J. Harvie Wilkinson III voices concern about the United States. "At present we are not doing well," he writes in his new book. "Our civil rights laws are courting racial separation at the very moment we should be seeking national unity. We have started down the road of ethnic division just as our multicultural future is taking shape."
Wilkinson, who is chief judge of the U.S. Fourth District Court of Appeals, outlines his ideas in a brilliant and thought provoking treatise, One Nation Indivisible: How Ethnic Separatism Threatens America, (Addison Wesley, $24).
Today, more Americans are descended from the 48 million who immigrated here since 1790 than those who lived in the U.S. before that date. Wilkinson criticizes the "pessimists (who) subtly seek to define Americans by the color of their skin." He's critical of those who would leave America as a mostly white island in a world growing increasingly interconnected and interracial.
Optimists assume the future will be just like the past. But Wilkinson says both optimists and pessimists see just part of the picture, each ignoring the "challenges of a new country in a new century." This new country of America presents challenges and dangers we are ill prepared to meet.
We can no longer cling to the old idea of white majority, black minority, he states firmly. Wilkinson believes that setting a goal of tolerance or coexistence surrenders to a separatist vision of America. Stating that we cannot understand one another with interacting, making racial integration "indispensable to achieving it."
He sees a major role for law in leading Americans to integration, but notes that law "cannot march them there." There's no questioning how important Wilkinson believes this is, as he states that racial separatism represents a threat to concepts of nation and citizenship, "More serious than any threat the country has faced since the Civil War ... Efforts to revitalize urban America are essential ... because fellow Americans suffer the acute consequences of urban decay. But what matters is their deprived state, not whether the deprived happen to be white or brown or black."
Wilkinson avers that discrimination can be conquered only by condemning it in every instance. He has no tolerance, however, for a separatist education, stating emphatically that a shared command of the English language "enables Americans to interact as one nation rather than as a collectivity of enclaves," giving short shrift to the notion of Ebonics or schools that teach in languages other than English. "To subvert this tie will weaken our Republic's very foundation."
The Virginia-based judge deserves the highest praise for having produced an important book that clearly and wisely assesses a danger and proposes a course of action that seems thoroughly convincing for America in the coming decades.
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