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Affirmative ActionThe Affirmative Action Debate INTRODUCTION Women, like African-Americans and other racial minorities, were treated as less than full citizens throughout much of American history, though to a different degree. As Justice William J. Brennan observed, neither slaves nor women could hold office, serve on juries, or bring suit in their own names, and married women traditionally were denied the legal capacity to hold or convey property or to serve as legal guardians of their own children. Over the past three decades, the United States has struggled valiantly to overcome that sordid legacy as it moves toward what Manning Marable, in the opening selection in this book, calls "the ultimate elimination of race and gender inequality, the uprooting of prejudice and discrimination, and the realization of a truly democratic nation." Out of that struggle came the policy of affirmative action. Although the term "affirmative action" is relatively new, the concept is not. The Civil Rights Commission defines the contemporary term as encompassing any measure, beyond simple termination of a discriminatory practice, which permits the consideration of race, national origin, sex, or disability, along with other criteria, and which is adopted to provide opportunities to a class of qualified individuals who have either historically or actually been denied those opportunities, and to prevent the recurrence of discrimination in the future. But well over a century ago, at the beginning of the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War, the Freedman's Bureau was established to assist newly freed slaves, providing for AfricanAmericans to receive clothing, land, and education. More recently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to avert a march on Washington planned by A. Philip Randolph, president of the powerful Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, signed an executive order in 1941 forbidding federal contractors from discriminating. However, the pernicious problem of racism still existed two decades later in 1961 when
John F. Kennedy, observing that the nation's top defense contractors employed few blacks,
signed Executive Order 10925. It invoked the term "affirmative action" for the
first time and established the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. President Lyndon
B. Johnson followed up in 1965 with Executive Order 11246, which required federal
contractors to take affirmative action to provide equal opportunity without regard to a
person's race, religion, or national origin. Three years later, women were added to the
protected groups. In 1969, under President Richard M. Nixon, "goals and
timetables" were added as yet another component of affirmative action. Now, a quarter of a century later, affirmative action is more controversial than ever. It has been credited by supporters with expanding the black middle class and lowering barriers to equal opportunity, while its critics suggest that this tool intended to eliminate discrimination is itself discriminatory. The question has developed into a major wedge issue in the 1996 presidential election. Affirmative action faces the prospect of being sharply curtailed, if not eliminated, by Congress and by voters in California, our largest state. This collection of twenty-nine essays, most of them published here for the first time, is not likely to end this emotionladen debate. Nor would I want it to do so. Rather, my goal from the outset has been to assemble some of the sharpest minds in the country, provide a forum for them to express their personal views on affirmative action, and hope that in the process we would expand our knowledge of the issue and develop a deeper tolerance for views with which we fervently disagree. CHAPTER ONE Affirmative action and other race-conscious remedies were created to erase the differences in rights and opportunities defined by that color line. In this chapter, four essays trace how affirmative action has evolved in the twentieth century. While all these authors favor affirmative action, their essays raise important questions: What alternatives to affirmative action did our country's political leaders see? Mat were their aims? How much can rules that prohibit discrimination accomplish? Do affirmative action programs go far enough? In context, we see that the debate over affirmative action is not a simple yes or no issue. First, Manning Marable, director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University and author of Beyond Black and White: Transforming AfricanAmerican Politics (1995), contrasts the efforts to prohibit discrimination in the 1940s and the triumphs of the civil rights era with the current political atmosphere. He also places affirmative action in the context of a long debate within the African-American community over the value of integration and inclusion. More than sixty years after Du Bois wrote about the color line, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a southerner, observed that it remained clearly visible: "In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope." Reprinted here is Johnson's commencement address at Howard University in 1965, which set both the tone and the rationale for affirmative action in the 1960s. The Johnson administration made affirmative action national policy to help open the doors of hope for racial and ethnic minorities (later expanded to include women and other disadvantaged groups). Appointed in 1969 as the nation's first assistant secretary of labor for employment standards, Arthur A. Fletcher has often been referred to as "the Father of Affirmative Action." He is the author of the Philadelphia Plan to combat racism in the construction industry. His essay is a behind-the-scenes account of the earliest efforts to institutionalize affirmative action. Despite the best intentions, however, the policy quickly became a political orphan, never clearly codified in federal statutes and owing its shaky existence to the generosity of the executive branch. The chapter concludes with an essay by Dr. Cornel West, whom Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of
Harvard University, calls "the preeminent African-American intellectual of our
generation." Looking at affirmative action in the context of race relations in the
United States, he is surprised that the furor over it is so intense. Affirmative action,
he says, is a "weak response" to the "legacy of white supremacy." It
is interesting to consider what other corrective measures our society might have tried.
