Once More Around the Race Track

...Clinton's description of growing up under segregation is consistent with the common American habit of using the word race to mean the contemporary problems and historical oppression of black Americans...

...That the President, like many journalists and academics, nonetheless continues to think in terms of abiding ethnic identities finds confirmation in the speech he gave to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) convention in July...

...Because of all the Jewish Americans here and the increasingly active and constructive Arab American community here...

...What one thinks should be done about the race problem depends, naturally, on how one defines that problem...

...Sleeper takes great pains to differentiate himself from conservatives who make some of the same points he does...

...Because of the Hispanic Americans, all the Latinos...

...Even those who chose "Other race" were required to write in their race...

...by law, opting out of this scheme of classification is forbidden...

...The combination of race-neutral urban, educational and antipoverty programs that many opponents of preferences call for is, from this perspective, beside the point...

...But for those struggles to succeed, in all other endeavors liberals must let race go...

...In 2050 a lot more of the population will look like Lani Guinier and Tiger Woods...

...It's much like the 1950s when Southern segregationists attacked the integrationists as Communists, making Communism look a lot better than it was and some of its opponents a lot worse...

...It is far from true, for example, that "Within the next three years here in California, no single race or ethnic group will make up a majority of the state's population...

...One finds people who do not replicate the racial alienations of the larger society but instead welcome interracial intimacy of the most profound sorts...

...I went through segregated schools," he pointed out in his California speech, "swam in segregated public pools, sat in all-white sections at the movies, and traveled through small towns in my state that still marked restrooms and water fountains 'White' and 'Colored.'" The South of segregation permitted no ambiguities...

...In doing so, he misstated a number of statistical facts...

...If one looks at the most admirable efforts by activists to overcome racial oppression in the United States," Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, who is black, said last year, "what one finds are people who yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular group...

...Even Sheldon Hackney, outgoing chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who has often been derided as a barometer of political correctness, told the National Press Club recently that he opposes preferences and setasides, though he favors other forms of affirmative action...

...Jim Sleeper, author of the forthrightly entitled Liberal Racism (Viking, 195 pp., $21.95), is one of several recent writers who think it does...

...But this attribution has the effect of giving conservatives all the best lines...

...Of course, Clinton's wish is to equalize and harmonize, not to segregate or subjugate...

...Interracial marriages were illegal until the mid-'60s...

...As long ago as 1960, the American Civil Liberties Union proposed that racial categories be removed from the census altogether...

...You will dwell insistently on the past, as Clinton did on the 40th anniversary of Central High School's integration in Little Rock, to sway people's minds about the present...

...Similarly, when people debate affirmative action programs, they almost invariably refer to their supposed effects on blacks, yet blacks constitute only a fifth of those eligible under Federal definitions of "protected categories...

...Second Thoughts ONCE MORE AROUND THE RACE TRACK By Christopher Clausen Although few people rank it in polls as one of the country's leading problems, "race"—the single, stark word with all its ambiguous baggage—is an obsession of American intellectuals andjournalists...

...A few days later, addressing a group of mayors, he declared that if America under his leadership became "the world's first truly great multiracial, multiethnic democracy," it would "rewrite the rules of human evolution, almost...

...Simpson's murder trial...

...Not all liberals are supporters of identity politics, racial preferences in hiring, and other paraphernalia that equate civil rights with ethnic entitlement...

...Nationally, the Census Bureau predicts that by 2050, if current trends continue, 53 per cent of the population will consist of non-Hispanic whites, down from 73 per cent today...

...With the exception of American Indians, who make up a fraction of 1 per cent of the population, no other group has had it so bad as blacks, and all other ethnic identities are in rapid flux...

...The New York Times, also a supporter of such preferences, headlined the report of his speech "Defending Affirmative Action, Clinton Urges Debate on Race...

...The guilt that comes from having grown up under segregation is one obvious reason...

...Again, the oddity was not so much Clinton's bizarre notions of evolution and Presidential power over it...

...The time has come, Sleeper maintains, for liberals to move beyond their obsession with racial identity to the real reward of the civil rights movement, an America where people are no longer imprisoned by their ethnic origins: "Full citizenship in the American republic entails a commitment to join in a race-transcendent human experiment...

...Either you were white or you were black, forever...

...On the other hand, the "race" problem can be defined more narrowly as a complex of problems afflicting African Americans—discrimination, family breakdown, poverty, inadequate education, drug addiction, disproportionate involvement in crime—that are arguably attributable to the long aftereffects of slavery and segregation...

