University Times

The current partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats is nowhere more evident than in their respective policies governing race relations and racial inequality in this country, an Oxford professor said here last week.

“American politics today in respect to race relations are divided into two sorts of racial alliances,” said author Desmond S. King, Andrew Mellon Professor of American Government at Oxford’s Nuffield College. “Regarding policies designed to address enduring material racial inequality, there is a conflict between policies that I call color-blind, which are supported by Republicans, and those I call race-conscious, supported by Democrats.”

King delivered the Roscoe Robinson Jr. Memorial Lecture on Diversity and Public Service, sponsored by the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He spoke at the University Club Feb. 16 on “Race and Politics in Obama’s America,” citing data from the book “Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America” that he co-authored with Rogers M. Smith.

There are three main eras to consider, King said:

• The 1787-1860 slavery era, roughly dating from the nation’s founding to the Civil War;

• The Jim Crow, pro-segregation era, defined as between the 1896 Plessey v. Ferguson “separate but equal” Supreme Court decision and the decision’s overturning in the Brown v. Board of Education 1954 decision, and

• The modern era, roughly between the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 2008 election of Barack Obama.

These eras spawned their respective racial alliances, King explained — “durable coalitions of political actors, social groups and governing institutions informally associated in support of policies on the central racial issues affecting racial inequality.”

The membership makeup of those loose associations has fluctuated as political and social philosophies have developed over time.

The slavery era

The pro-slavery alliance, best personified by U.S. Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and President James Buchanan, included such groups as slave owners; most Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats; many Southern Federalists and Whigs; most church leaders; working-class immigrants, and proponents of the so-called American School of Ethnology.

On the other side, the anti-slavery alliance, best personified by activist Rev. Absalom Jones and President and later Rep. John Quincy Adams, included Republicans; some Northern Federalists and Whigs; many small farmers, manufacturers, merchants and artisans; African-American religious, professional and business groups; some white religious groups, and some academicians.

The Jim Crow era

J. Henry Billings Brown, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the Plessey decision, and South Carolina Gov. and later Sen. Strom Thurmond, leader of the Dixiecrats, best personified the pro-segregation alliance.

The group included Southern Democrats; conservative Republicans; most presidents of both political parties; the majority of the Supreme Court up until 1954; most lower federal court judges and many state judges; most federal civil service officials; most white labor unions; most white churches; most social science scholars up until approximately 1930; white supremacists, and, in some contexts, some African-American leaders, such as Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey.

The anti-segregation alliance, King said, is best personified by Justice John Marshall Harlan, who wrote the single dissenting opinion in the Plessey case, an opinion that provided the basis for Brown v. Board of Education, and Pullman porters labor organizer A. Philip Randolph, whose threat to lead a march on Washington in 1941 prompted Franklin Roosevelt to issue an executive order forcing all industries with federal contracts to integrate.

That group included liberal Republicans and Democrats; a minority in Congress and on the federal bench; a few white and most black businesses; socialist advocacy groups; most non-white advocacy groups, such as the NAACP and the Urban League; black fraternal organizations; liberal black and white religious groups, and a minority of social scientists and intellectuals.

The post-Jim Crow transition

The 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Higher Education Act were part of a series of enormously important pieces of legislation in the 1960s that began a post-Jim Crow transition, King said.

A snapshot of the electorate in 1964 compared to 2008 points to significant changes over that period, King noted.

In 1964, non-Hispanic whites comprised 90 percent of the electorate, compared to 75 percent in 2008; college-educated voters comprised 13 percent, versus 46 percent.

“The overall vote for [Lyndon] Johnson in 1964 was 61 percent; the overall vote for Obama was 53 percent,” King said. “But Johnson in 1964 got 58 percent of the white electorate vote, Barack Obama got 43 percent.”

After the 1964 election, Southern Democrats switched to the Republican Party in droves, he noted.

“From 1964 to 1976 a lot of things solidified, bringing up the basis for the two modern racial alliances: the color-blind alliance and the race-conscious alliance. Johnson took the first legal step. He had come to see the passage of civil rights, if it was going to be real, as a legal step.”

The move was a small step in the ongoing quest for civil rights, King maintained. “Interestingly, the Democratic Party platform in 1964 was against affirmative action. But by 1976, it has been part of the party platform every presidential election since. So a lot transpired in those decade-plus years.”

The Republican Party platform remained consistent in its opposition to affirmative action, but changed the argument and the language. In 1964 the platform opposed “inverse discrimination,” while the language by 1976 had evolved into favoring an end to discrimination but opposing quotas to bring that about.

The modern color-blind alliance was codified during the late 1970s, King said. “A lot of that has to do with Allan Bakke. Bakke was an applicant to University of California-Davis medical school who was rejected in 1973. He had been rejected from [several other] medical schools,” he said.

Bakke, who earlier had served in the military, was rejected not on academic merit, but explicitly because he was deemed too old to begin medical training.

