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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: A Hypothetical Address by the President of the United States of America to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People A Hypothetical Address by the My fellow Americans: I wish to speak to you tonight more frankly than is usual about the topic of race. You may wonder what remains to be said on this subject. Everyone knows there is a "race problem," which has been discussed constantly for the past half century. However, these discussions, hobbled by taboos, have been misguided. The first step in tackling any problem is to define it precisely, and most versions of the "race problem" rest on assumptions completely at variance with reality. The problem is not "racism." Common sense tells us that systematic adverse treatment of blacks ended decades ago. And, despite endless repetition, it has never been shown that negative attitudes toward blacks have the devastating effects they are supposed to. Nor is the problem racial inequality. Inequalities in and of themselves are not bad. Most people see nothing wrong with one athlete being better than another and gaining greater rewards from his skill, or with some groups outperforming other groups. Russians are stronger than Japanese and make superior weight-lifters. Everyone accepts these facts of nature, and anyway nothing can be done about them, certainly not with our present knowledge. It has been denied again and again that racial inequalities are natural. But a review of the evidence, which has become increasingly accessible, has convinced me that they are. On average, blacks are less intelligent than whites and more impulsive, for largely biological reasons. This at bottom is why blacks don't do as well as whites in most of the endeavors our society rewards. 1 realize you may be shocked to hear me say this, but I assure you it is so. The cause of racial inequality is not malice or defective institutions. This is nonsense we must stop telling each other. My advisors have urged me to enter disclaimers about race differences as soon as I mention them: to point out that they do not justify judging individuals solely by their race, that these differences are merely statistical, that some blacks are more intelligent than most whites. Such qualifications are correct, but what is the hurry to roll them out? Dwelling on them defensively suggests that the facts about race need to be softened, that mentioning them is something to apologize for—when more candor, not less, is needed. Most people realize that average group differences permit overlap. Nobody finds it necessary to say there are tall Japanese. Why, then, does what goes without saying elsewhere have to be underlined about race? Rushing to say what race differences are not, I fear, is a way of avoiding what they are. The "race problem," then, is the friction produced when two populations differing in intelligence, emotional intensity, and concern for the future occupy the same geographical territory. What can be done about this friction? What would count as doing something? I will put some possibilities before you in a few moments. But let me emphasize one absolutely vital, indispensable condition for making any progress at all: we must accept the facts as they are. Convincing you of this is the most important thing I can do tonight. Let me cite the words of the physicist Enrico Fermi: "Whatever Nature has in store for mankind, however unpleasant, men must accept, for ignorance is never better than knowledge." I am convinced that once we recognize the reality of race differences, fully and openly, sound ideas will follow. But should we continue to pursue the illusion that our troubles will be ended by more anti-discrimination laws and more hand-wringing about racism, America will become increasingly Balkanized, and perhaps cease to exist. Many people say the idea of racial differences is a rationalization for the status quo. This charge gets everything backward. If the races do differ, the reasons for the present state of affairs are not "rationalizations," and the state of affairs itself needs no excuses. Suppose one day at the beach you announce that you are going to swim past the breakers. Someone, himself a good swimmer, warns you that you are not strong enough to fight the undertow. Do you instantly attack his motives, and assume he is rationalizing the status quo of his being thought the better athlete? Do you accuse him of trying to talk you into resigning yourself to an inferior status? No. The first thing you would want to know is whether he might be right. If he is, if you aren't able to swim past the breakers safely, there is nothing wrong with the status quo, his advice has probably been offered in good faith, and heeding it may save your life. We must stop attacking unwelcome news about race on the grounds that the messengers have bad motives, and then attack the motives of the messengers on the grounds that what they tell us are lies. When claims of race differences are said to discourage blacks, I ask in reply: if the races are truly not equal in ability, what is gained by pretending they are? What is gained by saying blacks would be as successful and prosperous as whites if the rules were not slanted against them? Which message, the truth or the flattering lie, is more likely to inflame blacks to anger over constant failure? Which one requires so much backing and filling that its dishonesty must sooner or later become obvious to everyone? "All right," say my advisors, who in this respect are like most Americans, "there are race differences. Now we know what the race problem is. What is the solution?" My friends, if a "solution" is supposed to be some magic formula, some way to make these differences go away or keep them from counting—to make the United States as harmonious as a racially uniform society—there may not be a solution. Looking for that kind of measure may be like trying to build a perpetual motion machine. We had better