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COMMENTARY
America's war against racism
By Yu Bin
With the US Supreme
Court ruling on the University of Michigan's admissions
policies this week, race relations in the United States
are undergoing a quiet "paradigm shift" away from the
Cold War consensus in correcting America's racial
injustice as a result of hundreds of years of slavery
and racial segregation.
The twin decisions
announced on Monday concerned the admissions procedures
of the baccalaureate and law-school programs at the
University of Michigan, one of the country's most
prestigious public universities. In the first case,
Gratz vs Bollinger, the court ruled 6-3 that the
university's policy, which automatically allocated 20
points to every minority applicant out of a possible 150
points required to guarantee admission, violated the
"equal protection" clause of the US constitution. But in
the second case, Grutter vs Bollinger, five of the
court's justices ruled that the law school was justified
in ensuring that a "critical mass" of minority students
was admitted to the school, even if that meant qualified
white students with higher scores or grades were
excluded.
The split decision of the court - in
effect that minority applicants may be given an edge
when applying for admissions to universities, but which
limited how much race can be a factor in the selection
of students - highlights some of the long-standing
dilemmas in America's racial relations: between majority
interests and minority rights; between the dream of
racial harmony and the reality of persistent
uninstitutionalized racial disparity; between the
US-pronounced principle of human dignity and its
down-to-earth pragmatism; and between being morally
correct and legally sound.
The shift may never
completely negate the legacies of the civil-rights
movement, president Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and
even president Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal. With
President George W Bush in power, however, neo-con
intellectuals and practitioners seem determined to knock
off the delicate racial balance based on affirmative
action.
There is no question that US minorities
have made obvious, and sometimes tremendous, progress in
almost every area and at every level of America's
socio-political life. There is apparently more "color"
in the Bush national-security team than in any previous
administration.
Nonetheless, there has also been
a resilient, persistent, and even growing counter-trend
in the past decade or so toward racial insensitivity and
intolerance. A rough list for the past decade or so
includes the police beating of black motorist Rodney
King, rioting in Los Angeles and Cincinnati,
black-church burning, continuous racial profiling,
rolling back affirmative action, Wen Ho Lee, efforts to
turn away minority voters in Florida in 2000, border
tightening, Immigration and Naturalization Service
detentions, the initial reluctance of the media and
Democrats to pick up the case of Senator Trent Lott's
"spontaneous" and "light-hearted" racial remarks late
last year, not to mention the recent riots in Benton
Harbor, Michigan. Indeed, Lott's reminiscence of the
"good old days"of racial segregation - which rocked the
Republican Party and gripped the media - receded fast
into the nation's collective amnesia, thanks to the Iraq
war and a worsening economy.
The complex racial
relations these days - progress amid retrogression -
contrast sharply with the Cold War decades (1947-91)
when the United States was awash in the tide of a
growing civil-rights movement toward Dr Martin Luther
King's dream. Such a tide of history was not only driven
by the US domestic chemistry, but also by the Cold War,
when the US locked itself in a fierce competition with
the former Soviet Union. While the arms race was the
most obvious area of rivalry, racial segregation in the
US, too, became an issue of contest with the Russians.
Both presidents Dwight D Eisenhower and John F Kennedy
realized that racial segregation in the US undermined
the country's foreign policy. The unspoken consensus was
that unless this country did something about its
prevailing racial discrimination against a large number
of its own people only because of the color of their
skins, the United States would not be able to persuade
and command the rest of the world to follow the US
model.
For these reasons, Eisenhower sent troops
to force schools to become integrated. His public
projects, too, included not only interstate highways but
also the polio vaccine campaign and generous federal
money for local education. A foreign policy
Machiavellianist, president Richard Nixon would be
judged today as an isolated leftist for his domestic
politics such as enforcing, though reluctantly, school
busing, enacting racial-quota hiring and "guaranteed
annual income" plans, as well as establishing the
Environmental Protection Agency. In 1970 alone, Nixon
"accomplished more ... to desegregate Southern school
systems than had been done in the 16 previous years",
wrote Tom Wicker, a former columnist for the New York
Times. Even president Ronald Reagan took final steps to
apologize to and compensate Japanese-Americans for their
post-Pearl Harbor ordeal, and signed, though grudgingly,
legislation that made Martin Luther King Jr's birthday a
national holiday.
The more tolerant and liberal
policies of the US presidents during the Cold War,
Republican or Democrat, the dedication and sacrifice of
Dr King and others, plus the final wake-up of "the good
people" from their "appalling silence" finally turned
the country away from the hated "good old days" of
racial segregation and toward a more humane alternative.
Without all this, Bush's National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice might still remain in her
segregated neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama, and
Secretary of State Colin Powell perhaps would never have
joined the Joint Chiefs. Indeed, the United States won
the Cold War not just because it outspent the Russians
in arms but, more important, because its democracy was
able to elevate itself from those selfish, basic human
instincts, and was able to offer dignity, fairness, and
justice to all of its citizens, at least in principle.
Now the Cold War is over. The Russians are down
and the Japanese stagnant. When the US is on the top,
there seems no need or pressure to compete and to excel
in ethical and moral areas. Following in the footsteps
of the neo-conservatives of the 1980s, the 1990s was
time not only for the joyride of the dot-com wizards,
greedy chief executives, dishonest politicians, and
politicized intelligence, but also a time of growing
sense of affirmative action's "fatigue" and
multiculturalist "overdose". Senator Lott's "poor choice
of words" last year, therefore, is not entirely
inappropriate at all these days, when mainstream society
becomes less patient and less generous toward the poor
and weak.
Over the horizon and into the future,
the mighty US military is unlikely to face another
serious arms race with any power. The race problem,
however, has never gone away in real life in the United
States. Despite the tremendous progress minorities have
made in many areas, the racial deficit of the centuries
cannot be quickly or easily fixed in a matter of a few
decades or by a few programs. Nor can it be removed from
the sight of the Americans by more prisons and more SWAT
(special weapons and tactics police) teams. A hands-off,
or social Darwinist, approach is an alternative. But
that may lead to more racial tension and violence like
those in Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Benton
Harbor.
In the age of preemption and US military
supremacy, the United States will never be able to win
the hearts and minds of the rest of the world without
keeping itself on a high moral ground, if not moral
supremacy. Legality cannot, and should not, substitute
for ethically sound practice. What is needed is not a
rolling back of the significant achievements in US civil
liberty - which is admired even by those who disagree
with, or hate, US foreign policy - but a race within US
society among political parties, politicians and social
groups for deeper mutual understanding, meaningful
dialogues, genuine tolerance and pragmatic programs for
Americans and their children. Such a race with and among
Americans perhaps will never take the United States to a
perfect society. The process of continuously overcoming
and transcending America's own "basic instincts",
however, will surely elevate the country to a much
higher moral plateau.
Yu Bin, PhD, is
associate professor of political science at Wittenberg
University, senior research associate of Shanghai
Institute of American Studies, and faculty associate of
the Mershon Center of Ohio State University. He
contributes regularly to Comparative Connections of the
Pacific Forum in Hawaii. His most recent books
include Power of the Moment: America and the World
After 9-11 and Mao's Generals Remember Korea.
This article contains additional reporting from Inter
Press Service.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication
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