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August 1968
The New Racialism
The liberals have been confusing their vocabulary,
talking of "racism" when they mean "racialism," and have been abandoning their
traditional opposition to decentralized government and racial quotas. The
results may be dangerous, observes Professor Moynihan, the buoyantly
iconoclastic sociologist, author, and director of the Joint Center for Urban
Studies of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
by Daniel P. Moynihan
The great enterprise on which the American nation was embarked when the Vietnam
storm arose was the final inclusion of the Negro American in the larger
American society. That the Negro was, and still in considerable measure is,
excluded none still doubt. But it seems not less clear that this fact of
exclusion has been the lot of a very considerable portion of the American
people over the generations and the process of inclusion, of "national
integration," in Samuel H. Beer's term, a process "in which the community is
being made more of a community," has been going on almost from the moment the
fortunes of war and empire defined this hopelessly heterogeneous people as made
up exclusively of General de Gaulle's "Anglo-Saxons." In fact, at midcentury
only 35 percent of the American people were descendants of migrants from Great
Britain and Northern Ireland. Most of the rest have known greater or lesser
degrees of exclusion--and into the present. But none quite like that of the
Negro, and final, palpable equality for him became the essential demand of our
time, just as it became the demand of the American presidency; only to arouse
among some elements of the society--in greater or lesser degree in all
elements--a pervasive fear and deep resistance. Laws in the hundreds were
passed, but changes were few. As the black masses for whatever reasons became
increasingly violent, white resistance became more stubborn, even as it assumed
more respectable forms: "Law and order."
This resistance has produced something of a stalemate, and in consequence a
crisis. The essential symbol, and in ways the central fact, of black exclusion
in white America is that the Negro is not permitted to move about freely and
live where he will. Increasingly he is confined to the slums of the central
cities, with consequences at once appalling to him and disastrous to the
cities. The laws do not require this exclusion; in fact, they forbid it. Now
also does the Supreme Court. But it prevails because of a process of private
nullification by whites.
More and more one hears that this situation is likely to persist so long as to
require that it be treated as a permanent condition. And largely as a result of
this conclusion, a marked reversal appears to be taking place in what are
generally seen as liberal circles on the subject of decentralized government
and racial quotas. For a good half century now--longer than that, in
truth--liberal opinion has held quite strong views on these issues, and they
are almost wholly negative. Nor have these views been in any sense marginal.
Quite near to the core of the liberal agenda in the reform period that began at
the turn of the century and continued almost to this moment we find two
propositions.
The first is that local government is conservative or even reactionary. Such
nostalgia as might have persisted about New England town meetings was seen as
historically obsolete and ethnically inapplicable. Local government in New
York, for example, was known to be run by Irishmen, who were bosses wielding
vast but illegitimate power, placing unqualified men on public payrolls,
consorting with criminals, and lowering the standards of public life. In the
South, local government was in the hands of racists, who systematically
excluded Negroes from participation in public affairs, and much else as well.
The West was far away. Hence the great thrust of liberal/intellectual political
effort, and central to liberal/intellectual political opinion, was the effort
to RAISE the level at which governmental decisions were made above that of
state and local government, to that of the federal government. The great and
confirming successes of that effort were, of course, the Administrations of
Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. "States' rights" became a symbol of
reaction. Distinguished public servants such as Paul Appleby developed the
doctrine that those who insisted that this or that governmental activity was
best carried out at the local level were in fact opposed to such activity, and
confident that in actuality the local government would do nothing. E. E.
Schattschneider explained the whole thrust of liberal politics in terms of the
effort to raise the level at which the decisions were made. These views had
consequence. Three years ago, for example, when the Johnson Administration was
about to come forth with a proposal for revenue-sharing with state
governments--the well-known Heller-Pechman plan--the proposal was vetoed by the
labor movement on grounds that giving more resources to local powers could only
strengthen the forces of conservatism and reaction.
The second general theme has to do with the whole issue of ethnic, racial (if
one wishes to make a distinction between those two), and religious
heterogeneity. These were matters which liberal opinion firmly held ought not
to be subjects of public moment or acknowledgment. Rather as politics and women
are proscribed as matters of conversation in a naval officers' mess, it was
accepted that such categories existed, and given the doctrine of freedom of
conscience, it was also accepted that religious diversity would persist, but in
general, opinion looked forward to a time when such distinctions would make as
little difference as possible. Opinion certainly aspired to the complete
disappearance of ethnic characteristics, which were felt to have little, if
any, validity. Increasingly, the identification of persons by race or religion,
especially in application forms of various sorts, was seen as a manifestation
of racism, of unavoidably malign intent.