Instead of pleasant-sounding but simplistic defenses of "affirmative action as it is," we need to do some hard thinking about the reasons why several significant constituencies that have greatly benefited from affirmative action have done relatively little to defend it. We need to recognize the critical theoretical and strategic differences that separate liberals and progressives on how to achieve a nonracist society. And we urgently need to reframe the context of the political debate, taking the initiative away from the Right. The triumph of "Newtonian Republicanism" is not a temporary aberration: it is the culmination of a thirty-year ideological and political war against the logic of the reforms of the 1960s. Advocates of affirmative action, civil rights, and other policies reflecting left-of-center political values must recognize how and why the context for progressive reform has fundamentally changed. The first difficulty in developing a more effective progressive model for affirmative action goes back to the concept's complex definition, history, and political evolution. "Affirmative action" per se was never a law, or even a coherently developed set of governmental policies designed to attack institutional racism and societal discrimination. It was instead a series of presidential executive orders, civil rights laws, and governmental programs regarding the awarding of federal contracts and licenses, as well as the enforcement of fair employment practices, with the goal of uprooting the practices of bigotry. At its origins, it was designed to provide some degree of compensatory justice to the victims of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and institutional racism. This was at the heart of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which stated that "all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens. . . ." The fundamental idea of taking the proactive steps necessary to dismantle prejudice has been around for more than a century. During the Great Depression, the role of the federal government in protecting the equal rights of black Americans was expanded again through the direct militancy and agitation of black people. In 1941, socialist and trade union leader A. Philip Randolph mobilized thousands of black workers to participate in the "Negro March on Washington Movement," calling upon the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to carry out a series of reforms favorable to civil rights. To halt this mobilization, Roosevelt agreed to sign Executive Order 8802, which outlawed segregationist hiring policies by defense-related industries that held federal contracts. This executive order not only greatly increased the number of African-Americans who were employed in wartime industries, but expanded the political idea that government could not take a passive role in the dismantling of institutional racism. This position was reaffirmed in 1953 by President Harry S. Truman's Committee on
Government Contract Compliance, which urged the Bureau of Employment Security"to act
positively and affirmatively to implement the policy of nondiscrimination in its functions
of placement counseling, occupational analysis and industrial services, labor market
information, and community participation in employment services." Thus, despite the
fact that the actual phrase "affirmative action" was not used by a chief
executive until President John F. Kennedy's Executive Order 10925 in 1961, the fundamental
idea of taking the proactive steps necessary to dismantle prejudice has been around for
more than a century. PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCES AMONG CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS The alternative to the Du Boisian position was expressed by integrationist leaders and intellectuals like Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Baynard Rustin, and Kenneth B. Clark. They too fought to destroy Jim Crow, but their cultural philosophy for the Negro rested on inclusion rather than pluralism. They deeply believed that the long-term existence of separate, allblack institutions was counterproductive to the goal of a "color-blind" society, in which racial categories would become socially insignificant or even irrelevant to the relations of power. Rustin, for instance, personally looked forward to the day when Harlem would cease to exist as a segregated, identifiably black neighborhood. Blacks should be assimilated or culturally incorporated into the mainstream. My central criticism of the desegregationist strategy of the inclusionists is that they consistently confused "culture" with "race," underestimating the importance of fostering black cultural identity as an essential component of the critique of white supremacy. The existence of separate black institutions or a self-defined, all-black community was not necessarily an impediment to interracial cooperation and multicultural dialogue. Despite the differences between Du Boisian progressives and inclusionist liberals, both desegregationist positions from the 1930s onward were expressed by the organizations and leadership of the civil rights movement. These divisions were usually obscured by a common language of reform and a common social vision that embraced color blindness as an ultimate goal. For