stop looking for "solutions" and start trying to do the best we can in the situation facing us. And isn't it a little facile to expect that we can just announce that thinking about race has been misguided for many decades, and then move briskly ahead? New truths, like old ones rediscovered, take time to sink in. When the Earth was found to revolve around the Sun, refuting the age-old notion that man is the center of the universe, it would have been absurd to ask the very next day, "Now what? How should religion, philosophy and morality adjust to this new development?" Major errors must be unlearned. We have to retreat along all the false paths we have taken before we can start up the true one. This process, of accustoming ourselves intellectually and emotionally to thinking about race in new ways, cannot be hurried. I believe the impulse to acknowledge race differences as quickly as possible, and then demand "solutions," is yet another effort to avoid the facts themselves. At some point in the future we will have to take concrete steps, and it is my duty as president to suggest some directions in which we might move, as well as some of the obstacles we may encounter. In doing so I must speak in general terms because, as I have said, neither I nor anyone else has all the answers now. A few voices, with new ideas, are beginning to be heard; perhaps this talk tonight will encourage still others. But I must warn you that any useful idea is likely to be radical. As Claudius says in Hamlet, "diseases desperate grown / By desperate appliance are relieved, or not at all." It is obvious, to begin with, that policies based on error must end. One such policy is affirmative action, conceived as compensating blacks for the harm done them by whites. No damages are owed when no damage has been done, and the difficulty blacks have in competing in a white world are not the legacy of past wrongs—however regrettable those wrongs may have been—but a result of biology for which whites are not to blame. Affirmative action is an injustice to whites that whites legitimately resent. Ending it will help calm racial tempers. As for more systematic approaches, there are three that can be taken: minimizing race differences, controlling their negative aspects, and laissez- faire. These strategies cut across the conventional classifications of Right and Left, and they are not mutually exclusive. Nonetheless, they represent different basic orientations. "Minimizing," as the name suggests, means large-scale social engineering efforts to reduce the race gap as much as possible. The government would undertake job training and job creation for blacks, daycare for the children of trainees and workers, childhood enrichment programs, programs to convince black girls not to have illegitimate children, programs for antisocial youths, and preferences for blacks in employment and the academy—all openly intended to create equality, not right past wrongs. At the international level, reducing race differences would mean support of Africa and Haiti by the United States and prosperous European and Asian countries. One drawback to this approach is white resentment. The richer white majority would have to fund the programs I have mentioned, and, once race differences are widely understood, whites may not wish to make sacrifices to end inequalities they did not cause. As I have said, equality as such is not a value many people find urgent. Advocates of minimizing the race gap might be forced to fall back on the rhetoric of "fighting racism" to defend policies whose aim is egalitarian, leading to hypocrisy and eventual exposure. A second drawback of the minimizing approach is the uncertainty, indeed he unlikelihood, of success. One of my predecessors thought to combat black crime with basketball leagues, on the theory that young black males turn to crime because of the dreariness of their lives. This theory is very dubious, and treatments based on misdiagnoses seldom work. Training programs geared to individual ability are more promising, but they too may be ineffective, for reasons that require a brief foray into science. Genes help shape human behavior—that can no longer be denied—but exactly what genes accomplish depends on their environment. This interplay leads optimists to hope that the input of genes can always be canceled by manipulating the environment. The truth is that genes often limit what environmental manipulation can accomplish. Some effects of genes cannot be overcome at all, others can be reduced but not eliminated—that is why I have spoken of minimizing—and others still can be reduced only at prohibitive cost. There is no guarantee that the race gap in intelligence, school achievement, productivity, or impulsiveness can be reduced to any significant extent. Certainly, intervention efforts to date give no grounds for optimism. We must be prepared to discover that no amount of training and childhood enrichment can shrink the race gap. We must be prepared to recognize, at some point, that further experiments in social engineering would be throwing good money after bad. We must be prepared, in other words, to find minimizing a dead end. Programs to help disadvantaged individuals of all races would avoid some of these problems. However, if training benefits whites more than blacks, another possibility that cannot be ruled out, race-blind social engineering will actually increase the race gap. A longer-range intervention is use of incentives, including cash payments, to encourage people with desirable traits to have children, and those with undesirable traits to abstain. Some have talked of licensing parents. Consider the fact that college-educated black women have proportionally fewer children than college-educated white women, while less-educated black women have proportionally more children than less-educated white women. Encouraging the more intelligent members of all races to reproduce, it is said, would shrink the race gap in intelligence, as well as benefit society in other ways. I oppose these