...Can we," he asked in a commencement speech at the University of California at San Diego, "fulfill the promise of America by embracing all our citizens of all races, not just at a university, where people have the benefit of enlightened teachers and the time to think and grow and get to know each other, but in the daily life of every American community...

...His astute analysis of the conflicts we experience over "diversity"—in the racial composition of Congressional districts, newspaper editorial boards, or public school curricula, to name three areas he covers in detail—is really aplea to today's liberals to return to their best ideas...

...Every American has a separate continent, or at minimum a corner of the Middle East, to boss around...

...The Census Bureau is careful to point out that its concept of race "does not reflect any clear-cut scientific definition of biological stock" and depends solely on "self-classification by people according to the race with which they most closely identify...

...Black Americans, of course, have Africa...

...In the 1990s that problem can be defined in several different ways...

...No wonder the racial preoccupations of journalists caused them some embarrassment when the champion golfer Tiger Woods, whom they had thoughtlessly labeled black because it fit the historical-victim-makes-good script so well, insisted on his richly mixed ancestry...

...Nobody really believes that racial preferences will lead to diminished race consciousness, an outcome that is in fact their opposite...

...As the details of their operation in employment and university admissions, hitherto usually kept secret, have started to become better known, longtime backers have begun to develop reservations...

...To make matters more confusing, "Persons of Spanish/Hispanic origin may be of any race" (they were considered Caucasian until 1970) and are required to choose one...

...Politicians are used to thinking in discrete blocs of voters, and turn-of-the-century Democratic city bosses used to define those blocs in ethnic terms...

...Liberals," he notes, "must [still] lead struggles against discrimination and abuse...

...Our civic culture cannot be blueprinted or parceled out along race lines...

...Why," he asked, "are we in a good position to unite all of Latin America with us in a common economic group early in the next century...

...A consequence is the increased resistance to preferential forms of affirmative action...

...That a President of the United States would speak in these racialist terms, would eagerly advocate change yet crudely define the people over whom he presides in terms of their ancestry, is much more important to notice than his careless statistics...

...You will talk about the need to be "inclusive" and "overcome barriers," blurring the distinction between barriers that derive from discrimination and barriers that come from applying the same standards to everyone...

...another is that since the 1960s Southern Democrats have usually been more dependent on black votes than Northern Democrats...

...In this sense, numerous data suggest that the strains between blacks and other groups—not only whites, but Asians and Hispanics as well—have been getting worse, not better, and that government policies defining people by race are in significant part responsible...

...with any luck, we will have stopped worrying about where their great-grandparents came from...

...Liberals who write like that nowadays are often labeled conservatives by Democratic politicians and the media...

...Democratic politicians from the South, like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, seem to find it harder to let go of race than Northern liberals do...

...For whatever combination of reasons, the Clinton Administration, much of academia and most of the mainstream press take the second view...

...Sometimes, but if you believe prejudice against black Americans remains so strong that antidiscrimination laws are insufficient—that numerical quotas in admissions and employment are the only way of insuring equal treatment—you may well support such quotas in good faith, though perhaps not describe them very candidly when trying to defend them before a national audience...

...You will seize on every reported incident of discrimination, real or imaginary, to prove your point about the intractability of racism...

...You will constantly run the double risk of alienating the majority by implying that the nation you govern is too bigoted to be trusted, while humiliating the minority you want to protect by implying that it remains incapable of doing what is expected of everyone else...

...abolishing preferences would be (at least for blacks, if not for other currently eligible groups) a step backward...

...By what other logic could the press describe the pale Lani Guinier, President Clinton's abortive nominee for a civil rights post at the Justice Department, as black...

...It can mean Americans continue to identify themselves too exclusively as members of racial groups, to feel stronger loyalties to those groups than to their fellowcitizens as a whole, sometimes to the extent of nullifying the criminal law in order to protect their own, as plausibly happened in O.J...

...In the 1990s many liberals like Sleeper agree with this definition of the race problem and its amelioration...

...The impulse is benign, but it leads inexorably to the quota mentality Clinton has been blamed for even by many liberals since he took office—so many Cabinet positions for blacks, so many for women, so many for Hispanics...

...In proposing his yearlong national "conversation" about race last June, President Clinton seemed to imply that it was a simple, though not easy, question of whether people of different racial backgrounds could get along harmoniously...

