Conservatives and Civil Rights Redux

We are very excited about the blog THIS WEEK. After our discussion of William Voegeli's excellent Wall Street Journal piece two weeks ago, we engaged in a discussion with Dr. Voegeli via email. We all agreed to reprint that exchange here for the purposes of stimulating additional dialogue. Though Dr. Voegeli did not have time to write a formal response to our response to his response (dizzy yet?), we leave open the invitation for him to do so in the comments section below. Further, we very much encourage you to also join in the discussion.

The following is the text of the email exchange with no changes except the inclusion of hyperlinks to additional material where we feel it might be helpful to you, the reader. We want to thank Dr. Voegeli for his willingness to engage us with this important topic and for agreeing to share the conversation in this space; we all three agreed that it is a great "teaching moment."

Before reading further, please take a few moments to read Dr. Voegeli's article and our blog about it. The following will be much more meaningful in the context of the original WSJ.com article, as well as our treatment of it.


Dr. Caliendo and Dr. McIlwain:

Thank you for bringing my article on civil rights and the conservative movement to the attention of the readers of “This Week in Race.” I appreciate, as well, the compliments and attention you paid to it. I’m guessing you won’t mind if I respond to some of the points you raised.

I should begin by saying that I haven’t read Echo Chamber, so when you discuss my article in the context of that book’s argument, everything I know about that context is based on your description of it. If reading the book invalidates anything I say here, I will, naturally, revise my positions.

As I understand your reading of it, Echo Chamber argues that conservatives further their agenda by “framing” the information the public receives and assesses. When I do read the book, the question I will want it to answer is whether this isn’t something that everyone in politics does. And, if so, what’s the big deal? Will Saletan’s book, Bearing Right, for example, argues that all the participants in the abortion debate try to frame the issue to their benefit. The choice frame competes against the life frame. In a democracy, the one that makes the most sense to the most people will prevail. If liberals feel that conservatives have been selling too many frames to too many voters, the thing to do is offer better frames that will have wider appeal, and explain clearly why the liberal frames are better. The thing not to do is complain, as Thomas Frank does, that wicked conservative rhetoricians cynically put forward arguments they don’t believe to ensnare stupid conservative voters who do believe them.

According to your analysis of my article, there is a conservative frame and a civil rights frame, each advancing distinctive and generally opposed ways to think about the requirements of racial justice in the U.S. The conservative frame is preoccupied with states’ rights and limiting government, the civil rights frame with correcting an American system that is “fundamentally stacked against people of color and those who are impoverished.” If I understand correctly, you think my essay was in some ways an analysis of how the conservative frame fails to appreciate the more compelling and admirable assertions of the civil rights frame, and in other ways was an example of that failure.

I agree with that argument to this extent: I am a conservative who thinks the conservatives were fundamentally wrong and civil rights activists fundamentally correct on the questions about which they disagreed from 1955 to 1965. At the same time, I think the conservative framework is, in general, better than all the alternatives to it for helping Americans to govern ourselves satisfactorily. Clearly, there is some tension between these two propositions. Your analysis of my essay welcomes its criticism of the way conservatives responded to the civil rights movement, but criticizes it for not resolving the tension I’ve described in the obvious way: by admitting that conservatism is essentially wrong, if not evil.

You won’t be surprised that I’ll decline that invitation, and you will be relieved that I won’t offer a full explanation for why I am (still, after the failings I describe in my essay) a conservative. To be as brief as possible, I agree with George Will that liberals think the point of politics is to make the world a better place, while conservatives think the point is to keep it from becoming worse. In the context of domestic American politics, the way things can get worse that worries conservatives the most is when social reformers become so convinced of the necessity and superiority of their plans that they become quite comfortable with the government’s using its inherent monopoly on legal physical force to compel other people to fall in line with their vision.

This was the thought that led me to write that conservatism came to grief over civil rights because it had no starting point for ending Jim Crow, while liberalism came to grief because it had no stopping point after Jim Crow had been defeated. I’m thinking about busing, for example, and specifically about the 1974 Supreme Court decision in Milliken v. Bradley. By a vote of 5-to-4 the Court rejected the mad scientist scheme, devised by a federal district court at the behest of civil rights plaintiffs and approved at the appellate level, to bus school children all over the Detroit metropolitan area - the city plus 53 suburban school districts - in order to achieve racial balance. Had such liberal heroes as William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall been able to find one more vote, the plan would have been upheld and conservative justices like William Rehnquist and Warren Burger would have been the dissenters.

