Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 24, 1994 TAG: 9408170001
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: William Raspberry
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But she never had a doubt that what these brave revolutionaries (white and black) were demanding was right. And she never doubted that it was wrong for some Americans to deny other Americans the right to buy a hamburger, or to sit where they chose to sit on a public bus, or to elect the people who make their laws.
It was this unambiguous sense of right and wrong - obvious even to old folk who had long since made their uneasy peace with Jim Crow - that gave the '60s movement the moral wherewithal both to unify black America and to change white America.
And it is this Grandma Test that today's black leadership is in danger of flunking.
It isn't that the attitudes and directions of today's leadership are wrong, only that they are ambiguous. What is the proper stance of the NAACP (whose finest hour may have been the Supreme Court ruling outlawing school segregation) on the question of preserving historically black colleges and universities? How should a black political leadership, plainly dependent on coalitions for its effectiveness, respond to the coalition-threatening specter of Louis Farrakhan? What is the correct position on affirmative action, minority set-asides, gay rights, school prayer, Afrocentric public education or reparations for slavery?
Where, in these disputes and countless others, is the uncontested moral high ground? On which of them could Grandma reach a conclusion she could defend with a simple ``right is right''? What is the simple truth that is capable of unifying blacks and changing whites?
Where is what Harvard's Cornel West called the ``precious moral vision [that] constitutes the best of the flawed American experiment in democracy''?
Two things have clouded that vision. The first is that the barriers between black people and their most pressing next steps are not as simple as they used to be. There was hardly an item on the top 10 of 1960s' priorities that couldn't be solved by persuading white people to do the right thing. To an astounding degree, the movement did persuade white people to do the right thing. That's why the movement succeeded.
Today's next steps, though, have a lot less to do with decisions white people must make and a lot more to do with the decisions, directions and priorities of blacks themselves.
Around what principle can we choose among the competing demands of our limited resources?
For me, the answer seems obvious: our children.
To begin with, we've always been at our noble best when we've acted for posterity. The marchers from Selma to Montgomery, the fighters for school desegregation, the folk who put their bodies on the line for jobs and justice were, most often, doing it not for themselves but for future generations.
In addition, looking at issues from the standpoint of what's best for our children can help us out of many of our intramural squabbles. What to do about Farrakhan is the sort of question that almost inevitably tears us apart. What to do to help our children grow up healthy, happy and competent is a question that can bring us together, despite our different answers.
Finally, a focus on our children can restore what's been missing for far too long: a role for white people of good will in the improvement of black lives.
It may take a saint to give up his own best interest in favor of mine. It may take a masochist (or an idiot) to volunteer for the villain's role in our ``Who's to Blame for the Black Plight'' drama.
But it requires only ordinary decency to want to reduce the amount of unfairness and failure for the next generation. Doing together what we can do to save our children passes the Grandma Test: It's just the right thing to do.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB