INTRODUCTION
One might think that hurricanes, like other natural phenomena, are equal-opportunity disasters. They certainly cannot be said to discriminate intentionally—jokes about tornadoes and trailer parks notwithstanding—but rather threaten equally and without prejudice whatever and whoever is in their path. The weather, in short, is color-blind.
And yet, as Hurricane Katrina so vividly demonstrated, the destructive effects of natural events may not be neutral with respect to race, class, or other categories of inequality. It is now well established that the Katrina's destructive and disruptive effects fell most heavily on the African American poor of New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast—those who lived in the lowest-lying areas of the city and its outlying areas and were poorly protected by the human-engineered system of levees, canals, and other flood-control devices that have long made the city habitable. Approximately one-third of the residents of the areas most severely affected by Katrina were African American, and the African Americans in these areas were nearly twice as likely as others to be poor. In New Orleans proper, African American households were more than twice as likely as White households to lack a vehicle, making it particularly difficult for them to evacuate in advance of the storm. Nearly three-fifths of the poor Black households in the city were in this predicament (Sherman and Shapiro, 2005).
Katrina, in fact, exposed the politics of race, poverty, and inequality to broad public view for the first time in a generation. Only rarely since the War on Poverty of the 1960s have these issues received as much attention in the national political forum as they did in the days and weeks after the storm, when Katrina's disparate racial impact was so visually and viscerally apparent, as was the government's anemic policy response to the immediate crisis. Observers have inferred a number of things from this state of affairs. Some imputed indifference at best and racism at worst to national political leaders, a conclusion expressed most famously and directly by the hip-hop artist and producer Kanye West, who said on live network television that “George Bush doesn't care about black people” (de Moraes 2005).
Other interpretations emphasized not the intentions of actors but the historical and structural background that underlay the particular vulnerability of African Americans to events such as Katrina (Frymer et al., 2005). These factors include historically rooted patterns of racial inequality reflected in extreme residential segregation; the concentration of poor African Americans in deindustrializing inner cities; the growing political linkage between race and social policy; the effects of federalism, particularly the devolution of social policies from the federal government to state and municipal government in ways that rendered minorities particularly vulnerable; and the general disengagement of the federal government from issues of poverty and urban development beginning in the 1970s and continuing into the twenty-first century (Massey and Denton, 1993; Wilson 1996; Lieberman 1998; Gilens 1999; Soss et al., 2001; Caraley 1992; Weir 1998). Regardless of how these racial disparities are interpreted, however, it is clear that, in human terms, the disastrousness of so-called “natural” disasters such as Katrina is, in fact, the result of complex interactions between the ecology of the natural landscape and the systems of social, political, and economic relations that human intervention engenders (Cronon 1983).
Seen in this light, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath constitute, in effect, a metaphor for the deep tension between color-blind and race-conscious models of politics and policy that has been one of the central defining themes of U.S. political culture, dating back to the founding of the American republic and even before. On the one hand, American politics is founded on the basis of a set of egalitarian liberal principles, which imply that race, like any other ascriptive category of social relations, should be irrelevant to public life and that the racial distinctions that often structure public life, for whatever purpose, are anomalous or invalid (Myrdal 1944; Hartz 1955). On the other hand, even a cursory glance at U.S. history reveals that color blindness has more often been the exception than the rule and suggests that racial hierarchy and inequality are central to American political development. An alternative view holds that public policy should take racial differences into account at least to recognize and remedy inequality (Morgan 1975; Hochschild 1984; Smith 1997; Brown et al., 2003; King and Smith, 2005; Horton 2005).
In this essay, I explore Hurricane Katrina as a window onto this fundamental dualism in U.S. political culture, its ambivalent embrace of both color blindness and race consciousness. In the storm's immediate aftermath, the president became the unlikely mouthpiece of this dualism, and I examine his statements about race in the storm's wake and place them in historical context. I then connect these presidential statements to the broader political context that shapes race policymaking in order to ask whether Katrina and the political response it provoked might generate a policy response that takes seriously the problem of racial inequality that Katrina exposed. A brief account of a parallel historical example of race-conscious policy emerging from political conditions apparently dominated by color blindness—the emergence of affirmative action in employment in the 1960s and 1970s—follows. This example highlights the mixture of ideological and institutional conditions that may be necessary to generate such a dramatic change in policy direction. I then conclude by drawing some lessons from this history for post-Katrina race politics.
