The Revolution According to Skrentny: The Politics of Implementation

Skrentny's central claim is that, between 1965 and 1975, there was a “minority rights revolution” in which legislative gains won by blacks were extended to a quite specific set of official ethnoracial minorities. Skrentny's project is to understand the nature and terms of this revolution. Why were some groups designated as minorities while others were not? When, where, and how were civil rights protections expanded from blacks to others? Answering these questions takes Skrentny back to both the origins of the civil rights movement and to the implementation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Skrentny opens with a discussion of two key aspects of the Civil Rights movement: the international context of World War II and the political mobilization around civil rights issues. World War II is critical for Skrentny because it highlights the ways in which global conflicts brought pressure to bear on racial discrimination at home. During this period, civil rights were increasingly framed as a national security issues; if America was going to win hearts and minds around the world, it would also have to address the persistent inequalities at home. Skrentny also notes that lengthy political mobilization was needed to secure major civil rights legislation; civil rights victories were hard won, secured only after decades of mass mobilization and protest across the country. These two factors, international pressure and mass mobilization at home, created the political opening for confronting the long history of slavery and Jim Crow.³

The heart of Skrentny's analysis lies in his examination of the implementation of Title VII of the Civil Rights act, which prohibited discrimination in employment using the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as its primary tool, and in his analysis of federal government set asides through the Office of Contract Compliance (OFCC).⁴

Thus, in the space of a few years, and remarkably quickly after passage of Title VII, government bureaucrats codified certain groups as America's official minorities: Negroes, Spanish Americans, American Indians, and Orientals. What is striking, according to Skrentny, is the ease with which these groups were sanctified by federal bureaucrats; there was very little debate over who was in and who out, and little controversy over the outcome. There were no studies commissioned to debate designation of minorities, no expert opinions sought, and no hearings scheduled to air questions of which groups ought to be recognized as official minorities and on what grounds. Skrentny thus recovers the remarkable process through which “administrators, apparently on their own, then created a list of ’other minorities'.” It was a rather silent and bloodless revolution – but one which had enormous consequences both for those who were chosen and those who were not.⁶

The extension of minority rights to groups other than African Americans was marked, Skrentny claims, by two features: the absence of both political mobilization from below and political debate from above. That is, Asian Americans, American Indians, Latinos, and women did not have to embark on an extensive political mobilization, and in fact, made few demands on the state. To substantiate his claim, Skrentny looks to discrimination complaint data and notes that in Fiscal Year 1966, “only 2 percent of complaints were based on national-origin discrimination, or 131 of 6,133.” Moreover, only 25 of the first 3,773 complaints “identified for investigation,” were from Mexican Americans. Though there were a substantial number of gender discrimination complaints filed (34% in the same year), the vast majority of complaints pertained to racial discrimination.⁷

At one point, Skrentny suggests that “there was something self-evident to administrators about the plausibility of these particular groups,” a “taken-for-grantedness” to the categories administrators chose that did not seem in need of expert consultation or political deliberation. Implementation of civil rights legislation, thus, led to what Skrentny calls “anticipatory politics” in which Asian Americans, American Indians, Latinos, and women were granted the civil rights protections and affirmative action remedies without ever having to fight for them.⁸

Bureaucrats rather than protesters or politicians established the criteria for official minorities and, in so doing, set the terms of political engagement for decades to come.

On Skrentny's telling, federal bureaucrats designated a set of official minorities by analogizing other groups to blacks. Where parallels could be sustained between blacks and other groups, minority status was granted; where it could not, official status was withheld. Hence, Skrentny claims, quite inaccurately I believe, that Latinos were granted official minority status because bureaucrats treated them as a racialized group, while Jews, Poles, and other white ethnics were treated as whites, and, as such, were not accepted as official minorities. In fact, it is precisely in this period, 1965 through 1977, that Hispanics/Latinos were quite formally designated as an ethnic group rather than a race within the official American ethnoracial taxonomy. As an ethnic group, they could be of any race. This classification of Hispanics/Latinos as ethnics had been in the works for some time, but was formally codified by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in Statistical Policy Directive 15 promulgated on May 12, 1977.¹¹

The 1964 Civil Rights Act: Who Was Covered?

Skrentny's argument rests, to a considerable extent, on a quite particular reading of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In order to establish that civil rights protections were initially intended for blacks and then extended to others during the implementation phase, Skrentny must first establish that the 1964 statute was originally intended for blacks alone. Once this is established, then the rest of his argument follows. However, if the statute is understood as containing a broader conception of discrimination, then the notion that civil rights protections were extended from blacks to others is no longer self-evident. Thus, how one understands the origins and intent of the 1964 Civil Rights Act changes how we view the politics of implementation. Is Skrentny's account of the statute accurate or sufficient? Specifically, was civil rights politics circa 1964 always understood as pertaining narrowly to African Americans?

Skrentny buttresses his argument by insisting that the unambiguous legislative intent of the 1964 law was to monitor and prevent discrimination against African Americans and that the statutory protections were only extended to other groups after the fact using the “black analogy.” Nonblack minorities, Skrentny claims, were never intended to be beneficiaries of the original statute. Although Skrentny notes that Section 703a of Title VII specifically states that “it is an unlawful employment practice for an employer to refuse to hire, or to discharge any individual,” on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” he nevertheless insists that despite the specification of five possible sources of discrimination, the statute always was intended as a means of monitoring and preventing discrimination against African Americans.¹²

Or, as he states emphatically in his concluding discussion of Title VII:

Throughout, Skrentny claims in no uncertain terms that the Civil Rights Act was intended for African Americans.

Skrentny supports this interpretation of statutory intent in two ways: first, with a set of quite specific claims concerning passage of the Act itself; and, second, with a broader claim concerning the primacy of the black civil rights struggle. Specifically, Skrentny notes that, when signing the bill into law, LBJ only refered to race and color, “naming no nonblack minority groups and making no mention of national origin, sex, or religious discrimination.” Similarily, during the Congressional debate, Senator Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) stated that “the bill has a simple purpose. That purpose is to give fellow citizens – Negroes – the same rights and opportunities that white people take for granted.” Finally, Skrentny points out that the first annual report of the EEOC stated that “the chief thrust of the statute was, of course, aimed at discrimination against the Negro.”¹⁵

More important than these proximate causes is a broader assumption that undergirds Skrentny's analysis but that is never fully articulated or defended, namely that blacks are America's original minority both historically and morally. That is, having suffered the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow, they have the strongest moral claim to political redress and, having mobilized for decades to protest white racism, to claim their civil rights. For Skrentny, blacks are the original and exemplary American minority, the model that others subsequently either benefitted from or copied. It is this view of blacks as central to American history that underpins his notion of an inappropriate expansion of civil rights protections from this core group to other minorities. There is a linearity to the narrative, a sense in which one group came first and others followed, legitimating one group over the others. African Americans, for Skrentny, are the true minority, both the principal object of American racism and the intended beneficiaries of federal protections.

Skrentny concludes his discussion of employment affirmative action with an implicit comparison between women and Latinos on the one hand and African Americans on the other:

Presumably, the “typical” pattern is to be found in black protest and politics, the benchmark against which Latinos, Asian Americans, American Indians, and women are judged and found wanting. The so-called “nonblack” minorities are seen by Skrentny as having reaped the benefits of civil rights protections without ever having mobilized or protested in order to secure these rights. Rather, civil-rights bureaucrats, along with a handful of self-appointed community leaders, assumed that this was the appropriate path to follow, and no one contested their actions.

The “minority rights revolution,” on Skrentny's tellings, has had several deleterious political effects. First, the absence of political debate over who was to count as an official minority, and on what grounds, has meant that the categories adopted by federal agencies were ill-conceived. There were no principled arguments as to why some groups were recognized as minorities while others were not; the criteria for inclusion were never theorized in any sustained fashion; rather, they were enacted unwittingly with little or no careful reflection as federal bureaucrats flew by the seat of their pants, generating a hodgepodge of incoherent civil rights claims.¹⁸

Skrentny's Error

Skrentny's analysis turns standard interpretations of American civil rights reform on their head. Typically, accounts of civil rights politics begin with social movements and political protest and end with passage of the civil rights legislation.¹⁹

Skrentny's analysis, as I read it, rests on three flawed claims: a mistaken distinction between legitimate and illegitimate minorities; an unsubstantiated claim of political quiescence on the part of nonblack minorities; and a refusal to heed the counterevidence that emerges within his own narrative. First, Skrentny creates too easy a division between legitimate and illegitimate minorities – that is, between African Americans and others. African Americans are cast by Skrentny as the authentic minority, the group with the longest history of discrimination, those who struggled long and hard for civil rights protections, and the intended beneficiaries of civil rights legislation. In contrast, Skrentny depicts Latinos and Asians, in particular, and to a lesser extent women and Native Americans, too, as illegitimate minorities who had civil rights protections handed to them with little or no political work. As noted above, Skrentny explicitly claims Asian Americans and Latinos received “free rides” when they cashed in on blacks' political hard work. They did not “earn” their civil rights protections through political struggle. Skrentny too readily pits minority groups against each other, as if they were engaged in a zero-sum game. He then designates some as deserving and others as imposters and interlopers.

