
          Race, Class, and Reconciliaton
          By Carter, Dan T.Dan T. Carter
          Vol. 23, No. 3-4, 2001 pp. 10-13
          
          People of color have had to deal directly
with issues of race for all of this nation's history; they couldn't
avoid it. For those defined as "white," and particularly those outside
the South, it's been a sometime thing: notably during the struggles
over slavery, war, and reconstruction in the mid-l9th century, and
during the civil_rights revolution of the 1950s and the struggles that
followed.
          There has always come a time, however, when whites
tired of this subject. 
          For one of the inescapable themes of
the history of the nation and particularly the American South is the
effort of whites to maintain racial supremacy over their
darker-skinned brothers and sisters. First there was slavery, then the
struggle of white Southerners to maintain a separate nation built upon
that institution, then the use of terrorism by the Klan and other
vigilante groups to overthrow the legally constituted biracial
governments of the post-war South, followed by the disfranchisement of
black Southerners, the escalation of white on black terrorism through
daily acts of violence--the most heinous of which involved  the
lynching of thousands of black_men (and women)--the creation of
segregation, a hellish institution designed to systematically degrade
black Southerners through the first sixty years of the 20th century
and exclude them from educational and economic opportunities within
the South. . . .
          No wonder we want to smooth over the rough
and crooked places of our past--to dismiss the deep historical events
of hundreds of years with an impatient: "Get over it: that was a long
time ago."
          Some of it was a long time ago. Today, I think the
majority of white Americans would agree with the proposition that a
society that accepts any form of hierarchy based upon so-called
"racial" considerations is inconsistent with our democratic
aspirations and incapable of achieving a meaningful reconciliation of
its citizens. Now this is a commonplace conviction; only a handful of
extremists would openly accept the notion that genetic differences
based upon race justify forms of discrimination. But I offer an
important corollary: if we truly believe that skin color is not a
determinant of intelligence, creativity or ability, we have an
obligation--a moral obligation--to do more than murmur pieties about
equal rights or equal opportunities. We must do everything in our
power to change a society in which it is obvious that deep racial
inequalities remain despite the progress of the last half
century. That is not easy and it requires more than conventional
rhetoric about equal opportunity; it requires uncomfortable choices
and no little sacrifice.
          And this at a time, when I suspect
most of us would agree that "sacrifice" is not exactly the prevailing
theme of our contemporary political culture. When lawmakers beholden
to corporate America face the choice between building classrooms to
replace trailers for our children or helping the super rich buy
another chalet in Switzerland, it's no contest. It is easier to fill
our political platforms with a rainbow of complexions, to join
enthusiastically once a year on Martin_Luther_King's birthday to utter
platitudes about equality. We insist that we're serious about the
problems of racial discrimination, but our actions--in contrast to our
words--treat the conundrums of race as though they were minor
annoyances; a vexatious hangover from an older era.  
          Yet the
reality is inescapable: as we begin the 21st century, far more people
of color than whites continue to live in the shadows of American life
while the racial dimensions of disparate treatment in income,
education, health services, and in our judiciary and penal system are
ignored. And the question which John Kennedy asked a quarter century
ago remains no less relevant today: As long as "Negro Americans remain
in the shadow of a full and free life," he asked six months before his
death, "who among us would be content to have the color of his skin
changed and stand in his place?"
          It's much easier to relegate
the uncomfortable shards of our past to a safe and comfortable
category we call "history."  Even the more recent past becomes the
victim of our desire to forget uncomfortable truths. The hustlers of
our popular culture have reshaped the complex history of the civil
rights era into a slick pre-packaged series of rhetorical slogans that
allow present injustices to live comfortably with historical memory
and the great voice of the civil_rights movement, Martin_Luther_King
survives as a soothing icon to black and white, conservative and
liberal alike. California businessman Ward Connerly launched his
successful anti-affirmative_action referendum on King's birthday with
the announcement that Martin_Luther_King would have approved since he
"personifies the quest for a color-blind society."
