Another shade of black

But you do believe in affirmative action in the workplace.

I believe in it wherever there is true discrimination. Affirmative action where there is a handicap. For example, I still agree with it in terms of class, whatever color you are. When I talk about business, I mean things like, you're trying to be a law partner. You're a black woman. You, as a black woman in 2003, don't hang out with your white male partners. You don't click with them. You don't, because you're black. You have a different thing -- you go to church on Sunday, you don't have the same jokes, you don't eat the same food. When it's time to pick somebody as partner, a lot of it is social. It's who you drank with last night. It's not going to be that black woman down the hall. There can be affirmative action there because it's not her fault.

Or if you grew up in a trailer park, how good are your SATs going to be? How good are your grades going to be? Affirmative action there is fine. Whether you are Eminem in "8 Mile" or somebody in "Boyz in the Hood" -- it's race neutral. But if you are Theo on "The Cosby Show," you don't deserve affirmative action. If Theo doesn't make good grades, it's because he's not a very good student, not because he's black. Affirmative action as we understand it needs to go -- racial preferences is what it is. That was acute 30 years ago, when so many black people were poor that it made a certain sense. But today it's obsolete. It's immoral.

For example, at Berkeley every third student is Asian. They're everywhere. There's clearly something that Asian students are doing above and beyond what anyone else is doing. They're obsessed with doing well and they show you what is required to hit the highest notes. Doing that requires incentive. Unfortunately, it also applies to black people, with all of our history and all of our struggle. Asian students have learned what it takes to do well -- you can't sleep, you can't date. They practically overdo it. There's no reason for that in the black community, because if you do pretty darn well, you'll get into a school above and beyond what Suzie Wong could possibly get into. People wonder why middle-class black students still have these low grades and scores. There's no reason to wonder. Part of it is that there's an element in black culture that is a legacy of racism, and another part of it is that there's no reason for that to go away, because everywhere a black person turns, they're given a pass. That has to stop.

I struggle with these comparisons between groups. Isn't it much more complicated? The history of blacks and the history of American immigrant groups -- it's so different. And each group is so different.

No, and I don't mean to cut you off, but I hear that question so much. Latinos are immigrants too. They have the same problems as black people, right down the generations, right into the middle class. What that shows is that it's not about whether you're an immigrant. It's cultural. There are people who for various geopolitical reasons identify doing well in school as inauthentic. In black culture, if you do that you're acting white. In Latino culture, you're acting like the gringos. It's not unfair to compare. Yes, there is such thing as immigrant pluck, but it doesn't even apply to all of the immigrants. With Latinos as well as black people, there's a sense that to be white is to be uptight and to sell out. Not to mention that black people didn't suffer from this until about 35 years ago. There was no such thing as the "acting white" syndrome in 1910. It's a new thing.

You refer to the "civil rights miracle" in your book, and then you talk a lot about the last 35 years as this great disappointment. Where do you think it went wrong?

It's a problem. If there were no civil rights miracle, I would not exist. But on the other hand -- God, the whole country really went to shit in [the 1960s.] What happened -- it wasn't a black thing, it was a general thing -- was that the white left realized that there's such a thing as structural poverty and that the American system is not as gee-whiz wonderful as intelligent people often assumed. Then, of course, there's Vietnam, which is a hideous mistake in the face of everybody day after day. Watergate comes soon after. As a result, it became common among thinking white people to suppose that reacting against the system was an authentic, vivid, lively thing to do.

That percolates down into the black power movement. So there's the Civil Rights Act and black people are freed. At that time, you have this new idea that reacting against the system and crying victim is an intelligent thing to do. You're enlightened if you do that. Black people were vulnerable. We have a self-image problem even today.

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