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The Following are Just a Few Examples of the Kinds of Books and Information You'll Get from Questia |
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Modern Critical Interpretations Ernest Hemingway's (The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical Interpretations can be found at Questia's Online Library by clicking here and searching for A Farewell to Arms). Editor's Note My introduction begins by seeking Hemingway's place in American literary tradition and then relates A Farewell to Arms to the aesthetic impressionism of Walter Pater and Joseph Conrad. Daniel J. Schneider begins the chronological sequence with a study of the poetic imagery or "imagism" of A Farewell to Arms. An investigation of tragic structure in the novel by Robert Merrill is followed by William Adair's Freudian account of A Farewell to Arms as Hemingway's own interpretation of the dreams, fantasies, and compulsions resulting from his early involvement in war. Michael S. Reynolds compares Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage to Farewell, and suggests that Hemingway, like Crane, relied upon imagination and not upon the autobiographical experience of battle. The palpable hostility of Hemingway toward women as the image of desire is traced in Farewell by Judith Fetterley, who confirms the earlier analysis by Leslie Fiedler which is cited in my introduction. In a textual study of the novel's much rewritten conclusion, Bernard Oldsey attempts to illuminate Hemingway's choices among his multiple possibilities. Scott Donaldson skeptically reads the passivity and "innocence" of Frederic Henry as masking a wily self that calls the narrator's stance into question. In Millicent Bell's interpretation, A Farewell to Arms is a coded system of feeling and judgment based upon Hemingway's war experiences on the Italian front. In a previously unpublished essay concluding this volume, Sandra Whipple Spanier sees Catherine Barkley as the true exemplar of Hemingway's code of heroism, since she manifests courage, loyalty, grace in confronting death, and a true ability to teach Frederic Henry what he badly needs to know. Spanier's argument is both feminist and shrewdly kind to Hemingway; it provokes skepticism in me, but itself shares in some of the qualities that Hemingway urged upon us. (The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical Interpretations can be found at Questia's Online Libary by clicking here and searching for A Farewell to Arms). Introduction This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old Or again: I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore drips, thinn'd with the
Hemingway is scarcely unique in not acknowledging the paternity of Walt Whitman; T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens are far closer to Whitman than William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane were, but literary influence is a paradoxical and antithetical process, about which we continue to know all too little. The profound affinities between Hemingway, Eliot, and Stevens are not accidental, but are family resemblances due to the repressed but crucial relation each had to Whitman's work. Hemingway characteristically boasted (in a letter to Sara Murphy, February 27, 1936) that he had knocked Stevens down quite handily: "... for statistics sake Mr. Stevens is 6 feet 2 weighs 225 lbs. and . . . when he hits the ground it is highly spectaculous." Since this match between the two writers took place in Key West on February 19, 1936, I am moved, as a loyal Stevensian, for statistics' sake to point out that the victorious Hemingway was born in 1899, and the defeated Stevens in 1879, so that the novelist was then going on thirty-seven, and the poet verging on fifty-seven. The two men doubtless despised one another, but in the letter celebrating his victory Hemingway calls Stevens "a damned fine poet" and Stevens always affirmed that Hemingway was essentially a poet, a judgment concurred in by Robert Penn Warren when he wrote that Hemingway "is essentially a lyric rather than a dramatic writer." Warren compared Hemingway to Wordsworth, which is feasible, but the resemblance to Whitman is far closer. Wordsworth would not have written, "I am the man, I suffer'd, I was there," but Hemingway almost persuades us he would have achieved that line had not Whitman set it down first. (The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical Interpretations can be found at Questia's Online Libary by clicking here and searching for A Farewell to Arms). II III It could be argued persuasively that Hemingway is the best short- story writer in the English language from Joyce's Dubliners until the present. The aesthetic dignity of the short story need not be questioned, and yet we seem to ask more of a canonical writer. Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises and not Ulysses, which is only to say that his true genius was for very short stories, and hardly at all for extended narrative. Had he been primarily a poet, his lyrical gifts would have sufficed: we do not hold it against Yeats that his poems, not his plays, are his principal glory. Alas, neither Turgenev nor Henry James, neither Melville nor Mark Twain provide true agonists for Hemingway. Instead, de Maupassant is the apter rival. Of Hemingway's intensity of style in the briefer compass, there is no question, but even The Sun Also Rises reads now as a series of epiphanies, of brilliant and memorable vignettes. Much that has been harshly criticized in Hemingway, particularly in For Whom the Bell Tolls, results from his difficulty in adjusting his gifts to the demands of the novel. Robert Penn Warren suggests that Hemingway is successful when his "system of ironies and understatements is coherent." When incoherent, then, Hemingway's rhetoric fails as persuasion, which is to say, we read To Have and Have Not or For Whom the Bell Tolls and we are all too aware that the system of tropes is primarily what we are offered. Warren believes this not to be true of A Farewell to Arms, yet even the celebrated close of the novel seems now a worn understatement: But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. (The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical Interpretations can be found at Questia's Online Libary by clicking here and searching for A Farewell to Arms). Contrast this to the close of " Old Man at the Bridge," a story only two and a half pages long: There was nothing to do about him. It was Easter Sunday and the Fascists were advancing toward the Ebro.It was a gray overcast day with a low ceiling so their planes were not up. That and the fact that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck that old man would ever have. The understatement continues to persuade here because the stoicism remains coherent, and is admirably fitted by the rhetoric. A very short story concludes itself by permanently troping the mood of a particular moment in history. Vignette is Hemingway's natural mode, or call it hard-edged vignette: a literary sketch that somehow seems to be the beginning or end of something longer, yet truly is complete in itself. Hemingway's style encloses what ought to be unenclosed, so that the genre remains subtle yet trades its charm for punch. But a novel of three hundred and forty pages ( A Farewell to Arms) which I have just finished reading again (after twenty years away from it) cannot sustain itself upon the rhetoric of vignette. After many understatements, too many, the reader begins to believe that he is reading a Hemingway imitator, like the accomplished John O'Hara, rather than the master himself. Hemingway's notorious fault is the monotony of repetition, which becomes a dulling litany in a somewhat less accomplished imitator like Nelson Algren, and sometimes seems self-parody when we must confront it in Hemingway. Nothing is got for nothing, and a great style generates defenses in us, particularly when it sets the style of an age, as the Byronic Hemingway did. As with Byron, the color and variety of the artist's life becomes something of a veil between the work and our aesthetic apprehension of it. Hemingway's career included four marriages (and three divorces); service as an ambulance driver for the Italians in World War I (with an honorable wound); activity as a war correspondent in the Greek-Turkish War (1922), the Spanish Civil War (1937-39), the Chinese-Japanese War (1941) and the War against Hitler in Europe (1944-45). Add big-game hunting and fishing, safaris, expatriation in France and