Racial Integration or Racial Separation?
By Mayer Schiller, Dinesh D'Souza

Schiller

Louis Farrakhan isn’t the only American expressing skepticism toward the ideal of racial integration today. Black Republican and PBS television host Tony Brown condemns the contemporary drive for "racial assimilation," arguing "we can remain racially separated and maintain a healthy, productive nation." Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has damned school integration schemes built on the premise that non-whites must sit next to whites to become educated.

Among blacks and whites both, integration is backed more by lip service than real conviction, as indicated by the fact that in all social settings where integration is not coerced, the races generally choose to separate. In churches, prisons, the military, professional athletic teams, and college campuses, the races mostly go their own way. Is this self-imposed segregation really as shocking and undesirable as commentators would have us believe?

Black and white Americans inhabit different universes of perception. This was apparent long before the divergent reactions to the O.J. Simpson verdict. Opinion polls show that large numbers of blacks believe guns and drugs are deliberately placed in their communities by whites in order to destroy them. One-third of blacks say whites invented aids to exterminate non-whites.

Whether or not existing racial differences are genetic, they are deeply ingrained. Forty years of massive financial aid and special legal and social assistance have done little to change this reality; instead the races seem to be diverging. Yet accepted political wisdom simplistically repeats, "We must be more understanding and learn to live together." Perhaps it is time Americans come to grips with the increasing numbers of citizens of all races who say, "We understand just fine, and we no longer wish to live together."

Some will say this is an ugly overreaction to national economic and social woes. Don’t despair, they argue, ethnic tensions will diminish as soon as all groups have the same high standard of living, or when "white racism" disappears, or when the problems associated with poverty are somehow eliminated. But even if all these desirable ends could be achieved, the question would remain whether people have the right or perhaps the obligation to survive primarily by reliance on one’s self and one’s kind.

As a Hasidic Jew, I sympathize with the deep natural yearning to pass on a distinctive way of life. America’s dominant culture tolerates such sentiments when expressed by minorities but sees the same sentiments as evil whenever whites express them. Blacks and Hispanics have clearly expressed a desire to be under the auspices of their own race in education, law enforcement, and government, to have their children speak their languages and learn of their heroes and culture, not those of whites. Are these basic human emotions simply wrong? Are they to be tolerated among non-whites but not among whites?

Historically, Americans ranging from Abraham Lincoln to Marcus Garvey held that mutually agreed-upon and respectful separation was best for Americans of all races. Could this again become our standard? Certainly any effort to gain breathing room between the races must eschew talk of racial superiority and affirm the moral principle that all ethnic groups have an equal right to self-determination. Non-whites may well prove more capable of elevating themselves if the psychological crutches of "white racism" and white alms are removed. In arguing for his own notion of racial separation, Tony Brown asserts that current arrangements foster only "more paternalism" and "black and white racism." Each racial group must earn its own equality and self-respect, he argues.

Aristotle similarly believed the cement that binds a country together is commonality and friendship among the citizens. He also taught that friendship flourishes only where there is a rough equality of condition. In America this may require an abandonment of the forced integration attempted over recent decades.

Critics will insist that even if it is not immoral, separation is impractical. Admittedly, peacefully disengaging without acrimony will be tricky. Each group must say to others, "Yes, of course, you want your own places to socialize, and neighborhood schools where your children can study and love their own culture. And so do we." Here the mainstream conservative advocacy of decentralized government as well as the New Left’s notions of "acting locally" can be applied. But allowing self-selected communities greater self-determination will require trimming back the federal and state leviathans. A first step would be to eliminate laws that encourage discrimination in favor of certain groups in the public sector, as well as those that prohibit preferences on the private level. In the long term, we may see neighborhoods, states, and regions explore the means of secession, much as Quebec is now doing. Havens of mandatory integration could continue to exist (let us see how many white liberals actually choose to live and school their children inside them).

All of this is preposterous, you say. Perhaps so from a 1995 perspective. But the notion that America would become today’s multiracial boiling pot would have seemed bizarre 60 years ago.

Respectful disengagement does not entail indifference to the well-being of other groups, but we can fulfill our moral and religious duties to others without incorporating the beneficiaries into our own self-defining culture.

Nor does a turning away from forced integration presume that race is the source of all of today’s cultural breakdowns. We have larger social problems. But new opportunities to address them might open up if only Americans could gain a little breathing space from a forced multiracial marriage that has clearly soured.