example, both positions are reflected in the main thrust of the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which declared that workplace discrimination should be outlawed on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." However, the inclusionist orientation of Wilkins, Rustin, and company is also apparent in the act's assertion that it should not be interpreted as requiring employers "to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group." Five years later, after Richard M. Nixon's narrow victory for the presidency, it was the Republicans' turn to interpret and implement civil rights policy. The strategy of Nixon had a profound impact on the political culture of the United States, which continues to have direct consequences within the debates about affirmative action today. Through the Counterintelligence Program of the FBI, the Nixon administration vigorously suppressed the radical wing of the black movement. Second, it appealed to the racial anxieties and grievances of George Wallace voters, recruiting segregationists like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond into the ranks of the Republican Party. On affirmative action and issues of equal opportunity, however, Nixon's goal was to utilize a liberal reform for conservative objectives: the expansion of the African-American middle class, which might benefit the Republican Party. Under Nixon in 1969, the federal government authorized what became known as the Philadelphia Plan, a program requiring federal contractors to set specific goals for minority hiring. As a result, the portion of racial minorities in the construction industry increased from 1% to 12%. The Nixon administration supported provisions for minority set-asides to promote black and Hispanic entrepreneurship, and it placed Federal Reserve funds in black-owned banks. Nixon himself publicly praised the concept of "Black Power," carefully interpreting it as "black capitalism." It was under the moderate-conservative aegis of the Nixon and Ford administrations of
1969-77 that the set of policies which we identify with "affirmative action" was
implemented nationally in both the public and the private sectors. Even after the 1978
Bakke decision, in which the Supreme Court overturned the admissions policy of the
University of California at Davis which had set aside sixteen out of one hundred medical
school openings for racial minorities, the political impetus for racial reform was not
destroyed. What did occur, even before the triumph of reaction under Reagan in the early
1980s, was that political conservatives deliberately usurped the "colorblind"
discourse of many liberals from the desegregation movement. As conservatives retreated from the Nixonian strategy of utilizing affirmative action tools to achieve conservative political goals, they began to appeal to the latent racist sentiments within the white population. They cultivated the racist mythology that affirmative action was nothing less than a rigid system of inflexible quotas which rewarded the incompetent and the unqualified, who happened to be nonwhite, at the expense of hardworking, taxpaying Americans, who happened to be white. White conservatives were able to define "merit" in a manner that would reinforce white male privilege, but in an inverted language that would make the real victims of discrimination appear to be the racists. It was, in retrospect, a brilliant political maneuver. And the liberals were at a loss in fighting back effectively precisely because they lacked a consensus internally about the means and goals for achieving genuine equality. Traditional liberals like Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, who favored an inclusionist, colorblind ideology of reform, often ended up inside the camp of racial reactionaries, who cynically learned to manipulate the discourse of fairness. SUPPORT FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AT DIFFERENT LEVELS According to a USA Today/ CNN/Gallup poll ( March 1719, 1995), when asked, "Do you favor or oppose affirmative action programs?" 53% of whites polled expressed support, compared to only 36% opposed. Not surprisingly, AfricanAmericans expressed much stronger support, with 72% in favor of affirmative action programs and only 21% against. Despite widespread rhetoric that the vast majority of white males have supposedly lost jobs and opportunities due to affirmative action policies, the poll indicated that only 15% of all white males believe that "they've lost a job because of affirmative action policies." However, there is severe erosion of white support for affirmative action when one focuses more narrowly on specific steps or remedies for addressing discrimination. For example, the USA Today/ CNN/Gallup poll indicates that only 30% of whites favor the establishment of gender and racial "quotas" in businesses, with 68% opposed. In contrast, two-thirds of all African-Americans expressed support for quotas in business employment, with only 30% opposed. When asked whether quotas should be created "that require schools to admit a certain number of minorities and women," 61% of the whites were opposed, with 35% in favor. Nearly two-thirds of all whites would also reject policies that "require private businesses to set up specific goals and timetables for hiring women and minorities if there were not government programs that included hiring quotas," whereas two-thirds of all African-Americans strongly favor affirmative action programs with goals and timetables for private businesses. On issues of implementing government-supported initiatives for social equality, most black and white Americans still live in two distinct racial universes. It is not surprising that "angry white men" form the core of those who are
