The Miner’s Canary: Race and the Democratic Process

The invitation to respond to David Plotke’s essay, “Racial Politics and the Clinton-Guinier Episode” (Dissent, Spring 1995) came as I was preparing to travel to Budapest to attend a conference hosted by Eastern and Central European academics and politicians. This accident of timing gave me the opportunity to reassess in international context Plotke’s thesis that talk about racial unfairness incites racial polarization. Experimenting with graduate students in Hungary, Plotke ostensibly uncovered tangible proof that race talk is inevitably coercive and divisive. Plotke showed the students my picture. After viewing the visual evidence, they tried to designate my ethnicity. They concluded that I might be North African but was probably Italian. They failed to “authenticate” my black American identity because ethnicity, not race, is their dominant frame of reference. Likewise, they were unfamiliar with the infamous American one-drop rule, where...