programs. I don't think anyone wants to see the government deciding who should and should not have children. Even using public funds as an incentive to influence private reproductive decisions is highly problematic. And whatever their pros and cons, eugenic measures do not show results for several generations, which in human terms is close to a century. We don't have that much time. Rather than trying to reduce race differences, we might try to control their disruptiveness. Since it is black crime, illegitimacy, and unemployment that deviate from the norms of the dominant society, a control approach would aim to instill self-discipline, respect for law, and the work ethic in blacks. Among the measures that might encourage these traits are the easing of regulatory burdens on black businesses, a more efficient criminal justice system, and the restriction of welfare to those employed on public works, or those with legitimate children, or unmarried women who agree to contraception. Perhaps welfare would be ended altogether. Black churches might be informally enlisted. I have no doubt that curtailing public assistance would necessitate more responsible black behavior. The problem with this course of action is that, for better or worse, a great many people have come to depend on public assistance. hundreds of thousands of women—of all races, but disproportionately black—have illegitimate children, no husband, and no marketable skills. The problem is especially acute in cities, where "living off the land" is not possible. A little later I will give you my ideas on this subject. Crime control would emphasize discipline, swifter justice, and more effective punishment—possibly corporal punishment for those undeterred by imprisonment. Capital punishment would be a basic element of this approach. One can envisage new technologies such as brain scans and DNA testing that permit monitoring of potential criminals, although the most effective step might simply be a return to now-discredited practices, like the chain gang. Measures like these, though they would affect blacks disproportionately, would not be inherently racial. Other anti-crime measures might well be. Race, for instance, might become a legitimate "probable cause" for police intervention. The police would be allowed to search all black males for weapons, confiscating any they found. The downside of many of these steps is their conflict with traditional civil liberties, potential overbroadness, and the risk of provoking disorder. At the same time, many blacks might be willing to surrender some civil liberties to restore the level of order their communities knew in earlier eras. It would be useful to poll blacks on this matter. Both the minimizing and control approaches call for government intervention, although they disagree about what sort. Opposed to both is classical laissez-faire liberalism, the policy, or nonpolicy, of leaving almost everything to the free market. The laissez-faire approach would also end all forms of public assistance, on the moral ground that people should not be forced to support each other as well as the practical ground that it encourages sloth. At the same time, all laws against private discrimination would be repealed, allowing individuals to live, work, and trade with whomever they please. Private affirmative action would be allowed; those who continue to feel that blacks deserve compensation, or that preferring blacks is desireable for some other reason, would be free to do so—as would those who prefer whites, and those who wish to ignore race. One can imagine various sorts of bargaining going on, as both black and white workers sought employment with discriminators by offering, for instance, to accept lower wages. Firms that prefer whites, those that prefer blacks, and those that prefer merit would compete against each other, in a real-world test of which policy is most efficient. This prospect may be called "turning back the clock," but if many people have a strong wish to associate with others of their own race, fighting this natural impulse by insisting that they live, work, and attend school with members of other races only heightens animosity. A laissez-faire government, aiming at efficiency, would be largely race neutral. Merit hiring and contracting with lowest bidders are cheaper than quotas and set-asides. However, as classical liberals regard control of violence as a key government function, they might permit some race-consciousness in the area of crime. As they have traditionally been civil libertarians as well, a balance would have to be struck on measures like race-based surveillance. The free market accommodates race differences more easily than the other two approaches, since it does not aim at a preset outcome that biology may have put out of reach. It imposes discipline. A woman who knows that she alone will be responsible for herself and a baby she bears will be more careful about having babies. In the long run, letting the racial chips fall where they may is an attractive prospect. But in the short run, as I have said, ending welfare will leave many in the lurch. Various temporary measures might soften these consequences. Announcing on a certain date that all forms of public assistance will end in five years, with support to be gradually reduced each year in the meanwhile, would give everyone time to seek work, help from private sources, or new skills from temporary public training programs. Present recipients of welfare with very young children could be grandfathered in. A basic problem during this transition and in a postwelfare world—again I will be blunt—is that the labor of many blacks is not valuable to most people, and will become less valuable as brain-power becomes more important in an increasingly high-tech world. Consequently, I urge the repeal of the minimum wage. A black whose skills cannot command $5 an hour may yet find someone willing to pay him $1 an hour, and it must be possible for him to accept employment at that rate. Many people recoil at such a