LEGL 4500/6500 - Employment Law

Dawn D. Bennett-Alexander, Esq.

Terry College of Business

struggle, as well as an attempt to come to terms with a broader question: What is the proper and future role of race in America?

For many of Powell’s supporters, the answer seemed self-evident. The very fact that they could support Powell was evidence that Americans were closer than ever to achieving King’s fabled dream. That answer, however, is far too facile, for it was not as if Powell’s supporters somehow didn’t notice that he was black; they simply decided – for various reasons – that his race was not a drawback, that perhaps (at that time and for that position) it was an advantage, if only in that it would allow the country to make a positive statement about race. Indeed, Powell’s standing among many whites as something of a black messiah – someone larger than race and yet, in some respects, reassuring precisely because of his race (and because of the patriotic, nonthreatening way in which he wore his racial pride)-can just as easily be cited as evidence that Americans are not really embracing King’s dream at all – if that dream is defined as the creation of a color-blind state. Instead, we may simply have become more accepting of the positive black stereotypes that counteract the disparaging ones that have always existed.

In a world in which opportunities, positions, and even wealth are often dispensed largely on the basis of connections, family ties, and physical appearance (not to mention race and ethnicity), King’s celebrated dream may be hopelessly naïve. But its improbability does not detract from its power. Americans cherish fairness. We like to believe that people, for the most part, are neither penalized nor unduly rewarded without justifiable cause.

And certainly, when looked at logically, racial difference is not a justifiable reason to penalize people. Race, after all, defines a relatively small part of who we are – at least from a strictly scientific perspective. As geneticist Christopher Wills noted in the November 1994 issue of Discover magazine: "We have known for decades that the variation of skin color is caused by rather small genetic differences, and it seems highly [italics in the original] unlikely that these differences have anything to do with intelligence, personality, or ability.

Yet, weak as its scientific foundation may be, race is an essential part of who we are (and of how we see others) that is no more easily shed than unpleasant memories. Few of us would choose to be rendered raceless – to be suddenly without a tribe. Even something as prosaic as television-viewing is heavily influenced by race. A special analysis of the Nielsen ratings for the 1994-95 season by the advertising agency BBDO found that blacks and whites generally watched totally different prime-time shows. Of the top twenty shows in America, only two were in the top twenty among blacks – NFL Monday Night Football and the NBC Monday Night Movie. Many of the differences in ratings were extreme. Living Single, a comedy centered on a group of young black singles, for instance, came in first among blacks and 110^th among whites. New York Undercover, a police drama featuring a black and a Latino lead, was second among blacks and 114^th among whites. Home Improvement, Grace Under Fire, and Seinfeld, all comedies featuring whites, were the top three shows overall but none ranked high among blacks; Seinfeld came in at 109^th place.

The ratings numbers reflect a simple fact: that even in our least political moments, when relaxing in the privacy of our homes, we are much more likely than not to gravitate toward those whom we perceive as our own kind (racially). That inclination – along with the tendency by jurists, politicians, and others to confuse color blindness with blindness to discrimination (and the continuing effects of past discrimination) – gives the lie to any literal notion of color blindness. Yet it does not change a basic reality: that while discrimination for most blacks is an unfortunate fact of life, it is no longer, as Newsweek previously put it, the central fact of life. As William Julius Wilson, among others, convincingly argued: Education and access to decent jobs may be more important variables in many black and brown lives than anything directly connected to race.

The attempt to think though where we may be heading led me to spend most of February 1996 in various parts of South Africa, which is how I came to be in the office of George Bizos, Nelson Mandela’s longtime attorney, confidant, and sometime emissary and a lifelong opponent of apartheid. The morning we spoke, Bizos, working with South Africa’s Legal Resources Centre, was engaged in planning the defense of a group of three hundred indigents who were in danger of being evicted from a squatters’ camp outside Johannesburg. Bizos, a rotund man with the courtly, commanding air of a born barrister, made the tongue-in-cheek observation, "It’s….
 
 
 
 

When I talked to Haizlip in 1995, her research on the newly found branch of her family tree had led her to a number of "white" cousins. She had taken on the task of establishing contact with them, and, coincidentally, informing them they were not quite as white as they may have thought. Haizlip would call and identify herself as a long-lost relative and, during the course of the conversation, would reveal that she knew a "family secret." Only after that news had been absorbed would she reveal, "Our great grandfather was a former slave." Invariably, Haizlip said, the person on the other end would blurt out: "A black slave?"

She had recently had that discussion with a forty-four-year-old assistant professor who lived in a town near Cleveland and was married to a conservative Republican whose ancestors were among the town’s founders. In a subsequent conversation, the woman described her initial reactions to Haizlip: " The first thing I did was went to look in the mirror. I wanted to see if I looked any different. And the second thing I did was to look at my fingernails." (Apparently, she had heard that black people had more bluish "moons" on their fingernails.) "Then I thought for about thirty minutes. I sat in a chair and had a cup of tea and I wondered whether I was going to keep this a secret." She soon resolved that she could not keep the news to herself: "It had been a secret too long; but I had to figure out how I was going to tell my husband." She decided to tell him one evening after dinner and dessert. Her husband, who had a sense of humor, took the news in stride, replying, "Well, I got a black cat. I got a black dog. Now I got a black wife."

