Progress in Fits and Starts
DOLMAN, JOSEPH
Progress in Fits and Starts The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America By Philip A. Klinkner with Rogers M. Smith Chicago. 418 pp. $32.50. Reviewed by Joseph...
...What about the perception that market forces will do more for racial progress than public programs...
...Klinkner and Smith make a finely detailed case, but their fears do not hold up...
...What about the disproportionate imprisonment of black men today...
...Today the worstpossible epithet is "racist...
...But when government uses its power to hasten race-based outcomes, the nation does seem to be regressing to the 1890s...
...The slaves served as Union laborers and offered crucial expertise as guides and spies...
...It hampers our world leadership by contradicting at home the message that we preach abroad...
...It's better to have "this property" work for the interests of the United States than for the interests of the Confederates, he decided...
...The system is in aperpetual state of reform, yet it never seems to improve...
...Answer: The problem may not be so much an absence of will as a shortage of new ideas from racial reformers...
...Back then, the worst thing one prominent white could call another was "Nigger lover...
...Something fundamental has changed...
...What about the abandonment of efforts to achieve high-quality integrated public education...
...Start with the Revolutionary War...
...This was always a bad idea...
...But even if we had a powerful will—who knows the way...
...American patriots were terrified that the British would enlist slaves to the loyalist cause...
...The authors are asking the wrong questions...
...New York City spends S9 billion a year on its schools, yet its high school graduation rate hovers around 50 percent...
...Cities and states have learned over the years that tough sentencing and diligent police work can make minority neighborhoods safer...
...Newsday" "What's love got to do with it...
...America continues to search, however fitfully, for a solution to its unfinished racial business...
...Over the last 40 years, everything has changed...
...Or consider the Civil War...
...So what happens now that the Cold War is over...
...Later, as ordinary citizens began to grasp their strategic importance, pressure built for emancipation...
...The War's outcome was a victory for abolitionists as well as the former colonists, and it led to the end of slavery in the North...
...When the War ended, slaves became free and enfranchised citizens...
...Therefore, let it be clear—in our own hearts andminds—that it is not merely because of the Cold War, and not merely because of the economic waste of discrimination that we are committed to achieving true equality of opportunity...
...The basic reason is because it is right...
...As a result, blacks have experienced a few lightning-fast bursts of progress— maybe one per century—followed by slow slides into retrenchment and neglect as soon as the white majority judged the crisis was over...
...Yet through it all, Klinkner and Smith point out, while much was said about America's global example and much was made of black contributions in the military, officials instinctively shied away from talk of morality...
...History doesn't always repeat itself...
...Where they see a nation poised to strip blacks of hard-won gains yet again, others may see a nation that simply wants to replace faltering programs (such as affirmative action or welfare) with policies that are more effective...
...What about the Supreme Court's specific rejection of carefully drawn minority political districts...
...For those who insist that Southern whites have undergone a fundamental change in their racial views since the 1960s, it should give pause that Duke received roughly the same share of the vote that a white supremacist candidate would probably have received 30 years earlier in Louisiana," the authors declare, speaking of a 1991 gubernatorial runoff that Duke lost...
...I've heard old white men confess that segregation was wrong, and I've seen black and white fathers hug each other as their sons scored touchdowns on integrated high school football fields...
...Each time they did so, they were deep into a crisis—usually a war—and urgently needed black assistance...
...Happily, Klinkner and Smith don't hit us with a bombastic polemic...
...It wasn't until the end of World War II that most whites even pretended to care...
...It increases the cost of public welfare, crime, delinquency and disorder...
...Wall Street's bull run so far has offered public-assistance clients a necessary cushion of available jobs as administrators turn welfare into workfare...
...Klinkner and Smith are at their best when they interpret history, not when they burden us with their political ideas...
...Race discrimination hampers our economic growth by preventing maximum development and utilization of our manpower," he said...
...Tina Turner famously asks...
...Some residents think a fancy outside world is conspiring to do them in...
...The Cold War transformed everything...
...As for affirmative action and welfare, no one ever conceived of these programs as permanent fixes for societal inequities...
