Well-Intended, Faulty Tools Must Go

“I have a dream,” said the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 34 years ago, King argued eloquently for a color blind society - one in which Americans would not be denied jobs, admission to school or access to public places just because they were black.

But in the years since King spoke those words, instead of doing all they could to demolish distinctions of race, government agencies have emphasized them, over and over. No wonder divisions between races remain; it’s a miracle they’re not wider.

Now, at last, things are changing. There’s mounting evidence that the days of counting by race may be numbered.

Two trends are accelerating simultaneously - one social, one legal. The first is that more and more blacks are marrying whites, and the lines between the races are fading. The second is that underpinnings of affirmative action - reverse discrimination in favor of blacks and against whites - are crumbling.

In 1993, one in eight African American marriages included a white spouse. Since 1970, the number of children in homes with a mother and father of different races has quadrupled. Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute says mixed-race kids may be “the best hope for the future of American race relations.”

The trend could lead, as Jim Sleeper writes in Harper’s, to the most pleasing result of all: “the implosion of the identity of blackness - and, with it, of whiteness.”

The Office of Management and Budget will soon decide whether to recommend a “multiracial” box on government forms. And Rep. Tom Petri, R-Wis., has introduced legislation he calls the “Tiger Woods Bill” to require such a check-off in the next Census.

Woods, the sensational young golfer, considers himself multiracial. He told Oprah Winfrey, “Growing up, I came up with this name: I’m “Cablinasian”’ - since his heritage is one-eighth Caucasian, one-fourth black, one-eighth American Indian, one-fourth Chinese and one-fourth Thai.

In this rich stew, he is not much different from other Americans; nearly all of us are gloriously mixed and the better for it, genetically and culturally. We should be celebrating the beauty of each melange. Instead, the tyranny of government racial policies forces us to define ourselves as white, black, Hispanic or Asian. The purpose may be benign (to track the progress of minorities) but the effect is vicious (to reinforce strict racial identity, the way segregationists did).

If a “multiracial” box becomes an option, I will likely check it off myself (my Russian forebears surely mixed with all sorts out on the steppes). More logically, Robert George, who is black and an aide to Speaker Newt Gingrich, asks, “Has the time come to dispense with the boxes altogether?” At any rate, the new box will mark the beginning of the end for the the whole delicate and ridiculous architecture of race-counting.

And don’t the political beneficiaries of the current system know it! Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus are in a panic. Letting people opt out of traditional race categories “just blurs everything,” she says. “I don’t think (people who want a multiracial option) are making the connection about how it could affect how they’re represented, or who’s being an advocate for them when they get mistreated.”

Gee, maybe they don’t want to be represented as blacks, Hispanics or Asians but as Americans or Californians or Angelenos.

But the main effect of the multiracial check-off is that it will doom affirmative action, already on the run. Last month, law schools in Texas and California, which have just barred race as a consideration in admissions, reported a sharp decline in the number of blacks and Hispanics they were accepting into next year’s classes.

The UCLA School of Law, for instance, accepted only 21 African American applicants, down from 104 last year. While these figures are sad, they’re also refreshing. Ward Connerly, a black member of the University of California board of Regents, welcomed them as the public unmasking of an “artificially engineered system of preferences that has been propping up diversity. … If we really want to help those black and Latino kids, we will give them some tough love and get them channeled into being able to compete.”

Connerly led the successful fight for the California Civil Rights Initiative, which bans discrimination by state agencies - including the admissions system that moved blacks and Latinos ahead of whites and Asians who scored higher.

Just last week, a federal judge ruled that an effort by the Arlington (Va.) School Board to achieve racial diversity was unconstitutional because it discriminated by race. Applicants to the popular Arlington Traditional School were assigned numbers in a random lottery, but the board decided to bump 11 white kids who had won in favor of blacks. The judge said no.

Meanwhile, the Clinton administration is hustling to craft new rules to preserve affirmative action in contracting, despite new court decisions that severely limit the practice. The president also wants to launch a “national discussion about race” this month. But he can’t keep ducking the big question that King posed and Connerly echoes.

“On the one hand,” said Connerly, a man of guts and principle, “there are those who say that race matters, that we have to use race to get beyond race. Then, there are those of us who believe, as President Kennedy said in 1963, “Race has no place in American life or law.”’ It’s time to choose.

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