...Instead, the number of categories has been expanded—in the 1990 count it included "white, black, American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Asian Indian, Korean, Vietnamese, Hawaiian, Samoan, Guamanian, Other API (Asian-Pacific Islander), or Other race...

...Six weeks after the President's San Diego speech, only 4 per cent of the respondents in a Pew Research Center survey thought race relations should be a top priority for the Federal government...

...The hopeful example of a Tiger Woods impresses them less than the difficulties of people with fewer talents or opportunities...

...In no small measure because of all the Asian Americans in this country...

...Even if one tendentiously counts all Hispanics as nonwhite, the California population is still about two-thirds white...

...With an intermarriage rate of over 40 per cent for people of Hispanic and 50 per cent for people of Asian descent born in this country, these groups continue to project distinct identities only because their numbers are constantly replenished by new immigration...

...Despite the example of Tiger Woods, recent proposals to add "Mixed race" as a category have encountered furious resistance from civil rights groups, which fear that doing so would result in a loss of their numbers and political influence —above all, in a reduction of their numerical affirmative action "goals...

...We affirm individual dignity when we refuse to treat any citizen as the delegate of a subculture or race...

...The other 96 per cent were not just being obtuse...

...Americans of predominantly African descent intermarry at much lower rates, but many people routinely described as black rather than mixed still qualify only by the Old South's anachronistic "single-dropof-blood" standard...

...Thus are our convictions about race shaped by the way memory interacts with current needs, in this case both emotional and political needs...

...When other groups (not all of them ethnic) adopt the language of black struggle, it always sounds derivative...

...This simplified rhetoric begs many questions, including who exactly is to embrace whom and what operational definitions Clinton might give to the verb embrace...

...After learning early such a powerful lesson about the differences between one race and another, what could be more natural than to assimilate other ethnic groups to the same pattern, one after another, as they swim into view...

...Once again, debate centers primarily on how a change in the government classification scheme would affect blacks and their supposed interests, rather than its usefulness as a reflection of changing demographic realities...

...But it is also true that the kind of identity politics he espoused at the NAACP and elsewhere owes something to his own experience of segregation as a boy in Arkansas...

...Are the supporters of group entitlements simply regressive tribalists who choose them over an integrated society where people are judged as individuals...

...Much of the time you will enrage everyone on every side of the question, inflaming where you hoped to heal...

...After all, they were dealing with unassimilated immigrant groups in the days when more than half the urban population might be foreign-born...

...Hence the common argumentative practice of announcing that because the United States has not yet achieved a "color-blind society," preferences and set-asides "remain necessary," after 25 years of being vigorously enforced, in order to prevent "resegregation...

...In that sense, Clinton is a very old-fashioned kind of Democrat...

...These things are contrary to the universalistic model that underlies even contemporary liberalism, which so often seems to embrace them out of guilt...

...You will use the word "diversity" as a mantra, ignoring all signs of racial or ethnic convergence...

...Does the way of thinking represented by the Clinton Administration and many but by no means all liberals, however well intended, constitute another form of racism...

...Rather, it was his assumption that the very laws of biology militate against cooperation between groups of Americans who, despite high rates of interbreeding and precipitous cultural homogenization, are by axiom immutably distinct...

...Matters become slightly clearer when one recognizes that the President's concrete purpose in announcing his "conversation" was to defend preferential forms of affirmative action, which the voters of California outlawed in a state referendum last year...

...If one believes the central issue is the persistent disadvantaging of blacks by whites and the mutual hostility that accompanies it, then abandoning racial designations would be an evasion...

...As Clinton's comments in San Diego indicated, the first of these experiences (predictably reinforced by the second) tends to make them see the country's racial problem in a particular regional light...

...Why are we in a good position to avoid having Asia become a separate economic bloc and a destabilizing force in the world...

...Why do we have some hope of being a major force for peace in the Middle East...

...Mother Jones, a bimonthly with an impeccably radical record, announced in September that for moral and political reasons it now opposes affirmative action...

...That is the rhetorical predicament in which our Southern President and the commission he appointed to advance his view of race find themselves at this historical moment...

...Our best leaders are those who show their neighbors, every day, how to leave subgroup loyalties at the doors of classrooms, jury rooms, hiring halls, and loan offices...

...All but the most exceptionally capable blacks would once again drift helplessly in a sea of prejudice and inherited disadvantage...

...In short, can we become one America in the 21 st century...