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"Of all forms of mental activity, the most difficult
to induce even in the minds of the young, who may
be presumed not to have lost their flexibility, is the
art of handling the same bundle of data as before,
but placing them in a new system of relations with
one another by giving them different framework."
(Herbert Butterfield, The Origins Of Modern Science)
Race has been America's biggest problem ever since Europeans "discovered" the New World. Race festered during the colonial period. Race complicated independence. Race impeded the "more perfect union" sought by the Constitutional Convention. The Civil War nearly destroyed the United States. Even after slavery ended, race continued to be a very sore spot. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, our political vocabulary was enriched with terms like "Jim Crow laws," "segregation," and "separate but equal."
Since the middle of the twentieth century there have been serious efforts to fix America's racial problems. School desegregation was ordered by the Supreme Court in 1954. A major Civil Rights Act was enacted in 1964, and an equally important Voting Rights Act in 1965. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established and "affirmative action" to end treatment based on race was mandated in employment.
Two generations of serious efforts to do something about race and racism have produced major changes in the United States. Most of the more gross manifestations of segregation have been swept away. However there is still a general and deeply-felt unhappiness about race relations Expressions of this unhappiness can be found in the editorials, op-ed columns, and letters-to-the- editor in every major newspaper.
Dissatisfaction about racial matters is reflected in action as well as talk. The Rodney King affair--the merciless beating of a black man by white policemen video-taped by a passer-by, the acquittal of the accused officers, the ensuing race riot in parts of Los Angeles--speaks louder than words. The California drive for Proposition 209, outlawing racial quotas and other manifestations of affirmative action, indicates the exasperation of many white people with the situation and with actions that have been taken to try to do something about it.
The trials of black athletic superstar O.J. Simpson for the alleged murder of his former wife, a white woman, brought to the surface once again the deep divisions of opinion and perception along racial lines in the U.S. Many black people, assuming that "white justice" is an oxymoron, cheered Simpson's acquittal on criminal charges; many white people, assuming that where there's smoke there's fire, booed the acquittal and maintained that it was an injustice.
Depressing data about unemployment, illegitimacy rates, criminal convictions, and imprisonment among black as compared with white people draw sharply different interpretations. Many white people see the data as an indication that black people are pathological. Many black people see the same data as evidence of centuries of maltreatment and racial oppression.
There was once a joke about Brazil, today a booming country. "Brazil is the land of the future," said the joke. "It always has been, and it always will be." Will America's racial problems ever be solved? They were not solved in the past. They have not been solved in the present. Is it time to give up and admit that the problem of race can never be fixed in the future, no matter how hard we try as a nation to do so?
The following story is true. It took place in 1990, after forty years of major national reforms directed at race relations. It took place in a small, private, church-related, midwestern liberal arts college that had been founded before the Civil War by idealists who were profoundly opposed to slavery. This college had always prided itself on admitting students without regard to their race or, for that matter, their gender. The names of the chief participants have been changed. Gung Ho College, as we will refer to the school, is also a fictitious name.
Elmer Gibson, the choir conductor at Gung Ho had been a music professor there since 1964. He was retiring at the end of the 1989-1990 academic year after a very outstanding career. His choirs had sung at weekly chapel services at Gung Ho, at special concerts on campus, around the state, and in other parts of the United States. Gibson had even taken the choir to Europe once.
Professor Gibson wanted to do one more choir tour before he retired. After consulting with choir members he decided to tour several states in the American South. He started immediately contacting local churches which would sponsor concerts along the tour route. He also worked out agreements under which he and choir members would be put up overnight by families in the churches where they would be performing. At Gung Ho College, money did not grow on trees. Some of the students came from families that were not very flush, either, and Gibson felt this was a good way to keep costs down.
