Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and
insidious that a state bound to defend the equal
protection of the laws must not allow them in any
public sphere.
-Thurgood
Marshall, Brown
v. Board of Ed (1954)
I have a dream that my four children will one day
live in a nation where they will not be judged by
the color of their skin but by the content of their
character.
-The
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., I
Have a Dream
Waiting to be checked through the White House security
area on the afternoon of December 19,
1997, I thought about distances. Even though I am
black and he is white, for instance, in many
respects I felt quite close to the
president I would soon be meeting. Both of us are from the South
and from the generation that finally escaped the
burdens of Southern history. Both of us are from
painfully broken homes, and both were saved by powerful
maternal figures who had, in their
desperate struggles to keep from slipping further
down in class, somehow managed to set us each on
a course of achievement. And yet we were also very
far apart, not because we were from different
races, but because of our different views on race.
And here the vast distance between us was filled
with irony: Bill Clinton's views had led him to
be praised by people such as novelist Toni
Morrison
as "our first black president," while mine had led
people of Morrison's political outlook to attack me
as "a white man with black skin."
I also had a sense of the distance we have traveled
as a nation, of what a long and tortured road we
have walked in our search for racial fairness and
how, in recent times, we seemed to have doubled
back again on our own tracks. A generation ago,
when Martin Luther King Jr. stood in roughly the
same spot I was standing in, waiting to be ushered
into the Oval Office, he brought with him a
simple and eloquent plea for equal treatment under
the law for all Americans, black and white. The
presidents he spoke toóJohn Kennedy and Lyndon
Johnson, men who until reaching high office
never really questioned the malicious racial myths
of their dayóagreed with him and committed the
government to King's great cause. But now, after
almost forty years of national introspection and
determined civic and political action had made America
a different country from what it had been,
the situation was reversed. I had come to Washington
to reaffirm King's message, but I knew I
would be opposed by a president who, although he
claimed that his views had been formed by the
moral urgencies of the civil-rights movement, nonetheless
insisted that race mattered even more
today than it did in the distant past, and that
equality under the law was no longer enough.
-Ward Connerly, Creating
Equal
There was a time when public figures with significant views on the great issues of the day would write pamphlets or treatises, even short books, detailing their positions. One thinks, for instance, of such writers as Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton at the time of the Founding, or in recent decades of Barry Goldwater's great book The Conscience of a Conservative, or William Simon's A Time for Truth. These are all polemical works, meant to argue for political positions, which, though intensely personal, are uncluttered by personality. They served an essential public service by addressing vital questions in a brief and readable form. As a result, they were widely read and quite influential.
Today, at a time when even White House pets have bestselling memoirs, these kinds of arguments are now grafted on to autobiographical texts for no discernible reason other than to exploit the current trend in publishing. It was with some trepidation then that I approached Ward Connerly's book, Creating Equal. I admire him and the battle he has waged over the past decade, but I honestly expected to skim through the typically pro forma story of his life to get to the meatier sections where he would present the intellectual case against racial preference programs. But an unexpected thing happened on the way through the boring bits; it turns out that, though much of his tale is familiar, Ward Connerly's own life experience is one of his best arguments.
As is common in American society, and only getting more so, Connerly comes of mixed racial stock : Black, White, and Native American. He is "Black" only by the terms of the ancient and racist "one drop rule" and by family tradition; in reality his race defies categorization. He did not meet his father until very late in life and, his mother having died, was raised first by an aunt and uncle, then by his grandmother. His grandmother and uncle were the real formative influences on his character, both of them strict and demanding that he make something of himself. His Uncle James in particular was a role model, asking only one thing of life : that people treat him like a man; in exchange always carrying himself like one. Together they instilled in Connerly a burning desire to be judged on his own merit.
It thus seems natural that when, as a member of the University of California Board of Regents, Connerly was approached by a couple who had statistical evidence of the use of quotas by the UC colleges, he turned their cause into his cause. His account of the battle for Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, and then subsequent contests in Washington, Texas and Florida, make for interesting reading, though they are perhaps not as viscerally powerful as the story of his early life.
Throughout the book, Connerly is animated by a simple timeless creed which gives the book its title :
I celebrated July 4 1995 with a heightened awareness
of the personal freedom at the core of
nationhood. When the Founding Fathers said
that we were all created equal, they were proposing an
audacious theory that ultimately inflamed the rest
of the world. By fits and starts, Americans had
tried to make that theory into a reality, with abolitionism,
the Emancipation Proclamation, and, of
course, the civil rights movement, which instituted
sweeping revisions of the law that have brought
us ever closer to the fulfillment of the promise
of our national life. I felt in my heart that race
preferences--by whatever name--were not a continuation
of that progress, but an obstacle in the road
to freedom and equality. At best a diversion,
and at worst a giant step backward, affirmative action
preferences caused us to lose sight of the task
we inherited from the Founders--creating equal as the
only category that counts in America.
There's a deep irony in the fact that these beliefs, traceable to Thomas
Jefferson's Declaration
of Independence and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, should
now make Ward Connerly anathema to the Democratic Party and to the institutionalized
civil rights movement. We have reached a sad point in our nation's
history where to the inheritors of the legacy of Jefferson and King the
idea of a color blind society has been transmuted into a weird kind of
racism itself. It should not have required courage to, as Connerly
boldly does, advocate that race be ignored in awarding government jobs
and contracts, but it did, and this demonstration of courage makes Connerly
into a heroic figure, willing to brave epithets, threats and hatreds to
vindicate his convictions. This memoir, harkening back to The
Autobiography of Ben Franklin and Booker T. Washington's Up
From Slavery, partakes of the great American tradition of self-reliance
and the demand that each of us be judged individually; this gives it an
impact all out of proportion to what I expected.
(Reviewed:27-Jan-01)
Grade: (A)
