Can We Improve Race Relations by Giving Racists Some of What They Want?

Carol Swain’s new book may offend all sides of the debates over affirmative action and immigration

In a brightly lit diner crowded with early-morning World Cup fans,

Carol M. Swain is eating breakfast with a colleague and preparing to run a gantlet of talk-show appearances. During the coming weeks she will appear on radio and television stations in at least a dozen cities, large and small.

Ms. Swain, a professor of law and political science at Vanderbilt University, recalls that when she published her first book, in 1993, she was too shy to do broadcast interviews. Now, she says, she is a different person. She is soldiering forward to promote her long-delayed second book, The New White Nationalism in America: Its Threat to Integration (Cambridge University Press), even though she knows from experience that its arguments will draw hostile reactions from several quarters.

Her colleague, George J. Graham Jr., a professor of political science at Vanderbilt, reminds her of the day last summer when she presented three chapters of her work-in-progress to a roomful of graduate students, some of whom were highly dubious. That seminar may be a mild preview of what she’ll face on the talk-show circuit.

“Let me see,” says Ms. Swain, with a smile. "[One student] was upset because she thought I was arguing that the family should be a traditional two-parent structure. And I told her, Well, that is what I’m saying.’”

The definition of family is hardly at the center of Ms. Swain’s concerns. The fact that it crept into that graduate seminar is suggestive of how ambitious and loose-limbed her new book is. In its crevices are digressions into almost every major area of social policy.

The book’s primary argument is that “white nationalism” of various stripes, from violently racist fringe ideologies to the softer ethnic solidarity of those who promote “European-American heritage,” is an underappreciated danger to the American ideals of civil rights and racial integration.

Ms. Swain further argues -- and it is here that she puzzles and infuriates her critics -- that society should combat white nationalists in part by acknowledging the legitimacy of some of their grievances. In particular, she says, we should abolish affirmative action and “reduce immigration to the levels of twenty-five years ago.” In a final turn of the wheel -- where she loses yet another group of potential allies -- she makes a number of left-wing proposals to combat income inequality: a guaranteed living wage for the working poor, and audits of welfare agencies to ensure that “caseworkers are ... providing individuals with the assistance for which they qualify.”

“So there’s something for everyone to like,” Ms. Swain jokes, over a bowl of strawberries.

Mr. Graham raises his eyebrows. “People don’t see what they like, Carol,” he says with a laugh. “They see what they want to argue with, in the academy. ... You’re going to get a lot of questions about the things you say about immigrants.”

“What do I say?” Ms. Swain returns. “I simply say that they should not be eligible for affirmative action. [That is, if affirmative action can’t be abolished altogether, as she advocates.] And that they take away jobs from low-skilled, native-born Americans -- " “All I’m saying,” he interjects, “is that you can expect to get a lot of questions along those lines, especially after 11 September.”

“I don’t care, because I believe in my position.”

“Carol’s good to work with,” Mr. Graham observes, “because you can say, They’re going to rip you up for this, and she’ll say, OK!”

Later in the morning, at her law-school office, Ms. Swain seems more pensive.

“The world has not heard from me for a while,” she says. The New White Nationalism, published this month, has had a long, difficult gestation, and many of her colleagues, she fears, expected her years ago to have published a follow-up to her first book, Black Faces, Black Interests: The Representation of African Americans in Congress (Harvard University Press, 1993). It captured an enormous amount of attention and praise, winning one of the American Political Science Association’s most prestigious honors, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award. Ms. Swain was the first African-American, and only the second woman, to win the prize.

An Academic Odyssey

Ms. Swain was born in 1954 into an extremely poor household in rural Virginia, not far from Roanoke. She grew up with 11 brothers and sisters, dropped out of school in the ninth grade, and married at age 16 -- in part, she says, because she saw no need to plan for a lengthy future. She was a Jehovah’s Witness, and accordingly believed that Armageddon would begin in 1975.

In her early 20s, Ms. Swain -- who was by then living on her own with two young sons -- decided to return to school. She earned a high-school-equivalency degree and enrolled at Virginia Western Community College. During her first year, as she juggled work, parenting, and classes, she was content to earn C’s. Before long, however, her anxiety about finding a job to support herself and her sons made her intensely grade-conscious. “I noticed on job applications that there were lines where you could list honors and awards. And I knew that I didn’t have anything to put on those lines. So the next year I started to apply myself.”

