LARRY: Chris Edley is the dean and the professor at the Boalt
Law School at UC Berkeley.
He was formerly at Harvard Law School, and he was co-founder
of the Harvard Civil Rights Project.
He served on President Clinton's advisory board on the
race initiative, and served in the Clinton administration.
Please welcome Chris Edley.
[APPLAUSE]
CHRIS EDLEY: Thank you Larry and thank you to the Google
community at large for everything except having
me follow Majora and John on the stage.
Look, I want to state boldly, without detailed
argument my premise.
Which is that in America, challenges of poverty and
opportunity are racialized.
That is to say we see them through the prism of race, or
that race is subtext, if not overt in the way we think
and argue about it.
And that's as such, building the moral and political
consensus to act requires strategies to build bridges
across lines of color and class, bridges across
chasms of difference.
And of course, when you look globally it's not just color,
that racializes our problems, but caste, tribe, religion.
But coming home again, surveying the modern America
struggle for racial and ethnic justice, the murder of Martin
Luther King Junior 40 years ago this coming April 4 seems a
reasonable place to mark the shift in leadership from
clergymen to lawyers and policy engineers.
These new leaders largely abandoned the language of
values and their spiritual underpinnings in favor of
constitutional litigation, analysis of dual labor markets,
and the design of preschool intervention programs.
Faith leaders who continued to work in the cause of justice
continue to use their basement meeting rooms, and their
mailing lists, and their ability to draw a local
television crew, but these leaders usually put aside their
theology to secularize their racial justice labors.
And thus, you might say that beacons that had shown down
through the millenia-- beacons lighted by Moses and Mohammed
and Maimoides were effectively shuttered by a fog of footnotes
and regression equations, which has got to be peculiar.
Because obviously the central challenge of defining and
achieving racial justice concerns connecting communities
and stoking compassion.
Matters of identity and values, matters which Americans, among
the most worshipping of industrialized Homo sapians are
far more likely to engage through the discourse of
spirituality, if not religion, than through the sort
of stuff that I do.
So what is to be done?
Well, the social science evidence demonstrates that
discrimination continues.
Widespread, but often subtle.
And cognitive scientists point towards unconscious forms
of bias-- ubiquitous, robust, pernicious.
Yet science alone cannot revitalize the
anti-discrimination paradigm in law or in politics because
frankly, this is not about technocratic truths, it's about
ethical chasms.
And bridging those chasms is the goal of a moral
and ethical agenda.
So this then is the first suggestion I have for the
future of civil rights and racial justice.
The movement must augment its secular technocratic strategies
with a recommitment to the discourse of values, and
even to the tactics of spiritual engagement.
The second idea I want to stress comes from a frank
recognition that Bull Connor is long dead.
And our contemporary polity is politically and ethically
exhausted on race, having become impatient with a search
for racial wrongdoers and conveniently oblivious to
history, even recent history.
The courts have been a big part of this, on a steady retreat I
would say for the past generation, pausing only
occasionally to render a decision that one might at best
say is not quite as bad as it might have been.
And I say retreat because in my view this direction is a
detour, if one hopefully takes the war in court victories
of yesteryear as the truer course for America's future.
Meanwhile, the anti-discrimination paradigm
must be augmented with another strategy which I called, no
fault regulatory rights.
Think of the dream crushing disparities in high school
graduation rates, or brutal medical pain mismanagement in
emergency rooms, or disparities in the sighting of
toxic waste facilities.
The difference between Majora's neighborhood
and your neighborhood.
I believe that we can construct policies in which some forceful
financial or other intervention is triggered, not based upon a
factual predicate of discrimination, but based
instead on the mere existence of a racial disparity or
inequity that we deem unacceptable as a matter
of public policy.
Now what's an example of that?
I think the most prominent example today is the No Child
Left Behind federal statutes involving K through
12 education.
Notwithstanding, its many, many flaws there is a central civil
rights virtue to this scheme.
Educators and administrators are held accountable for
narrowing racial disparities in K12 achievement using an
escalating series of interventions, and the key is
that rewards and sanctions are triggered without first
stopping to search for someone with racial animus dripping
from his or her lips.
We regulate air pollution, not to assign blame-worthiness, but
to alleviate an unacceptable public health risk.
Similarly, we should engineer policy reforms and resource
allocations to alleviate the unacceptable risks in America
of a nouveau Jim Crow, and an America tomorrow ripped
asunder by our differences.