As luck would have it, Sam Childs, the minister at one of the churches which agreed to host a concert, was himself a Gung Ho graduate. Childs' church was in a small town in rural Georgia, a town in which race relations were not good. A comment by a church board member--who wanted to know if any of the students in the choir were black--got to worrying Childs. What if some choir members were black and he assigned them to stay in homes where they would not be treated respectfully? The minister realized that some of his church members might be a problem here. Childs contacted Elmer Gibson, explained the situation, and asked the professor to identify any black members before the choir arrived. Then, the minister felt, he could arrange in advance to place the black students where they would be assured decent treatment, perhaps in his own home.
Professor Gibson wrote back to Childs naming the two choir members who were black. He gave his handwritten draft to the departmental secretary, Mona O'Brien, to type. O'Brien, however, regarded the letter, which singled out two students on the basis of their race and named them as such to the minister, as racist and incompatible with the historic ideals and practices of Gung Ho College. She took the matter to the music department chairman, a very junior member of the faculty, Jerald Kinney.
The inexperienced Kinney, instead of discussing the matter with Elmer Gibson, went instead to a college administrator, Harold Anderson, who was in charge of minority students advising. Anderson was a thoughtful and cautious person who did not jump to conclusions, but he in turn discussed the situation with a very radical black woman who was currently interning with the college chaplain. The intern, disposed to interpret everything that happened in the worst way possible, proceeded to do so in this case.
On the small Gung Ho campus, it did not take long for the situation to get out of control. Somebody contacted top administrators about the case and word "got out" somehow to the students. Very shortly a racially mixed group of students stormed into the administration building and began a sit-in in the grand old style to protest racism on the part of Elmer Gibson and Gung Ho College!
The internal political situation at Gung Ho was confused, to say the least. The college president, Guy Fox, had only come to Gung Ho a few months earlier and had not yet been formally inaugurated. The academic dean, Walter Cooley, had been around longer, and had served as acting president the previous year while the search that eventually hired Guy Fox was going on. Some of the faculty had wanted Cooley to retain the presidency and were mad about the hiring of Fox. Other faculty resented the campaign they believed Cooley was waging to unseat the new president and get the job for himself and thought that the Dean should be thrown out. Under these circumstances, the top Gung Ho administrators did not need a scandal and were very uncertain what ought to be done about the student demonstration and a list of antiracist demands which had been presented by leaders of the black students involved.
Special faculty meetings considered proposals to censure Gibson; the situation was discussed from a wide variety of perspectives. At one meeting, Gibson was allowed to read a statement of his own perspectives on what he had done and why he had made the decisions that he did. The censure proposals were handily defeated, an outcome which led the faculty minority to conclude that Gung Ho College was hopelessly racist. A majority of the faculty did vote to express extreme unhappiness with Gibson's actions, but this did not appease those who thought it was just a rap on the knuckles when serious punishment was required.
After Guy Fox agreed on behalf of the college to most of the demands presented by black students, the sit-in in the administration building came to an end.
I present this story in some detail because it raises interesting questions about the state of race relations in the United States as the twentieth century approached its end. It is clear that some racism still exists in the U.S., probably a good deal of racism. It is also clear that some racists were involved in the situation surrounding the Gung Ho College choir. But exactly who and where were these racists?
Sam Childs, the small-church minister in rural Georgia, was clearly not himself a racist. His motive for contacting Elmer Gibson and asking about the make-up of the choir was the eminently non-racist, perhaps even anti-racist goal of assuring that choir members would be assigned to stay in homes in which they would be treated with complete hospitality.
Elmer Gibson, the Gung Ho choir conductor, was clearly not a racist, either. He, too, wanted his choir members to be treated politely, and this was why he wrote the letter answering the questions about students' race which had been raised by Sam Childs. The mere act of identifying specific individuals as black people, surely, was not racist in a society in which people were required by the government to state their own race when surveyed by the census as well as in many other situations. Racism, as we will see later, to a great extent is defined in terms of the intent with which people take an action, with their action's motive, and professor Gibson's motive for identifying the black students in his choir was completely non-racist.
