Civil Rights: The All-Purpose Cure (Or Not)

Indefatigable reader Fred Ray has reminded me that I was about to miss two interesting articles that appeared in the Washington Post on Wednesday.

The first, “Report: Black, White Disparities Abound,” by Chaka Ferguson, summarizes a report by the National Urban League that finds “Equality Gaps remain in Jobs, Wealth, Education, Health and Social Justice.” The cited disparities, as ususal, are depressing, but by now it will surprise none of you that I found the following passage almost equally dispiriting:

The report also found that, 50 years after the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, decreed segregated public schools unconstitutional, the performance of black students continues to trail that of their white counterparts.

The 2000 census found that 91.8 percent of white students graduated from high school, compared with 83.7 percent of black students.

“The as-yet unfinished process of implementing Brown has turned out to be nearly as slow as the process of tearing down the Jim Crow system that allowed the educational segregation challenged in Brown,” Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree Jr. said in one of the report’s essays.

Brown, of course, “decreed” that public schools could not be segregated on the basis of race. It did not decree that blacks and whites must graduate at the same rate. Charles Ogletree Jr. is not only a law professor at Harvard but a distinguished law professor at Harvard, but I wonder if he teaches his students that “implementing Brown” requires guaranteeing equal outcomes across the board?

That might be true if all inequalities were the result of racial discrimination, but the other article that I almost missed — Courtland Milloy’s column on “A Challenging Analysis of Black America” — calls on no less an authority than Henry Louis Gates Jr., also famously of Harvard, to challenge that notion.

Gates offered some observations that fell considerably short of profound, such as the assertion that “it is ridiculous to expect 35 years of affirmative action to cure hundreds of years of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.” How true. And : “If America can rebuild Iraq, which I guess remains to be seen, we can rebuild the economy of our inner cities.” Both whether this is true and whether, if true, it is desirable is debatable, but lets ignore these predictable party line throwaways because he also said some unexpectedly sensible things, such as pointing to a profound transformation that must precede any “jobs program” or similar reform: “a behavioral change among black people, which includes a renewed interest in education and less of an interest in the misogyny, homophobia and violence that are the hallmarks of rap and hip-hop culture. ”

“There was good news,” Milloy reports, “such as the quadrupling of the black middle class.”

But Gates was in no mood to celebrate. The percentage of black children in poverty had remained about 40 percent since 1968, and the devaluation of black traditions — such as the quest for literacy — seemed likely to hamper progress for generations to come.

In Chicago, for instance, where Gates did much of his research on poverty, 45 percent of black men ages 20 to 24 are out of school — most without a diploma of any kind — and out of work. Even among high school graduates, he noted, “a huge percentage are functionally illiterate, meaning they can’t read the front page of the local newspaper and pass an exam about it.”

One in five black men in their twenties in the Windy City is in prison, on probation or on parole, and single women head 69 percent of all black households. The average life span for black men in Chicago is 59 years, and during any given week there, only 45 percent of black people 18 and older are gainfully employed.

….

To combat the problems, Gates has called for a new civil rights movement within the black community. For that to succeed, the “talented tenth” — meaning college educated blacks — must address and correct self-defeating behavior, in themselves and others.

“Our leaders are geniuses at jumping on white racism when it manifests itself. And believe me, I don’t want anybody to be confused — when anti-black racism by anybody manifests itself, I’ll be right there pouncing on it, too. But unless we do the second, necessary, act of leadership, which is to critique pathological forms of behavior with any [within?] African American community, our people will be doomed, doomed to perpetuate the class divide….

UPDATE [3/27]

Roger Sweeney reminds me that Milloy actually wrote a trilogy of Gates columns. Here’s a passage from the second that re-inforces one of Gates’s perceptive observations quoted above:

“We were taught that doing well in school was like firing a bullet into the heart of George Wallace and Orval E. Faubus,” said Harvard University scholar Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., 53, referring to the former segregationist governors of Alabama and Arkansas.

But just as victory appeared to be in sight, something went wrong — something that Gates believes too few black leaders are willing to talk about.

“If Wallace and Faubus had been sitting around in 1963, wondering how to stop the [civil rights movement], and one said, ‘We are going to persuade them not to embrace deferred gratification, that education is a white thing, throw in some bling-bling and persuade them that authentic black identity is some kind of thug ghetto anti-education identity,’ the other would say, ‘Oh, man, nobody is that stupid.’ ”

Gates continues to emphasize this theme, and they are to be congratulated for doing so because no doubt they have been criticized by many of their friends and allies for “blaming the victim.” And yet, for all the strength of his insight into how the moral capital of the civil rights movement has been wasted by self-destructive behavior and values in one area, Gates remains curiously blind to something else that “went wrong,” i.e., to the enormous damage done to the civil rights cause by the abandonment — in principle, not just in practice — of the commitment to colorblind equality. Stubbornly, many people simply continued to believe the lesson taught them by the civil rights movement, that it is wrong for anyone to receive a benefit or burden because of race.

Also from the second column:

Gates, a native of Piedmont, W.Va., entered Yale University in 1969 as part of what he calls “the affirmative action generation.” He graduated in 1973 and later earned a doctorate in English from Cambridge University before coming to Harvard.

“For me not to defend affirmative action, as someone who has benefited so much from it, would make me as big a hypocrite as Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas, and I just couldn’t live with myself,” he said.

And from the third:

Henry Louis “Skip” Gates was one of 96 black men and women who entered Yale in 1969. His class included Ben Carson, who achieved renown as the first pediatric neurosurgeon to separate Siamese twins joined at the head. Sheila Jackson, who became Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.), also arrived at Yale that fall.

By contrast, six blacks were admitted to Yale in 1966.

“Did black people all of sudden become smart in three years?” Gates, now a professor at Harvard, asked during a recent talk at the Aspen Institute in Washington. In the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, he said, affirmative action began providing opportunities previously denied to qualified blacks.

The comparison to Clarence Thomas is instructive. To the best of my knowledge Thomas has never denied that he benefited personally from affirmative action, but he still maintains that racial preference is wrong. For this he is considered a “hypocrite.” By contrast, I’d be willing to wager that Gates knows lots of rich people, people who have personally benefited from capitalism, who favor one degree or another of socialism. Indeeed, Gates, a rich person himself (I’ve heard rumors about his Harvard salary which, if true, would make a Wall Street tycoon, or even a college president, blanch), may well favor policies that would redistribute income. He probably regards these rich socialists as altruistic and principled.

It would be quite interesting to know exactly what Yale changed between 1966 and 1969. Did it lower its standards substantially in order to find Gates, Carson, and Lee? I tend to doubt it. I expect that, in the spirit of affirmative action as originally conceived, Yale dedicated itself to beating the bushes to find highly qualified, talented candidates that its older admissions procedures, with their well-worn paths from privileged schools and families to the doors of the Ivy League, had overlooked. If that’s what affirmative action had continued to mean, the great opposition to it never would have built up, for that sort of affirmative action neither needed nor defended racial preference and double standards.

It’s not surprising that Gates may see an attack on affirmative action as an attack on his own worth (a critic might say, on the path to his net worth), but the fact that an autobiography of Skip Gates would would understandably sing the praises of racial preferences is no reason for the rest of us to join the choir.