KATRINA AND AMERICA'S RACIAL DUALISM
During the immediate period after the storm, President George W. Bush expressed the fundamental American tension between color blindness and race consciousness. In the span of a few days, he offered two diametrically opposed views of Katrina and its consequences, corresponding in turn to the color-blind and race-conscious paradigms. His initial off-the-cuff response to accusations of racism in the government's response to the storm was an assertion of official color blindness: “My attitude is this: The storm didn't discriminate, and neither will the recovery effort. When those Coast Guard choppers, many of whom were first on the scene, were pulling people off roofs, they didn't check the color of a person's skin” (Bush 2005b, p. 1382). Left dangling was the unspoken implication that if the faces clinging for dear life to the roofs of New Orleans as the floodwaters rose were more Black than White, it was not the government's fault, nor could the government legitimately be expected to recognize that the challenges facing African American victims of the storm were in any way distinctive.
But this was not to be the president's final word on the subject. Several days after making these unscripted remarks, he returned to New Orleans to deliver a major speech on Katrina and the government's response to it. Standing in Jackson Square against the backdrop of St. Louis Cathedral (which, in the midst of the still blacked-out city, was floodlit using generators that the president's advance team had flown in especially for the occasion—even though no one had seemed able to provide electric power for the city's residents huddled in their homes, the Superdome, or the city's convention center), the president offered an entirely different view of the hurricane and the racial politics surrounding it. Gone was the color-blind frame that he had adopted just days earlier, and in its place was a new race-conscious understanding of what had occurred in New Orleans in the weeks since the storm.
After promising assistance to those displaced by the storm and pledging the federal government's full backing to the reconstruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the president turned his attention to the manifest inequality that the hurricane had revealed:
When communities are rebuilt, they must be even better and stronger than before the storm. Within the gulf region are some of the most beautiful and historic places in America. As all of us saw on television, there's also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above this legacy of inequality. When the streets are rebuilt, there should be many new businesses, including minority-owned businesses, along those streets. When the houses are rebuilt, more families should own, not rent, those houses. When the regional economy revives, local people should be prepared for the jobs being created (Bush 2005a, p. 1407).
This statement was a remarkably forthright acknowledgment not only of the racial disparities in conditions in Katrina's aftermath but also of the historical and structural roots of these disparities. In this speech, the president essentially reversed himself, contradicting his color-blind statement of just days previously and reframing the event in race-conscious terms. Rather than understanding these racial imbalances as incidental consequences of a fundamentally race-neutral chain of events, he argued that we should address them directly, taking racial differentiation into account in crafting policy solutions.
The statement was particularly unexpected coming from George W. Bush. Bush was elected president twice with very small percentages of African American votes—approximately 9% in 2000 and 11% in 2004—and clearly had little to gain politically from a direct political appeal to African American voters, either on his own behalf or that of his party. Bush has had particularly frigid relations with established African American organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); he is the first president since Herbert Hoover not to address the NAACP's annual convention while in office. Moreover, little in the Bush administration's pre-Katrina record suggested that the president would be amenable to such race-conscious policy rhetoric in response to the hurricane. The administration, for example, opposed affirmative action before the Supreme Court in the University of Michigan cases, both in a brief and in the oral argument. A report drafted by the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 2004 found that “President Bush has not defined a clear agenda nor made civil rights a priority” (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 2004, p. vii).1
The report was later removed from the commission's website.
Bush's New Orleans speech was surprising not only because Bush's own predilections made it unlikely, but also because the historical political context has, for the last forty years, been particularly infertile soil for such presidential pronouncements of race consciousness. Ironically, the last such pronouncement—perhaps the most incisive and influential statement of race consciousness as a policy approach, and certainly the most famous—came from a previous Texan in the White House, one whose career had flourished on the knife edge between color blindness and race consciousness (of both the benign and the malign sort) (Caro 2002). In his commencement address at Howard University in 1965, Lyndon Johnson famously said, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair” (Johnson 1965, p. 636). But until Bush's statement in New Orleans, no U.S. president since had issued such a clear call for a race-conscious approach to social policy. Even President Bill Clinton's Initiative on Race of the late 1990s focused primarily on rhetorical and cultural questions of race consciousness and color blindness rather than on more concrete questions of policy, politics, and power that ultimately shape racial outcomes (although Clinton had previously defended affirmative action, after a fashion, in his typically Clintonian “mend it, but don't end it” speech of 1995) (Clinton 1995; Edley 1996; One America 1998).
COLOR BLINDNESS, RACE CONSCIOUSNESS, AND AMERICAN POLICYMAKING
Most observers of American race politics—including most famously Gunnar Myrdal (1944)—have viewed this question in terms of the dilemma between color blindness and race consciousness. The color-blind approach begins with the liberal proposition that people should be regarded in the public sphere as equal individuals and that group categories such as race, to which societies tend to ascribe collective judgments about inferiority or superiority, are improper bases for public policy (Skrentny 1996, p. 7). For much of American history the dominant interpretation of American political culture has emphasized these liberal premises of universal equality. On this view, social relations and public policies that rely on racial distinctions—such as slavery or Jim Crow segregation—have typically been understood as either anomalies or mistakes. On the other hand, even a cursory glance at American history reveals that color blindness has more often been the exception than the rule and suggests that racial hierarchy and inequality are central to American political development (Smith 1997). In this picture, American political norms of liberal equality and color blindness have been in constant conflict with an alternative tradition that deems racial difference to be real and relevant to public life. Historically, this tradition has been one of racism, the ascription to groups deemed non-White of inferiority that renders them incapable of or ineligible for the equality that the liberal tradition demands. But increasingly, a variant of this race-conscious understanding of U.S. society has emerged: one that accepts, or even celebrates, such group distinctions and expects public policy to accommodate them (King 2000).
The conflict between color blindness and race consciousness is not merely one of academic interpretation but also an ideological debate with material policy stakes. The incorporation of African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities into the full promise of American political, social, and economic life has been one of the central challenges of American politics—and remains so, as Katrina so clearly revealed. Even in the wake of the civil rights revolution of the mid-twentieth century, racial inequality remains and, in some domains, appears as intractable as ever (Hochschild 1999; Lieberman 2005; Harris et al., 2006). What kind of policies will help achieve the full incorporation of minorities into American life? One approach is to accept only policies that conform to color-blind notions of equality and individualism. By this standard, any policy that categorizes citizens by race is invalid; just as the state should prohibit racial discrimination in the allocation and protection of civil and political rights in realms such as education, employment, and voting, so it should not itself distinguish citizens by race for the purpose of allocating benefits or bestowing targeted protection. The problem, in this view, is the incomplete triumph of color blindness and the perverse persistence of race consciousness. There are left and right variants of this position. On the left (Bell 1992; Hacker 1992) are those who believe that racism of the old-fashioned kind remains a serious barrier to racial advancement and incorporation, while those on the right (Sowell 1984; Thernstrom and Thernstrom, 1997; Sleeper 1997) argue that race-conscious policies unwittingly and condescendingly perpetuate racial classifications. The alternative, race-conscious approach recognizes race as a legitimate political category and racial groups as legitimate targets of public policy. From this position, it is reasonable to frame policies explicitly to address racial differences in order to remedy the effects of past discrimination, equalize future opportunity, and ensure diversity in institutions such as schools and workplaces. Many analysts defend race consciousness on these grounds, either as a necessary step toward the full flowering of the color-blind ideal or, more positively, as a desirable end for policy on its own terms (Steinberg 1995; Appiah and Gutmann, 1996; Glazer 1997).