Nor was Gung Ho College itself a racist institution. It had historically accepted black students and still did, as evidenced by the considerable number of black people who participated in the sit-in. In hiring and retaining Elmer Gibson the college had not done anything racist, unless Gibson himself could be considered a racist.
The racists in this situation were some of the members of a small church in rural Georgia. How do we get from this fact to an indictment of Elmer Gibson and of Gung Ho College as, themselves, racist?
Gibson's critics at the faculty meeting, among other things, said that he should have canceled the whole choir tour or at least the scheduled concert and overnight in the Georgia town, rather than taking his students, including the black students, into a racist situation. But there was no evidence that the situation at the church was racist in the sense that presented any danger of physical attacks on any of the choir members; even the minister, who knew his people, was concerned with more subtle questions of hospitality and politeness. He wanted to avoid anything which might make the black members of the choir uncomfortable.
Furthermore there were anti-racist arguments in favor of going ahead with the scheduled concert at the church. Perhaps it would be educational for the people of rural Georgia to see, before their own eyes, how white students and black students could work peacefully together, could cooperate to produce beautiful music, could be harmonious! The force of example is powerful indeed, and the choir could--by its very makeup--be that example.
Some students and faculty members argued that going forward with the planned concert would be wrong because one should not associate with racists. But there is a close analogy here to the idea 2000 years ago that one should not sit down with "sinners" and "tax-collectors" (the veriest low-life scum in New Testament times!). Of course there were strong counterarguments to be found by force of example in that same New Testament. And Gung Ho College, we must remember, is historically and currently associated with a Christian church. It is, by its own description, "a small Christian college." (To which one might feel like adding, after the Elmer Gibson affair, "For small Christians"!)
In Anglo-American law, a person accused of a crime is entitled to a presumption of innocence. There can be no conviction until guilt is proved "beyond any reasonable doubt." Perhaps there should be a similar principle in evaluating charges that one has behaved immorally.
But in the climate of 1990, just to be charged with racism suggested to many people that the accused, be it a choir conductor named Elmer Gibson or Gung Ho College, must be guilty. The climate of the times, in good liberal circles (and the faculty and administrative climate at Gung Ho was distinctly liberal!), suggested that anybody perverse enough to defend themselves against charges of racism practically proved their own guilt by that very act.
Let it be recalled that Elmer Gibson, the object of all the uproar, was scheduled to retire from Gung Ho just a few months in the future. Even if he had been the moral monster that some students and faculty members perceived, he would not have been around to do his evil deeds for much longer whether the faculty voted to censure him or not. From Gibson's point of view, though, the whole affair must have seemed like an example of the cynical old witticism: "no good deed goes unpunished"!
It is sobering that at the beginning of the final decade of the twentieth century, after decades of strenuous governmental efforts to eradicate racism, a dedicated professor and musician could be attacked so viciously for trying (as he himself saw it) to look out for the welfare of his students. Is there something about race that brings out the worst in people? What do we need to be doing differently?
Sometimes we need to change the entire way we think about a problem if we want to get anywhere with it. When the problem has been thought about for a long time, to no avail, this may be a signal that a changed orientation is needed. When major resources have been devoted to solving the problem, and still the problem won't go away, it may mean we need to change our approach. When talented people, strongly motivated by personal interest, noble ideals, or both, cannot figure out what to do about a problem, either the problem is unsolvable, or we need to think about it in a new way. Racism may be a current example of such a problem.
In Aristotelian physics, there was a horrible problem in explaining why an arrow keeps on moving even after the bowstring is no longer pressing against it and pushing it forward. For a thousand years, deep thinkers tried to come up with an explanation of the observed fact that the arrow does keep on moving even after it has disengaged from the bowstring. One of the better answers speculated that the vacuum created by the forward motion of the arrow attracted a flow of air from in front of the arrow, and that this flow of air then pushed the arrow forwards. Like all of the other answers that were produced to this question, however, this one does not make sense and does not hold up when closely scrutinized. This Aristotelian problem never was solved. The question itself turned out to be a nonsense one, all possible answers to which were therefore also nonsense.