Cuba, bullfighting, the Nobel prize, and ultimate suicide in Idaho, and you have an absurdly implausible life, apparently lived in imitation of Hemingway's own fiction. The final effect of the work and the life together is not less than mythological, as it was with Byron and with Whitman and with Oscar Wilde. Hemingway now is myth, and so is permanent as an image of American heroism, or perhaps more ruefully the American illusion of heroism. The best of Hemingway's work, the stories and The Sun Also Rises, are also a permanent part of the American mythology. Faulkner, Stevens, Frost, perhaps Eliot, and Hart Crane were stronger writers than Hemingway, but he alone in this American century has achieved the enduring status of myth. IV Fiedler finds a touch of Poe in this, but Hemingway seems to me far healthier. Death, to Poe, is after all less a metaphor for sexual fulfillment than it is an improvement over mere coition, since Poe longs for a union in essence and not just in act. (The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical Interpretations can be found at Questia's Online Libary by clicking here and searching for A Farewell to Arms). Any feminist critic who resents that too-lovely Hemingwayesque ending, in which Frederic Henry gets to walk away in the rain while poor Catherine takes the death for both of them, has my sympathy, if only because this sentimentality that mars the aesthetic effect is certainly the mask for a male resentment and fear of women. Hemingway's symbolic rain is read by Louis L. Martz as the inevitable trope for pity, and by Malcolm Cowley as a conscious symbol for disaster. A darker interpretation might associate it with Whitman's very American confounding of night, death, the mother, and the sea, a fourfold mingling that Whitman bequeathed to Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane, among many others. The death of the beloved woman in Hemingway is part of that tropological cosmos, in which the moist element dominates because death the mother is the true image of desire. For Hemingway, the rain replaces the sea, and is as much the image of longing as the sea is in Whitman or Hart Crane. Robert Penn Warren, defending a higher estimate of A Farewell to Arms than I can achieve, interprets the death of Catherine as the discovery that "the attempt to find a substitute for universal meaning in the limited meaning of the personal relationship is doomed to failure." Such a reading, though distinguished, seems to me to belong more to the literary cosmos of T. S. Eliot than to that of Hemingway. Whatever nostalgia for transcendental verities Hemingway may have possessed, his best fiction invests its energies in the representation of personal relationships, and hardly with the tendentious design of exposing their inevitable inadequacies. If your personal religion quests for the matador as messiah, then you are likely to seek in personal relationships something of the same values enshrined in the ritual of bull and bullfighter: courage, dignity, the aesthetic exaltation of the moment, and an all but suicidal intensity of being—the sense of life gathered to a crowded perception and graciously open to the suddenness of extinction. That is a vivid but an unlikely scenario for an erotic association, at least for any that might endure beyond a few weeks. Wyndham Lewis categorized Hemingway by citing Walter Pater on Prosper Merimée: "There is the formula . . . the enthusiastic amateur of rude, crude, naked force in men and women.... Painfully distinct in outline, inevitable to sight, unrelieved, there they stand." Around them, Pater added, what Merimée gave you was "neither more nor less than empty space." I believe that Pater would have found more than that in Hemingway's formula, more in the men and women, and something other than empty space in their ambiance. Perhaps by way of Joseph Conrad's influence upon him, Hemingway had absorbed part at least of what is most meaningful in Pater's aesthetic impressionism. Hemingway's women and men know, with Pater, that we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Our one chance is to pack that interval with the multiplied fruit of consciousness, with the solipsistic truths of perception and sensation. What survives time's ravages in A Farewell to Arms is precisely Hemingway's textually embodied knowledge that art alone apprehends the moments of perception and sensation, and so bestows upon them their privileged status. Consider the opening paragraph of chapter 16: That night a bat flew into the room through the open door that led onto the balcony and through which we watched the night over the roofs of the town. It was dark in our room except for the small light of the night over the town and the bat was not frightened but hunted in the room as though he had been outside. We lay and watched him and I do not think he saw us because we lay so still. After he went out we saw a searchlight come on and watched the beam move across the sky and then go off and it was dark again. A breeze came in the night and we heard the men of the anti-aircraft gun on the next roof talking. It was cool and they were putting on their capes. I worried in the night about some one coming up but Catherine said they were all asleep. Once in the night we went to sleep and when I woke she was not there but I heard her coming along the hall and the door opened and she came back to the bed and said it was all right she had been downstairs and they were all asleep. She had been outside Miss Van Campen's door and heard her breathing in her sleep. She brought crackers and we ate them and drank some vermouth. We were very hungry but she said that would all have to be gotten out of me in the morning. I went to sleep again in the morning when it was light and when I was awake I found she was gone again. She came in looking fresh and lovely and sat on the bed and the sun rose while I had the thermometer in my mouth and we smelled the dew on the roofs and then the coffee of the men at the gun on the next roof. The flight of the bat, the movement of the searchlight's beam and of the breeze, the overtones of the antiaircraft gunners blend into the light of the morning, to form a composite epiphany of what it is that Frederic Henry has lost when he finally walks back to the hotel in the rain. Can we define that loss? As befits the aesthetic impressionism of Pater, Conrad, Stephen Crane, and Hemingway, it is in the first place a loss of vividness and intensity in the world as experienced by the senses. In the aura of his love for Catherine, Frederic Henry knows the fullness of "It was dark" and "It was cool," and the smell of the dew on the roofs, and the aroma of the coffee being enjoyed by the anti-aircraft gunners. We are reminded that Pater's crucial literary ancestors were the unacknowledged Ruskin and the hedonistic visionary Keats, the Keats of the "Ode on Melancholy." Hemingway too, particularly in A Farewell to Arms, is an heir of Keats, with the poet's passion for sensuous immediacy, in all of its ultimate implications. Is not Catherine Barkley a belated and beautiful version of the goddess Melancholy, incarnating Keats's "Beauty that must die"? (The full version of A Farewell to Arms, Modern Critical Interpretations can be found at Questia's Online Libary by clicking here and searching for A Farewell to Arms).
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The Ethics of Abortion: Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice, By Robert M. Baird, Stuart E. Rosenbaum get the full version of this research at Questia Online Library by clicking here Introduction
Sometimes, however, the judgment that
comparable integrity moves activists on both sides seems confounded
by the facts. When Michael Griffin, an anti-abortion activist,
allegedly shot and killed Dr. David Gunn, an abortion provider, at a
clinic in Pensacola, Florida, on March 17, 1993, one could only
wonder what acts of violence might be next on the activists' agenda,
and what kind of moral or religious integrity could endorse killing
to achieve its ends. Nevertheless, Michael Griffin, according to
news reports, vowed to provide his own legal defense and to make the
Bible its primary source. However much one might be baffled by
Michael Griffin, the man himself apparently felt morally comfortable
with his action. Furthermore, public statements offered by those
commenting on behalf of Operation Rescue and Rescue America, while
regretting Griffin's action, did not neglect to mention the millions
of babies abortion providers like Gunn kill every year in America.
