Dispatches: Facing up to America’s ambivalence on race

DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet: Our editor believes we must recognize that America is still a highly segregated society.

By: Hank Kalet
   Race remains the unspeakable topic in our collective cultural closet.
   Sure, we talk about it a lot, generally around the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday or during Black History Month. We offer neat little bromides about equality, offer paeans to diversity, celebrate Dr. King and Fannie Lou Hamer Day — and then place the whole subject neatly back in its box until we do it all over again a year later.
   It’s all so self-congratulatory — and schizophrenic — allowing us to feel good about ourselves, about the progress we’ve made, while brushing aside the difficult issues we still face and the long road we still have to travel before we can truly claim to be a color-blind society.

   This schizophrenia was evident in Monday’s rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court on the race-based admissions policies used by the University of Michigan for its undergraduate and law school programs.
   The court, by a 5-4 vote, ruled that affirmative action was a legitimate public policy tool and upheld the law school’s inclusion of race as one of many deciding factors for admission. "Race-based action to further a compelling government interest does not violate the Equal Protection Clause (of the Constitution) so long as it is narrowly tailored to further that interest," Justice Sand- ra Day O’Connor wrote for the majority.
   At the same time, it voted 6-3 to toss out an undergraduate admissions plan that relied on a point system — minority students, athletes and low-income students each receive 20 points, students from underrepresented Michigan counties receive six points, alumni’s children four points, and so on, with 100 points guaranteeing admission. The court said the point system was too mechanical and resulted in nearly all qualified minority applicants being admitted, while many qualified whites were turned away.
   The "tangle of majority opinions, concurrences and dissents," as the New York Times called them in a Tuesday editorial, perfectly mirrors the ambivalence with which we as a society approach the issue. Even someone as far to the left as I am on most issues have great difficulty parsing the competing and conflicting claims made for and against affirmative action.
   Affirmative action is designed to rectify past wrongs and has been responsible for unlocking doors for blacks, Latinos and women to higher education and jobs that had previously been off limits. It has worked exceedingly well, even if there is a lot more work left to do.
   But affirmative action — because it grants privilege to certain classes of people — would seem to contradict the basic tenets of fairness. It is built on an inherent double standard, one that privileges blacks and other minorities at the expense of whites to redress the wrongs done to blacks by whites in the name of race. This double standard has led — though not as often as affirmative action’s critics would have us believe — to situations in which unqualified candidates are given slots because of their race at the expense of someone who might be more qualified.
   It is this contradiction that makes affirmative action such a difficult topic: Most liberals refuse to acknowledge the double standard because it complicates their own arguments in favor of affirmative action, while most conservatives dismiss the efficacy of affirmative action so as not to muddy their own disingenuous arguments.
   That said, I ultimately come down in favor of affirmative action, but only as a temporary measure and only as part of a larger program designed to level the economic and social playing fields in America.
   We remain a highly segregated society. The vast majority of American blacks live in urban centers (either in cities or in the first ring of older suburbs surround cities) with crumbling infrastructure and shrinking tax revenue. The schools tend to be old, ill equipped and under funded. And the jobs tend to be low-paying and service oriented, with the higher-paying ones being reserved for college graduates or moved to suburban office parks.
   What this means is that students in city schools, like those in Trenton or New Brunswick, cannot get the same level of education as students in districts like South Brunswick, Hopewell or West Windsor-Plainsboro and often garner lower scores on the kinds of tests needed to gain entry to college — limiting their choices.
   Affirmative action is just one cog in a larger machine — which includes more money for schools and revitalization of American cities – that can fix these disparities and help us get to the illusive goal of a color-blind society.
   But we have to start being honest about it.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The
Cranbury Press. He can be reached via e-mail at
href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected].