmed with how shamefully wrong a wrong could be.
For a time, we were released from the prisons of moral weakness and am-
biguity. In the year or two that followed-the mid-Sixties-the notion
that some humans are more human than others, whites more human
than blacks, appeared to have been overturned. The next step seemed
obvious: society would have to admit that when one race deprives an-
other of its humanity for centuries, those who have done the depriv-
ing are obligated to do what they can to restore the humanity of the
deprived. The obligation clearly entailed the mounting of compre-
hensive long-term programs of developmental assistance-not guilt-
money handouts-for nearly the entire black population. The path
forward was unavoidable.
It was avoided. Shortly after the award of civil rights and the in-
stitution, in 1966, of limited preferential treatment to remedy em-
ployment and educational discrimination against African Americans,
a measure of economic progress for blacks did appear in census re-
ports. Not much, but enough to stimulate glowing tales of univer-
sal black advance and to launch the good-news barrage that con-
tinues to this day (headline in the New York Times, June 18,
1995: "Moving On Up: The Greening of America's Black
Middle Class").
After Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term, the
new dogma of black-white sameness found ideological sup-
port in the form of criticism of so-called coddling. Liberal
activists of both races were berated by critics of both races
for fostering an allegedly enfeebling psychology of dependen-
cy that discouraged African Americans from committing
themselves to individual self-development. In 1988, the
charge was passionately voiced in an essay in these pages, "I'm
Black, You're White, Who's Innocent?" by Shelby Steele, who
attributed the difference between black rates of advance and those of oth-
IN THE LAST TWO DECADES,
et minority groups to white folks' pampering. Most blacks, Steele
claimed, could make it on their own-as voluntary immigrants have
THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY
done-were they not held back by devitalizing programs that presented
HAS SYSTEMATICALLY IGNORED
them, to themselves and others, as somehow dissimilar to and weaker
than other Americans. This argument was all-in-the-same-boatism in a
THE HISTORICAL EXPLOITATION
different key; the claim remained that progress depends upon recognition
of black-white sameness. Let us see through superficial differences to the
OF AFRICAN AMERICANS
underlying, equally distributed gift for success. Let us teach ourselves-in
the words of the Garth Brooks tune-to ignore "the color of skin" and
"look for
the beauty within."
Still further support for the policy once known as "do-nothingism"
came from points-of-light barkers, who held that a little something might
perhaps be done if accompanied by enough publicity. Nearly every broad-
caster and publisher in America moves a bale of reportage on pro bono ef-
forts by white Americans to speed the advance of black Americans. Exam-
ple: McDonald's and the National Basketball Association distribute
balloons when they announce they are addressing the dropout problem
with an annual "Stay in School" scheme that gives schoolkids who don't
miss a January school day a ticket to an all-star exhibition. The publicity
strengthens the idea that these initiatives will nullify the social context-
the city I see through my windshield. Reports of white philanthropy sug-
gest that the troubles of this block and the next should be understood as
phenomena in transition. The condition of American blacks need not be
read as the fixed, unchanging consequence of generations of bottom-caste
existence. Edging discreetly past a beggar posted near the entrance to
Zabar's or H&H Bagels, or, while walking the dog, stepping politely
around black men asleep on the sidewalk, we need not see ourselves and
our fellows as uncaring accomplices in the acts of social injustice.
Yet more powerful has been the ceaseless assault, over the past genera-
tion, on our knowledge of the historical situation of black Americans. On
the face of things it seems improbable that the cumulative weight of doc-
umented historical injury to African Americans could ever be lightly as-
sessed. Gifted black writers continue to show, in scene after scene-in
their studies of middle-class blacks interacting with whites-how histori-
cal realities shape the lives of their black characters. In Killer of Sheep, the
brilliant black filmmaker Charles Burnett dramatizes the daily encounters
that suck poor blacks into will-lessness and contempt for white fairy tales
of interracial harmony; he quickens his historical themes with images of
faceless black meat processors gutting undifferentiated, unchoosing ani-
mal life. Here, say these images, as though talking back to Clarence
Thomas, here is a basic level of black life unchanged over generations.
Where there's work, it's miserably paid and ugly. Space allotments at
home and at work cramp body and mind. Positive expectation withers in
infancy. People fall into the habit of jeering at aspiration as though at the
bidding of physical law. Obstacles at every hand prevent people from lov-
ing and being loved in decent ways, prevent children from believing their
parents, prevent parents from believing they themselves know anything
worth knowing. The only true self, now as in the long past, is the one
mocked by one's own race. "Shit on you, nigger," says a voice in Killer of
Sheep. "Nothing you say matters a good goddamn."
For whites, these works produce guilt, and for blacks, 1 can only assume,
pain and despair. The audience for tragedy remains small, while at the mul-
tiplex the popular enthusiasm for historical romance remains constant and
vast. During the last two decades, the entertainment industry has conduct-
ed a siege on the pertinent past, systematically excising knowledge of the
consequences of the historical exploitation of African Americans. Facti-
tious renderings of the American past blur the outlines of black-white con-
flict, redefine the ground of black grievances for the purpose of diminishing
the grievances, restage black life in accordance with the illusory conven-
ESSAY
37
EACH DAY THE CHANCE OF
tions of American success mythology, and present the operative influences
on race history as the same as those implied to be pivotal in White Men
STRIKING THROUGH THE MASK
Can't Jump or a BellSouth advertisement.
OF CORPORATE-UNDERWRITTEN,
Although there was scant popular awareness of it at the time (1977),
the television miniseries Roots introduced the figure of the Unscathed
FEEL-GOOD, AHISTORICAL
Slave. To an enthralled audience of more than 80 million the series inti-
mated that the damage resulting from generations of birth-ascribed, semi-
RACISM GROWS MORE REMOTE
animal status was largely temporary, that slavery was a product of motive-
less malignity on the social margins rather than of respectable rationality,
and that the ultimate significance of the institution lay in the demonstra-
tion, by freed slaves, that no force on earth can best the energies of Amer-
ican Individualism. ("Much like the Waltons confronting the depres-
sion," writes historian Eric Foner, a widely respected authority on
American slavery, "the family in 'Roots' neither seeks nor requires out-
side help; individual or family effort is always sufficient.") Ken Burns's
much applauded PBS documentary The Civil War (1990) went even fur-
ther than Roots in downscaling black injury; the series treated slavery,
birth-ascribed inferiority, and the centuries-old denial of dignity as matters
of slight consequence. (By "implicitly denying the brutal reality of slav-
ery," writes historian Jeanie Attie, Burns's programs crossed "a dangerous
moral threshold." To a group of historians who asked him why slavery
had been so slighted, Burns said that any discussion of slavery "would
have been lengthy and boring.")