They did not say Griffin was justified in killing Gunn, but they
obviously thought Griffin's action was no worse morally than Gunn's
regular abortion of living fetuses. Was Griffin morally justified in
killing David Gunn? Was Gunn even more disreputable than Griffin
because he regularly and without compunction dispatched living
fetuses (what antiabortion advocates call innocent babies)? Was Gunn
so blind, morally speaking, that killing him was the only
responsible recourse? Or, was Griffin's idea of moral and religious
integrity just badly misguided? The deep perplexity many people feel
about these and related questions motivates this collection of
essays. An interesting analogue of Atwood's anti-choice society appears in contemporary Communist China. Chinese society is also antichoice, but instead of requiring women to reproduce as much as possible the Chinese require women to reproduce no more than once. The one-child mandate is rigidly enforced, and women who become pregnant a second time face mandatory abortion. Most women in contemporary Western societies likely find Communist Chinese society no more desirable than Atwood's imaginary one. Most women want control over their own reproductive powers, control systematically denied in both of these anti-choice alternative societies. "Pro-choice" individual might naturally find Atwood's imaginary society more objectionable than Communist China, while "pro-life" individuals might find Communist China more objectionable than Atwood's. What those alternative societies have in common is the requirement that women accept "external" control of their reproductive powers. Different sorts of rationale seem to authorize external control of women's reproductive powers. A biblical rationale for an anti-choice position differs from a population control rationale for the same position. Michael Griffin, with his staunch biblical perspectives, would certainly not be tolerant of the Chinese one-child-per-family policy mandating abortion. Likewise, Communist Chinese planners would find Griffin's biblical perspective, at best, oddly unrealistic. Most women in contemporary Western societies would find both Griffin's and the Communist Chinese positions to be unacceptably paternalistic. Where on this confusing spectrum of alternatives is the view richest in moral integrity, the wisest view, the view most worthy of allegiance to be found? Again, these are the questions that motivate this collection of essays. This revised selection of essays and opinions about abortion reflects the fact that the issue is now more divisive than it was four years ago when we first focused our attention on the topic of abortion. The social and political landscape now looks significantly different. We have tried in this revised volume to take into account the new look of that landscape. We have also segmented the collection into clusters of essays, each addressing a distinctively problematic aspect of the abortion issue. An ideally "balanced" selection of essays on this topic, along with an ideally "balanced" introduction, is probably an impossible ideal. Anyone picking up a volume like this one will inevitably look to see how their particular predispositions are handled by the editors and authors. We, the editors, do have our moral, political, religious, and professional perspectives. We confess that those perspectives as a whole have guided our choices about what to keep from the original edition and what to add to create the present volume. In our opinion the selections included here are incisive and informative, and anyone who hopes to think coherently about the topic of abortion needs to become familiar with them. The first cluster of essays presents a series of "snapshots." Richard Selzer focuses on the horror of the killing in abortions; Ellen Messer and Kathryn E. May, followed by Anna Quindlen, call attention to the horrors of fife without safe, legal abortion. The second cluster concerns the
constitutional issue of abortion. Whether or not Roe v. Wade was a
legitimate use of judicial authority is a question judges and
scholars have debated extensively. We offer here edited versions of
each of the three major Supreme Court decisions dealing with
abortion: Roe v. Wade, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, and
Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey. The
remaining selections mark out a route into the question whether or
not the Roe decision was constitutionally legitimate. Robert H.
Bork's brief essay deriding the "political activism" he sees in the
Casey decision is set alongside Melvin Wulf's response, and Ronald
Dworkin's applause for the decision.
Horror, like bacteria, is everywhere. It blankets the earth, endlessly lapping to find that one unguarded entryway. As though narcotized, we walk beneath, upon, through it. Carelessly we touch the familiar infected linen, eat from the universal dish; we disdain isolation. We are like the newborn that carry immunity from their mothers' wombs. Exteriorized, we are wrapped in impermeable membranes that cannot be seen. Then one day, the defense is gone. And we awaken to horror. In our city, garbage is collected early in the morning. Sometimes the bang of the cans and the grind of the truck awaken us before our time. We are resentful, mutter into our pillows, then go back to sleep. On the morning of August 6, 1975, the people of 73rd Street near Woodside Avenue do just that. When at last they rise from their beds, dress, eat breakfast and leave their houses for work, they have forgotten, if they had ever known, that the garbage truck had passed earlier that morning. The event has slipped into unmemory, like a dream. They close their doors and descend to
the pavement. It is midsummer. You measure the climate, decide how
you feel in relation to the heat and the humidity. You walk toward
the bus stop. Others, your neighbors, are waiting there. It is all
so familiar. All at once you step on something soft. You feel it
with your foot. Even through your shoe you have the sense of
something unusual something marked by a special "give." It is a
foreignness upon the pavement. Instinct puts your foot away in an
awkward little movement. You look down, and you see . . . a tiny
naked body, its arms and legs flung apart, its head thrown back, its
mouth agape, its face serious. A bird, you think, fallen from its
nest. But there is no nest here on 73rd Street, no bird so big. It
is rubber, then. A model, a . . . joke. Yes, that's it, a joke. And
you bend to see. Because you must. And it is no joke. Such a gray
softness can be but one thing. It is a baby, and dead. You cover
your mouth, your eyes. You are fixed. Horror has found its chink and
crawled in, and you will never be the same as you were. Years later
you will step from a sidewalk to a lawn, and you will start at its
softness, and think of that upon which you have just trod. Now the street is filling with people. There are police. They know what to do. They rope off the area, then stand guard over the enclosed space. They are controlled methodical, these young policemen. Servants, they do not reveal themselves to their public master, it would not be seemly. Yet I do see their pallor and the sweat that breaks upon the face of one, the way another bites the fining of his cheek and holds it thus. Ambulance attendants scoop up the bodies. They scan the street; none must be overlooked. What they place upon the fitter amounts to little more than a dozen pounds of human flesh. They raise the fitter, and slide it home inside the ambulance, and they drive away. You and your neighbors stand about in the street which is become for you a battlefield from which the newly slain have at last been bagged and tagged and dragged away. But what shrapnel is this? By what explosion flung, these fragments that sink into the brain and fester there? Whatever smell there is in this place becomes for you the stench of death. The people of 73rd Street do not then speak to each other. It is too soon for outrage, too late for blindness. It is the time of unresisted horror. Later, at the police station, the
investigation is brisk, conclusive. It is the hospital director
speaking: ". . . fetuses accidentally got mixed up with the hospital
