Deal with racial differences or 'we will have hell to pay'

Updated 4:00 PM January 27, 2004

Christopher Edley Jr. lecture

Deal with racial differences or 'we will have hell to pay'

By Kevin Bergquist

Dealing with racial differences is the single-most important challenge facing America in the 21st century, says a law dean speaking about the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.

"If we can get this right, we can handle all other problems," said Christopher Edley Jr., founding co-director of The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University and former Harvard law professor. "If we don't do a good job in the coming years, we will have hell to pay. It may not be today, or even this year, but certainly within a generation."

The issue is not identification of a policy agenda for the president, policymakers or researchers in dealing with racial and social injustices, Edley said. The issue is whether America will have a moral and political consensus necessary to move forward.

Edley spoke to a packed Michigan Union Ballroom Jan. 19 as part of the MLK Symposium. U-M Law School Dean Evan Caminker introduced Edley, who Dec. 10 was named dean of the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

Edley cited data about the changing racial landscape in the United States: The 2000 census counted more than 29 million immigrants living in metropolitan areas—an increase of 10 million since 1990. The number of Black Americans with origins in sub-Saharan Africa nearly tripled in the 1990s, he said.

"This assures us that the patterns we continue to see are growing and are here to stay," he said. "Soon, it will transform the workplace and every arena of national life. It will make America's struggle with difference as painful, and perhaps even as murderous, as the struggles elsewhere throughout the world."

Edley said the challenge is twofold; it requires dedication to completing a difficult, anti-discrimination agenda, and it depends upon building the next civil rights and racial justice movement. Race-neutral strategies are important to consider on political and ethical grounds, he said.

Affirmative action is far from a cure-all, Edley said, calling it a limited tool for a limited purpose. Affirmative action is, in some ways, a transitional policy, he said.

But, Edley said, affirmative action is worth fighting for because it is a tool that takes qualified individuals standing at the threshold of some opportunity, and helps them get across that threshold, even while facing some form of individual or structural bias.

Speaking on Brown, Edley said the ruling proved the Supreme Court has the power to make social revolution and to force dramatic social change, even against majority opposition. The case also showed effective advocacy within the law need not have popular legitimacy, he said.

The Bentley Historical Library, Information Technology Central Services, Kresge Business Administration Library, Law Library, the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives, School of Information, University Housing and the University Library sponsored the lecture.

Christopher Edley Jr. lecture

Deal with racial differences or 'we will have hell to pay'

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