Conservative opportunism, liberal cowardice
Siegel, Fred
m m CONSERVATIVE OPPORTUNISM, LIBERAL COWARDICE THE RACIALIZATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS FRED SIEGEL here is a question haunting American politics. Why is it, a quarter century after the...
...Conservatives who had few objections when the quota for blacks was zero have successfully cloaked themselves in the mantle of a single standard of justice even as they, in fact, play their own cynical version of separatism...
...in their mind...
...Even more dramatically, white Ohioans under twenty-four years of age were Republican by a 64-25 margin...
...the film's appealing protagonist, triumphs over a broken home, a dangerous neighborhood, and the usual sexual and generational conflicts...
...Union leadership, in public at least, insisted that racial issues were a diversionary tactic by big business looking to revive rightto-work laws and therefore there was no need to discuss these issues with their members...
...Shaken by the defeat of forty-seven incumbents, almost all of them solid supporters of the Great Society, George Meany, AFL-CIO president, commissioned a poll whose "political findings were shocking...
...and into the third world...
...Mary Daly Robert J. Daly, S.J...
...Ten years ago, I would have cut my tongue out before I said 'those people' or 'those blacks.' Now as I see the neighborhood crumbling, I tend to generalize...
...Laissez-faire ideology, in the Edsalls' view, did double duty for the Republicans, providing the argument for opposition to all regulation, economic and racial...
...Furthermore, as Brown notes, income figures do not convey total assets: black, middle-class households have one-tenth the assets of comparable white households--so that most middle-class blacks lack a family safety net if there is unemployment, illness, or other misfortunes...
...Clear-cut notions of right and wrong once so compelling on the race issue have been replaced by a confusing checkerboard of both black progress and black privation...
...The net result is that busing and affirmative action programs meant to achieve racial balance in schools and the workplace transformed the public perception of the Democrats from the party of economic equality into the party of minority privilege...
...In the Republican rubric, why should government pick either economic or racial winners...
...Chain Reaction and Minority Party come to common conclusions about the overwhelming impact of race on American politics, but from very different perspectives...
...he public's attitude toward minority poverty has become intertwined with its declining trust in government...
...A friend of Arkansas governor, and presI 8 November 1991:645 idential candidate, Bill Clinton puts it succinctly: "I just don't understand the world we're living in...
...But where the Edsalls are liberals affronted by the racial and economic injustices of American society, Brown sees only blue skies and endless opportunity ahead if only the underclass would get on the bandwagon and join the great American parade...
...Furthermore, in the case of race norming (a practice in which tests are scored separately for white, black, and Hispanic groups, and defended by some as essential if blacks are to have access to better paying jobs that require such exams) a premium ought to be placed on: (1) requiring that minority test-takers be given the opportunity to raise their skill levels, and (2) insuring that norming be begun with an understanding that the differences in how the tests are scored will be narrowed over time...
...Reviving the old "culture of poverty" arguments, conservatives contend that policy has to break the cycle of dependency produced by generation after generation growing up on welfare in fatherless homes...
...and Minority Party: Why Democrats Face Defeat in 1992 and Beyond by Peter Brown, lay out the dynamics of how the Republican party has reaped the rewards of aligning itself with the resentments of the "won't work" perspective...
...Greider demands that Democrats delimit their discussions solely to economic inequalities...
...year-old film school graduate John Singleton, and is in many ways a very conventional coming-of-age story...
...You could give him a billion dollars and he'd make little or no progress...
...Yet there has been no discernible impact in the schools...
...Racialized politics, they show, didn't simply flood into an estuary and empty it of class politics...
...Gunshots punctuate the night, and children are as likely to stumble over a bullet-ridden corpse as a tricycle...
...Party chair Paul Kirk had commissioned an independent, nonpolitical polling firm to do an extensive study of politics and racial attitudes...
...The Edsalls' approach is analytic, Brown's journalistic and anecdotal, yet both show how the rise of Republicanism in suburbia, the decline of the Democrats' trade union base, and the increase in international economic competition have drastically redrawn the political landscape...
...Stephen F. Brown Lisa Sowle Cahill Francis X. Clooney, S.J...
...and among white professionals and managers, 11 points...
...In New York, for instance, a film produced in 1967 by Mayor John Lindsay to encourage open housing mocked the "tickytacky houses" of white, lower-middle class homeowners...