...President John F. Kennedy did not mention it until a 1963 address to push his civil rights legislation...
...In the East Texas hills of Cherokee County (where I grew up), they toil side by side in machine shops, medical labs, sawmills, fire houses and on city councils...
...That is because the tale they tell—of the on-again, off-again march toward reconciliation between blacks and whites over the course of history—is as profound and tragic and pathological as anything a playwright might concoct...
...It mars the atmosphere of a united and classless society in which this nation rose to greatness...
...But among the people 1 know, there is a far greater acceptance of racial equality than anyone thought possible in 1960...
...And many took the economic downturn of the early 1990s especially hard...
...Not only was an embittered and impoverished black community an obvious propaganda bonanza for the Soviet Union, but U. S. officials also worried that al ienation and frustration made black political organizations vulnerable to Communist subversion...
...They have their share of meanness, and they are staunchly conservative...
...Yet they argue that the similarities between the current Zeitgeist and the post-Reconstruction era "ought to restrain optimism that further racial progress will henceforth come automatically or easily...
...Public schools...
...New York replaced its welfare system a few years ago with a work-oriented plan that still retains a safety net...
...Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer...
...The authors sound like those Wall Street doomsayers who forever focus on similarities to 1929...
...Rather, academic competence became a more urgent goal...
...Over the last 380 years, say Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, whites have fought enthusiastically to advance racial justice on only a few occasions...
...In the cities, at least, educators did not set out to abandon integration, as the authors fret...
...Not until blacks came flooding across Union lines did General Benjamin Butler make a simple calculation...
...Love doesn't fit into the equation at all...
...Too much free market in social policy...
...This isn't the 1890s...
...The court was right to scrap the practice...
...The authors offer their own agenda for closing the gap between blacks and whites, but most of it is familiar stuff: stronger welfare programs, increased enforcement of civil rights laws, less incarceration for felons and more rehabilitation (as if anyone knew how), and so on...
...But wait, say Klinkner and Smith, what about trends...
...So they signed up 8,000 blacks to fight the Red Coats, permitted thousands more to work as civilians, and gave many their freedom when the fighting stopped...
...The Founding Fathers in Philadelphia ultimately sold out their interests as the price for a new, unified—and very white—nation...
...No one has figured that one out...
...Where is the nation's will to honor "its more egalitarian ideals...
...Above all it is wrong...
...The Federal government should guarantee minorities a fair shake as they seek office...
...As evidence they cite among other things, the popularity in the early 1990s of David Duke, a former neo-Nazi and KJansman...
...In small towns throughout the South— David Duke or no David Duke—whites and blacks now work together, attend school together and, to some degree, respect each other...
...It had taken American officialdom centuries to admit that...
...In the end, there was no payoff for Southern blacks...
...1 have not heard anyone yearn for the days when blacks were invisible and despised...
...Yet by the end of the 19th century, Southern redeemers had managed to resegregate blacks and deny them many of their constitutional rights...
...Imprisonment...
...What about policy...
...But it also prompted nervous Southerners to quickly patch up their tattered racial hierarchy...
...Well, racial progress in the United States has never come easily—but the idea that we are regressing to the early 1960s or late 1800s rings false...
...None of it sounds very persuasive...
...As other states (such as Texas) scale back on racebased affirmative action in college admissions, they are seriously examining different ways to ensure that their student bodies remain diverse...
...It never began as a struggle to end slavery, of course...
...Racially gerrymandered legislative districts...
...Please...
...And with the Cold War won, the authors worry, whites might be ready to shut out blacks once more—just as they did a century ago...
...These towns will never be mistaken for Martin Luther King Jr.'s beloved community...
...Over the next two decades, the Armed Forces were integrated, the Supreme Court ordered the schools desegregated, and Congress passed laws to open public accommodations to everyone and to guarantee Southern blacks the right to vote...
...They concede the cumulative progress blacks have made...
...Their most intriguing idea would introduce universal national service...
...If we are discussing the white contribution to racial progress through most of American history, the answer apparently is, nothing...
Vol. 82 • December 1999 • No. 15
