ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 1, 1996 TAG: 9612030131
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
THE MORE attention you pay to race, the more important - and divisive - race becomes. The surest way to end racism is to embrace policies and attitudes that refuse to see race: to work at becoming color-blind.
That, I think, is a reasonably fair statement of the views of a growing number of opponents of affirmative action. I don't mean those uncaring souls who don't mind that blacks or women have less access to the good things of American life, and I don't mean the racists who think it natural for blacks to occupy an inferior position. I'm thinking of the good, fair-minded people who think the race consciousness that drives affirmative action is a mistake - perhaps a terrible mistake.
Are they correct? I don't think so. And I think so less after reading ``All That We Can Be,'' Charles C. Moskos and John Sibley Butler's book on racial integration in the Army.
The U.S. Army, they contend, has become the most successfully integrated institution in the country. And while it has achieved that status without resort to quotas and preferences, it has not pretended color-blindness. Indeed, they write: ``Consciousness of race in a nonracist organization is one of the defining qualities of Army life.''
A small story illustrates their point. A table in a mess facility at Fort Hood, Texas, had come to be monopolized by blacks - a sharp exception to the rule that finds far more commingling of races in Army mess halls than in most of civilian life and more off-duty and off-base interracial socializing as well.
A white sergeant approached the table and told the blacks to sit at other tables with whites. The black soldiers resented the sergeant's rebuke. They pointed out that they were perfectly willing to receive any white soldier who wanted to join their table but wondered why the initiative should fall to them.
The point of the story goes beyond the general degree of racial intermingling and the fact that the sergeant read the situation through ``white eyes.'' The additional point: ``The white sergeant's intention, however naive or misdirected, was to end a situation of racial self-segregation. Suppose a white professor asked black students at an all-black table in a college dining hall to sit at other tables with whites. The very question shows the contrast between race relations on campus and in the Army.''
But the book is only partly about race relations; it is also about affirmative action. Not quotas, or reverse discrimination or any of those canards, but about efforts to ``level the playing field'' and to increase opportunity specifically for blacks. From recruitment to training to remedial learning to the West Point ``prep'' school, the Army gives minority soldiers a chance to measure up - not by lowering standards but by elevating the soldiers.
Moskos and Butler, professors of sociology at Northwestern and the University of Texas respectively, found in their research what I have heard countless black soldiers say: There may be racism and ignorance in the Army, as there is in the rest of American life. But the Army may be the one institution that comes closest to providing opportunity and rewarding performance - that allows people to be all they can be.
And because the service is viewed as fundamentally fair, its members don't have to pretend color-blindness in order to respect competence.
But the Army is inherently hierarchical and anti-democratic. Are there lessons the general society can learn from the military's special history? Butler and Moskos list 12 lessons, including some moderately surprising ones. For instance, ``Focus on black opportunity, not on prohibiting racist expression. ... It would be foolhardy to consider the absence of white racists as a precondition for black achievement.''
They also offer some caveats regarding affirmative action, including this one: It should not involve quotas but should involve goals based on the relevant pool of qualified candidates. Whatever special help is made available should go toward strengthening the pool. And finally, this bit of reality: Color-blindness - even generalized efforts on behalf of ``minorities'' - misses the point that ``the basic social dichotomy in our society is black versus white and, increasingly, black versus nonblack. ... The confluence of race, slavery and segregation has created a social reality that in the American experience is unparalleled.'' For this reason, the authors argue, affirmative action should be ``geared de facto to blacks.''
You don't have to agree with everything Butler and Moskos say, but this point seems solid: An essentially blue-collar organization that has overcome its own grim racial history to achieve a remarkable degree of racial integration and racial fairness perhaps has something to say to the rest of us.
- Washington Post Writers Group
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