Reagan policies dismaying to blacks

Press, 14 September 1981, Page 16

Reagan policies dismaying to blacks

' From “The Economist,” London

A counter-revolution in civil. rights is. under way in America. During the Reagan years Federal Government support for efforts to end racial segregation and to promote opportunities for disadvantaged minorities cannot be taken for granted. The new, harsher climate represents a victory for some of the nastier forces on the American Right which have always baulked at civil rights laws. But it has been given an intellectual underpinning by those free-market economists with good White House connections who argue that government aid to minorities has been useless, perhaps even harmful.. The Reagan Administration’s enthusiasm for this logic heralds an end to the bipartisan consensus on civil rights that has prevailed for the past 20 years. It is also of some international significance, since similar legislation abroad (including Britain's race relations laws) has often owed much to American experience. Now the American example is being unravelled. On August 28 the Justice Department abandoned its efforts to. force a more radical desegregation of Chicago’s schools.. Instead the department has given authorisation to a voluntary scheme which only six weeks before it called “incomplete.” Chicago’s ruling Democratic machine has resisted pressure from Washington to desegregate its school system (the third largest in the country) for more than 20 years. Now it will push ahead with a token plan of its own involving magnet schools (to attract pupils from all over the city) and the redrawing of some boundaries to produce a better racial mix. Although whites make up only 18 per cent of Chicago’s students, many schools will stay over 70 per cent white while more than 250 will re-

main all black or Hispanic. There is now no possibility of a Federal mandatory, busing order for at least two years and, given Mr Reagan's opposition to busing, no realistic prospect of one as long as he is in the White House. A more permissive pattern is emerging in the Justice Department's attitude to recalcitrant school systems. The day before the Chicago decision it abandoned an attempt to integrate . Houston’s inner-city black schools with those in the large white and affluent suburbs. Several cities, sensing the change in climate, are going their own way: Los Angeles has given up its scheme for mandatory desegregation of schools and busing programmes have also been cut back in Seattle and Dallas. There is, besides, a battery of bills in Congress designed to end the Federal Government's power to require mandatory busing. The Democratic majority in the House of Representatives is not necessarily a defence against such moves; the lower chamber has already passed such a measure. Efforts to desegregate higher education are also being reined in. Recently the Justice Department ditched the Carter Administration’s attempt to merge some black and white colleges in Louisiana. Instead it settled for a state promise to aim for a better mix and to channel more money into black colleges.. A similar settlement was reached in North Carolina in June. Neither state faces penalties if steps towards voluntary integration, which both have promised, come to nothing. In both cases civil rights activists can detect a return to the days before the Supreme Court's landmark decision in 1954 which outlawed separate but supposedly equal educational institutions. After mandatory busing, “af-

firmative action" programmes designed to boost the job opportunities of minorities have probably been the most controversial of civil-rights schemes. Here, too, the Reagan Administration is moving to curb federal support. It has proposed that smaller companies with government contracts should be freed from the need to draw up plans to hire minorities and women. At present firms employing fewer than 50 people with government contracts of less than $50,000 are exempt. Under the new rules the limits would be raised to 250 and SIM. Such a move can be seen as part of Mr Reagan's promise to rid industry of government regulation. But it is also a test of how far the President can go in repealing affirmative action, which he dislikes. The new rules would still leave three-quarters of the 26 million workers employed by federal contractors covered by af-firmative-action rules. But they would also make it more difficult for individuals who feel they have been discriminated against to collect compensation. More important, federal contractors would not be allowed to favour one race over another simply to make up for past grievances. These changes strike at the heart of the programme, which was first launched by executive order in 1975 and expanded even during the Nixon years. A weakening of the drive to desegregate and an end to affirmative action would represent a triumph for those conservative economists who have led an intellectual onslaught against such Federal Government schemes. One of the most notable is Mr Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Two of Mr Sowell’s most recent publications. “Markets and Minorities" and

“Ethnic America." provide a free-market justification for the Administration's new tack. His arguments are important not just because they are a well marshalled critique of conventional wisdom which is read and absorbed by the Reagan White House, but because Mr Sowell is black. The essence of his argument is that although “individuals may be devastated by discrimination ... it does not explain the economic conditions of a group as a whole.” He quotes the examples of Japanese-Americans and Chin-ese-Americans, both heavily discriminated against in their time, to show that it need not hold a racial group back. Japanese-American family income is now 32 per cent above the average, while the Chinese earn 12 per cent more. He goes on to argue that government programmes designed to end discrimination or to compensate for it will not necessarilv

improve the lot of the groups they are intended for. The significance of this argument is that it challenges the traditional liberal view that racial and ethnic, discrimination is responsible for poverty — a view which has been the basis of much civil rights and economic legislation in America for the past 20 years. If that was the case, he asks, why do second-generation American blacks of West Indian origin have average incomes higher than whites? Historical experience and ethnic attitudes (especially towards education) explain why some groups do better than others. Because it is only in the past 50 years that blacks have flooded into the cities, he places their development at the stage the Irish had reached in the 1870 s. Mr Sowell also claims that blacks, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans are really doing a lot better than the usual figures

suggest. Statistics which show blacks earning only 60 per cent or so of the national average fail to take into account the fact that the average age for blacks is lower than for the nation as a whole (hence they command, on average, lower salaries) and that half of all blacks live in the South (where wages are lower for all). Average black wages in New York are twice those of blacks in Mississippi. Married black couples outside the South earn 93 per cent as much as their white counterparts. Like many revisionists. Mr Sowell takes his argument too far. But it is a symptom of the disarray among liberals that a sustained critique of his writings has yet to be mounted. Meanwhile, the Reagan Administration has been given a rigorous and fresh justification for policies which, in the past, would have enjoyed most support among racialists and Southern segregationists.