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IN THIS ISSUE

Front Page

Letter from the President

Notes on the Right: The Real “Unmentionable Secret”

Poll Shows Californians Think Race Discrimination Still a Problem

Unique Collaboration with Teachers’ Union Addresses Unconscious Bias in the Classroom

Dismantling the Intent Doctrine: an International View

Inequality in the Gene Age

Two New Books Focus on Rights Won and Lost

EJS Welcomes New Members; Motley Fellowship Launch

Staff/Board News & Notes

Newsletter Editors:
Elaine Elinson
Miguel Gavaldon

Email Feedback

Notes on the Right:
The Real 'Unmentionable Secret'

By Lee Cokorinos

We are reaching an important crossroads in American race relations. Over the past several months the issue of race has been forced to the surface by two stories: the inept and some said racist government response to Hurricane Katrina, and the well organized and impressive political reaction of the Latino community and its allies to the Republican Right’s passage of the racially-charged and punitive Sensenbrenner immigration bill.

Now a third factor has been added to the mix by the Supreme Court’s decision to pass judgment on, and possibly shut down, voluntary efforts to achieve racial diversity in the public schools. Already anti-diversity groups are lining up amicus briefs and social science research, and trying to draw support from public school districts across the country for their efforts to drive a stake through the heart of voluntary student diversity plans.

A great deal will be written in coming months on each of these issues (just wait for when McMansions for the wealthy start appearing in the depopulated sections of New Orleans), but as they come to a head it is worth reflecting on something that is rarely spoken about openly in the media. That is how the battles over Katrina rebuilding, immigration and school integration might be providing an opportunity for hard core racists to move their political agenda into the mainstream, if not into the law.

In conventional media quarters—TV’s Sunday talk shows for example—it is considered out of bounds to even raise the possibility that the beliefs of teenage Nazis, hardcore racial supremacists in business and industry, race scientists in academia, anti-immigrant Minutemen and millions of garden-variety suburban bigots might be driving the national policy agenda on race. The most you will hear is euphemistic pollster-talk about whipping up “the conservative base” for “November.”

Racism Not “That Big A Deal”?

The prevailing myth, allegedly provable by polls and voting behavior, is that we’ve put “all that” behind us and “solved” the issue of race by ending Jim Crow, passing the voting rights act(s) and celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday. “Here’s the unmentionable secret,” President Bush’s new press secretary Tony Snow said in 2003, “racism isn’t that big a deal any more.” The forces that have produced the resegregation of America’s schools are all purely impersonal, objective and economically-driven, we are told by the libertarians.  It’s a question, you see, of free markets and individual choice, not racial animus, white supremacy and billions of Federal dollars to promote suburban over urban development and efficiently organize big city disaster-mode evacuations—by whites. The agendas of the far Right never get traction, the politicos say.

But is that really true when we see a legislative initiative making English the official language of the U.S. that the Right has been pushing for decades finally getting Senate approval? Its author certainly has a sense of history and declared it “a victory over twenty years in the making.” Is it really a stretch to connect the Right wing drumbeat for such a bill with the history of similar legislative initiatives already passed in 27 states by the organized Right relying on its populist base? Or to connect it to the forgotten unsuccessful efforts in 1996 by Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R- Butner Federal Correctional Complex, NC) to pass an English-only act that itself was the culmination of a decade’s worth of effort by extreme Rightists like Larry Pratt, a founder in 1986 of the group U.S. English? Pratt has since gone on to work on other issues, such as thinking up solutions to deal with future Katrina-like crises.

Many would consider it outrageous to suggest that such motives might be feeding the dogged, year-in-year-out tenacious efforts of buttoned-down “public interest” law firms such as the Center for Individual Rights, or “think tanks” such as the Center for Equal Opportunity, to try to eradicate the gains of the civil rights movement for racial justice and equality. And indeed we can never know for sure what’s in people’s minds. It’s considered out of bounds to raise the question of motive outside the courtroom, and inside the courtroom only in connection with defendants, frequently poor and inadequately represented, not lawyers and judges.