It is hard to judge which is the more extraordinary: that Americans could have
thought they could eliminate such identities, or that so little comment was
made about the effort. (Resistance, then as now, was largely silent and
ashamed.) Andrew Greeley has recently speculated that the historians of, say,
the twenty-third or twenty-fourth century looking back to this time will find
that, apart from the great population increase in the world, and its
Westernization and industrialization, quite the most extraordinary event was
the fusing of cultures in the American republic.
The historians of the future will find it hard to believe that it could have
happened that English, Scotch, and Welsh, Irish, Germans, Italians, and Poles,
Africans, Indians, both Eastern and Western, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Finns,
Swedes, Lebanese, Danes, Armenians, Croatians, Slovenians, Greeks, and
Luxembourgers, Chinese, Japanese, Philippinos, and Puerto Ricans would come
together to form a nation that not only would survive but, all things
considered, survive reasonably well. I further suggest that the historians of
the future will be astonished that American sociologists, the product of this
gathering in of the nations, could stand in the midst of such an astonishing
social phenomenon and take it so for granted that they would not bother to
study it.
I agree, largely as I feel that future historians, relieved of our
nineteenth-century preoccupation with the appearance of industrialization and
the issue of who would control the artifacts thereof; a preoccupation, in other
words, with issues such as capitalism, socialism, and Communism, still also see
that the turbulence of these times here and abroad has had far more to do with
ethnic, racial, and religious affiliation than with these other issues.
Nonetheless, beginning with the New Deal, federal legislation began prohibiting
discrimination based on race and religion, and this movement increasingly took
the form of forbidding acknowledgment even of the existence of such categories.
In New York, for example, a prospective employer simply may not ask to know the
religious or ethnic affiliation of an employee. A dean of admissions may not
ask for a photograph of an applicant. The culmination of this movement, and
given its insistence on absolute equality in competition, the high-water mark
of social Darwinism in the United States was, of course, the Civil Rights Act
of 1964.
Now, of a sudden, all this has changed. The demand for decentralization of
government and local participation in decision-making about the most global
issues has become almost a leading issue with liberal thinkers and politicians.
Distrust of Washington, once the sure giveaway of a conservative or reactionary
mind, has become a characteristic stance of forward-looking young men. And now
ethnic quotas have reappeared, although primarily in terms of racial quotas.
That which was specifically forbidden by the Civil Rights Act is now explicitly
(albeit covertly) required by the federal government. Employers are given
quotas of the black employees they will hire, records of minority-group
employment are diligently maintained, and censuses repeatedly taken. In
universities in particular the cry has arisen for racial quotas roughly
representative of population proportions, in both university faculties and
student bodies, and the proposal is most ardently supported by those who would
have themselves considered most advanced in their social thinking. It would
seem altogether to be expected that this process will continue, and come to be
applied to all the most visible institutions of the land, starting, of course,
with those most sympathetic to social change, and therefore most vulnerable to
such pressure, and gradually, grown more legitimate, extended to the more
resistant centers.
What on earth happened? Taking these developments in the order that I listed
them, one can perceive at least two sources of the thrust toward
decentralization, both related to the racial stalemate and both of which can
properly be described as the result of a learning process, and on that ground
welcomed. The first is the discovery by liberal middle-class America that many
of the institutions of urban working-class politics served important and
legitimate purposes, and that the destruction of these institutions created a
vacuum in which by and large Negroes now have to live. Having destroyed the
power of the local bosses, we learn that the people feel powerless. Having put
an end to patronage and established merit systems in civil service, we find
that the poor and unqualified are without jobs. Having banished felons from
public employment, we find that enormous numbers of men who need jobs have
criminal records. Having cleaned up law enforcement, we find that crime is run
by the Mafia (or whatever is the current term for slandering Italians), instead
of the Police, as was the case in the idyllic days of Lincoln Steffens' youth.
Hence liberals now are urged to return to local organization with an enthusiasm
ever so slightly tinged with the elitism of the middle-class liberal/ radical
who now as always is confident that he is capable of running anything better
than anyone else, even a slum neighborhood. Middle-class radicals continue to
insist the Negroes in Harlem are powerless, not least, one fears, because the
one type who is never elected is the middle-class radical. (But to my knowledge
there is hardly a single significant elected or appointed political, judicial,
or administrative office in Harlem that is not held by a Negro.) Hence an ever
increasing enthusiasm of liberal foundations and reform mayors for creating new
"indigenous" community organizations and giving to them a measure of real or
pretend power. Whether in fact outsiders can create an "indigenous"
organization is problematic. (Would it not be good sport for the Landmarks
Commission to assign to Mayor Lindsay's Little City Halls their traditional
Tammany designations of Tuscorora Club, Iroquois Club, Onondaga Club?) But the
effort is sincere, if withal tinged with a certain elitist impulse to manage
the lives of the less fortunate.
