On Monday, interested members of the Oberlin community assembled in Finney Chapel to hear Christopher Edley, Jr. deliver the fourth address in the 2001-02 Convocation Series. Edley, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-director of the university’s Civil Rights Project, gave a speech that focused on the evolving problem of race in America.
In contemporary politics, Edley said, affirmative action has become a lightning rod, attracting those who resist the changes in race relations of the last 40 years as well as those who support further change for the future. Edley said that affirmative action was never meant to be a social band-aid. It was only designed to help the small portion of people already situated on the verge of achieving employment and higher education. “[Affirmative action] doesn’t do anything for the people who aren’t prepared to walk through the door,” he said, calling the current debate over the issue, “a moral Rorschach test for where our society is, where our politics are.”
In addition to his positions at Harvard, Edley is also a member of the National Commission on Election Reform, led by former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, and the US Civil Rights Commission. Edley is the author of Not All Black & White: Affirmative Action, Race and American Values, and is currently working on a new book based on his experiences as a policymaker during the Clinton administration. He often returned to this experience throughout his speech, recalling numerous difficulties in forming policy on racial issues.
“One thing I learned [as an advisor to Clinton] during the ’90s [was that] the binding constraint is the absence of the moral and political will to [implement] an idea that we’re pretty sure would work,” Edley said.
“[The race problem] is not rocket science. Rocket science is easy,” Edley said. “Race is 400 years and counting, older than the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — old, deep, hard stuff.” Edley argued that the legacy of slavery persists to the present day, from gaping disparities in inherited wealth among races to the “more complicated and more subtle” forms of discrimination revealed by “matched pair studies.” “Affirmative action,” he said, “remains a needed tool in order to get where we need to go.”
Edley began his address, entitled “Affirmative Action and American Values,” by reading several passages from Martin Luther King’s 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom. King wrote that segregationists had accused leaders of the Civil Rights movement of creating a crisis in race relations, when in reality they had revealed an underlying one. Similarly, Edley said, minority activists today are liable to be blamed for bringing “the race card” into an issue implicitly connected to race.
Edley admitted that he had allowed the climate of his youth, when victories in civil rights occurred one after another, to combine with his own lack of historical knowledge to instill in him a false hope for the future of race relations. “I mistakenly believed that there was a certain inevitability to the triumph of American values,” he said.
Amy Levin-Epstein, co-vice president for the Class of 2002, presented her own remarks before Edley spoke. “Professor Edley gave a powerful presentation on the difficult issue of affirmative action,” Levin-Epstein said. “Having prominent and provocative speakers like Edley is important to the intellectual vitality of Oberlin.”
Last semester, Oberlin students formed a coalition in support of legislative affirmative action measures. Many of these students applauded Edley’s presence on campus, a few questioning what they saw as scant publicity for the talk. “I wasn’t surprised because I know Nancy Dye as a huge supporter of affirmative action. What was surprising was that they barely publicized it, which says something about competence, or priorities,” junior and Oberlin Coalition for Affirmative Action organizer Nick Stahelin said.
Edley concluded with a call for supporters of affirmative action to engage their ideological opponents in the debate. “Community doesn’t happen by accident; transformative experiences don’t happen by accident.” Instead of “choir practice,” where citizens discuss politics with people like themselves who are likely to have the same beliefs, Edley challenged the audience to engage in “missionary practice: practice communicating with people whose experiences and values are different from our own.”