What is the future of Civil Rights in America? Leading figures whose unique perspectives have helped to illuminate important aspects of intergroup relations were invited to contribute to a special symposium. Each was asked to write a short essay on how our responses to discrimination and tensions arising from racism, sexism, religious bigotry, or similar forms of prejudice in our society are likely to shape this nation's future over the next 40 years. Thirty invitees-historians, social scientists, theologians, university administrators, journalists, lawyers, publishers, and specialists in philanthropy - submitted essays. Their wide-ranging responses follow. Larry P. Arnn The future of civil rights depends upon how we settle a controversy here in the present. That controversy concerns two different views of civil rights, each becoming authoritative at different times in our history. Our country began with the purpose of securing civil rights, as the Declaration of Independence stated: "To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." What rights? James Madison provided a guide. We have, he wrote, a right to our property. In the narrow sense, property is "land, merchandise, or money...." But that is not the whole. In its "larger and juster [emphasis added] meaning," property includes everything to which a person "may attach a value and have a right, and which leaves to everyone else the like advantage." In this sense, property includes the right to "opinions and the free communication of them." It includes one‘s religious opinions, and ... the profession and practice dictated by them." Our "property rights" include then freedom of speech, of worship, of the press, of association. These stand upon the same footing as our right to our material goods. And all rights are qualified by this point, which Madison himself placed in italics: we may possess only those rights that leave to everyone else the like advantage. Before I move on from the Founding, I should say a word about two issues that will be on the lips of every reader of a publication like this, namely slavery and women's rights. The word is this: To the extent that James Madison and his friends did not include women and blacks --- any human being -- as holding these rights, they were wrong. As a matter of fact, they agree with me on that. But anyway, even if they did not agree, and even if they failed to protect the rights of blacks and women, it does not make the principle wrong. Now for new times. In January 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt an-nounced that we had discovered new "self-evident truths," and according to them it was time for a "second Bill of Rights." This new bill of rights would be "economic" in character, not "political." 'The old "political" rights had proved insufficient.Would these new rights supplement, or replace, the old rights? The new rights included "the right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him ... a decent living." The farmer has then a right to sell at a good price. Does someone else have an obligation to buy? What if a farmer chooses to grow broccoli and the public loses its taste for it? What if most farmers grow broccoli, and though we continue to like it, we do not like it that much? Is some individual responsible to purchase the broccoli anyway? Am I? Are we all, through the government? But if we spend our money-buying broccoli that we do not wish to eat, then we have nothing left to buy the beans that a few farmers may still grow. And if that happens, how shall we guarantee a "decent living" to the poor bean farmers? Already we are in trouble, and we have not yet begun to define a "decent living." Indeed, these poor bean farmers, in relation to the broccoli boys, will not have Madison's "like advantage." It costs us nothing to permit --- and a moderate amount to protect-another in the enjoyment of his freedom of speech, or the possession of the property he has earned for himself. But if we must provide some people a "decent living," then we may run out of money. We must choose whose "right" we will recognize. Some will be left out. Broccoli yes. Beans no. This is the problem of modern civil rights policy. The government deploys about half the entire economy, which is by far the largest economy in the world, and probably bigger than the whole world economy in the day of Franklin Roosevelt. Yet it cannot satisfy all the claimants. It subsidizes some crops and not others. It grants preferences to some races and not others. It recognizes the "rights" of some, but not others. Of course, we all press upon the government to make sure we are the ones who get our rights recognized. We begin to think of ourselves, not as citizens, but as claimants. We become members, not of a nation, but of groups that make claims on the nation. We are African-, or Mexican-, or Farming-, or Whatever-Americans. Meanwhile, the government spends its time arbitrating among our claims. And it runs a deficit. The old policy - to each his own - had its hard aspect. Being responsible for oneself is the hard price of liberty and of equality. But it did give rise to a practice of philanthropy and neighborliness unprecedented in the entire world. And it did not lead us so inevitably toward a war over whose rights come first. We shall have that