This conflict between race-conscious and color-blind policy recurs continually in U.S. politics, particularly in the politics of poverty and social policy, to which it has long been central (Quadagno 1994; Lieberman 1998; Gilens 1999). It came to a head most recently in the lawsuits over admissions policies at the University of Michigan, which also highlighted the nuances and complexities that are often obscured in simplistic renderings of the color-blind/race-conscious dichotomy. In these cases, a closely divided Supreme Court upheld the principle of race-conscious admissions for the purpose of ensuring diversity (Grutter v. Bollinger 2003), while restricting the range of acceptable policy instruments through which race-conscious purposes could be applied (Gratz v. Bollinger 2003). The plaintiffs were White applicants to the university's undergraduate college and law school who claimed that the university's admissions processes, which were designed to produce a racially diverse student body, violated their rights to equal protection because it identified applicants by race and thus violated the precepts and practices of color blindness. But in her majority opinion in the critical case (Grutter), Justice Sandra Day O'Connor rejected the premise that race-neutral policies had an absolute claim to priority, arguing instead that racial diversity is a legitimate, even compelling, goal and that race-conscious admissions policies are a reasonable way of achieving that diversity—especially given that race-neutral alternatives have demonstrably failed to achieve comparable levels of incorporation for minorities at public universities (Tienda et al., 2003). Still, the court's majority in favor of race-conscious admissions expressed considerable ambivalence about race-conscious policies, suggesting that affirmative action and other race-conscious approaches are permissible only as temporary deviations from “true” color blindness.
Nevertheless, the presumption that color blindness is, or should be, the norm, pervades contemporary American policy discourse (Skrentny 1996). As Lawrence Bobo has argued, since the civil rights breakthroughs of the 1960s, many White Americans tend to assume that the end of state-sponsored racial segregation and the prohibition of most forms of discrimination have leveled the playing field to create a truly color-blind public sphere in which opportunities for advancement are, indeed, equal across the color line. Consequently, they tend to attribute racial inequality neither to explicit White racism nor to structural barriers that inhibit advancement but, ironically, to the incapacity of members of minority groups themselves—a phenomenon Bobo calls “laissez-faire racism” (distinguished from classic racism because it does not entail belief either in the inherent inferiority or cultural underdevelopment of particular groups) (Bobo et al., 1997; Bobo and Smith, 1998; see also Gilens 1999).2
Although Bobo is doubtless right that “laissez-faire racism” is today the dominant mode of racialist thinking in the United States, both genetic and cultural arguments have surfaced in public discourse in recent years (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994; Sowell 1994).
The recent dominance of the color-blind paradigm is more than simply a matter of its disproportionate ideological hold on the American political imagination. There are also structural political reasons for the growing dominance of color blindness in U.S. race politics since the 1960s. During the generation between Johnson and Clinton, no president or other leading national figure of either party had strong political incentives to address issues of race and poverty directly or to advocate race-conscious policies strongly. For one thing, since the 1970s there has been a general trend toward conservatism in public opinion and toward the Republicans in partisanship. This growing conservatism is associated in public opinion with antipathy toward targeted, race-conscious policies such as affirmative action (Erikson et al., 2002; Sniderman and Piazza, 1993). Color blindness, in fact, almost by definition means a relatively passive or reactive state, limited to proscribing discrimination rather than actively intervening in the market or other putatively private behavior to rectify racial imbalances. It is a rather peculiar irony that once laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed most forms of racial discrimination, were on the books, color blindness, which formed the ideological basis for a transformative social movement that truly revolutionized American life, became effectively the conservative position. As the American electorate has become more conservative, pivotal voters in national elections are less likely to be attracted to race-conscious policy appeals.
The racial dynamics of partisan support have changed, too. During the ascendancy of the New Deal in the mid-twentieth century, the Democratic and Republican parties did not diverge substantially from each other on civil rights or other racial issues. Democrats depended on an inherently unstable coalition between southern Whites, committed to White supremacy, and northern urban workers, who supported expanded social protection. Republicans, committed principally to limited government, made their peace with the New Deal when they needed to, but made common cause with southern Democrats when it suited them, particularly on the closely intertwined issues of labor and race (Katznelson et al., 1993; Farhang and Katznelson, 2005). This fragile equilibrium was rattled in 1948, when President Harry Truman, in order to court pivotal Black voters in northern cities in support of his reelection bid, took moderate steps toward support for civil rights initiatives, driving southerners to walk out of the party's national convention and nominate a rump ticket. But southern Whites returned to the Democratic fold in the 1950s, and there they remained until 1964, when mainstream Republicans joined with northern Democrats to pass the Civil Rights Act. The key holdouts from the civil rights consensus were not only southern Democrats but also a vocal group of conservative Republicans led by the party's presidential nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater. Johnson trounced Goldwater in the election, but Goldwater won five states in the Deep South that had been safely Democratic since Reconstruction, inserting a wedge between two key components of the Democratic coalition: southern Whites, whose voting behavior and party allegiance began migrating toward the Republicans; and African Americans, whose voting rights would be protected the following year thanks to Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic-led civil rights coalition (Carmines and Stimson, 1989; Lublin 2004).
Given this divergence of the parties on civil rights and other racial issues over the last generation, African American voters consistently vote in overwhelming numbers for Democratic candidates. As a result, Democrats have little incentive to campaign for African American votes on grounds that might alienate more racially conservative White voters, except in concentrated areas of Black population, where Democratic victory tends to be a reasonably sure thing. Nationally, however, Democratic candidates and policymakers must appeal for moderate White votes in order to form winning electoral and governing coalitions (Frymer 1999). This electoral imperative has increasingly led Democratic candidates to emphasize universal and ostensibly race-neutral themes in campaigns, but has also left them increasingly open to implicit racial appeals (Edsall and Edsall, 1991; Williams 1998; Mendelberg 2001).
As a consequence of these structural trends in American political development, color blindness has come to seem the norm in U.S. politics, as a matter not just of moral or ideological stance or policy instrumentalism but also of political expediency. This structural account of the privileged position that color blindness has come to occupy in U.S. politics further underscores the surprising nature of President Bush's remarks in New Orleans. But it also offers clues to help understand why the race-conscious seed that Bush planted appears not to have taken root—it may have fallen upon fallow soil. To appreciate why this is so, it is worthwhile exploring the political and structural conditions that might make a turn toward race-conscious policy possible. In order to undertake such an exploration, it is necessary to find a comparable political situation—a moment when ideological and structural conditions seemed to favor color-blind policy—that produced a race-conscious policy turn. By examining how that historical policy turn occurred, we can come to some appreciation of the necessary conditions for such a turn to recur, whether in Katrina's wake or at some future moment.
A HISTORICAL CASE: THE RISE OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
Recent American political history provides us with just such a case: the emergence of affirmative action in employment in the 1960s and 1970s. Affirmative action is perhaps the paradigmatic race-conscious policy: it depends on the recognition of groups, and grants benefits to individuals on the basis of their group affiliations (Skrentny 1996, pp. 7–8). And yet affirmative action emerged as a means to enforce what appeared to be a resolutely color-blind law, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII of the act outlawed deliberate, individual acts of discrimination such as the refusal to hire or promote individuals because of their race. In doing so, the act appeared explicitly to rule out an alternative race-conscious approach to antidiscrimination, which some civil rights advocates had wanted. After the grand compromise that broke the legislative logjam and allowed the act to pass, its strongest supporters voiced this color-blind interpretation: Senator Hubert H. Humphrey famously promised to “start eating the [law's] pages one after another” if it proved susceptible to race-conscious interpretation (Congressional Record 1964, p. 7240). And yet, within ten years of the act's passage, the United States adopted precisely the approach that Humphrey had denied was possible—a set of race-conscious, group-based policies and practices offering compensatory advantages in employment (as well as education and other fields) to members of historically or currently disadvantaged groups, policies and practices that came to be known collectively as affirmative action. The evolution of race-conscious affirmative action from color-blind legislative origins provides an instructive parallel to the field of post-Katrina race politics.