Mass media treatments of the civil rights protest years carried forward
the process, contributing to the "positive" crasure of difference. Big-bud-
get films like Mississippi Burning, together with an array of TV biographi-
cal specials on Dr. Martin Luther King and others, presented the long-
running struggle between disenfranchised blacks and the majority white
culture as a heartwarming episode of interracial unity; the speed and car-
ingness of white response to the oppression of blacks demonstrated that
broadscale race conflict or race difference was inconceivable.
A consciousness that ingests either a part or the whole of this revision-
ism loses touch with the two fundamental truths of race in America;
namely, that because of what happened in the past, blacks and whites can-
not yet be the same; and that because what happened in the past was no
mere matter of ill will or insult but the outcome of an established caste
structure that has only very recently begun to be dismantled, it is not
reparable by one-on-one goodwill. The word "slavery" comes to induce
stock responses with no vital sense of a grinding devastation of mind visit-
ed upon generation after generation. Hoodwinked by the orthodoxy of
friendship, the nation either ignores the past, summons for it a detached,
correct "compassion," or gazes at it as though it were a set of aesthetic con-
ventions, like twisted trees and fragmented rocks in nineteenth-century
picturesque painting-lifeless phenomena without bearing on the present.
The chance of striking through the mask of corporate-underwritten, feel-
good, ahistorical racism grows daily more remote. The
C
trade-off-whites promise friendship, blacks accept the sta-
tus quo-begins to seem like a good deal.
osseted by Hollywood's magic lantern and soothed by press re-
leases from Washington and the American Enterprise Institute, we
should never forget what we see and hear for ourselves. Broken out by
race, the results of every social tabulation from unemployment to life ex-
pectancy add up to a chronicle of atrocity. The history of black America
fully explains-to anyone who approaches it honestly-how the disaster
happened and why neither guilt money nor lectures on personal responsi-
bility can, in and of themselves, repair the damage. The vision of friend-
ship and sympathy placing blacks and whites "all in the same boat," ren-
dering them equally able to do each other favors, "to give rides to one
another," is a smiling but monstrous he.
38 HARPER'S MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 1995
Race, Identity and Political
Activism: The Shifting Contours
of the African American
Public Sphere
Steven Gregory
We in Corona-East Elmhurst are people who live with blacks but in
a white community. We think outside of our community.
AN AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY ACTIVIST
1
n 1988 a multi-ethnic committee of neighborhood activists met in the basement
of an African American church in Corona, Queens in New York City to
discuss ways of improving intergroup relations. The committee, calling itself
the Cultural Awareness Council, had been formed two years earlier in the wake
of the racial attack on three black men by whites in Howard Beach. Most of the
members of the Council, which included Jews, Asians and Latinos, were from
the neighboring community of Jackson Heights and had been invited to the church
by its newly appointed pastor. For the five church members who attended, all
well over sixty, the sparsely furnished church basement was steeped in local
political history. During the 1960s, voter registration drives, school desegregation
battles and political campaigns had been discussed and planned here. The base-
ment had also housed the church's Head Start Program. Square wooden cupboards
that once held the preschoolers' lunch boxes still lined one of the walls. Most
of the black church members present that evening had participated in those activi-
ties. For example, John Booker, a retired real estate agent in his eighties, had
served on the Board of Trustees of the Congregational Church during the 1960s
and played a key role in organizing church-based antipoverty programs. When
the former pastor of the church ran for City Council in 1963, challenging Corona's
white Democratic party machine, Booker worked to forge alliances with reform
Democrats in predominantly white Jackson Heights.
Public Culture 1994, 7: 147-164
©1994 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
151
152
The memory of this coalition-building during the 1960s framed the opening
Gregory
of discussion. Judy Grubin, the Jewish founder of the Council, began the meeting
by recalling the long-standing relationship that activists in Jackson Heights have
had with African Americans in Corona and East Elmhurst. With the assembly
seated in a wide circle, she recounted the struggle twenty years before to desegre-
gate the community's schools. Grubin went on to describe the Council's purpose;
"We were formed to discuss the cultures and traditions of different groups, and
to open up a dialogue. Sharing diverse ethnic backgrounds is just the first step
towards promoting harmony among people." Glancing at her clipboard, Grubin
explained the format of the Council's meetings, held monthly at various locations
in Queens, "Each person in the circle talks personally about their particular ethnic
background and the experiences that they've had in the neighborhood."
Mrs. Blanche Hubbert, a church member and part-time caterer in her seven-
ties, frowned and peered over her glasses at John Booker. "What do I want to
be talkin' about my ethnic background for?" she asked him. Booker shrugged
his shoulders and then focused his attention on the first speaker, Zakallah Prasada,
a slender man from Pakistan. Prasada described how during the Iranian hostage
crisis he and his wife had been harassed by people because they are Muslims.
"Two times they burned our mosque in Corona," he reported. "For me, religious
freedom is the most important issue." Yanghee Hahn, a woman from Korea,
described cultural misunderstandings between Korean merchants and African
Americans, and emphasized the importance of good communication. When
Blanche Hubbert's turn came, she hesitated and fidgeted with her notepad. After
an awkward silence, she spoke about food stereotypes, suggesting that this too
was a form of prejudice. "I'm a caterer," she said, "and people always assume
that I'm going to serve collard greens."
John Bell, who was next, appeared annoyed. Just turning seventy, Bell had
been a labor organizer in the furriers union and active in Harlem politics during
the 1930s. Looking youthful and debonair, Bell stood, striking a pose that betrayed
decades of political speaking. "John Booker and I are the only ones here who
have been active in both communities," he began, motioning to Mr. Booker at
his side. "It seems like history is repeating itself! All that you have experienced
here," he continued, gesturing to the group from Jackson Heights, "we already
experienced. We have to become a political force, not a social one."
For John Bell, as for many African Americans in Corona, the post-civil rights
period represents less a political victory than a rupture with politics. The sense
that "history is repeating itself" registers not merely the awareness that the struggle
for racial equality is not yet over, but more profoundly, the perception that its
conditions of possibility, both political and discursive, have been weakened, if
153
not undermined. Blanche Hubbert's choice of a story about catering and collard
Race, Identity and
greens was neither intended to be humorous, nor to trivialize the question of
Political Activism
racism. Rather, it was a strained attempt to convey the complex politics of race
in the United States through the reductive logic of cultural misunderstanding. The
Awareness Council's strategy for addressing the problem of intergroup relations
captures in microcosm important changes in how many Americans have come
to think-and not think-about issues of race, politics and social justice in the
post-civil rights eΓa. The (re)construction of racial and other systemic inequalities
as problems of individual awareness, communication and sensitivity characterizes
how a host of social issues, ranging from racially motivated violence to multicul-
tural education, are framed in contemporary discussions, debates and scholarly
research.
The case of Corona not only affirms the persistence of racial inequalities, it
also reveals the power relations and practices that obscure and mask inequality.