In the modern physics associated with Isaac Newton, a new concept, that of inertia, emerged. In terms of this concept, bodies in motion remain in motion, and bodies at rest remain at rest, unless acted upon by some force. Since inertia applied to the arrow, it was now obvious why it kept on moving even after it was no longer being pushed by the bowstring. "Bodies in motion remain in motion." Now a new question came up: why doesn't the arrow keep on moving forever? And to this new question answers were not hard to find: air friction and gravitational motion towards the earth could explain why the arrow didn't continue moving indefinitely.
Major changes in our point of view are sometimes called "paradigm shifts" and sometimes called "scientific revolutions." (Footnote 1) There is significant difference between a scientific revolution and a political revolution. A scientific revolution is merely a change in the frame of reference within which we observe and think about things. Such a change can be very helpful in solving problems which could not be solved when looked at from some previously prevalent point of view, and as such a scientific revolution is a very good thing. Political revolutions, on the other hand, are changes in governmental institutions which are brought about by methods which are incompatible with the methods of change which are stipulated by existing arrangements. As we will see later, political revolutions are almost never a good idea.
This book will argue that America's racial problems cannot be put behind us until we look at them in a new way. It will argue that the current impasse is due largely to a widespread misunderstanding of the basic nature of government.
The essential nature of government can only be grasped if we understand how government has developed through time. This is not entirely a new idea. Most serious students of government are well aware that it is impossible to make any sense of today's government in England, for example, if we look at it entirely in the present tense. A hereditary monarch? A House of Lords? A democratically elected House of Commons? All of these at the same time?! No sane person would design such a monstrosity if creating a new government out of whole cloth. However each of the apparently motley assortment of institutions that, coexisting uneasily with one another comprise today's English government, developed in specific past circumstances in which their emergence made all sorts of sense. As I already noted, this fact is widely understood. But few people have noticed that the same principle applies to our ability to understand all government, not just the government of England.
As later chapters will show, sequence is critical in understanding the nature of government. We will see that government arises spontaneously, but in a very distressing form. Constitutions, which restrict what government can do by requiring it to comply with "the rule of law" and by democratizing it, do not arise spontaneously but require much purposeful and prolonged human effort. Government precedes the rule of law, and the rule of law, we will see, precedes democracy.
Our general lack of understanding of the nature of government makes it very difficult to govern, and even more difficult to control or reform it. It is therefore not at all surprising that even well-intended political actions often produce dreadful consequences.
The connection between our understanding of a situation and our ability to produce results that we desire can be vividly illustrated with an analogy employing an electric blanket. Imagine a married couple (to be a bit old-fashioned about it) whose bed has an electric blanket with dual controls. The heating elements are divided into two areas, his and hers, and a separate thermostat allows husband and wife to adjust the temperature of their own sides of the bed to their individual tastes.
But imagine that the cleaning service messed up when they made the bed this morning. They managed to put the thermostat controlling the temperature on his side of the bed on her side, and vice versa. Tonight, the happy couple turns in. She finds herself too cold and turns "her" thermostat up, which of course boosts the temperature on his side of the bed. Since he is now too warm, he turns down "his" thermostat, resulting in her side of the bed getting even colder. So she turns the control on her side up still further, and . . . ! In the extreme case, she would end up freezing to death, and he would be roasted alive. And it would all be because they both had incorrect concepts of how their bed was "organized."
