Cobb

As usual, I agree with your critique of the critiques of affirmative action.

However, I think that you're missing something important in the way that whites protest grounded in the American Immigrant Myth. I don't think that it's simply another rhetorical trick to lock out blacks. I think a lot of whites are genuinely wrestling with what they perceive to be issues of fairness.

Whites sincerely believe in cultural assimilationism, because their own family legends make clear that cultural assimilation and the social and material rewards of American society are linked. Because they do not see how cultural assimilation was valueless in black experience through much of our history, all they see is how it has been rewarded in the last generation or two. And similarly, they do not see the unjust limits of even those recent rewards, because they see the obstacles faced by contemporary blacks as analagous to those faced by own their pre-assimilated ancestors.

A lot of black political rhetoric includes a rejection of any change in blacks' cultural voice in the public sphere --- a rejection of assimilationism. Though I confess that I have some complicated discomfort with that position, ultimately I respect it and the legitimacy of the concerns that motivate it.

For most whites, however, that resistence to assimilationism is truly incomprehensible. Cultural assimilation is the deal. It's how participation in American society works. "It's what they asked of my grandfather, it's what we ask of immigrants today. How dare you ask for the fruits of American society without accepting the same conditions on it as everyone else?"

Harold Ford Jr. was born in 1970 and has never known a day of legal discrimination in his life.

His father was a prominent congressman. Others in his family were mayors and members of the state legislature. He went to the best schools, had a much greater leg up on life than more than 98% of the population, black or white.

Meanwhile, poor white kids--and by the way, there are more white kids in shit schools and living below the poverty line than black kids--as well as poor Arabs, poor Asians, and other ethnic groups get the shaft while pampered rich boy Harold Ford wants to brag that he personally benefitted from Affirmative Action?

Fuck him. That's indefensible Cobb. But hey, like you siad, it's not about what's right, it's about power, who's got it, and who doesn't. But those of us who ain't got the power will speak truth to power.

I understand, and I turned up the volume on this post for a lot of reasons.

What I percieve African America going through right now has a lot to do with the inevitable distance from the black power struggle of late 60s and 70s. There is going to be a kind of referendum on blackness.

Assimilation is problematic because it wasn't assimilation of the same sort between blacks and whites. You have white immigrants who didn't even speak the language who got into union jobs marked whites only. My wife is from Detroit and is intimately familiar with what black families there had to contend with in the auto industry. So really, the battle for assimilation was lost a generation ago. It should have happened before the end of WW2 but it didn't.

I see that in terms of the 'Negro Problem' which was when African Americans were in the main, willing and able to assimilate and be just like everyone else, the option wasn't given to them. We were separate and unequal, and to a certain degree willing to go along with that, but the separateness had a very, very low cieling, as compared to what blacks today can achieve separately. So the Negro wanted assimilation in the WW2 days - intermarriage and the whole nine yards, but could not have it.

Out of that denial came the opposition that fueled the thinking of the leaders of the Black revolution, which basically said whites are morally wrong and we don't want a part of that, if that's what America is going to be. So by the time of James Baldwin and Richard Wright you had the need for the Negro to die and a new black man to take over - someone who didn't need that white approval, someone who took his case to the world instead.

The legal status of the African American was always trailing behind the thought of African Americans themselves. What MLK and groups like CORE and NAACP were able to agitate for were always moral slam dunks because society was so intransigent. That's why the Civil Rights Act, while vitally significant did not constrain Black ambition. It granted by law what the Negro wanted 20 years prior, but the Negro was already headed toward Blackness as illustrated by the defiance of Malcolm.

Once the legal barriers were broken, the 70s saw black nationalist organizations go mainstream. So out of that you get people like Vernon Jordan and Cornel West. People raised on black power bogarding through newly integrated institutions. I came of age on the tail end of that, with the experience of what I call hardball integration. In your face forced bussing and the like. And this was a salutory experience. Everybody benefitted. Think Richard Pryor. It was the black vs white in stark relief. People had to deal with it even though they didn't want to, blacks and whites alike.

Multiculturalism came about because blacks were successful as blacks. So I think everyone began to believe that it must also be true for gays, latinos, asians, every minority. I don't think it translates well. The history of struggle is not as deep or broad. All minorities aren't equal. And I think that the liberal interpretation of the 70s and the successes of hardball integration is overstated. Even though the liberal side won the culture wars of the 80s, the paradigm is not holding up well. I think it's missing the juice of the black nationalist mainstreamers and is therefore crippled. More on that later.

So the presumption that Affirmative Action is all that blackfolks want or need is wrongheaded. I strongly believe that African Americans think of it as I do. A political victory. A statement of power. A Black Power Institution. Hardball Integration. It is not, was not and never will be a solution to Black ambition.

Think of Affirmative Action like tearing down the Berlin Wall. There will always be people who need to escape from the damage done on the East side of the Iron Curtain.

As for Harold Ford Jr, and other blacks who didn't start at square one, I think their tokenism is still valuable and I defend their privilege at the expense of the ordinary Joe.

I do so from the point of view of racial integration. Which means that if the floor of the factories in Detroit are fully integrated, there is still something wrong if all the Vice Presidents of GM are white.

You cannot at this late date attempt to redefine the scope of the ambition set forth by blacks who stepped beyond the Negro Problem. They meant *every* aspect of American society, not just the places where whitefolks would be comfortable having blackfolks. That was a political decision, it was not one based on strategies for the efficient and equitable redistribution of wealth. It was about Black Power.

What Harold Ford Jr knows is what restraint is put upon him. Chances are that he possesses the talent of people far more advanced in society than he. It's not a fair game at the top any more than it in the middle or at the bottom. That doesn't mean that he doesn't get to represent as a black man wherever he is.

Sure there are people who have been successful changing Integration into Diversity. They're very clever and popular. But that's not what it was all about.

All that said, the mistake of Affirmative Action is that it is public and overt and therefore subject to the whims of the political majority.

As a conservative I understand full well that whomever can convince the citizenry that Affirmative Action is bad for the nation can and will defeat it. But I am very thankful for those beneficiaries, especially Vernon Jordan and Colin Powell, who got to the top and will inevitably network with their black cohorts.

So while I'm poking people in the eye, let me remind you that Condi Rice is doing for black women too.

Cobb, I think you're exactly right about how America totally fubared the timing on white acceptance of black assimilation.

And I think I'm convinced by your analysis of the origins of multiculturalism. Certainly the multiculturalist project of total respect for an infinite range of cultures is ultimately impractical: we can't all learn a rich understanding of Latino culture and Japanese culture and Hmong culture and on and on.

Which leaves us in a weird black/white biculturalism. OK, arguably we always were there --- read your Douglass or your Twain --- but in a form rife with injustice. What does biculturalism with justice look like? Is it even possible? And the moral argument for a special bicultural respect for black culture is squirrely: is it simply power politics driven by blacks' numbers? is it a special consequence of slavery as America's Original Sin?

Are these some of the questions you imagine us addressing in your imagined "referrendum on blackness"?