Speech concerning Affirmative Action, 1999

1 Copyright 1999 by Julian Bond AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Speaking about the loss of her family members to the Holocaust, Secretary of State Madeline K Allbright said the search for justice: "...requires that painful memories be revisted, easy evasions confronted and inconvenient questions asked and answred."¹ Those same torturous restrictions apply to discussions of race in America - we must confront painful memories, easy evasions, and inconvient questions. This is never an easy subject to discuss. How do we tell the truth about the reality of our past and present-day race relations without hurting someone's feelings? Or making someone feel as if they are being blamed for something they are sure they did not do? Can we admit to a centuries-old system of racial preferences for whites, a vast affirmative action program fueled by white supremacy that began when the first Europeans stepped on these shores, continuing until today? Can we accept the truth that discrimination is an every day fact of life in modern day America, and that it produces enormous benefits for many - even for those who honestly believe themselves to be free of racist thought and action? Nonetheless, that is where we must begin. I want to focus on the battle over affirmative action. While my remarks will center on discrimination against black Americans, they are really about our common struggle to achieve a more perfect union. We meet at time when the leadership of the House and Senate are more hostile to fairness than at any time in recent memory.

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They have become the running dogs of the wacky, radical right. The signals are clear. The former Speaker of the House of Representatives filed a lawsuit to keep racial minorities from being fairly counted in the next Census. The present Speaker was co-sponsor, in the last Congress, of a resolution to eliminate all federal equal opportunity programs. The United States Senate recently mugged a black Supreme Court Justice from Missouri, keeping intact a record that saw non-white judicial candidates twice as likely not to be confirmed as their white counterparts. And the Majority Leader of the United States Senate regularly fraternized with the leadership of a white supremacist organization, speaking to their conferences, endorsing their goals, and hosting their leadership in his Senate office in Washington. The worlds wants to become Y2K compliant; they seem to be KKK complaint. We want guarantees of justice; they give us pious lectures on moral uplift. We want protection from an epidemic of gun violence; they make us read the Ten Commandments. We want to get guns off the streets; they want them in churches and schools. We want a budget that provides for all; they want to balance their budget on the backs of the poor. We want public schools that educate every child; they want public welfare for private schools. We want to keep our cities from burning; they want to keep the flag burning. We want justice and fair play; they tell us we're playing the race card. We meet at a time when affirmative action is under attack -

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even by those who benefited from it most, even affirmative action's poster child - Justice Clarence Thomas. Affirmative action created the sizeable middle class that constitutes one-third of all black Americans today. In the late 1960s, the wages of black women in the textile industry tripled. From 1970 to 1990, the number of black police officers, black lawyers and black doctors doubled; black electricians and black college students tripled; black bank tellers more than quadrupled. If you think affirmative action stigmatizes black people, ask yourself this question - would you rather have a good job and be thought unqualified, or be though unqualified and not have a good job? Look at it this way - it is the fourth quarter of a football game between the white team and the black team. The white team is ahead 145 to 3. They have been cheating since the game began. The white teams owns the ball, the uniforms, the field, the goalposts, and the referees. All of a sudden the white quarterback, who feels badly about things that happened before he entered the game, turns to the black team and says: "Hey, follows, can't we just play fair?" Of course, playing fair is double speak for locking the status quo in place, permanently fixing inequality as part of the American scene. In their topsy-turvy world, "fair" never means "fair"; it means the game will go on, the score will remain the same, and the team that is behind will never catch up. The late great jurist Frank M. Johnson, Jr., of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, understood this. He told a commencement at Boston University years ago; "Religious differences, race differences, sex differences, age differences and political differences are not the same. It is no mark of intellectual soundness to treat them as if they were. Moreover, if the life of the law has been experience, then the law should be realistic enough to treat certain issues as

4 (center aligned) special; as racism is special in American history. A judiciary that cannot declare that is of little value." Unfortunately, today we have a Supreme Court that not only cannot declare that, it cannot even see the differene between race as a burden or a benefit. As Justice Thomas put it in his concurring opinion which struck down federal minority contracting programs: "[I]t is irrevlevant whether a government's racial classifications are drawn by those who wish to oppress a race or by those who have a sincere desire to help those thought to be disadvantaged. ^"2 Whether race is burden or benefit is irrelevant to these theorists; that is what they mean when they speak of being color-blind. They are color-blind all right, blind to the consequences of being the wrong color in America today. Or, as Justice Stevens put it with more eloquence in his dissent in the same case: "There is no moral or constitutional equivalence between a policy that is designed to perpetuate a caste system and one that seeks to eradicate racial subordination. ^"3 Justice Ruth Ginsburg, one of the two Clinton appointees who made up half of the minority in Adarand, emphasized the "persistence of racial inequality" and the need "to act affirmatively, not only to end discirmination, but also to counteract discrimination's lingering effects. ^"4 "Bias both conscious and unconscious", Justice Ginsburg wrote, "reflecting traditional and unexamined patterns of thought, keeps up barriers that must come down if equal opportunity and nondiscrimination are ever genuinely to become this nation's law and practice.^"5 A short time ago, the Los Angeles Times rid the word "ghetto" from its lexicon, but we have not eliminated the ghetto from our reality.

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The ghetto's foundation is institutionalized white supremacy in the real estate and banking industries; its pilings aare individual state-sanctioned prejudice and discrimination. The latest census tells us that 30% of the nation's blacks still live in near-totla segregation - with more than 9 million still living in neighborhoods that are at least 90% black. Northern cities on average are severely segregated. At the average rate of change acorss all northern areas, it will take 77 years to just achieve a moderate level of segregation. Southern metropolitan areas are less segregated than those in the North are, but it will take 36 years for them to reduce their segregation to the moderate range. "Compared with poor whites, poor blacks are more likely to live in neighborhoods where a high proportion of the residents are poor. ^"6 They interact mainly with others who are poor, who share their disadvantage. They live, squeezed together, in less than standard housing, in neighborhoods that have been denuded of essential services. They shop at stores owned by merchants geared to do business with a poor clientele. Their neighborhoods are economically segregated, bereft of opportunity, out of sight and often out of mind. Their children attend schools only with other poor children. As the New Jersey Supreme Court has said, "They face, through no fault of their own, a life of poverty and isolation that most of us cannot begin to understand and appreciate.^"7 In America today, compared with a white child, a black child is one and a half times more likely to: -grow up in a family whose head did not finish high school. That child is two times as likely to: - be born to a teenaged mother, be unemployed as a teenager and unemployed as an adult. That child is two and a half times more likely to: - be born at low birthweight and to die during the first year of life.