...The Edsalls have been attacked by Rolling Stone columnist William Greider, among others, for even discussing racial divisions...
...Boyz N the Hood was written and directed by twenty-threePAUL BAUMANN is the associate editor of Commonweal...
...Given that inseparability, it's not surprising that there is substantial statistical and anecdotal evidence for both the "can't work" and "won't work" positions...
...In the United States the areas that will lose the most in the 1990 census are regions with heavy industry-blue collar-trade union constituencies that have traditionally voted Democratic...
...Anthony J. Saldarini Margaret A. Schatkin Francis P. Sullivan, S.J...
...The political Right and Republicans were left alone in public to define the issue and proceeded to produce the very linkage between racial and redistributive regulation that the unionists had feared...
...Powell suggested that just as in the matter of veterans' preferences, race could and should be a strongly weighed category in employment and in college admissions outreach but that it ought not be decisive...
...Although neither book takes note of it, the depth of the white backlash was well understood by the late '60s...
...Charles C. Hefting, Jr...
...Why is it, a quarter century after the civil rights revolution, that a substantial segment of black America is worse offthan it was before...
...The report said that the party had "a dual identity" composed of ideological "liberals, on the one hand, and special interests (blacks, gays, Hispanics, feminists and labor), on the other hand...
...For a family unwilling to send its children to a public school that has been undermined by due process protections for disruptive students, or a neighborhood forced to pay for private security guards because there aren't nearly enough police, the rights revolution has turned out to be a costly matter...
...Much like the silently sullen white college students who are whipsawed by administrators and activists playing the same/different game--whereby they are open to charges of racism if they treat blacks either the same or differently--the average voter is at best bewildered and more often annoyed by the rules of racial regulation...
...Oppressed by a largely unseen 8 November 1991:647...
...This sentiment is echoed by "Louise," a school teacher and former Democrat, interviewed by Peter Brown: "I don't like this [racial] attitude in me...
...The Democrats, notes party consultant Robert Squier, disassociated themselves "from the idea of representative government...
...Cornel West, director of Afro-American Studies at Princeton, sees these two camps as highlighting one of two explanatory mechanisms...
...These two sets of 'owners' trade the party between themselves leaving the common man out of the picture...
...Robert Imbelli Pamela Jackson Philip J. King Matthew L. Lamb Frederick G. Lawrence Claire Lowery H. John McDargh William W. Meissner, S.J., M.D...
...But with all of these gains in income, the black middle class has achieved only a precarious prosperity and generally only in those occupations that involve either direct government employment or close EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) supervision...
...Under Cuomo, New York has increased per capita expenditure on education by between 60 and 80 percent during the 1980s...
...Class politics were also displaced by a cultural radicalism that was only too happy to trumpet its own superiority to the moral mildew of middle-class life...
...Conservatives, by contrast, downplay white racism...
...The D.C...
...Application deadline is March 1, 1992...
...I blame the Democrats, people like Ted Kennedy...
...in Systematic Theology, History of Christian Life and Thought, or Christian Ethics...
...They depict poverty as a problem of deviant behavior...
...Yet black Southeast Washington desce~lded into a despair so deep that it stirred a belief even among parts of the black middle class in conspiracy theories (about white plots to introduce AIDS and crack use) that would be ludicrous if the pain they reflected weren't so heartfelt...
...Overlooking, by and large, the problems of the working poor, conservatives see self-help and the free market as the remedy for the character ills produced by government handouts...
...Raymond G. Helmick, S.J...
...The M.A...
...among white high school graduates, 18 points...
...The report concluded that for many voters "it is these underclasses that signify the present image of the Democratic party...
...As a start, they need to forthrightly acknowledge what they have suppressed since the Moynihan report: The problems of poverty are both structural and behavioral...
...James A. O'Donohoe John J. Paris, S.J...
...government, protected from federal budget cuts by its status as the capital, increased overall spending between 1984 and 1989 by 50 percent, while expenditures on human services rose 82 percent...
...Liberals, he writes in Dissent (Spring 1991), see AfricanAmericans held back by "structural restraints" of both systemic racism and world capitalism, which have shifted the demand for unskilled labor out of the U.S...
...That attack on Moynihan's report, in effect, closed the subject of race and rights, at least among liberals, for nearly a quarter of a century...
...Because the fact is, even if the Democrats won't deal with the race issue, it will continue to deal with them...