war, as sure as the sun comes up, if we cling to these new principles. If we abandon them, and go back to the old ones, we have a chance of peace. Upon this choice hangs the future of civil rights. Dr. Larry P. Arnn is President of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy and was the Founding Chair of the California Civil Rights Initiative, or Proposition 209 on the November 1996 ballot. Stephen H. Balch We've fallen into a very bad habit when debating affirmative action policies. Instead of discussing whether or not they serve the common good, we argue almost exclusively about their positive or negative impact on the interests of specific groups. Thus, their defenders assert that without them, minority ac-cess to education and jobs will continue to suffer diminution, while opponents plead the deprivations of reverse discrimination suffered by white males, or contend that upon careful examination group preferences work to hinder minority prospects. It is of course, hardly surprising that this happens. Conflict and collision among interest groups are the stuff of day to day democracy, leading most conventional issues to be weighed in just those win\lose terms. Nor is there anything necessarily wrong about debating the merits of affirmative action in this manner. Giving all our citizens, particularly those long denied equality, a full opportunity to lead successful, prosperous lives is deservedly a major goal of public policy. And we cannot be blind to the lingering effects of past injustices on the fortunes of contemporary Americans. But confining this debate to such specific questions of interest is ultimately to do our country and all its citizens, whatever their race or ethnicity, a very grave disservice. This is true because something is at stake in it that far transcends in importance the immediate interests of any one group: the need to preserve the fundamental character of our society. Over the past two hundred years, America has achieved a level of human freedom and flourishing matched by few other countries. The secret of this success has been our willingness to abjure the distinctions of caste and tribe that so poison politics and stifle energies elsewhere. This abjuration was incorporated into the Nation's founding documents, most famously the Declaration of Indepen-dence's proclamation that "all men are created equal" but, as significantly, in the U.S. Constitution's prohibitions on the granting of titles of nobility. These constitutional provisions, now taken utterly for granted, separated the United States, at a stroke, from all other nations then in existence where bloodlines determined rights and duties. Needless to say, America's actual experience has fallen well short of the ideal of castelessness. Yet no other ideal has proven such a polestar for our aspirations, charting the Nation's history through tragedy and triumph to an ever closer realization of equality's promise. Because of its brilliance in our firmament of principles, America has been illumined as a haven for the downtrodden from all over the world. Simultaneously, it has proven a beacon for use by our own oppressed to search the consciences of their compatriots, helping to discover within them the moral courage needed to undo injustice. Considering the convulsions that rival claims of birthright have produced in other lands, I feel that this is not a light we should ever wish to see extinguished. In assessing the wisdom of specific affirmative action policies, we must have as a paramount concern always their effect on the health of this flame not the material interests they may, in the short term, serve or slight. Dr. Stephen H. Balch is President of the National Association of Scholars and a member of the New Jersey State Advisory Committee to the US. Commission on Civil Rights. Joseph Bruchac My grandfather Jesse Bowman was a dark-haired man. To anyone who asked, and some who didn't, his answer to explain his color was that he was "French" and "us French is always dark." Grampa Jesse, who raised me, quit school when he was in fourth grade. Someone called him "a dirty Indian." He knocked that person down, jumped out a window, and never went back. His Abenaki Indian blood was the family secret that everyone knew and no one talked about. Because my family walked the edge of that color barrier between darker skin and lighter skin, I grew up with an intense consciousness of prejudice and discrimination. Instead of hiding my Indian blood-which was less than Grampa Jesse's, for my father's family was Slovak - I spoke of it openly. In college I worked for civil rights. After college I taught in Africa. On returning to the United States I ran a college program in a maximum-security prison. And through it all, I sought out traditional elders and listened to their common-sense wisdom. When Ktsi Nwaskw (the Great Mystery) made us, Abenaki elders explain, we were given two ears. That way we would always be able to hear both sides of everything. But we have only one mouth. We were meant to listen twice as much as we talk. Listen! In West Africa I found myself in the lighter-skinned minority. Yet, in Ghana, color did not define whether a person was avoided or accepted. Other things came into play-tribal origin, language, economic status - but race was not the be-all