Several factors made this surprising development possible. One was the status of the ideology of color blindness in U.S. politics at the high point of the civil rights era. The debates over civil rights policy in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented the culmination of a long-standing debate in American political and institutional life between color-blind and race-conscious visions of society. Not surprisingly, the color-blind vision dominated the field, while the race-conscious ideological tradition was not popular among civil rights advocates during this period. But as students and practitioners of civil rights law addressed the practical challenges of enforcing emerging antidiscrimination rules, it became increasingly clear that a straightforward color-blind approach would not suffice, because simply treating race as irrelevant would not outweigh the effects of past discrimination that left many, if not most, African Americans ill-equipped to avail themselves of whatever advantages and opportunities color blindness might hypothetically offer (Burstein 1985; King 1995, pp. 208–209; Kryder 2000, pp. 88–132; Skrentny 1996, pp. 114–117). The debate surrounding the Civil Rights Act thus took place on an ideological turf defined by two competing paradigms, each of which had both a deep intellectual legacy and institutionally powerful proponents.
Some of the institutional conditions that prevailed in American politics in the early 1960s were not especially favorable for the emergence of race-conscious policy. As they had for a generation, southern Democrats wielded disproportionate power in Congress through a variety of procedural and organizational means (such as the filibuster in the Senate). Race increasingly structured the party system, dividing the Democratic Party along regional lines and leaving Republicans in the pivotal position in the policymaking process. Finally, civil rights policymaking was situated in a chronically fragmented state, in which what little authority there was was divided among several different, mostly weak, federal agencies, as well as state and local governments.
And yet there were in the 1960s also institutional factors that were more favorable to the development of race-conscious policy. One was simply the fluid electoral incentives facing national political leaders. Both Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson needed to balance the electoral demands of southern Whites and northern Blacks, for each group was an essential piece of their electoral coalition. Consequently, civil rights legislation posed both challenges and opportunities for building a reelection coalition for 1964 (Miroff 1981). Civil rights posed similar challenges for Richard Nixon as he sought to pry the South loose from the Democrats' grip while also competing for minority votes in his quest to forge a majority coalition (Frymer and Skrentny, 1998).
The second factor was the civil rights movement itself, which was cresting just as the Civil Rights Act was taking effect (the act's passage came almost exactly in between two of the movement's high-water marks, the march on Washington and the march from Selma to Montgomery). The movement embraced race consciousness in a double sense, both embodying it in its embrace of race as a collective political identity, and increasingly championing it as a policy paradigm. It was not the mere fact of the movement's existence and national strength that was important for the advancement of race-conscious policy, but rather its organizational structure. While it was indeed a national movement, it was also importantly and deeply rooted and active in local political and economic arenas through local organizations (Young and Burstein, 1995). The flourishing of local African American political organizations was, in fact, one of the most enduring consequences of the civil rights movement, and these organizations gave African Americans enhanced political leverage in many parts of the country (Greenstone and Peterson, 1973; Button 1989; Morone 1990, chapter 6). The NAACP, among other organizations, was organized in a federated structure, which mirrored the federal structure of the American state—with federal, state, and local branches—and so was able to operate in multiple venues and with varied strategies simultaneously to exploit the political opportunities that were available (Skocpol 2003).
In particular, federated organizations such as the NAACP and its Legal Defense Fund (LDF) collaborated with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency charged with enforcing the employment discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act. While the EEOC spent a long time getting itself up and running after it came into being in 1965, the NAACP—along with other civil rights organization such as the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and even the American Civil Liberties Union—already had established and highly coordinated organizations, both in the South and around the country. These organizations supplemented the field organization of the chronically understaffed and organizationally challenged EEOC and effectively provided it with an extra set of finely tuned eyes and ears. These organizations brought important patterns and practices of job discrimination to the EEOC's attention. The LDF, which took the lead in representing plaintiffs in antidiscrimination suits, worked closely with the EEOC to share data, strategize about cases, devise courtroom arguments, and work out legal interpretations. These relationships between the state and movement organizations were the linchpin in advancing collective, race-conscious enforcement of apparently color-blind civil rights law, resulting in the unraveling of the momentary color-blind consensus of 1964, and the consolidation of a race-conscious policy approach backed powerfully by the state by the early 1970s, an outcome that had seemed most improbable only a decade earlier (Lieberman 2005).