Perhaps you think busing was a fine idea, that it’s a shame the Milliken decision prevented it from being extended to entire metropolitan areas, that conservatives (and whites generally) who opposed busing were, yet again, “privileging the values of individualism and states’ rights over values of equality and (social) justice by buying into myths and stereotypes about people of color.” But the question about the absence of a liberal stopping point will not go away. Bill Clinton was aware of it in his “mend it, don’t end it” speech in 1995, saying that affirmative action “should not go on forever” and “should be retired when its job is done.” It’s clear, however, that the refusal of its advocates to state clearly what it would mean for its job to be done – or what it would mean for an affirmative action plan to go too far and violate rights of citizens who aren’t part of any minority group and whose well-being doesn’t figure into any scheme of social justice, but who deserve, simply and merely as citizens, to have those rights respected – guarantees that affirmative action will be retired only because of the victories of opponents like Ward Connerly.

Let me note, in closing, that I dispute your interpretation of my quotation of the Ta-Nehisi Coates article on Bill Cosby. I was making the same point that Coates made: black voters have entirely plausible reasons for voting Democratic, even those black voters whose worldviews are, in important respects, conservative. Thus, it was untrue and unfair for you to say that I was implicitly criticizing black voters by making the inherently racist assertion that they are “so unsophisticated that they vote against their interests.” (Do you think, by the way, that Thomas Frank was in any way bigoted, or simply condescending, for explicitly making the same generalization about white, working-class voters?)

Secondly, you misconstrue my “swipe at the social science” used in the 1954 Brown decision. I was not trying to evaluate the Clark doll experiment, but to argue that Supreme Court justices lack the capacity to do so, and shouldn’t have tried. It’s an argument the historian James Patterson, no one’s idea of a conservative ideologue, made in Grand Expectations, where he said that Clark’s research was “dubious and subject to different interpretations. Black children attending desegregated schools in the North, for instance, seemed to have lower self-esteem, as Clark defined it, than black children in segregated schools. The fact of the matter was that in 1954 there simply did not exist sufficient research that could ‘prove’ whether any particular racial mix in schools was superior – or in what ways – to any other. The Court would have done better to avoid socio-psychological speculation, which opened it to criticism.” The best way for the Court to have avoided that criticism would have been to overturn Plessy by embracing the “color-blind Constitution” Justice Harlan’s dissent called for.

Best regards,

Bill Voegeli
Claremont, CA


Dr. Voegeli,

Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply to our blog. We don't at all mind that you responded; to the contrary, we'd like to include this exchange in a future blog, if you agree to do so. We'll be happy to extend you an invitation to write the final entry if you wish to respond to what we write below.

First, we want to be clear that our blog focuses on race, politics and language, so our treatment of Jamieson and Cappella's Echo Chamber was less designed to be a review of the full volume as it was intended to situate your essay in the context of its discussion of the Trent Lott situation, which they use as an illustration of their larger point in chapter 2. Their thesis is not simply that conservatives frame information to further their political agendas. You are absolutely right that everyone does that. The point of their book is to show the relationship between the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, Rush Limbaugh's radio show, and Fox News television broadcasts. They discuss framing and priming, but those comprise the theoretical basis for their research, not the thrust of the book. The close relationship of message framing and the potential effects it has on the audience is the primary contribution of this work. It is certainly true that conservative frames have been more effective than liberal frames in the past thirty years (at least). George Lakoff's 2004 book Don't Think of an Elephant speaks directly to that.

Second, we want to note that one of the premises upon which our work rests is that there is too much debate and not enough dialogue in politics today. In that spirit, we'd like to elaborate and, perhaps, clarify the points you raise, but we do not wish to persuade you that we're "correct." The mission of THIS WEEK IN RACE is to apply scholarship from the fields of political science and communication to current issues of race, politics and language. Our work is not value-neutral, of course; we are decidedly committed to racial equality and exposing the way language tacitly serves to perpetuate racial inequality. So while we strive for objectivity, we do not attempt to be neutral, nor do are we naive enough to believe that our own values do not inform our work.

So the criticism you make of Thomas Frank's claims about "wicked conservative rhetoricians cynically pu[ting] forward arguments they don't believe to ensnare stupid conservative voters who do believe them" is beyond our scope. Indeed, one of the things that we've argued consistently is that as social scientists, we are interested in the effects of language, not the intent of those who use it. Intent is often inferred (by our readers, as well as the broader community), but it's always speculative. We try to point out inconsistencies and poor logic by those who use racialized language, but we are not interested in "outing" bigots as much as we are in pointing out the inherent racism in all of us.

