What is often called the “race problem” in America is a whole anthology of questions, some of them more tractable and others less so. In 1944 the Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, a Nobel laureate, who was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to provide a dispassionate foreigner’s view of our uniquely national sickness, used a more appropriate word in a massive and highly influential two-volume study entitled An American Dilemma. Questions and problems sometimes have relatively simple answers or solutions. A dilemma always signals arduous, uncomfortable work, and resolutions that are not without friction. Though certain racial issues that became prominent in public action and discussion during the pandemic spring and summer are no longer the invariable daily fare of the press, they have not gone away and they cannot go away unless and until they are addressed with a determination and an honesty neither easily found nor comfortably pursued.
Speaking of honesty, it is not easy to avoid the two most flagrant topic of the moment. The first of these is the publication of President Trump’s astonishing telephone conversation with Georgia’s Secretary of State. From my point of view the economic and cultural decline of my native country may be regarded is an additional sadness of my old age. Its moral and political degradation as revealed in what sounded like a presidential supplement to the John Gotti tapes comes closer to tragedy. Then, just as I am publishing this post, there comes news from that same state of Georgia of a very different tenor. But the shake-up of the Senate will hardly lack for public commentary far better informed than my own. Persevering with the topic already contemplated, I found that once past the banner headlines in Monday’s newspapers, I could find at least two items of relevance to our racial dilemma, one a breaking news story, the other a cluster of letters relating to an earlier news story continuing over many months.
A front page article announced that “Lawsuits Target a Covid Fund Meant to Help Black Residents”, with a subhead elaborating: “A Cry of Discrimination over the Economic Aid in Oregon”. It has been widely reported that African-American and Hispanic communities have been “disproportionately” affected by the coronavirus, the gauge of proportion being by percentage of the entire American population. With this in mind, Oregon state legislators earmarked sixty-two million dollars (out of roughly a billion and a half total allocation) for the exclusive relief of “Black residents, business owners, and community organizations enduring pandemic-related hardships.” One especially hard-hit group, throughout the country and necessarily through all ethnic groups, have been the proprietors of small businesses. The crisis has been acute in the alimentary sector, dealing financial devastation to the owners of or workers in restaurants, diners, cafés, snack carts, and so on; but of course very few economic sectors have been unscathed. One does not require a Yale J.D. to sense a potential problem with the legislature’s plan to distribute public relief funds on an exclusively racial basis. Indeed, you probably need that degree to avoid seeing a problem. It is inevitable that such a plan would meet with prompt opposition, as it has. It is utterly irrelevant from the legal and constitutional point of view that the presenting plaintiffs are “one Mexican-American and two white business owners,” but the obvious sense of importance of that fact to the New York Times is probably shared by most Americans likely to read about it. Less likely to achieve consensus are attitudes toward the justice of the plan or the appropriateness of the objections to it. The admirable motives and good intentions behind the legislation can hardly be doubted. But by the standard of “equal justice under the law” the initiative seems a non-starter. To categorize it as an exercise in affirmative action, as the Times does, requires an understanding of that term far different from the one I have encountered in many years of discussing the college admissions process. So, a dilemma.
Another form of the dilemma dominated the letters section of the op-ed pages of that same issue, where several articulate readers responded to an editorial that ran on December 26 entitled “Elite Schools Don’t Need to be Exclusive.” The subject here is one I have written about before: the composition of the student bodies of great, selective public high schools in New York City, such as Stuyvesant and the Bronx High School of Science. Admission to the schools is made on the basis of a single competitive examination in two broad subjects: the levels of competence and distinction in the skills of English language literacy (reading and writing) and mathematics. No examination is an entirely adequate gauge of a student’s abilities and preparation to do advanced work at a high level; but this one is about as objective a predictor as I can imagine. It reveals with some clarity a student’s potential for successful pursuit both of the humanities and the crucial STEM fields. It is not culturally insensitive to expect competence in our national language, which also happens to be the world language of learning. But the problem is that a “disproportionally” large number of Asian-American students win places and only a tiny number of African-Americans do. The remedy proposed by the Mayor and the Superintendent of Schools is to get rid of the admissions test. All of the letters published recognized the scandal in the situation, but most of them also derided the speciousness of the mayor’s solution. The retired principal of one of the schools wrote thus: “The mayor’s plan to remove academic admission screening for middle schools for at least a year does nothing to address the deficient preparation that too many Black and Latino students receive, and that is where our effort and finances should be directed. There are no shortcuts. Attacking entrance standards is simply a cover-up, concealing the financial and moral commitment the city has been reluctant to make.” That devastating statement, particularly with regard to moral commitment, has broad applicability to the national scene.
Whoever penned the title “Elite Schools Don’t Need to be Exclusive” apparently doesn’t know what the word elite means. Or perhaps exclusive either. The dictionary definition of elite in its nominal form is “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society.” I presume that would characterize the Times’s view of its own editorial board. The adjectival form means “chosen” or “elected/selected”. When Joe Biden was chosen as the Democratic presidential candidate, that action excluded twenty other people actively seeking to be chosen. When the electorate gave him the presidency, it necessarily excluded Donald Trump from that office. Because it is only in Alice in Wonderland that “everybody has won, and all must have prizes.” Any truly democratic system—that is, one that elects people by preferential choice—is necessarily an elite system.
It is the natural impulse of the social mind to want to solve problems and the nearly invariable desire of the political mind to want to solve them as cheaply as possible with cosmetic applications or outright leger-de-main, which is French for the light touch as practiced by card-sharps and magicians. Mayor De Blasio’s proposed solution to the admissions dilemma at Stuyvesant High reminds me of a legendary anecdote from an earlier age of train travel, partially founded in partial fact. As the number of passenger lines proliferated in the nineteenth-century European rail system to accommodate an ever-growing ridership, so also did the number of fatal rail accidents. Neither pedestrian nor equestrian travel was without its risks (consider the implications of the English word travail), but train wrecks could be very gory and cause multiple deaths. Furthermore, train wrecks were a journalistic sensation and therefore a political problem. If it bleeds, it leads. Today a statistically rare air disaster is international news. Meanwhile millions upon millions of uneventful flight miles are racked up every week, but that is not news. In any event legend has it that in the Low Countries about 1900 a royal commission set up to study and solve the problem of frequent fatal train wrecks discovered that most fatalities occurred in the last car of the train. The commission’s recommendation was simplicity itself. Just remove the last car from all trains. Problem solved. But not our dilemmas. Those will take unstinting hard work on the part of generations younger than my own.
