Beyond civil rights

 From our overstocked archives

Sam Smith, 1993 - It's not polite to say so, especially on the anniversary of the great 1963 march on Washington, but the cause of civil rights is in trouble.

Much of this is due to forces over which civil rights activists have little control, such as the rightward drift of both of America's major political parties and a growing culture of meanness exacerbated by the country's economic problems.

Yet the advocates of thirty years ago faced  even worst obstacles and still managed to raise an exceptionally powerful, focussed, and moral voice on behalf of human justice. Today, instead, we find civil rights laws increasingly immeshed in arcane legalisms, civil rights politics transferred from the street and the pulpit to the courtroom and the attorneys' office, a growing if often needless conflict between civil rights and  those of free speech, a persistence of deep segregation in places ranging from central cities to Ivy League campuses, administrative excesses by university officials in the name of diversity proclaimed but unachieved, a failure to even discuss serious discrimination in some of its more virulent forms, and  a sense that the one true commonality flourishing among Americans is that they all feel they're being screwed.

We can change this, and in so doing revive the fight for human justice, but not without reexamining and rearranging some assumptions. For multiculturalism to work, for example, there have to be people working for it. Yet for all the talk, the constituency for multiculturalism is surprisingly small. What does exist is an enormous, diverse and growing constituency for implacable mono-culturalisms.

Relying on the law as our defense, preferring litigation to negotiation, indifferent to the intercultual relations we claim to want, unskilled and apathetic in dealing with the practicalities of diversity, and stymied by mutual self-righteousness, multiculturalism may turn out to be far less pleasant condition than many of its advocates imagine, a place not of peace and justice but only of more hate, violence and litigation.

 To change this, we need a new dream and a new plan. What follows is neither, only some notes that might help along the way: 

Rediscover the moral voice: Somewhere between Martin Luther King and Marion Barry the voice of the civil rights movement lost its moral edge.  Ministers, educators and writers took the back seat to ethnic politicians whose agendas and visions were often quite limited.

This is not irreversible, especially if ethnic leaders move from representing their own constituency to applying the humanistic and moral wisdom of their cause to all of America.   

Even majority America is getting tired of false prophets. It is ready for those who can speak the truth and show it a way out.

Don't just say no. We have attempted to exorcise racism much as Nancy Reagan tried to get rid of drugs, by just saying no. It has worked about as well.  Opponents to the war on drugs have argued that a more reasonable goal is to mitigate the harm that drugs do to society. Much the same could be said about racism and prejudice.  If humans were truly moral the concept of race wouldn't even exist. It has no biological, and only a limited taxonomic, justification, serving largely as an excuse for one group of humans to do harm to another. In fact, our desire to separate ourselves from those unlike us is much deeper than we are willing to admit. As Ruth Benedict wrote: 

All primitive tribes agree in recognizing [a] category of the outsiders, those who are not only outside the provisions of the moral code which holds within the limits of one's own people, but who are summarily denied a place anywhere in the human scheme. A great number of the tribal names in common use, Zuñi, Déné, Kiowa. . .  are only their native terms for 'the human beings,' that is, themselves. Outside of the closed group there are no human beings. And this is in spite of the fact that from an objective point of view each tribe is surrounded by peoples sharing in its arts and material inventions, in elaborate practices that have grown up by a mutual give-and-take of behaviors from one people to another. . . We are not likely to clear ourselves easily of so fundamental a human trait.

Once we accept the unpleasant persistence of human discrimination, once we give up the notion that it is merely  social deviance controllable by sanctions, we will be guided away from a priggish and puritanical corrective approach towards one that emphasizes techniques of mitigating harm, towards what Andrew Young has called a "sense of no fault justice" and towards emphasizing countervailing human qualities that can serve as antibiotics against prejudice.

Diversity also means people you don't like. Progressives don't talk about this but a truly multicultural community might include a representative sample of born-again Christians opposed to abortion, Muslims with highly restrictive views on the role of women, prayer-sayers and atheists, Playboy readers and feminists. Is there a litmus test for entry into the multicultural community? If there is, who gets to decide? Does  this make them more equal then others?

Don't sweat the small stuff. Common sense is a great civil rights tool. Even in a multicultural society, loutish sophomores are going to use tasteless language, fundamentalists will sneak in private prayers on public occasions, and eight-year-old boys will grab girls where they shouldn't. Hyper-reaction to such minor phenomena hurt and trivialize the cause of human justice

Go for the important stuff. One of the reasons such matters as the aforementioned get such big play is because of the lack of a clearly articulated and meaningful civil rights agenda.