rubbish . . . were picked up at approximately eight fifteen A.M. by
a sanitation truck. Somehow, the plastic lab bag, labeled HAZARDOUS
MATERIAL, fell off the back of the truck and broke open. No, it is
not known how the fetuses got in the orange plastic NM labeled
HAZARDOUS MATERIAL. It is a freak accident." The hospital director
wants you to know that it is not an everyday occurrence. Once in a
lifetime, he says. But you have seen it, and what are his words to
you now? He grows affable, familiar, tells you that, by mistake, the fetuses got mixed up with the other debris. (Yes, he says other; he says debris.) He has spent the entire day, he says, trying to figure out how it happened. He wants you to know that. Somehow it matters to him. He goes on: Aborted fetuses that weigh one pound or
less are incinerated. Those weighing over one pound are buried at a
city cemetery. He says this. Now you see. It is orderly. It is
sensible. The world is not mad. This is still a civilized society. And you know, too, that the Street of the Dead Fetuses will be wherever you go. You are part of its history now, its legend. It has laid claim upon you so that you cannot entirely leave it--not ever. I am a surgeon. I do not shrink from the particularities of sick flesh. Escaping blood, all the outpourings of disease--phlegm, pus, vomitus, even those occult meaty tumors that terrify--I see as blood, disease, phlegm, and so on. I touch them to destroy them. But I do not make symbols of them. I have seen, and I am used to seeing. Yet there are paths within the body that I have not taken, penetralia where I do not go. Nor is it lack of technique, limitation of knowledge that forbids me these ways. It is the western wing of the fourth floor of a great university hospital. An abortion is about to take place. I am present because I asked to be present. I wanted to see what I had never seen. The patient is Jamaican. She lies on the table submissively, and now and then she smiles at one of the nurses as though acknowledging a secret. A nurse draws down the sheet, lays bare
the abdomen. The belly mounds gently in the twenty-fourth week of
pregnancy. The chief surgeon paints it with a sponge soaked in red
antiseptic. He does this three times, each time a fresh sponge. He
covers the area with a sterile sheet, an aperture in its center. He
is a kindly man who teaches as he works, who pauses to reassure the
woman. A little pinprick, he says to the woman. He inserts the point of a tiny needle at the midline of the lower portion of her abdomen, on the downslope. He infiltrates local anesthetic into the skin, where it forms a small white bubble. The woman grimaces. That is all you will feel, the doctor says. Except for a little pressure. But no more pain. She smiles again. She seems to relax. She settles comfortably on the table. The worst is over. The doctor selects a three-and-one-half-inch needle bearing a central stylet. He places the point at the site of the previous injection. He aims it straight up and down, perpendicular. Next he takes hold of her abdomen with his left hand, palming the womb, steadying it. He thrusts with his right hand. The needle sinks into the abdominal wall. Oh, says the woman quietly. Another thrust and he has speared the uterus. We are in, he says. He has felt the muscular wall of the
organ gripping the shaft of his needle. A further slight pressure on
the needle advances it a bit more. He takes his left hand from the
woman's abdomen. He retracts the filament of the stylet from the
barrel of the needle. A small geyser of pale yellow fluid erupts.
We are in the right place, says the doctor. Are you feeling any pain? he asks. She smiles, shakes her head. She gazes at the ceiling. In the room we are six: two physicians, two nurses, the patient, and me. The participants are busy, very attentive. I am not at all busy--but I am no less attentive. I want to see. I see something! It is unexpected, utterly unexpected, like a disturbance in the earth, a tumultuous jarring. I see a movement--a small one. But I have seen it. And then I see it again. And now I see that it is the hub of the needle in the woman's belly that has jerked. First to one side. Then to the other side. Once more it wobbles, is tugged, like a fishing fine nibbled by a sunfish. Again! And I know! It is the fetus that worries thus. It is the fetus struggling against the needle. Struggling? How can that be? I think: that cannot be. I think: the fetus feels no pain, cannot feel fear, has no motivation. It is merely reflex. I point to the needle. It is a reflex, says the doctor. By the end of the fifth month, the fetus weighs about one pound, is about twelve inches long. Hair is on the head. There are eyebrows, eyelashes. Pale pink nipples show on the chest. Nails are present, at the fingertips, at the toes. At the beginning of the sixth month, the fetus can cry, can suck, can make a fist. He kicks, he punches. The mother can feel this, can see this. His eyelids, until now closed, can open. He may look up, down, sideways. His grip is very strong. He could support his weight by holding with one hand. A reflex, the doctor says. I hear him. But I saw something in that mass of cells understand that it must bob and butt. And I see it again! I have an impulse to shove to the table-it is just a step--seize that needle, pull it out. We are not six, I think. We are seven. Something strangles there. An effort, its effort, binds me to it. I do not shove to the table. I take no little step. It would be . . . well, madness. Everyone here wants the needle where it is. Six do. No, five do. I close my eyes. I see inside of the
uterus. It is bathed in ruby gloom. I see the creature curled upon
itself. Its knees are flexed. Its head is bent upon its chest. It is
in fluid and gently rocks to the rhythm of the distant heartbeat. Its place is entered by something. It is sudden. A point coming. A needle! A spike of daylight pierces the chamber. Now the light is extinguished. The needle comes closer in the pool. The point grazes the thigh, and I stir. Perhaps I wake from dozing. The fight is there again. I twist and straighten. My arms and legs push. My hand finds the shaft--grabs! I grab. I bend the needle this way and that. The point probes, touches on my belly. My mouth opens. Could I cry out? All is a commotion and a churning. There is a presence in the pool. An activity! The pool colors, reddens, darkens. I open my eyes to see the doctor feeding a small plastic tube through the barrel of the needle into the uterus. Drops of pink fluid overrun the rim and spill onto the sheet. He withdraws the needle from around the plastic tubing. Now only the little tube protrudes from the woman's body. A nurse hands the physician a syringe loaded with a colorless liquid. He attaches it to the end of the tubing and injects it. Prostaglandin, he says. Ah well, prostaglandin--a substance found normally in the body. When given in concentrated dosage, it throws the uterus into vigorous contraction. In eight to twelve hours, the woman will expel the fetus. The doctor detaches the syringe but does not remove the tubing. In case we must do it over, he says. He takes away the sheet. He places gauze pads over the tubing. Over all this he applies adhesive tape. I know. We cannot feed the great numbers. There is no more room. I know, I know. It is a woman's right to refuse the risk, to decline the pain of childbirth. And an unwanted child is a very great burden. An unwanted child is a burden to himself. I know. And yet . . . there is the flick of that needle. I saw it. I saw . . . I felt-in that room, a pace away, life prodded, life fending off. I saw fife avulsed * -swept by flood, blackening--then out. "There," says the doctor. "It's all over. It wasn't too bad, was it?" he says to the woman. She smiles. It is all over. Oh, yes. And who would care to imagine that from a moist and dark commencement six months before there would ripen the cluster and globule, the sprout and pouch of man? And who would care to imagine that trapped within the laked pearl and a dowry of yoke would fie the earliest stuff of dream and memory? It is a persona carried here as well as
a person, I think. I think it is a signed piece, engraved with a