Put another way, in the post-civil rights period why have issues of racial inequality
receded from public debate and contestation in the political life of African Ameri-
cans in Corona? The answer lies in changes in institutional power arrangements
that disarticulate questions of race from important arenas of political activism
and discourse in Corona, thereby shielding practices of racial subordination from
public debate and contestation.
This depoliticizing of race in local activism can be viewed in part as the result
of a harnessing of the public sphere of African American neighborhood life to
state-sponsored mechanisms of political participation, established in the wake of
civil rights era activism and urban unrest. By directing attention to this restructur-
ing of the public sphere of black community life- that is, to the multiple social
arenas where people deliberate about neighborhood needs and formulate strategies
for political action-I want to challenge a view that is prominent in discussions
about the inner city. This view holds that the increasing intensity of the effects
of racial inequalities or inner-city poverty is tied to a decay of black civil society,
promoted by an exodus of the middle classes.¹ This view offers a reductive
and decontextualized perspective on class identities, narrowly conceptualizing
African American class formation as a function of occupational mobility. Equally
important, this exodus model deflects attention from the institutional power rela-
1. See. for example, William J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago, 1987) and Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990).
154
tions and practices through which racial inequalities and class asymmetries are
Gregory
secured, negotiated and contested in the everyday lives of urban African Ameri-
cans.
The state's role in shaping and reshaping the socio-political terrain on which
African Americans in Corona interpret their needs, construct their identities and
formulate their political commitments needs to be stressed. The heterogeneity
and plasticity of African American identities can be seen in the social processes
through which black class identities are formulated and reworked, "subject to
the continuous play of history, culture and power."²
Inner-City Exodus and the Politics of the Public Sphere
The debate about the degree to which class stratification has occurred among
African Americans has tended to gravitate around the work William Julius Wilson.
Wilson has proposed that since 1940 the black occupational structure has shown
a "consistent pattern of job upgrading," leading to growth in the ranks of the
black working and middle classes.³ However, this job mobility has not benefited
all sectors of the black population equally: structural changes in the economy
decreased the number of entry-level jobs for poorly educated, low-skilled blacks at
the very time that their more educated and skilled counterparts were experiencing
upward job mobility. Thus, despite gains made by the black work force, Wilson
argues that there has been "an uneven development of economic resources in the
black community" and the "income gap between the black poor and higher-income
groups has widened." Wilson also points to what he sees as the rise of an intense
form of poverty concentrated in inner cities and linked to an array of social
problems unprecedented in black community life. The emergence of this persistent
form of ghetto poverty presents a paradox for Wilson, and he presents this paradox
as a challenge to those who stress the importance of contemporary discrimination
in producing black poverty. Backers of this "discrimination thesis," Wilson
writes,
find it difficult to explain why the economic position of poor urban
blacks actually deteriorated during the very period in which the most
2. Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference,
ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), XX.
3. William J. Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1978), 129.
4. Ibid., 134.
sweeping anti-discrimination legislation and programs were enacted and
155
implemented. Their emphasis on discrimination is even more problem-
Race, Identity and
atic, in view of the economic progress of the black middle class during
Political Activism
the same period.
Wilson's solution to this paradox rests partly on his analysis of changes in
the economy, which undermined the period's gains for the black poor. To this
macroeconomic argument Wilson adds a sociological one that relates changes
in black occupational structure to the concentration of the black poor in inner
cities. In Wilson's view, changes in occupational structure widened the income
gap between the poor and non-poor, provoking an outmigration of the working
and middle classes from inner-city areas. The exodus of the non-poor, Wilson
contends, weakened community institutions and divested the inner cities of "main-
stream role models that help keep alive the perception that education is meaning-
ful, that steady employment is a viable alternative to welfare, and that family
stability is the norm, not the exception."
The case of Corona contrasts with the exodus hypothesis proposed by Wilson
and variously challenged by others.⁷ Corona did not experience a wholesale
exodus of the black middle classes and a weakening of its civic infrastructure.
Rather, deepening class divisions interacted with state interventions to harness
the social institutions of black civil society to arenas of political activism where
race was shielded from contestation, and where community needs and demands
were increasingly refracted through the property-based interests and ideologies of
middle-class homeowners. By directing attention to these changes in institutional
power arrangements within African American communities, the role of the state
can be seen both in shaping the process of black class formation, and in articulating
its specific political, economic and ideological effects. From this perspective,
the isolation of the inner-city poor becomes less the result of the flight of middle
5. Wilson 1987, 30.
6. Ibid., 56.
7. See Douglas Massey and Mitchell Eggers, "The Ecology of Inequality: Minorities and the
Concentration of Poverty, 1970-1980," American Journal of Sociology 95 (1990): 1175-77; Douglas
Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
(Cambridge: Harvard University, 1993); Robin D. G. Kelly, "The Black Poor and the Politics of
Opposition in a New South City, 1929-1970," in The Underclass Debate, ed. Michael B. Katz
(Princeton: Princeton University, 1993), 293-333; Thomas F. Jackson, "The State, the Movement,
and the Urban Poor: The War on Poverty and Political Mobilization in the 1960s," in The Underclass
Debate, ed. Michael B. Katz (Princeton: Princeton University, 1993), 403-439; and Adolph Reed,
"The Underclass Myth," The Progressive 55 (August 1991): 18-20.
156
class social, cultural and institutional capital than it is an effect of a restructuring
Gregory
of political life in ways that shield racial inequalities from civic activism. This
can be readily seen by examining activism in the context of the public sphere.
Jürgen Habermas's book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
investigates the development of the "liberal model of the bourgeois public sphere,"
which emerges along with the widening of political participation and the consoli-
dation of citizenship rights in early modern Europe.8 As a counterweight to the
absolutist state, the bourgeois public acted as a mediator between society and
the state, holding the state accountable to "publicity" and to the critical scrutiny
of an organized body of public opinion. In its mature form, this mediating role
meant transmitting the interests of the bourgeoisie to the state through "forms
of legally guaranteed free speech, free press, and free assembly, and eventually
through the parliamentary institutions of representative government.' Habermas
contends that the utopian potential of the bourgeois public sphere was never
realized. The contradictions of capitalist development giving rise to monopoly
capitalism, state intervention in social conflicts, and the fragmentation of the
public into competing interest groups undermined the liberal ideal of an autono-
mous public sphere, where citizens could engage in rational-critical deliberation,
unfettered by state power and the market economy. 10
Habermas's account of the rise and transformation of the public sphere has
been repeatedly critiqued. 11 The criticism most relevant here is that Habermas
largely ignores "plebeian" and other competing, often oppositional public spheres.
