The Audacity of Hope

considered middle class has grown by more than 70 percent. In their hopes and
expectations, these black and Latino workers are largely indistinguishable from their
white counterparts. They are the people who make our economy run and our democracy
flourish—the teachers, mechanics, nurses, computer technicians, assembly-line workers,
bus drivers, postal workers, store managers, plumbers, and repairmen who constitute
America’s vital heart.
And yet, for all the progress that’s been made in the past four decades, a stubborn gap
remains between the living standards of black, Latino, and white workers. The average
black wage is 75 percent of the average white wage; the average Latino wage is 71
percent of the average white wage. Black median net worth is about $6,000, and Latino
median net worth is about $8,000, compared to $88,000 for whites. When laid off from
their job or confronted with a family emergency, blacks and Latinos have less savings to
draw on, and parents are less able to lend their children a helping hand. Even middleclass
blacks and Latinos pay more for insurance, are less likely to own their own homes,
and suffer poorer health than Americans as a whole. More minorities may be living the
American dream, but their hold on that dream remains tenuous.
How we close this persistent gap—and how much of a role government should play in
achieving that goal—remains one of the central controversies of American politics. But
there should be some strategies we can all agree on. We might start with completing the
unfinished business of the civil rights movement—namely, enforcing nondiscrimination
laws in such basic areas as employment, housing, and education. Anyone who thinks
that such enforcement is no longer needed should pay a visit to one of the suburban
office parks in their area and count the number of blacks employed there, even in the
relatively unskilled jobs, or stop by a local trade union hall and inquire as to the number
of blacks in the apprenticeship program, or read recent studies showing that real estate
brokers continue to steer prospective black homeowners away from predominantly
white neighborhoods. Unless you live in a state without many black residents, I think
you’ll agree that something’s amiss.
Under recent Republican Administrations, such enforcement of civil rights laws has
been tepid at best, and under the current Administration, it’s been essentially
nonexistent—unless one counts the eagerness of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights
Division to label university scholarship or educational enrichment programs targeted at
minority students as “reverse discrimination,” no matter how underrepresented minority
students may be in a particular institution or field, and no matter how incidental the
program’s impact on white students.
This should be a source of concern across the political spectrum, even to those who
oppose affirmative action. Affirmative action programs, when properly structured, can
open up opportunities otherwise closed to qualified minorities without diminishing
opportunities for white students. Given the dearth of black and Latino Ph.D. candidates
in mathematics and the physical sciences, for example, a modest scholarship program
for minorities interested in getting advanced degrees in these fields (a recent target of a
Justice Department inquiry) won’t keep white students out of such programs, but can
broaden the pool of talent that America will need for all of us to prosper in a
technology-based economy. Moreover, as a lawyer who’s worked on civil rights cases, I
can say that where there’s strong evidence of prolonged and systematic discrimination