“There has been no one-way movement toward improved group relations, but instead many detours, oscillations, and even severe backward movements.”119 —Thomas Sowell
Argument 1: There is no transcendent principle of equality. Groups that were once discriminated against should now be treated better than others. Proof of this is that America has often failed to live up to the principle of equality, so its founding documents are false.
Response: Just as Beethoven’s Für Elise is a beautiful piece of music even if one performer plays it badly, a principle can be true even if people sometimes fail to live up to it. In fact, it is precisely because humans are fallible that we look to principles to “guard us against our inevitable tendency to injustice.”120 America’s principles give us standards by which we can judge the goodness or wrongness of our behavior, and they show us that if it was wrong to discriminate against one person yesterday, it is wrong to discriminate against another tomorrow. It is right, instead, to try to live up to the principles of equality and justice.
Argument 2: Because some white people in the past wielded power against black people, all white people today must be made to suffer to pay for this ancestral debt. What wealth and privilege white people have should be taken and given to black people, and black people today should be given preferences at white people’s expense. Yes, this will hurt innocent people, but in the words of Justice Lewis Powell, “innocent persons may be called upon to bear some of the burden of the remedy.”121
Response: It is wrong to punish innocent people to benefit abstract groups. What is more, this argument is the same old argument that justified some of the worst behavior in the past. Justice Henry Billings Brown did not think he was doing evil when he announced the separate-but-equal rule; he thought he was doing what was good for the peace and comfort of racial groups. Black power radicals who burned and looted people’s homes and businesses did not think they were doing wrong; they thought that the good they hoped to do for their racial group outweighed the harm they caused to individuals.
Argument 3: Some non-white groups, like people of Asian descent, have now surpassed some white people in wealth and education, and so all of them, too, must be held back so that other less successful groups can rise.
Response: The racial groups that this argument tries to help are arbitrary. What Frederick Douglass said in 1867—that Americans make up so many races that “no man can remember”—is far truer today than it was then. The label “black” includes descendants of slaves, recent African immigrants, multiracial people, rich people, and poor people. People who fit under that label “def[y] all the ethnological and logical classifications.”122 Every other racial label is the same. Some white people descend from slave holders, some white people descend from slaves, and some are recent immigrants whose ancestors had nothing to do with it.
The label “Asian” is likewise meaningless. It refers to everyone who comes from the part of the planet between Pakistan and Japan and groups together 60 percent of the world’s population. What does a wealthy Pakistani Muslim immigrant have in common with a poor American Christian whose ancestors came here from China 100 years ago? The answer is: probably nothing except their humanity. Or, in other words, everything that matters.
Ultimately, these arguments are recipes for division and hatred. Racial prejudice is “an ancient feeling among men,” and every time that we have given it control over our will and our behavior, it has “brought the nation to the verge of ruin.”123 Nothing, Justice Harlan said, is surer to spark hatred than laws that treat people differently based on the color of their skin.124 History has sadly proved him right, over and over.
If America chooses once again to turn its back on the hard path toward equality and follows once again the easier path toward racial division, it will find the same old thing waiting at the end of the path that has always waited there. The only question will be whether America is able to fight its way back yet again.
ENDNOTES:
119. Thomas Sowell, RACE AND ECONOMICS vi (1975).
120. Alexander Bickel, THE MORALITY OF CONSENT 134 (1975).
121. Wygant v. Jackson Bd. of Educ., 476 U.S. 267, 281 (1986) (plurality opinion).
122. Frederick Douglass, Our Composite Nationality, supra note 69.
123. Id.
124. Plessy, 163 U.S. at 560 (Harlan, J., dissenting).
