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June
5, 2002 8:45 a.m.
Color
Lines
A
new book features the best conservative thinking on race relations.
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t is a simple fact of American life that the Left is obsessed with race
and can't stop talking about it, but only on the Right are interesting
things actually said. Thursday's formal release of Beyond
the Color Line, a collection of original papers published jointly
by the Hoover Institution and the Manhattan Institute, certainly drives
the point home.
Four years ago, a
group of conservatives grew frustrated with Bill Clinton's Race Advisory
Board for its willful neglect of their views. Headed by John Hope Franklin,
the Clinton panel issued a tendentious report complaining about America's
"system of racial hierarchy" and the "significant barriers
to opportunity" facing non-whites. The report made no attempt to
address the obvious economic, political, and social advances of minority
groups. Nor did it try to grapple with the conservative critique of racial
preferences. Instead, it sought merely to update the bleak outlook of
LBJ's Kerner Commission for the 1990s.
So the conservatives
convened their own commission, called the Citizens' Initiative on Race
and Ethnicity. Members included Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice;
Elaine Chao, who is now secretary of labor; Linda Chavez of the Center
for Equal Opportunity; Ward Connerly, the man who made California's Proposition
209 possible; Gerald Reynolds, who has since become head of the Department
of Education's civil-rights office; and Shelby Steele, author of The Content
of Our Character. They have now produced this volume, edited by the wife-and-husband
team of Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, and it may be the most fair-minded
assessment of American race relations currently available.
The book's 25 chapters
cover a wide range of issues and contain a diversity of views: Steele
on stigma; William Clark on residential segregation; James Q. Wilson on
crime; Sally Satel on health and medical care; Thomas Sowell on discrimination
and economics; Eugene Volokh on racial and ethnic classifications in the
law; and Nelson Lund on antidiscrimination law.
What separates the
Left and Right on these subject, at bottom, is how much weight each side
gives to the effects of white racism. In an introduction to Beyond
the Color Line, the Thernstroms acknowledge that white racism "has
not entirely disappeared." But whatever gaps in racial equality remain
have more to do with dysfunctional underclass culture and lousy urban
schools than with The Man always trying to keep people down. The contributors
to Beyond the Color Line do what so many liberals refuse: They
credit the amazing progress the United States has made on race relations
in just a generation.
"In the heyday
of the civil-rights movement," say the Thernstroms, "those who
fought for racial equality were optimists." They had good reason
for this optimism, too, considering all the gains that minorities have
made since then. Yet there seems to be an inverse relationship between
the actual state of things and the mood of civil-rights activists: "Pessimism
is strikingly pervasive in civil-rights circles today."
Back in the 1960s,
conservatives failed to confront the reality of racial oppression; today,
liberals fail to recognize the reality of racial progress. Here's another
way of looking at it: On one side of the political spectrum, we see a
positive evolution toward an improved understanding of American unity,
and on the other, a full-on retreat into headstrong blindness.
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