The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [117]
The same formula holds true today. As recently as 1999, the black unemployment rate fell to record lows and black income rose to record highs not because of a surge in affirmative action hiring or a sudden change in the black work ethic but because the economy was booming and government took a few modest measures—like the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit—to spread the wealth around. If you want to know the secret of Bill Clinton’s popularity among African Americans, you need look no further than these statistics.
But these same statistics should also force those of us interested in racial equality to conduct an honest accounting of the costs and benefits of our current strategies. Even as we continue to defend affirmative action as a useful, if limited, tool to expand opportunity to underrepresented minorities, we should consider spending a lot more of our political capital convincing America to make the investments needed to ensure that all children perform at grade level and graduate from high school—a goal that, if met, would do more than affirmative action to help those black and Latino children who need it the most. Similarly, we should support targeted programs to eliminate existing health disparities between minorities and whites (some evidence suggests that even when income and levels of insurance are factored out, minorities may still be receiving worse care), but a plan for universal health-care coverage would do more to eliminate health disparities between whites and minorities than any race-specific programs we might design.
An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn’t just good policy; it’s also good politics. I remember once sitting with one of my Democratic colleagues in the Illinois state senate as we listened to another fellow senator—an African American whom I’ll call John Doe who represented a largely inner-city district—launch into a lengthy and passionate peroration on why the elimination of a certain program was a case of blatant racism. After a few minutes, the white senator (who had one of the chamber’s more liberal voting records) turned to me and said, “You know what the problem is with John? Whenever I hear him, he makes me feel more white.”
In defense of my black colleague, I pointed out that it’s not always easy for a black politician to gauge the right tone to take—too angry? not angry enough?—when discussing the enormous hardships facing his or her constituents. Still, my white colleague’s comment was instructive. Rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America; even the most fair-minded of whites, those who would genuinely like to see racial inequality ended and poverty relieved, tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization—or race-specific claims based on the history of race discrimination in this country.
Some of this has to do with the success of conservatives in fanning the politics of resentment—by wildly overstating, for example, the adverse effects of affirmative action on white workers. But mainly it’s a matter of simple self-interest. Most white Americans figure that they haven’t engaged in discrimination themselves and have plenty of their own problems to worry about. They also know that with a national debt approaching $9 trillion and annual deficits of almost $300 billion, the country has precious few resources to help them with those problems.
As a result, proposals that solely benefit minorities and dissect Americans into “us” and “them” may generate a few short-term concessions when the costs to whites aren’t too high, but they can’t serve as the basis for the kinds of sustained, broad-based political coalitions needed to transform America. On the other hand, universal appeals around strategies that help all Americans (schools that teach, jobs that pay, health care