Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 21, 1991 TAG: 9103210449
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The Civil Rights Act of 1991, whose passage the civil-rights establishment has declared as its No. 1 goal for the year, illustrates the point.
It is a slightly reworked (not to say improved) version of last year's model, vetoed by President Bush, who insisted it was a "quota bill." This year's effort to enact it - over another veto, if necessary - has begun with a change of the nameplate. It is no longer a bill for blacks, designed to restore civil-rights law to what it was before a series of Supreme Court decisions made it harder to sue for discrimination. It is now a bill for the disabled, for working people and, oh yes of course, for women.
It is all those things, in fact. But the point is that instead of trying to show that the legislation will fix problems Americans care about, or working to make it more acceptable to business leaders who really do fear it could lead to racial quotas, the civil-rights establishment is trying to sell the bill by changing the ad copy.
The tactic would be questionable enough if the bill were perfect. It isn't. And - if the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights will forgive me - in the context of the problems confronting black America, it may not be all that important.
Yes, that 1989 series of court decisions made it harder for minorities to win class-action discrimination suits and called set-aside contracting programs into question. And yes, it would be helpful to go back to where we were before those decisions - not to quotas but to fairer access to opportunity. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 ought to be enacted.
But are the rules governing "disparate impact" suits and minority set-asides (which this bill is principally about) of such overriding importance that they should constitute the No. 1 priority of our leaders? I don't think so. The problems most critically affecting black America are the joblessness and despair of our young people, the academic indifference of our children, the dissolution of our families, the destruction (by crime and drug trafficking) of our neighborhoods and the economic marginality of our people. And the Civil Rights Act of '91 won't do a blessed thing about these problems.
Worse, it threatens to divide America along racial lines, when - in my view, at least - white America stands ready to support racial programs and policies it believes to be fair.
An unpublicized survey commissioned by the Leadership Conference (a coalition of civil-rights, labor, women's and disabled citizens' organizations) makes the point. White Americans, it revealed, see black leadership as no longer concerned with fairness but only with group advantage. Whites do not see themselves as racists, or as opponents of equal opportunity and fundamental fairness. But they oppose preferential benefits for minorities, which they see as the main commodity of the civil-rights leadership.
They aren't buying. How could we expect them to buy a product we have spent 400 years trying to have recalled: race-based advantage enshrined in the law?
The black consensus is that white resistance to the agenda of the civil-rights leadership is nothing more than latter-day racism, a new mean-spiritedness that is 180 degrees away from the attitudes that helped to produce earlier civil-rights legislation. My own view is not that white people have changed but that our goals have been transformed. We still say we want to be judged by the "content of our character," but our agenda is based on the color of our skin.
Well, suppose we came up with another product line based on the ideals we hold in common: equal opportunity, equitably enforced; programs designed to heal the crippling effects of past discrimination; hiring, promotion and college placement based on individual achievement and potential, sensitively evaluated; policies to enhance the academic and career prospects of young people who have had too little opportunity.
Suppose we ended production of the old model which, designed to appeal to white guilt, no longer is selling and replaced it with a new model whose chief marketing points would be its orientation toward solutions (as opposed to blame-assignment) and its unambiguous fairness.
I, for one, think it would sell. I think it would do more for those most in need of society's help. And I think that America would be a better place because of it. Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB