Race Relations and the President’s Backyard Summit
- Aug 3, 2009 -
The July 16 arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., by Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley might have remained a local issue if President Barack Obama had not made what appeared to be an offhand comment about the incident in a press conference. In an attempt to make the incident a “teachable moment” for the nation, the president invited the pair to the White House to join him and the vice-president for a discussion of the dispute over, unfortunately, alcoholic drinks. The White House lawn event prompted the Tennessean newspaper to ask several area citizens their views on race relations in 2009.
We’ve excerpted a few of Richard Land’s answers here:
How does race affect your daily life?
RICHARD LAND: As head of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, which deals with racial reconciliation as part of its ministry assignment, I deal with racial reconciliation issues on a weekly and sometimes daily basis as questions come from Southern Baptist individuals, churches, associations and state conventions. I’m delighted to say that after the passage of our Racial Reconciliation resolution in 1995, where the ERLC led the Convention to apologize for past racism and bigotry and to ask for the forgiveness of our African-American brothers and sisters, we have seen tremendous growth in the number of African-Americans who are participating in Southern Baptist life. We have gone from 337,000 African-American Southern Baptists in 1995 to 885,000 African-American Southern Baptists in 2008, which is a 162 percent increase. Of course, it’s impossible to live as an American in our society without having race as a component of one’s life, in that it has always been the serpent in our American Eden. If America has a national original sin, it is our treatment of Native Americans and African-Americans from the beginning of settlement of this continent.
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Have you ever felt you were “profiled’‘ by police or other authorities based on race?
LAND: Yes, absolutely. Christmas vacation 1966, I was on my way home from Princeton University to Houston. I was traveling with three other Princeton students (two white fellow Houstonians and one African-American student from New Orleans). In other words, three white guys and a black guy in a car with New Jersey plates traveling through Mississippi in December 1966. We picked up a tail from the state highway patrol two miles inside the border after entering Mississippi from the east, and they tailed us all the way across the state up to and, including a highway patrolman, questioning us while we were filling our car with gas in Meridian. We certainly felt profiled as the policemen asked us where we were going and if we planned to stop for anything other than gas or a meal in Mississippi. I later found out that it was state policy at the time to follow any cars with passengers of more than one race, particularly if they had northern license plates. I was shocked, angered, and couldn’t believe this was happening in the United States of America.
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Have you ever heard race-based jokes? How does the race of the person telling the joke affect your reaction?
LAND: Yes, unfortunately, I have. I never thought they were funny, but came under conviction as a high school student in 1963 after having heard Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” that silence was not a sufficient reaction and that I should never by my silence let anyone misinterpret that for agreement or toleration of such jokes. Consequently, since that time, I have confronted people of all ethnicities who tell such jokes. It doesn’t make any difference to me the race of the person telling the joke. Racial jokes aren’t funny.
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Is affirmative action still needed, or do such policies simply need to be retooled for today’s society?
LAND: I believe affirmative action has run its course in American society and that it is now counterproductive to that which it seeks to achieve. Affirmative action exacerbates racism and prejudice when people (whites) are discriminated against in promotion and admission practices because of the past racial sins of their fathers and grandfathers — sins for which they are not responsible. When people are discriminated against because they are white, it exacerbates racial tensions. The controversy over the recent New Hampshire firefighters case (Ricci v. DeStefano) illustrates this point vividly.
Second, affirmative action largely neutralizes the most effective weapons against prejudice, which is performance and excellence. When African-Americans and other minorities are promoted or admitted to prestigious schools in the wake of affirmative action, it is all too often assumed they are admitted or promoted under different and lower standards than the majority-white community. They may, and often do, have the best test scores or the best performance reviews, but in the wake of affirmative action, it is too often assumed that race was a contributing factor to their promotion or admission. This vitiates performance and excellence as weapons against prejudice. As Chief Justice John Roberts so succinctly and eloquently stated last year in a Supreme Court case, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” If the goal is a truly, post-racial, multi-racial society, then we have to at some point, as a society, declare that discrimination is always wrong.
We encourage you to read the Leading voices on civil rights break down how we arrived at White House ‘beer summit’ article in its entirety on the Tennessean’s Web site.
Further Learning
Learn more about: Citizenship, Racial Reconciliation, Social Issues