Stanley Crouch, the iconoclastic writer, must be regarded as quite a grouch by the civil rights establishment, which he is at great pains to distinguish from the civil rights movement.
The movement was a loose confederation of organizations and volunteers that faced fierce opposition, some of it murderous. Its moral and legal victories set the stage for the civil rights establishment, mainly a few well-known organizations and some public personalities.
President Bush, Crouch notes, has no possibility breaking the Democratic stranglehold on the civil rights establishment, but his prospects with the civil rights movement is more promising, in large part because
changing demographics are undercutting the civil rights establishment’s power. People with no history of legalized discrimination and infused with that good old immigrant drive are arriving in this nation. And some of them are black people from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
These new arrivals highlight a problem with one of the main legal remedies people have used to fight the legacy of segregation: affirmative action. This tactic was intended to help the descendants of slaves. But it is so loosely interpreted today that many blacks whose forebears were not American slaves demand and receive a boost from affirmative action.
It’s even looser than that, of course, giving preferences to some Hispanics and all women, regardless of color. Still, even though “the abuses of affirmative action” are both broader and deeper than Crouch acknowledges here, he is right to regard the civil rights establishment’s rigid reliance on it, and on the Democratic party, as creating an opportunity for the Republicans.
