A few weeks ago, Joseph C. Phillips, one of my childhood “ace boon coons” (black Southern speak for best friends), rolled through the Twin Cities. He’s mainly an actor (The Cosby Show, General Hospital, and the upcoming Vanished), but on this trip he was promoting his book, He Talk Like A White Boy—Reflections on Faith, Family, Politics and Authenticity. In it, Joseph proudly riffs on why he is so “old school,” which he defines as embracing traditional values: love of God, devotion to family, patriotism, and Smokey Robinson crooning about love and marriage. In other words, he is what our label-happy culture calls a conservative. For him, affirmative action is demeaning, hip-hop music is nihilistic and same-sex marriage an abomination.
While in Minneapolis, he appeared at Raking Through Books, this magazine’s monthly showcase for authors. After his reading, Joseph and I volleyed on the state of racial politics in America, and on affirmative action and reparations, each saying the things that you would expect people with our political viewpoints to say. We have had this conversation so many times and are both so hammy that for us eating pork is akin to cannibalism; the audience loved it.
However, the warm fuzzies floating around the room grew frosty after an earnest young African-American law student asked Phillips if he agreed that diversity fostered by affirmative action enhanced the value of education for all students. Phillips responded with a passionate denunciation of Gratz v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court decision that upheld the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program but rejected the school’s policy of giving undergraduate minority candidates an automatic extra twenty points on their admissions scores.
Phillips’ voice lost the relaxed cadence of our friendly banter. Pointing to the corner of the room where most of the African-Americans were sitting, he shouted, “I reject the notion that African-Americans need extra points to get into an elite school! We have just as much brain power as anyone else!” A few minutes later, the same law student, not so subtly referring to George W. Bush, asked how Phillips felt about people who secured spots at fancy schools like Harvard and Yale due to their money, family name, and connections. Is it OK, he asked, to give these “legacies” a leg up in college admissions but not to do so for members of historically oppressed minority groups? Joseph never really did answer the young man’s question.
After the event, Joseph and I reconnected with old classmates from George Washington High School in Denver over dinner. He was frustrated that so much of the discussion had centered on affirmative action. “Our country needs to get back focusing on our shared values—the things that unite us as Americans,” he said. Meanwhile, I thought about those long-ago days in Denver, when we both knew that being African-American enhanced our chance of getting into an elite school. We did not doubt for a minute that we had just as much “brain power” as anyone else. However, affirmative action was not about who had the bigger cranium. We saw it as deferred compensation for the brutally dashed dreams of our forefathers and mothers. From that perspective, we felt no remorse for being “affirmative-action babies.”
There is a scene in the movie Ragtime in which a black man named Coalhouse Walker Jr. barricades himself in an art museum after being disrespected by some white firemen. Booker T. Washington tries to convince him to give himself up, and makes a moving speech encouraging Walker to trust the system. Walker replies that Washington “spoke like an angel,” but that he and the people he cared about most lived “on earth,” with its cold and bitter realities.
As we finished our meal, I remembered that scene. It so neatly captured why Joseph and I, despite growing up with the same political signs on our lawns, competing on the same high school speech team, and enduring the same racial pressures in our white middle-class Denver neighborhood, have differing views on certain issues.
Like Booker T., Joseph still trusts that “the system” can work without enforcement tools like affirmative action. I am more like Coalhouse. I want to believe in the lofty rhetoric Joseph espouses in his book. However, just when I am about to take that leap of faith and believe I am truly part of the “we,” something happens to me or my family, like getting stopped for driving at night in the wrong neighborhood, which brings me back to reality of living in a still-unequal America.
Therefore, I am not ready to give up affirmative action and other institutional safeguards that help to protect “us,” until my country gives me consistent and sustained reasons to believe that the “we” are prepared to actually do—and not just talk about doing—the right thing for all Americans.
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