Lighten up on the lawyers. While of inestimable assistance in securing basic rights, lawyers are not well equipped to deal with complex relationship between ethnic groups.  We need to train large numbers of mediators who can serve as the peacekeepers of multiculturalism.

Get the universities to lighten up: The main achievement of some of our universities appears to have been to convince a generation of students that the protection of their feelings is the moral equivalent of the First Amendment.  We could use a moratorium on abridgements of free speech by campus officials, during which time these institutions might usefully increase the number of minorities on their faculty and in their administrations.

Find political solutions. One of the clearest manifestations of justice is equitable political power.

Attack economic discrimination: After every ethnic group and gender gets its rights the powerful among them will discriminate against the weak and the wealthy against the poor. Ethnic and gender discrimination currently get far more attention than economic prejudice. A better balance would help.

Stop worrying so much about language. At worst it provides a warning of problems and at best serves as an intercultural safety valve. Paul Kuritz, in an article on ethnic humor in the Maine Progressive, points out that "as early as 1907, the English-speaking rabbis and priest of Cleveland united to protest the stage Irish and Jewish comedians. . . . The suppression of crude ethnic humor both accompanied the economic exploitation of the lower-class work force, and paralleled the dismissal of the lower classes' tastes as 'offensive' to the newly refined sensibilities of upwardly-mobile second and third generation Americans."

Kuritz, a third-generation Slovak, was arguing that the problem with a recently fired French-Canadian radio host was not that he made fun of his own culture but that the full panoply of Maine's ethnicity was not also represented on the air. This would have allowed all these groups to experience what anthropologists call a "joking relationship," a bonding that helps to reduce tensions between potentially antagonistic clans. Said Kuritz, "As a general rule of thumb, an attempt to suppress speech as 'offensive' or 'disempowering' is not a signal to lessen the amount of talk, but to increase the amount.”

He cited his own experience with Italian schoolmates joking about his Slovak background. He responded with Italian jokes. One of two things happened. Those classmates who felt "disempowered" shoved his  face in a snowbank; the others increased their joking.  Said Kuritz, "My best friends came from the second group."

   Learn from multiculturalism that works. Ethnic restaurants are perhaps the most successful practitioners of multiculturalism in America. Why is it so hard for universities to deal with multicultural issues while the Arab carry-out across from my office offers a "kosher hoagie?" It is, in part, because most of us are like Bismarck who said when offered German champagne  that his patriotism stopped at his stomach. It is also that the ethnic restaurant offers a fair intercultural deal: a good living for the owner in return for good food for the patrons.

For multiculturalism to work, we need a willing suspension of our politics as well as places where we can participate in another culture that will leave us feeling that something good has happened. Outside of restaurants, this  is rarely available in America. We are not taught the pleasures of diversity, only its problems and burdens. We are seldom invited to enjoy other cultures, only to be sensitive towards,  or to feel sorry for, them. Thus, inevitably, we tend to think of multiculturalism in terms of conflict and crisis.

The restaurant analogy is not trivial. Political scientist Milton L. Rakove, writing on the Daley machine, credits Irish dominance in Chicago partially to the fact that the Irish ran saloons that "became centers of social and political activity not only for the Irish but also for the Polish, Lithuanian, Bohemian and Italian immigrants. . . As a consequence of their control of these recreational centers of the neighborhoods, the Irish saloon keepers and bartenders became the political counselors of their customers, and the political bosses of the wards and, eventually, of the city."  As one politician put it, "A Lithuanian won't vote for a Pole, and a Pole won't vote for a Lithuanian.  A German won't vote for either of them -- but all three will vote for an Irishman."

  Teach multiculturalism as a gift, not a problem. Education is the one thing that we know reduces prejudice. Teach  the variety of the world as something to explore and enjoy. We can't have a multicultural society that works unless the multiple cultures have reason to appreciate one another.  At present we treat multiculturalism like some overbearing parent saying to her toddler, "Now go make friends with that nice Nancy.' It didn't work when we were six and it's not working much better now.

Recognize our interdependence and deal with it. Despite one's individual culture, it is virtually impossible to live in America and not be interdependent with other ethnic groups. We are not unlike the Bedouins who rely on settled Arabs for trade, their culture partially defined by others. Anthropologist A. E. Kroeber  called the Bedouins a half culture or part culture, which is not a bad way of thinking of ourselves. This concept places us nearer to where we actually are than where we sometimes say we are: neither separate nations nor integrated into one, but constantly intersecting. If we can develop a model for successful and equitable interdependence it will help us solve the puzzle of how one maintains one's ethnic integrity in a polyglot society. And then multiculturalism could start to be fun.