Rabbi Mayer Schiller teaches Talmud at Yeshiva University High School for Boys in New York City.

While I agree with Rabbi Schiller that many social policy measures designed to bring about racial integration have only driven the races apart and fostered condescension and resentment, I do not agree that all efforts to bring races together should be abandoned. Just because heavy-handed and coercive policies such as busing and racial preferences have failed to reach the goal of integration, we need not conclude that the goal itself is undesirable.

After all, despite much rhetoric boosting "multiculturalism" and deriding the "melting pot," the melting pot has in fact worked reasonably well for other ethnic groups. Immigrant groups have preserved symbolic aspects of the Old World, such as St. Patrick’s Day, while at the same time embracing a new American identity.

Consider intermarriage, the strongest social indicator of integration and assimilation. Intermarriage rates between white ethnic groups have now reached epidemic proportions. Jews marry Christians at rates that have raised concerns about the continuation of a distinctive Jewish community. Levels of intermarriage between whites and Hispanics, and between whites and Asians, have also escalated to the point where hundreds of thousands of mixed-race children are born in the United States every year.

For American blacks, however, the situation is different. Although the rate of black-white intermarriage has more than doubled in the past two decades, it remains vastly lower than that for other minority groups. On nearly all measures of social integration—where people live, how they vote, whom they befriend, and whom they marry—the melting pot is a reality for every group except American blacks.

Some civil rights activists will triumphantly announce that this amounts to a confession that racism is still the primary obstacle facing African Americans. Not so. To understand the root of the problem, we must return to the debate between two great black leaders, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, in the early part of this century. Du Bois maintained that blacks face one serious problem: white racism. Washington said no, blacks face two problems: white racism and black cultural deficiencies. He wholeheartedly agreed that these cultural weaknesses were the product of slavery and oppression. Yet he also insisted that black crime rates were too high and black savings rates too low. Cultural deficiencies, Washington argued, would inhibit blacks from being competitive with other groups and would also strengthen white racism in the long term by giving it an empirical justification.

Du Bois’s view prevailed, and for more than a generation the civil rights establishment, including the NAACP which Du Bois helped found, has promoted a strategy calculated to fight racism and secure legal rights for blacks. That strategy has produced important gains, yet now it has run its course, and its main flaw has become increasingly apparent.

Blacks enjoy the same legal rights as other groups, yet on virtually every measure of academic achievement and economic performance, blacks are uncompetitive with whites, Hispanics, and Asians. What is needed is a two-step strategy to reverse this ominous trend: first, a public policy that is strictly race blind—what I call "separation of race and state." Let’s abandon any public policy that sets citizens against each other on the basis of their skin color. The second step is a cultural strategy, concentrated in the private sector, that aims to raise the cultural standards of all Americans, but especially those of the black underclass. In the black community, for practical reasons, such a strategy must be led by inner-city preachers, teachers, and parents, but other Americans can help by supporting these civilizing forces that work to uphold what urban anthropologistElijah Anderson terms the African American "culture of decency."

America’s fatal public policy mistake is to believe that forced integration is the means of success for a group. History shows that voluntary integration is usually the consequence of a group’s success. When Catholics and Jews attained a certain measure of economic and social status, other Americans became less reluctant to vote for a Catholic for president, and more willing for their sons and daughters to marry into Jewish and Catholic families.

Ethnocentrism can be a business asset—to this degree, Rabbi Schiller is correct. Indeed, while Jews, Italians, Koreans and other ethnic groups have advanced by helping their own, American blacks—whose homogenous voting habits show that they have a strong sense of political solidarity—demonstrate no comparable sense of economic solidarity. If blacks emulate Koreans and set up rotating credit associations and other means to generate start-up capital, they can develop the strong entrepreneurial base that is essential to a group’s success in America.

When a group is consistently failing, there is a temptation to believe that intrinsic inferiority is the cause. But if blacks become increasingly competitive with other groups, they will discredit racism by removing its empirical foundation. Social acceptance for blacks as a group is inextricably tied to reducing scandalously high black rates of crime and illegitimacy, and raising standards of academic achievement and economic self-reliance.

Although Rabbi Schiller and I agree on certain matters of public policy, such as the failure of coerced integration, we have quite different visions for America. At bottom, he is a racial separatist, and I am an integrationist. My arguments, unlike his, presume that a multiracial society is both possible and desirable. Over time, it is African Americans who will prove one of us right.

Dinesh D’Souza, John M. Olin Fellow at AEI, is the author of The End of Racism.