Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

408 // MICHAEL WALZER
Like other identified and committed minority groups in American society,
Blacks and Jews need political and economic integration. They need all the
benefits that come from full participation in the political system and in the market,
for these are places where recognition is won and resources—power and
wealth—are accumulated. Separatism in these spheres is self-defeating and silly.
I don't mean to argue against Black shops in Black neighborhoods, only to insist
that that can't be the ultimate ambition of Blacks in the economy. Similarly, a
handful of representatives from gerrymandered congressional districts can't be the
ultimate ambition of Blacks in the political system. Jews have done better in both
places, and it was that success that we hoped in the '60s, and still hope, Blacks
will repeat.
Affirmative action was and is a program for integration, and it is largely for
that reason that it has had so much support from Jews, even though the collective
memory of discriminatory quotas predisposes Jews to oppose it (and many Jewish
neoconservatives have in fact opposed it, claiming to speak—though they don't
speak—for the community as a whole). The aim of affirmative action is to overcome
the kinds of political and economic isolation forced on American Blacks by
centuries of prejudice—to bring them in, as Jews and white ethnic immigrants have
come in, to the larger American society. The programs are remedial in nature and,
since they carry political and moral costs, they were originally conceived as temporary,
founded on the hope that integration can be made a self-sustaining
process. If that hope turns out to be unfounded, other or additional egalitarian
strategies will have to be tried. In any case, success is measured by integration:
the presence of Blacks in significant numbers in political assemblies and government
agencies, in entrepreneurial activities, in the professions, and in managerial
ranks that are all, given American demography, predominantly white.
But all this says nothing about cultural assimilation. Many (but not all)
Jewish activists in the civil rights movement were opposed to assimilation for the
Jews—and never supported it for Blacks either. Historically, indeed, multiculturalism
is a Jewish idea, first defended, under the name of "cultural pluralism,"
by the American-Jewish social theorist Horace Kallen in the 'teens and 'twenties
of this century. Kallen was arguing against the melting pot theory of American
culture, which he identified with European nation-statism, in favor of a new
world of ethnic and religious diversity. That is still my position today. Blacks and
Jews will have to decide for themselves the extent to which they maintain separate
social and cultural institutions. But the success of any form of cultural independence
in the United States today requires resources that can only be accumulated
through political and economic integration.
Consider the hospitals, day care centers, nursing homes, family services,
schools, and cultural societies run by the Jewish community today (and also by
Catholics, Lutherans, and so on). These are paid for in part by fees, in part by philanthropic
funds raised in the community, and in part by government money in
the form of entitlements and matching grants. American Blacks are not at present