Thus began an academic odyssey supported by patchwork arrangements of part-time jobs, child-care providers, and student fellowships. In 1980, having earned an associate degree, Ms. Swain transferred to Roanoke College, where she majored in criminal justice. “When I got to Roanoke College I knew that I wanted to graduate with honors,” she says. “And one of my advisers told me not to expect to do as well at Roanoke as I’d done at Virginia Western. And I sat there listening, but I was thinking all the while, Yeah, I’ll show you.” (She graduated magna cum laude and recently served a term on the college’s Board of Trustees.)

In 1983, Ms. Swain enrolled in a master’s-degree program at Virginia Tech. “I chose political science because I wanted to become a public administrator. But I was also always fascinated by power, by other people’s power, because I felt I didn’t have any.”

Two years later, she entered the Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was only at that point, she says, that she became deeply acquainted with left-liberal arguments about racial justice and affirmative action. “I had been naive in certain ways. Almost all of my mentors had been white men. [In Chapel Hill] there were more minorities, and they were more politicized. I became more aware of my status as a victim. But by then it was just too late.” She flashes an ironic grin. “I had already done a lot of the things I was not supposed to be able to do.”

At Chapel Hill, Ms. Swain gravitated toward studies of Congressional behavior. She crafted her dissertation in the tradition of Richard F. Fenno Jr., a professor of political science at the University of Rochester, who wrote the classic Home Style: House Members in Their Districts (Little, Brown, 1978). He tried to discern how representatives and their staff members allocated their time, and how individual citizens and interest groups influenced “representation strategies” at the local level. Ms. Swain decided to use similar methods to explore racial politics: Among African-American members of Congress, do those from majority-black districts and those from majority-white districts relate to their constituents in systematically different ways? And how effectively can white members of Congress represent black voters?

The dissertation evolved into Black Faces, Black Interests. “It was a breakthrough for the study of African-American politics,” says Mr. Fenno. Others joined in the praise for its methodology -- but Ms. Swain’s policy recommendations were controversial. African-Americans would be better served in the aggregate, she argued, if their Congressional representatives were not so heavily concentrated in districts designed to have large black majorities. “Further progress requires new alliances and new strategies,” she wrote. "[A]nd that in turn calls for recognizing the substantive representation of blacks coming from white [Congress] members.”

Ms. Swain’s book was cited in the 1994 U.S. Supreme Court decision Johnson v. DeGrandy, which held that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 does not require states to carve out the maximum feasible number of “majority-minority” districts, in which ethnic minorities make up a majority of the population.

Skeptics were not convinced. “There’s a whole range of distinctive issues that are important to the black community, which white politicians just aren’t likely to represent with the same force,” says Stephen Steinberg, a professor of sociology at Queens College of the City University of New York. “We don’t have abstract citizens. We have highly structured black communities, which are a product of -- guess what? Centuries of discrimination. To deny that is to deny these communities meaningful representation.”

In 1990, three years before the book was published, Ms. Swain took a tenure-track position in Princeton University’s department of politics. (She earned tenure in 1994.) “One thing that was refreshing about Princeton was that they didn’t hire me under a minority slot’ -- they hired me to teach Congressional politics, and they let me be a Congressional scholar.” During interviews elsewhere, she says, she’d felt pressure to declare her allegiance to particular groups, which she found uncomfortable, because her unorthodox views had already become known. “I’ve always felt like a misfit in the academy,” she says. "[At a Western university] I was told that the black students said that they’d never had a black faculty member in political science, and they couldn’t afford for the first one to be me.”

A Crisis of Identity

In 1995, Ms. Swain began work on her next book. It was designed, she says, as an optimistic account of a “hidden consensus” on affirmative action and racial preferences. Its working title: When Whites and Blacks Agree.

The new book -- based in part on data from an elaborate survey designed by Ms. Swain -- was to argue that Americans, including black Americans, disapprove of race-based affirmative action when the beneficiaries are from middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds. What they would rather see, she reported, is “class-based” affirmative action. In September 1998, she presented some of her material at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

“Glenn Loury was sitting next to me,” she recalls, “and he said, Who cares if whites and blacks agree? There are serious problems in this country. There are issues out there.’ ”

Ms. Swain felt that Mr. Loury, a professor of economics at Boston University, was accusing her of naiveté. (He declined to comment for this article.) “And maybe I was being naive,” she says. “I’ve always been an optimist.” Around that time, she says, she was also going through a more general crisis of identity. “I had several black scholars, some of them high-profile, really go after me, calling me things like sellout.’ And at the same time, I’d published some op-eds in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and I started to get fan mail. It struck me like a ton of bricks one day: I have influence. And ... suppose I’m wrong?”