"From the beginning," writes Nancy Fraser, "counterpublics contested the exclu-
sionary norms of the 'official' bourgeois public sphere, elaborating alternative
styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech.' "12 Pointing
to contemporary social movements, Fraser notes that members of subordinated
groups, such as women, people of color, lesbians and gays have found it politically
important to constitute alternative, or "subaltern counterpublics"; that is, "parallel
discursive arenas where those excluded from dominant discourses, invent and
8. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991, xviii.
9. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," in The Phantom Public Sphere," ed. Bruce
Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1993), 4.
10. Geoff Eley, "Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth
Century," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992)
289-339.
11. See for example, Dana R. Villa, "Postmodernism and the Public Sphere," American Political
Science Review 86:3 (1992), 712-721.
12. Fraser 1993, 8.
circulate counterdiscourses, so as to formulate oppositional interpretations of
157
their identities, interests, and needs."" The proliferation of such counterpublics
Race, Identity and
allows issues that were previously shielded from contestation to be publicly ar-
Political Activism
gued. Through public deliberation and contestation across a range of discursive
arenas and publics, Fraser suggests, issues and concerns become politicized and
therefore, subject to political struggle. 14
The idea of a subaltern public sphere highlights the problem of understanding
how specific power arrangements shape and reshape the discursive spaces within
which social groups interpret their needs, invent their identities and collectively
formulate their political commitments. Put another way, the presence of a coun-
terpublic can direct attention to the public arenas where micro-level discursive
interactions are shaped by wider institutional power arrangements and discourses,
and it locates the process of politicization and the formation of oppositional
identities in social relations and practices that engender, or incite public delibera-
tion and debate. In the case of Corona, the shift in the focus of political activism
in the post-civil rights era is a shift from issues of racial inequality to the quality
of life concerns of middle-class homeowners. This shift can be read, in part, as
the effect of a restructuring of the public sphere of black neighborhood life as seen
from the perspective of the face-to-face associational settings of neighborhood
activism. 15
Black Resistance and State Reform
Corona and the adjoining neighborhood of East Elmhurst today form the second
largest concentration of African Americans in Queens County, New York. The
two communities have a common history and common institutions, and are consid-
ered by residents and nonresidents alike to be a single black community. African
American families began settling in Corona at the turn of the century. Many
early arrivals were skilled workers, household workers, and professionals who
13. Ibid., 14.
14. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989).
15. In this essay I say less about structures of mass-mediated public communication which play
an increasingly important role in the production. circulation and consumption of meaning in the
imagining of publics. For accounts of these structures, see Craig Calhoun, "Tiananmen, Television,
and the Public Sphere," Public Culture 2:1 (1989), 54-71; Bruce Robbins, "Introduction," The Phan-
tom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1992). vi-xxvi; Miriam Hansen, "Unstable
Mixtures, Dilated Spheres: Negt and Kluge's The Public Sphere and Experience, Twenty Years
Later," Public Culture 5:2 (1993), 179-212.
158
left congested areas of black settlement in Manhattan in search of homeownership
Gregory
and better living conditions in Queens. In 1910 black settlement in Corona was
boosted when the Pennsylvania Railroad completed construction of the Sunnyside
Yards in Long Island City, just west of Corona. African Americans, employed
as Pullman porters, maids, cooks and in other railroad-related jobs moved to
Corona to be closer to the Sunnyside Yards. Many Corona women found employ-
ment with commercial laundries and other local industries servicing the railroad.
Prior to the Second World War, African Americans lived throughout Corona
alongside European, working-class immigrants.
As their numbers grew during the 1920s and 1930s, black Corona residents
organized an infrastructure of churches and voluntary associations, such as the
Elks, Prince Hall Masons and Urban Big Sisters, while maintaining important
social, cultural and political ties to Harlem. Black social clubs proliferated, carv-
ing up Corona society into overlapping, and often competing social sets, along
age, gender and class lines. 16 Older residents often speak of the period between
the world wars as a Golden Age, a time when the area boasted a "better class
of people" and "good society." A weekly feature of the New York Age, New
York's leading black newspaper of the period, was called Corona Chatter, which
regularly reported on Corona society and community events during the 1930s.
Written by We Seven, seven anonymous residents, Corona Chatter was a gossip
column that provided an important forum where claims to status and class identity
were publicly aired and contested, often along the axis of gender. In a caustic
response to the announcement of a cocktail party hosted by the Glamour Girl
Social Club, We Seven wrote: "There are several chippies in Corona who claim
to be sub-debutantes. Where did they get this? A point of reality [sic], they are
just a bunch of plain Corona chicks. The meaning of sub-debs is to be found in
the dictionary and you will find that they are far from that so-called society
class."¹⁷
During the 1930s Corona's black population increased fifty percent and the
community began to exert its political muscle. Black political clubs established
patron-client relations with white political kingpins, exchanging patronage for
Corona's growing black vote. One prominent realtor and "race politician" orga-
nized boycotts of local businesses that refused to hire blacks and, together with
local ministers, picketed the 1939 World's Fair for its discriminatory hiring prac-
16. See St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1945) and E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: Collier, 1962).
17. New York Age, 11 March 1939, 7.
tices. Black voluntary associations, such as the Negro Youth Association, the
159
Phyllis Wheatly Sewing Circle and Corona's social clubs provided resources
Race, Identity and
and labor for these actions, as well as important public forums for cultivating
Political Activism
oppositional views and styles of political behavior. For example, in a 1941 Corona
Chatter column, the Musketeer Social Club appealed to the "Negro people of
Corona" to mobilize for a boycott of a segregated local theater. Far from merely
providing "status without substance," as Franklin Frazier wrote of black bourgeois
society, Corona's voluntary associations formed a fluid, heterogeneous and, from
the vantage point of white society, largely invisible network of constituencies
or publics, which could be, and often were mobilized for political activities.
By 1950 the black population of Corona had reached nearly 10,000. Those
who arrived during the 1940s and 1950s were more diverse economically than
had been their working and middle-class predecessors. Many had arrived directly
from the South in search of jobs during the war. Other were displaced from nearby
Flushing, when a slum area was cleared through the federal Urban Renewal, or,
as James Baldwin put it, "Negro removal program." Housing in black sections
of Corona deteriorated as single family homes were converted into apartments
and rooming houses. "Whatever happened to the Corona of old?" asked the editors
of Corona Chatter. "It is getting so that desirable and respectable families, migrat-
ing from other parts, venture further out on Long Island to avoid Corona."18
Rapid population growth, coupled with overcrowded housing and poor city
services, promoted a differentiation of the area along the lines of race and class.
Whites fled black areas of Corona for other sections of Long Island while many
middle-class black families left declining areas of Corona and bought homes in
the adjoining, more affluent community of East Elmhurst. Although the socioeco-
nomic differences between the two areas remained fluid and contested, moving
out of Corona became increasingly meaningful as a marker of status and economic
stability for middle-class homeowners in East Elmhurst. To enhance and empha-
size their distinction, residents of East Elmhurst pressured the postal service to
have their area assigned a separate zip code. One woman, who had moved with
her family to East Elmhurst from Corona in 1952, told me: "If you didn't have
a college degree, the neighbors would walk all over you." She added: "I was
surrounded by people who owned their own businesses, and they got to putting
on airs. So I told them, 'I pay the same taxes as you all, I throw out just as much
garbage as you do, and I do just as much for my children.' That stopped them!"
