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.