So Ms. Swain suspended her book project, went on sabbatical from Princeton, and challenged herself to explore American race relations through a more pessimistic lens. The following summer, she was horrified and fascinated by the case of Benjamin Smith, a white student from Indiana University at Bloomington who went on a shooting spree aimed at African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Jews. He killed two people and wounded nine before killing himself. (In her new book, she notes that the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist group with which Mr. Smith was associated, grew from 41 to 75 chapters in the year following his rampage.)

Ms. Swain began to examine the world of white nationalism in both its extremist forms and its more genteel guises, like the magazine American Renaissance, whose conferences attract small coteries of far-right academics. Now she found herself at work on a book with an entirely different tone. Its working title: Woe to America.

She and a collaborator, Russell Nieli, a professor of politics at Princeton, conducted lengthy interviews with white-nationalist leaders. In many cases, she chose not to reveal her own race to her respondents; Mr. Nieli, who is white, did the face-to-face work. (Next February, Cambridge will publish the transcripts of those interviews as a companion volume to Ms. Swain’s book.)

As she reviewed the conversations, Ms. Swain began to worry that the United States could soon face much higher levels of ethnic conflict. For that reason, among others, she urges that racial preferences and affirmative action be abolished. She prefers colorblind, merit-based policies, along with an expansion of means-tested programs, like Head Start, that help recipients on the basis of income rather than ethnicity.

Some observers have received Ms. Swain’s arguments warmly. Jim Sleeper, author of Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997), says in an e-mail message, “Carol Swain is a noble, much-misunderstood person, not least because her own deep sense of moral propriety makes it difficult for her to lodge the criticisms of liberal academia’s mishandling of race which so many of its scholars and administrators so richly deserve.”

Others, however, have greeted her arguments with extreme skepticism. “I’m sure her argument is well-intended,” says Derrick Bell, a professor of law at New York University. “But you could do away with affirmative action, and you could do away with the civil-rights acts, and these [white nationalists] would still feel the same way. In the early 20th century we had lynchings at the rate of hundreds each year, and there was no affirmative action. What were white racists’ grievances back then?”

Ms. Swain replies that this is to miss her point: White nationalists, she says, see resentment against affirmative action as a bridge-building issue with which they can recruit from among moderately conservative white citizens. “There are certain legitimate issues that white nationalists are exploiting. They have a well-thought-out strategy, and we can undercut that strategy if we take those legitimate issues away from them.”

Ms. Swain faces doubt of a different sort from paleoconservative scholars. Paul Edward Gottfried, a professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, says Ms. Swain is simply wrong when she predicts that white Americans will embrace separatist politics. “White Christian American society, to the extent that it believes in anything, believes in racial tolerance ... To the extent that we have a state religion, racial tolerance is that religion.” The Bush administration, he adds, has shown no sign of breaking from that orthodoxy. “With immigration, for example, my heart is with my paleocon friends, but I just don’t see it becoming an electoral wedge issue.”

Ms. Swain replies that Mr. Gottfried fails to take into account the nation’s shifting demographics. That continuing factor, she says, is likely to create a “devil’s brew” as white Americans begin to perceive themselves as a minority, and people of other races raise their expectations for social and political power.

Indeed, that dimension of Ms. Swain’s argument has drawn interest from voices on the far right. A recent letter to the editor in the weekly New York Press argues that white Americans should build their own “exclusionary political institutions.” The writer continues, “Carol Swain, the black professor who’s writing a book on white nationalism, is right on the money. As whites are pushed into minority status, it will become more likely, not less, that there will be nationalist backlash.”

Is Ms. Swain concerned that her book and the companion volume of interviews might become best sellers among organized racists?

She responds that such people are foolish if they see her as a kindred spirit. She is an integrationist, she stresses, and unsympathetic even to “soft” white nationalists. She was recently invited to contribute to a new magazine founded by Patrick J. Buchanan. “If [the magazine’s editor] wants me to write for them,” she says, “then he’s obviously been misreading what I’ve been saying.”