against affirmative action. What is striking, however, is the general orientation of white
women on this issue. White women have been overwhelmingly the primary beneficiaries of
affirmative action: millions have gained access to educational and employment
opportunities through the implementation and enforcement of such policies. But most of
them clearly do not share the political perspectives of AfricanAmericans and Hispanics on
this issue, nor do they perceive their own principal interests to be at risk if
affirmative action programs are abandoned by the federal government or outlawed by the
courts. In the same USA Today/ CNN/Gallup poll, only 8% of all white women stated that
their "colleagues at work or school privately questioned" their qualifications
because of affirmative action, compared to 19% of black women and 28% of black men. Less
than one in five white women polled defined workplace discrimination as a "major
problem," compared to 41% of blacks and 38% of Latinos. Forty percent of the white
women polled described job discrimination as "not being a problem" at all. These
survey results may help to explain why middle class-oriented, liberal feminist leaders and
constituencies have been less vocal than African-Americans in the mobilization to defend
affirmative action. A quarter-century of affirmative action programs, goals, and timetables has been clearly effective in transforming the status of white women in the labor force. It is certainly true that white men still dominate the upper ranks of senior management: while constituting 47% of the nation's total workforce, they make up 95% of all senior managerial positions at the rank of vice president or above. However, women of all races now constitute about 40% of the total workforce overall. As of the 1990 census, white women held nearly 40% of all middle management positions. While their median incomes lag behind those of white men, over the past twenty years white women have gained far greater ground in terms of real earnings than black or Hispanic men in the labor force. Black professional women have also gained ground in recent decades, but blacks overall still remain significantly behind white men in median incomes at all levels. In this context, civil rights advocates and traditional defenders of affirmative action must ask themselves whether the majority of white American women actually perceive their material interests to be tied to the outcome of the battle for income equity and affirmative action that most blacks and Latinos, women and men alike, continue to fight. We should also recognize that although all people of color suffer in varying degrees from the stigma of racism and economic disadvantage within American society, they do not have the same material interests or identify themselves with the same politics as the vast majority of African-Americans. For example, here are mean on-the-job earnings, according to the 1990 census: All American adults $15,105 None of these statistics negate the reality of racial domination and discrimination in terms of social relations, access to employment opportunities, or job advancement. But they do tell us part of the reason why no broad coalition of people of color has coalesced behind the political demand for affirmative action. Various groups interpret their interests narrowly and in divergent ways, looking out primarily for themselves rather than addressing the structural inequalities within the fabric of American society as a whole. A DU BOISIAN STRATEGY TOWARD AFFIRMATIVE ACTION Affirmative action was largely responsible for a significant increase in the size of the black middle class; it opened many professional and managerial positions to blacks, Latinos, and women for the first time. But in many other respects, affirmative action can and should be criticized from the Left, not because it was too liberal in its pursuit and implementation of measures to achieve equality, but because it was too conservative. It sought to increase representative numbers of minorities and women within the existing structure and arrangements of power, rather than challenging or redefining the institutions of authority and privilege. As implemented under a series of presidential administrations, liberal and conservative alike, affirmative action was always more concerned with advancing remedies for unequal racial outcomes than with uprooting racism as a system of white power. Rethinking progressive and liberal strategies on affirmative action would require sympathetic whites to acknowledge that much of the anti-affirmative action rhetoric is really a retreat from a meaningful engagement on issues of race, and that the vast majority of Americans who have benefited materially from affirmative action have not been black at all. A Du Boisian strategy toward affirmative action would