and end-all it had seemed to be in America. To this day, one of the first things we notice about a person in the United States is the color of their skin, especially if they look African. The old Ewe fisherman sat with me on a log by the Gulf of Guinea. Together we looked at the old slave fort where so many left this shore in chains. "We thought the Yevus, the white men, were taking us to eat," he said. "Why were they so hungry for us?" How did Africans come to be in America? And how could, and can, we ignore this nation's responsibility for the aftermath of slavery? Until we come to terms with this part of our shared history, we cannot put racial bias behind us. "This Earth," an Onondaga Clan Mother said, "is our mother. A child does not own her mother. She cares for her." How can we speak of civil rights without remembering the right of the natural world to exist? What good will civil rights do us if we cannot breathe the air or drink the water? In the next 40 years, unless we turn things around drastically, the degradation of our biosphere will accelerate. Our mother earth is sacred, the source of all life for us and the generation to come. I flinched as the huge metal door of Comstock Prison clanged shut behind me. I had 13 more doors to pass through before I reached the classroom. The gray-haired African American inmate mopping the floor looked up at me, looked back at the door, and smiled. "That's just steel, boy," he said. Then he patted his chest. 'What's in here is stronger." Working in America's prisons taught me how easy it is to demonize others. Most of my students were African American or Hispanic, imprisoned for drug-related crimes. Most were from poor families, uneducated, survivors of abuse. Despite disadvantage, their intellectual hunger and their desire to find a better way were so strong that I was never afraid among convicted felons. People in prison are like anyone else. Some are good, some are not, and some are changing in one direction or the other. Yet American popular culture uses stereotypes to describe those we do not understand. Because we do not understand them we fear them. Because politicians use that fear for their own advantage, we build more prisons instead of accepting that there are usually cheaper, more effective alternatives to putting human beings in cages. And putting someone in jail does not imprison just one person. The innocent family of that man or woman or child is imprisoned emotionally, economically, and socially. The unchecked growth of prison populations in America affects us all. How can this nation be free with a larger percentage of its population behind bars than anywhere else in the world? "What do you do with guilt?" my Cheyenne friend said. He held up his hand. "If you have a cup of water and that water goes bad, what do you do with it?" He turned his hand over and smiled. "Pour it out." Some solutions to our problems are so simple no one seems to listen to them. Acknowledging the errors of the past does not mean burying yourself in guilt. We need to see causes and outcomes, not just present dilemmas. Intolerance is rooted in ignorance. Crime is the child of poverty and abuse. Life is not just a human right but a right of all the living things. We are interdependent. Education is the heart of it. With unbiased education there are options and opportunity to understand. If in the next four decades we can acknowledge more than one side of our history and educate all those who need education, then we, in the years to come, may fill our cups with the good water of peace. Dr. Joseph Bruchac is the award-winning author of more than 60 books of fiction and fact for adults and children, and his poems, stories, and articles have appeared in more than 500 publications. An editor as well, he is founder and Co-director with his wife, Carol, of the Greenfield Review Literary Center and the Greenfield Review Press. Robert N. Butler Back in 1968 1 was prompted to coin the term "ageism." Stormy neighborhood opposition had arisen against the purchase of an apartment building in Washington as public housing for residents who would be old, poor, and many black. As chairman of the District of Columbia Advisory Committee on Aging I was involved in the acquiring of public housing for older people, and I was asked by a Washington Post reporter if the opposition to the purchase of the building in the particular neighborhood resulted from racism. In reply, I attributed the opposition more to "ageism." Then I defined the new term: "Ageism can be seen as a systematic stereotyping of and discrimination against people because they are old, just as racism and sexism accomplish this with skin color and gender. Old people are categorized as senile, rigid in thought and manner, old-fashioned in morality and skills... . Ageism allows the younger generation to see older people as different from themselves, thus they subtly cease to identify with their elders as human beings." In the ensuing years, there has been a steady improvement in attitudes toward older people, in part due to increased media attention, better public education, and the growth of gerontology. Age discrimination, however, still occurs. In the important areas of work and health care, it is common. The corporate downsizing and early retirement buyouts in the last decade have cost many Americans in mid-life and beyond their jobs, some of whom did not want to retire, some of whom could not afford to retire. Today the average retirement age is about 61. Although the Age Discrim-ination in Employment Act has provided a mechanism to fight workplace ageism since 1967, success has been quite limited. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission statistics for 1996, as an example, show that only 2.6 percent of the complaints were resolved by settlement, while about 90 percent were dismissed. Often a year or more passes before the investigation of a complaint begins. We need to change public mindsets about the value of older people as workers and as contributors to their families and communities. It is poor public policy to have 40 million people exiled from the workforce through either retirement or unemployment. Disability rates are declining among older people, who now on average have a longer active life expectancy. Society must find effective ways to maintain older people's productive contribution to society. The next century should see further increases in vigorous, healthy life expectancy. When the baby boomer generation begins turning 65, one of every five Americans will be 65 and older. That will be a powerful voting bloc, and baby boomers may significantly transform society's conception of old age. As for health care, Medicare should be preserved, and it and care in general should be made more responsive to the needs of older people. Although older people have benefited a great deal from Medicare, it is not well designed to meet their needs. Not geriatrics-oriented, it is geared toward covering acute care needs rather than chronic or long-term care needs. Despite most patients being older people, few American doctors are even exposed to geriatrics training. In general, physicians do not invest the same amount of time with elderly patients as with younger patients. Doctors question why they should bother treating certain problems in older patients. Some even withhold reasonable treatment because of a patient's advanced age. The fear of aging is undoubtedly at the root of discrimination against the old. While progress against age discrimination has been made, our fears about aging are so deep that ageism will probably never be totally eradicated. That is why we must maintain vigilance against denial of care or income on the basis of age. Dr. Robert N. Butler is Director of the International Longevity Center and Professor of Geriatrics and Adult Development at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. Jorge Chapa The rapid growth of the Latino population of the United States is a key feature of the American landscape in the last part of the 20th century. During the 1970s, the Latino population grew by 57 percent. During the 1980s, it grew by 54 percent. These rates stand in sharp contrast to the rates for the Anglo (white non-Latino) population, which grew by I percent during the '70s and 4 percent during the '80s. About half the recent growth in the Latino population is due to natural increase; that is, their birth rate is higher than their death rate. In fact, the Latino population would have grown rapidly even if the number of Latino immigrants had been zero during that period. Immigration was responsible for the other half of the recent population growth. The magnitude of recent migration and the rapid population growth are the motivation driving many of the recent efforts to restrict the civil rights of Latinos. Although the current efforts to stem Latino civil rights are mainly reactions to recent immigration, Latino civil rights have faced severe restrictions since a large part of Mexican territory was annexed in the 1840s. Many of the Latino landowners were victims of illegal land grabs by the Anglo immigrants to the western, who used physical and political intimidation, Many Anglos of that period explicitly considered Latinos to be an "inferior" race. The Mexican-origin residents of Texas were subject to prejudice and contempt, as David Montejano has shown in his 1987 book 'Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836. 1986." That ignominious beginning of restricted Latino civil rights in the United States was the foundation for other gross civil rights violations in the 20th century such as blocked access to the ballot box, de jure segregation into inferior schools, residential segregation, and widespread employment discrimination, again as displayed by Montejano and others. Such violations of Latino civil rights are not only part of our past. Recent social science research provides strong evidence of discrimination against Latinos. For example, a study printed in the September 1993 Social Science Quarterly found that while Hispanic judges gave similar sentences to Anglo and Hispanic convicts, Anglo judges gave much severer sentences to Hispanics than to Anglos. As other examples, a number of matched-pair "audits" where Anglos and Latinos with substantively identical credentials applied for jobs, housing, or mortgage loans convincingly showed a high degree of discrimination against Latinos, as reported in the 1993 study "Clear and Convincing Evidence: Measurement of Discrimination in America," published by the Urban Institute Press, and a June 1994 article