Life Changes

Ms. Swain’s anxious glimpses into the world of white nationalism coincided with a time of personal and professional unease. During her 1998 sabbatical, she decided to leave Princeton. She considered leaving academe entirely. “I was just so disillusioned,” she says. At elite universities she saw “an attitude that minorities are not good enough to be at our institutions, but we have to have some. It’s like you never prove yourself.”

“I have never felt that I have been accorded the respect that my vita would command.”

Such feelings of stigma and self-doubt, she argues, are widespread byproducts of affirmative action. It is partly for that reason that she hopes racial preferences will be abolished.

On the Margins

Ms. Swain acknowledges that some of her opposition to affirmative action might derive from her own feelings of being a fish out of water. Her rural, poor background meant that, as a student, she had a difficult time fitting in with the mainstream of even African- American campus life. “I always found that the more affluent the background, the less a person seems to have to prove.”

She remains close with some members of her family, most of whom are still in the Roanoke area. She is a mentor to a 17-year-old niece who recently entered a foster home and who plans to enroll in a Southern Baptist seminary next year.

Ms. Swain decided to accept the joint appointment in law and political science at Vanderbilt. The Vanderbilt offer was attractive partly because it included an additional year of sabbatical, which she used to earn a master’s degree at Yale Law School. She arrived in Nashville in the fall of 2000. Despite some early apprehensions about Vanderbilt’s culture (the student body is generally very wealthy) and collegiality (the political-science department, torn by methodological feuds, has been placed under receivership), she says that she’s been very happy there. Unexpectedly, she says, she feels “less marginalized as a minority scholar” than she did at Princeton.

Ms. Swain’s experience in New Haven led her to rework her manuscript yet again. During her year at Yale, she experienced a religious conversion, becoming an evangelical Christian. Her new faith prompted her to reconsider the book’s tone. She spent most of 2001 rewriting the text, restoring some of the original, more optimistic mid-1990s material. The book also includes a chapter that skeptically explores whether religion can serve as a unifying force in a racially diverse America.

“It occurred to me that this might be my last academic book,” she says. “I felt like I had a lot of things to say, and wanted to use this opportunity to make a statement about the issues that are important to me.”

For now, however, Ms. Swain is content to stay in academic life. Her colleagues at Vanderbilt, she says, have been quite supportive. She seems to have found peace -- at least as much peace as her temperament will allow.

When asked if she has found a strong church community in Nashville, she laughs. “Well, I’m still being Carol Swain, going about this church thing. I’m already finding things I don’t like, causing trouble.”

	RACE, CLASS, AND COLLEGE ADMISSIONS Imagine a college admissions committee working to fill the year’s one remaining slot. There are two candidates: The first student, from an affluent family, is an A student with strong standardized-test scores. The second student, from a low-income family, is a hard-working B student with slightly below-average test scores. Which student do you believe the committee should choose? And which student do you believe a real-world admissions committee would choose? Carol M. Swain, a scholar at Vanderbilt University, posed those two questions to 837 randomly selected people in 1996. The twist: In her study, a computer varied the race of the hypothetical students. Some respondents heard a vignette in which an affluent white A student was competing against a working-class black B student (the “white A/black B” scenario). Other respondents heard a vignette in which the affluent A student was black and the working-class B student white; still others heard scenarios in which both students were of the same race. To the first question -- which student should the admissions committee choose? -- Ms. Swain found a great deal of common ground between white and black respondents. In all four possible racial scenarios, roughly half of the people, both white and black, said the college should admit the working-class student, despite his lower grades and test scores. To the second question, however -- which student would a real-world college probably choose? -- Ms. Swain found a great deal of divergence between white and black respondents. Across the four scenarios, 16 percent of black respondents predicted that the college would choose the working-class B student. That number jumped to 31 percent, however, for the “black A/white B” scenario -- suggesting that a substantial number of black people felt that colleges bend over backwards to aid white students. The converse was true for the “white A/black B” scenario: White respondents were much likelier than black respondents to expect the college to admit the black B student. Ms. Swain speculates that many African-Americans are uncomfortable with racial preferences in theory but support affirmative action because they believe that raw discrimination is a continuing practice in college admissions. Her preferred solution is to abolish affirmative action, but to beef up enforcement of antidiscrimination laws with new fines and criminal penalties.

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