November 26, 1997 -- Round Two: Concluding RemarksNovember 13, 1997
Race -- meaning, mostly, the relationship between Caucasians and African-American descendants of slaves -- is commonly described as the most difficult, troubling issue in American life. This is nothing new: the race issue was even more troubling in the nineteenth century, when it was the cause of our bloodiest war. The century that is now ending began with a proclamation by W.E.B. Du Bois -- "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line" -- the prescience of which not many people would dispute.
Throughout American history, policies that were supposed to solve the race problem have been put into place -- and have failed. The Constitution's three-fifths rule, the ban on the slave trade, the limits put on the expansion of slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the civil-rights revolution -- all, in the minds of their proponents, were supposed to get American race relations to a point of equipoise. But they did not.
Lemann is The Atlantic Monthly's national correspondent and the author of The Promised Land (1991).
Dinesh D'Souza
A research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, D'Souza is the author of The End of Racism (1995).
Christopher Edley Jr.
A professor of law and the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, Edley served as special counsel to President Clinton for the White House review of affirmative action and is currently a special advisor to the President for the White House Initiative on Race. He is the author of Not All Black and White (1996).
Glenn C. Loury
A professor of economics and the Director of the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University, Loury is the author of One by One, From the Inside Out (1995). His article "The Conservative Line on Race" appears in the November, 1997, issue of The Atlantic.
From the archives:
An interview with Jim Sleeper, author of Liberal Racism, who says it's time to end the relentless color-coding of public life.
Seminal essays by Atlantic contributors Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Previous Roundtables:
The most disturbing thought about all this is that the real problem is simply deep, abiding, insoluble ethnocentrism: that the state of nature is for races not to get along and that there's nothing American policymakers can do about it. Most of us, however, probably take the more optimistic view that the United States has the ability to create a culture that can triumph over ethnic hostilities -- even if we are still a long step away from having done so. At the other end of the spectrum of opinion is the view that animates Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom's new book, America in Black and White, which Glenn C. Loury reviews in the November issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The Thernstroms say that the American race problem is in fact well on its way to being solved, and they imply that most public commentators are unwilling to acknowledge how much progress has been made.If there is a race problem today, what, precisely, is it? Our participants in this discussion will have their own answers, but I would say that ever since African-Americans got full legal equality in the 1960s, the main problem has been the same: the deep inequality of condition that remains. This problem can be divided into two parts. First, the dramatically worst-off places in the country are all-black, all-poor neighborhoods -- mostly in big cities, with bad schools, few two-parent families, and high rates of poverty, crime, and unemployment. Second, there is still a substantial, though narrowing, gap in economic status between blacks and whites overall. I suspect that at least one of our panelists will say that inequality of condition is not a problem as long as we have equality of opportunity; nonetheless, racial inequality does exist and everyone notices it. Additionally there is the overarching problem of race relations in the literal sense: a persistent hostility between blacks and whites at least some of the time that they come into contact, or even discuss each other from a distance.
This year President Clinton appointed a commission on race relations, with a not-very-specific mandate to look broadly at the issue. It is now at work, with the help of one of our panelists, Christopher Edley Jr. Affirmative action is a bigger public issue than it has ever been, mainly because it has been intensely under attack for the past several years. A major Supreme Court case involving a New Jersey school district's laying off a white teacher instead of a black one, an executive-branch review of all federal affirmative-action policies, and several state initiatives and Congressional legislation that would ban affirmative action entirely -- are all pending. There is more high-level official attention being paid to race relations than at any time since the 1960s.
As for what is going on in race relations itself, let us turn to our distinguished panelists for their views. I'll start the discussion by asking a couple of questions:
- Where do you stand on the question of how good or bad things are right now?
- Should equality of condition between the races be a public-policy goal?
- Will the American public accept explicitly race-based policies of any kind?
November 26, 1997DINESH D'SOUZA | GLENN C. LOURY |
Introduction and opening questions by Nicholas Lemann
Round One -- posted on November 13, 1997
- Dinesh D'Souza: Opening Remarks
- Glenn C. Loury: Opening
Remarks
- Christopher Edley Jr.: Opening Remarks
- Selected Reader Responses
- Dinesh D'Souza: Concluding Remarks
- Glenn C. Loury: Concluding Remarks
- Christopher Edley Jr.: Concluding Remarks
- Nicholas Lemann: Concluding Remarks
Copyright © 1997 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
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