          Forgotten
is the Martin Luther  King who dismissed such arguments
in his Stride Toward Freedom. It was "obvious that if a
man is entered at the starting line in a race three-hundred years
after another man, the first man would have to perform some impossible
feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner." Forgotten is King's
denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam, or his call for a
"restructuring of the architecture of American society," a
restructuring in which there had to be a "radical redistribution of
economic and political power and wealth."   
          As Julian Bond
put it, we don't like to remember  "the critic of capitalism, or the
pacifist who declared all wars evil, or the man of God who argued"
that a nation that chose "guns over butter" would end up starving its
people and destroying its soul. The historical radicalism of King's
call to struggle has been stripped away, leaving only a soothing
pablum of feel-good sentiments.  
          There is actually a
justification for promoting this kind of cultural amnesia. Historian
Ernest Renan argued that every nation is a community both of shared
memory and of shared forgetting. Forgetting, wrote Renan, "is an
essential factor in the history of a nation." To the extent that we
may become caught up in an endless cycle of fruitless recrimination,
Renan may be right.
          But I prefer the ancient wisdom of the
Jewish tradition: only remembrance can bring redemption.
          This
does not mean that times have not changed, or that we should let our
remembrance of a bitter past blind us to the journey we have made and
the opportunities that lie ahead. Much has happened in the past half
century for the better as the harshest contours of American racism
have been worn away by the persistent struggles of the civil_rights
movement. In Columbia, South_Carolina, today, my next door neighbors
are an African-American couple who personify the American dream. He is
the personnel director for a major international corporation based in
Columbia; she a former assistant to the Governor of South_Carolina. My
neighbor across the street is a successful young Chinese-American
attorney. My next door neighbor is a Lebanese-American cardiologist; a
woman working in a specialty almost exclusively male just two decades
ago. Three houses away is an African-American neighbor who has just
become the number two budget officer for the state. These
professionals are not simply tokens; they reflect the growing
opportunities that do exist for those individuals given the chance to
develop their abilities.  
          At the same time, the conflict
between good and evil enacted on the television screens of the 1950s
and 1960s seem far away. There are contemporary racial issues that
reflect newer versions of that age-old struggle, but often we deal not
with unambiguous moral decisions, but day-in, day-out struggles to
determine what is the best of a series of uncomfortable choices. How
should we judge "ability" and promise in a way that is fair? What
discriminatory results are the consequence of purposeful racism and
what reflect happenstance or simply the results of unquestioned
institutional patterns? Was I denied this job because of the color of
my skin? Or was the other candidate truly better qualified? Is it
possible to achieve a redress of past injustices by fathers and
mothers without penalizing sons and daughters? Each action, each word
must be weighed; it is surely one of the most bitter and exhausting
legacies of our past and our ongoing association of darker skin color
with notions of inferiority. 
          One way to help understand the
changing nature of our dilemmas is to recognize that racial ideas and
attitudes increasingly reflect assumptions about class. In my Southern
childhood the "single drop" theory of race was almost
unchallenged. Black was black. We all know the once fashionable
historical cliché about Brazilian race_relations: that race was
important, but "money whitened." Well, that wasn't really true about
racial attitudes in Brazil, but there clearly was a difference between
American and Latin societies. 
          That too is changing. I don't
in any way mean to suggest that race has disappeared as a constant (if
often unconscious) measure of judgment by most white Americans. Still,
as the overt racism of an earlier generation declines, and a broader
African-American and Hispanic middle_class emerges, the way is paved
for whites (and some African_Americans) to see class, as opposed to
race, as a legitimate means of separating our society into winners and
losers. 
          The problem for me is that this amounts to a shift
from a hierarchical society built upon the foundation of racism, to
one resting on the notion that there are vast differences in human
beings that justify massive social and economic
inequality. Increasingly that is seen as progress. Not for
me. 
