Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990
159 pages*
Reviewed by William B. Allen
Winston Churchill and George
Washington expressed themselves similarly after their initial encounters with
dangers in battle. A curious detachment from danger to their own lives and a
sense of excited pleasure marked their reactions. Washington expressed it most
succinctly: “I heard the bullets whistle [by me], and, believe me, there is
something charming in the sound.” These great statesmen reveal with clarity
how important it is, in preparing for great moral crises, that the soldiers in
such encounters embrace the sights and sounds of battle as the handmaidens of
victory and liberty.
When Americans undertook a
decade ago to challenge the growing regime of racial preferences, they
enlisted in a great moral crusade for which they were ill-prepared. Setting off
after Ronald Reagan on behalf of “white firefighters,” they had not sufficiently
contemplated the reality that they would be fired upon by enemies whose
bullets consisted of charges of “racism” and “self-interest.” Stung by the
weight of the fusillade and seized with a mortal fear not only for themselves
but for their cause, the anti-quota warriors fell back, determined to drop the
cause of “white firefighters,” and set forth anew under the disguise of bringing
“empowerment” to the disadvantaged.
The Unfinished Business of civil rights is, in reality, Clint Bolick’s
response to the suspicion that his prior book, Changing Course, had veered off course with a view of civil rights
as reserved for minorities or the disadvantaged. Bolick admits as much in Unfinished Business: “Some commentators
have criticized Changing Course for
what they perceive is a suggestion that laws that arbitrarily restrict
entrepreneurial opportunities are violations of civil rights because they have
an adverse impact on blacks and other minorities.” Bolick finishes the
business of Changing Course with the
flat declaration that these are rather “violations of civil rights because the
people affected are Americans.”
So much done, Bolick may
next raise the question, What is the next step for civil rights? His response:
emulate the early 20th century legal strategy of the NAACP, and use
the courts to re-establish civil rights protections that safeguard individuals
instead of just groups. A sensible litigation strategy, highlighted by such
notable cases as the Ego Brown case (the right to operate shoeshine stands in
Washington, D.C. just like other open-air vendors), the Amaya-Crawford case
(challenging the legally enforced exception of black children from IQ testing
in California schools), and the Alfredo Santos case (the right to operate a
jitney service in San Antonio against unduly restrictive and antiquarian
regulations), will chip away both at the barriers to economic liberty that
undermine all other civil rights guarantees and also at the threats to equal
protection of the laws contained in all race-based legislation and regulation.
Bolick is persuasive: A
strategy of cultivating the “right” cases in order to challenge bad laws—even
such long-standing bad law as the Slaughterhouse
decision (1873)—promises to increase the leverage of new civil rights advocates
working against the inertia of the old civil rights lobby. Some critics will
imagine that Bolick’s prescription (revitalizing the 14th Amendment)
threatens to augment the authority of the Federal Government in our lives by
making courts perpetual censors of every act of legislation. I, on the other
hand, cannot imagine how federal power might ever increase beyond the present
level! Besides, it is precisely because this strategy opens all legislation and
regulation more generally to judicial second-guessing that the spiraling costs
of litigation—and especially of losing—will become an ally of fundamental
rights by fostering avoidance behavior in legislatures and bureaucracies.
Nevertheless, Unfinished Business still must confront
the dilemma that this crusade cannot be so well developed as the country
requires, so long as “sympathetic plaintiffs” must be disadvantaged. If it were not so unpardonably lighthearted
in the face of the tragedy of black-Jewish relations, one could well dub Bolick the new Jew of civil rights—that is,
advancing the interest of his own people by means of a sincere attachment to
the civil rights of a minority. What is rather required, however, is frank
espousal of the rights of the strong, if I may put it so. The common sense
inherent in the Reconstruction Congress’ defining equality as guaranteeing the
“same rights to blacks as white men enjoy” lay in the entirely reasonable
assumption that white men would never neglect to assert and defend their own
rights—their self-interest ought naturally to incline them to it. In this
respect, however, the drafters of the Reconstruction era statutes and
amendments were unfortunately in error. This embarrassing imponderable is
surely the greatest mystery of our contemporary dilemma.
I am persuaded that the
unfinished agenda in civil rights does not end with persuading conservatives
sincerely to espouse the claims of minority victims of discrimination. Still
more importantly, the grounds of common interest between minorities and others
must be established, and that means that “white firefighters” must be no less
readily defended than the disadvantaged. It is even reasonable to suppose, in
the circumstance, that any civil rights advocate who is bashful in the
assertion of his own claims thereby renders his solicitousness for other folk
suspect.
It must be said in all
candor that “white men posing as the saviors of po’ black folk just ain’t
gonna cut it anymore.” Our new statesmen can earn respect for their efforts
only when they can stand up and shout, like the American Revolution heroes, “I
got my rights.” Those are the kinds of souls other folk, all kinds of folk, are
willing to go into battle with, for such men fight with a fearless awareness
that their own fates are at stake. At the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights I
have often reflected that the too rare presence of such allies makes that work
nearly impossible, meaning that I might more wisely look elsewhere to carry on
the unfinished business of civil rights.
W. B. Allen