The process of reconnecting the various offshoots of the family tree, Haizlip told me, caused her to rethink her own racial identity. Previously, she had accepted the fact that she was black without so much as a second thought: "I had rejected the white part of my family. I didn’t know them and I rejected them…. My father was a very active black minister. I grew up in a black church. So, for me, blackness was my grounding and frame of reference." She now has a more complicated view: "I call myself black politically, socially, and culturally, but I say I have roots in many gardens and genetically I’m mixed. I’m more convinced than ever now that all of us are mixed people. As geneticists now know, none of us [is] pure. So I have broadened my vision of myself. I haven’t diminished it." As for what identifiably multiracial people should be called, she was unsure, but if forced, she would "push for mixed race for everybody, white and black. In other words, one label, which effectively is no label."

Haizlip believes that people are growing weary of racial polarization. "I think we have come to the end of our rope, and we want to say, ‘God, what is the answer? We’ve tried everything, and what is the answer?" The question, she suspects, may ultimately lead people to accept the notion that one racial label for everyone is the only course that makes sense. Once we recognize that everyone is mixed. That we all share genes from a common pool, perhaps "we can look at each other as extended family and distant cousins." If we begin to do that, Haizlip said, "we’re going to be more tolerant of each other. We don’t love everybody in our family, but we are more tolerant of them."

America, of course, has not gotten to that point; it insists not only on racial labels, but on treating people differently on the basis of perceived racial differences. Even under the so-called one-drop rule, as I noted earlier, not all shades of black are always seen as equal. In The Color Complex, authors Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall pointed out, "For light-skinned Blacks, it simply remains easier to get ahead. Take a close look at Black urban professionals, or ‘buppies,’ with their corporate salaries, middle class values, and predominantly light-brown to medium-brown skin color. They benefit not only from their social contacts with other light-skinned Blacks but also from looks that, in a predominantly White society, are more mainstream."

Professors James Johnson and Walter Farrell attempted to quantify the color advantage. In their report of their study of the two thousand male job seekers in the Los Angeles area in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1995, they stated that color seemed to play a role in determining who worked and who did not; being African American and dark reduced the odds of working considerably: "In our sample, only 8.6 percent of white males were unemployed, compared with 23.1 percent of black males in general and 27 percent of dark-skinned black males," and among light-skinned black men, it was 20 percent. Even among those who were relatively well educated, Johnson and Farrell indicated, skin tone seemed to make a difference: "We found that only 10.3 percent of light-skinned African-American men with 13 or more years of schooling were unemployed, compared with 19.4 percent of their dark-skinned counterparts with similar education. Indeed, the unemployment rate for the light-skinned black males was only a little higher than the 9.5 percent rate for white males with comparable schooling." Johnson and Farrell’s point was not that light skin ensures success or that dark skin guarantees failure, but that complexion is far from a neutral trait, that skin tone had a great deal to do with how warmly one is received by the world.

That a lighter complexion may be related to success is no news to many blacks, who have long acknowledged - if not always openly - that color sometimes matters nearly as much as does race. As Teresa Wiltz, a light-skinned black journalist, observed in the Chicago Tribune: "From the beginning black wealth and skin color have been inextricably linked. The lighter you were - and most likely, that meant you were the descendant of a wealthy white slaveowner - the more likely you were to be middle class." Precisely because that linkage has always been there, some blacks are suspicious of those with lighter complexions. Piper alluded to that suspicion when she wrote: "I have sometimes met blacks socially who, as a condition of social acceptance of me, require me to prove my blackness." The standard of proof is elusive and sometimes unachievable, and the test creates frustration and a sense of injustice among "light" blacks that are no less real than the feelings of "dark" blacks when they see that a light complexion and "good" hair bestow social, professional, and even romantic advantages.

Much of the uneasiness engendered by the multiracialists is rooted in such frustration, in unpleasant and ugly racial memories, in racial insecurities, in anxieties about race and rank, and in the knowledge that race has never been neutral in America but has inevitably forced people to take sides. The debate, in short, is really not so much about a multiracial box as it is about what race means - and what it will come to mean as the society approaches the millennium. Juliet Fairley, a New York-based journalist whose white mother was born in France and whose father is African American, recalled the difficulty growing up with a split identity and desperately wanting to fit in. She went through a phase when she wanted to be totally "black" and even sported an Afro pick in her straightish dark hair. Eventually, she decided that she could not ignore the part of herself that is also her mother, and she has come around to support a multiracial category - but only "if it has no consequences."

Some analysts have considered the issue as fundamentally a political one. Lawrence Wright, for instance, noted: "Those who are charged with enforcing civil-rights laws see the Multiracial box as a wrecking ball aimed at affirmative action, and they hold those in the mixed-race movement responsible." Yet, on the basis of early research, it seems unlikely that any huge proportion of the people specifically protected by those laws would opt suddenly to decamp to the multiracial zone. And even if they would, it’s easy to envision a multiracial census option that would not undermine civil rights laws or create a special legal status for the multiracial "race." People could mark whatever box they thought appropriate, and if the questionnaire then asked people to designate in what ways they were mixed, the information could eventually be aggregated or massaged (albeit at some cost) in whatever way was useful.

In short, the purpose of the data collection process could be served even as people were allowed to make statements about their personal identities. Whether the census should be used as an occasion for such statements (or, for that matter, should be used as a solution to feelings of low self-esteem or racial estrangement) is another subject altogether. Suffice it to say that those who go to the U.S. Bureau of the Census searching for psychological deliverance are looking in the wrong place and are bound to be greatly disappointed. Certainly, what we call ourselves is important and, therefore, people ought to have broad latitude to call themselves whatever they wish. But the more important issue is not whether multiracial is officially a racial category or whether Hispanic-Latino is a race, or even whether black and white are races. As historian Gary Okihiro pointed out in Margins and Mainstreams, racial classifications are not inherently stable, even among groups now considered to be racially….
 
 
 
 

©1997 Harper Collins
 

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