THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 28, 1996 TAG: 9607300514
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL ANFT
LENGTH: 88 lines
TRAGIC FAILURE
Racial Integration in America
TOM WICKER
William Morrow. 195 pp. $25.
Of all the uncivil abominations facing Americans at the end of the century, of all our collective failures (poverty, the federal debt), racism remains both the most pressing and the most stubborn. And without question, the most shameful.
It is the one dilemma, after all, that national policymakers have had nearly 120 years to deal with. Despite political gains made through the Earl Warren-era Supreme Court, the civil rights movement, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs and the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act, African-Americans as a bloc have never gained the economic power necessary to influence our skewed, dollar-centric elections.
Their political victories, meanwhile, have become tenuous and subject to revisions by the whites who do hold power. Recent Supreme Court decisions have nullified ``majority-minority'' congressional districts in which blacks were elected (with the approval, it must be noted, of Justice Clarence Thomas). Affirmative action programs that pave the way for true equal opportunity are also under attack.
And despite a segregated underclass that grows even faster than the exploding black middle class, white America's disdain for using more federal dollars to lift the inner-city poor out of their plight (through programs such as Move to Opportunity) threatens to bury the whole question of equality or the striving for it. Whites, meanwhile, point to daily news accounts of drive-by shootings and slum drug busts as evidence of blacks' inherent inferiority.
Given such a backdrop, there's little wonder why race relations continue to fester. Perhaps the most accessible proof that the races haven't exactly meshed as LBJ and Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned was the O.J. Simpson trial, during which opinion as to his guilt was split directly along racial lines.
Tom Wicker, the retired and respected New York Times columnist, has long chronicled the inequities that have kept many blacks from achieving full and true citizenship, first as a reporter throughout the South during the civil rights era, then as the Times' most liberal opinion writer. In Tragic Failure, Wicker, echoing Lincoln's Civil War fears, wonders if ``a house divided against itself,'' which could not stand in the era of chattel slavery, can long endure in today's destructive atmosphere of black disadvantage, white anger, and racial animosity?''
Wicker's not sure. He claims that racism can only be remedied through ``the hearts of the people.'' But he does have some original ideas for leveling the field a bit, ideas that have nothing to do with our traditional two-party system, which Wicker believes has largely shafted the poor and powerless in favor of the rich (its campaign contributors) and the middle class (its perceived voter base).
He sees no reason for blacks to continue to cast their considerable political lot with the Democrats, who have veered rightward and away from their past racial voting record for fear that it could cost them more elections. Wicker thinks that the Democrats' political instincts are on the mark: White voters are scared of the racial equality broached by '60s Democrats.
``I believe it was white racial anxieties that brought disaster to the party of Kennedy and Johnson only four years after its greatest victory,'' he writes. Politics, then, have simply mirrored the bigotry of the electorate.
Wicker also believes that the white world's unwillingness to accommodate and integrate the black one within by sacrificing a pittance of its good (and, in some ways, ill-gotten) fortunes is at the root of things. The only answer, Wicker claims, is for blacks to form a third party, one that will take into account their economic interests and their similarities with poor whites, as well as take notice of the fact that minorities will be a majority in the United States halfway through the next century.
With formerly Democratic planks - full employment, workers' rights, national health care - in its platform, this party would empower blacks and others at the bottom of the well, the author notes. Even if its leaders were not elected, this new renegade party could still affect policy, as did the Republicans in the 1850s, Norman Thomas' socialists in the '30s, or George Wallace's independent (and racist) candidacy in the '60s and '70s.
Although its last half rambles and rehashes old arguments, this thin volume represents a stalwart reaffirmation of the high-road morality and hope that mark the now largely defiled liberal wing of the Democratic party. In this era of mean-spirited self-interest, Wicker's voice is surely welcome for its civility and its transcendence of petty partisanship. MEMO: Michael Anft is a Baltimore-based writer and critic. by CNB