The End Of the Melting?

Last night, Charles A. Murray '65 told his Harvard audience that America must face the problem that Blacks may be genetically consigned to disproportionate representation within the underclass. A few weeks ago, the President of Rutgers University bit his tongue after voicing similar beliefs.

These academics are not bigoted. Nor are they right. But they reflect the growing reaction within the white community away from affirmative action and toward racial politics.

The American Melting Pot has fallen on hard times. It was first rejected in the late 1960s by Marxists and relativists from the Left who claimed the idea of an American culture was some ethnocentric construct designed to preserve the power of the white majority and annihilate the heritage and values of non-white groups.

While the Civil Rights movement sought to remove race as a relevant political category, i.e. to integrate races within one political culture, this new racial consciousness rejected "selling out," and taught that race must remain the distinctive political category. Minority leaders emerged and told their followers, "Refuse to let your own identity be boiled away in a Melting Pot designed to keep you down." The pursuit of "Eurocentric" standards of excellence gave way to the demand for ethnic studies. And the political result was a call for "authentic" representation.

Murray's advent suggests that some whites may have come to reject the Melting Pot as well. Like the Left, Murray's message is essentially that race means more than private identity, that it has a strong political element as well. While integration may be desirable, he argues, it might never be possible.

The irony is that while the American dream of universal political freedom and equality is closer than it has ever been in its past, it seems to be breaking at the seams.

In the revolt of the '60s, leftists reinterpreted American history and argued that the dream of freedom and equality was a farce of slaveowners. Yet while racism is part of the American past, each generation has seen our society grow more open and more inclusive. If we cannot claim a just past, we surely can look at a progress toward justice.

But in an effort to escape that past, the pendulum has swung beyond integration. The law does not segregate racial groups any more, but now it sets them against each other. The assumption underlying the convoluted racial Congressional districts is that race is a more meaningful political category than geography or socioeconomic status.

When you define an ethnic group as a political unit you divide society into competing and ultimately irreconcilable racial groups. Rather than sharing common human goals of prosperity and liberty, racial politics emphasizes relative inequalities and who's in charge. Affirmative action appears as the "solution" to the crippling economic and social disintegration in the inner cities.

But the problem is more acute than a misdiagnosis of our social problems. The most pernicious effects of this racial corporatism are felt in faraway places, in Bosnia and Rwanda and Turkey and Chechnya. While America is hardly threatened by a race war, its existence as a unified state has always depended on relegating ethnicity to the perimeter of politics.

As a state of many nations, American unity relies on a common political commitment to liberal democracy and individual freedom. You cannot be Russian or French simply because of where your mother gave birth. But every person born beneath the American flag is American.

That's because Americanism is not a hereditary tie but a shared ideal, and the Melting Pot is what keeps us together as one state, not by destroying our private identity, but by providing us with the common ground to work together.

It is this common interest that racial corporatism destroys. We are "one nation" only to the extent that we recognize our hereditary differences as skin deep.

Steven A. Engel's column appears on alternate Wednesdays.