Government, of course is much more complicated than the electric blanket situation. It is surprising that we have done as well as we have, given our basic lack of understanding of the general nature of government. Much of what we have achieved has been done by means of sheer trial and error rather than guided by any reliable understanding of what we are doing. It is, of course, better to stumble around blindly than to go efficiently in the wrong direction:
Can knowledge have no bound, but must advance,As the German poet Goethe commented once, "People throw themselves in politics, as they do on the sick-bed, from one side to the other in the belief that they can thus find a better position." This would not be a bad description of our efforts during the last fifty years to develop laws or norms to deal with our racial problems. Policies have often flipped suddenly from one extreme to the other, a sure sign that we do not understand what we are doing.
So far, to make us wish for ignorance?
And rather in the dark to grope our way,
Than, led by a false guide, to err by day? (Footnote 2)
Early in the civil rights period, for example, several major symphony orchestras were criticized for allegedly discriminating against black people when they auditioned new musicians. Since musicianship is largely a matter of sound, the symphonies satisfied their critics by agreeing to audition applicants on a "blind" basis. The applicants, as before, would play some music for the judges, but now they would sit behind a screen so that the judges could not see them. Since the judges could not see the person being auditioned, they could not be influenced by the race or gender of that person.
For some years, blind auditions satisfied the demands of civil rights advocates. But more recently, it was noticed that there were still very few black musicians in some leading symphony orchestras. Notably, the Detroit Symphony, residing in a city in which a considerable majority of the population was black, had only one or two black players. Some black members of the Michigan state legislature threatened to get that body to reduce the subsidy paid by the state government to the Detroit Symphony unless it increased the number of black players. But if auditions remained blind, there was nothing the management of the symphony could do to comply with this demand. Now they were under pressure from civil rights sources to abandon the blind auditions which had been adopted in order to satisfy earlier demands from the civil rights movement!
Another example: "Color blindness" was long a demand of civil rights advocates. Justice John Marshall Harlan (the Elder) (footnote 3) had called for such blindness in his famous dissenting opinion in the pernicious 1896 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. (In Plessy, the Court majority upheld mandatory segregation of the races in railroad passenger cars as long as the facilities provided were "separate but equal.") By the late 1960's, however, a leading law school casebook (footnote 4) on civil rights law deleted Harlan's call for colorblindness from its edited version of the case, in spite of the fact that this was probably the single most widely quoted comment from a dissenting opinion in the entire history of the Supreme Court. The reason for this "editing" was obvious: colorblindness was entirely incompatible with busing children from school to school to achieve "racial balance," indeed was incompatible with the very concept of racial balance to begin with. If you are "blind" to race, how can you tell if there is balance or not? (Footnote 5)
All of this thrashing around, all of this moving from one policy to its opposite, suggests that we are quite lost when we try to think our way through the problems posed by racism. It is therefore not surprising that in discussing racial issues, people have often invoked principles in a very unprincipled way. If a principle points to action that is currently desired, people will point to that principle as a sacred one. However if that same principle, in other circumstances, prohibits action that is currently desired, the very same people will pointedly ignore that principle and, perhaps, invoke some other principle which is completely incompatible with it.
The unprincipled invoking of principles is unfortunately all too common in political life in general, not just in the politics of race. And partisan, elective politics has no monopoly on this unhappy state of affairs. It can also be found in the courts of law and in the writing of legal commentators, as the colorblindness example recited above shows all too clearly.
Perhaps if we can reorient our thinking, in part by deepening our understanding of the basic nature of government, we can reduce the temptation of political actors to invoke principles in an unprincipled way. But even if political actors continue in their unprincipled ways, there is no need for political observers to imitate them in this respect. It is helpful to this end to remember a simple analogy:
political science:politics = criminology:crimeNot all criminologists are themselves criminals; political scientists--and indeed citizens in general-- are not politicians and need not succumb to the same temptations that politicians do.
It is always important to use concepts systematically if we want to get anywhere in our thinking. But it is especially important when we think about race. Race and our efforts to deal with it are an "acid test" not only for good government but also for our ability to think objectively and not get carried away with shallow passion.
