Speech concerning on how the new administration has brought our long national nightmare to an end and a review of the recent era of American politics, 1993 (1 of 2)

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behavior became the reason why blacks and whites live in separate worlds. Racism retreated and pathology advanced, and the burden of racial problem solving shifted from the creators of racism to its victims.

The color-blind society that was the '60s ideal became today's imagined reality. The failure of the lesser breeds to enjoy its fruits became their fault alone. Thus pressure for additional, stronger civil rights laws became special pleading. America's most privileged population, white men, suddenly became a victim class. Aggressive blacks and pushy women were reponsible for the Democrats' defeats.

All this occurred despite almost daily incidents of racial attack, and a series of public opinion surveys which demonstrate most white Americans believe racial minorities are less than equal human beings, lacking in thrift, morality, industriousness and patriotism. (1) In the opinion of our fellow citizens, Wille Horton and Bill Cosby were the same man, equally undesirable as neighbor, schoolmate, co-worker, or defender of our common soil.

Ronald Reagan had never seen a civil rights law he liked; his appointees to the federal courts and the Department of Justice were determined to destroy or disobey every civil rights law they read. They made dangerous, precipitous and radical shifts toward contravening the Constitution and the law of the land.

The ultimate result of such policy was contempt for the rule

1. Smith, "Ethnic Images", National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, GSS Topical Report No. 19, Dec. 1991.

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of law itself. Had they prevailed, our constitutional rights would have been protected only when they were popularly agreed to, or when a person who supports them was elected President of the United States.

For the past and present Administration, the Constitution is a document of infinite elasticity, to be tailored and snipped to fit the passions of the moment.

The record is appalling.

The Reagan/Bush years saw attempts to give tax breaks to segregated schools; opposition to renewal of the Voting Rights Act followed by a cynical claim of credit for its passage; the trashing of the Civil Rights Commission; the transformation of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice into a society for the protection of white male privilege; the halting of integration of public schools; strident attacks on that part of the federal judiciary that still sought to protect minority rights.

The human costs of these actions are beyond measure. When the government becomes the aggressor against the civil rights of its people, it becomes the promoter of prejudice and makes common cause with the stain of white supremacy that has persisted throughout our History.

Despite this dreary record, there were successes, and the bipartisan Congressional majority on civil rights remained intact.

A second front against racial justice was opened in the 1980s and has gained strength and power ever since. Led by

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scholars and academicians, funded by corporate America, this movement of neo-conservatives aimed its efforts at removing government regulation from every aspect of our lives, and found a handy hated target in civil rights.

While professing strong support for equal rights, these neo-Bourbons opposed every tool devised to achieve that goal. They discredited affirmative action, not only because it threatened ancient skin privilege, but because it served as an easy symbol of despised government intervention.

For these new racists, equal opportunity is a burden society cannot afford to bear. Their less than subtle message is that including blacks and women excludes quality.

The truth is that true equality requires an increase in unwanted competition these new States' Righters cannot stand; their old-boy networks, in academia or in industry cannot tolerate federal imposition of equal rights.

The argued that the civil rights laws of the 1960s eliminated all discrimination, that the playing field is now level, that every contestant stands equal at the starting line.

That some contestants have no shoes, that others find their legs gripped by heavy baggage from the past, and that an advantaged few begin the race at the finish line is of no consequence to these champions of the new order.

The movement today suffers not from its imagined excesses, but from the lies and distortions of its opponents.

They tell us discrimination against minorities is not a problem; society must protect itself from discrimination against

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the majority instead. They tell us school teachers and unemployed mothers are "special interests". They tell us civil rights remedies produce civil wrongs.

They tell us America is color blind, but a recent national survey tells us that the majority of whites believe Blacks and Hispanics prefer welfare to work, are lazier than whites, and are more prone to violence, less intelligent, and less patriotic.

These new obstructionists reject the intergenerational effects of racism as a cause of disadvantage; discrimination is dead, they say, and cannot be at fault, but blacks will suffer disadvantage as long as they exhibit discrimination's badges.

When the topic is Black unemployment rates - twice those for whites - past and present bias plays no role. But when the subject is welfare burdens or other so called "pathologies," these neo-segs never tire of listing the cumulative effects of our racist past.

Yesterday's movement has been criticized - in the perfect hindsight of today - for winning gains for middle class blacks alone, but middle class blacks in Montgomery did not ride the city's busses, and college professors and bankers in Greensboro did not eat their lunch at the five and ten.

Someone needs to disabuse the modern world of the notion that the beneficiaries of race-centered affirmative action are somehow "profiting" from it, as if the movement's goals were an investment shared by a greedy few - a subtribe of ebony Ivan Boeskys trading up life's ladder. There is no 'profit' in receiving right treatment. Receiving rights others already enjoy

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is no special benefit or badge of privilege; it is the natural order of things in a democratic society.

The continuing disparity between black and white life-chances is a result of epidemic racism and an economic system dependent on class division.

Abundant scholarship notwithstanding, there is no other possible explanation - not family breakdown, not lack of middle class values, not lack of education or skills, not absence of role models.

These are symptoms. Racism is the cause; its elimination is the cure.

The last item on the civil rights agenda -- economic justice --remains unfulfilled and unaddressed.

Martin Luther King lost his life supporting a garbage workers' strike in Memphis; the right to decent work at decent pay is as important as the right to vote.

"Negroes," King said in 1961, "are almost entirely a working people. There are pitifully few Negro millionaires and few Negro employers." (1)

That there are more Black millionaires today is a tribute to the movement King lead; that there are proportionately fewer blacks working today is an indictment of our times and our economic system, a reflection of our failure to keep the movement coming on.

The first years of the kinder, gentler administration only

1. King, M.L. Address before the 4th Constitutional Convention, AFL-CIO, Bal Harbour, Fla. Dec. 11, '61.

Last edit 11 months ago by shashathree
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