On a different level, a movement toward decentralization has arisen largely
from the emergence of what James Q. Wilson has called the bureaucracy problem,
the fact that "there are inherent limits to what can be accomplished by large,
hierarchical organizations." Although Max Weber explained to us why large
bureaucracies, once established, would work for themselves rather than the
putative objects of their concern, it was not until the bureaucracies were
established, and someone tried to do something with them, that any great number
of persons came to see the point. Interestingly enough, this seems to have
happened in the Soviet Union at about the same time as in the United States.
For certain it is an endemic mood among men who went to Washington with John F.
Kennedy. The problem involves not just the dynamics of large organizations, but
also the ambitiousness of our society. As Wilson continues: "The supply of
able, experienced executives is not increasing nearly as fast as the number of
problems being addressed."
This is all to the good. It responds to reality; it reflects an openness to
experience. Irving Kristol has remarked, echoing Sir William Harcourt at the
turn of the century on the subject of socialism, "We are all decentralists
now." The acknowledgment that race and ethnicity are persisting and
consequential facts about individuals that ought in certain circumstances to be
taken into consideration is long overdue. (Several years ago, to my ultimate
grief, I tried to get the welfare establishment in Washington to abandon its
"color-blind" policy which refused to record anything about the race of welfare
recipients. Last year Southern committee chairmen brought about the enactment
of vicious anti-Negro welfare legislation, which no one could effectively
oppose because no one is supposed to "know" about such things.) But before
lurching from one set of overstatements to another, is it not possible to hope
that a measure of thought will intervene, and that the truth will be found,
alas, somewhere in the middle?
The issues are intertwined, and tend to work against one another. Thus the
fundamental source of equal rights for Negro Americans, for all Americans, is
the Constitution. Where the federal writ runs, all men are given equal
treatment. But this process is not directed by some invisible hand; it is the
result of political decisions made year to year in Washington. "Local control"
means a very different thing in Mississippi than it does in New York, and let
us for God's sake summon the wit to see this before we enshrine the political
principles of George C. Wallace in the temple of liberal rationalism. Paul
Appleby knew what he was talking about. An aggressive federal insistence on
equal treatment for all races is indispensable to the successful inclusion of
the Negro American into the large society.
Further, to argue that all things cannot be run from Washington is not to
assert that neither can they be run from city hall. Unfortunately, a good deal
of decentralization talk is fundamentally antigovernment in spirit, and this
can be a calamity in areas such as race relations. Giving a mayor enough untied
federal funds to enable him to govern his city could release immensely creative
energies. Forcing him to break up his administration into endlessly
fractionating units will bring on anarchism at best and chaos at worst. Given
the heterogeneous political community of most large cities, this potential for
ethnic and racial chaos, Kristol remarks, is especially great.
School decentralization in New York seems to be encouraging just this. The
problem is that now, as ever in the past, the lower classes of the city are
ethnically quite distinct from what might be termed the bureaucratic classes,
and neighborhoods tend to conform to those distinctions. The result is that
conflict induced between the two groups gets ugly fast. Thus the New York times
reported that the militant picketing of I.S. 201 in east Harlem in 1967 was
"flagrantly anti-Semitic." Similar tendencies have appeared in the Ocean
Hill-Brownsville area where decentralization is being experimented with. A
leaflet recently distributed there reads:
If African-American History and Culture is to be taught to our Black Children
it Must Be Done By African-Americans Who Identify With And Who Understand The
Problem. It Is Impossible For The Middle East Murderers of Colored People to
Possibly Bring To This Important Task The Insight, The Concern, The Exposing Of
the Truth That is a MUST If The Years of Brainwashing And Self-Hatred That Has
Been Taught To Our Black Children By Those Blood-sucking Exploiters and
Murderers Is To Be Overcome.
A pretty sentiment, to which, not surprisingly, there are Jews capable of
responding in kind. Charles E. Silberman, the distinguished author of Crisis in
Black and White, recently demanded of an American Jewish Committee meeting that
it
face up to the raw, rank, anti-Negro prejudice that is within our own midst.
We talk--endlessly--about Negro Anti-Semitism; we rarely talk about--let alone
try to deal with--the Jewish Anti-Negroism that is in our midst and that is
growing very rapidly.
All too familiar. And as Archbishop John F. Dearden of Detroit, president of
the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, observed last year, in other
cities of the nation the Negro-white confrontation is becoming a Negro-Catholic
(Protestant-Catholic) encounter. Plus ça change...
