A Politically Correct Solution to Racial Classification

PAUL E. PETERSON

Whether or not to classify by race is a political, not a moral or ethical, question. Put more exactly, the politically correct answer in a pluralist democracy is also likely to be ethically correct. Those who first attempt to work out a moral position and then devise ways of imposing their answers on their fellow citizens are unlikely to have discerned the correct moral position in the first place. Paradoxically, those who first attempt to find a politically satisfactory resolution to racial classification and only then place it within a moral or legal framework are the more likely to have found an ethically satisfying answer.

"Politically correct" has acquired a derogatory connotation in contemporary social discourse. But if one adheres to its grammatically correct meaning, then one can say that on matters of race and ethnicity one should, indeed, be politically correct. Those on the political right who relentlessly charge their opponents with political correctness are unlikely to agree with the proposition I am advancing. They have recently discovered that classifying by race is contrary to the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, conveniently ignoring the fact that in the past many conservatives defended the constitutionality of racial classifications.

The proposition I am advancing may not necessarily appeal to everyone on the political left either. Many liberals have insisted that classifying by race is essential if past patterns of discrimination are to be reversed—despite the fact that liberals have in the past rejected any and all classifications based on race. As Justice John M. Harlan said in his famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Constitution is color-blind.

The Historical Case for Racial Classification

Both conservatives and liberals make compelling arguments for their newly acquired ethical positions. Conservatives point out that classifying individuals by race introduces a suspect category into public policy. If used as a criterion for allocating educational and occupational opportunities, it confers advantages on members of some racial groups to the disadvantage of members of others. It creates a suspicion that individuals in the advantaged group have acquired their position for reasons other than their individual merit. In so doing, it perpetuates racial antagonisms as well as feelings of racial superiority and inferiority. In the end, racial classification is self-defeating. If it is difficult to fire minorities, they will not be hired in the first place.

To these normative arguments, liberals have an equally powerful reply. Racially blind public policies are a myth, they say. The Constitution is not color-blind: it permitted the slave trade; it counted black slaves as only three-fifths of a person; it gave the white population from slave states disproportionate representation in the Senate. Though a Civil War ended slavery, the country allowed racial segregation to continue virtually unabated for over a century after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. Racism permeates institutions and practices so thoroughly that the only way discrimination can be alleviated is through explicitly race-conscious policies designed to reverse past practices. The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not preclude classification by race. The clause requires only that race classifications not harm those minorities against whom discrimination has historically been practiced.

The essays in the second part of this volume substantiate and elaborate many of these claims. Richard Valelly's essay, "National Parties and Racial Disenfranchisement," tells us that in the period after the Civil War, African Americans contested southern efforts to reconstruct the antebellum world through segregation and disenfranchisement. But as their Republican allies in the North abandoned Reconstruction, the elaboration of color lines accelerated. Theda Skocpol's analysis, "African Americans in U.S. Social Policy," describes the extent to which social policy has been shaped by racial considerations. Robert Lieberman extends this argument in his essay, "Race and the Organization of Welfare Policy." He shows the way in which even the Social Security Act, the essential core of New Deal liberalism, was designed in ways that would safeguard existing patterns of racial discrimination. By excluding agricultural and domestic laborers, the legislation denied Social Security to most black workers. By leaving the implementation of federal welfare policy to state and local governments, state and local officials were given opportunities to classify by race (which they were most sincerely willing to do).

Some may dismiss these essays as reports from the past, historic examples of racial classification utterly removed from contemporary political and social life. I learned about such predispositions when an influential policy analyst mentioned to me one day that he opposed using historical approaches to the study of public policy. He felt such studies dredged up the dead hand of the past and ignored all that has since been done in recent years to bring past patterns of racial discrimination to an end. But Margaret Weir's comparative analysis, "The Politics of Racial Isolation in Europe and America," suggests that the past is not easily exorcised. She shows that the geography of American cities, when viewed in comparative perspective, has been defined as much by racial conflict as by technological innovation. As late as 1980, 70 percent of the black or white population would have had to have moved in order to eliminate racial segregation in the residential neighborhoods of our metropolitan areas. When public schools are as...