hieroglyph of human genes. Later, in the corridor, the doctor explains that the law does not permit abortion beyond the twenty-fourth week. That is when the fetus may be viable, he says. We stand together for a moment, and he tells of an abortion in which the fetus cried after it was passed. What did you do? I ask him. There was nothing to do but let it five,
he says. It did very well, he says. A case of mistaken dates. 2 The Bad Old Days CAROLINE For a long time I think I drank to avoid the feelings. And it wasn't until quite recently, five years ago, after I had stopped drinking for a while, that I went through a whole period of really reliving the terror of this experience. It was in the summer, between my junior and senior years of college. I was going to college in Cleveland, living there for the summer. And somehow I just knew I was pregnant. It was the first and only time that I was ever sexually intimate with this man. He was a young artist whom I had been seeing for some time. I wasn't particularly physically attracted to him, but he was pressing me, and I just finally got to the point where I couldn't struggle with it anymore. So I gave in. Somehow I immediately had the sense that I was pregnant. I really didn't know what to do. I knew, though, that having a baby would ruin my whole life. The man involved felt responsible and wanted to marry me, but I thought it was a very weak reason for getting married. I spent a lot of time just seeing my life in a shambles. Things at that time in Cleveland were very tight. There had been several incidents reported in the paper. An abortion ring had been broken up. It was 1963, and when I followed up on the few leads there were, it seemed that it was absolutely the worst possible time in about five years to have an abortion in Cleveland. In the meantime the weeks were going by and I was more pregnant all the time and it was really getting to the point that if I didn't do something soon it was going to be too late. Being raised a good Catholic girl, abortion was not a thing that I was very comfortable thinking about. But I didn't feel that I had any other option. I was getting pretty desperate by this time because I was nine weeks pregnant. I finally located an abortionist in Youngstown, Ohio. This so-called doctor was a bookie and he was an abortionist. He was an elderly man in a ramshackle little house in a disreputable, shabby part of Youngstown. It in no way fit my image of a doctor's house and office. I think there was some actual gambling going on while we were waiting. He had a room with a chair and stirrups set up. The money, one hundred dollars, had to be in cash, in certain denominations, and it had to be given to him in an envelope. He checked it very thoroughly to make sure it wasn't marked. He explained he was doing a saline injection and that there should be some cramping and the abortion would happen within twenty-four hours. Nothing happened. I don't know how many days passed; I did a lot to block out this experience. But I do know that when I finally aborted I was alone in my room in the dormitory at school. I went through at least twelve hours of labor alone in my room. It was more terrible than I ever imagined, partly because I was alone, partly because I was scared. I was timing the contractions and I just didn't think I could bear anymore. I didn't feel I could cry out for help, and I just remember thinking, "I'm going to get through this." I remember noticing that the contractions were getting more and more frequent, five minutes, then four minutes, then three minutes, and then there was a lot of blood and there was a fetus. I was really beside myself, and terrified. I didn't know what to do. There was more blood than I ever imagined. I used one of these metal waste baskets we had in the dorm rooms and I remember it being filled up. I think I had gone through a whole night and it was now midmorning, and there weren't many people around. I managed to get to the bathroom, very surreptitiously. I was terrified of someone discovering me, of being arrested. I remember taking this fetus and not knowing what else to do but flush it down the toilet. And I was terrified that it wasn't going to go down, that they'd have to call a plumber and then there would be this hunt to find out who did this terrible thing in the dorm, and I'd be tracked down and prosecuted. Somehow I thought then it would be over, but it wasn't over. It went on and on. I kept hemorrhaging and it just wouldn't stop. I had become pregnant in August, and the abortion was in early November. I remember going home for Thanksgiving and my mother kept saying, "I think you're anemic." And I remember being very drained and wiped out. Early in December, I became friendly with a very gentle, brilliant but quite crazy college student who had been hospitalized while he was suicidal. I found myself confiding in him that I'd had this abortion, and was still bleeding. He talked to the rector of the Episcopal Church in Shaker Heights, and the rector, to whom I shall be forever grateful, called one of the doctors in his congregation. He was so appalled at my condition that he said, "Do you rearm you could have killed yourself?" He admitted me to the hospital. After they built me up they did a D & C. I wasn't yet twenty-one, so the doctor called and spoke to my mother and said there was nothing to be concerned about; the D & C was just a routine procedure and would help. He said that I was quite anemic. I must have been in the hospital five days. The Episcopal Church paid my hospital bill and the doctor never charged. I was very thankful, and totally done in at the end of that ordeal. I didn't feel guilty. I was determined
once I made the decision to go through with it, and I did.
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The Affirmative Action Debate By George E. Curry, Addison Wesley get the full version of this research at Questia Online Library by clicking here INTRODUCTION
Women, like African-Americans and other racial minorities, were treated as less than full citizens throughout much of American history, though to a different degree. As Justice William J. Brennan observed, neither slaves nor women could hold office, serve on juries, or bring suit in their own names, and married women traditionally were denied the legal capacity to hold or convey property or to serve as legal guardians of their own children. Over the past three decades, the United States has struggled valiantly to overcome that sordid legacy as it moves toward what Manning Marable, in the opening selection in this book, calls "the ultimate elimination of race and gender inequality, the uprooting of prejudice and discrimination, and the realization of a truly democratic nation." Out of that struggle came the policy of affirmative action. Although the term "affirmative action" is relatively new, the concept is not. The Civil Rights Commission defines the contemporary term as encompassing any measure, beyond simple termination of a discriminatory practice, which permits the consideration of race, national origin, sex, or disability, along with other criteria, and which is adopted to provide opportunities to a class of qualified individuals who have either historically or actually been denied those opportunities, and to prevent the recurrence of discrimination in the future. But well over a century ago, at the beginning of the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War, the Freedman's Bureau was established to assist newly freed slaves, providing for AfricanAmericans to receive clothing, land, and education. More recently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to avert a march on Washington planned by A. Philip Randolph, president of the powerful Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, signed an executive order in 1941 forbidding federal contractors from discriminating. However, the pernicious problem of
racism still existed two decades later in 1961 when John F. Kennedy,
observing that the nation's top defense contractors employed few
blacks, signed Executive Order 10925. It invoked the term
"affirmative action" for the first time and established the
Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. President Lyndon B.
