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In the third and final dialogue in a series on race relations, David Gergen, editor at large of U.S. News & World Report, talks with Orlando Patterson, professor of sociology at Harvard University and author of The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s Racial Crisis.
A RealAudio version of this segment is available.
NEWSHOUR LINKS:
July 9, 1998
A dialogue on race with President Clinton.
Browse NewsHour essays , and coverage of race issues.DAVID GERGEN: Professor Patterson, as America engages in a conversation about race, there have been a number of new books on this subject. One by the Thernstroms, Abigail and Steve Thernstrom, your colleagues--one of them is your colleague at Harvard--has argued that we made great progress, even astonishing progress in the last 50 years. Another by David Shipler has argued that there’s an enormous amount of discomfort out there and that we’re really a nation of strangers. Your book says--seems to say that both of those ideas are correct, and that there’s a paradox here.
ORLANDO PATTERSON, Author, The Ordeal of Integration: Yes, they are correct. And the paradox we have is that in spite of the progress made there’s still a great deal to be done. So there’s the situation is paradoxical in the sense that we’ve come a long way. We’ve made enormous progress. In the course of making that progress we’ve generated a great deal of conflict. In the course of making that progress we’ve also left behind and even created a situation in which the situation will become worse with certain groups. So the situation is, itself, complex and paradoxical but the long-term trajectory is definitely one in which are most indices--income differences, health, even housing, and there’s a growth of the Afro-American middle class, which is one of the largest it’s ever been and the largest in the world among the Afro-American population. We’ve made enormous progress. But our current perception of the situation is one in which, at best, that we have not done very much; that we’re heading for a racial crisis; we’re heading towards almost racially hell in some terms now, which is extraordinary.
DAVID GERGEN: Why if you make progress, why, if we achieve greater integration the way we hoped we would do some 30/40 years ago, why does that bring more friction? Why does that bring more pessimism?
ORLANDO PATTERSON: Well, progress always is accompanied by friction. I am suspicious of any situation which claims to have had genuine change which was not accompanied by conflict. If you bring two groups of people together who are separated by hundreds of years, their opportunities for conflict increases even as progress is being made.
But it’s also true that for many people--in America you have a situation in which significant groups of Afro-Americans get a feeling of greater pain--even while most Afro-Americans are, in fact, improving their situations, so that the people left behind in the ghettos are in many ways experiencing genuinely a situation that’s worse than the time in which they were segregated, but at least they were integrated--they were in communities in which they are their own leadership and so on among them. So in reality, you do have greater friction, greater sense of pain. Also much of the burden of racial progress has been born by Euro-American working class, who become very resentful. So there’s a sense in even as the majority of Euro-Americans are becoming more liberal, the degree of intensity of hostility is increasing among those who are feeling that they’ve born most of the brunt of the change. And they happen to be the ones who are interacting most with Afro-Americans.
DAVID GERGEN: When you say Euro-Americans, to keep our terminology straight, you’re referring to what we ordinarily call whites but you believe, more properly, are called Euro-Americans, as you call blacks Afro-Americans.
ORLANDO PATTERSON: Right. Isn’t it strange that we agree to use the term African-Americans or Afro-Americans but still keep the term "white." If you read the dictionary, you’ll see why.
DAVID GERGEN: I understand. I wanted to make sure that all of us share the same terminological foundations here, but your point is then that you think that friction and tension is likely to accompany us for a while here. We’re going through a passage, in effect.
ORLANDO PATTERSON: That’s right. In other words--so the situation itself is one in which there is not a simple movement, harmonious movement. There is a change--positive change is always accompanied by friction; however, our perception of what’s happening is also paradoxical in the sense that both the right and the left, as well as the Afro-American leadership, all have strong interest in perceiving the situation as in negative terms.
DAVID GERGEN: Tell me more about that. That’s really--
ORLANDO PATTERSON: Well, for the right wants to castigate the government for the failures of its--all its programs on behalf of the poor, the Afro-American poor. It makes sense they exaggerate the problem to show how we’re losing ground because of the horrendous government interference in policies, so that welfare dependency and so on is increasing and it’s increasing because of rotten government policies. For the left, the liberal group, exaggerating the problem, emphasizing that America is chronically racist seems--is mistakenly believed that this will keep the pressure up for government to intervene even more. And the criticism here is just the opposite of the right, which is that things are bad because the government hasn’t gone far enough, or there’s still, the place is still chronically racist, so there’s still a need for more government intervention.
And for Afro-American leadership emphasizing racism as being--America as irredeemably racist--enhances their broker role, obviously, and again mistakenly is based on the view that by presenting an image of almost no progress, you will increase the possibility of greater intervention. And it’s also partly due to the tragic commitment to the ideology of the victim, a very deterministic view, which I’m afraid most Afro-American leadership has adopted, which tends to assume that by perceiving of Afro-Americans as victims you increase the chance of intervention on their behalf. Now, unfortunately, this worked. This is the strategy of the 60's. It’s interesting that the great Supreme Court decision, which struck down school segregation, was based on a determinist view, i.e., social scientists were brought in to show that it created victims, rather than the view that this is the right thing to do.
DAVID GERGEN: But today, in effect, it drives pessimism higher, higher than it should be.
ORLANDO PATTERSON: Yes. And I think, more important, it’s created a dogma of the victim, which I think is disastrous for people who need to change their own lives.
DAVID GERGEN: I understand. So that friction is inherent in progress, but with the kind of arguments that are coming from the right and the left, in your view, it’s making it much more difficult to make other progress.
ORLANDO PATTERSON: Yes. Not only that, but it’s also making it difficult to understand the situation.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
ORLANDO PATTERSON: And what’s happening, because in many cases we racialize problems which are not racial. And if you do that, you end up applying the wrong strategies. For example, the problem of the underclass and the problem of the Afro-American poor is no longer really a problem which is due to racism. Ironically, the people who face most racism, what remains in a society and is still a significant amount, are more middle class Afro-Americans. For lower class and for working Afro-Americans the problem is low income. The problem is a growing inequality in a society. The problem is a lack of skills. The problem is not primarily one of racism. But if you define the problem as one of racism and if you racialize it, you end up attacking, you see, the wrong target.
DAVID GERGEN: Professor Patterson, we could go on. I know you have two more books coming out. This is first of a trilogy, so Professor Orlando Patterson, we’d like to ask you back, and we look forward to talking to you.
ORLANDO PATTERSON: Thank you.
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