There is a change happening withthe way many view race politics.
I had a very interestingconversation with a professor recently.
Although it started as a ratherboring discussion about the views of Al Sharpton it evolved into a excellentdiscussion about something far more exciting than the positions of Al.
Race politics and how the whendiscussed it always seems to be spoken of with one view.
Many African Americans are sofast to jump on the racial bandwagon that the refuse to see that there is onethan one view to race politics.
Only a generation ago racialprejudice dominated the politics of race.
There was opposition of whiteAmericans to government policies intended to help blacks because a largenumbers of white Americans disliked blacks, and, disliking them, weredisinclined to support government policies to help them.
In the minds of Americans whohave long cared about the problems of prejudice and racial inequality, there isincreasingly an intuition-imprecise, tentative, more often implicit thanexplicit-that the meaning of race as an issue in
American life is changing. Butchanging in what ways? And to what extent? And with what consequences for thefuture?
It’s hard to address questionslike these impartially if only because it has become difficult to talk aboutprejudice in politics candidly.
It has become fashionable, forexample, to blame conflict over racial policies as a reason for such prejudice.
Through bigotry; and it is notuncommon, even for scholars, to insist that opposition to affirmative actionis, in and of itself, proof of bigotry.
The most recent example of thisis noted by the past issues of admission policies the University of Michigan.
This demonstrates that althoughit is true that some whites dislike affirmative action because they dislikeblacks, it is also true that a substantial number of whites dislike the idea ofaffirmative action so much that they have come to dislike blacks as aconsequence.
Hence the irony of the newpolitics of race.
In wanting to reduce the racialdivider in America, we have widened it.
Prejudice remains a part of thepolitics of race, but a larger part is politics itself.
Social welfare policies, equaltreatment legislation, and race-conscious policies represent very differentpolicy agendas; and the impact of ideology, conflicting intuitions aboutfairness and responsibility, and prejudice itself varies from one racial policyagenda to another.
A minimal condition for participatingin the contemporary debate over race is to recognize that there is a variety ofdifferent arguments.
They are centrally driven not byracial prejudice but by considerations of public policy.
We must remember that as apeople, nothing has marked our existence more so than struggle.
The ideologies and movements ofpast contributors to the struggle yield a host of lessons to be picked up,improved upon and put to use.
Today, African Americans, moreso than ever must learn how to take the best of these diverse ideologies,remembering they all focused upon the same goal, and apply them to improve uponour present condition.
As blacks we have to realizethat any racial issue whether it is affirmative action or any other racialissue it can be seen in more than one view and we need to open our mind to themin order to change the falsehoods that come alone with prejudice.
This is not tell you what to think, but rather what to think about.