“But UC-Davis at that time had a program which stated that of the 100 openings to the medical school, 16 were to be given to African Americans, because they believed in diversity in the classroom. Bakke had reasonable grades and his grades were better than some of the students who got in,” King said.

“The Supreme Court, in one of the most imprecise and unclear judgments ever issued by that distinguished group, supported the principle that this was discrimination. In a 5-4 judgment, the court based its main opinion[on the fact] that this was a violation of the equal protection clause,” he said.

In support of this decision grew an alliance advocating color-blind policies and laws. The group included most Republican officeholders after 1976; the president, 1980-1992 and 2001-2008; a majority of the Supreme Court after 1980; some white businesses and lobbyists; some traditional labor unions; conservative media figures and think tanks; fringe white supremacists; Christian-right groups, and conservative foundations, King said.

On the flip side, a smaller alliance supporting color-conscious policies arose. It included most Democrats; the president, 1993-2000; some federal and state judges; military leadership; most labor unions; liberal media figures and advocacy groups; most non-white advocacy groups, and liberal religious and foundation groups.

“This is the group, basically, that’s willing to use policies designed to attack racial inequality. But this side of the argument has really lost the debate,” King maintained.

Why? Lay the blame at Ronald Reagan’s feet for a curious inversion of the civil rights advocates’ argument.

“The changes that came, due to the ways in which character — that is, the language of character and individual responsibility championed by Ronald Reagan — had laid claim to be heirs of the civil rights movement [by extension]: to treat individuals by the content of their character, not the color of their skin,” King explained.

Other political approaches, so popular today with Republicans, derive from this way of thinking, he said. Those include rewarding economic self-help while opposing economic dependency; favoring the contributions of religion while opposing moral relativism; promoting so-called traditional family values while discouraging unconventional lifestyles; protecting the law-abiding citizenry while severely punishing lawbreakers, and honoring patriotism while questioning dissent.

There also are a number of policy implications, depending on which form of the racial alliances dichotomy one supports, King said.

In employment, color-blind policies support a pro-market approach, whereas race-conscious policies support affirmative action; in housing, color-blind policies support real estate market solutions, whereas race-conscious policies support affordable public housing and racial integration of neighborhoods; in education, color-blind policies support vouchers and charter schools whereas race-conscious policies support integrated public schools; in criminal justice, color-blind policies support incarceration whereas race-conscious policies support crime prevention and criminal rehabilitation; in immigration, color-blind policies support punishing undocumented immigrants whereas race-conscious policies support preventing racial profiling, as well as wage and other discrimination.

King said the main consequence of government-sponsored and legally sanctioned color-blind racial policies is the continuation of racial inequality without any end in sight.

“That’s why this is such a pertinent issue. The consequences are pretty dire,” he said. “The average black family earnings are 60 percent that of whites; average black [accumulated] wealth is less than 10 percent of whites’; the black infant mortality rate is more than two times that of whites; the overall black mortality rate is 1.6 times that of whites; black men are eight times more likely than whites to be incarcerated and to be charged with federal crimes; middle-class blacks are four times more likely to get sub-prime mortgages than middle-class whites; there are 11 million undocumented aliens without social rights, and school and residential segregation is rising in many areas.”

The election of 2008 offered a measure of hope for reducing racial inequality, but the efforts have not succeeded, with a few exceptions such as passage of the universal health care bill and the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, King said.

“Obama wasn’t running as an African American; he was running as an American. In terms of policy, President Obama has been pretty explicit in his support of race-conscious measures in many of his speeches,” he said.

Obama said, for example, “Affirmative action programs, when properly structured, can open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities without diminishing opportunities for whites” and “An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs (is)…good policy…also good politics.”

“So Obama supports having universal policies and solutions that he hopes would make a huge difference in certain kinds of modern discrimination,” King said.

“But he faces enormous challenges [from the right]. Rush Limbaugh has said, ‘Obama’s entire economic program is reparations.’”

The upshot is that the United States now is situated between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

“What might be the way forward? What happens demonstrably in the U.S. is that the color-blind alliance, the color-blind position that these are steps that are designed to ‘fix the nation,’ to help victims of discrimination, is impossible in principle. It is simply insufficient in combating discrimination.”

One the other hand, King maintained, “color-conscious, race-targeting policies are politically unsustainable in the current climate.”

What makes matters worse, he added, is that “the distinction between color-blind and race-conscious policies in the modern era has one defining characteristic that makes it quite distinct from the previous two eras. It’s matched with the partisan division between Democrats and Republicans. In the two previous eras the alliances had a mixture of both Democrats and Republicans as advocates.

“In the current era, this division is party-wide and that makes it a period of intense and deep polarization, very different from the forces in the previous eras,” which at least allowed a hope of political compromise between the two parties, King said.

—Peter Hart