Race Policy in Three American Cities.

• Author: GRAGLIA, LINO A.

In the 1960s, America underwent a revolution in race relations, removing all legal obstacles to black advancement. The U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision prohibited racial segregation in schools and, it soon became clear, all official race discrimination. In the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Congress ratified and made effective the Brown nondiscrimination principle and extended it even to private discrimination, as in employment, public accommodations, and by recipients of federal funds. The 1965 Voting Rights Act was drastic but effective, finally guaranteeing to blacks the fight to vote. The 1968 Civil Rights Act, prohibiting race discrimination in housing, pretty much completed the task of banning discrimination, a magnificent achievement hardly thought possible a short time before.

Great as the achievement was, it soon became apparent that the ending of legal racial discrimination would have little immediate impact on the lives of many blacks, particularly the worst off. In a sense they were even worse off, in that it began to appear that their condition was less the result of societal disadvantage than of personal characteristics. As Edward Banfield pointed out in The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (1970), the condition of the worst-off blacks would be little affected if by some miracle they became white overnight. In any event, the immediate effect of the civil fights revolution seemed to be, surprisingly enough, not to end or lessen but to increase black discontent. The first response of many urban blacks to their new guarantee of equal treatment was, it seemed, not gratitude but anger, leading them to riot, loot, and burn down their cities, thereby increasing both their own misery and the disaffection of whites for years to come.

We have no more pressing need than to understand how our nation's successful efforts to remove legal obstacles to the advancement of blacks had the effect of increasing racial strife and hostility and worsening the condition of many blacks. It is clear that the worsening trend in race relations must be halted if the country is not to be torn apart.

Someone Else's House, America's Unfinished Struggle for Integration: The Effects of the New Racism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), by Tamar Jacoby, a writer on social issues and former editor of the New York Times, is a detailed history of race relations in three American cities--New York, Detroit, and Atlanta' from the late 1960s to the present. In essence, she provides three case studies of how our race relations reached their present dangerous state, showing us not so much what to do as what not to do to keep the situation from deteriorating further. In each case, liberal public officials and community leaders sought to increase racial harmony and integration and thereby to improve the condition of blacks by adopting race-based policies that proved to have the opposite effect. The single most important step toward improved race relations, Jacoby's book shows, would be simply to terminate the failed race-based policies of the past, policies that necessarily have the consequence of increasing racial consciousness, separatism, resentment, and strife.

New York City

Jacoby begins with the story of the devastation wreaked on New York City by the policies of John Lindsey during his eight years as mayor, aided and abetted by McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation. The year before the 1965 mayoral election (and two weeks after the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act), Harlem erupted in four consecutive nights of rioting and looting following the shooting of a black youth by a policeman in the course of law enforcement. The depth of the problem was indicated by the fact that "virtually all black leaders with a base in Harlem found ways to justify and applaud the rioters" (p. 73). There also seemed to be a surprising degree of approval of the riots from ordinary Harlem residents. As one put it, "White folks respect us more when they find out we mean business"; smashing the plate glass windows of stores convinces whites that "Those Negroes are mad! ... And for a little while, they will try to give you a little of what you want" (p. 73). In fact, however, Jacoby points out, whites in New York City had already been giving blacks a good deal of what they wanted. Although blacks accounted for one-seventh of the city's eight million people, one-half of the city's budget was being spent on them "for welfare, schooling, public housing and the like" (p. 83).

Lindsey campaigned on his goodwill, his "general, well-meaning determination to do the right thing by the black man" (p. 79). The focus of his campaign became the need for a civilian police review board. His opponent on the Conservative Party ticket, William F. Buckley, Jr., put forward "the serious idea ... that government could not solve all the problems blocking black entry into the mainstream--could not eradicate illegitimacy or make rebellious teenagers into scholars" (p. 80). Jacoby recognizes that Buckley spoke the truth "that many blacks were not prepared to compete in the mainstream, that the black crime rate was soaring, hurting no one so much as other blacks" (p. 81). Perhaps nothing better illustrates the strong disincentives to a frank discussion of race issues than that Jacoby nonetheless goes on to accuse Buckley of "mischievous race baiting" (p. 81), "mean-spiritedness" (p. 81), and running a "pandering campaign" (p. 80).

Realism and candor are the central values of Jacoby's book, yet perhaps in the interest of maintaining an appearance of moderation and balance, she often writes as if she thinks realism can be overdone. Thus, she accuses Buckley of failing to "try to talk to liberals and convince them with reasonable arguments" (p. 81). But she had just quoted Buckley's statement, apparently with approval, that any attempt to discuss the problem of, say, black illegitimacy with liberals would cause them to "either simply vanish from the room in a cloud of integrated dust; or else they will turn and call you a racist" (p. 81). The core of our race problem, as her book amply demonstrates, is the absolute commitment of liberals to white racism as the only acceptable explanation of black difficulties and the impossibility of shaking this view by reasonable arguments.

The "race relations" problem the Lindsey administration faced and the country still faces is essentially the problem of how to bring more blacks fully into the mainstream of American life. More specifically, it is how to deal with the social pathologies-illegitimacy, crime, academic failure--characteristic of the so-called black underclass. The defining characteristic of the 1960s was the belief that there are no social problems, including racial problems, that cannot be solved by more law and government. The need was simply to wage a "War on Poverty"; poverty could be defeated by government action and its effects would thus be removed. The fundamental need, according to liberals, was for whites to convince blacks of their goodwill by accepting responsibility for black problems--attributed to past and continuing oppression-and demonstrating their determination to solve them.

The need, in a word, was for appeasement. It became obvious that equality of opportunity would not quickly produce equality of outcome for blacks; the latter would have to be produced, therefore, by other means. Inequality of outcome caused the black anger that led to threats of violence and the necessity of appeasement. Blacks could be appeased, it was hoped, by preferential treatment in schooling, employment, and contracting, and such symbolic gestures as Black History Month and making the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., a national holiday and putting his name on a major street in every city. Nowhere was a policy of appeasement adopted and implemented more fully than in New York City under Mayor Lindsey. The results, Jacoby makes clear, should be sufficient to establish conclusively that it is the precise opposite of the policy that is needed.

"If the youth of Watts and Harlem had not felt so powerless," Lindsey believed, "they would have felt no need to rampage through their cities" (p.89). The need, therefore, was for "ghetto empowerment" (p. 88), the turning over of the new War on Poverty social service programs to local black organizations and leaders. In search of such leaders, Lindsey's aide Barry Gottehrer frequented such places as the Glamour Inn, a "seedy one-room lounge on 127th Street, frequented mostly by gamblers and pimps" (p. 107). He "immediately fell in love with the place" and spent "as many as four nights of his week there, trying earnestly to convince regulars that rioting `would hurt the poor far more than the rich'" (p. 107).

What led Gottehrer to believe that the rioters were concerned with helping the poor is not indicated. As a result of his efforts, the Lindsey administration soon had "every...