America's race problem

An interesting story in The New Republic about how racial attitudes influence voting patterns. For all the talk of "values voters" and the impact of evangelical Christianity, the Solid South is still all about white and black.

Race is the one issue in America that never seems to go off the radar. For example, Michigan, my new state-of-residence, recently overwhelmingly approved a ban on affirmative action. But don't let the catch-all term "racial issues" fool you; the only important racial issue today is relations between the white and black communities.

Consider California, where state universities have been forbidden from practicing affirmative action for a decade. Since the ban, Hispanic enrollment in those universities has risen to just under 5 million (15% of the total, approximately the same as the percent of Hispanics in the overall U.S. population). But black enrollment has declined or stayed roughly flat.

To me, this indicates that Hispanics' status as an "underprivileged minority" is temporary, and has more to do with their recent-immigrant status than the color of their skin. Hispanic assimilation is proceeding apace, and half of Hispanics identify themselves as white. But black people have been here for as long as white people, and the gap between those races shows few signs of narrowing.

To me, the fundamental issue is one of assimilation. Hispanics, like Italians or Poles or Irish before them, chose to come to America. In the pro-immigration rallies this past summer (in which I participated), American flags outnumbered Mexican ones by a hefty margin.

But black people's ancestors came here unwillingly, in one of the most egregious situations of human degredation ever perpretrated. Their history here is not one of advancement, economic opportunity, and hope. It's this. So is it any surprise that there were no American flags being waved at the Million Man March? Is it any surprise that many black people would be reluctant to accept mainstream American institutions and customs (like public education and marriage), which can be seen as the customs of their longtime oppressors? Is it any surprise that, as a black professor at UMich recently told me, the American flag "represents horror" to even many well-educated African-Americans?

These facts may not be surprising, but they are massive problems. "Assimilation" may be a dirty word to many African-Americans, but failure to assimilate is precisely what keeps many black people from enjoying the fruits of wider American society - the fruits that Hispanic immigrants are picking with gusto. Yes, many whites still harbor racist attitudes toward their black countrymen, but I can only imagine those attitudes would shrink - as they have in Britain - if there weren't such a cultural gulf between the two races.

I am not issuing a call to either the white community or the black community to "change its ways." Communities don't act as one, for one thing. What's needed is for both communities to change their attitudes toward each other, and to actively seek out friendship with the other. Separate-but-equal didn't work for the school system, and it won't work for our neighborhoods and social circles either. If America's white-black problem is going to be solved, black America must cease to exist as a nation-within-a-nation.

Yes, I realize that few things could be more wishy-washy than to call for "interracial friendship". Yes, I do believe there are government policies that can help speed this process along. But that is a topic for another blog post. For now, I think we should simply acknowledge that the separation of the black and white communities is the problem, and that this problem won't go away on its own if it hasn't already.