Room At The Top - For Improvement

Last year this time, the president was assembling allies and consulting his cadre before the official opening of his national initiative on race.

In case you missed it, and most of us did, the idea was to put the race issue back on our personal agendas. We were going to reason together and seek solutions for our common problems and, in the end, we would begin to see each other even as we see ourselves.

He had taken to calling it America’s “Third Great Revolution,” and maybe that should have been enough to tell us the president was in a different place from most of America on this subject. I don’t think anyone expected his “initiative” would end with people of every race, creed and color joining hands to sing “Kumbaya.”

But America’s Third Great Revolution ended with a more feeble whimper than even the most jaded cynics expected. It sputtered to a stop last week without a single shot fired or prisoner taken. Or even an inch of ground gained.

The third and final forum of the president’s dialogue on race was staged on the Public Broadcasting System’s “Newshour with Jim Lehrer” and featured a lot of nice people saying all the right things about race. The president kept the discussion moving, and, before anyone knew it, the hour and the year were over.

The high point of this roundtable discussion came when one of the panelists, Kay James, who is dean of Pat Robertson’s Regent University, said that she is persuaded that “racism is evil.”

Evil. In the moral relativity of the political realm that the leader of the Free World presides over, very little is ever labeled evil. So the president, who is not on the most familiar terrain when he defends the moral high ground, just sidestepped that one.

But she was onto something, something that Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua met head-on in his missive, “Healing Racism Through Faith and Truth” earlier this year. Without labeling anyone a racist, he called racism a “moral plague … a wound to the soul.”

“Racism and Christian life,” the cardinal declared, “are incompatible.”

Racism is incompatible with any kind of spiritual life or with common everyday decency. If we think we can harbor resentments toward people of a certain race or religion and still see ourselves as decent people, we’re in denial.

A lot of us are in denial in America. Some of us have never had a relationship with a person of another race, but we know all about them or we know as much as we want to.

That’s the part that the president actually believed he could change. He seemed sincerely to believe that all he had to do was explode a few myths and expose a few stereotypes, and most of us would say, “Oh, wow. I didn’t know they were just like me.”

That’s what he told us last year when he assembled a small group of black columnists in the White House Cabinet Room to try out his spiel. This was a day before he headed off to San Diego to make the speech that marked the official opening of his national dialogue on race.

“With racism,” he told us, “the enemy is always ignorance and fear.

“I want to promote education to explicitly expose myths that aren’t true and salient realities that are. … It’s a huge challenge.”

But he has no idea how huge. The president can be forgiven for misjudging the scope of the problem. He is a man who seems genuinely to enjoy his social and business contacts with people of other races. These interactions have broadened him and enriched his life.

Many of us have not had that experience. When we start to see too many people of other colors and creeds, we start hiding our stuff and protecting our turf.

Because racism, as the cardinal pointed out, “operates in strategies of self-interest.”

In the end, there was nothing in the president’s initiative for any of us. He couldn’t restore affirmative action programs that eased admission into colleges, careers and other opportunities for women and minorities. He couldn’t promise an absolute end to preferences for those who see them as inherently unfair.

All he could do was try to bring us together around the table for a frank discussion that most of us grew weary of years ago.