Knowledge And Decisions

To the outside white world, and especially the mass media, the image of the NAACP officials and lawyers is that of “spokesmen” for blacks as a whole — though there is no institutional mechanism to make that so, and much public opinion evidence on both busing and “affirmative action” to contradict that image. Institutionally, neither blacks as a whole nor even the particular plaintiffs have any control over, or effective input to, NAACP leaders or lawyers. Here, as elsewhere, firms defined by hoped-for results as “public interest” law firms are institutionally simply law firms financed by third party interests. In the case of the NAACP, these third party interests are well insulated from the costs of their activities by the fact that their own children are enrolled in private schools. This includes both direct participants in the school “integration” drive, like Thurgood Marshall and Kenneth B. Clark, political supporters like Senator Kennedy and Senator McGovern¹⁷² and media supporters like Carl Rowan.¹⁷³

The point here is not to make a categorical assessment of the NAACP. Such an assessment would undoubtedly include many valuable and heroic contributions of the NAACP in areas of crying injustices. The question at this point is the incremental movement of the NAACP, and whether that is in the area of diminishing or negative returns. One of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund’s staunch supporters and former officials recalls that by the mid-1960s “the long golden days of the civil rights movement had begun to wane”¹⁷⁴ and that legal “tools had been developed which now threatened to collect dust”¹⁷⁵ unless some new crusade was launched — as it was. Earlier, there was “simply too much else to do.”¹⁷⁶ The progression from the urgent to the optional to the counterproductive is one already seen in other organizations with mandated jurisdiction and costs paid by third parties. There is no reason to expect the NAACP to be exempt from patterns discovered elsewhere under such incentives and constraints.

Where third party costs and benefits determine the actions of so-called “public interest” law firms, and where the administrative and judicial resolutions of the issues they raise are insulated from the feedback from those directly affected, then a major shift in political and legal power has occurred away from the actual experiences and desires of the general public and toward the beliefs and dreams of small self-anointed groups — and all this in the name of “democracy” and “the public interest.”

THE SPECIALNESS OF RACE

Racial preferences and antipathies theoretically might be — and historically have been — dealt with by the whole range of social processes and institutions. This plain fact can be expressed, on the one hand, by saying that racism pervades American society, or can be expressed on the other hand by saying that race-based attitudes and behavior, which have affected mankind in every place and time, are handled with varying degrees of effectiveness by this society’s decision-making processes and institutions as well. For “racism” to be an empirically meaningful category, there would have to be a nonracist alternative somewhere. Pending this discovery we are left with the age-old problem of judging institutions by how well they resolve the dilemmas that derive precisely from man’s limitations in knowledge, power, and morality. Presumably, God and the angels do not need institutions.

Clearly, one reason for treating race as special is the historic and traumatic experience of blacks, subject to slavery, discrimination, and degradation in American society. But even if this might justify a special policy for blacks, that is quite different from justifying a general principle, applicable wherever racial differences exist, and readily extendable — logically or politically — to nonracially-defined subsets of the population who choose to call themselves “minorities” (in open defiance of statistical facts in the case of women). This “unreflective extension of policies deriving from America’s racial dilemma to other areas”¹⁷⁷ is one of the costs of decision making through those processes which by their nature make their decisions in general and precedent-setting terms. Political, administrative, and especially judicial processes tend to operate in this way. Not only does this “trivialize the historic grievances”¹⁷⁸ which served as initial rationale; it multiplies the cost of any resolution of race problems by creating principles applicable beyond the special case used to justify them.