argue that despite the death of legal segregation a generation ago, we have not yet reached the point where a color-blind society is possible, especially in terms of the actual organization and structure of white power and privilege. Institutional racism is real, and the central focus of affirmative action must deal with the continuing burden of racial inequality and discrimination in American life. There are many ways to measure the powerful reality of contemporary racism. For example, a 1994 study of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management found that African-American federal employees are more than twice as likely to be dismissed as their white counterparts. Blacks are especially likely to be fired at much higher rates than whites in jobs where they constitute a significant share of the labor force: for example, black clerk-typists are 4.7 times more likely to be dismissed than whites, and black custodians 4.1 times more likely to be fired. Discrimination is also rampant in capital markets. Banks continue policies of "redlining," denying loans in neighborhoods that are largely black and Hispanic. In New York City in 1992, for instance, blacks were turned down for mortgage applications by banks, savings and loans, and other financial institutions about twice as often as whites. And even after years of affirmative action programs, blacks and Latinos remain grossly underrepresented in a wide number of professions. As Jesse Jackson observed in a speech before the National Press Club, while native-born
white males make up only 41% of the U.S. population, they are 80% of all tenured
professors, 92% of the Forbes 400 chief executive officers, and 97% of all school
superintendents. If affirmative action should be criticized, it might be on the grounds that it didn't go far enough in transforming the actual power relations between black and white within our society. More evidence for this is addressed by the sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro in Black Wealth/White Wealth (1995). The authors point out that "the typical black family has eleven cents of wealth for every dollar owned by the typical white family." Even middle-class African-Americans, people who often benefited from affirmative action, are significantly poorer than whites who earn identical incomes. If housing and vehicles owned are included in the definition of "net wealth," the median middle-class African-American family has only $8,300 in total assets, as against $56,000 for the comparable white family. Why are blacks at all income levels much poorer than whites in terms of wealth? African-American families not only inherit much less wealth; they are hit daily by institutional inequality and discrimination. For years, they were denied life insurance policies by white firms. They are still denied home mortgages at twice the rate of similarly qualified white applicants. African-Americans have been less likely to receive government-backed home loans. Given the statistical profile of racial inequality, liberals must reject the temptation to move away from "race-conscious remedies" to "race-neutral" reforms defined by income or class criteria. Affirmative action has always had a distinct and separate function from antipoverty programs. Income and social class inequality affect millions of whites, Asian-Americans, Latinos, and blacks alike, and programs that expand employment, educational access, and social service benefits based on economic criteria alone are absolutely essential. But the impetus for racism is not narrowly economic in origin. Racial prejudice is still a destructive force in the lives of upper middle-class, college-educated African-Americans as well as poor blacks, and programs designed to address the discrimination they feel and experience collectively every day must be grounded in the context of race. However, affirmative action is legitimately related to class questions, but in a different way. A truly integrated workplace, where people of divergent racial backgrounds, languages, and cultural identities learn to interact and respect each other, is an essential precondition for building a broadly pluralistic movement for radical democracy. The expanded implementation of affirmative action, despite its liberal limitations, would assist in creating the social conditions essential for pluralistic coalitions to promote full employment and more progressive social policies. What is required among progressives is not a reflexive, uncritical defense of affirmative action, but a recognition of its contradictory evolution and conceptual limitations as well as its benefits and strengths. We need a thoughtful and innovative approach in challenging discrimination which, like that of Du Bois, reaffirms the centrality of the struggle against racism within the development of affirmative action measures. We must build on the American majority's continued support for affirmative action, linking the general public's commitment to social fairness with creative measures that actually target the real patterns and processes of discrimination that millions of Utinos and blacks experience every day. And we must not be pressured into a false debate to choose between race and class in the development and framing of public policies addressing