Reckoning with Race. Gene Dattel

       Preface

      We need a frank and honest discussion about race. Or as James Baldwin said in 1964 and as Martin Luther King Jr. put it in 1967, “Tell it like it is.” How many times have you heard or read this dictum about America’s most sensitive, tragic, and inflammable topic, race? Although the call persists, the conversation never occurs. Instead white Americans are surprised, in fact stunned, by the level of racial tension in America, especially when it turns violent. It fuels the fear of a large, permanent black underclass that will not go away. Fifty years after Baldwin and King, why is the racial divide still our defining social issue?

      In the pages to follow I concentrate on what I see as the fulcrum of this issue: the entrance of most black Americans into the economic mainstream. Make no mistake: blacks see economics, exacerbated by past injustice and discrimination, expressed as income gap or poverty as the main cause of black frustration. Economics—which means jobs—is a critical part of the discussion within the black community. And the prerequisite for broad participation in economic advancement is assimilation, denied to blacks until the mid-twentieth century. Assimilation, sometimes considered pejorative, is falsely assumed to deny one’s cultural differences. In the word game that has ensued, integration and acculturation are often preferred. Let’s be clear: the proper use of assimilation allows for practical and efficient adjustment to common values while retaining different cultural heritages. Without appropriate assimilation, a harmful road to separatism follows.

      To assimilate should be a greater priority for blacks than the overzealous pursuit of cultural acceptance. The eye on the prize should be focused on economic improvement, not perceived slights and a separate black society.

      For the most part, blacks want more resources thrown at their problems—more public and private funding. Concerned whites agree that money is needed to address issues of housing, education, crime, and single-parent families but want more accountability. Blacks also want more law enforcement against discrimination and more programs run by blacks. They dismiss troubling behavior in the black community, avoiding responsibility and blaming inadequate economic support.

      From the birth of the nation, America has relied on assimilation to mold a cohesive society. Assimilation has meant the acceptance of common goals, common values, a common language, and a common legal system that leaves abundant room for cultural heritage. George Washington clearly outlined the country’s attitude toward immigrants and their heritage in his 1790 letter to the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode Island. He welcomed the Jews, promising tolerance, protection, and the “good will of other Americans” while reminding them of the obligations and responsibilities of good citizenship.

      The Founding Fathers had witnessed the catastrophic results of European fragmentation by land, ethnicity, language, and culture. These were practical men. National unity was the only means of survival. They could also observe firsthand the inherent weakness and vulnerability of the Native American tribal organization, which led to internecine warfare among the tribes and various collaborations with European countries against each other in their battles.

      Tribalism and provincialism had to give way to a national identity. As it happens, no other country has attracted so many immigrants from diverse backgrounds and absorbed them into a cohesive unit necessary for the survival of the whole. Immigrants by the millions still come to America for political, religious, and economic reasons but overwhelmingly for a better material life. A large part of their success has been due to America’s adaptable free enterprise system.

      White immigrants left the “old country” and came voluntarily to America. African Americans, involuntary immigrants, arrived in slave ships, first in the seventeenth century, and have been struggling with their identity—national or separate—ever since.

      The first Naturalization Act in 1790 specified that “any white alien, being a free white person” was eligible for citizenship. In an America with race-based slavery, where did a free black fit into the assimilation scheme? Although the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 granted citizenship to blacks, social norms continued to exclude them from the process of assimilation.

      Other newcomers to American shores were urged toward assimilation. In 1793 Washington welcomed German immigrants but cautioned them against retaining their “language, habits and principles.” Better that they “intermixed,” he wrote, “with our people. . .assimilate to our customs, measures and laws: in a word, soon become one people.”

      We need to be reminded of the practicality of the Founding Fathers’ vision. Washington was a land surveyor and real estate investor before he was a general and a president. Thomas Jefferson mastered law, mathematics, horticulture, and architecture; he wanted a distribution of immigrants “sparsely among the natives for quicker amalgamation.” Benjamin Franklin was an inventor, discoverer of the electrical conductivity of lightning, printer, advocate of hard work and education, and a self-made man. He, too, advocated the distribution of immigrants among English speakers. The Germans “begin of late,” warned the sage Franklin, “to make their Bonds and other legal Writings in their own Language, which—though I think it ought not to be—are allowed good in our Courts.” The chaos and inefficiency of allowing multiple-language contracts was obvious then and remains so now.

      When Irish-American groups in 1818 applied for a designated section of the Northwest Territory to be set aside exclusively for Irish settlement, Congress, in an emphatic, defining decision, rejected this attempt at separatism. Afterward, new states gained admittance to the union only when they had a majority of English speakers.

      The prerequisite for a successful ethnically diverse population living under one roof is assimilation, which leads to a national identity, unity, and the practical means to facilitate social, legal, and commercial interchange. Ethnic cultural heritage can remain a distinct part of identity after concessions are made to assimilation. Prosperous large countries such as Japan, Korea, and those of Western Europe have homogeneous populations. They have not been concerned to develop an assimilation process. Europe is now being tested by its Muslim immigrants, some of whom it sees as incapable of assimilation.

      In the American story, the major exception to assimilation, of course, was the exclusion of black America. But the Supreme Court’s ending of legal segregation in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision marked the beginning of a new era. With restrictions removed, values and merit might now prevail over race and ethnicity. Despite Southern resistance, most Americans assumed that our racial dilemma was thus being solved in the 1960s. The promise of Brown seemed to play out in the Civil Rights Acts, the War on Poverty, the end of overt public segregation, and the removal of suffrage barriers. Yet the Northern urban race riots of the sixties, in New York, Watts, Detroit, and Newark, warned of a racial chasm, filled with complex social issues.

      Although the 1968 “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders” (now known as the Kerner Report) is the benchmark definition of American racial issues, the number of conferences, commissions, and reports on race in America has been continuing and endless. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” in 1965 exposed the plight of black family structure, a product of crime, slum housing, and “high rates of alcoholism, desertion, illegitimacy and the other pathologies associated with poverty.” Two decades earlier, the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal had explored the problems of black Americans in An American Dilemma, and the same issues had been recognized by the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier in The Negro Family in Chicago, a classic study from 1932. Does anyone remember the First Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, chaired by former president Rutherford B. Hayes in 1890?

      The parade continues. In June 1997 President Bill Clinton announced “One America in the 21st Century: The