In contrast to the American experience, Great Britain and France, which also adopted antidiscrimination policies in the 1960s and 1970s, both seemed more likely to develop a race-conscious approach to antidiscrimination enforcement (Lieberman 2005). This was particularly true in Britain, whose law (the Race Relations Act of 1976) explicitly embraced a more race-conscious definition of discrimination based on group imbalances rather than individual action and clearly anticipated some form of “positive discrimination.” France's antiracism law of 1972, in keeping with the country's Republican tradition, which disdains subnational group identities such as race or ethnicity, hewed to a narrowly color-blind understanding of discrimination, yet lodged enforcement power with France's supposedly “strong” state (Bleich 2003). And yet neither Britain nor France has created anything like the U.S. race-conscious antidiscrimination enforcement regime. The British case is particularly instructive because, even though race-consciousness was effectively written into law, the window of political opportunity that made that law possible shut decisively three years after its passage when, in 1979, Margaret Thatcher's Conservatives swept into office and promptly scotched the possibility of race-conscious enforcement, underscoring the importance of institutional and political backing for the development of race policy. The French case, too, carries lessons, particularly concerning the limitations of single-minded color blindness as a strategy for addressing racial inequality, as the recent racial violence in the wretched banlieues of Paris and elsewhere in France so starkly showed.
KATRINA AND THE FUTURE OF COLOR BLINDNESS
What lessons can we draw from this historical analysis that might help us sort out the prospects for a new direction in race policy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? Does President Bush's apparent embrace of a more race-conscious approach to inequality and public policies indicate that the political ground is shifting in ways that might create opportunities for the creation of policy that might address issues of race, poverty, and inequality in fresh ways? While past performance, as investment companies say, does not guarantee future results, it is possible to draw some inferences from the history of U.S. race policymaking, which is systematically embedded in the color-blind/race-conscious dilemma (King and Smith, 2005).
The stylized history of affirmative action I have recounted briefly here is important not because it provides a precise historical parallel with the current post-Katrina political moment, but because it advances a theoretical framework that illuminates how race policy is made, suggesting not a pinpoint prediction in answer to the questions that open this section, but rather a set of observational guidelines that can tell us where to look in order to understand contemporary political dynamics. The affirmative action story suggests that ideological framing by itself—the perennial battle between color blindness and race consciousness—is not sufficient to explain policy outcomes. Analyses of U.S. race politics tend to presume that ideas and beliefs about race—racism or egalitarianism, race consciousness or color blindness—matter most in making race policy; in other words, that race policy is essentially a matter of moral suasion. But what the history of affirmative action reveals above all is that race policy is equally a matter of strategic action and depends on the formation of coalitions. Coalition building, moreover, is not a straightforward matter of reaching ideological agreement, but rather entails the convergence of purposive and strategic political actors operating under common institutional rules on particular courses of action—agreement not on ends but merely on means. Ideas about race interact with political institutional factors at particular historical moments to shape the possibilities available to political actors to form and maintain race-policy coalitions and to pursue their various and often incommensurable goals (Lieberman 2002).