18. New York Age, 7 November 1941, 8.
160
Neighborhood deterioration, fueled by post-war suburbanization, black in-
Gregory
migration and structural weaknesses in the urban economy, sharpened the percep-
tion of class and status differences between the two areas. But it also heightened
awareness among activists that Corona's growing problems of poverty, housing
deterioration and poor city services were tied to its lack of political power as a
black community. Real and imagined class differences remained important in
articulating black identities and in shaping the specific effects of racial exclusion.
But the impact of neighborhood decline, underscored for many the vulnerability
of African American residents across class lines to wider structures and processes
of racial exclusion.
During the 1960s and 1970s, African Americans in Corona pursued a range
of strategies to address the interrelated goals of political empowerment and neigh-
borhood preservation. Given its constricted playing field of the patronage system,
politics was for many synonymous with corruption and narrow, sectarian inter-
ests; yet politics came to be seen as vital to the preservation of black neighborhood
life. Indeed, civil rights era activism is distinguished from earlier periods of
mobilization by the widespread politicization of the social networks and institu-
tions of black civil society. This process of politicization involved both an expan-
sion of the range of power relations contested by activists in Corona, as well as
a proliferation of the public arenas within which such contests took place.
A broad spectrum of issues-ranging from school segregation and political
exclusion, to unemployment and racist mortgage lending practices- became tar-
gets for social activism, and were publicized as interrelated effects of structural
economic and political inequalities. 19 A campaign flyer circulated during the
unsuccessful campaign of a Corona minister for the City Council in 1963, illus-
trates the close interweaving of neighborhood concerns with structural economic
issues and the national agenda of the Civil Rights Movement. Reverend Robert
D. Sherard, the flyer reads, "will lead the community's fight for civil rights for
all and an end to discrimination, a full employment economy, improved and
integrated education, better housing for low- and middle income families, con-
sumer protection against increased fares, rates and prices, and honest, efficient
and responsible government." In addition to this proliferation of contested issues,
the public arenas, where these inequalities were defined and acted upon, expanded
to embrace a heterogeneous array of social networks and institutions. For exam-
ple, although Corona's churches had played a minor role at best in earlier political
19. See Ira Katznelson, City Trenches (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981).
contests, they provided an important political base for much of the activism in
161
Corona during the 1960s and 1970s.
Race, Identity and
This rapid politicization of black civil society had multiple causes, linked to
Political Activism
national and local political and economic conditions. The Civil Rights Movement
provided both a new political vocabulary and model of social mobilization which
rearticulated the meaning, terrain and borders of politics. Corona activists formed
ad hoc, direct action committees, which drew support from an assortment of
social networks and institutions. One committee, the Independent Citizens for
Good Government, adopted strategies used by the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference (SCLS) in its Crusade for Citizenship, and convened activists from
an unprecedented array of political clubs, voluntary associations and churches
to address political empowerment, school desegregation and other issues. The
federally sponsored Urban Renewal and War on Poverty programs created new,
although short-lived political spaces where activists could deliberate about com-
munity interests and needs. Federal regulations intended to promote the "maxi-
mum feasible participation" of residents in poverty areas led to the creation of
citizens' advisory bodies such as Corona's Community Action Council (1961)
and the Urban Action Task Force (1968). These citizens' councils convened
diverse groups of activists, whose political skills and identities had been honed
within a range of political arenas, including the trade union movement, school-
based parents associations, and in emerging sectors of the Black Power and Black
Nationalist movements.
Although offering only limited participation in decision-making, these govern-
ment-sponsored citizens' advisory councils provided important public arenas
where activists learned the mechanics, as well as structural weaknesses of urban
governing regimes. 20 For example, in Corona as elsewhere, activists often appro-
priated the federal rhetoric of citizen participation, and the institutional resources
provided by the government's War on Poverty to press demands against local
governing agencies and political elites. In so doing, they extended the concept
of "maximum feasible participation" to goals and arenas of activism that reached
beyond the service-coordination focus on the War on Poverty. In Corona, activists
working through antipoverty agencies mobilized voters against local politicians,
and organized parents in struggles over the control of schools.
20. On this issue see Susan S. Fainstein and Norman I. Fainstein, Urban Political Movements
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974) and "Economic Change, National Policy and the System
of Cities," in Restructuring the City, eds. Susan S. Fainstein, Norman I. Fainstein, et al. (New York:
Longman, 1983), 1-26.
162
To briefly summarize, the civil rights period witnessed an expansion of the
Gregory
public sphere of black political activism. This involved the politicization of ex-
isting public arenas, such as the churches, block clubs and other civic institutions,
as well as the creation of new political spaces, in part through federal and local
attempts to manage civil rights era activism through strategies of bureaucratic
enfranchisement. The proliferation and coordination of these insurgent groups
or counterpublics was evidenced in neighborhood struggles. Activism in Corona
was characterized by intense coalition-building, often cross-cutting class, ideolog-
ical and racial lines. For example, in 1964, the Independent Citizens for Good
Government joined with the NAACP, black Republican and Democratic political
clubs, block associations and an interdenominational coalition of churches to
establish the Ad Hoc Committee for Voter Registration. "We have pledged
to put aside all individual differences," wrote the Committee's chair in a letter
to community residents, "and work as one to achieve our objective."
Similarly, when the 1968 New York City teachers' strike threatened to close
local schools, the Corona branch of the Black Panther Party, many of whose
members had been recruited from the Enforcers, a Corona street gang, joined
in demonstrations with a multiracial coalition of parents and members of the
largely middle-class East Elmhurst Civic Association. In the early 1970s block
and civic associations worked closely with clergy, parents' groups and members
of the Black Panther Party and Nation of Islam to pressure the city to fund a
community library specializing in black history and culture.
These struggles produced important results. Through the War on Poverty,
community action agencies were established to provide job training, day-care
and other social services. Political decentralization in New York led to the creation
of government-sponsored, citizens' advisory boards intended to bridge the gap
between local communities and city government. Black community activists were
appointed and elected to newly formed institutions such as the Community Board,
the Police Precinct Council and the Local Community School Board. Finally,
voter registration drives of the 1960s mobilized black voters, making them a force
to be reckoned with by local white politicians. In 1974, following a power-sharing
agreement with the Queens County Democratic Party, Corona-East Elmhurst
elected Helen Marshall, a parents' association activist, to be a State Assembly
District Leader and later a member of the State Assembly.