Race and racism are very unpleasant and touchy subjects. Some years ago, after I had heard about the Elmer Gibson scandal and reflected on its implications, I decided to create a new political science class on racism. It seemed to me that the Gibson affair showed the urgent need for people to learn how to discuss race and racism in a civilized and productive way, and that the new course might contribute to this goal. My wife, a very astute observer of the world, suggested kindly that I rethink this decision. If I taught such a course, she warned, I would probably get into political hot water. I would not be content to recite the currently fashionable platitudes that are nearly mandatory in politically correct liberal academic circles. They might even try to break my tenure!
Fortunately, I have managed not to get into unmanageable trouble with the racism class. But my wife's warning was based on a generalization that is perfectly true. For me, though, this simply means that we need to redouble our efforts to develop clear, systematic concepts with which to think about the politics of race in ways which avoid jumping off the rails in our trains of thought.
One of the most troublesome things about political vocabulary in general, and about the vocabulary needed to discuss racial matters in particular, is that most of the key words have multiple, often conflicting meanings. I am thinking of words like "equality," "law," "opportunity," "discrimination," "segregation," "representation," and so forth. Later in our discussion, I will explain how the word "law," for example, actually is used to point to three wildly different concepts, and how easy it is to confuse these three concepts because we generally use the same word to point to all of them. For now, though, let me give one non-political example of multiple meanings pointed to by one word, and then an additional example from the vocabulary with which we discuss race and racism.
The word "door" can be used to point to two concepts that are almost diametrically opposed to each other. A "door" can be a hole in a wall through which one can go through. Thus we can say, "I saw John walk through this door thirty minutes ago." But the very same word can be employed to refer to an object used to block up an opening in a wall so that one cannot go through. Thus, "Jane was unable to enter the classroom because Security had forgotten to unlock the door."
Happily, in the case of "door" the two meanings are clearly distinct, and no one has interests or emotions which might incline them to confuse these meanings with each other. Unhappily, the same cannot be said for the language of politics, of which the language of race and racism is a very important subset.
"Segregation," for example, may refer to a situation in which people of different races are required to attend different schools, schools to which each student is assigned on the basis of his or her race. It is brought about by discriminatory treatment of individuals for the purpose of maintaining separateness (apartness, in South Africa: apartheid) and is entirely deliberate. Segregation in this sense was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954. The same word "segregation" has also been employed to describe an entirely different situation, one in which students of different races are not distributed in equal proportions in the various schools of a certain city. Thus if the overall population of Podunk is 25% black, but some public schools have 5% black students and others 95%, the schools are said to be segregated.
In the latter case, one possible explanation for the statistical state of affairs in the Podunk schools could be discriminatory assignment of students based on their race. But merely because there are differences in the percentage of black students from school to school does not prove that discriminatory treatment is going on, since there may be other explanations such as neighborhood residential patterns. The fact that these housing patterns may reflect past or even continuing racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing does not furnish any evidence that the school authorities are treating students in a discriminatory way.
Recognition that we are really talking about different things even when using the same word "segregation" is implied by the common distinction between "de jure" and "de facto" segregation. De jure, required by "law", segregation is the kind that was struck down in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. De facto, or statistical, segregation is what presently exists in most of the public schools of the United States.
Sloppy reporting in the mass media may reinforce people's natural tendency to confuse two concepts which are pointed to by the same word. When Time Magazine reported that U.S. schools are becoming "re-segregated," for example, it must have suggested to many people that the clock was being turned back to the pre-1954 era of segregation, which it manifestly was not.
Solving major problems usually requires keeping one's eye on the ball and not getting distracted by irrelevancies. If anything is going to be done about problems created by racism, it would be helpful if we could distinguish between genuine problems and situations which only appear to be problems. Then we would not need to waste scarce resources trying to fix things that aren't broke, thus releasing more resources with which to tackle the real problems. The more systematically we can think about and conceptualize problems of race, the better we will be able to keep our eye on the ball.