Yet there is a trail to follow that reveals possibly relevant history: The Center for Individual Rights, which litigated the University of Michigan anti-affirmative action cases, once received money from the Pioneer Fund, a New York-based foundation that has promoted eugenics and funded many of the race scientists that Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein relied on in their book, The Bell Curve, which argued that intelligence is correlated with race.

The head of the Center for Equal Opportunity, Linda Chavez, whose employment of an undocumented worker sunk her bid to become Labor Secretary, once worked for John Tanton, the founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). To her credit she quit when a scandal erupted over the surfacing of a memo written by Tanton warning of the dangers of a Latino population explosion. FAIR, which criticized the draconian Sensenbrenner bill from the Right, also received Pioneer Foundation funding.

But how could such views be mainstreamed, people might ask. By the new Congressman who’s filling Duke Cunningham’s seat, the proud former co-chair of FAIR, perhaps? Or by Charlie Norwood (R-GA), one of the right wing congressmen who recently derailed efforts to renew the Voting Rights Act, and joined FAIR for a joint press conference to push for legislation requiring the Federal government to take immediate custody of all undocumented immigrants apprehended by local law enforcement?

Dire warnings about the perils of immigration are usually associated with spluttering demagogues like Bill O’Reilly or organizations like the Minutemen (now actually split between two factions, one rejecting overt connections with racist groups, the other refusing to disavow them). But such demographic alarmism has a long history in America, and is now resonating through the most prestigious of universities, well-endowed think tanks and highest levels of government. Samuel F. Huntington, perhaps the country’s most prominent conservative political scientist, has renewed the case for demographic peril in his widely-discussed book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution and Claremont Institute, the author of Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, was once invited to discuss his views with Scooter Libby and Vice President Cheney over dinner.

The far Right itself is certainly not shy about laying claim to authoring ideas that eventually make it into the bipartisan mainstream. “I was the first candidate who ran against affirmative action,” former Klansman David Duke has bragged, “and I predated Clinton on welfare reform.” They have also greeted new developments in race science with enthusiasm, and are busy networking through organizations such as American Renaissance with the most prominent scientists promoting racialist views, such as Canadian eugenicist J. Philippe Rushton, the current president of the Pioneer Fund; and Richard Lynn, one of the sources cited by Murray and Herrnstein, and now a Pioneer Fund director who co-edits the Mankind Quarterly with Roger Pearson, a leading proponent of race science for five decades.  Pearson, no slouch at mainstreaming himself, once garnered a fundraising letter from Ronald Reagan praising him for “promoting and upholding those ideas and principles that we value at home and abroad.”

Back to the Future

Aside from the eugenicists, however, there are other storm clouds on the horizon regarding the dangerous mix of genetics, law and race. There is currently a vigorous debate on the proper use of genetic screening, particularly as this is connected to corporate decision-making on such things as employment, insurance coverage, and in government criminal law enforcement. [See EJS Newsletter article “Inequality in the Gene Age” by Osagie Obasagie -- link]

Sociologist Troy Duster has warned us that “as more and more [genetic] patterns are discovered, and they coincide with social groups, they will place in the hands of those who want to see it evidence for the genetic explanation for complex behaviors,” which can lead to “huge and unwarranted leaps.”

The challenge for the future is that even as we face up to the responsibility of isolating the Rushtons and Lynns of this world, we not allow their arguments to essentially creep in through the back door of “socially beneficial” science. There can be benefits from genetic research. But we also do well to remember that precisely such arguments were used to justify the horrendous history of official eugenics programs in the past. How the judiciary and the legal profession meet the challenge of drawing the appropriate lines in coming years will have a profound effect on the kind of society we live in.

Lee Cokorinos conducts political research on Right-wing movements and organizations. He is the author of The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice (Rowman & Littlefield), and Target San Diego: The Right Wing Assault in Urban Democracy and Smart Government, and can be reached at rightnotes@earthlink.net.