Ending Racial Discrimination

First Quarter 2003

Editor's Watch

by James W. Skillen

The wounds of our history of slavery and segregation have not yet healed. Senator Trent Lott's offhand comments in mid-December brought the 1940s back to life. Yet we should take some encouragement from the fact that instead of receiving any applause for his positive recollection of Senator Strom Thurmond's segregationist presidential bid that year, Lott's comments were universally denounced. He repented publicly at least five times. Racism no longer has standing in America, not in public and not in private.

Racially discriminatory attitudes of the heart cannot be changed by public laws and political rhetoric, however, and there is more to the fruits of America's racist past than legal discrimination in the narrow sense—the sense that is now officially dead. This is why Americans today are in a historical bind. Racial discrimination is no longer legitimate under the law, and any sign of it that can be fought legally is taken to the courts. But what do we do with the legacy of racism, which the law by itself cannot erase?

The simple answer, which never quite satisfies, is that we need to learn to love one another and ignore distinctions of race, embracing one another as fellow humans. Certainly, we must do that. But the question is how to do it in our complex society: how do we build a color-blind society in which race no longer shows up as a motive for discrimination at the same time that we are reminded regularly of wounds of the past, racist habits of the heart, and fears of continuing discrimination, which have not yet been completely healed, or transformed, or dislodged?

If racial discrimination is no longer legitimate, then doesn't that mean the decisions about who gets into college or graduate school should be made without regard to the race of the applicant? Shouldn't hiring practices and housing choices be handled without reference to race? Yes, most will say, but only after we have arrived at the end of the legacy of racism when all wounds from the past have been healed. Until that time, those who bear the painful marks of the past should be noticed and treated with special affirmation in order to help move us more quickly to the new day.

The difficulty here, of course, is that those who today suffer most from the heritage of slavery and racial discrimination experience public obstacles that are chiefly economic and educational. And the qualifications for most jobs and academic advancement are, by their very nature, not racial in character. People who are economically or educationally disadvantaged need help regardless of their race. So race-qualified or race-targeted efforts to help those in need may only keep racial discrimination alive in the very attempt to end it. This is why people of all races must indeed work together to find economic and educational answers, not race-based answers, to the needs that exist, in part, because of our segregational history. If we do not work together as citizens, regardless of our racial and ethnic distinctives, to find these answers, then we will indeed be ignoring or consciously carrying forward America's racist legacy to our own destruction.

The challenge we face today, whether we are members of Congress or ordinary citizens, is to bury the legacy of racism in an avalanche of civic cooperation that, sooner rather than later, will give us a new heritage to remember and celebrate.