discrimination. Moving toward the long-term goal of a colorblind society, the deconstruction of racism, does not mean that we become neutral about the continuing significance of race in American life. As the national debate concerning the possible elimination of affirmative action comes to define the 1996 presidential campaign, black and progressive Americans must reevaluate their strategies for reform. In recent years we have tended to rely on elections, the legislative process, and the courts to achieve racial equality. We should remember how the struggle to dismantle Jim Crow segregation was won. We engaged in economic boycotts, civil disobedience, teach-ins, freedom schools, and freedom rides; we formed community-based coalitions and united fronts. There's a direct relationship between our ability to mobilize people in communities to protest and the pressure we can exert on elected officials to protect and enforce civil rights. Voting is absolutely essential, but it isn't enough. We must channel the profound
discontent, the alienation and anger that currently exist in the black community toward
constructive, progressive forms of political intervention and resistance. As we fight for
affirmative action, let us understand that we are fighting for a larger ideal: the
ultimate elimination of race and gender inequality, the uprooting of prejudice and
discrimination, and the realization of a truly democratic nation. Our earth is the home of revolution. In every corner of every continent men charged with hope contend with ancient ways in the pursuit of justice. They reach for the newest of weapons to realize the oldest of dreams; that each may walk in freedom and pride, stretching his talents, enjoying the fruits of the earth. Our enemies may occasionally seize the day of change. But it is the banner of our revolution they take. And our own future is linked to this process of swift and turbulent change in many lands in the world. But nothing in any country touches us more profoundly, nothing is more freighted with meaning for our own destiny, than the revolution of the Negro American. In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope. In our time change has come to this nation too. The American Negro, acting with
impressive restraint, has peacefully protested and marched, entered the courtrooms and the
seats of government, demanding a justice that has long been denied. The voice of the Negro
was a call to action. But it is a tribute to America that, once aroused, the courts and
the Congress, the President and most of the people, have been the allies of progress. As majority leader of the United States Senate, I helped to guide two of these bills through the Senate. As your President, I was proud to sign the third. And now very soon we will have the fourth -- a new law guaranteeing every American the right to vote. No act of my entire administration will give me greater satisfaction than the day when my signature makes this bill too the law of this land. The Voting Rights Bill will be the latest, and among the most important, in a long series of victories. But this victory -as Winston Churchill said of another triumph for freedom -"is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." That beginning is freedom. And the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share fully and equally in American society -- to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others. 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, 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 to just open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity -- not just legal equity but human ability -- not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result. For the task is to give twenty 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. To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough. Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family you live with, and the neighborhood you live in, by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the infant, the child, and the man. We seek not just freedom but opportunity -- This graduating class of Howard University is witness to the indomitable determination
of the Negro American to win his way in American life. The number of Negroes in schools of higher learning has almost doubled in fifteen years. The number of nonwhite professional workers has more than doubled in ten years. The median income of Negro college women exceeds that of white college women. And there are also the enormous accomplishments of distinguished individual Negroes -- many of them graduates of this institution, and one of them the first lady ambassador in the history of the United States. These are proud and impressive achievements. But they tell only the story of a growing middle class minority, steadily narrowing the gap between them and their white counterparts. But for the great majority of Negro Americans -- the poor, the unemployed, the
uprooted, and the dispossessed -- there is a much grimmer story. They still are another
nation. Despite the court orders and the laws, despite the legislative victories and the
speeches, for them the walls are rising and the gulf is widening.Here are some of the
facts of this American failure. Thirty-five years ago the rate of unemployment for Negroes
