Have Americans Forgotten Who They Are?

American ideals of equality, opportunity and fair play have been confounded over many decades by the politics and practices of division and exclusion.

Legions of racial and ethnic minorities and women feel less of a sense of opportunity, less assured of equality and less confident of fair treatment today than in many years. Society’s collective thinking on the meaning of opportunity seems to begin and end with the topic of affirmative action--more a war of sound bites than a constructive and honest debate.

The specter of opinion polls and political agendas overshadows basic concepts of fair play and due process. The notion of equality is never even mentioned in public discourse today, as if avoiding the subject avoids the problem. Some openly question whether the civil rights movement has gone too far and behave as if the history of America is a history of discrimination against white men.

Many Americans, including many minorities, question whether integration was ever a valid goal. Indeed, race relations is the only major social ill today that we are seriously considering curing by denial, as if declaring ourselves colorblind in law will make us colorblind in fact.

But take a look at us. The unemployment rate for black males is still twice as high as for white males. Even college-educated black and Latino men and women of every race and ethnic background are paid less than comparably educated, comparably prepared white men. It’s still harder for black folks and Latinos and in many cases for women to rent apartments, get mortgages, get hired or promoted.

Two-thirds of all African American children still attend segregated schools. And yet just three years ago, a cash-poor school district spent a million dollars to expand an all-white elementary school, rather than send white students to a predominately black school that was one-third empty and 800 yards down the street.

Black churches are on fire just like 30 years ago. A black 9-year-old in South Carolina was recently tied to a tree and terrorized by a white playmate and his parents. A 300-unit apartment building in Ohio refused ever to rent to African Americans. In Alabama recently, we caught a landlord racially coding his applications. A 6-foot cross was burned in front of a neighborhood auto repair shop in Florida because the white shop owner hired two black workers. Not far from there, a police department routinely threw applications from blacks in the trash. A 90% white congressional district drawn in four parts that don’t even touch each other is OK in Texas. But a 55% black Texas district that sent Barbara Jordan to Congress is ruled too bizarrely drawn to be constitutional.

And it’s not all black and white. A Louisiana corrections center required a minimum passing score on the written examination of 90 for men but 105 for women. In fact, when one woman scored 100 on the exam, she was disqualified in favor of a man who scored a 79, had an arrest record and no high school diploma. In California, when two young Latino couples earned the chance to move literally across the railroad tracks to a better neighborhood, a condominium manager told them there was no room because Latinos, in his view, were given to multiplying and he didn’t want his building to become like the barrio they had come from.

I still get followed in department stores. I still get stopped if I’m driving a nice car in the wrong neighborhood. I still have trouble hailing a cab in most major cities. Now, perhaps these are nothing more than what I sometimes refer to as the indignities du jour. But they nag at my personhood every day even in my rarefied life.

Imagine what kind of effect these things have on the life and mind of a young African American or Latino man or woman who knows less about hope and faith than I do. They know like any of us that not everything wrong in their lives or in their communities is explained by race. But they also know that intolerance is with us, and in the midst of this come efforts to dismantle what national consensus we have on civil rights today and to divide us along racial and ethnic lines for political advantage or worse.

Affirmative action is equated with discrimination, as if there were no difference between cancer and cure. And the courts are on the brink of rationalizing justice right out of the law. Small wonder that people of perspective are wondering whether we have forgotten what we have dedicated ourselves to become in this country and are watching anxiously to see whether this country is about to make a giant lurch backward in its long struggle for equal opportunity and fundamental fairness.

Not all is lost, thanks to my colleagues at the Justice Department and to advocates and people of goodwill everywhere. That Ohio apartment complex, that California condominium and that Alabama landlord have changed their rental policies and have new black and Latino tenants. That Louisiana corrections center has qualified women on its payroll today and that Florida police department has black cops on the beat. We are standing behind affirmative action and working hard to see that federal programs comply with the Supreme Court’s new rules. The banking industry itself tells us that our fair lending program is responsible for last year’s record-high level of lending to minorities and women.

Despite strains on our resources and sometimes hostile courts and Congress, despite furloughs and shutdowns and budget uncertainties, we have managed in the last few years to start more investigations, file and win more cases and resolve more problems in more areas of civil rights law than in any other time in the division’s history. That is all good news. But it’s not enough.

It’s not enough because the greater problem is not just that we, the lawyers and the advocates, are facing a shortage of hands and money. The greater problem is that we, the American people, are forgetting who we are. People have come to this country from all over the world and built from a wilderness the most extraordinary society on earth. And we are most remarkable not just because of what we have accomplished, not just because of what we have materially accumulated, but because of the ideals to which we have dedicated ourselves. We have defined our ideals over time with principles of equality, opportunity and fair play. For this, deserved or not, we are an inspiration to the world.

Civil rights is the struggle for those ideals. It’s hardly about some abstract racial spoils system. It has nothing at all to do with conservative or liberal labels. It’s about breaking down artificial barriers of whatever kind to equality, opportunity and fair play. It’s about assuring everyone a fair chance to perform. It’s about redeeming that fundamentally American sense of hope and affirming our basic values and aspirations as a nation.

Our forward movement as a society depends on the clarity and the perspective with which the next generation views the challenge and the creativity with which they undertake to address it. And that in turn depends on whether they understand and embrace American ideals of equality, opportunity and fair play and are inspired to act on them.

In our time and in others, there were national purposes like civil rights and national heroes like Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson who called upon our idealism and challenged this nation’s conscience. In fits of starts of courage and pain, we responded by reaching across our differences, if only for an instant, to seize our common humanity.

As in all other times, the human spirit is the same today. Young people still harbor idealism--a little shyly, perhaps, and with veiled reticence. Even in the bleakest places, children still look for a reason to hope. And what shall we offer them? Who will call forth their idealism? Who will set his or her own discouragement and weariness and cynicism aside long enough to light a fire of purpose under somebody else?

Will history really say of the legacy and the challenge we pass on to them that ours was the generation and the time that gave up on and lost interest in building an integrated national community? While we debate the abstract merits of colorblindness or this or that civil rights remedy, there are millions of young people all over this nation, would-be idealists, who are left out and left back and who will never become journalists or doctors or lawyers or teachers or police officers or little else; whose latent idealism will never be free to grow into compassion and action, because there was no teacher, no friend, no one like you who by action or example quietly inspired or showed them how to look up rather than down.

And what must we teach this next generation if not also our own? What is the perspective without which their progress is impossible? I say it is this: that civil rights today is, as it has always been in human history, a struggle for the human conscience, and that we all have a stake in that struggle. So when an African American stands up for a quality integrated education, he stands up for all of us. When a Latina stands for the chance to elect a candidate of her choice, she stands for all of us. When a person who uses a wheelchair stands for access to a public building, she stands for all of us. When a Jew stands against those who violate and desecrate his place of worship, he stands for all of us.

Civil rights is still about affirming basic values and aspirations as a nation. It’s still about good citizenship. And it’s still about the perennial American challenge to reach out to one another--across the artificial and arbitrary barrier of race, across gender, across ethnicity, across disability and class and religion and sexual orientation and maybe, most of all, across our fear and hopelessness to seize our common humanity and see our stake in that.

Let history record that we in our time faced our challenges remembering who we are and believing finally in that old adage that we are more than our brother’s keeper: that on this earth, we are his savior and he is ours.