...The seeds that were planted twenty years ago have borne bitter fruit, we started going our separate ways...
...In the glare of the mass media's craving for news and the entertainment industry's insatiable demand for "product," art and reality are notoriously promiscuous partners...
...The Edsalls refuse to blink at the heavy costs imposed by the need to compensate for suburbanization and the internationalization of the economy...
...In a carefully argued analysis, the Edsalls show how "working-class whites and corporate CEOs, once adversaries at the bargaining table, found common ideological ground in their shared hostility to expanding government intervention...
...A party of fiercely self-identified minorities has become the minority party, at least where presidential politics is concemed, because the whole of its ferocious factions is far less then the sum of their narrowly liberal and particularist parts...
...Union members, it seemed, were "more concerned with.., property taxes, crime, and zoning regulations than they were with the welfare state agenda of the AFL-CIO...
...While African-Americans associate government with the end of slavery and the triumph of civil rights, whites, whether in business or labor, have increasingly come to see government as a threat to their interests...
...In "the great reversal," Republicans--known before the racial GRADUATE STUDIES IN THEOLOGY @ The Faculty: Mary C. Boys, S.N.JM...
...The free market attack on government economic regulation was joined to criticism of what liberals call social programs, but which many whites have come to see as a racial spoils system...
...Pheme Perkins Stephen J. Pope Louis P. Roy, O.P...
...It's a balance that even liberal Democrats should be able to defend in public...
...In the long run, however, it was the liberal silence on race issues, to which the unions contributed, that brought on what the AFL-CIO most feared...
...The argument that the economy does not work for blacks, that they "can't work," is belied, in this view, by the success of new immigrant groups as well as the growth of a significant AfricanAmerican middle and upper-middle class...
...When liberals speak of civil rights they have a picture of Martin Luther King, Jr...
...By the early 1990s 15 percent of blacks had incomes above $50,000, twoand-a-half times the 1968 rate...
...What is open to debate is the form that it should take...
...But they had completely misjudged the impact of the riots in Watts and Newark...
...If there is to be any hope for intergenerational black mobility in a period of declining college enrollments among blacks, it's essential that some form of affirmative action be maintained...
...David Hollenbach, S.J...
...FRED SIEGEL, author of Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan ( Hill and Wang), teaches in the humanities department of The Cooper Union in New York City...
...by 1990, after a 17point shift, the Republicans had gained a 6-point advantage...
...646: Commonweal revolution as the party of Anglo-conformity and Protestant provincialism-are now seen by the public, fairly or not, as the party of universal values...
...Margaret Gorman, R.S.C.J...
...But it is a transformation that many, if not most, white voters long ago noticed and now take for granted...
...All take us into the everyday lives of African-Americans, and into the bewildering labyrinth of racism and black anguish, in ways rarely done before...
...Yet the outcomes have been similar...
...The Edsalls examine the connection between contempt for government and the conflict between the races...
...West concludes that neither explanation can stand alone because structure and behavior are inseparable...
...Nearly half of all black professionals work for government...
...But now we see that perhaps the price of not speaking may have been even greater...
...Even then, its conclusions were already almost twenty years old...
...The fears that a segment of black America has now invested in a permanent set of separate standards, or what whites see increasingly as privileges, is part of what is driving racial polarization...
...m m CONSERVATIVE OPPORTUNISM, LIBERAL COWARDICE THE RACIALIZATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS FRED SIEGEL here is a question haunting American politics...
...When it comes to race, liberal Democrats speak a language unrecognizable to most white Americans, including many people of good will...
...For example, in France the shut down of the giant Renault complex, which had traditionally delivered workers' votes for the left-wing parties, dealt a grievous blow to the Communists and Socialists...
...DOCTORAL STUDIES in the Joint Graduate Program with Andover Newton Theological School lead to the Ph.D...
...The urban underclass," write the Edsalls (Tom Edsall covers politics for the Washington Post), "is the Achilles' heel of the liberal movement...
...The disparity in income between CEOs and line workers, already the widest in the industrialized world, doubled during the 1980s...
...How is it, they ask, that the Republicans continue to control the White House despite the growth in income inequality over the past decade...
...Wherever the money goes (New York City and State have more educational administrators than all the countries of the European Economic Community), it is not reaching the black poor...
...He concluded that for many traditional Democrats, "civil rights is now equated with losing the savings invested in your home...
...617) 552-4602...