          Quite apart from the fact that I find it morally
repugnant, I don't
believe that true social reconciliation in our
democratic society is possible unless we arrest the growing economic
inequality between our citizens. Since 1979, overall income in the
United_States has increased over 55 percent. But the greatest
increase, by far, has been for the wealthiest Americans. Over half the
growth in after-tax income has gone to the top one-half percent of America's taxpayers and the
results are what one would expect. 
          In 1977, the bottom 20
percent of the American people received a little less than 6 percent
of the nation's annual income, while the wealthiest 1 percent received
some 7 percent. Today that bottom 20 percent receives 4 percent of the
nation's annual income; the wealthiest 1 percent has seen its share
almost double, to 13 percent. And today, the wealthiest 1 percent of
Americans control more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth, a
maldistribution of wealth greater than at any time since the
1920s. 
          Now the argument, of course, is that a rising tide
lifts all boats. With everyone growing richer, why should we be
concerned if some groups are a little wealthier than others?

          Only that is not the case. In inflation corrected dollars,
the top 1 percent has seen its after-tax income increase 120 percent
in the last quarter century, the bottom 20 percent has actually
suffered a decline of 12 percent in after-tax income. Thirty million
Americans--more than half of them children--still live below the poverty
line; forty-two million Americans still have no health insurance. And
despite the last ten years of steady economic expansion--once you
exclude increased family income due to the growing number of dual wage
earners--it is only during the last two and a half years that childhood
poverty has begun to decline and the mid-50 percent of households in
America has seen a slight increase in income. So much for a rising
tide lifting all boats. 
          Now this shift in the distribution of
income and wealth stems from many sources: The internationalization of
trade, the opening of a global labor economy, the decline of trade
unions and the displacement of semi-skilled and skilled workers
through new technologies. But the evidence is inescapable that the
growing gap between rich and poor has been exacerbated by deliberate
government policies of the past two decades, particularly tax policy.

          Despite all the talk of "tax cuts" in the 1980s, the bottom
half of the population actually saw its taxes increase as escalating
social security, medicare and excise levies and increasingly
regressive state and local taxes offset the marginal declines in the
federal income tax rates. While the 50-to-90th percentile received a
very modest reduction in taxes, the nation's richest 1 percent of
Americans saw an annual decrease of 15 percent in federal income tax
liabilities in the decade of the 1980s.  
          These were policy
decisions, deliberately made, not the inevitable consequences of free
market forces beyond our control. The underlying philosophy seems to
be: If you make the lives of the poor, the working class and the
marginal middle_class more precarious and give them less money, they
will be more productive and resourceful workers, returning benefits to
society as a whole. And then if you give the rich and the well to do
more money and make their already secure and prosperous lives even
more secure and more prosperous, they will be more productive and
resourceful in returning benefits to society as a whole. You think I
engage in polemical exaggeration? How else can one describe the
policies of the dominant national party whose main economic goals are
to freeze the miserably low minimum wage for the poor, give a massive
tax cut for the rich and allow them to pass on their vast wealth to
their sons and daughters.
          I realize that I am on far shakier
ground here. For the last thirty
years, conservative think tanks have
been pouring out an endless intellectual justification for this
proposition: that there is a natural hierarchy of class and
intelligence which functions equitably on the basis of social and
economic competition and any attempt to interfere with the unfettered
forces of the marketplace can only lead us backward on that archaic
and discredited path of socialism and social democracy. As Dinesh
D'Souza concludes in his recent book on The Virtue
of Prosperity, the "prime culprit in causing contemporary social
inequality [in America] seems to be merit."
          Really? In 1974,
the nation's corporate chief executive officers made, on average, 34
times as much as their workers. By 1996, it was 180 times that of
their workers. By the beginning of this century, it was nearly 200
times that of their employees. Are we to believe that the merit of
corporate leaders has increased sevenfold over that of the men and
women in their employ?
