Clinton's Race Initiative: Recasting the American Dilemma

Abstract

President Clinton's Initiative on Race (1997-1998) was widely dismissed as empty political grandstanding. This article argues that the initiative actually bore an historical significance which observers have overlooked: it dramatically reformulated the American race problem at the dawn of the new century. We can see this clearly if we compare the race initiative to the two most important "moments" in official race discourse earlier in the twentieth century: Myrdal's American Dilemma (1944) and the Kerner Commission report (1968). Myrdal's work defined a postwar liberal orthodoxy on race that, first, denied the existence of intrinsic racial/cultural differences between Blacks and Whites, and second, identified White racism or prejudice as the most important barrier to Black advancement in American society. A generation later, the Kerner Commission report sustained this orthodoxy while shifting attention from individual racism to institutionalized racism, in keeping with the times. Then, thirty years later, Clinton's race initiative repudiated this liberal orthodoxy, essentializing racial/cultural differences and arguing that the race problem consisted not of White racism but of the threat these differences posed to national unity. This recasting of the American Dilemma reflected two major ideological developments of the post-civil rights era: the growing liberal-conservative consensus on the need to move beyond a focus on racism and race in public policy and the spread of multiculturalist ideas and rhetoric. The long-term implications of this recasting of the race issue remain to be seen.