...Black congressional leaders and their white liberal allies have too often played the game of bait and switch wherein they point to desperate black poverty as a warrant for programs that benefit those who have already "made it...
...The Democrats' path to power, as I noted many times in Commonweal, especially during the 1988 elections, lies across a territory that they are politically and intellectually afraid to cross...
...Washington, D.C., under the administration of former mayor "Let's watch whose status quo we're calling obsolete, Mac/" 642: Commonweal Marion Barry is a perfect example...
...And while the party was going up, the voters were going out...
...Stunned by the size of the liberal defeat, Helmuth Kern, polit644: Commonweal ical director of the Amalgamated Meatcutters, argued that liberals had been bushwhacked by a "vicious issue, which strangely enough was kept silent and hushed up: integration and civil rights...
...For crucial groups within the industrial working class the period from 19781982 represented a second great depression...
...Roughly speaking, answers to that question break down into the "can't find work" and "won't find work" schools...
...It doesn't seem beyond the capacity of the Democrats to move toward the kind of system Justice Lewis Powell referred to in his once celebrated but now forgotten plurality decision in the Bakke case (1978...
...Biblical Studies may be pursued as a minor field...
...Representative Thomas Finneran, the Democratic chair of the Ways and Means Committee of the Massachusetts House, who represents greater Boston, sees the social and cultural problems as so intractable that money is irrelevant...
...The Democrats, by contrast, once the universalist party of merit and equal opportunity, are now known as the party of minority favoritism...
...For example, Brown notes that between 1984 and 1988 in Illinois, turnout in the Democratic primary dropped by 150,000 voters, while participation by people with incomes above $50,000 increased from 5 to 15 percent...
...The Democrats have consistently declined to deploy the sophisticated polling needed to chart the choppy waters of a racialized politics...
...I don't think blacks are inferior, they just lack a work ethic and the system has reinforced that...
...But on the terrain of politics, the "won't work" school is the clear winner...
...This is understandable, but largely wrongheaded...
...Faced with the difficulty of dealing with the findings, Kirk chose to deep-six the report...
...The shape and trajectory of his journey are as familiar as any Horatio Alger story...
...Two new books, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics by Tom and Mary Edsall...
...Lindsay's late-sixties' coalition of "the best people" and the "bottom dwellers" anticipated the shape of liberalism to come...
...John A. Darr Donald J. Dietrich Harvey D. Egan, S.J...
...James Rurak Patrick Ryan, S.J...
...DOING FOR OURSELVES BLACK DIRECTORS RECAST THE AMERICAN STORY PAUL BAUMANN he steamy ideological hothouse of New York City is never short on ethnic and racial strife...
...Tre Styles (Cuba Gooding, Jr...
...It is true that in the 1980s black, upper-middle-class incomes grew more rapidly than comparable white incomes...
...By contrast, resentful whites and frightened politicians point to the rise of the black middle class as an argument to eliminate affirmative action altogether...
...Ethnic neighborhoods that had gone two to one for LBJ in 1964 swung two to one against the Democrats in 1966...
...At the tumultuous funeral for the child, the crowd outside the church shouted "No justice, no peace," while inside, Dinkins pleaded with the congregation to "increase the peace...
...The action is set in a working-class neighborhood where the residents try to eke out a modest existence while drug dealers and other predators prowl the streets and police helicopters circle forever overhead...
...We need the federal courts to integrate our schools by race, but we need the federal courts to segregate our legislature by race...
...Chain Reaction shows that race, rather than social justice or economic equality, is now the filter through which many Americans, black and white, read government policy...
...Yet in roughly the same period, Democratic party identification among white, manual workers fell 15 points...
...J. Cheryl Exum Ernest L. Fortin, A.A...
...n truth, there was n,o easy answer...
...Liberals worried, with good reason, that one cost of discussing the race question openly would be more bigotry...
...From this perspective, black poverty, says West, is a product of broken families in which the youngsters, sometimes three and four generations removed from the last working parent, are cut off from middle-class life...
...Thomas E. Wangler James Michael Weiss For further information on graduate programs and resources, Contact Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Director of Graduate Programs, Box C, Department of Theology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02167...
...long with E. J. Dionne's Why Americans Hate Politics (Simon and Schuster), the Edsalls' book is sure to be one of the two or three most important primers for the 1992 elections...
...Brown describes a fascinating episode following the 1984 election...
