Speech- "Aaron Henry Commemoration", 1999

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victims. The failure of the lesser breeds to enjoy society's fruits became their fault alone. In a kind of nonsensical tautology we heard again and again: these people are poor because they are pathological, they are pathological because they are poor.

Pressure for additional civil rights laws became special pleading. America's most privileged population, white men, suddenly became a victim class. Aggressive blacks and pushy women became responsible for America's demise.

All this occurred despite almost daily incidents of racial attack, and a series of public opinion polls that demonstrate most white Americans believe racial minorities are less than equal human beings, lacking in thrift, morality, industriousness and patriotism.¹¹

Most Americans don't just believe minorities are suspect; they believe there are more of them than there actually are.

According to a Gallup Poll, the average American thinks that 18% of all Americans are Jewish; the real figure is 3%. The average American thinks that 21% of all Americans are Hispanic; the exact number is 10%; most Americans think that 43% of all Americans are Black; the real figure, of course, is 12%.

For the average American then, minorities are the majority, 71% of the national population.

This exaggeration of the other, this blame-shifting and role-reversal, where victim becomes perpetrator and minorities become majorities, this perversion of reality occurred as a result of an organized campaign which continues until this day.

It is led by a curious mix of whites and a few blacks, academics, journalists and policy-makers.

They profess strong support for equal rights while opposing every tool designed to achieve this goal.

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 continuing disparity between black and white life chances isn't result of black life choices; it stems from epidemic racism

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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 and skills, not absence of role models. These are symptoms. Racism is the cause; its elimination is the cure.

We must be careful not to define the ideology and practice of white supremacy too narrowly. It is greater than scrawled graffiti and individual indignity, the policeman's nightstick, the job or home or education denied. It is rooted deeply in the logic of our market system, in the culturally defined and politically enforced prices paid for different units of labor, and it is deeply entrenched in our national psyche.

The successful strategies of the 1960s movement were litigation, organization, mobilization and coalition, aimed at creating a national political constituency for civil rights advances.

In the 1970s, electoral strategies began to dominate, prompted by the increase in black votes engendered by the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

No sooner had black workers began to win access to industrial jobs and organized labor, the jobs went offshore and labor declined in power and influence.

Some black elites joined white elites at the feeding trough.

Since the heady days of the 1960s, too many have concentrated too much on enriching too few, while the large numbers of working class black Americans, like their counterparts in the larger society, have seen their plight ignored, their incomes shrink and their jobs disappear.

Martin Luther King lost his life supporting a garbage workers' strike in Memphis; the right to decent work at decent pay remains as basic to human freedom 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."¹²

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That there are more black millionaires today is a tribute to the movement King led; that in these best of times unemployment rates for blacks remain twice the rates for whites is an indictment of our economic system and a reflection of our failure to keep the movement coming on.

Everywhere black Americans face conditions different from but just as daunting as the bus back seats, fire hoses and billy clubs of three decades ago.

When I was young, bad boys fought with knives, not with automatic weapons. Crack was something that, if you stepped on it, you'd break your mother's back. Songs we sang were about June and moon, not ugly words for women.

On streets and sidewalks where many black American live, crime and violence are a frequent rule. As angry white men blow up buildings, angry black men blow each other away.

In America today, compared with a white child, a black child is one and a half times more likely to:

- grow up in a family whose head did not finish high school.

That child is two times as likely to:

- be born to a teenage mother.

That child is two and a half times more likely to:

- be born at low birthweight.

That child is three times more likely to:

- live in a single parent home.

That child is four times more likely to:

- have a mother who had no prenatal care.

That child is four and a half times more likely to live with neither parent.

That child is five times as likely to depend solely on a mother's earnings.

That child is nine times as likely to be a victim of homicide as a teenager or young adult, the end of a long, winding, uphill struggle to beat the racial odds against success.

In life chances, life expectancy, median income - by all the standards by which life is measured, black Americans see a deep

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gulf between the American dream and the reality of their lives.

For the last 30 years - the period of the second Reconstruction - the most effective tool for advancing entry into the mainstream of American life has been affirmative action.

Opponents now try to tell us that it doesn't work, or it used to work but doesn't now; we used to need it but it isn't needed now; when it does work, it only helps people who don't need it.

Affirmative action really isn't about preferential treatment for blacks; it is about removing preferential treatment whites have received through history, giving equal treatment to people who were denied equality in the past.

Affirmative action isn't a poverty program, and ought not be blamed for failing to solve problems it was not designed to solve. It is a program designed to counter racial discrimination, not poverty. No one beat Rodney King or killed James Byrd because they were poor.

Affirmative action created the sizeable middle class that constitutes one-third of all black Americans today.

In the late 1960s, the wages of black women in the textile industry tripled.¹³ From 1970 until 1990, the number of black police officers doubled; black lawyers and doctors doubled; black electricians and black college students tripled and black bank tellers more than quadrupled. The percentage in managerial and technical jobs doubled.

These are not numbers. They represent the growth and spread of the tiny middle class I knew as a boy into a stable one-third of all black Americans today, black women and men with jobs and homes, productive tax-paying citizens, able to provide for their families now and in the future.

Outside this building there is a parking lot. Some of the spaces are reserved for handicapped drivers. An able bodied driver sees those spaces and thinks he has been denied the right to park. But eliminating those spaces increases room for the able bodied by only a handful, but they make all the difference in the world to the handicapped. Removing those spaces deprives us of the company

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of a man or woman who might enrich our lives.

Without affirmative action, both white and blue collars around black necks would shrink, with a huge, depressive effect on black income, employment, home ownership and education.

This is because racism is alive and all too well in America. Those who would have us believe otherwise, who argue for a return to a fantasy color-blind America that never was, who would have us believe that their opposition to affirmative action is rooted in a desire for fairness and equality - these people are engaged in justification, rationalization and downright prevarication. We have long heard these arguments from white racists - they are joined by black self-haters and apologists too.

They are color blind, all right - blind to the consequences of being the wrong color in America today.

Let me tell you what they say. It is the fourth quarter of a football game between the white team and the black team. The white team is ahead 145 to 3. The white team owns the ball, the field, the goalposts, the uniforms and the referees. They have been cheating since the game began. There are two minutes left to play. Suddenly the white quarterback, who feels badly about things that happened before he entered the game, says. "Can't we just play fair?"

In their double-speak 'playing fair' means freezing the status quo in place, permanently fixing inequality as part of the American scene.

They just won't quit. They argue that affirmative action stigmatizes all blacks, making the beneficiaries and all others feel as if they've received some benefit they do not deserve.

Do you ever hear that argument made about the millions of whites who got into college as a 'legacy' because Dad is an alumni? Or the whites who got good jobs because Dad was president of the company? You never see them walking around with heads held low, eyes hidden, moaning that they've lost their self esteem because everyone in the executive washroom is whispering about how they got their job.