in the American Economic Review. Those audit studies were conducted because of the well-founded fear that sanctions imposed by the 1986 Immigration and Control Act against employers who hired undocumented immigrants would also make employers reluctant to hire Latinos who were U.S. citizens or documented residents. The fact that Latinos have faced restricted civil rights through much of their history in the United States and that they currently are subject to racial discrimination would be reason enough to be pessimistic about Latino civil rights in the next century. But there is more. Recent initiatives, court cases, and laws are likely further to restrict Latino rights. The first of these is California's Proposition 187 passed in 1994, intended to deny government services to undocumented immigrants. While Proposition 187 was targeted against undocumented immigrants, there can be no doubt that its blunderbuss impact has hit Latinos who are citizens or documented residents as well. Robert D. Hershey, in an April 2 7, 1995 New York Times article reporting a sharp increase in Latino unemployment rates shortly after the passage of Proposition 187, noted: "Many Latino workers are held back by outmoded skills, job inexperience and weaker educational credentials. But these days they are also finding themselves increasingly subject to intense suspicion, resentment and, in many cases, outright discrimination." He quotes San Diego Deputy Mayor Juan Vargas: "There's no doubt that discrimination has increased against Latinos. Proposition 187 has created almost a crisis in the Latino community. It has employers panicked." Since California has about 30 percent of the Latinos in the United States, the State proposition could well have an impact on national Latino employment statistics. California has also led the way against equal access to higher education of Latinos and other minorities, first in the decision by the University of California Regents to end their affirmative action programs and then by the recent passage of Proposition 209 ending affirmative action programs in all State institutions. The number of minority students in many higher education programs has already dropped drastically. A quarter of the U.S. Latino population resides in Texas. There the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court's Hopwood decision, banning the consideration of race in higher education admissions and financial aid decisions, has also decimated minority enrollments. Efforts to bring similar suits in all regions of the U.S. are under way. My studies demonstrate that Latinos, even with the enhanced opportunities offered by affirmative action, have not been attaining educational, economic, or occupational parity with Anglos despite having been in this country for many generations. Even Latinos who are the U.S. born children of U.S. born parents have extremely high dropout and failure rates. Until local, State, and national leaders are willing to acknowledge and address these facts, policy interventions that can mold a better future for Latinos seem unlikely. Still, Latino demographics lend this cloud a silver lining: As the population and voting prowess of Latinos continue to grow during the next century, politicians and other decision makers may well begin paying better attention to Latino civil rights. Dr. Jorge Chapa is an associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin. Harry Edwards The problem of the 21st century will be the problem of diversity in all of its expanding variations and complexities. Domestically, black-white relations will continue to be at the core of the American human relations drama if for no other reason than the two groups have traveled so far and so long together locked in a network of mutuality and competing interest. Diversity more generally, however, will increasingly occupy center stage not only in the United States but in international affairs as well. Indeed, by comparison to the burgeoning problems of diversity, the problem of the color line may well appear in retrospect to be far less complicated and intractable - a daunting notion considering the fact that it has only been with the greatest of difficulty that we have managed to stagger and stumble forward in dealing with race alone over the course of the 20th century. Here at home, among the most powerful and relentless factors influencing a shift toward a focus upon racial and ethnic diversity have been the mass media. Together with other communications technologies, they have provided the most effective dissemination of images and interpretations of changing intergroup relations in the history of this Nation. Meanwhile, dramatic population changes have utterly reconfigured the human face and profile of America, making it increasingly impossible to even pretend that black-white relations effectively exhaust the principal challenges of intergroup relations in this society. Within 30 years, one in every three people in the United States will be a member of one of America's least assimilated racial or ethnic minorities. Many of these groups, either singularly or in multi-ethnic combination, will outpace blacks and whites relative to proportionate population increase over the next 40 years. While collectively white ethnic populations will increase by 24.8 percent over that period and blacks will increase by 68.3 percent, Hispanic (or Latino) populations will increase by 186.8 percent and Americans belonging to other minority racial and ethnic groups. Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and others-together will register a 78.7 percent population increase. By the year 2050 only 53 percent of the U.S. population will be composed of traditional white ethnic groups. Expanding racial and ethnic diversity constitutes only the most obvious dimension of challenges already well this side of the social-political horizon. Both within and between groups, differences in class, gender, age, religion, sexuality, and even such emerging classifications as technoclass status (or relative level of technological literacy) will increasingly cross-cut racial and ethnic categories, at once confounding and eroding the credibility of any singular and unmitigated emphasis upon race and ethnicity as defining group features. (For example, within black society we will never again be able to presume that dealing with the racial problem automatically addresses also the array of problems confronting black women. A great deal of what happens to black women happens to them not because they are black but because they are women and much of this happens at the hands of black men. We must now, at long last, deal with this situation as a condition impeding black freedom no less than racism.) These developments portend an end to established traditions of group identity and solidarity and the majority-minority relationships that have been fostered. They also promise alteration of expectations and standards of conduct and operations in virtually every realm of American institutional life, from the media, the economy, and education to medicine, law enforcement, and popular culture. Globally, over the last half of the 20th century in particular, geopolitical and technological developments have greatly altered the character of diversity and its significance as a factor in human affairs. With the demise of European colonialism in the wake of World War 11 and, more recently, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent end of the Cold War, long standing interethnic rivalries, tensions, and animosities that had been suppressed by dent of powerful centralized bureaucracies and military might have been loosed, too often to evolve toward deadly, even genocidal outcomes. The sheer numbers of demographic and political fractures potentially exposed are bewildering. Throughout the world there are some 3,500 population groups that describe themselves as nations while only about 189 such groups are actually recognized as nation states by the international community. Of these 189 nation states less than 10 percent are ethnically homogenous, and only half have one ethnic group that accounts for as much as 75 percent of their populations. In Africa a thousand different ethnic and language groups are squeezed into 50 or so recognized states. Within the collapsed political orbit of the former Soviet Union it is estimated that there are at least 125 ethnic and minority disputes simmering, with about 25 of these classified as potentially armed confrontations. In the international sphere, as the only remaining super power the United States clearly has the economic, political, and military capacities to project its power globally. But in a media saturated, computerized world its moral authority to influence global affairs will become increasingly linked to domestic human relations developments. As Zbigniew Brzezinski points out in his book "Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century," power capacity in the absence of moral authority is impotent. And nothing will have so great an impact upon determining the world's vision of America's moral authority to influence global developments as this Nation's handling of its own diversity-related problems. And so as we approach the 21st century, the alternatives confronting us as a society are clear. Either we can permit South Central Los Angeles and Oklahoma City, among other tragedies, to become harbingers of our future, or we can commit ourselves and our resources to creating a society with neither the isolation, material fetishism, and spiritual sterility of the suburbs and privileged gated enclaves, nor the desolation, material deprivation, and spiritual degradation of the inner cities and other alienated and dispossessed backwaters of our society. The wealth of energy, creativity, and talent potential inherent in our treasure trove of human diversity will either propel this Nation to hitherto unprecedented heights of purpose, possibility, and productivity or drag us all down into an ever-deepening spiral of social-political madness toward a national nervous breakdown. In sum, we are compelled to seek seriously and earnestly to resolve the riddle of this Nation's motto, E Pluribus Unum (one from many), not in pursuit of some abstract noble sentiment but in pragmatic recognition that unity within the context of our expanding diversity has now become an absolute necessity of social-cultural viability and national integrity. Dr Harry Edwards is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of four books and numerous a

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