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RACE AND ETHNICITY

The Politics of Race Relations

In proposing a national "conversation" on race in 1996, President Clinton asked "can we fulfill the promise of America by embracing all our citizens of all races.… Can we become one America in the 21st century?" If the United States could become "the worlds first truly great multiracial, multiethnic democracy," Clinton declared, then it would "rewrite the rules of human evolution." Clinton's avowed political purpose in announcing this dialogue was to defend preferential forms of affirmative action. Yet, despite the president's aspirations, only 4 percent of the respondents to a 1996 Pew Research Center survey thought race relations a serious enough problem to be a top priority of the federal government. Data complied from several sources suggested that the continued government policy of defining people according to racial criteria was in part responsible for the mounting tensions that surfaced during the 1990s among African Americans, whites, Asians, and Hispanics. These tensions were perhaps most dramatically exemplified by the trials of Rodney King and O. J. Simpson, in which many perceived blacks as feeling a stronger allegiance to the members of their racial group than to fellow citizens and to be more concerned with their own advancement than with the achievement of justice.

Racial and Ethnic Convergence

With an intermarriage rate of 40 percent among persons of Hispanic descent and 50 percent among those of Asian descent, most students of racial and ethnic demographics agree that the United States faces a future in which the majority, or near majority, of its citizens will be of mixed race and ethnicity. Even the intermarriage of blacks and whites, despite the enduring cultural impediments to such unions, became more prevalent during the 1990s, especially among young, middleclass, college-educated blacks. Still, black-white inter-marriage remained strikingly less common than intermarriage between the members of other groups. The prospect of a mixed racial and ethnic citizenry in the future has elicited varied responses. To some, this demographic projection has suggested that American society and government had better attend to the needs of its minority citizens and residents who will soon be in the majority. To others, it has meant that the federal government should restrict immigration in order to avoid the advent of a "nonwhite majority" in fifty or one hundred years. To civilrights activists and those concerned to maintain the power of specific minorities, it has prompted objections to the official recognition of multiracial and multiethnic identities. Such unwieldy complexities, after all, would make it even more difficult to advance programs and legislation designed to end discrimination against a single, homogeneous group.

Changing Attitudes

An additional response to the changing racial and ethnic composition of the United States was the growing opposition to preferential forms of affirmative action. The majority of Americans during the 1990s, fully 67 percent according to a Wall Street Journall NBC News survey conducted in 1995, opposed affirmative action. The increasingly angry and divisive debate posed a conflict between two cherished American ideals: the belief that all Americans deserve equal opportunities and the idea that hard work and merit, not race or gender, ought to determine who prospers and who does not. The debate intensified during the early-to-mid 1990s, which were years of slow economic growth, stagnation of middle-and working-class incomes, and corporate downsizing. In 1995, Clint Bolick, cofounder of the Institute for Justice, summed up the changing sentiments about affirmative action saying "there's a great deal of pentup anger beneath the surface of American politics that's looking for an outlet." These anxieties combined in the 1990s with a growing sense that affirmative action represented another instance of government intrusion and social engineering. The logic of affirmative action, that those hobbled by generations of bias could not hope to enjoy equal opportunities, made sense to many Americans during the 1960s. By the 1990s, however, many had come to believe that the government was not only working to ensure equality of opportunity but equality of condition, not only to give the disadvantaged a fair chance but to guarantee their success. The opposition to affirmative action culminated in California's Proposition 209, which outlawed racial and gender preferences in admission to colleges and universities. At the end of a decade of controversy, however, the questions at the heart of the affirmative action debate remained unanswered.