So, How Should We Think About Civil Rights?

Although unplanned, this post is a continuation of the one immediately below, How Not To Think About Civil Rights. Go read that one first.

In concluding that post I argued that racial gaps are not necessarily a civil rights issue. They may be more serious or more threatening than civil rights issues, but seriousness or threat is not a defining element that makes something a civil rights issue.

To a certain degree this issue is purely semantic. If what we mean by civil rights is racial equality — not equal treatment or equal opportunity but actual equality — then of course any differences among the races and ethnicities, at least any that put minorities at a disadvantage, are civil rights issues. Eventually, however, regarding all efforts to close some of these gaps as civil rights remedies results in an unacceptable stretch. It’s rather like looking for something where the light’s good rather than where you lost it.

These further thoughts are prompted by an article that appeared today in the Milwaukee Journal Citizen on Milwaukee and Wisconsin 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education. (Thanks to Howard Bashman)

A good argument can be made that Brown reflects — it certainly did not resolve — the persistent, pervasive question of what we mean by civil rights. Do we mean an absence of discrimination based on race or the presence of either integration or actual equality? The article, too, in presenting a host of disturbing statistics on the dimension of the racial achievement gap in Milwaukee and Wisconsin — “among the largest in the United States” — often unintentionally reveals this central ambiguity.

For example, the article states:

In Milwaukee, an epic effort to bring the city an open housing law in the late 1960s, including marches for 200 consecutive days, eventually brought such a law. But did it bring open housing if you define it as a metropolitan housing pattern that is colorblind?

But what does this mean? That the ban on discrimination was not enforced, or that racially distinctive neighborhoods persisted even though they were not produced by discrimination? If the latter, should social engineers, using all the tools that “diversity” could put at their disposal, set about to promote a more appealing racial mix in neighborhoods across the city? If “diversity” is as compelling as its advocates claim, would it not be irresponsible not to?

This same ambiguity — in Brown and in our own current thought — is nicely captured by the following quote and comment. First the article quotes Brown:

Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does.

And then it comments:

The words come again from 1954 and the Brown decision, which stated clearly the belief that integration was itself an important step toward raising the quality of education of black children.

But those words from Brown are deeply ambiguous. They certainly can be read to require integration, as busing advocates and others have maintained. But they can also be read to assert that the moral and constitutional offense lies not in the mere fact of racially separate schools but in the state’s assigning students to schools on the basis of race. “Segregation,” on this reading, is not a descriptive term for racially identifiable schools but rather a term for the result of policies that discriminate on the basis of race.

If we don’t agree on what we’re talking about when we talk about civil rights, we can hardly agree on policies to protect or implement them.