Clear Signals

Six weeks ago the Reagan administration faced one of its most embarrassing controversies when it announced that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would no longer deny tax exempt status to religious schools practicing racial discrimination. It was certainly an important issue. Many of these "Christian" schools are nothing more than fronts to avoid racially integrated public schools. Any public subsidy to such institutions is contrary to even the most limited notions of fairness. It was particularly unsettling to see churches asking the state for assistance in carrying out such un-Christian policies.

But the segregation academies issue was also significant in the same way that the tip of an iceberg is. It was a relatively small, visible indication of something very big and dangerous just below the surface.

Reagan's response to the widespread criticism of the school tax decision was predictable. He back-pedaled on the issue and then tried to divert the political heat to Congress by claiming that what he really meant was that legislation was needed to legitimate the IRS policy. This was not true. The prohibition of tax exempt status for segregation academies was mandated by federal court interpretations of existing statutes. And the four-day gap between the two announcements casts further doubt on this rationale.

But the real substance of Reagan's defense against charges of racism was to trot out his greatest asset, his congenial personality. He earnestly insisted at a press conference that he has always been on the side of black people. When Attorney General William French Smith was testifying before a Senate committee regarding the Voting Rights Act several days later he said that blacks should trust the administration's intentions because, "The president does not have a discriminatory bone in his body."

The recent past gives us reason to fear that much of the public will accept these statements at face value. It is understandable. We would all like to think that our president is not a bigot. Unfortunately there is little in his public record to support these assertions of private virtue.

Reagan has been called the "communicator-in-chief." He understands the power of political code words and symbolism better than any politician in recent memory. He knows the danger of "sending the wrong kind of signal," especially to the Russians. Yet for some time now the president has been sending the wrong kind of signal to black Americans. The segregation academies decision was just one of the more blatant examples.

During his 1980 campaign Reagan sent a clear signal when he traveled to Neshoba County, Mississippi, and gave a speech drenched in the code language of "states rights." As president-elect he sent a signal to blacks with his practically all-white list of appointees. In the first year of his presidency the message came in the form of the near elimination of affirmative action requirements for government contractors, and later the announcement that the Justice Department would oppose even voluntary affirmative action programs in the private sector.

The new general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission has said that he plans to stop using class action lawsuits to combat job discrimination and to stop pursuing equal pay for equal work cases entirely. In foreign policy, black Americans have received a clear signal from the administration's friendly posture toward the white supremacist regime in South Africa and the treatment given Haitian refugees. Black people also hear something in the callous attitude of the president and his aides toward black unemployment, which has risen from 12 per cent to a record high 17 per cent in Reagan's first year.

The number one item on the black political agenda this year is the extension of the Voting Rights Act. On this issue Reagan has waffled back and forth several times. At present he is backing an amendment to the act that would require the Justice Department to prove that unfair election practices were intentionally designed to be discriminatory, rather than just proving that racial discrimination resulted. The extreme legal difficulty of proving intent could gut the law's authority.

The signal these policies are sending to black people is that Ronald Reagan is not their friend. Of course all this doesn't prove that the president is personally a bigoted man. What the record does prove, however, is that his private attitudes are beside the point.

Reagan's approach in matters of racial justice, as in economics, is to reduce everything to isolated transactions between individuals. This is essentially an attempt to escape from history, to abdicate human responsibility for the powerful economic, political, cultural, and spiritual forces that form and feed the racist impulse in people and societies. This approach denies the fundamental fact of individual and collective sin in relations between white and black people past and present.

The biblical tradition teaches us that we cannot escape from history; rather we must align ourselves with God's purposes of liberation and justice. For more than 200 years of U.S. history, the white churches' greatest shame has been their silence in the face of racism against blacks, Native American Indians, and other minority groups. At the same time, some of the churches' best moments have come when black and white Christians have disengaged themselves from that racist legacy and joined together to demand justice. It is clear that the years ahead will require a revival of that spirit.

Danny Collum was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.