          I have a word for that kind of smug
justification for the status quo; it's not one that I prefer to use in
polite society.
          To be fair, most of us--conservative, centrist
and liberal alike--are uncomfortable with the fictional character
Gordon Gecko's unvarnished assertion that "greed is good." And so we
conceal the unpleasant realities of our current economic system with
slogans about promoting individual opportunity, or using education as
a means of redressing powerful imbalances of economic and educational
opportunities. At times I feel as though I'm watching the captain of
the Titanic solemnly hand out teaspoons to the passengers left on the
sinking decks, with the cheery instructions: "Start bailing, you'll be
fine." The truth is, those of us who are safe in our life rafts daily
check our retirement portfolios as our hearts increasingly vibrate in
harmony with the raucous Muzak of our contemporary culture: that
clanging bell that daily opens and closes the New_York Stock
Exchange.
          So where can we begin.
          First, I would
suggest, by expanding our vision of reconciliation beyond the issue of
race, gender, ethnicity and sexual discrimination to include a demand
for broader economic and social justice.
          Looking back on the
last generation, we can see now that there has been a constant
struggle for personal freedom and autonomy. Remember in the 1960s and
1970s--all politics is personal? While the battles still rage, I would
argue that victory was won by social libertarians--Jerry Falwell and
John Ashcroft notwithstanding.  In the 1980s, there was a different
kind of struggle: a battle for unre-strained economic freedom.  To a
considerable degree, that struggle was won by conservatives. But
somehow in our headlong race for cultural and economic freedom, we
have lost touch with an earlier dream most recently embodied in the
call for what John Lewis describes as "the beloved community." Instead
we have come to accept as normal  a society divided into the
fabulously wealthy few, a comfortable upper middle_class and half a
nation one short step away from economic disaster, struggling to
survive.
          I do not believe real social reconciliation is
possible based under
these conditions.  But recreating a sense of
what might be--what  should be--will not be
easy.
          A couple of brief suggestions:
          Today we live in
"America, Incorporated," in which rampant individualism operating
within the framework of the marketplace reigns with only a murmer of
protest. Well, let me enter my dissent. We are not autonomous. If we
look honestly at our own lives we see the truth of the old Irish
expression: that "we all drink from wells we never dug; we warm
ourselves by fires we never built." As a means of allocating resources
and creating wealth, corporate capitalism has a positive place in our
culture, but if we allow it to make our decisions, as a society we end
up in the same position of the cynic described by Oscar Wilde. We know
the price of everything and the value of nothing.
          I don't
underestimate how hard that may be, for words have been corrupted in
true Orwellian fashion. Some people, said the Puritan martyr Richard
Rumbold as he stood upon the scaffold, believe that "Providence had
sent a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and
millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden. I do not." But today
those who are booted and spurred no longer swagger and proclaim their
God given right to exploit those beneath them; now they speak with the
voice of humility and concern--everyone feels everyone's pain--and there
is much talk of offering a helping hand to those in
need.
          Well, I propose that we all become cantankerous
naysayers whose main duty is simply to remind all who will listen that
those of us who are comfortably settled atop the pyramid of our
unequal society, are always ready to talk about
"compassion."
          But there is another language that has come from
authentic social movements bent on changing our society by breaking
down the barriers that divide us: the struggle for economic justice in
the 1930s; the fight for racial justice in the anti-slavery and civil
rights movement. These authentic political movements have emerged when
least expected. As one of my favorite writers said, a keen sense of
irony has seldom led anyone to mount the barricades. Our task in the
future is to not to lead, but to be a part of that
struggle.
          What I do know is that, when that moment arrives,
the voices that bubble up from the grassroots will not use the
paternalistic language of "compassion": they will speak of something
far more fundamental--justice.	
          
            Dan T. Carter is Educational Foundation
Professor of History at the University of South_Carolina.This article
is adapted from a speech Carter presented at the Reconciliation
Symposium held at Emory University on January 26,
2001. 
          
        
