Next Thursday, President Clinton will make a speech in Little Rock, Ark., marking the 40th anniversary of the effort to integrate Central High School. Since announcing his year-long race initiative in June, the most news from the president’s advisory board has centered on a dispute as to whether the focus of the board’s efforts should be (at least initially) on black-white relations or on all the races. The board’s chairman, the esteemed historian John Hope Franklin, has argued for the former, essentially saying that if we are ever to fully realize the dream of a harmonious multicultural society, we must first come to terms with the legacy of slavery.
I agree with Franklin. Whether we like it or not, the issue of slavery, of being owned, will always be a shameful part of our history. It will always distinguish the relationship between blacks and whites, will always mark it apart from the relationship between whites and Asians, or whites and Hispanics, or between whites and any ethnic group that has emigrated to America and faced adversity.
That is not to downplay or minimize the considerable animosity and prejudice those groups encountered, but adversity and ownership are not the same thing. “You know,” an African-American recently said to me, “the only thing that we’re equal about is the amount of time we get in a day. And for a long time, that one equal thing was taken away by white folk, so if we had 24 hours in a day, 18 of mine belonged to you.”
There has been a lot of talk in recent months about whether there should be an official apology to blacks for the sin of slavery–or, going further, actual reparations. This argument goes back to the promise, made after the Civil War, of every black receiving 40 acres and a mule, a promise that was never kept.
I don’t think the idea of an apology is particularly good, because, frankly, it’s too late and far too “politically correct”; it would be polite but it wouldn’t mean anything and it wouldn’t change anything. As for actual reparations, that is not likely to happen. Nor is it likely that enough political will exists to make the condition of America’s inner cities more of a priority–a situation for which we all bear responsibility.
In that same way, we–blacks as well as whites–have a responsibility to move beyond polarization and stereotypes and resolve the dilemma of race. Over the past couple of weeks, I have been participating in the same sort of town meetings that the president’s advisory board will be conducting across the country. And what I have found is that race is a subject about which there are points of agreement, and about which there is no agreement; a subject that is either spoken of reluctantly, or not spoken of at all. Race is used, by all of us, in the most manipulative ways, is often force-fit and reduced to something it isn’t, to something that gives us a sense of comfort, a false one. Many of us thought–needed to feel–the whole business was “settled.” But it’s not, never has been. Laws have only taken us so far.
Much as we might try, from under the powerful and permissive umbrella of democracy, to deny it, run from it, not think about it, act cynical about it, and even try to wish it away, there race remains, cornering us, dividing us, and exhausting us; there it remains–visible and invisible, mainly separate and unequal–patiently waiting for “the better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln once said, to take permanent root and work toward common ground and common good.
Race, as I’ve learned without enthusiasm, is incorrigible, defies a writer’s natural, cozy desire to order things, to have a tidy beginning, middle and end. However grudgingly, I accepted that fact long ago. I accepted it because as long as race–and all the tentacles that attach to it–continues to be our greatest burden; as long as we continue to argue over what truths we truly hold to be self-evident; as long as roughly three-fifths of whites continue to think of blacks as both intellectually inferior and lazy; as long as vast numbers of people are not connected to work of any kind; as long as 11-year-old girls in the inner city are busily planning their own funerals instead of their next birthday parties, there can be no satisfying conclusion, none at all.
The color line that W.E.B. DuBois spoke of at the beginning of the 20th Century is still there, defiant and seemingly immovable, as we approach the start of the 21st. We as a country have made much progress, but still the line remains, there to be reckoned with, a pox on all our houses.
In order to cross it, though, whites can no longer make their acceptance of blacks so conditional on their being “more like us” or “acting white”; they can no longer fear that having blacks live in the same neighborhood will either bring disharmony or bring down the value of their property; they can no longer exploit, consciously or not, the advantages that come to them just because they are white. And blacks, for their part, must find a way beyond seeing themselves as victims in the instances where they are not, beyond seeing conspiracies in the instances where they don’t exist, beyond seeing racism where it doesn’t exist.
The consequences of giving up the fight to achieve racial harmony are more and more desultory accusations that lead us nowhere. To that end, I see the workplace as the perfect environment to wage the battle to change hearts and minds. It is, after all, the one place where blacks and whites interact more than any other, more than where they live or where they pray or where they spend their leisure time.
It’s an opportunity to truly understand each other, an opportunity to respect each other’s differences and yet find that we are not that different after all. If nothing is made of this opportunity, though, then we will continue as we have, two groups living, for the most part, as if we were on separate planets.
As the “great and unprecedented conversation about race” the president has asked for begins to take shape, it is imperative that it be honest, that it punch through easy rhetoric and political expediency, and that it ultimately leads to solutions which just might last. It is imperative because so much–so much about the way we live–is at stake.
