Rise of "the new segregation": the "politics of difference" threatens to produce a divided society

THE CIVIL RIGHT's movement of the 1950s and 1960s culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts--two monumental pieces of legislation that dramatically have altered the fabric of American life. During the struggle for their passage, a new source of power came into full force. Black Americans and their supporters tapped into the moral power inspired by a 300-year history of victimization and oppression and used it to help transform society, humanize it, and make it more tolerant and open. They realized, moreover, that the victimization and oppression blacks had endured came from a marriage of race and power. They had to stop those who maintained that, merely because they are white, they have the power to dominate, enslave, segregate, and discriminate.

Race should not be a source of power or advantage or disadvantage for anyone in a free society. This was one of the most important lessons of the original civil rights movement. The legislation it championed during the 1960s constituted a "new emancipation proclamation." For the first time, segregation and discrimination were made illegal. Blacks began to enjoy a degree of freedom they never had experienced before.

This did not mean that things changed overnight for blacks. Nor did it ensure that their memory of past injustice was obliterated. I hesitate to borrow analogies from the psychological community, but I think this one does apply: Abused children usually do not feel anger until many years after the abuse has ended--that is, after they have experienced a degree of freedom and normalcy. Only once civil rights legislation had been enacted did blacks at long last begin to feel the rage they had suppressed. I can remember that period vividly. I had a tremendous sense of delayed anger at having been forced to attend segregated schools. (My grade school was the first to be involved in a desegregation suit in the North.) My rage, like that of other blacks, threatened for a time to become all consuming.

Anger was both inevitable and necessary. When suppressed, it eats a person alive; it must come out, and certainly did during the 1960s. One form was the black power movement in all its many manifestations, some of which were violent. There is no question that we should condemn violence, but we also should understand why it occurs. You can not oppress people for more than three centuries and then say it is all over and expect them to put on suits and ties and become decent attache-carrying citizens and go to work on Wall Street.

Once my own anger was released, my reaction was that I no longer had to apologize for being black. That was a tremendous benefit and helped me come to terms with my own personal development. The problem is that many blacks never progressed beyond their anger.

The black power movement encouraged a permanent state of rage and victimhood. An even greater failing was that it rejoined race and power--the very "marriage" that civil rights legislation had been designed to break up. The leaders of the original movement said, "Anytime you make race a source of power you are going to guarantee suffering, misery, and inequity." Black power leaders declared: "Were going to have power because were black."

Is there any conceivable difference between black and white power? When you demand power based on the color of your skin, aren't you saying that equality and justice are impossible? Somebody is going to be in, someone else out. Somebody is going to win or lose, and race again is a source of advantage for some and disadvantage for others. Ultimately, black power was not about equality or justice, but, as its name suggests, about power.

When blacks began to demand entitlements based on their race, feminists soon responded with enthusiasm, "We've been oppressed, too!" Hispanics maintained, "Were not going to let this bus pass us by," and Asians stated, "We're not going to be left out either." Eskimos and Native Americans quickly hopped on the bandwagon, as did gays, lesbians, the disabled, and other self-defined minorities.

By the 1970s, the marriage of race and power was firmly established again. Equality was out; the "politics of difference" was in. From then on, people would rally around the single quality that makes them different and pursue power based on that characteristic. It is a very simple formula. All you have to do is identify that quality, whatever it may be, with victimization, which is itself, after all, a tremendous source of moral power.

The politics of difference demanded shifting the entire basis of entitlement in America. Historically, it was based on the rights of citizenship elaborated in the Declaration of Independence and the US. Constitution. This was the kind of entitlement the original civil rights movement leaders claimed for blacks--recognition of their rights as American citizens to equal treatment under the law. They did not insist, "We deserve rights and entitlements because we are black," but "We deserve them because we are citizens of the United States and like all other citizens are due these rights." The politics of difference changed all that. Blacks and other minorities began demanding entitlement solely based on their history of oppression, their race, sex, ethnicity, or whatever quality that allegedly made them victims.