Барак Обама - The Audacity of Hope

Many Americans disagree with me on this as a matter of principle, arguing that our institutions should never take race into account, even if it is to help victims of past discrimination. Fair enough — I understand their arguments, and don’t expect the debate to be settled anytime soon. But that shouldn’t stop us from at least making sure that when two equally qualified people — one minority and one white — apply for a job, house, or loan, and the white person is consistently preferred, then the government, through its prosecutors and through its courts, should step in to make things right.

We should also agree that the responsibility to close the gap can’t come from government alone; minorities, individually and collectively, have responsibilities as well. Many of the social or cultural factors that negatively affect black people, for example, simply mirror in exaggerated form problems that afflict America as a whole: too much television (the average black household has the television on more than eleven hours per day), too much consumption of poisons (blacks smoke more and eat more fast food), and a lack of emphasis on educational achievement.

Then there’s the collapse of the two-parent black household, a phenomenon that is occurring at such an alarming rate when compared to the rest of American society that what was once a difference in degree has become a difference in kind, a phenomenon that reflects a casualness toward sex and child rearing among black men that renders black children more vulnerable — and for which there is simply no excuse.

Taken together, these factors impede progress. Moreover, although government action can help change behavior (encouraging supermarket chains with fresh produce to locate in black neighborhoods, to take just one small example, would go a long way toward changing people’s eating habits), a transformation in attitudes has to begin in the home, and in neighborhoods, and in places of worship. Community-based institutions, particularly the historically black church, have to help families reinvigorate in young people a reverence for educational achievement, encourage healthier lifestyles, and reenergize traditional social norms surrounding the joys and obligations of fatherhood.

Ultimately, though, the most important tool to close the gap between minority and white workers may have little to do with race at all. These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts: downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy. (Blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends, since they are more reliant on blue-collar manufacturing jobs and are less likely to live in suburban communities where new jobs are being generated.) And what would help minority workers are the same things that would help white workers: the opportunity to earn a living wage, the education and training that lead to such jobs, labor laws and tax laws that restore some balance to the distribution of the nation’s wealth, and health-care, child care, and retirement systems that working people can count on.

This pattern — of a rising tide lifting minority boats — has certainly held true in the past. The progress made by the previous generation of Latinos and African Americans occurred primarily because the same ladders of opportunity that built the white middle class were for the first time made available to minorities as well. They benefited, as all people did, from an economy that was growing and a government interested in investing in its people. Not only did tight labor markets, access to capital, and programs like Pell Grants and Perkins Loans benefit blacks directly; growing incomes and a sense of security among whites made them less resistant to minority claims for equality.

The same formula holds true today. As recently as 1999, the black unemployment rate fell to record lows and black income rose to record highs not because of a surge in affirmative action hiring or a sudden change in the black work ethic but because the economy was booming and government took a few modest measures — like the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit — to spread the wealth around. If you want to know the secret of Bill Clinton’s popularity among African Americans, you need look no further than these statistics.

But these same statistics should also force those of us interested in racial equality to conduct an honest accounting of the costs and benefits of our current strategies. Even as we continue to defend affirmative action as a useful, if limited, tool to expand opportunity to underrepresented minorities, we should consider spending a lot more of our political capital convincing America to make the investments needed to ensure that all children perform at grade level and graduate from high school — a goal that, if met, would do more than affirmative action to help those black and Latino children who need it the most. Similarly, we should support targeted programs to eliminate existing health disparities between minorities and whites (some evidence suggests that even when income and levels of insurance are factored out, minorities may still be receiving worse care), but a plan for universal health-care coverage would do more to eliminate health disparities between whites and minorities than any race-specific programs we might design.

An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn’t just good policy; it’s also good politics. I remember once sitting with one of my Democratic colleagues in the Illinois state senate as we listened to another fellow senator — an African American whom I’ll call John Doe who represented a largely inner-city district — launch into a lengthy and passionate peroration on why the elimination of a certain program was a case of blatant racism. After a few minutes, the white senator (who had one of the chamber’s more liberal voting records) turned to me and said, “You know what the problem is with John? Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white.”

In defense of my black colleague, I pointed out that it’s not always easy for a black politician to gauge the right tone to take — too angry? not angry enough? — when discussing the enormous hardships facing his or her constituents. Still, my white colleague’s comment was instructive. Rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America; even the most fair-minded of whites, those who would genuinely like to see racial inequality ended and poverty relieved, tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization — or race-specific claims based on the history of race discrimination in this country.

Some of this has to do with the success of conservatives in fanning the politics of resentment — by wildly overstating, for example, the adverse effects of affirmative action on white workers. But mainly it’s a matter of simple self-interest. Most white Americans figure that they haven’t engaged in discrimination themselves and have plenty of their own problems to worry about. They also know that with a national debt approaching $9 trillion and annual deficits of almost $300 billion, the country has precious few resources to help them with those problems.

As a result, proposals that solely benefit minorities and dissect Americans into “us” and “them” may generate a few short-term concessions when the costs to whites aren’t too high, but they can’t serve as the basis for the kinds of sustained, broad-based political coalitions needed to transform America. On the other hand, universal appeals around strategies that help all Americans (schools that teach, jobs that pay, health care for everyone who needs it, a government that helps out after a flood), along with measures that ensure our laws apply equally to everyone and hence uphold broadly held American ideals (like better enforcement of existing civil rights laws), can serve as the basis for such coalitions — even if such strategies disproportionately help minorities.