It is on this point that we are concerned that you may have taken offense to our point about our criticism of your use of the Coates quotation. TWIR readers will recognize that we use the term "racist" very purposefully. It refers to systemic racism, not individualized bigotry. Everyone who has been socialized in the United States is racist in a way that privileges whites. That "racism" is mostly subconscious, but it exists, and it exists for everyone, irrespective of skin color. This is why you will hear scholars claim that "black people can't be racist." Black people can certainly be bigoted, meaning that they have animosity toward whites or members of other racial groups, but racism is the internalized assumptions that we all posses about people of color, even as our conscious minds strive to counteract that socialization. In that context, what we perceived as your assumption that blacks are so unsophisticated that they vote against their own interest did, indeed, reflect your racism. You may, as some conservatives (like Sean Hannity do) argue that you are not racist. Lots of folks do because most of us do not consciously judge people negatively by the color of their skin. We will not try to convince you otherwise, but we will say that racism is like an affliction such as alcoholism or even cancer: until we recognize that it's there, we cannot treat it. We've long argued (alongside others) that an unfortunate legacy of Martin Luther King is that white civil-rights progressives agreed with him so much that they convinced themselves that they were no longer racist because they were not bigoted. It is largely that reason that racism (not bigotry) is still so prevalent today. We haven't dealt with it squarely. So, even though Coates is black, he very well can make racist statements based on his assumptions. That's the real revelatory power of the Clark experiments.

On that point, we may not have been as clear as we wished to be about the possibility that Clark's work did not necessary imply that segregation was the cause of the black children preferring the white dolls. We are in absolute agreement that such an inference was a stretch (at best). Our concern was your original sentence, which we took to implicitly criticize the study itself by characterizing the research as "problematic." We agree that it was problematic to use the results in the case the way it was used, but the study is not problematic -- it is an important indication of the way racism (as opposed to bigotry) works in America -- it affects all of us in a way that we do not usually even recognize, and it leads to what Dr. Cornel West argued in his 1993 book Race Matters is one of the largest problems facing black America: "too little self love" (he pairs this with "too much poverty"). We intended our discussion of the scholarly debate over footnote 11 in the Brown case to suggest that we were sensitive to the argument about employing Clark's work in this way, but we may have not been as clear as we should have.

We chose to highlight your essay because it is one of the few works by a conservative where the writer is not trying to explain away misunderstandings of racist policies or language. We appreciate that you are frank about the mistakes conservatives made with respect to civil rights. But you certainly are aware that you are unique in this respect. That's precisely why we invoked Jamieson and Cappella's chapter on the Lott incident. Rather than own his racism, Lott argued in his memoirs that he was misunderstood. After all, he asks us to understand, he doesn't use the n-word and he's had black friends, staffers and supporters. Again, he's making a fine argument that he's not a bigot, but that's not the same as not being racist. Further, the conservative media, while distancing themselves from Lott, didn't do as you do and argue that those policies were flawed -- instead, they turned the tables to argue that liberals were being hypocritical (which they were). From our position, it is this inability or unwillingness to embrace the way racism really works that is at the heart of the problem.

As committed as we are to racial equality, we must, by definition believe that "conservatism is essentially wrong" on the issue of civil rights. We wouldn't say "evil," because that implies intent, and we can't ascribe intent or speculate on motives (well, we can, but it's not useful or grounded in any way). So we want to make two points here: 1) we do not comment at all on conservatism writ large; we are focused on race, so in that context, we believe conservatism is wrong. 2) we do not come to this conclusion by a skewed perception of conservatism but by its history and current practices by adherents.

We were not aware of George Will's explanation of contemporary American ideology, but we find it to be accurate. So by that definition, "liberals think the point of politics is to make the world a better place, while conservatives think the point is to keep it from becoming worse." Inherently, those who are disadvantaged (the poor, the uneducated, women and racial minorities) will be less interested in maintaining the status quo as those who are in relative positions of advantage. "Worse" is relative, is it not? If one is homeless, how much worse can it get? If one is illiterate and living on minimum wage, how much worse can it get? It can always get worse, but the floor is a lot closer to folks in these situations than it is to you (presumably) and us. On the other hand, if one is advantaged, it is attractive to have the boat not be rocked because there is more to lose. For most middle-class Americans, the perception of their position (as a result of living beyond our means) allows us to view ourselves further up the socio-economic ladder, and thus less likely to support policies that would do anything other than "keep things from getting worse." If one accepts that the racial and economic inequality that exists in America today is unacceptable and not solely the fault of those who suffer the disadvantage, then keeping things from getting worse is not a viable option; we want things to get better.

