Page 4-Tuesday, January 17, 1978-The Michigan Daily
Eighty-Eight Years of Editorial Freedom
420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mt 48109
Vol. LXXXViiI, No. 88
News Phone: 764-0552
Edited and'managed by students at the University of Michigan
Slated anti-discrimination
bill should be kept intact
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L AST MONDAY, the Ann Arbor City
Council debated a comprehensive
anti-discrimination ordinance that
could well be called the most far-reach-
ing doctrine of equal rights ever attem-
pted by a local government. One coun-
cil member called it "a model" for oth-
er cities to pattern, while more than one
observer thought the Ann Arbor ordi-
nance was second only to the Federal
1964 Civil Rights Act.
And it is for this reason that the An
Arbor ordinance received its sharpest
criticism.
Opponents of the ordinance argue
that the bill as it now stands is so com-
prehensive and so all-inclusive as to be
rendered ineffective. Councilman
Roger Bertois (R-Third Ward) told the
asembled council that the anti-
discrimination bill "included every-
thing but the whales - and they made
the endangered species list."
Instead of the proposed all-encom-
passing ordinance, opponents of the
human rights bill want a simple state-
anent outlawing discrimination based
on race, creed, color, sex, national
origin and religion. Anything beyond
that, they say, is unworkable.
As it now stands, the ordinance out-
laws discrimination based on those five
areas, as well as prohibiting discrimin-
ation based on age, family responsibili-
ty (meaning people with children),
marital status, sexual orientation, edu-
cation association, physical limitation,
source of income, personal association,
and the condition of being pregnant.
Opponents were able to muster
enough support to delete too other
areas, discrimination based on person-
al appearance and on political affilia-
tion.
Mayor Albert Wheeler has already
indicated. that although he went along
with the amendments deleting personal
appearance and political affiliation, he
will not stand for any further cut-and-
paste episodes that will reduce the
scope of the document.
Wheeler has also declared that he
will veto the bill if it is amended beyond
recognition during the Council's
working session.
The basic premise of those who
would trim down the ordinance is that
there have been few cases reported to
the Human Rights Office in the last few
years of discrimination based on any-
thing other than "the big five." It was
that line of thinking that got personal.
appearance and political affiliation
yanked from the original bill.
T HE FACT of the matter is that peo-
ple are still discriminated against
6ecause of their personal appearance,
and people are still discriminated
against because of the political party
they belong to. People still find them-
selves shut out in the cold because land-
lords are adverse to long hair, beards,
or applicants with ax scars down the
middle of their face. We have not reach-
ed such a utopian state where commu-
nists and even nazis can expouse their
particular beliefs without being subject
to chastisement in either housing or
employment opportunities.
Any section of the human rights or-
dinance as it now stands that gets
deleted is in effect deleting a segment
of society that is discriminated against
with the justification that that segment
is not as visible as "the big five" _
race, cried, color, sex and national
origin.
It is a foregone conclusion that most
complaints of discrimination will be
limited to the traditional areas. But
that is no excuse for limiting our efforts
to deal with discrimination in whatever
forum it chooses to rear its ugly head.
If the only complaint against the
human rights ordinance is that it is too
all-inclusive, then that is also the bill's
most commendable feature.
Ann Arbor has enacted the first or-
dinance for a local unit that attempts to
deal with discrimination on more than
the traditional fronts. Even if a city this
size does not have the resources to en-
force every provision, as the opponents
claim, is it to be faulted for attempting
the first real effort at wiping out the
most conspicuous blot on our society?
U. S.
blacks'
fear the
resurgence of
i 0
By JOEL DREYFUSS
Pacific News Service
Now that the victories of the civil rights
movement have become history, there is a
growing fear among blacks that racism is
again taking hold in America. The revival is
seen by many as more subtle and elusive than
in the past, and thus harder to fight, because a
majority of white Americans, supported by
an influential body of intellectuals, denies it is
real.
The controversy over the Bakke case and
affirmative action is partly responsible for
ptions about people who are different."
THE WHITE complacency goes back to the
period following the death of Dr. Martin
Luther King, when the Nixonian ethic of law
and order submerged the race debate. Ed-
ward Banfield, a Nixon urban affairs advisor,
provided an intellectual rationale for
-dismissing the race issue in his 1970 book The
Unheavenly City.,
"Thevlower class individual lives in the
slum and sees little or no reason to com-
plain," wrote Banfield. "Features that make
'You run into good,
well-motivated people
who think they are fair, who feel they have
turned around from attitudes and beliefs they
grew up with. But they continue to view blacks
in a deficit model: "less than, " "not as good
r
as, ' "if we could only d
bring them up to speed.'
