Still, with a passion usually seen only in the aftermath of a riot, those who profess concern over racial estrangement are pushing the issue onto the national agenda. Last week, House Speaker Newt Gingrich followed the president’s June 14 race speech with his own 10-point plan for racial progress. Most of the speech was a repackaging of familiar GOP nostrums, but Gingrich also offered a vision of a new, less race- conscious America, with a ““multiracial’’ census category established as a step toward eventually abolishing racial labels altogether. Rep. Tony Hall, Democrat of Ohio, has also leapt into the fray with a well-intentioned but essentially pointless proposal that Congress apologize to blacks for slavery. (One sign of the gap still dividing the races: support among whites and nonwhites for Hall’s proposal mirror each other - with 61 percent of nonwhites supporting the apology and 60 percent of whites opposed, according to a new NEWSWEEK Poll.)
Politicians aren’t the only ones revisiting race. The Gallup Organization and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies have both released major new polls on the subject. And this Friday evening NBC News will air a one-hour documentary anchored by Tom Brokaw that plumbs the perennial question: ““Why Can’t We Live Together?''
Does all the chatter and navel-gazing portend real progress? One ominous, and widely noted, finding of the Gallup poll was that a majority of Americans - 58 percent of blacks and 54 percent of whites - agree that ““relations between blacks and whites will always be a problem.’’ For all the pessimism indicated by that response, the polls also uncovered some striking signs of hope. Blacks and whites between the ages of 18 and 25 have more in common with each other, in some respects, than with their same-race elders, the Joint Center survey found. Also, the vast majority of whites and blacks now prefer to live in highly integrated neighborhoods, according to Gallup.
The problem with such polling is deftly underscored by the NBC News documentary, which takes a close look at Matteson, Ill., an upper-middle-class Chicago suburb, once nearly all white. The suburb, which is now roughly half black and half white, is in the grip of a familiar crisis: whites, fearful of plunging property values, rising crime and declining schools, are rushing to escape. One woman, explaining her decision to leave, mentions gangs and gunplay. The white community to which she has relocated seems much safer: ““It’s a good place to raise kids,’’ she says.
The irony, which NBC goes to some lengths to document, is that the woman’s fears are totally without foundation. Matteson has experienced none of the problems with schools, violence or lower property values that the fleeing whites confidently attribute to it. The income level of residents hasn’t changed; all that has is their race, which in the eyes of some whites is enough to condemn their once-perfect community to damnation. One moral of the documentary is that facts have no power against fear, even if the fear is rooted in ignorance.
Another moral has to do with honesty. Matteson’s residents presumably are not much different from those who claimed to Gallup that they support housing integration. The same is true of school integration, which people support overwhelmingly in polls. Yet according to research by Harvard education professor Gary Orfield, schools are becoming more segregated, not less.
So what is the point of a national dialogue if people are fundamentally dishonest about racial issues, and unwilling to see prejudice debunked? Christopher Edley, a Harvard law professor and Clinton adviser, argues that when presented with a clear analysis of facts, Americans may be able to move closer to consensus about racial reality. But ultimately Edley sees the high-profile process Clinton has set in motion as less of an opportunity for a national teach-in than as a chance to charge-up a new cadre of leaders - who will work in their own communities to bring about constructive change.
Lani Guinier, the University of Pennsylvania law professor whose nomination Clinton withdrew under fire as assistant attorney general for civil rights, insists that it is possible to get beyond the defenses that engender dishonesty if one can avoid framing racial issues in terms of conflict. Guinier, who has received funding from the Ford and Mott foundations to test her ideas, believes that focusing on areas of common interest - such as why it makes sense to spend more money on schools and less on prisons - could be one bridge to productive dialogue.
If the so-called national dialogue is to provide anything more than emotional catharsis, it will indeed have to provide a model of how people who don’t trust each other can work in harmony, and of how people who don’t believe they have much in common can learn that they do. Otherwise, all the talk about getting beyond race will do little more than confirm how far we remain apart.
