Races must team up for victory against discrimination

When civil rights leader and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond spoke last week in McCosh 50 on the future of race relations in America, he began by wondering aloud how to talk about race without making people uncomfortable. More than that, he wondered how to do it without blaming people who feel they are not at fault. But in a speech marked by lingering bitterness and a surprisingly divisive tone, Bond failed to avoid the very pitfalls he had himself identified.

His bitterness is more than understandable, not only historically, but also for the inevitable and still-growing frustration of a career spent working tirelessly with the government to scale bureaucratic impediments to civil rights. Much of his anger is fairly directed against that government — he blames Congress and the courts populated by Bush and Reagan for "promoting a racial version of don't ask, don't tell" by suppressing statistical analysis in the theory that "where there's no data, there's no discrimination." On the whole, he blames government for telling us that the past 35 years of progress in race relations have been enough. This is a fair, justifiable and constructive criticism of a government that moves far too slowly and far too conservatively on many issues.

But we must ask, too, whether that lingering bitterness is truly productive. In his reproach of our national policies, Bond never distinguishes between the inhibiting voice of the largely white government and the voices of sympathetic individuals in the white majority who are not connected to the government at all. This error of omission — his failure to recognize white sympathy — makes his bitterness appear directed toward whites in general. As a result, whether intentionally or not, Bond draws a sharp divide between races that sets them in destructive opposition to each other.

This divide is clearest in his advocacy of affirmative action (on its own, a worthy agenda), when he explains, "Look at it this way, it's the fourth quarter of a football game between a white team and a black team. The white team is ahead 145-3. They have been cheating since the game began. The white team owns the ball, the uniforms, the field, the goal posts and the referee. All of a sudden the white quarterback feels badly about things that happened before he entered the game, and turns to the black team and says, 'Hey, can't we just play fair?' "

This metaphor is in many ways disturbingly accurate. In fact, outside of the affirmative-action context, the statement of the white quarterback is related to the argument I am trying to make here. But his metaphor breaks down in its most fundamental assumption — that there are two opposing teams in the first place. At one time, certainly there were. But race relations have improved to a point where we can now work as one team toward a common goal. It is divisive and destructive to continue to view race relations as a zero-sum contest between opposing sides.

Bond's solutions to current problems in race relations include continued litigation, fighting discrimination in government and corporate offices, stopping racial profiling and police violence and providing reparations to blacks as a group. But these are all merely temporary patches for the greater problem of racism, and each of these patches in a way pits the white team against the black one. The only genuine solution to racism, in the long run, is to actually change people's minds. And the best way to do this is to build a greater sense of a unified community among all races that shares in the wealth of diverse cultures without dividing along racial lines.

We must stress the importance of working as one team, and toward that end we cannot allow our rhetoric to focus on differences and divisions. Julian Bond's rhetoric did just that, and as a result he may have contributed more to the existing divide than he did to its resolution. There are better ways to achieve racial unity. We just have to find them together. Alex Rawson is a history major from Shaker Heights, Ohio. He can be reached at ahrawson@princeton.edu.