[NOTE: This post has been cross-posted on National Review Online’s Phi Beta Cons]
[NOTE 2: This post has been UPDATED. See below.]
[NOTE 3: This post has been CORRECTED]
As an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1960s I was privileged to take a small class with then-visiting Sociology professor St. Clair Drake, co-author of the classic Black Metropolis. One day he asked me and a couple of other students to join him at a table in the student union, interrupting something he’d been writing. When I asked what he was writing, he said a draft of a letter he planned to send to the New York Times — about an article that had not yet been written about an event, something to do with Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah (with whom he was a close advisor) that had not yet happened. (I suspect it was this letter.)
As you can see, that event stuck with me, and now I would like to take a page out of Professor Drake’s book and criticize a speech by President Obama that, as I write (Friday night, May 6), I have not read because it won’t be delivered until tomorrow at the Howard University commencement.
In his speech Obama is almost certain to quote all or part of the following passage from another presidential commencement speech at Howard — “To Fulfill These Rights,” by President Lyndon Johnson on June 4, 1965. Under the heading “Freedom Is Not Enough, LBJ famously declared:
But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
That passage is widely cited both as the beginning of and justification for the abandonment of colorblindness and turn toward racial preferences, and I suspect Obama may refer to it in a similar manner.
But take another look at LBJ’s speech. The “equality as a result” he sought is not at all the same thing as the “equality of results” demanded by today’s proponents of “disparate impact” proportionalism. What Johnson meant by “equality,” it is quite clear, is non-discriminatory equality of opportunity.
The evidence? For starters, the very next sentence in Johnson’s speech, after the oft-quoted passage quoted above, states:
For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities–physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness. [Emphasis added]
True, Johnson then says in the following sentence that “equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough,” but in the remainder of the speech he does not specify what more is needed, other than various forms of assistance there is no reason to assume would be conditioned on skin color as opposed to need.
Moreover, three months after his Howard speech, Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, which required “affirmative action” of government contractors. But note how that order defined “affirmative action”:
The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. [Emphasis added]
Whatever LBJ thought at the time, and whatever he might have thought had he lived to see the regime of racial preference Democrats proceeded to inflict upon the nation, there is no reason to treat his Howard speech as calling for the abandonment of the “without regard” principle he affirmed in his Executive Order three months later.
UPDATE
Well, I was wrong. The speech has now been delivered, and there’s not one word in it about LBJ’s Howard commencement address, no doubt the most quoted and influential commencement address every given at Howard. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that Obama didn’t want to share the stage, even for a moment, by mentioning his predecessor who signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and did so much for civil rights … as it was formerly understood.
Several things in the actual speech deserve comment, but I will limit myself here to only two, which share an interesting feature — an extremely tenuously connection to facts as most people understand them.
Here’s an excerpt of Obama on the importance of listening and compromise:
When I was a state senator, I helped pass Illinois’s first racial profiling law, and one of the first laws in the nation requiring the videotaping of confessions in capital cases. And we were successful because, early on, I engaged law enforcement…. So we engaged and we listened, and we kept working until we built consensus.
The point is, you need allies in a democracy….
And democracy requires compromise, even when you are 100 percent right. This is hard to explain sometimes. You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want.
What’s interesting here is not the substance of this paean to compromise and listening but that Obama may actually thinks he conducted his presidency consistent with this advice.
Next, consider the following:
America is a better place today than it was when I graduated from college. (Applause.) Let me repeat: America is by almost every measure better than it was when I graduated from college. It also happens to be better off than when I took office — (laughter) — but that’s a longer story. (Applause)….
I graduated in 1983…. Our nation had gone through years of economic stagnation, the stranglehold of foreign oil, a recession where unemployment nearly scraped 11 percent….
[Now] [t]he overall unemployment rate is 5 percent….
As most observers know, the official unemployment rate has increasingly become a fiction because it does not count the millions of unemployed who are no longer looking for work. Let’s look instead at the much more meaningful labor force participation rate (the percentage of the working age population who have jobs). On June 1, 1983, the month Obama graduated from Columbia, the labor force participation rate was 64.3%. On June 1, 2009, several months after Obama became president, it was 65.7%. In each succeeding June, however, it was lower than it had been the year before:
2010-06-01 64.6
2011-06-01 64.0
2012-06-01 63.8
2013-06-01 63.4
2014-01-01 62.9
2015-06-01 62.6
On June 1, 1983, the working age population was 148,109,844. With a labor force participation rate of 64.3%, that means 52,875,214 people of working age did not have jobs. The exact working age population for 2016 is not available yet, but the latest reported labor force participation, for April 2016, was 62.8%, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in April that there were “109.1 million non-working able-bodied citizens.”
In other words, not only is the labor force participation rate much lower than it was in 1983, but because the working age population is much larger there are over twice as many Americans not working now than then.
What’s interesting here, again, is that Obama may actually think the economy is better off after his seven years in office than it was in 1983 when he graduated.
CORRECTION
Following is a correction, verbatim, from care reader (and former newspaper editorial writer) Linda Seebach:
Two things about the labor force participation rate — first, it is not people “who have jobs” — it’s people who either have jobs or are unemployed. That’s just wrong.
Second, it’s not the “working age population” — that’s wrong too, but the extent to which the decline in lfpr is the result of people of working age leaving the labor force is only part of the story.
The labor force participation rate, as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is “the percentage of the population [16 years and older] that is either employed or unemployed (that is, either working or actively seeking work).”
Lots of people 65 and older are in the labor force, but the percentage of people over 16 who are 65 or older is growing because more Boomers are reaching that age every year then are just turning 16.
I’m sure your arithmetic is correct, you’re just applying it inconsistently to different categories.
Nice Article. What I found most disturbing about the speech was the reference to “luck” in the process of becoming a good, productive citizen/person (and college graduate). It is another form of the non-organic nature versus nurture argument that is so often applied to social problems. This is cynical proposition (when used outside of biology), that is intended to push for governmental “leveling” of the nature factor, in lieu of action on the nurture factor, which has been arrogantly zeroed out (I remember one of the adolescent writers at The Nation stating that “anyone who mentions behavior is a racist). Therefore, as you suggest, he could not reference the centrality of opportunity implied in the previous speech.