This distinction between the authentic, original minorities and others is spurious because it ignores the long and complex history of discrimination against Native Americans, Asians, and Latinos. Skrentny completely ignores the rich body of work that has been produced over the last two decades in which the varied nature of American racism has been explored.²⁰

Second, Skrentny frames his argument as a counterpoint to movement-centered accounts that have dominated to date by continually asserting that Asian Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and women did not secure their civil rights protections through mass mobilization and protest. At best, advocacy elites spoke on their behalf; at worst, federal bureaucrats assumed what these groups wanted. Although this claim is central to Skrentny's argument, he never fully defends it by considering recent work exploring the politicization of other minorities alongside the experience of African Americans. As I noted earlier, Skrentny supports his claim of nonmobilization by noting that Latinos “were simply not filing discrimination complaints in any significant numbers.”²²

More important than discrepancies over discrimination rates is the question of whether such data are sufficient evidence to sustain Skrentny's claim concerning the political quiescence of nonblack minorities. Even if one accepts Skrentny's discrimination complaint data, it is a significant leap to claim this as evidence that Latinos, Asian Americans, American Indians, and women got “free rides.” Surprisingly, Skrentny pays little attention to the rich literature on the politicization of a whole range of subnational identities during this period: The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), GI Forum, the Chicano movement, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Young Bloods, the Young Lords, Brown Power, Yellow Power, and many others have been explored in recent years.²⁴

Third, Skrentny undervalues or ignores evidence that runs counter to his argument. In fact, he often refers to various counterpoints along the way; however, he simply proceeds with his narrative without ever integrating the counterevidence into his account. Evidence of a more complex racial history continually erupts within the text, but Skrentny simply ignores it, pressing on without modifying his claims. The 1964 Civil Rights Act is a classic case in point; Skrentny, I have noted, insists that the legislation was intended for African Americans and was only extended to other minorities by unauthorized bureaucrats. However, the language of the statute, which Skrentny also acknowledges, suggests otherwise. The statute specified five possible grounds for discrimination: “race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.” Even though LBJ only referred to Negroes when signing the bill into law, in many of his classic speeches on American racism and the importance of civil rights reform in this same period, LBJ often referred to his experience teaching in Cotulla, Texas, where he witnessed discrimination against Mexican Americans. Take, for example, his speech when signing the 1965 Voting Rights Act in which Johnson by no means limited discrimination to African Americans. At one point Johnson declared:

Perhaps the most extensive documentation of Johnson's relation with Mexican Americans has been undertaken by Julie Pycior, who has traced the detailed interaction between LBJ and Mexican Americans in Texas. Throughout, Pycior meticulously documents the impact of these relationships on Johnson's conception of discrimination as well as his political strategy.²⁶

In fact, Skrentny begins his book with an anecdote in which Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) writes to the newly elected Richard Nixon to encourage him to attend carefully to Mexican Americans early in his administration. Similarly, Skrentny also notes that Kennedy won 85 percent of the Mexican American vote, drawing, many have assumed, on a shared Catholic identification.²⁸

Let me stress that my point is not to deny the importance of black civil rights, nor to deny the centrality of slavery and Jim Crow to American racism, nor the importance of black protest and urban riots as key to passage of the civil rights legislation. However, I do not think that acknowledging the centrality of racism against African Americans requires that we claim one group as the true minority and designate others as free riders. We can, and ought to, explore the multifaceted, complex history of white racism. Many were subject to discrimination, albeit in different ways. If we take the multidimensionality of racial domination seriously, how does this change our views of civil rights politics? How does it change the account of the politics both during the 1960s, 1970s, and today? Let me conclude by pointing the way to an alternative interpretation of civil rights reform and its legacy for antiracist politics now.

Narrating the Past, Authorizing the Future

How might we retell the story of civil rights politics in the 1960s and 1970s so as to avoid some of the problems evident in Skrentny's account? I would not simply revert to a movement-centered approach. I think Skrentny is right to consider the ways in which state policy, especially administrative action, has shaped the terrain of ethnic and racial politics after 1965. However, I would begin by taking the language of the Civil Rights Act itself seriously – that is, by considering how and why Congress embraced such a capacious notion of discrimination in which race, color, religion, sex, and national origin all were identified as possible grounds for discrimination. We need not assume all aspects of discrimination to be equally important, nor that all were followed up with equal enthusiasm by the EEOC and other federal agencies. Indeed, we know they were not. Yet beginning with the statute's language suggests a rather different dynamic than that identified by Skrentny. In fact, I suspect that reverse processes were at work, narrowing, not expanding, the statutory provisions during the implementation phase. That is, rather than a minority rights revolution, I want to know why some forms of discrimination were not seen as in need of federal protection. Why were religious minorities not protected by the EEOC or the OFCC despite inclusion of religion in the statute? Or, put, simply how were the capacious provisions of the statute narrowed? What were the political effects? That is, the Act initially specified a wide range of grounds for discriminatory practices, not all of which were sustained during implementation. Acknowledging that the Civil Rights Act itself allowed for a wide range of discriminatory practices gives pause to Skrentny's claim that blacks were the benchmark. Furthermore, the claim that the black analogy was the test to pass simply does not hold.

