Dean's gently blunt talk about race
Derrick Z. Jackson, New York Times News Service. Derrick Z. Jackson is a syndicated columnist based in BostonPublished January 5, 2004CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Howard Dean said "I'm trying to gently call out the white population." His genteel example was a story he tells to voters about how as governor of Vermont, his chief of staff was always a woman. After two or three years, Dean noticed that she had created a "matriarchy" in the office. When the chief of staff was going to hire a new person, Dean said, he told her, "`I notice we have a gender imbalance in the office, and I wonder if you could find a man?' She said it's really hard to find a qualified man. I got everybody laughing about that."
That is Dean's icebreaker to get audiences to understand institutional racism. "The punch line of the story that it's so hard to find a qualified man is everybody does it," he said. "Everybody tends to hire people like themselves. And I get them all nodding, including the African-Americans in the audience."
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"Dealing with race is about educating white folks," Dean said in an interview last week on a campaign swing through the first primary state where African-American voters will have a major impact. "Not because white people are worse than black people about race but because whites are in the majority, and therefore the behavior of whites has a much bigger influence on hiring practices and so forth and so on than the behavior of African-Americans." It is unknown whether Dean's style of education will have a big influence on either white or African-American primary voters at the expense of, say, Wesley Clark's experience with affirmative action in the military or John Edwards' Clintonesque folksiness. While the Republicans have baldly capitulated to racism in modern presidential campaigns, such as appearing at Bob Jones University and claiming that the nation is so close to a "colorblind" society that affirmative-action programs can be dismantled, the Democrats have struggled to find a message that attracts swing white voters and loyal voters of color at the same.
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Another seminal moment was during his freshman winter. One of his roommates became a leader in the black student alliance, which resulted in frequent, large gatherings of African-American men in his dorm room. At one of these gatherings, Dean said, "I suddenly realized I was the only white person in the room, and literally the hair went up in the back of my neck. `Cause I thought, what if it was always like this? What if everywhere in your world you were the only white person and everyone else was black?' For one instant I had some tiny inkling what it was like to be black in America."
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E-mail: jackson@globe.com
Copyright © 2003,
Chicago Tribunehttp://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/oped/chi-0401050139jan05,1,687471.story?coll=chi-newsopinioncommentary-hed
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