The danger is that we shall see the emergence of a new racialism. Not racism, a
term--dreadfully misused by the Kerner Commission--that has as its
indispensable central intent "the assumption that psychocultural traits and
capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively
from one another" (Webster's Third New International Dictionary). There is a
streak of the racist virus in the American bloodstream, and has been since the
first "white" encounter with the "red" Indians. But it is now a distinctly
minority position, and mainly that of old or marginal persons, with an
occasional politician seeking to make use of what is left. Yet there is a
strong, and persisting, phenomenon of racialism, defined as "racial prejudice
or discrimination: race hatred." This is in no sense confined to "whites," much
less "Wasps." (I use quotation marks. The geneticist Joshua Lederberg notes
that it is scientifically absurd to call anyone in this country "black," and
probably not accurate to speak of "whites" either.) Writing in a 1935 issue of
Race, E. Franklin Frazier, for example, referred to W. E. B. DuBois's then
current proposal that the Negro build a cooperative industrial system in
America as "racialism." There is nothing mystical about racialism; it is simply
a matter of one group not liking another group of evidently antagonistic
interests. It is a profoundly different position from that of racism, with its
logic of genocide and subordination. And it does no service whatever to this
polity to identify as racist attitudes that are merely racialist and which will
usually, on examination, be found to have essentially a social class basis. But
our potential for this type of dissension is large and very likely growing. In
the hands of ideologues (who often as not enjoy the chaos) or charlatans (who
stand to benefit) or plain simpletons, many forms of decentralization in the
modern city will give rise to racialism. Responsible persons should examine
that prospect beforehand.
The question of quotas raises the same issue. As I am almost certain to be
misunderstood--that appears to be an occupational hazard in this field (and I
would seriously suggest that the training of any social scientist in years to
come should include something equivalent to the processes by which
psychiatrists are taught to anticipate and accept hostility)--let me offer a
word or two by way of credentials. I believe it fair to say that I have been
one of a smallish band of sociologists and political scientists who have
insisted that race, ethnicity, and religion were and are relevant and
functional categories in American life. I accept fully, as does Greeley, the
Weberian analysis of E. K. Francis that the ethnic collectivity represents an
attempt on the part of men to keep alive during their pilgrimage from
Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or as Greeley puts it, "from peasant commune to
industrial metropolis," some of the diffuse, ascriptive, particularistic modes
of behavior that were common to their past. I have argued in favor of the
balanced political ticket; I have even been a member of one. I see the
emergence of "black pride" as wholly a good thing. And so on. But at the same
time, I would hope as we rush toward an ethnically, racially, and religiously
conscious society that we try to keep our thinking just a bit ahead of
events.
My concerns are twofold and come to this. First, I am worried that having so
far been unable to assemble the political majority that would enable the nation
to provide a free and equal place for the Negro in the larger society by what
are essentially market strategies (full employment, income supplementation,
housing construction, and such-like), we will be driven to institutional
strategies involving government-dictated outcomes directed against those
institutions most vulnerable to government pressure. I don't like this mostly
because I don't like that kind of government pressure. But I oppose it also
because I fear the kind of rigidities that it can build into a society that
obviously is most effective when it is most flexible.
Remember, the Negro middle class is on the move. A recent study at Columbia
found that the proportion of Negroes with professional or technical occupations
in New York City is distinctly higher than that of Irish or Italians.
If there is an ethnic balance "against" Negroes in many municipal bureaucracies
today, there is likely to be one "for" them in the not distant future. These
are for the most part truly integrated groups, which, much as do the Armed
Forces, provide major opportunities for Negro advancement on purely equal terms
involving neither discrimination nor preference. (When the Jewish principal at
I.S. 201 resigned, his Negro deputy refused the job on grounds that she would
not be appointed as a Negro. She had no need to be. Inspired or lethargic,
brilliant or bright, she was on her way to a principalship on her own. That is
what bureaucracy is like.)
My second concern is, to my mind, the greater. Once this process gets
legitimated there is no stopping it, and without intending anything of the
sort, I fear it will be contributing significantly to the already
well-developed tendency to politicize (and racialize) more and more aspects of
modern life. Thirty years ago Orwell wrote, "In our age there is no such thing
as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues...." I resist
that. Not all issues. Not yet. Note that he added "and politics itself is a
mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia." Not all American
politics. Not yet. But enough is, and we must therefore struggle against the
effort of government, in some large general interest, to dictate more and more
of the small details. It is necessary to be more alert to Robert A. Nisbet's
observation that democracy is, fundamentally, "a theory and structure of
political power," but that liberalism is "historically a theory of immunity
from powers.
