We want honest talk about race
Thursday, May 14 ,1998

By ABIGAIL THERNSTROM

When several of my colleagues and I recently decided to form our own panel to study race relations in America apart from President Clinton's initiative, we were branded as dissidents.

To the contrary, we're hoping to bring some perspective that, so far, has been missing from the President's discussions on race, and we hope that he is truly pleased—as he has said he is— that we've joined the dialogue he called for. A group of us—including Linda Chavez, Ward Connerly, Bob Woodson, Shelby Steele and myself—have organized a Citizens' Initiative on Race and Ethnicity to lend our voices to the conversation the President started last June.

The media calls us conservatives, and paints a picture of rival ideological groups on the racial battlefield. In tact, on the issue of race, we're old-fashioned liberals who want the government to view every American citizen as a unique individual. We don't like our public officials deciding who gets what on the basis of race and ethnicity.

Chavez is president of the Center for Equal Opportunity. Steele is a best-selling author. Woodson is president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. Connerly is the man who led the drive in California to ban racial preferences from public life. I’m a scholar who sparred with the President at a "town meeting" on race in Akron, Ohio, last December.

We differ from Clinton on preferences, but our effort is intended to complement his. Race and ethnicity are big, complicated, hard-to-get-our-arms-around issues, and no single viewpoint holds a moral monopoly. Lots of voices need to be heard.

But because people often feel morally intimidated, afraid to speak out, most of the conversation is (at best) in whispers. The dialogue being led by the White House suffers from precisely this timidity. It avoids too many tough questions.

For instance, it's easy to talk about the relatively small number of blacks in managerial positions in professional sports; it's much harder to talk about the too-great focus of young black males on athletic accomplishment and the neglect of academic success as the measure of a life well-lived.

It takes no courage to talk about remaining problems involving employment discrimination, but it's much more difficult to address family structure and its close link to the racial gap in family income. And it's easy to talk about the racism of some officers of the law, but the conversation gets less comfortable when the topic turns to too many young black men who are engaged in crime.

Our report, which will contain separate essays by first-rate scholars (whose names have yet to be released), will take a hard look at the hard issues. And it won't ignore the wonderful news of immense racial change over the last half century—as those on the President's panel too often do.

Surely the fact of change is indisputable. Just think, in 1940, 60% of working black women were domestic servants; today, the figure is 2.2%, and 60% work in white-collar jobs.

Yes, racial equality is still an elusive goal. We haven't won the ongoing battle against discrimination and inequality.

But black progress is a train that left the station 50 years ago, and it has been chugging along ever since. If we're going to talk honestly about race, we need both to celebrate how much we've accomplished and to acknowledge the problems that remain.  Only honest talk will make for honest —and effective—solutions.

Our report will offer some solutions—specific policy proposals. For instance, one of our writers will suggest ways to expand the pool of minority contractors. Other essays will talk about school choice and regulatory barriers to black entrepreneurship.

Like the President's commission, we, too, are a voice for civil rights. We differ on means, not ends. Racial equality is our common goal. How far we've come, the obstacles that remain, and the best road to a much better future: These are the questions our "Citizens' Initiative" will address.

Thernstrom, of the Manhattan Institute, wrote the book "American in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible" with her husband; Stephan.

©1998 Daily News

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