Dyson vs. Connerly: Affirmative Action

In August 1998, before a massive gathering of thousands at the national meeting of Blacks in Government (BIG) in Washington, D.C., Michael Eric Dyson debated Ward Connerly, then University of California Regent, who spearheaded the movement to bring affirmative action to an end most recently in Michigan, and before that in California through the ballot initiative Prop 209. The debate lasted nearly two-and-a-half-hours and was carried live on C-SPAN, and then rebroadcast on the network several times. The proceedings were always civil, often lively, and occasionally humorous. And yet the two sides couldn’t have been more clearly stated or actively contested as Connerly and Dyson defended radically different visions of racial justice and affirmative action:

Connerly: I believe that at some point we as a nation have to say this is going to be the policy: we’re going to treat everybody the same. If there is discrimination then, doggone it, deal with it.

Dyson: Affirmative action is an attempt to address a specific set, a finite set, of conditions that existed in this country that have to be reversed. I think it’s not a black/white issue and divide. Of course it’s not. It’s much more complex than mere blacks against whites. It’s Latinos, Native Americans, Jews for that matter, and other racially excluded ethnic groups in this country. But to say that it’s beyond black and white—the reality is that the black/white divide [is central to our history]. And, as I end here, let’s be fair. Ward wants fairness, by doggit, he wants honesty and equality. I’ll tell you what. Let’s only have affirmative action as long as we had slavery. And then we can call it a day. [Laughter]

Connerly: Well, I’m writing down some of his quickies. You know there’s some good ones there. [Laughter] I come back to the point that this is a moral question for me. And at some point, I have to say to my fellow Americans, “You done me wrong but I don’t want you to do it again.” And try to put in place all the tools that we can to deal with discrimination. If the tools are inadequate, let’s keep trying to hone them to the point that we get them to be adequate. But I don’t think we can go on with policies that say we’re going to hold someone accountable for something over which they say, “I didn’t do that. I’m not responsible for that.” When we give a preference to somebody from Vietnam in the area of employment because some government agency wants to make sure there is parity in that agency, I as a black man say, “I didn’t do anything to the Vietnamese. I’m not responsible for any oppression that you might have. I’m not responsible for any adversity you may have encountered. So therefore, you should not receive any preference over me.” To me, that’s simple.

We’re not far apart on the basic issue. And it really does reduce itself to the fundamental question of whether you believe it’s appropriate, or I believe it’s appropriate, to use race as a means of determining whether I get admitted to school, whether I get a contract, whether I get hired. I believe it’s not right, that the government should not do that. And we can argue ’til the cows come home with a different point of view. The one philosophy is, race matters, and the only way we can get beyond race is to use race. And the other philosophy, to which I subscribe, was enunciated by John F. Kennedy on June 11, 1963, when he said, “Race has no place in American life or law.” We’re not there. I know we’re not there. We’re not a color-blind society. But I think that the only way that we get to that point—and race is still that one big mountain that we have to climb—the only way we get there is to say we want to get there, and we work at it.

Dyson: When John Kennedy made that statement, he lived in a world in which race ruled and was so dominant against the interests of African American color, that to articulate a conception of color-blindness was to speak in behalf of African American people. That’s the fundamental paradox of universal notions of race objectivity—that when you talk about color-blindness in the ’60s, you’re talking about defending the interest of people who are excluded from an already universal document. Wait a minute, now. We got competing universalisms! First of all, if the documents—the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution—were already universal, why would you have to argue for black folk to get included? Because universality itself don’t make a diddly-squat difference—it’s the application of that ideal. And so in the ideal world, yes, I agree with you. I don’t want race to rule. I don’t want race to matter. But in the real world race matters. Race rules. Race makes a difference. And until we get to that nirvana of racial objectivity, we got to live with what we got right now. And that is, making sure that we are not so naïve or ignorant as to believe the goodness of our brothers and sisters to do the right thing. We don’t even believe our husbands and wives do that—that’s why we have a contract to marry them, and if we get a divorce, we go to court. [Laughter]