"I graduated from a segregated high school seven years after President
Dwight Eisenhower integrated Little Rock Central High School," President
Clinton said in a July 1995 speech. "My experiences with discrimination
are rooted in the South and in the legacy slavery left."
As the White House orchestrates its National Initiative on Race, those sentences
explain much about Bill Clinton's vision of government's role in fostering
race relations in America. Clinton's view was born at the end of Jim Crow,
at a time in which Southern liberals, black and white, offered an integrationist
vision that saw us all living in a single, interracial community, with the
federal government fostering that goal by actively breaking down state
and local segregationist policies.
Clinton's vision is unfortunately frozen in the Arkansas of the 1950s, when
the barriers black Americans faced in the South were overtsegregated schools,
workplaces, restaurants and parks. Much has improved since then, especially
for the burgeoning black middle and upper classes.
Still, many African-Americans must overcome more subtle obstacleswretched
public schools, welfare dependency, a tax and regulatory system (and a failed
drug war) that make it tempting for young persons to live on the fringes
of everyday life. Scholars such as Richard Epstein, Thomas Sowell and Walter
Williams have convincingly argued that many of the remaining barriers black
Americans face were erected by the same government that was perceived as
a liberating force not so long ago.
Nevertheless, the president's outlook is optimistic, and it offers opportunities
for honest discussions with his critics. Another, far less
optimistic vision of race relations is on display in the White House,
however. It comes from Vice President Al Gore. At a recent "outreach"
meeting with opponents of racial preferences, Gore proposed this scenario:
"If you lived in a community that was 50 percent white, 50 percent
black, and for a variety of historic reasons, the level of income, educational
attainment and so forth was lower among the blacks in that community, and
the police force was 100 percent white, do you think that the community
would be justified in making affirmative-action efforts to open up a lot
more positions on the police force?"
The vice president invoked an extreme case of racial exclusion in a local
police department, one that may have been common a few decades ago but is
certainly nonexistent now (because of both changing attitudes and affirmative-action
programs).
Most people would consider the type of situation Gore suggests intolerable
or, at least, a curious way to promote confidence in a law enforcement agency.
But notice how Gore engages in his own brand of racial classification, suggesting
that individuals (in this case, police officers) are merely cogs in a wheel
who exist to fill slots in some grand social scheme.
Gore's view of enforcing "diversity" dominates the civil rights
establishment these days, and when diversity trumps all other values, there's
no room for pluralism, individualism or personal choice.
Gore's vision of race relations, like Clinton's, is rooted in the civil
rights past. Butas Gore has stated repeatedlyhe views racism as an intractable
aspect of human nature that will always lead to subjugation of a minority
group. Yet he believes an elite class of planners is immune from this taint
and should therefore be trusted with the power to enforce racial categories
and allocate privileges accordingly.
In the minds of diversity advocates, since racism can never be eradicated,
its consequences must be managed through a mind-boggling array of preferences,
set-asides and quotas. Gore's belief in endless head-counting and ever more
complicated plans to move people into the "correct" racial combinations
ignores the dynamic processes by which racial and ethnic groups have historically
been assimilated into the American community.
Unlike the hopeful (if anachronistic) liberal-integrationist view held by
Clinton, Gore's "diversity" vision leads to perpetual meddling
by social planners, ceaseless resentment by those who feel cheated by the
system and a never-ending divisiveness between individuals from different
racial backgrounds.
Clinton's particular vision is very much a bottom-up view, generated from
his lower-middle-class childhood in Arkansas and the grass-roots vitality
of the original civil rights movement. Such factors as rising interracial-marriage
rates and the increasing equality of income levels among individuals of
all races who have similar education levels strongly suggest we've advanced
a great deal along that integrationist path since Bill Clinton was a boy.
The diversity vision, by contrast, is top-down, much more consistent with
Al Gore's upbringing within the corridors of power in Washington. This vision
is exemplified by acting Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee's position
thatin defiance of federal court decisionshe would not enforce the California
Civil Rights Initiative.
The diversity enforcers are less concerned about expanding access so that
individuals can pursue their own dreams than they are about directing persons
from above to fill boxes in some societal organization chart.
A more hopeful approach to race relations acknowledges the evils of the
past, appreciates how far we've come and pushes us to look at people as
human beings rather than members of arbitrary groups. It also recognizes
that when government sorts individuals by skin color, it merely maintains
and supports the type of prejudice the diversity crowd ostensibly abhors.