In fact, the American ethnoracial taxonomy is not quite as coherent as Skrentny suggests. The black analogy cannot account for the ethnoracial taxonomy adopted by the federal government in the wake of the civil rights movement, which insists on a distinction being drawn between race and ethnicity – a distinction with a long history within American thought and social practice. Thus, rather than trying to clarify the criteria on which groups were and were not granted minority status, we would do better to think of the taxonomy as codifying a more complex racial history that does not fall neatly along black-white lines. Once we think of the American taxonomy as multidimensional, we no longer need to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate minorities and can attend instead to the ways in which the statute targeted a range of discriminatory practices without designating some as more deserving than others.³⁰

At one point, Skrentny himself suggests that the designation of “official minorities” had a certain “self- evident” quality to it, in which there was “a taken-for-grantedness” to the categories adopted by the EEOC and the OFCC. But he does not follow this line of inquiry. When we do, however, we can acknowledge that the early civil rights statutes reflected the long and complex history of American race relations. Rather than official minority status being construed out of whole cloth, federal bureaucrats codified prevailing social expectations as to who had suffered during the history of American racial domination. From this perspective, it is especially interesting to note that the civil rights statutes did not simply introduce a race-based classificatory scheme, as Skrentny suggests. On the contrary, Hispanics/Latinos were not treated as another racial group; they were included in the American ethnoracial taxonomy as an ethnic group and not a race. This is why U.S. ethnic and racial data distinguish between Hispanic and non-Hispanic whites. It is accepted, contrary to Skrentny's claim, that Hispanics, though they might be of any race, nevertheless qualify for civil rights protections due to the long history of discrimination on the basis of Spanish origin and culture, namely their religion and language. An alternative reading of the Civil Rights Act, the EEOC, OFCP, and Statistical Directive 15 would emphasize the consistently broad construction placed on discrimination. Civil rights legislation and the administrative agencies they spawned have always allowed for discrimination on other grounds as well as on race.³¹

In short, American racism has never been exclusively a black-white affair, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act recognized the complex history of American racial politics, as did federal agencies charged with enforcing the statutes. Rather than seeing bureaucrats as extending civil rights protections without political authority or debate, I would suggest they were implementing the statute's own rather capacious discrimination provisions. Again, I do not want to contest the centrality of the African American experience to American racial politics; rather, I simply wish to allow that other forms of racism existed alongside slavery and Jim Crow, and that civil rights legislation made evident the importance of addressing a wide range of racism practices.

What difference does it make if we allow for a broader and more complex history of American racial domination than the assumptions undergirding Skrentny's analysis? What is at stake in these different interpretations of the Civil Rights Act and its implementation?

Telling a Different Story, Authorizing a Different Politics

Skrentny's account of the minority rights revolution focuses attention on intergroup rivalries, on the tensions and divisions between African Americans and “other minorities”; tensions that were fueled, on Skrentny's telling, when Asians, Latinos, Americans Indians, and women benefitted unwittingly from affirmative action. Tensions that are further accerbated by Skrentny's account of the minority rights revolution with its assumptions that we specify which minorities came first, which suffered most, protested more, and as such were the most deserving. I think these are not the most useful issues to focus on when trying to assess the history of civil rights reform and its legacies for contemporary racial politics. Skrentny's analysis, as I see it, perpetuates a politics of racial antagonism and division and casts the principal legacy of the minority rights revolution in largely negative terms. The notion that other minorities reaped the benefits after blacks had done all the work oversimplifies the complex history of American racial domination and, in so doing, presents a one-dimensional picture of the civil rights movement itself.

Even if one takes a cursory glance at recent accounts of civil rights movement in the early 1960s, we can see all the ways in which it was never only about race, never only about blackness. Rather, there is a way in which the black civil rights movement galvanized a broad ranging transformative movement that certainly was about redressing the wrongs of slavery and Jim Crow; however, it was never only about that.³²

If we consider the civil rights movement in a broader frame – as a movement rather than a series of identity claims – then we might also begin to think in coalitional terms, about the many ways in which different groups might align rather than divide in their efforts to challenge American racism. Rather than seeing minorities as struggling against one another in a zero sum game, we can attend to the ways in which the events of the 1960s also brought groups together in new ways. One does not have to assume that all racial domination is the same, or that interest groups were politicized at the same time or in the same ways, to allow for identification and alliance building across differences in the service of a common end, namely challenging American racism in its many forms. Nor does one have to assume that building antiracist coalitions across ethnic and racial divides will be an easy task. There are important differences that need to be acknowledged, and that can lead to antagonism and competition. However, whether individuals and groups pursue coalitions or division remains an open question. The answer to this question will undeniably be influenced by the ways in which we narrate the history of American racism, and our efforts to diminish it through civil rights reform.