Perhaps this is where we part ways. Part of the conservative position has been the reliance on a model of American democracy that stresses meritocracy and personal responsibility. Given an equal starting point, it would be hard to argue with these values. But it is clear that the starting point is not equal. There continues to be documented inequality with respect to income, wealth, education, incarceration, teen pregnancy, etc. There are two possible explanations for this: it is the fault of those who continue to make bad choices, or it is a systemic problem. (There is another argument -- a biological one -- as well, but so few subscribe to it that it's not worth mentioning here.) While individual choice is always a variable in one's social standing, bad choices by a wealthy teenager in a suburban town are less likely to have life-changing results as such choices by a person of color who lives in the inner city. Where a white kid's mom with connections might be able to plea down a DUI, a city kid relying on a public defender my lose his or her chance for financial aid to college. Further, meritocracy is a myth. For example, inner city schools are vastly underfunded compared to suburban schools. Conservatives argue that "you can't throw money at the problem," but while some suburban children take Advanced Placement classes and, therefore, can have a GPA above 4.0, the smartest kid in the school with no AP classes is bound by a maximum GPA of 4.0. Relying only on "merit" for college admission, then, is inherently disadvantaging persons in certain situations and advantaging others. Those sorts of examples rarely surface in affirmative action discussions amidst the "I knew a guy who was denied admission to college because he was white" stories.

In short, then, we don't have a policy position on busing, but we agree that it certainly didn't work. We disagree, however, that liberalism has (you said "had," referring to the Jim Crow era, to be fair) no stopping point. We're aware of no thoughtful advocates of affirmative action, to take but one example of a liberal position on civil rights, who believe it's a permanent fix for racial inequality. It has, however, helped to level the playing field (though there is clearly a long way to go). We agree with Justice O'Connor's position in her opinion in the U. of Michigan cases in 2003 that there should be a time when it is not needed, but that time is not now. Quotas were wrong, and we agree with their illegality. Giving a person of color points on an entrance equation is not denying a white person his or her civil rights, though; that person got "points" throughout his or her life that cannot be codified on an admission form. Very poor whites are not helped and often harmed by affirmative action. We concede that point for sure. That's unacceptable. Poverty in America is disproportionately black and brown, though, and even wealthy people of color face systemic disadvantages. In short, the "end point" of liberal positions on civil rights is when these situations no longer exist. The end point is when a white parent would just as soon have his or her child go to an inner city school than a suburban school because children in both schools have the same chance of gaining admission into a four-year college. The end point will be when persons of all races can choose where they want to live because income ranges are evenly distributed within racial groups. The end point will be when political figures' use of racial language is not effective.

We'll close, then, by noting that we were very critical of comments by Hillary Clinton and her surrogates during the primary campaign. We were critical of Joe Biden's comments about Obama being "articulate." We were critical of the Washington Democratic Party suggesting that an Italian-American opponent was attached to organized crime. Where we see language that plays on racial predispositions, we point it out. That's not only done by conservatives, but, as your essay so nicely points out, conservatives have been on the wrong side of this issue for a long time (RNC chair Ken Mehlman admitted as much in 2005). We hope that your work makes conservatives more likely to come forward and embrace those mistakes rather than pointing the finger at others or rationalizing them. If conservatives in the public sphere were as honest as you are, we would be satisfied that we are having a fair and open debate. If John McCain would say, "In my presidency, I would advocate policies that would keep things from getting worse in America," that would be refreshing. But we all know that he will not say that, even if he believes it (though maybe he's not a conservative in the Reagan form, so he may be a bad example). If conservative public figures are against judicial activism, they should denounce the Brown decision (it didn't integrate schools anyway), but they do not. They should address why white privilege (e.g., the AP courses) is acceptable, but affirmative action is not. We agree with you that "[i]n a democracy, the [frame] that makes the most sense to the most people will prevail." We have taken it upon ourselves to unpack those frames as they concern race, politics and language, and we appreciate your willingness to engage with us on the topic.

Best wishes,

Stephen and Charlton