These civil rights era gains increased African American representation in
electoral politics, in the administration of social welfare programs and on newly
formed citizens' advisory boards. However, as I proposed below, the state's
response to the insurgent politics of the 1960s was to restructure political space
in ways that shielded racial inequalities from contestation, while empowering
163
class-specific forms of civic activism and consciousness.
Race, Identity and
Political Activism
Contested Publics
The opening of opportunities for political participation in government bureaucra-
cies and mainstream political parties served to funnel activists in Corona into
specialized public arenas, where community needs were interpreted and framed
in narrow, enclaved contexts. The antipoverty program. in Corona led to the
creation of highly specialized neighborhood service corporations, bureaucrati-
cally tied to a tangled assortment of city, state and federal agencies. In 1970
these community action agencies were consolidated under the aegis of Elmcor
Youth and Adult Services, a multiservice agency providing job training, housing
assistance and other services. Poverty, once interpreted as an effect of an interre-
lated set of racially constructed inequalities, was reframed as an administrative
problem, which would be managed, as Thomas Jackson puts it, in a "segregated
'arena' of poverty politics.'
Elmcor was not only dependent on government agencies for funding, but was
also constrained to interpret and respond to community needs in ways that com-
plied with the bureaucratic, client-driven service strategies of its funding sources.
Moreover, the viability of Elmcor depended less on the political mobilization of
residents than on the tactical support of local political elites. Elwanda Young,
the executive director of Elmcor and a former Black Panther Party activist, spoke
to how this client-based service strategy restricted social interaction across class
lines:
I'm thinking about the clients we serve and how they might even begin
to interact with upper class blacks and there's no type of connection.
Their paths never cross anymore. The only possible connection might
be in the church where you might have this grassroots person still at-
tending this church. But other than that there's little opportunity for
them to meet.
An equally important effect of this process was to remove the issue of poverty
from the purview of institutions, such as the church, the NAACP and other civic
21. Thomas Jackson, "The State, the Movement, and the Urban Poor: The War on Poverty and
Political Mobilization in the 1960s," in The Underclass Debate, ed. Michael B. Katz (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
164
groups, which had earlier played important roles in defining and publicizing the
Gregory
political significance of black poverty. It was not that the membership and leaders
of these groups had lost interest in the "plight of the poor"; rather, their roles
in both defining and mobilizing residents to act on the issue of poverty were
superseded through the bureaucratic institutionalization of the War on Poverty.
As one former pastor of the Corona Congregational Church put it, "The loyalty
of the people went to Borough Hall, rather than to the church and what it was
doing."
This separation of the issue of black poverty from the public arenas of neighbor-
hood activism was exacerbated by state actions limiting citizens' involvement in
community development. As early as 1965 the United States Conference of May-
ors, alarmed by African American and Latino political mobilization in cities,
pressured the federal government to prohibit voter registration activities by feder-
ally funded community action agencies. In 1974, under the Nixon administration's
new federalism policy, the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) pro-
gram was established, which weakened federal requirements for citizen participa-
tion by relegating decisions concerning community participation to local offi-
cials. 22
Similarly, the funneling of activists into mainstream channels of political par-
ticipation fragmented interrelated community issues and restricted their delibera-
tion to highly specialized governing elites. Problems in the schools, for example,
today fall under the jurisdiction of the Local Community School Board. Housing,
zoning and other issues pertaining to the performance of city agencies are managed
by a politically appointed Community Board. Each of these governing bodies has
its own electoral or appointment process, meeting schedule and decision-making
protocol, rendering the mechanics or political participation confounding, if not
inaccessible to most community residents.
Bureaucratic enfranchisement also narrowed the range of neighborhood con-
cerns deliberated and contested in public through Corona's voluntary associations.
Problems of run-down housing and police misconduct, for example, were once
focal points for community mobilization and coalition-building, and are now
routinely channeled through the formal complaint mechanisms of government-
sponsored institutions. Once relatively autonomous, even oppositional civic
groups, such as the NAACP, block clubs and civic associations, today work in
tandem with local politicians and city officials, translating neighborhood needs
and demands into the narrow service categories and power-evasive worldviews
22. Fainstein and Fainstein, 1983.
of city officials. For example, at a meeting of the East Elmhurst-Corona Civic
165
Association, which I attended in 1989, an official from the Department of Sanita-
Race, Identity and
tion was invited to respond to complaints about services, which residents felt
Political Activism
were inferior to those provided in neighboring white communities. The Sanitation
Department's community liaison gave a presentation on his agency's efforts to
better serve the neighborhood. The official's presentation provides an example
not only of how expert knowledge is bureaucratically deployed to fragment and
depoliticize community issues, but also of how officially sanctioned ideologies
penetrate local contexts, in this case to redefine a problem of political weakness
as one of moral crisis. In response to complaints about erratic garbage collection,
the Sanitation Department official cited statistics on the number of summonses
that had been issued in the area for "behavioral incidents"; that is, for the failure
of residents to sweep the fronts of their homes and businesses. Continuing in a
more philosophical vein, he observed, "Garbage is no longer out of sight, out
of mind. There is a moral breakdown in our society that includes crime, drugs,
garbage and everything. It is the young kids who don't care about your houses
and don't have values and morals."
This example suggests how bureaucratic incorporation depoliticizes racial in-
equalities, disarticulating related community needs, while directing demands into
enclaved arenas of political participation. Bureaucratic incorporation has also
shaped the political effects of deepening black class divisions. The arenas of
activism that opened in the post-civil rights period have proven to be dispropor-
tionately responsive to middle-class homeowners who are organized into tightly
knit networks of block and civic associations.
Block associations, once referred to by the area's state assemblywoman as the
"building blocks" of the community, criss-cross East Elmhurst and to a lesser
extent Corona. These block clubs have proven to be important resources for
government, for gauging, and whenever possible, regulating public reaction to
controversial policies. Through them problems of poor services, housing decline
and inadequate police protection can be micro-managed and contained by city
officials at the local, block-focused level. For this and other reasons, block clubs
and their umbrella organization, the East Elmhurst-Corona Civic Association,
are important venues for state and private sector intervention in neighborhood
politics. Accordingly, these block and civic clubs enjoy privileged access to
power.
This concentration of political power is refracted through the prism of class.
As David Harvey has pointed out, a strong correlation exists between homeown-
166
ership and community activism through block and civic clubs. 23 In fact today
Gregory
there are more than twice as many block associations active in middle-class East
Elmhurst as there are in Corona, a relation which reflects East Elmhurst's higher
rate of homeownership. In short, the mechanisms of political participation that
emerged in the post-civil rights era served to disproportionately empower middle-
class homeowners by responding vigorously both to their class-specific forms of
civic activism and their property-based interpretations of community needs.
