Originally published in the Washington Post December 18, 2004 Saturday
Copyright 2004 The Washington Post
By Mary Frances Berry
In 1980, when I was appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights by
President Jimmy Carter, the glass of equal opportunity was half full.
Today it's teeming with new and intractable challenges that keep it
half empty.
In the early days of my
tenure, the unemployment rate for blacks was twice that of whites, and
the black youth jobless rates -- teetering at 60 percent -- compelled
Carter to start a youth unemployment initiative. There was much talk of
how awful urban K-12 education was. The uneasiness surrounding the
Supreme Court's Bakke ruling on higher education was balanced by the
more hopeful Weber decision leaving in place affirmative action in employment.
Fear persisted about the clock being turned back by creeping prejudice
and erosion of the reforms of recent decades. But blacks were becoming
admirals and generals, and they were visible in the service academies.
An African American middle class was becoming reality.
By the time President Ronald Reagan took office, however, there was an
atmosphere in this country in which civil rights could be branded as a
special interest. I joined the chorus that declared resolutely that
civil rights were in fact in the national interest. The battles
intensified at the commission, punctuated by fights, firings and
court-ordered reinstatements.
With Reagan and the supposedly kinder, gentler Bush I administration came an assault on "racial
quotas," as well as cuts in the budget for civil rights enforcement.
Some insisted that sex and race discrimination -- if they even existed
-- had nothing to do with the economic plight of women or racial
minorities. Comparable worth was regarded by such people as a loony
idea. But voices persisted, perhaps in the background, to insist
otherwise.
By the time President Bill Clinton took office, affirmative action
was almost on its deathbed -- labeled "reverse discrimination" against
white men. Clinton threw in a lifeboat called "mend it, don't end it."
Meanwhile, family and medical leave were coupled with an end to welfare
as we know it, giving disadvantaged women dead-end jobs that trapped
them and their children in poverty. The black unemployment rate went
down in the economic boom.
Highlighting
the major problem of health care disparities, Clinton talked the talk
about ending invidious discrimination in every area of American life.
Racial profiling against blacks and Latinos was in the national
spotlight. African American
incarceration rates soared, making the United States the world leader
in imprisonment. Thanks largely to the "war on drugs" and draconian
sentencing, more young black men were enrolled in the prison system
than in institutions of higher education.
Enter the years of Bush II with a wave of voting rights complaints that
led us to the Florida election battle of 2000. Despite the detractors,
our recommendations on the civil rights commission contributed to the
national debate on election reform. The Help America Vote Act -- a good
try in its conception but lacking sorely in implementation -- attempted
to deal with the problem.
During President Bush's first term, we witnessed a retreat on environmental justice, accelerated racial
profiling of the traditional targets and expanded targeting of other
people of color who "look Arab." And in the post-Sept. 11 world, civil
liberties and freedoms were compressed in a chilling quest for national
security. A new surge in unemployment among black youth and high Latino
dropout rates have gotten only passing attention. At the same time,
opposition to affirmative action, and nominations of
judges with a stunted vision of equal opportunity, have fostered loud
and heated controversies as the administration draws its battle lines.
Today's half-full glass has led to new conversations never considered
two decades ago: New Americans bring before us the realities of life
for Latinos, Asian Americans, Arab Americans and the attending issues
of immigration rights and English as a second language in our public
schools. Diversity is evident in appointments to positions never before
held by women, blacks or other people of color. So too is the certainty
that there is no policy victory in merely putting diverse faces in high
places.
Today the nation is crying out
for presidential leadership on intractable issues of race, opportunity
and rights. A watchdog is still needed: that is the job the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights has done.
The
president can either squander or seize the moment. His stiff resolve to
quiet critics and defeat those he believes may pose a threat to his
notion of liberty and justice -- both here and abroad -- can only
distance us from the values he has pledged to protect.
The writer, outgoing chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, is a
professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.