prospect as if it were a return to feudalism, but it is surely better that a laborer with limited skills receive a low salary for work that snobs consider demeaning than that he find no work at all. Other legislation and regulation that increases the cost of hiring low-skilled labor should be repealed. A commonplace of contemporary cant is worry that blacks can only get "dead-end" jobs, which forgets that it is the individual who is obliged to make himself useful to others. I cannot promise that that segment of the black underclass grown dependent on public funds will find the end of welfare painless. And similar dilemmas are developing at the international level. The African population is outstripping its capacity to grow or buy food, and is being ravaged by AIDS. Interventionists will want the United States to take collective action; others will insist that American taxpayers not be forced to support anyone else. But above all, we must not assume that help is possible. Perhaps the cycle of overpopulation and starvation in black Africa is beyond human control. triage, the denial of scarce resources to those past help, may be unavoidable. These are hard sayings, but I remind you again that not every problem has an agreeable solution: we must learn to live with reality as it is, not as we wish it to be. Cutting across the three approaches I have outlined is the divide between race-consciousness and race-blindness. Right now public policy is a schizophrenic jumble of both. For example, attorneys may not consider race in premptorily challenging jurors, yet the racial makeup of juries is carefully monitored for enough blacks. Consistency and coherence should be restored. Now you might imagine that if race differences exist, it automatically shows that they should always be taken into account. This is not so. Social policy can acknowledge race differences while reducing the relevance of race far below its present level. The approach I have in mind might be called realistic race blindness: Racial classifications are never to be used, but disparate impact is accepted as a natural consequence of race differences. Of any course of action, the race-blind realist asks: Is it a good idea apart from its racial impact? Would we follow it if races did not exist? If the answer is "yes" we should follow it, with eyes open to the likelihood that it will affect the races differently. Disparate impact is anticipated but discounted, never allowed to exercise a veto. Let me illustrate how this rule would treat an issue facing educators, the grouping of students by ability. The main argument in favor of "tracking," as it is also called, is that it allows bright students to be challenged without being held back by slow learners, and slow learners to move at their own pace without falling behind. Realistic race-blindness would accept tracking if the only argument against it were that it places disproportionately many blacks in the slower groups. Decide what is best on educational grounds, according to this attitude, and accept racial stratification as a by-product of differences in intelligence. This rule would sometimes be difficult to apply. Reasons for balking are always ready to hand when disparate impact looms. I have heard educators say, to my mind preposterously, that tracking harms the bright student, when what really bothers them, I suspect, is white and Asian dominance of classes for the gifted. Race-blindness is impossible without recognition that differences in ability will assert themselves in almost every facet of life. I have already mentioned that race might be used as one among many predictors of crime. Yet most crime-control measures could be race blind. The basic equation of social order is that, other things being equal, crime falls when its cost rises, so crime can be reduced by making punishment swifter, surer, and more disagreeable. Limits on appeals, corporal punishment, and the application of new technologies are, as I pointed out, inherently race neutral. Realistic race blindness would have us evaluate such steps on their own merits, while recognizing that any measure to curb crime will affect blacks more than whites. It is hard to balance a tolerable level of crime against the measures necessary to attain it, but race-blind realism keeps the prospect of disparate impact off the scales. Some issues, though, present a different picture. One is public assistance. A purely race-blind assessment of welfare would focus on just three points: the morality of taxing Peter to support Paul, the incentives created by welfare, and the consequences of ending it—all the while recognizing that, since black families are many times more likely than white families to receive public assistance, any cutback will affect blacks disproportionately. Yet black and white responses to welfare seem to differ in ways that must be taken into account. For many years before 1960, when public assistance as we know it did not exist, the black illegitimacy was a flat 16%. This was far above the white illegitimacy of that period, but still below the 70% it is approaching. White illegitimacy has also risen, but not nearly as much, and, while both trends are disturbing, the steeper black increase seems tied to a greater willingness on the part of blacks to rely on public assistance. If reducing black illegitimacy is important, welfare policy may reasonably take this race difference into account. Explicit consideration of race, or realistic race consciousness, would be triggered by a two-part test: a policy's racial impact is to be taken into account when individual reactions to the policy cannot be predicted, but it is known that blacks and whites will on average react to it in significantly different ways. Welfare reform meets this test because, while no one can tell how any particular teenage girl is going to be influenced by the availability of public subsidies for illegitimate children, teenage blacks are on average more likely than teenage whites to take advantage of it. Hence the two-part test