and whites was about the same. Today the Negro rate is twice as high. Moreover, the isolation of Negro from white communities is increasing, rather than decreasing, as Negroes crowd into the central cities and become a city within a city. Of course Negro Americans as well as white Americans have shared in our rising national abundance. But the harsh fact of the matter is that in the battle for true equality too many are losing ground every day. We are not completely sure why this is. The causes are complex and subtle. But we do know the two broad basic reasons. And we do know that we have to act. First, Negroes are trapped -- as many whites are trapped -- in inherited, gateless poverty. They lack training and skills. They are shut in slums, without decent medical care. Private and public poverty combine to cripple their capacities. We are trying to attack these evils through our poverty program, through our education program, through our medical care and our other health programs, and a dozen more of the Great Society programs that are aimed at the root causes of this poverty. We will increase, and accelerate, and broaden this attack in years to come until this most enduring of foes finally yields to our unyielding will. But there is a second cause -- much more difficult to explain, more deeply grounded, more desperate in its force. It is the devastating heritage of long years of slavery; and of oppression, hatred, and injustice. For Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences -deep, corrosive, obstinate differences -- radiating painful roots into the community, the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced and dealt with and overcome, if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin. Nor can we find a complete answer in the experience of other American minorities. They made a valiant and a largely successful effort to emerge from poverty and prejudice. The Negro, like these others, will have to rely mostly on his own efforts. But he just can not do it alone. For they did not have the heritage of centuries to overcome. They did not have the cultural tradition which had been twisted and battered by endless years of hatred and hopelessness. Nor were they excluded because of race or color -- a feeling whose dark intensity is matched by no other prejudice in society. Nor can these differences be understood as isolated infirmities. They are a seamless web. They cause each other. They result from each other. They reinforce each other. Much of the Negro community is buried under a blanket of history and circumstance. It is not a lasting solution to lift just one corner of that blanket. We must stand on all sides and raise the entire cover if we are to liberate our fellow citizens. One of the differences is the increased concentration of Negroes in the cities. More than 73% of all Negroes live in urban areas compared with less than 70% of the whites. Most of the Negroes live in slums. Most of them live together -- a separated people. Men are shaped by their world. When it is a world of decay, ringed by an invisible wall -- when escape is arduous and uncertain, and the saving pressures of a more hopeful society are unknown -- it can cripple the youth and desolate the man. There is also the burden that a dark skin can add to the search for a productive place in society. Unemployment strikes most swiftly and broadly at the Negro. This burden erodes hope. Blighted hope breeds despair. Despair brings indifference to the learning which offers a way out. And despair, coupled with indifference, is often the source of destructive rebellion against the fabric of society. There is also lacerating hurt of early collision with white hatred or prejudice, distaste, or condescension. Other groups have felt similar intolerance. But success and achievement could wipe it away. They do not change the color of a man's skin. I have seen this uncomprehending pain in the eyes of little Mexican-American school children that I taught many years ago. It can be overcome. But for many, the wounds are always open. Perhaps most important -- its influence radiating to every part of life -- is the
breakdown of the Negro family structure. For this, most of all, white America must accept
responsibility. This, too, is not pleasant to look upon. But it must be faced by those whose serious intent is to improve the life of all Americans. Only a minority -- less than half -- of all Negro children reach the age of eighteen having lived all their lives with both of their parents. At this moment little less than two-thirds are living with both of their parents. Probably a majority of all Negro children receive federally aided public assistance sometime during their childhood. The family is the cornerstone of our society. More than any other force it shapes the attitudes, the hopes, the ambitions, and the values of the child. When the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale the community itself is crippled. So unless we work to strengthen the family, to create conditions under which most
parents will stay together -- all the rest: schools and playgrounds, public assistance and
private concern, will never be enough to cut completely the circle of despair and
deprivation.
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