This, to my mind, is something more than a generalized concern. For centuries
it has been obvious that property is not always evenly distributed, and it has
been more or less legitimate to talk about it. In America, however, in the
modern world generally, there have grown up new forms of property and
influence, not so readily perceived, and the people who possess them have been
wisely content to leave it at that. Success, as Norman Podhoretz wrote, and as
he learned, is a dirty little secret in America, which those who are successful
very much dislike to see discussed in public. A quality which makes for social
stability at this time is that different groups in the population value
different kinds of success, and tend to be best at those they most value. But
government knows little of such variegations, and I very much fear that if we
begin to become formal about quotas for this or that group, we will very
quickly come to realize that these are instantly translated into quotas
against. This is painfully true in the field of education and culture, which to
a very considerable degree at this particular moment in our history is
exceptionally influenced by American Jews. It was in a certain sense in an
effort to resist the processes that brought about this partial hegemony that
the "older American" institutions imposed quotas in the first place, and it was
to abet the process that the quotas were abolished. Those were in fact quotas
on success, imposed against a disproportionately successful group.
Let me be blunt. If ethnic quotas are to be imposed on American universities
and similarly quasipublic institutions, it is Jews who will be almost driven
out. They are not 3 percent of the population. This would be a misfortune to
them, but a disaster to the nation. And I very much fear that there is a whiff
of anti-Semitism in many of these demands. I was interested that when demands
for quotas were made at Harvard, the Crimson endorsed with some enthusiasm the
idea of ethnic representation, if not exactly quotas, on the faculty, but the
editors were not at all impressed with the advantages of extending the
principle to the student body. I do not know what was on their mind, but I do
know that if ethnic quotas ever should come to Harvard (surely they won't!),
something like seven out of eight Jewish undergraduates would have to leave,
and I would imagine it to be a higher proportion in the graduate schools. This,
I repeat, would be a misfortune for them, but a disaster for a place like
Harvard. And much the same exodus would be required of Japanese and Chinese
Americans, especially in the graduate schools.
One assumes that America has known enough of anti-Semitism and anti-Oriental
feeling to be wary of opening that box again. Especially now. Given the
prominence of Jews in current American radical movements--the Times describes
the student activists at Columbia as "typically very bright and predominantly
Jewish"--and the hostage of Israel, Jews are at this moment perhaps especially
exposed to conservative or reactionary pressures which could easily make an
issue of "overrepresentation." Recalling what we did to Japanese Americans in
World War II, we surely should be careful about exposing Chinese Americans
today to reactionary pressures simply on the basis that mainland China is our
enemy.
It comes down to a matter of prudence: of recognizing our potential for
racialism, and guarding against it, while responding to real and legitimate
racial needs. Thus Negroes need preferential treatment in some areas, and
deserve it. The good sense of the country in the past has been to do this kind
of thing by informal arrangements--the balanced ticket. At the present time
Israel, for example, seems to be having success with similar arrangements for
its Eastern Jewish immigrants. Can we not do as much?
I hope I would not be interpreted as resisting a more open acknowledgment of
these factors. To the contrary, I feel they should be more in our minds, but at
a private and informal level of concern. I am acutely aware, for example, of
the debilitating imbalance in the ethnic origins of American social scientists.
I say debilitating because it is the nature of heterogeneous societies such as
ours that analysis that could in any way be taken as criticism is routinely
rejected when the analyst is of a distinctly different group. That is the plain
truth of it. And it is a truth much in evidence with respect to Negro studies
at this time. Thirty years ago in this country anyone seeking to learn more
ABOUT Negroes would have had to read books written BY Negroes: Frazier, Drake,
Cayton, Johnson, and others. Somehow that tradition, nobly begun by DuBois,
faltered. There was not, for example, a single Negro social scientist on the
research staff of the President's Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Now,
with only a few exceptions, social science studies of Negroes are carried out
by whites, and we are not to wonder that more and more the cry goes out from
the slums that they are tired of that white magic and will listen no more. But
Negroes are only one case, and not a particularly special one. American social
science desperately needs to expand its ethnic, racial, and religious base,
just as it has got to expand its interests in those areas.
Let me conclude with the words with which Nathan Glazer and I closed our own
study of the city:
Religion and race define the next phase in the evolution of the American
peoples. But the American nationality is still forming: its processes are
mysterious, and the final form, if there is ever to be a final form, is as yet
unknown.
Copyright 1968 by Daniel P. Moynihan. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; August 1968 ; The New Racialism; Volume 222, No. 2;
pages 35-40.
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