permits race-consciousness about welfare. Likewise, it is impossibile to measure the maturity of every youthful offender, but if blacks mature more quickly than whites on average, which scientists tell us they may well do, black offenders might be treated as adults at an earlier age than white offenders. If blacks are on average less deterred than whites by the punishments currently attached to crime, and deterrence is an important goal, the two-part tests says that race can be taken into account in sentencing. It may be that, while the objectivity of particular jurors cannot be measured in advance, blacks tend on average to side with black victims and defendants regardless of the evidence in interracial cases. If so, the two-part test permits the exclusion of black jurors from such cases. It may be that blacks tend on average to be less objective than whites about black defendants no matter what the victim's race, in which case the two-part test sanctions limits on the number of blacks in juries. I present the option of realistic race consciousness to make clear that there is nothing wrong in principle with taking race into account. Nonetheless, I expect that in practice realistic race blindness will usually prove superior. Equity and efficiency seldom requires explicit attention to race. I would also encourage people to use realistic race blind standards for personal behavior. Should you wish to write a letter to the editor criticizing rap music on aesthetic grounds, and all that stops you is fear of "insulting the taste of blacks," write the letter. If your children and their friends want to form a science club, but you fear it will "exclude blacks" because blacks are less interested in science, help them form the club anyway if you think it is otherwise a good idea. Private decisions that are sound apart from their racial side-effects are sound, period. Every course of action I have described requires complete candor. We cannot try to close the race gap unless we recognize it for what it is and assess progress, or its lack, accordingly. We cannot control black crime unless we are honest about its causes. We cannot have a free market unless we are prepared for racial stratification. Classroom presentations of "cultural diversity" that evade race differences are deceitful. "Speech codes" and "sensitivity training" in universities should end. Centuries of warfare between enlightenment and obscurantism have made it plain that enlightenment is always better. I will give you two examples of what we cannot have. In 1974, a journal of social thought published an articlel whose authors, while disavowing the use of force against hereditarians, accepted "responsibility" for the chance that their readers might misunderstand them and take violent action. During the same period, an article in Scientific American concluded: There is a case for limiting public funds for science to research that bears on national security. But defunding should not be used as a threat to silence unpopular opinions. I am not alone in deploring censorship, but I believe racial censors are often misunderstood. I am convinced they do not think of themselves as seeking to suppress harmful truths, but as protecting the public, and particularly blacks, from harmful untruths. Were they to admit the reality of race differences, to themselves as well as others, they would no longer see merit in censorship. The issue underlying censorship is, once again, whether the races do in fact differ, and that, I reassure you, can no longer be denied. I understand, and regret, that talk of genetic differences will upset many blacks. Nobody wishes to hear his group called unintelligent. I don't like to think that my words may distress or seem to demean my black friends and associates, and I wish I did not have to say what I am saying tonight. Let me emphasize, in this connection, that race differences are no excuse for personal unpleasantness. Members of each race should continue to treat members of every other race with the same courtesy they expect to receive. No-one should adopt an attitude of superiority in individual encounters. The fact remains, though, that certain distressing truths about group characteristics need to be said, and everyone, black and white, must come to terms with them. It seems cruel to speak in what seems a negative way of a racial group because people don't choose the race they belong to. At the same time, most people acquire their religious convictions early in life, and have no more choice in being offended by perceived insults to their faith than by slights against their race, yet we do not for that reason refrain from criticizing religion or otherwise saying things that give offense. Many religious persons are disturbed by Darwinism, but few people oppose open discussion of evolution. Loss of cherished illusions and abandonment of dreams is often the price of wisdom. The impossibility of our hopes is seen first as a crisis, then a chronic problem, then, finally, accepted as part of the human condition. So it will be with race. And, while the feelings of blacks deserve respect, so do those of whites. Not only have whites, particularly white males, been made to pay reparations for what they did not do, they have been vilified and ridiculed in public discourse to an extent unthinkable for other groups. They must be permitted to defend themselves, and if calling attention to unwelcome facts about nonwhites is part of their defense, that too must be allowed. When Niels Bohr realized that atomic fission could be harnessed in a weapon, his assessment was terse: "We are in a completely new situation." So is America at the end of the 20th century. There has never been a society as racially heterogeneous as ours, and we are just now realizing that almost everything that happens between the races has a biological component. Race matters. The rethinking forced on us by this great fact will not be easy. Let it begin, bravely and honestly. Thank you.
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