...He detects "a whiff of old-fashioned scapegoating" in their account and insists on seeing racial preferences as unproblematic, much as many liberals persist in seeing abortion-ondemand as uncompromisable...
...Indeed, in urging his audience to "increase the peace," Dinkins was borrowing a line from the coda of Boyz N the Hood, a story of gang violence in Los Angeles...
...Most whites hear those same words and they see and hear Malcom X or one of his many current legatees, among whom Stokely Carmichael's assertion of twenty years ago, has become common fare: "integration is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy...
...Racial antagonism sells, both on the front page and in front of the cameras...
...It's a theme now being taken up not only by black conservatives, but by some on the left like the socialist weekly In These Times, which hopes that race-based affirmative action programs can be replaced with purely class-based ones...
...The Louises of the world are responding to more than pique...
...This year African-American filmmakers, often taking their storylines from the headlines, have brought out movies of unprecedented power, among them, Jungle Fever, Boyz N the Hood, and Straight Out of Brooklyn...
...When David Dinkins, New York's black mayor, tried to calm the situation he was besieged by a black mob...
...DEGREE may be earned in Theology or Biblical Studies...
...Thomas H. Groome AT BOSTON COLLEGE The Department of Theology at Boston College, a leading Catholic university in an ecumenical setting, shares the resources of eight other schools in the metropolitan area through membership in the Boston Theological Institute...
...Private sector gains are far more limited...
...The driver of the car that killed the child was a Hasidic Jew from Crown Heights...
...Reading Chain Reaction, I was struck by the similarities among the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the dramatic decline of Communist parties in Western Europe, and the travails of trade unionism right here at home...
...We made a serious mistake," he writes, "when the movement turned against its first principle: integration...
...If the honesty and leadership of Barry can be called into question, that of New York's governor Mario Cuomo can not...
...It almost doesn't matter who is mayor [of Boston...
...And what would they have done with the data had they gathered it...
...But both the Edsalls and Brown are persuasive in arguing that it is this very lack of debate that has helped cripple the Democratic party...
...For liberals the solutions lie in an active government that supplies jobs, health care, and more money for the schools while restraining racism through widespread affirmative action programs...
...Under the inspiration of the incendiary Reverend A1 Sharpton and others on the fringe of New York's black politics, retributive violence was condoned and an overt anti-Semitism soon emerged...
...we "did not (so much) go left, [as] we went up" the social scale...
...This past August saw some of the most bitter and violent conflict in years, when black rioters took to the streets of Brooklyn's Crown Heights in the aftermath of a traffic accident that killed a seven-year-old black boy...
...The National Opinion Research Center polls show that 78 percent of whites think blacks are more likely to prefer to "live off welfare" than to work...
...There was much that could have been discussed, but little could be said publicly in the wake of denunciations of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his report on the sad state of the black family...
...Many liberal Democrats have yet to come to grips with the way black power long ago supplanted, with some notable exceptions, integration as the beau ideal of black militancy...
...Their hardheaded look at how race has replaced class as the key divisor in American politics is likely to produce discomfort among many liberals...
...John Lewis, once a leader of SNCC and now a Georgia congressmen, analyzes it differently...
...The differences are, with numerous variations, a replay of the old saw about whether the slums make the people or the people make the slums...
...In 1980, white Ohio was 11 points more Democratic than Republican...
...Within hours a gang of black youths had stabbed a Hasidic man, who died later at the hospital...
...Overwhelmed by the social pathologies found in the black ghettos of America's largest cities, most whites, and many blacks, have become skeptical about the once-powerful liberal argument that spending money on social welfare programs is an investment in the future...
...Going into the midterm elections of 1966 and counting on what seemed like overwhelming support for Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the AFL-CIO spoke exultantly of how a permanent liberal majority in Congress would finally complete the New Deal...
...The Edsalls excel at showing how the rights revolution, ini8 November 1991:643 tiated by the movement for black freedom, and then extended into a variety of areas from students' rights to prisoner and welfare rights, has made civil rights into an economic as well as a moral issue...
...Liberalism, the Edsalls conclude, has become a victim of its own virtues...
...All were hard hit by an internationalized economy in which the industries of the first and second industrial revolutions were transferred to newly developing countries...
...This is a frontier of sorts, one where a homeowner has to guard his property with a gun and strengthen his children against the wayward example of their friends...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 19
