After a year of pondering America’s racial dilemma President Clinton’s Initiative on Race hasn’t come up with many surprises, except one, its own naivete about the complexities of race.
“We knew it was a daunting task when we assumed it,” panelist William Winter, a former Mississippi governor, told the Christian Science Monitor. “None of us fully understood how many nuances there are to the question of race relations in America.”
Oh, really? Nuances? In the era of Oprah Winfrey and O.J. Simpson? Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas? Rodney King and Reginald Denny? Tiger Woods and the two Michaels, Jordan and Jackson?
Well, as the teens say these days, du-uh-uh!
But the panel has produced at least one new idea that reveals its improving grasp on the heart of the problem. It is a suggestion that Clinton create a new index of where we stand nationally on race.
It would be called the “Citizens’ Indicators of Racial Disadvantage.”
John Hope Franklin, chairman of the Initiative on Race and a distinguished historian and African-American, mentions it in one of four letters he has sent to Clinton, according to the Associated Press, which obtained copies of the letters.
To figure out how it might work, think of the consumer price index, the government’s monthly report on the cost of living. Every month, government researchers go shopping for food, fuel and other commodities to determine whether you and I are paying more than we did last month and by how much.Or maybe, on a more ominous note, you should think of the “Doomsday Clock” posted by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago for the past 51 years. It tells us how close civilization has come to nuclear annihilation. Maybe we need something similarly dramatic to tell us how close we are to racial meltdown.
The racial index responds to the great respect many of us have for hard numbers. According to Franklin’s letter, the index could give us a readout every couple of years on the price blacks and other minorities pay for being discriminated against in education, hiring, housing and loan applications.
It could “serve as a continuing reminder that African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and American Indians are not making it up when they cry `racism,’ ” Franklin wrote in his April 23 letter.
There’s the problem. If anything has changed in the 30 years since President Johnson commissioned the last major White House study on race, it is how much today’s racial divide is a problem of perceptions as much as prejudice.
Race is a volatile topic because each of us understands it through our experiences and all of our experiences are different. If we had a yardstick to measure racism, we would avoid a lot of racial arguments.
That’s why much of what Clinton’s race initiative has been doing over the past year is to develop racial yardsticks, with the help of the Council of Economic Advisers and other presidential and academic bodies, to develop new and precise ways to measure our racial progress or lack of it.
But will it be enough?
Today it is easy to spot the racism in an episode like the lynching death last week of James Byrd Jr., the disabled black man who was beaten and then dragged behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Tex., allegedly by three white men who were linked to a white supremacist organization.
But, a week earlier in Jasper County, another black man, Donald Louis Kenebrew, was charged with beating to death Jerry Lynn McQueen, a white man. Was racism involved in that? Or was it just a fight?
That’s the big problem with racism today. It’s hard to measure and difficult to compress into concrete numbers.
“Jim Crow” has been replaced by “Jim Crow Jr.,” as Kweisi Mfume, the NAACP’s president, puts it. Racism is more subtle today and therefore more sinister, for it is easier to exaggerate or deny, depending on your perspective. Where you stand depends on where you are forced to sit.
I would suggest, then, that Clinton’s racial index avoid the trap of measuring racism. Instead, I would shift the focus to the good news, to the opportunities (or lack of them) that are available for blacks and others to improve themselves.
When a taxi passes me by and picks up a white woman, I might think it is racism at work, but I would have a hard time proving it.
But it is easy to measure the absence of opportunities available to, say, inner-city kids who don’t have a computer or a certified science teacher in their public school, while their more affluent suburban counterparts do.
We will never totally eradicate prejudice from people’s heart, but as a society we can do a lot to equalize opportunities for every American child, regardless of race, creed or gender.
Without such action, our racial index might as well be a Doomsday Clock, ticking toward midnight.