The complex restructuring of Corona's political landscape has given rise to
forms of political discourse, subjectivity and activism that emphasize the defense
of household equity and residential privilege, not unlike the "slow growth" move-
ments that Mike Davis has associated with homeowner politics and its ideology
of "responsible environmentalism." The ascendancy of homeowner politics in
Corona registers wider political transformations that have occurred in many cities
within the context of global economic restructuring. Economic restructuring in
the United States, driven by the crisis of the Fordist regime of accumulation in the
1970s, accelerated the deindustrialization of central cities and incited important
changes in the pattern of state intervention. Specifically, as Manuel Castells
points out, the emphasis in state intervention shifted from strategies of social
redistribution to policies aggressively facilitating capital accumulation. 25 In New
York City this economic and political restructuring provided a context for reori-
enting policy priorities away from community-based development initiatives and
toward fiscal austerity and economic development strategies promoting capital
accumulation in post-industrial growth areas, such as finance and real estate. 26
As a result, in Corona and other communities, land-use politics has come to
dominate the local political agenda, as governing alliances of city officials, bureau-
crats and private land development interests appeal to, and attempt to marshal
tightly knit networks of homeowners to support elite-driven land-use strategies.
Thus the arenas of political participation that have proven the most accessible
and responsive to African Americans in Corona are precisely those within which
the land-use strategies of governing elites resonate with, or better, interpellate
property-based constructions of black middle-class identity. Here I stress how
23. "Labor, Capital and Class Struggle around the Built Environment in Advanced Capitalist
Societies," in Urbanization and Conflicts in Market Societies, ed. K. R. Cox (New York: Methuen,
1978), 9-37.
24. Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990), 156-160.
25. The Informational City (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989).
26. Ibid. See also Robert Fitch, The Assassination of New York (London: Verso, 1993) and
Susan S. Fainstein, The City Builders (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994).
institutional power arrangements and practices both engender and hinder particu-
167
lar constructions of political needs, identity and interests.
Race, Identity and
Finally, the ideological contours and contradictions of this quality of life poli-
Political Activism
tics can be seen in a 1989 meeting of the East Elmhurst-Corona Civic Association.
The association met at the La Guardia Airport Holiday Inn to consider a New
York State-funded proposal to establish a group home for mentally retarded
adolescents in East Elmhurst. The plan had already been rejected by the 99th
Street Block Association, where the state had purchased a building for the group
home. State Assemblywoman Helen Marshall invited representatives of the not-
for-profit agency sponsoring the home to present its plan to the community. After
the presentation, Civic Association members were invited to question the home's
sponsors. One resident asked, "Shouldn't you come to the community first before
you contract to buy a house?" The representative responded with a question: "Do
you ask permission from neighbors when you move into a new neighborhood?
We see our home as one big family." This response provoked an angry outburst
from the audience, since it seemed to conflate the establishment of the group
home with the experience of black families moving into segregated white neigh-
borhoods. Assemblywoman Marshall tried to restore calm, assuring the audience
that the area's Community Board would hold a public hearing later in the month.
"Will there be drug testing?" a young woman asked. "The residents will be
mentally retarded adolescents and not drug addicts," came the response. The
audience again erupted in anger. "No way! We have enough problems with our
own families," one man stated. A second shouted: "I don't want them; I live two
doors away. I'm a pretty good shotgun artist," he added, menacingly. A woman
asked: "How can you force this on us when we don't want it? Our property values
will go down. This is basically a business and a quality of life decision for us."
Assemblywoman Marshall, again trying to calm the audience, stood and addressed
the representative. "You see, Mr. Farnum, this is a black community and everyone
has put their life savings into this community. We care so much about the disadvan-
taged that we already have 481 beds for special populations. We did our share,
but the city didn't do its share."
The Civic Association's response to the proposal for the group home suggests
that these public spheres of black middle-class activism can also be sites for
contesting governing practices and for rearticulating class identities. Association
members challenged the sponsor's compliance with both the procedures of bureau-
cratic service provision ("Will there be drug testing?") and the legitimating con-
ventions of urban regime politics ("Shouldn't you come to the community first
before you go into contract?"). Although these critical responses were narrowly
168
framed as a defense of property and family values, they did question the right
Gregory
of the state and its allies to dictate patterns of urban land-use.
But more importantly, Assemblywoman Marshall's assertion that Corona "is
a black community" and that the "city didn't do its share" disrupted the construction
of black middle-class identity as raceless and overdetermined by property values.
By naming Corona a black community, Marshall recovered the specificity of
race, reframing the community's refusal to accommodate special populations as
a wider issue of environmental justice. For like other communities of color,
Corona has born a disproportionate share of quality of life threats within the
increasingly polarized postindustrial city.27 However, we need to be careful not
to exaggerate the oppositional possibilities of this, or similar recoveries of wider
relations of social injustice. The middle-class identities called into being within
the public arenas of black homeowner activism are at once enabling and limiting,
offering residents a specific perspective of elite power, as well as of the possibili-
ties for resisting it.
What needs to be emphasized is the heterogeneity and plasticity of African
American social identities and the multiplicity of public spaces where they are
crafted. The ascendancy of homeowner politics is not a simple reflection or
realization of an essential and monolithic black middle-class identity. Rather, it
is a complex and often contradictory result of the interplay of resistance and state
power-"a war of position," as Gramsci put it, in which the stakes are the very
surfaces (what I have been calling the public sphere) on which people imagine
their political needs, identities and projects. If we are to change this society, we
must learn much more about the church basements, hotel meeting rooms and
other public arenas where we do politics, and indeed, where politics does us.
Steven Gregory teaches anthropology and Africana Studies at New York Univer-
sity. His recent work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Diaspora and Po-
LAR. He is co-editor with Roger Sanjek of the forthcoming volume Race (Rutgers
University Press) and is currently writing Race and the Politics of Subjugation
in the Post-Civil Rights Era.
27. See Robert D. Bullard, ed., Confronting Environmental Racism (Boston: South End Press,
1993).
*** GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1894-384-424
THE WHITE HOUSE OFFICE
NO. 78580
TRAVEL AUTHORIZATION
Date of Request: Feb. 9, 1996
1. TRAVELER'S NAME:
Margaret Williams
Extension:
Room:
K
White House Staff
Other:
6-6266
100 DEOB
2 PURPOSE(s) AND DATE(s):
3. ITINERARY (List all cities where stopopers occur):
Conference on racial issues and the
process and organizational structures
Leaving 7AM on 12th, arriving in NY at
8AM.
needed to strengthen African American
leadership.
