How Not To Think About Civil Rights

Robert Tagorda has a very interesting post on Howard Dean’s misconstruction of civil rights. I hardly need link this now since InstaPundit beat me to it (though my intention preceded Glenn’s reference).

Anyway, go read it if you haven’t already. You should also read the Los Angeles Times article that Tagorda discusses, although my take on it is somewhat different from his.

Tagorda writes:

In arguing that identity politics have sent the civil rights movement adrift, Hicks and Lehrer challenge orthodox minority leaders to focus on urban crime and education. They argue that self-help is the path to improved race relations.

That is certainly true, and on this point I agree with both Tagorda and Hicks & Lehrer, as I do with H & L’s main point: that the civil rights movement is “adrift” in part because it has lost its focus and defined every problem as a civil rights problem.

Recently, Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn couched the grocery workers strike and lockout as a civil rights fight, even though the issues are classic labor-management disagreements over salary and benefits. Several City Council members echoed his remarks.

Examples of special-interest issues cast as civil rights causes abound. Latino activists recently called for a daylong work and school boycott to protest Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s repeal of the law that would have allowed illegal immigrants to get a driver’s license. The activists claim the repeal is racist and anti-Latino.

Earlier in 2003, then-Gov. Gray Davis signed into law a bill that allowed discrimination claims to be filed if, for example, a business owner (even one with as few as five employees) did not hire an applicant whose “dress or behavior is different from that traditionally associated with the [prospective] employee’s birth gender” (i.e. cross-dressers and transgender individuals).

Such issues deserve a full debate, but are they civil rights issues? Or are they simply an attempt to use the mantle of civil rights to push forward the cause of identity politics?

I have no quarrel with Hicks and Lehrer when they say what isn’t civil rights. But when they say what is they sound pretty much like the folks they are criticizing:

If most of today’s civil rights establishment seems to be driving down the road with its eyes planted on the rearview mirror, what’s being missed? Well, for starters, what about the bloody reign of terror occurring in many urban black and brown communities — not as the result of white supremacist group activities but because black and brown thugs victimize residents? Black leaders fear that speaking publicly about this problem is the equivalent of airing dirty laundry.

Orthodox civil rights groups are also largely silent on what may be the most important civil rights issue of our time: the perplexing and shocking racial learning gap between white and Asian students at one end of the learning spectrum and black and Latino students at the other. By the 12th grade, on average, black and Latino students are four years behind their white and Asian counterparts.

Don’t misunderstand. Violence within minority communities is indeed a major problem; but it is not a civil rights problem. The racial learning gap may well be the leading source of racial inequality in the United States today, as not only Hicks and Lehrer argue here but as laid out convincingly by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom in their new book, NO EXCUSES (whose argument Hicks & Lehrer echo but do not cite). It’s a wonderful book (as I wrote here and here), and the Thernstroms are certainly right when they write, as they did on page one, that “the racial gap in academic achievement is an educational crisis,” as well as when they say “racial inequality is America’s great unfinished business, the wound that remains unhealed.” But, as hard as it is to disagree with them about anything, I must demur when they go on to say that “the central civil rights issue of our time” is “our failure to provide first class education for black and Hispanic students….”

That failure, horrendous and fundamental though it is, is not a civil rights issue in my view unless it derives from an intent to deprive minorities because of their race. If the racial gap in academic achievement is a civil rights issue simply by virtue of being a racial gap, then so is the racial gap in income, in symphony attendance, in everything. That indeed is what the civil rights organizations argue, but that argument is based on the assumption that civil rights means actual equality of everything rather than a right to be free from discrimination based on race.

Say What? (2)

  1. ELC January 5, 2004 at 1:43 pm | | Reply

    Instapundit? I go months without reading that blog, but not even a few days without reading yours.

  2. stu January 5, 2004 at 2:14 pm | | Reply

    I heard a very interesting general theory some time ago that attempted to explain why some minority groups (on average) have achieved more than others. The dividing line was political involvement. In the author’s view, those groups which sought political power above all (e.g., Irish, Blacks) had markedly lower average income, education, etc., or took much longer to achieve affluence than those groups who emphasized hard work in some private enterprise (e.g., Japanese, Jews).

    I don’t begin to know if this is valid, but it has the veneer of plausibility. For Blacks it has a particular relevance given the two choices presented to them about a century ago. Carver or DuBois? Personal achievement or political power? The latter route was chosen, and while it has had its triumphs, there is much too much bitterness left (for all of us).

    Since as a general cultural rule private achievement is not highly valued among certain groups (that seems one of the unmistakeable implications of No Excuses), then as a political matter (and a result of the underachieving groups’ disproportionate political power) affirmative action is a wholly “rational” occurrence. It is going to be damn tough to dislodge until the Blacks and Hispanics eschew “leaders” and the lure of political influence in favor of personal achievement. And, of course, the grace of personal achievement will be out of reach for all Blacks and Hispanics as long as affirmative action lifts the unworthy along with the worthy.

    Just thinking about this makes my head hurt. Thanks again for all your efforts to make some sense of what increasingly has the look and sound of insanity.

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