So this is a second clue as I would frame it.
It's that through appropriate engineering of our social and
economic interventions we can circumvent, if not remedy,
our racial exhaustion.
I want to suggest a third and final element.
Consider the great research universities of the world.
Beginning of course with what is surely the preeminent
research university, UC Berkeley.
As gateways to the upper reaches of privilege, these
institutions have through the centuries been critical
components of recapitulating the distribution of privilege,
and conferring it selectively on a few fortunate, newly
ascending lucky ones.
The broader benefits of these institutions to society have
flowed through trickle down mechanisms, the force of which
could actually be regulated by the elites to suite their
own instrumental advantage.
For the future, accelerated progress we need can come
only with reinventing these institutions.
To make central an element of their mission that has been
subordinate at best, and too often, entirely absent.
And I frame that central element this way.
I believe that fundamental to a public institution, or a
publicly minded institution, even a corporation, is the
obligation to harness our excellence in research and
teaching to vigorously engage a portfolio of the toughest and
most important problems facing our nation and our world.
Now of course, purely private entities often
make the same claim.
That they're making a difference on the most
important problems, but I honestly believe that
their contributions are often accidental.
What makes the public-minded university or corporation
distinctive is the intentionality with which we
pursue that process of engagement.
In 1937 some of the most talented scientists in the
world were working at Berkeley-- engineers,
mathematicians, physicists, chemists-- separately.
Working separately.
By 1942 they were harnessed together racing the Nazis to
build the atomic bomb, and make possible the survival oh
so much that we hold dear.
That same collective enterprise is now needed
on so many fronts.
The most difficult problems require the most capable
problem solvers, and there is no problem more difficult or
important in America than the challenge of race.
And no problem more important globally than that of the
crushing poverty, a poverty that not only crushes souls,
but complicates what ever one might hope to do about climate
change or endemic disease or human freedom.
Now like great universities the prophecies and institutions of
technological innovation have a duality that challenges us.
And here I mean not the duality of empowerment versus the
invasiveness of the panopticon that you heard about this
morning, but technology as the driver or instrument of greater
inequality versus technology as the great leveler.
Think about books and reading.
Well, for centuries this was a technology of
both enlightenment and socioeconomic hierarchy.
But with the birth of mass public education, a new concept
put together with books and reading, this new conception
made the technology a vehicle for uplift and for the
fulfillment of human potential.
Let me say, perhaps provocatively, that the
democratization of the internet and IT is a phenomenon setting
intergalactic records for hype.
The flatness, the equality, I believe, are not truly
global, but largely local.
Local to the top quintile or two of privilege, and that's
probably too generous.
The potential benefits of these technologies, like that of
universities will not be fully realized without self-conscious
efforts to make opportunity the mission, and engineer
accordingly.
Self-conscious efforts by people like those in this
room are the only way that that's going to happen.
So in closing, I want to recall something that I heard from
President Bill Clinton.
He was talking about sitting in the Oval Office, meeting with
leaders from nations around the world who preside over society
in which thousands and thousands of people are
murdered every month because of racial, tribal,
religious differences.
And those leaders see in America an inspiring
demonstration that a diverse society can be stable,
can be prosperous.
Of course, we recognize-- well, at least, we should recognize
that America's not immune from the kind of chaos that
these leaders in other societies witness.
Indeed, we have some of that chaos now.
Majora spoke of it, children ducking for
cover testify to it.
But we could have much, much more.
Consider the history of the world.
Consider human nature.
Clinton believed race to be the nation's toughest challenge for
the 21st century because he said, "if we can deal with our
racial differences then Americans can pretty much
handle anything else that comes along." More globally, a
similar statement could be made about poverty.
Especially in its interrelationships with
racial, tribal, and religious differences.
Now not surprisingly given my business card, a key part of my
prescription, my challenge to this assemblage is to conduct
and fund more research, more deliberation, more
demonstration, and even advocacy.
How to change values and build community.
And meanwhile, how to engineer around our racial exhaustion.
How to transmute the hierarchy producing institutions like
university and web 3.0 into engines of opportunity, and
bridges across our differences.
These are extraordinarily difficult, but researchable
questions, and they are urgent questions.
Regarding what I know best, I often say that race in America
is not rocket science.
It's harder than rockets science.
This is not a decade's race to the moon, but a century's old
struggle over who we wish to be.
It's a struggle unfinished, and we must continue it together.
Thank you.