Johnson followed up in 1965 with Executive Order 11246, which
required federal contractors to take affirmative action to provide
equal opportunity without regard to a person's race, religion, or
national origin. Three years later, women were added to the
protected groups. In 1969, under President Richard M. Nixon, "goals
and timetables" were added as yet another component of affirmative
action. Now, a quarter of a century later, affirmative action is more controversial than ever. It has been credited by supporters with expanding the black middle class and lowering barriers to equal opportunity, while its critics suggest that this tool intended to eliminate discrimination is itself discriminatory. The question has developed into a major wedge issue in the 1996 presidential election. Affirmative action faces the prospect of being sharply curtailed, if not eliminated, by Congress and by voters in California, our largest state. This collection of twenty-nine essays, most of them published here for the first time, is not likely to end this emotionladen debate. Nor would I want it to do so. Rather, my goal from the outset has been to assemble some of the sharpest minds in the country, provide a forum for them to express their personal views on affirmative action, and hope that in the process we would expand our knowledge of the issue and develop a deeper tolerance for views with which we fervently disagree. CHAPTER ONE Affirmative action and other race-conscious remedies were created to erase the differences in rights and opportunities defined by that color line. In this chapter, four essays trace how affirmative action has evolved in the twentieth century. While all these authors favor affirmative action, their essays raise important questions: What alternatives to affirmative action did our country's political leaders see? Mat were their aims? How much can rules that prohibit discrimination accomplish? Do affirmative action programs go far enough? In context, we see that the debate over affirmative action is not a simple yes or no issue. First, Manning Marable, director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University and author of Beyond Black and White: Transforming AfricanAmerican Politics (1995), contrasts the efforts to prohibit discrimination in the 1940s and the triumphs of the civil rights era with the current political atmosphere. He also places affirmative action in the context of a long debate within the African-American community over the value of integration and inclusion. More than sixty years after Du Bois wrote about the color line, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a southerner, observed that it remained clearly visible: "In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope." Reprinted here is Johnson's commencement address at Howard University in 1965, which set both the tone and the rationale for affirmative action in the 1960s. The Johnson administration made affirmative action national policy to help open the doors of hope for racial and ethnic minorities (later expanded to include women and other disadvantaged groups). Appointed in 1969 as the nation's first assistant secretary of labor for employment standards, Arthur A. Fletcher has often been referred to as "the Father of Affirmative Action." He is the author of the Philadelphia Plan to combat racism in the construction industry. His essay is a behind-the-scenes account of the earliest efforts to institutionalize affirmative action. Despite the best intentions, however, the policy quickly became a political orphan, never clearly codified in federal statutes and owing its shaky existence to the generosity of the executive branch. The chapter concludes with an essay by
Dr. Cornel West, whom Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard University,
calls "the preeminent African-American intellectual of our
generation." Looking at affirmative action in the context of race
relations in the United States, he is surprised that the furor over
it is so intense. Affirmative action, he says, is a "weak response"
to the "legacy of white supremacy." It is interesting to consider
what other corrective measures our society might have tried.
Instead of pleasant-sounding but simplistic defenses of "affirmative action as it is," we need to do some hard thinking about the reasons why several significant constituencies that have greatly benefited from affirmative action have done relatively little to defend it. We need to recognize the critical theoretical and strategic differences that separate liberals and progressives on how to achieve a nonracist society. And we urgently need to reframe the context of the political debate, taking the initiative away from the Right. The triumph of "Newtonian Republicanism" is not a temporary aberration: it is the culmination of a thirty-year ideological and political war against the logic of the reforms of the 1960s. Advocates of affirmative action, civil rights, and other policies reflecting left-of-center political values must recognize how and why the context for progressive reform has fundamentally changed. The first difficulty in developing a more effective progressive model for affirmative action goes back to the concept's complex definition, history, and political evolution. "Affirmative action" per se was never a law, or even a coherently developed set of governmental policies designed to attack institutional racism and societal discrimination. It was instead a series of presidential executive orders, civil rights laws, and governmental programs regarding the awarding of federal contracts and licenses, as well as the enforcement of fair employment practices, with the goal of uprooting the practices of bigotry. At its origins, it was designed to provide some degree of compensatory justice to the victims of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and institutional racism. This was at the heart of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which stated that "all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall have the same right in every State and Territory, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens. . . ." The fundamental idea of taking the proactive steps necessary to dismantle prejudice has been around for more than a century. During the Great Depression, the role of the federal government in protecting the equal rights of black Americans was expanded again through the direct militancy and agitation of black people. In 1941, socialist and trade union leader A. Philip Randolph mobilized thousands of black workers to participate in the "Negro March on Washington Movement," calling upon the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to carry out a series of reforms favorable to civil rights. To halt this mobilization, Roosevelt agreed to sign Executive Order 8802, which outlawed segregationist hiring policies by defense-related industries that held federal contracts. This executive order not only greatly increased the number of African-Americans who were employed in wartime industries, but expanded the political idea that government could not take a passive role in the dismantling of institutional racism. This position was reaffirmed in 1953 by
President Harry S. Truman's Committee on Government Contract
Compliance, which urged the Bureau of Employment Security"to act
positively and affirmatively to implement the policy of
nondiscrimination in its functions of placement counseling,
occupational analysis and industrial services, labor market
information, and community participation in employment services."
Thus, despite the fact that the actual phrase "affirmative action"
was not used by a chief executive until President John F. Kennedy's
Executive Order 10925 in 1961, the fundamental idea of taking the
proactive steps necessary to dismantle prejudice has been around for
more than a century. PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCES AMONG
CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS The alternative to the Du Boisian position was expressed by integrationist leaders and intellectuals like Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Baynard Rustin, and Kenneth B. Clark. They too fought to destroy Jim Crow, but their cultural philosophy for the Negro rested on inclusion rather than pluralism. They deeply believed that the long-term existence of separate, allblack institutions was counterproductive to the goal of a "color-blind" society, in which racial categories would become socially insignificant or even irrelevant to the relations of power. Rustin, for instance, personally looked forward to the day when Harlem would cease to exist as a segregated, identifiably black neighborhood. Blacks should be assimilated or culturally incorporated into the mainstream. My central criticism of the desegregationist strategy of the inclusionists is that they consistently confused "culture" with "race," underestimating the importance of fostering black cultural identity as an essential component of the critique of white supremacy. The existence of separate black institutions or a self-defined, all-black community was not necessarily an impediment to interracial cooperation and multicultural dialogue. Despite the differences between Du Boisian progressives and inclusionist liberals, both desegregationist positions from the 1930s onward were expressed by the organizations and leadership of the civil rights movement. These divisions were usually obscured by a common language of reform and a common social vision that embraced color blindness as an ultimate goal. For example, both positions are reflected in the main thrust of the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which declared that workplace discrimination should be outlawed on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex, or national origin." However, the inclusionist orientation of Wilkins, Rustin, and company is also apparent in the act's assertion that it should not be interpreted as requiring employers "to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group." Five years later, after Richard M. Nixon's narrow victory for the presidency, it was the Republicans' turn to interpret and implement civil rights policy. The strategy of Nixon had a profound impact on the political culture of the United States, which continues to have direct consequences within the debates about affirmative action today. Through the Counterintelligence Program of the FBI, the Nixon administration vigorously suppressed the radical wing of the black movement. Second, it appealed to the racial anxieties and grievances of George Wallace voters, recruiting segregationists like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond into the ranks of the Republican Party. On affirmative action and issues of equal opportunity, however, Nixon's goal was to utilize a liberal reform for conservative objectives: the expansion of the African-American middle class, which might benefit the Republican Party. Under Nixon in 1969, the federal government authorized what became known as the Philadelphia Plan, a program requiring federal contractors to set specific goals for minority hiring. As a result, the portion of racial minorities in the construction industry increased from 1% to 12%. The Nixon administration supported provisions for minority set-asides to promote black and Hispanic entrepreneurship, and it placed Federal Reserve funds in black-owned banks. Nixon himself publicly praised the concept of "Black Power," carefully interpreting it as "black capitalism." It was under the moderate-conservative
aegis of the Nixon and Ford administrations of 1969-77 that the set
of policies which we identify with "affirmative action" was
implemented nationally in both the public and the private sectors.
