The Continuing Dilemma

MORE THAN 25 years have passed since K. Gunnar Myrdal first wrote of the "American dilemma"--the conflict between America's democratic and egalitarian ideals and its treatment of racial minorities.

More than 25 years have passed since nonviolent civil rights protests and the savage southern response they received swung public opinion against segregation and state-sponsored discrimination.

More than 25 years have passed since Martin Luther King Jr. told America his dream and Lyndon. B. Johnson stood in Congress and stated the civil rights mantra: We shall overcome.

More than 25 years have passed, and many in America, majority and minority, are wondering if anything has changed.

FOR MANY BLACKS, Hispanics and other members of minority groups, discrimination persists, and the future looks bleaker than ever. The promises of the 1960s, the ephemeral Great Society, King's dream--all have seemed empty recently in the face of another King's nightmare.

The violence in South Central Los Angeles sparked by the Rodney King verdict left 52 dead and hundreds injured. Millions in property were burned or stolen. And, to make matters worse, gang members grabbed an additional 4000 guns in the melee--and suburbanites have purchased up to 300 percent more than before the riots.

Furthermore, with only 31 percent of those Blacks who even make it to college graduating, with over 56 percent of Black families headed by single women and (according to the Urban Institute) with more than one quarter of Blacks still facing some from of discrimination in the workplace, the American dilemma seems alive and well.

At the least, it can be said that America's trade-off between democracy and capitalism falls hardest on those on the martins.

For many whites--especially those working-class whites whose tax burden increased in the dozen years as their wages decreased--the conservative response to urban decay has rung true: The costly, taxpayer-funded social policies of the 1960s only exacerbated Blacks' problems and urban decline in general by providing disincentives to employment.

The answer, conservatives argue, is law enforcement coupled with encouraging morality and social responsibility. Translation: Get Blacks off the dole and they will be forced to find a job.

The liberal's response to the problems of minorities--vociferous support for civil rights bills and expanded affirmative action--is well intentioned but has alienated many whites and thus made implementation difficult. In addition, liberals have often failed to support tough crimeprevention policies.

For many whites, a new American dilemma has emerged--a conflict between America's meritocratic ideals and its race-based preferential treatment in hiring, election districting and school choice. President Reagan tapped into this dilemma, galvanizing a slice of white working voters around "a new conservative egalitarianism," as Thomas B. Edsall of the Washington Post and Mary D. Edsall '65 wrote recently.

Few of those in power have articulated sensible ways to deal with this disaffection. Conservatives fail to admit that discrimination still exists, often hidden away from the federal government in the private sector.

And they refuse to concede that the Great Society worked for the people it reached. The Black middle and upper-middle classes have grown more than twofold in the last two decades. The number of Black and Hispanic professionals has risen drastically.

Furthermore, majority and minority liberals fail to acknowledge what white working-class voters have lost in what has become a contest for increasingly limited government resources. A city's best schools, its best jobs and promotions, federal housing subsidies--all came to be contested by Blacks for the first time, and rightly so.

But liberals have not dealt with the explosive political ramifications of the ideologically defensible policy of affirmative action. Urban whites competing with Blacks have felt disadvantaged by the very policies their tax dollars paid for. The GOP has exploited this divide and reaped the electoral benefits.

The Los Angeles violence is only one example of the consequences of years of conservative leadership and stagnation in Congress. Unemployment in South Central is estimated at more than 50 percent. Crime and illegitimacy have skyrocketed and graduation rates have plummeted. Clearly, it's time for a change.

The problem is not a shortage of new ideas, however. The New Republic suggests switching to community-rather than city-based policing, providing more drug treatment and nixing welfare in favor of a guaranteed jobs program in the style of the Works Progress Administration.

In congressional testimony last Thursday, Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) President Will Marshall--the major idea machine for Gov. Bill Clinton--suggested a Police Corps program to exchange college funds for police service, a civilian version of the G.I. bill, expanding the earned income tax credit, raising work-discouraging wage limits for Medicaid and Aid to Families with Dependent Children and contracting out to private companies devoted to finding jobs for welfare recipients.

And Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack F. Kemp talks endlessly about "empowerment" and "enterprise zones," by which the government would give tax and regulation breaks to firms that locate in low employment, high poverty areas.

Some of these ideas are better than others. The PPI proposals, for example, seem particularly well reasoned.

The enterprise zones, on the other hand, would probably entice businesses to areas that desperately need them from areas that still need them badly. As Michael E. Kinsley '72 wrote recently, "What will Jack Kemp say to a white working-class area that loses a factory to an `enterprise zone'?"

But regardless of the merits of these plans, the important goal now is to drive some new ideas onto the national agenda of ordinary voters.

That will require disentangling tough but fair stances on crime and social decay from racism. It will require drastic reform of welfare to break cycles of dependency and disaffection.

For the Democrats, it will require policies and rhetoric which address the concern of both Blacks in the underclass and white working-class voters. If affirmative action is to continue and aid to cities is to increase (and we believe both should happen), the costs must be shifted onto wealthier Americans. In short, this will require ending the largest upward income redistribution in history.

Inertial and short-sighted American businesses must stop blaming taxation and regulation (which have severely declined in the Reagan-Bush era) for their own unwillingness to respond to the changes brought about by globalizing the American economy.

ALL THIS WILL REQUIRE, in short, massive political and social change. And, to be honest, such change probably won't be implemented to the extent the nation needs. Not because the American political system has become "gridlocked" or "stagnated" beyond belief, as this year's anti-politicians (namely Edmund G. Brown Jr. and H. Ross Perot) would have us believe. This has always been true.

The reason, unfortunately, is simply that most voting Americans don't like change very much--if change means what the Republicans say it means: higher taxes with few benefits.

Corporations will have to engage in messy and expensive restructuring. Already strapped middleclass Americans (both minority and majority) will have to work more, save more and study more.

And those who want change most desperately participate least in the political system. Perhaps the best we can hope for, then, is a president committed to some change--or at least the ousting of a president who has shown his inability to work for any change.

Refusing to change can only lead to more South Centrals, more poverty and less participation in the structures of politics by those who need them the most. It can only lead to more David Dukes and more Leonard Jeffrieses. It can only lead to a new, even deeper American dilemma, one that we cannot afford to face.