Race and the Simpson verdict.

In the days following the Simpson verdict there was a lot of talk about what this decision revealed about the relationship between black and white people in the United States. The more I think about it, even following the Million Man March, the more I have concluded not much. But it highlights something that is not likely to change soon. Race is still a deep problem in America, one too deep for any governmental policy to fix. At the same time, America is one of the few countries that even bothers to see the problem, or to care deeply about trying to change things. It's rough being black in America, but try being a Turk in Germany or an Algerian Arab in France, or a gypsy in any part of Europe. Only in England could a racist sort like Enoch Powell be dealt with respectfully. How terrible for the home of kidney pie to have to deal with jerk chicken! At least in the United States we take our own pulse enough to know that we are sick, and we occasionally try to take steps to move things in another direction.

That patriotic declaration out of the way, we are a terrible mess. Any American, white or black, who reflects about it can come up with dozens of anecdotes. When I was very small, there were restaurant signs in my hometown of Springfield, Illinois--home of Abraham Lincoln-which said: "We reserve the right to seat our patrons." That meant we will not seat blacks. I remember the deep embarrassment of having to respond to people like the young black man who, when I was in college, talked to me about the strip-tease he liked to go to because all the strippers were white; as well as with black people who were bothered when some people in their families dated or married other people who were too black.

A black student at the seminary I attended was stopped once by the police because a bank had been robbed down the street. He answered the description of the robber: black, white shirt and tie, small black case. The police were polite; they took him to the bank, and the teller said that he was not the robber. He told me later-this was post-rodney King--"Thank God we weren't in L.A.!" He felt he had been dealt with fairly, since in fact he was one of the few people in this Westchester suburb who answered the description. He was also routinely stopped by white cops on upstate highways and the streets of New York: he "fits a profile." I can't help noticing that a disproportionate number of the drivers I see stopped by the police are black or Hispanic, and since everyone in New York drives insanely, this is strange to me.

A woman told me that she did not approve of interracial marriage. I asked her if she meant us-my wife is Asian-and she said, "I don't mean that." Asians, she explained, are really white.

Race of this absolutely black-and-white sort is an American invention, no doubt contrived originally to justify making human beings property. It has had a perverse resonance in the Afro-centric studies that make of any Egyptian or North African a black, so that Egyptian culture is seen as totally African, Saint Augustine is African, etc.--and of course, in some continental sense this is true, but irrelevant. What ought to amaze us is the lack of any reference to ideas like "race," used in its modern sense, in the ancient world. Nation and culture mattered, as color did occasionally, but relatively little was mentioned in ancient literature, except in the most fleeting way, about what has become race for us. It is not an ancient and overwhelming reality, but a modem sickness, for the most part invented to justify the form of slavery which was an aftermath of the discovery of the world, with its odd questions about th, real humanity of Indians and Africans.

Our problem is compounded by the current political debate over affirmative action. Though I am as bothered as anyone by numerical quotas based on race, and find it hard to see that the daughter of a black physician is disadvantaged as compared to the son of a white sharecropper, I'm afraid that some people really believe that we would have a "level playing field" if only affirmative action were abolished. The progress made by many black Americans during the past several decades is the result almost entirely of aggressive affirmative-action policies.

The proposal to base affirmative action on class rather than race makes some sense, I think, and will almost certainly go nowhere, because America's dirty little secret, one that lies beneath much of the discussion on race, is class. Gennifer Flowers wasn't taken as seriously as Anita Hill, partly because she seemed like white trash. Relatively few white people would mind living next door to a black dentist or tenured math teacher, but they don't want to live next door to a young black guy who walks with a deliberate limp and carries a boom box, and neither does the black dentist. Fear of the underclass is the subtext to a lot of what passes for discussion on racial issues, but because this involves economic inequality it is not likely to be addressed seriously by either the Democrats or Republicans.

This may be the best argument for a Colin Powell presidency. If he ran as a Republican he could help revive the moderate-to-liberal wing of the party. If he ran as an independent he could frighten both parties, and that would be nice to see. And as the only black man in American history who could conceivably be elected president, he would have a resonance which would be symbolically more important for America than the election of Kennedy was for Catholics. As bad as anti-catholicism has been, racism has been America's deepest sin from the start, and symbols are essential here, and go to depths that political policies can't touch.