Colorblind? Or Unaccountable?

One of my oldest friends, actor Joseph C. Phillips (mayor on CBS’s The District), who grew up black, hopeful, and liberal, but is now African-American, angry, and conservative, recently asked me how I felt about the latest Ward Connerly initiative. Connerly, the black University of California regent who convinced voters to make affirmative action verboten in college admissions, now wants California to banish all racial references from official state records. Joseph liked the idea. I knew, or at least thought I knew, that I did not like the idea, but told him I needed to mull it over for a few days to figure out why.

Meanwhile, I chanced across an article about Anatole Broyard, a New York Times book reviewer who spent forty years passing as a white man. Broyard, who died in 1990 without ever telling his children who he really was, left a rich legacy of literary criticism. According to one of Broyard’s close friends, Broyard believed he could not simultaneously be an “aesthete” and a Negro. Harvard scholar Henry Gates said that Broyard “did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy. We give lip service to the idea of the writer who happens to be black, but…has anyone ever seen such a thing?”

My musings about Connerly and Broyard took place against the backdrop of the March on Washington’s fortieth anniversary. I heard Martin Luther King’s classic words replayed many times that week: “…an America where my four little children will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” What do King’s words mean now, in the context of Ward Connerly’s latest crusade? Do they place Broyard’s deceptions in a more sympathetic light?

I think King envisioned an America where race would be acknowledged as part of who one is, not as a criterion by which to measure what someone is worth. But the America in which Martin Luther King and Anatole Broyard came to manhood contained many reminders of the direct correlation between race and value. Almost everything associated with black people—from the schools we attended to the jobs we held—was inferior. Remember the scene in the film Malcolm X, when a white teacher told him that being a lawyer was not a “proper job for a nigger”? “Now Malcolm,” he said in a very kind voice, “you are good with your hands… you should be a carpenter. After all, Jesus was a carpenter…”

Broyard had, as we would say now, “trust issues” with America. He did not trust that the land of his birth would judge him solely by the “content of his character” and did not believe that he could transcend race. So he decided to hide his race to give his talent room to soar.

Reflecting on Anatole Broyard made it clear to me why I do not like Connerly’s idea. Quite simply, I do not trust that the people who run our bureaucracies—and let’s be real, it is still primarily white folks—will do the right thing.

Collecting racial information provides the statistical firepower to know, for example, that African-American motorists are far more likely to be stopped by the police, for “driving while black.” Racial statistics have been the smoking gun in housing discrimination lawsuits, damning proof of funding disparities for all sorts of stuff, and the basis for just about every social service decision ever made. To stop collecting this information because the Ward Connerlys of the world believe that we have reached some racial utopia would be stupidity of nearly criminal proportions. Our society has yet to demonstrate that it can be trusted to treat all its citizens equally without the accountability that this information helps to provide.

Sadly, Broyard felt that his only option for addressing this mistrust of the society white folks built was to fold himself into the very ranks of those who built the racist walls that trapped him. For better or worse, collecting racial data is another, less personally destructive way of doing the same thing. We simply cannot make the leap to the world King dreamed of on that bright summer day so full of hope forty years ago, without keeping track of who’s who.