Even after the 1978 Bakke decision, in which the Supreme Court
overturned the admissions policy of the University of California at
Davis which had set aside sixteen out of one hundred medical school
openings for racial minorities, the political impetus for racial
reform was not destroyed. What did occur, even before the triumph of
reaction under Reagan in the early 1980s, was that political
conservatives deliberately usurped the "colorblind" discourse of
many liberals from the desegregation movement. As conservatives retreated from the Nixonian strategy of utilizing affirmative action tools to achieve conservative political goals, they began to appeal to the latent racist sentiments within the white population. They cultivated the racist mythology that affirmative action was nothing less than a rigid system of inflexible quotas which rewarded the incompetent and the unqualified, who happened to be nonwhite, at the expense of hardworking, taxpaying Americans, who happened to be white. White conservatives were able to define "merit" in a manner that would reinforce white male privilege, but in an inverted language that would make the real victims of discrimination appear to be the racists. It was, in retrospect, a brilliant political maneuver. And the liberals were at a loss in fighting back effectively precisely because they lacked a consensus internally about the means and goals for achieving genuine equality. Traditional liberals like Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, who favored an inclusionist, colorblind ideology of reform, often ended up inside the camp of racial reactionaries, who cynically learned to manipulate the discourse of fairness. SUPPORT FOR AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
AT DIFFERENT LEVELS According to a USA Today/ CNN/Gallup poll ( March 1719, 1995), when asked, "Do you favor or oppose affirmative action programs?" 53% of whites polled expressed support, compared to only 36% opposed. Not surprisingly, AfricanAmericans expressed much stronger support, with 72% in favor of affirmative action programs and only 21% against. Despite widespread rhetoric that the vast majority of white males have supposedly lost jobs and opportunities due to affirmative action policies, the poll indicated that only 15% of all white males believe that "they've lost a job because of affirmative action policies." However, there is severe erosion of white support for affirmative action when one focuses more narrowly on specific steps or remedies for addressing discrimination. For example, the USA Today/ CNN/Gallup poll indicates that only 30% of whites favor the establishment of gender and racial "quotas" in businesses, with 68% opposed. In contrast, two-thirds of all African-Americans expressed support for quotas in business employment, with only 30% opposed. When asked whether quotas should be created "that require schools to admit a certain number of minorities and women," 61% of the whites were opposed, with 35% in favor. Nearly two-thirds of all whites would also reject policies that "require private businesses to set up specific goals and timetables for hiring women and minorities if there were not government programs that included hiring quotas," whereas two-thirds of all African-Americans strongly favor affirmative action programs with goals and timetables for private businesses. On issues of implementing government-supported initiatives for social equality, most black and white Americans still live in two distinct racial universes. It is not surprising that "angry white
men" form the core of those who are against affirmative action. What
is striking, however, is the general orientation of white women on
this issue. White women have been overwhelmingly the primary
beneficiaries of affirmative action: millions have gained access to
educational and employment opportunities through the implementation
and enforcement of such policies. But most of them clearly do not
share the political perspectives of AfricanAmericans and Hispanics
on this issue, nor do they perceive their own principal interests to
be at risk if affirmative action programs are abandoned by the
federal government or outlawed by the courts. In the same USA Today/
CNN/Gallup poll, only 8% of all white women stated that their
"colleagues at work or school privately questioned" their
qualifications because of affirmative action, compared to 19% of
black women and 28% of black men. Less than one in five white women
polled defined workplace discrimination as a "major problem,"
compared to 41% of blacks and 38% of Latinos. Forty percent of the
white women polled described job discrimination as "not being a
problem" at all. These survey results may help to explain why middle
class-oriented, liberal feminist leaders and constituencies have
been less vocal than African-Americans in the mobilization to defend
affirmative action. A quarter-century of affirmative action programs, goals, and timetables has been clearly effective in transforming the status of white women in the labor force. It is certainly true that white men still dominate the upper ranks of senior management: while constituting 47% of the nation's total workforce, they make up 95% of all senior managerial positions at the rank of vice president or above. However, women of all races now constitute about 40% of the total workforce overall. As of the 1990 census, white women held nearly 40% of all middle management positions. While their median incomes lag behind those of white men, over the past twenty years white women have gained far greater ground in terms of real earnings than black or Hispanic men in the labor force. Black professional women have also gained ground in recent decades, but blacks overall still remain significantly behind white men in median incomes at all levels. In this context, civil rights advocates and traditional defenders of affirmative action must ask themselves whether the majority of white American women actually perceive their material interests to be tied to the outcome of the battle for income equity and affirmative action that most blacks and Latinos, women and men alike, continue to fight. We should also recognize that although all people of color suffer in varying degrees from the stigma of racism and economic disadvantage within American society, they do not have the same material interests or identify themselves with the same politics as the vast majority of African-Americans. For example, here are mean on-the-job earnings, according to the 1990 census: All American adults $15,105 None of these statistics negate the reality of racial domination and discrimination in terms of social relations, access to employment opportunities, or job advancement. But they do tell us part of the reason why no broad coalition of people of color has coalesced behind the political demand for affirmative action. Various groups interpret their interests narrowly and in divergent ways, looking out primarily for themselves rather than addressing the structural inequalities within the fabric of American society as a whole. A DU BOISIAN STRATEGY TOWARD
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION Affirmative action was largely responsible for a significant increase in the size of the black middle class; it opened many professional and managerial positions to blacks, Latinos, and women for the first time. But in many other respects, affirmative action can and should be criticized from the Left, not because it was too liberal in its pursuit and implementation of measures to achieve equality, but because it was too conservative. It sought to increase representative numbers of minorities and women within the existing structure and arrangements of power, rather than challenging or redefining the institutions of authority and privilege. As implemented under a series of presidential administrations, liberal and conservative alike, affirmative action was always more concerned with advancing remedies for unequal racial outcomes than with uprooting racism as a system of white power. Rethinking progressive and liberal strategies on affirmative action would require sympathetic whites to acknowledge that much of the anti-affirmative action rhetoric is really a retreat from a meaningful engagement on issues of race, and that the vast majority of Americans who have benefited materially from affirmative action have not been black at all. A Du Boisian strategy toward affirmative action would argue that despite the death of legal segregation a generation ago, we have not yet reached the point where a color-blind society is possible, especially in terms of the actual organization and structure of white power and privilege. Institutional racism is real, and the central focus of affirmative action must deal with the continuing burden of racial inequality and discrimination in American life. There are many ways to measure the powerful reality of contemporary racism. For example, a 1994 study of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management found that African-American federal employees are more than twice as likely to be dismissed as their white counterparts. Blacks are especially likely to be fired at much higher rates than whites in jobs where they constitute a significant share of the labor force: for example, black clerk-typists are 4.7 times more likely to be dismissed than whites, and black custodians 4.1 times more likely to be fired. Discrimination is also rampant in capital markets. Banks continue policies of "redlining," denying loans in neighborhoods that are largely black and Hispanic. In New York City in 1992, for instance, blacks were turned down for mortgage applications by banks, savings and loans, and other financial institutions about twice as often as whites. And even after years of affirmative action programs, blacks and Latinos remain grossly underrepresented in a wide number of professions. As Jesse Jackson observed in a speech