SE -'
o such-and-such to
-Dr. Price Cobbs
author of Black Rage
EDITORIAL STAFF
ANN MARIE LIPINSKI
Editors-in-Chief
JIM TOBIN
LOIS JOSIMOVICH ....................Managing Editor
GEORGE LOBSENZ..................... Managing Editor
STU McCONNELL............................Managing Editor
JENNIFER MILLER... .................Managing Editor
PATRICIA MONTEMURRI.............Magaging Editor
KEN PARSIGIAN........................ Managing Editor;
BOB ROSENBAUM...........................Managing Editor
MARGARET YAO..... ...............Managing Editor
SUSAN ADES JAY LEVIN
Sunday Magazine Editors
ELAINE FLECTCHER TOM O'CONNELL
Associate Magazine Editors
STAFF WRITERS: Susan Barry, Richard Berke, Brian Blan-
chard, Michael Beckman, Lori Carruthers, Ken Chotiner, Eileen
Daley, Lisa Fisher, Denise Fox, Steve Gold, David Goodman,
Elisa Isaacson, Michael Jones, Lani Jordan, Janet Klein, Garth
Kriewall,;Gregg Krupa, Paula Lashinsky, Marty Levine, Dobilas
Matunonis, Carolyn Morgan, Dan Oberdorfer, Mark Parrent,
Karen Paul, Stephen Pickover, ChristopherPotter, Martha
Retallick, Keith Richburg, Diane Robinson, Julie Rovner, Dennis
Sabo, Annmarie Schiavi, Paul Shapiro, R. J. Smith, Elizabeth
Slowik, Mike Taylor, Pauline Toole, Sue Warner, Jim Warren,
Linda Willcox, Shelley Wolson, Tim Yagle, Mike Yellin, Barbara
Zahs, Jim Zazakis
Mark Anrews, Mike Gilford, Richard Foltman
Weather Forecasters
reopening the debate on race relations that
had been dormant since the 1960s. It has also
exposed, quite clearly, the new sophistication
of racial attitudes that have continued
unabated since the 1950s.
"RACISM IS ALIVE and well," says Dr.
Price Cobbs, a black psychiatrist and co-
author of the best-seller Black Rage.
"You run into good, well-motivated people
who think they are fair, who feel they have
turned around from attitudes and beliefs they
grew up with. But they continue to view.
blacks in a deficit model: 'less than,' 'not as
good as,' 'if we could only do such-and-such to
bring them up to speed.' "
The notion that racism is no longer a
significant force in America is implicit in the
work of Nathan Glazer, one of the leading in-
tellectual champions of neo-conservatism. In
his book Affirmative Discrimination, Glazer
announces that racism has been defeated and
calls on the courts to withdraw from the battle
for equal opportunity so "the forces of
political democracy in a pluralistic society
can do their proper work."
THE CONCEPT is.attractive if you believe
that race is now a benign factor. But many
blacks see signs of just the opposite: signs in
unemployment and income statistics, in sur-
veys of white racial attitudes, or in the por-
trayal of blacks in the popular media.
A Louis Harris survey last summer repor-
ted t hat "a majority of blacks feel
discriminated against while a majority of'
whites feel blacks are not."
"Much of what passes for benign race
relations," says Dr. Cobb, "is some kind of
social comfort on the part of whites who are
dealing with blacks. There are many whites
who can be comfortable with blacks socially
but who don't have any idea of the depth and
degree of their remaining negative assum-
the slum repellent to others actually please
him."
Banfield's attitude has become widespread
today, according to Stanford University
socidlogist Seymour Martin Lipset, another
neo-conservative.I
MOST WHITES, says Lipset, "accept the
reality of at least some racial discrimination
but see black problems as stemming essen-
tially from the moral failings of individuals."
In other words, the old stereotype of the lazy
and shiftless black persists. At the same time,
fully 55 per cent of white Americans feel
blacks have "moved too fast" in their
struggle for equality, according to a 1977
Harris poll.
Syndicated columnist Bob Greene reports
that the use of the word "nigger" has
regained prominence. "The word is popping
up more and more in polite company as well
as among people who used it all along," he
says. "It probably means that we're on our
way into a new cycle of racism in America..."
Recently, Atlanta businessman J. B.
Fuqua, chief executive of Fuqua Industries
and a friend of President Carter, exposed a
slight variation of the neo-conservative
theology. Fuqua told New York magazine
writer Dan Dorfman that blacks are the
"least capable of producing in today's
society. You park a certain percentage of
them-like antiquated machinery (which you
depreciate)-and you support them through
welfare .. . which we're doing. (Blacks) say
they haven't had the opportunities, but that
doesn't change things. The fact is many are
not productive . .. they're just not as skillful
as the whites..."