Leaving NY 5PM on the 13th of Feb. 1996
Leaving for New York Feb. 12, 1996
Arriving back in Washington, D.C.
on Feb. 13, 1996
4. DEPARTURE
RETURN
Date:
Time:
Mode:
Date:
Time:
Mode:
Feb. 12, 1996
Airplane
Feb. 13 196
a
Airplane
5. FUNDING SOURCE:
Official
Political
501 (c)(3)
Other: Foundation (Rockefiller)
Please Read Instructions Regarding Travel Expenses on Reverse side of this Form
6. SPECIAL EXPENSES
TRAVEL ADVANCE REQUESTED
Commercial Car Rental
Taxi
Yes
No
Amount $
Hotel Name:
Recipient's Signature:
Date:
Other:
7. TRAVELER'S SIGNATURE (I HAVE READ AND AGREE TO THE TERMS SET FORTH ON THE REVERSE SIDE):
8. APPROVING SIGNATURES:
Office Head:
Approving Official (Political or Foreign Travel):
Special Assistant to the President and Director of White House Operations:
DICTRANSPORTATION OFFICE
Control No.:
Account:
#REV. 8/3/93)
ORIGINAL (Return with Voucher)
Contact person: Evan Ryan
Phone number: (202) 456-6266
Date of request: Feb. 9, 1996
ACCEPTANCE OF TRAVEL EXPENSES FROM OUTSIDE SOURCE
In order to consider whether the Government may accept from an outside source payment of
your travel, subsistence and related expenses under the GSA travel rule, you must complete the
information below. The outside source need not be a 501(c)(3) organization, but if it is, please
state so on this form and include the IRS determination letter.
Please include a copy of the letter of invitation if one was received.
Your name and position:
Margaret A. Williams
Chief of Staff to the First Lady
Nature of meeting or similar function and how it relates to your official duties:
Conference on racial issues and the process and organizational structures needed
to strengthen African American leadership.
Date and place(s) of travel:
Feb. 12, 1996 Leave Washington National Airport for New York La Guardia Airport
Fab. 13, 1996 Leave La New York La Guardia Airport for Washington National Airpot
Persons or entity making the payment (please also note any financial interests of the person or
entity known to you that may be affected by the exercise of your Government responsibilities):
The Rockefeller Foundation
Nature of expense(s) paid for:
travel, lodging, and meals
Method and approximate amount of payment (payment may be made either in-kind or by
check made payable to U.S. Treasury; you may not directly receive payment in cash or check
made out to you):
This form and any accompanying memorandum of approval must be attached to your travel
authorization. You must complete a travel voucher following the trip. Please send completed
form to Room 128, OEOB, at least 3 days before commencement of travel.
Center for African American History and Culture
Smithsonian Institution
VISUAL JOURNAL:
HARLEM AND DC IN THE THIRTIES AND FORTIES
-
(Names)
I/We will attend the opening reception on
Thursday, April 18, 1996 at the Art and Industries Building
6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Limit two reservations per invitation.
For more information, please contact the Center at
202/357-4500.
No Postage
Official Business
Necessary
Penalty for Private Use $300
If Malled in the
United States
Business Reply Mail
First Class Permit No. 12915 Washington, D.C.
Postage will be paid by Smithsonian Institution
Yes'
Center for African American
History and Culture
Smithsonian Institution
A&I, Room 1130, MRC 431
WASHINGTON DC 20277-2915
PHOTOCOPY
PRESERVATION
VISUAL JOURNAL
HARLEM AND D.C. IN THE THIRTIES AND FORTIES
DUFFYS TAVERN
RKO
SAS
CENTER FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE
Smithsonlan Institution
WASHINGTON
FENALTY
U.S.POSTAGE
FOR
900 Jefferson Drive, SW
APR:0'96
PRIVATE
'SC $300
A&I 1130, MRC 431
177 0.32 "
D.C
BMETER
Washington, DC 20560
7312325
Official Business
Penalty for private use $300
Fill
proml
16:46 04/10/96 155#2 WGMF ; DC 200
Margaret Williams
White House
Suite 100
Washington, DC 20500
—
USA
CELEBRATING THE
Contennial Anniversary y
oftbe
MODERN OLYMPIC
G
A M E CO
100years 1895 1996
1
The United States Olympic Committee
wishes to thank
Textron
for its commitment to our
Olympic athletes through its
generous underwriting of
the 1996 United States Olympic Dinner
President William Jefferson Clinton
Honorary President of the United States Olympic Committee
Vice-President Albert Gore, Jr.
Honorary Vice-President of the United States Olympic Committee
The House Committee on Standards of Official
Dr. LeRoy T. Walker
President of the United States Olympic Committee
Conduct and the Senate Select Committee on
Richard D. Schultz
Executive Director of the United States Olympic Committee
Ethics have formally determined that the
Speaker of the House
Newt Gingrich
Congressional Gift rules permit Members and
Senate Majority Leader
Bob Dole
Senate Democratic Leader
as
Tom Daschle
Staff of their respective bodies to attend the
House Majority Leader
&
Richard Armey
House Democratic Leader
Richard Gephardt
1996 Olympic Dinner
USA
as guests of the
Cordially Invite You To The
United States Olympic Committee.
1996 United States
The office of the Legal Counsel to the President
Olympic Dinner
Wednesday, May 1, 1996
has made a similar determination for members of
The Washington Hilton Hotel
the White House Staff.
International Ballroom
Washington, D.C.
Betters available upon request
R.S.V.P. card enclosed
Black Tie
Reception 6:30 p.m. Dinner 7:30 p.m.
United States Olympic Dinner
3205 N Street, NW
WAS INGTON. 27 PM MAR :00
BUCKLE UP
Washington, DC 20007
4/5
1995
SAVE LIVES!
yes
sile
[
the Homorable
Margaret Williams
-
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500
100years 100 years
1896 ~ 1996
PHOTOCOPY
PRESERVATION
Fill MAW invites
Tom & Chris Downey and Vin & Cheryl Weber
invite you to celebrate the publication of
SHOWDOWN: THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE
-
GINGRICH CONGRESS AND THE CLINTON WHITE HOUSE
BY ELIZABETH DREW
Tuesday, April 16, 1996
6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
2727 34th Place, NW
Washington, D.C. 20007
R.S.V.P.
202 898 6458
..... USA
PM ON. DC
132
2000
Ms. maggie Williams
I
Chief of Staff
office g the First Lady
The White House
Washington, D.C. 20500
1401 I Street NW, Suite 1210, Washington, DC 20005
You are invited
to a champagne and cocktail reception
in honor of
Ms. Carolyn Curiel
formerly of ABC News Nightline, The New York
Times and The Washington Post,
on her promotion as
Senior Presidential Speechwriter and
Special Assistant to the President.
Friday, February 16, 1996
6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
at the
Home of Carmen Lomellin
The Prospect House
1200 N. Nash Street # 539
Arlington, Virginia
RSVP: (703) 525-8270
For directions, please call Ms. Lomellin at (202) 606-5052
15 pt u muits
Ms. maggie Williams
Chief of Staff tothe First Lady
The White House
2nd Floor West Wing
Washington, Dc 20220
Personal