before the National Press Club, while native-born white males make
up only 41% of the U.S. population, they are 80% of all tenured
professors, 92% of the Forbes 400 chief executive officers, and 97%
of all school superintendents. If affirmative action should be criticized, it might be on the grounds that it didn't go far enough in transforming the actual power relations between black and white within our society. More evidence for this is addressed by the sociologists Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro in Black Wealth/White Wealth (1995). The authors point out that "the typical black family has eleven cents of wealth for every dollar owned by the typical white family." Even middle-class African-Americans, people who often benefited from affirmative action, are significantly poorer than whites who earn identical incomes. If housing and vehicles owned are included in the definition of "net wealth," the median middle-class African-American family has only $8,300 in total assets, as against $56,000 for the comparable white family. Why are blacks at all income levels much poorer than whites in terms of wealth? African-American families not only inherit much less wealth; they are hit daily by institutional inequality and discrimination. For years, they were denied life insurance policies by white firms. They are still denied home mortgages at twice the rate of similarly qualified white applicants. African-Americans have been less likely to receive government-backed home loans. Given the statistical profile of racial inequality, liberals must reject the temptation to move away from "race-conscious remedies" to "race-neutral" reforms defined by income or class criteria. Affirmative action has always had a distinct and separate function from antipoverty programs. Income and social class inequality affect millions of whites, Asian-Americans, Latinos, and blacks alike, and programs that expand employment, educational access, and social service benefits based on economic criteria alone are absolutely essential. But the impetus for racism is not narrowly economic in origin. Racial prejudice is still a destructive force in the lives of upper middle-class, college-educated African-Americans as well as poor blacks, and programs designed to address the discrimination they feel and experience collectively every day must be grounded in the context of race. However, affirmative action is legitimately related to class questions, but in a different way. A truly integrated workplace, where people of divergent racial backgrounds, languages, and cultural identities learn to interact and respect each other, is an essential precondition for building a broadly pluralistic movement for radical democracy. The expanded implementation of affirmative action, despite its liberal limitations, would assist in creating the social conditions essential for pluralistic coalitions to promote full employment and more progressive social policies. What is required among progressives is not a reflexive, uncritical defense of affirmative action, but a recognition of its contradictory evolution and conceptual limitations as well as its benefits and strengths. We need a thoughtful and innovative approach in challenging discrimination which, like that of Du Bois, reaffirms the centrality of the struggle against racism within the development of affirmative action measures. We must build on the American majority's continued support for affirmative action, linking the general public's commitment to social fairness with creative measures that actually target the real patterns and processes of discrimination that millions of Utinos and blacks experience every day. And we must not be pressured into a false debate to choose between race and class in the development and framing of public policies addressing discrimination. Moving toward the long-term goal of a colorblind society, the deconstruction of racism, does not mean that we become neutral about the continuing significance of race in American life. As the national debate concerning the possible elimination of affirmative action comes to define the 1996 presidential campaign, black and progressive Americans must reevaluate their strategies for reform. In recent years we have tended to rely on elections, the legislative process, and the courts to achieve racial equality. We should remember how the struggle to dismantle Jim Crow segregation was won. We engaged in economic boycotts, civil disobedience, teach-ins, freedom schools, and freedom rides; we formed community-based coalitions and united fronts. There's a direct relationship between our ability to mobilize people in communities to protest and the pressure we can exert on elected officials to protect and enforce civil rights. Voting is absolutely essential, but it
isn't enough. We must channel the profound discontent, the
alienation and anger that currently exist in the black community
toward constructive, progressive forms of political intervention and
resistance. As we fight for affirmative action, let us understand
that we are fighting for a larger ideal: the ultimate elimination of
race and gender inequality, the uprooting of prejudice and
discrimination, and the realization of a truly democratic nation. Our earth is the home of revolution. In every corner of every continent men charged with hope contend with ancient ways in the pursuit of justice. They reach for the newest of weapons to realize the oldest of dreams; that each may walk in freedom and pride, stretching his talents, enjoying the fruits of the earth. Our enemies may occasionally seize the day of change. But it is the banner of our revolution they take. And our own future is linked to this process of swift and turbulent change in many lands in the world. But nothing in any country touches us more profoundly, nothing is more freighted with meaning for our own destiny, than the revolution of the Negro American. In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope. In our time change has come to this
nation too. The American Negro, acting with impressive restraint,
has peacefully protested and marched, entered the courtrooms and the
seats of government, demanding a justice that has long been denied.
The voice of the Negro was a call to action. But it is a tribute to
America that, once aroused, the courts and the Congress, the
President and most of the people, have been the allies of progress. As majority leader of the United States Senate, I helped to guide two of these bills through the Senate. As your President, I was proud to sign the third. And now very soon we will have the fourth -- a new law guaranteeing every American the right to vote. No act of my entire administration will give me greater satisfaction than the day when my signature makes this bill too the law of this land. The Voting Rights Bill will be the latest, and among the most important, in a long series of victories. But this victory -as Winston Churchill said of another triumph for freedom -"is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." That beginning is freedom. And the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share fully and equally in American society -- to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others. But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "You are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough to just open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity -- not just legal equity but human ability -- not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result. For the task is to give twenty million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities -- physical, mental, and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness. |