THE SUBTLE message of Fuqua's not-so-
suble words is that racism is no longer to
blame for the condition of blacks. Blacks are
poor because they are incapable of being
anything else, he seems to say.
raczsm,
The complexity of this "new racism," as
some have called it, was cited in a September
1977 report by the U.S. Civil Rights Com-
mission. It noted that ... more subtle forms
of discrimination continue to materialize
requiring ever more stringent enforcement to
ensure compliance with the law."
One example of this new subtlety may be
found in sports, an area viewed by many
Americans as the greatest example of equal
opportunity.
AFTER ANALYZING 12 National Football
League games on the three major television
networks, psychologist Raymond E. Rainvile
of the State University of New York in Oneon-
ta found that the announcers subjected black
athletes to more negative comments about
their talents, abilities and motivation. He
concluded that the announcers were
"building a positive reputation for white
players and a comparatively negative
reputation for black players."
And there are other examples. Most of the
dozens of black studies programs that sprang
up in the 1960s are gone today, the victims of
underfundingand general neglect. Few books
or articles by black authors are published
today, and since the demisei of "blax-
ploitation," the film industry has reverted to
the lily-white look of the 1950s.
Major box office hits give little evidence of
a movement toward Glazer's "pluralistic
society." In "Star Wars," "Annie Hall," "The
Deep" and other major films, blacks are
either excluded or limited to villainous roles.
AND DESPITE the success of "Roots," the
television industry has made little progress in
its portrayal of blacks or other minorities,
who are too often cast as modern day versions
of Amos and Andy.
"Few blacks" on television, says Dr.
Eugene Thomas of the University of Wiscon-
sin, "are seen with the pluses and minuses of
the average man, the ambiguity. The black is
either super-excellent or super-deficient."
"It appears to mean that the American
majority is nowhere near ready to accept
blacks as equal-if you see television as a
reflection of society."
THUS WHILE the opponents of affirmative
action still point to the considerable progress
blacks have made in the last two decades,
blacks are growing ever more concerned that
whites have made little progress in their
racial attitudes, and that the "new racism"
will spread and affect opportunities for blacks
and other minorities.
Dr. Faustine Jones of Howard University
studied changes in racial attitudes between
1969 and 1975 and concluded: "Black
Americans feel that a significant proportion
of the white population has shifted priorities
from, elinfinating the vestiges of racial
discrimination as the major goal of this
society to reviving feelings that blacks have
had as much help as they need or deserve.
She adds: "The feeling is that blacks cannot
afford to let this happen again. If you under-
stand history, you don't sit around and let
history repeat itself."
Joel Dreyfuss, formerly a staff reporter
for the New York Post and Washington
Post, is a member of PNS' Foundation-
funded task force of scholars and Jour-
nalists on inner cities.
Editorials which appear without a by-line represent a con-
sensus opinion of the Daily's editorial board. All other editorials,
as well as cartoons, are the opinions of the individuals who sub-
mi theme -
:. ...... ...... .....:.:.:.:..:....:...........: ::::::....::.:: .:: ::::::: :::.:
OUR CONCERN IS THAT THE PANAMA CANAL
TREATY SHOULD GUARANTEE "EXPEDITIOUS
TRANSIT" OF OUR WARSHIPS DURING
EMERGENCIESI
3
WHAT WOULD WE DO IN AN EMERGENCY
WITHOUT THAT GUARANTEE?
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ITING.
Letters to
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hit and run
To The Daily:
Help! New Year's Night (Sun-
day, January 1, 1978), we were
involved in a hit and run acci-
dent: while waiting for the light
at the intersection of South In-
dustrial and Eisenhower we were
attacked by a large snowplow!
The cumbersome vehicle not only
ranner h -m ia nd n.rnmfi
wagon containing four witnesses
whose names we neglected to ob-
tain. This message is our only
hope to find these good
samaritans who assisted us in
tracking down our assailants.
Hopefully we can together get
this matter cleared up so that all
parties involved can start
sleeping better at night.
-Mr. and Ms. Lewandowski'
r p. n l..'-foi.,71C
TheE
and hospital areas there are
many such "associations."
Where there are not, clericals are '
sometimes called together for
management-run "secretarial
meetings" or "in-service training
sessions."
Such "associations" and
meetings are initiated and en-
couraged by management in an
effort to con clericals into
'.i~b rr -- hnie ..r- - nnr .rn
'aily
about the union in non-work areas
during non-work time, University
management recently interfered
with a lunch meeting in the
School of Business Ad-
ministration staff lounge. (The
OCC has filed an unfair labor
practice charge with the
Michigan Employment Relations
Commission, which will be con-
duct a hearing on January 31.)
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