After Color Coding: Forging a New American Identity

NEW YORK —  ‘In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race,” wrote Justice Harry A. Blackmun in the 1978 Bakke case. “And in order to treat some persons equally, we must first treat them differently.”

Fair enough. But the tricky word is “first,” which some seem to think means “always.” For it has taken us 19 years to rediscover how deeply official racial labeling can work its way into Americans’ hearts and minds, driving them to define citizenship foremost by skin color or surname.

Consider the recent clamor for yet another race label, for mixed-race people, on the next U.S. census. “We do not want to be the ‘check-all-that-applies’ community. We want to be the ‘multiracial’ community,” said Susan Graham, president of Project RACE, a Georgia-based organization protesting a federal task force’s recommendation against adding “multiracial” to the census list.

But if the child of, say, a Chinese American mother and an Anglo American father shares a “community” with the child of an American Jewish mother and an African American father, that community already has a name. It is called America. The last thing we need is a new racial banner to wave as Americans answer the census.

If anything, we need no racial designations--or fewer people checking the ones we have. Skin colors mean a lot less now than they did 50 or even 20 years ago. No longer do they automatically signal particular political or cultural affiliations, especially in cities being deluged by new immigrants whose understandings of race are more fluid and ecumenical than American blacks’ and whites’.

True, race has been such a source of injustice in U.S. history that “a strong case can be made for continuing to monitor group differences in education, employment, health, housing, and crime,” write Stephan and Abigail M. Thernstrom in “America in Black and White.” Yet, the authors note, government has been able to enforce laws forbidding discrimination against Jews and homosexuals without tracking religious and sexual orientations. It hasn’t had to micromanage people that way, with ever more labeling and litigation based on the assumption that everyone is operating in bad faith.

Against daunting odds, Americans have found better civic and cultural strategies to reduce the anti-Semitism and homophobia woven into American life. The civil rights movement, too, used to be better at practicing such a politics of persuasion. But the movement has faltered, losing moral capital and resorting more and more to courts and regulatory bureaucracies. It has constructed a race industry that assumes that since too few whites will ever be fair to blacks, we must parcel out the commonweal by race in separate hiring and contracting procedures, college admissions and election districting.

This micromanaging of society along race lines is the essence of “liberal racism.” By blurring clear universal standards for all individuals in order to reach racial goals, liberal racism demeans its intended beneficiaries by denying them the hard-won satisfactions of real growth and achievement. By passing off their deficiencies as “cultural differences,” it revives 19th-century notions about race that are patently racist. This color-coding of America no longer curbs discrimination; it invites it. It does not expose racism; it recapitulates and sometimes reinvents it.

Black leaders who support such policies opposed a census “multiracial” category not because they want less race consciousness and loyalty, but because they fear defections by people who checked “black” in the past, though they are racially mixed. In this view, blacks must keep their numbers up, or else they will never secure a fair share of American life.

That strategy isn’t working. The Thernstroms show that the rates of black advance in education and income were as substantial between 1940 and 1960 as they have been under affirmative action, and there is no reason whatever to believe that, without it, those rates would have slowed. The explosive growth of the black middle class in the 1960s rested on those early gains and improved white attitudes. Without affirmative action, blacks’ advancement strategies would have been different--more small businesses and fewer government jobs, for example--and, arguably, more productive.

The irony is that the civil rights movement once understood that civic culture and polity cannot be blueprinted or parceled out along race lines, and that individual dignity is affirmed and discrimination is best fought when we refuse to see one another as mere delegates of subcultures or races. Proud though we may be of our ethnic and other roots, we transcend them at times to share in a larger American civic culture that is “thick” enough to live in on its own raceless terms.

Impossible for blacks? On the contrary. Last year saw decisive white support for black representatives in white-majority Southern congressional districts, for example, and critical (26%) black support for California’s Proposition 209 against affirmative action--two blows against the race industry of government color coders, racial activists, corporate diversity trainers, professors of blackness and purveyors of other racialist epistemologies in the academy and the media.

Equally confounding to color coders, the growing black middle class has been fighting busing and black inner-city encroachments on its turf with a ferocity that makes Archie Bunker’s grousing seem, well, pale. For them--in that context, at least--race problems count a bit less than class problems.

Meanwhile, more than 2 million young Americans are already a generation or two removed from any clear racial designation. That’s why the federal census task force was right to reject any effort to herd mixed-race people into a multiracial corral.

Some people find this a hard lesson to learn. Even while rightly recommending against a “multiracial” designation, for example, the task force wrongly urged dropping the already existing category “other.” Refusing to pin a racial label on oneself need not mean renouncing racially distinct experiences any more than one renounces one’s religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation because they are not a census category. It would mean declaring that government should get out of the racial and cultural heritage business.

Nor need refusing to accept an official racial identity mean that one thinks that racism no longer exists; it’s to say, as those Southern white voters did, that we are sliding away from making race the organizing principle of our political and civic life. Since blacks and whites have been locked in a 300-year physical and psychic embrace, many aren’t ready to let go because they have let the terms of past racial encounters define what they are. But neither blackness nor whiteness in America harbors any lasting political meanings aside from the ones created in confrontation with one another under a racist dispensation.

Beneath the race industry’s radar, a new American identity is being forged. With good leadership, it will spawn a rebellion that sends today’s reigning “diversity” doctrine into the past. Precisely because the country is becoming more racially, ethnically and religiously complex than color-coding can comprehend, liberals, who were once the framers of great public narratives, should be working overtime to identify and inculcate some shared American values and customs that will keep us flourishing as the democracy “beyond race” that Blackmun envisioned.