The argument of this book can be summarized in terms of a medical analogy. The patient is still sick after extensive and protracted treatment. This makes us wonder whether the treatment has been the correct one. Our doubts about the correctness of the treatment, in turn, make us skeptical about the diagnosis which led to the recommendation of the ineffective treatment in the first place. It is even possible that to some extent the current profile of the disease actually has been caused by the treatment itself.
Change has undoubtedly occurred in U.S. race relations during the last half century. A good deal of this change has been beneficial. But change as such is not always good, and not all of this change has been good. Conditions in certain parts of the black population have gotten worse during this half century. A rhetoric of "victimization" has begun to run rampant, which may sometimes turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy blinding some black people to actual opportunities to improve their lives. To be a "beneficiary" of certain kinds of help, such as "affirmative action," may actually be demeaning and undermine the confidence of some putative beneficiaries. Many black people, looking at the programs created by their friends, may wonder: With friends like these, who needs enemies?
As long as the civil rights movement focused on eliminating the legal rules which required segregation and unequal treatment of the races, it was on solid ground. It would not be unfair even to employ the cliche that it was on the side of the angels. I will argue, however, for reasons which will be presented in later chapters, that the civil rights movement lost its way when it began to support antidiscrimination laws. Such laws were not totally unprecedented in Anglo-American jurisprudence, but they had previously been limited to the arena of labor law, and only going back to the 1930's at that. The original antidiscrimination rules applied only to employers who discriminated against workers on grounds of their union membership or advocacy, so the impact of the rules---the damage done by them---was quite limited. Their biggest danger lay not in themselves, but in the dangerous precedent which was taken up by the civil rights movement.
We will argue that the antidiscrimination laws should be repudiated and repealed. But in doing this, we must be very careful not to allow reintroduction of Jim Crow rules, rules mandating segregation (de jure) and discrimination. It will turn out that the same principles which forbid Jim Crow law prohibit antidiscrimination law.
Towards the end of our analysis, we will examine an overlooked arena which offers considerable promise in combating racism: etiquette. We badly need to develop rules of etiquette appropriate for the multicultural world that we all inhabit and are inevitably going to continue to inhabit. Getting the laws right is a necessary part of rising above racism, but it is only a part. Some problems cannot be solved by law, and etiquette may be an appropriate tool for dealing with some of those problems.
Finally, a word to civil rights enthusiasts who may not be pleased by some of my arguments in this book, especially if these arguments seem persuasive! I think Professor Stephen Carter got it exactly right in his Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby when he says: "[T]o be a critic is not necessarily to be an opponent." (Footnote 6) This has certainly been true of mainstream civil rights leaders who were very critical of the United States government and of conditions in the country. The civil rights leaders were not opponents of the country. The civil rights leaders were not treasonous. The civil rights leaders thought the country was good enough that it deserved fixing and saving! And their criticism was a helpful criticism. Let those who are disturbed by my analysis consider the possibility that my criticism of the civil rights movement is also not that of an opponent, but of a loyal friend who is willing to speak unpleasant truths in order to better achieve the goals we are all striving for.
__________________________
1 For the classic discussion of scientific revolutions see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.
2 Sir John Denham, "Cooper's Hill," quoted in Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. Garden City, N.Y: Dolphin Books, 1961, p. 131.
3 John Marshall Harlan, who served on the Supreme Court from 1877 to 1911. Not to be confused with his grandson with the same name, who served on the Supreme Court from 1955 to 1970.
4 Thomas I. Emerson, David Haber, Norman Dorsen (Eds), Political and Civil Rights in the United States, Student Edition, vol II. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967.
5 For an interesting recent treatment of colorblindness, see Andrew Kull, The Color-Blind Constitution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
6 Stephen Carter, Reflections of An Affirmative Action Baby (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 6 .