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December 21, 2002, 12:45 p.m. The GOP’s Race Problem… …and ours. By William J. Bennett

s a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Texas in 1967, my peers and I were looking for teaching posts. Most of my colleagues were looking to teach at quiet and civil liberal-arts institutions like Oberlin. My dissertation adviser, John Silber, told me, "Oberlin is not for you Bennett — I have a place that will really test your mettle. I think you should go to the University of Southern Mississippi." Never one to turn down a challenge, off to Hattiesburg I went.

I was from Brooklyn and I was not prepared for what I saw in Hattiesburg. I arrived three years after the famous murders of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi, and saw a society still steeped in segregation and racism. Martin Luther King spoke in Hattiesburg while I was there and I attended his speech and wrote a few columns justifying his principles — just as I had taught in my classes his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. There may be no better exegesis on just and unjust laws than is found in that Letter. I thought so then, and I think so now. King set the standard, and still does. My teaching contract was not renewed the following year.

Driving back to Texas, I was being "tailed" by another car and I pulled over to the side of the road to confront the driver. He said, "With your license plates and all that crap in your car, I thought you were a n****r." We nearly came to blows. The next year, driving up to Cambridge, Massachusetts to begin law school, I was driven to the side of the road by a group of college students. Confronting them, one said, "With those Texas license plates, we thought you were some kind of racist coming up here to organize against us, or worse." I realized there were two kinds of prejudice: Both kinds are repugnant, both kinds make snap judgments based on almost anything but the "content of character." In the worst cases, those judgments are based on race, sometimes, however, they are based on geography, sometimes any other kind of irrelevant condition. The common denominator is prejudice, and small-mindedness.

In a lesser-known portion of King's Letter, he writes, "Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up, but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured." We see a boil today that prevents our moving forward because we refuse to call it by its proper name: racism. We saw it in Trent Lott's comments lamenting Strom Thurmond's defeat for president in 1948 (even though Lott is not a racist) and we see it in race-based admissions programs at places like the University of Michigan where there are differing standards of admission for white and black applicants (even though admissions officers are not racists).

Having been a lifelong Democrat until my forties, I finally became a Republican in 1986. I became a Republican because I thought that party had it right on issues of freedom and the defense of our nation's founding principles. I thought the Democratic party of my earlier life had lost its way. Indeed, the Republican party was founded, like our nation, on moral principles dedicated to freedom and equality, condemning slavery, electing as its country's president Abraham Lincoln. And the Democratic party had a legacy opposed to Lincoln's.

President Eisenhower was the first president to send federal troops to the South since Ulysses S. Grant. Eisenhower deployed the 101st Airborne in order to integrate a school in Little Rock, a school the Democratic governor was blocking black students from attending. During the civil-rights battles of the 1960s, again, it was the Republican party in the Senate that gave LBJ his landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act — Republican senators like Everett Dirksen pushed the bill through the Senate; Democrats like Robert Byrd, Sam Ervin, and Albert Gore Sr. opposed that bill and, in fact, only four Republican senators opposed it while 18 other Democrats joined the Byrd, Ervin, Gore "no" vote. It was too bad that Barry Goldwater, one of the Republicans who opposed the bill, became the nominee of the Republican party in 1964; his opposition to the Act was misunderstood: He opposed it for libertarian reasons, not supporting the idea that the government should be able to tell businesses what to do (Goldwater's credentials on civil rights were already established as he had desegregated Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, years before). The Byrd, Ervin, and Gore sentiments were not so noble.

Nevertheless, with Goldwater's candidacy, the GOP began to lose its credibility with the black community, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly. But the Republican legacy on race has more positive than negative to offer, which expands the controversy surrounding Trent Lott into a new boil that needs to be lanced. Thurmond was wrong in 1948, morally, and, now, legally. No celebration of yesterday's segregation can be tolerated; it was a contradiction of our nation's founding principles, and an ugly one.

Most Republicans, like most Democrats, believed in Martin Luther King's colorblind society where people would be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. They still do. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan had it right in his dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson some two generations before King: "[I]n view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved."

It is because Justice Harlan and Reverend King were right that Strom Thurmond in 1948, and Trent Lott along with the University of Michigan today, are wrong. Strom Thurmond bolted the Democratic party in 1948 because the Democratic party placed a civil-rights plank in its platform. Race was not one of many issues for Thurmond and the Dixiecrats; it was the single, driving issue. When Thurmond ran for Senate, he returned to the Democratic party — not becoming a Republican until 1964. Thurmond's candidacy for president was the same candidacy George Wallace (another Democrat) would attempt 20 years later and that David Duke would emulate in 1992. They all tried to divide us on the meaningless grounds of race; "meaningless," because race means nothing when it comes to personhood, and it should mean nothing when it comes to law.

Abraham Lincoln put it best in the context of race defining slave status: "If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B, why may not B snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A? You say A is white, and B is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own." By the logic of race-based servitude status, albinos would enslave us all.

That was racism a century ago, and the reason Harlan and King wanted to end all distinctions based on color: They are meaningless and they are a departure from our founding principles that all are created equal. To think of people deserving rights or privileges because they black, white, or any other color, perpetuates the idea that race should matter in law or privilege. Thurgood Marshall put it best in his brief for the NAACP in the Brown v. Bd. of Education case: "Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state, bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere." Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell echoed that sentiment in the Bakke case: "The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color. If both are not accorded the same protection, then it is not equal."

A few years ago, I wrote that we had converted moral equality into a perverse system of numerical equality by converting the theme of racial unconsciousness into a policy of racial consciousness with racial set-asides, quotas, and affirmative-action programs. And we, as a nation, were on a path to fanning the flames of racial resentment. Equally disturbing, these policies were placing on many blacks what Shelby Steele calls "the stigma of questionable competence."

The most-blatant forms of injustice in law today are seen in cases like that of Jennifer Gratz, a young white woman who was denied admission to the University of Michigan. This young woman, the daughter of a police officer, did everything expected of her; she graduated from high school with a 3.765 grade-point average; she finished near the top of her class; and she was involved in extracurricular activities like tutoring.

Here was a clearly qualified individual who was nevertheless denied admission to a university: She was of the wrong skin color. And the Supreme Court will be hearing her claim this term. Already, however, it has been established that the University of Michigan was using an admissions policy that added admission points to racial minorities, creating a double standard for admission to the university, making it harder for one race to get in over and against another. That is what was done to black applicants at the University of Alabama in the 1950s. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now.

In a recent speech, President Bush stated, "We will not, and we must not, rest until every person of every race believes in the promise of America because they see it in their own eyes, with their own eyes, and they live it and feel it in their own lives." Every person of every race will never believe in the promise of equality and the promise of America as long as double standards based on race are allowed to continue in this country: one admission standard for whites, a different standard for blacks. And every person of every race will never believe in the promise of equality and the promise of America as long as political leaders who venerate segregation — however innocent their explanation — are not called to task: one school, one neighborhood, one bathroom, one restaurant for whites, another for blacks. These policies — segregation having been discarded, double standards being employed — are of a piece, they are both racist and they are both bad for our country.

The White House should weigh in with an amicus brief in the Michigan cases before the Supreme Court this term and, in so doing, help bring to a conclusion our long march toward equality and freedom. Our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution — along with the legacies of Lincoln and King — demand equality as a means toward freedom. It is the right means, and now is the right time to finally end both forms of race-based policies that look to who one's great-grandparents were rather than who we are. We are all one people, living in one nation, and we need, finally, to act like it.

— William J. Bennett, who co-wrote Counting By Race with Terry Eastland, is a former Secretary of Education.