This framework suggests looking at both the ideological and institutional setting of Bush's pronouncement as a way of framing the context for post-Katrina race policymaking. Ideologically, color blindness seems to be every bit as dominant, if not more so, in American political discourse as in the 1960s. Public policies such as affirmative action that depend on racial classification are regarded as at least as suspect as they were a generation ago, and the White public is no more supportive, in the aggregate, of policies that they perceive as preferential toward African Americans (Skrentny 1996, pp. 4–5; Schuman et al., 1997). At the same time, the justification for what once were race-conscious policies such as affirmative action in higher education and the corporate world has become considerably more complex and convoluted as the number of racial, ethnic, and other categories deemed worthy of attention has proliferated. Diversity is now the watchword, and the diversity rationale has become increasingly detached from the notion of compensation for historical discrimination and, as a result, from race-conscious specificity (Prewitt 2003). The meaning of race consciousness, moreover, has become more complex since the immigration reform of the 1960s opened American borders to immigrants from around the world, broadening the racial and ethnic palette of the American population. Against this backdrop, President Bush's invocation of race consciousness and the historical roots of discrimination against African Americans cut rather against the grain. Still, in the spirit of Nixon's trip to China, a race-conscious statement from a politician like Bush, who otherwise seemed personally and politically committed to color blindness, might be part of a reasonable political strategy to move policy in an unexpected direction, precisely because his color-blind bona fides might reassure those who might resist such a claim from a figure associated with race-conscious policy positions (Nincic 1988).
But even assuming that Bush's statement was sincere—an assumption that is not universally shared (Herbert 2005)—this policy effect can be expected to follow only if institutional conditions provide sufficient opportunities for the formation of a coalition around race-conscious policies, and here the terrain looks rather different than it did in the 1960s. African American voters are, if anything, more tightly linked to the Democratic Party than a generation ago, while White voters increasingly vote Republican across class and region. The party system is less fluid and more rigid, especially compared to the complexities facing Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon as they tried to assemble winning electoral and policy coalitions that spanned races as well as classes and regions. In Congress, the parties are more polarized than they have been for a generation, with very little overlap in issue preferences between Democrats and Republicans. Given recent Republican dominance and knife-edged party margins in both congressional and presidential elections, there seems to be little prospect for a dramatic change of course in social policy. Other institutions seem equally unlikely to provide openings for race-conscious policy. The federal judiciary, a key institutional forum for civil rights policy in the past, is increasingly dominated by Republican appointees—in addition to the two Supreme Court justices he has chosen in the last year, President Bush has appointed approximately one-quarter of the federal appeals court judges (Nagourney et al., 2006). The federal bureaucracy, too, has become less likely to reach for race-conscious policy approaches as the EEOC did in promoting affirmative action in the 1960s. The Voting Rights Section of the Bush Justice Department, for example, has visibly shifted its emphasis from actively protecting minority voting access, to the prevention of voting fraud, a shift essentially from race consciousness toward color blindness in its understanding and implementation of the Voting Rights Act (Toobin 2004). And finally, while civil rights organizations such as the NAACP, the LDF, and others are still broadly engaged in a wide variety of policy issues in venues at all levels of government, the prospect that collaboration between these organizations and state actors will provide the lever for a policy shift in a more race-conscious direction seems remote. In sum, despite the president's rhetoric and the ideological possibilities that it might seem to represent, the post-Katrina institutional ground seems rather infertile for the growth of new policy initiatives focused on issues of race and poverty in the United States.
Taken together, the president's two apparently contradictory statements about race in Katrina's wake expressed the essential dualism of U.S. race politics. And as strange as it may seem, the two statements were both true—within the ideological frames in which they were situated. From the color-blind point of view, the storm didn't discriminate—that is, it did not treat the people unfortunate enough to be caught in its path differently on account of their race. At the same time, there is no getting around the history of discrimination that was clearly embedded in the landscape of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, both literal and figurative, and directly implicated in the racial disparities evident in the storm's aftermath. Recognizing that this dualism exists, that it is possible for race-neutral causes to have profoundly unequal racial effects, is not an insignificant event in U.S. political discourse, which is not generally prone to perceiving the subtler nuances of political life. But as Katrina recedes into the background, replaced in the public's mind with other concerns, it becomes increasingly clear that such a recognition is not sufficient for policymaking that might begin to address the challenges of racial division and inequality that remain as present as ever.3
In an Associated Press/Ipsos poll in mid-September 2005, most people named recovery from Katrina as the number one priority (from among a list of issues) for federal government attention. By mid-December, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal found that Katrina had fallen to fifth place (behind Iraq, health care, job creation, and terrorism), named as the top priority by only 11%.
