That's our dear friend Clarence, whom we adore," Abigail Thernstrom said, proudly showing me the framed photograph of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that hangs above the fireplace in the office she shares with her husband, Harvard University historian Stephan Thernstrom. She added mischievously: "It's there to make reporters faint." Abigail Thernstrom, a fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute and one of America's most influential conservative intellectuals, had been talking to a lot of reporters that week, frantically "doing press" for another "dear friend"--Linda Chavez, whom George W. Bush had nominated to be his labor secretary. Just a few days before I arrived at the Thernstroms' red colonial house in Lexington, Massachusetts, Chavez had withdrawn her nomination, under fire for hiring an illegal immigrant in her home.
Abigail Thernstrom, who serves on the board of Chavez's Center for Equal Opportunity, an anti-affirmative action "research group" in Washington, was still fuming: "She did not employ that woman. She took in this--this was a battered woman! Linda is such a giving person--you can't imagine. She's always taking people in, people in trouble. I could never do what she does. Every summer, she hosts these Fresh Air Fund kids and pays for their Catholic-school tuition."
Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom are best known as the authors of America in Black and White, a 700-page tome on race relations that identified racial preferences and black militancy as the main barriers to achieving a colorblind society. Their new book, Getting the Answers Right: The Racial Gap in Academic Achievement and How to Close It, which will come out next year from Simon and Schuster, is almost certain to be read by Rod Paige, President Bush's secretary of education. "We're letting another generation of black and Hispanic kids go by horribly educated, and I'm on a moral tear about that. I mean, it just makes me furious," Abigail told me. A Marshall Plan for urban schools, then? "No, you'd just be pouring money down the same sinkhole," said Abigail, who prefers the usual conservative medicine of vouchers and draconian standards.
Lined with books and flooded with newspapers and magazines, the Thernstroms' study has a messy vitality; it conveys a powerful impression of intellectual camaraderie, the bedrock of their marriage of over 42 years. But for this room, nothing in the house would suggest that Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom are deeply intertwined in debates over the future of affirmative action. Their walls are decorated with modern art and pictures of their children: Melanie, the author of two books of nonfiction, and Sam, a speechwriter for New York Governor George Pataki. Their life in Lexington--an affluent, largely white suburb of Boston that was covered in a blanket of snow when I visited them in mid-January--could hardly seem more distant from the problem of the color line.
Abigail--a short, bespectacled woman with gray hair--looks as if she stepped out of an Edward Koren cartoon. She's highly excitable, acerbic and fretful by turns, with a voice that warbles nervously from a throaty bass to a falsetto screech. The day before I met her, Justice Ronnie White had testified in the John Ashcroft hearings, which she said she didn't want to "sound off on" because she hadn't been following them too closely. "I caught a little bit of Ted Kennedy," she said, "and I just wish he'd lower the decibel level." Abigail had recently returned from Tallahassee, Florida, where, as a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, she was investigating charges of irregularities at the Florida polls in election 2000--irregularities that many believe cost thousands of African Americans their votes and Al Gore the presidency. "Mistakes were made, and there are better ways to run elections," she said. "But do I think there was some deliberate effort there to keep black voters from the polls? No, absolutely not."
Abigail's 1987 critique of the Voting Rights Act, Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights, is a virtual bible among conservative jurists, including Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas. A frequent visitor in Thomas's chamber, Abigail has testified several times in the House against the creation of "majority-minority" districts by the Justice Department. Other voting-rights experts, notably Harvard Law School professor Lani Guinier, have raised concerns that majority-minority districts result in racial gerrymandering and have suggested new mechanisms like cumulative voting. Abigail, however, has distinguished herself with her hostility toward any method of promoting black and minority representation.
"Doors are wide open to black candidacies today," she claims. "Our problem is not bigoted white voters (a relatively small minority), but a paucity of black candidates willing to test the biracial electoral waters." It is "racist," she says, to suggest that "only black officeholders can represent black interests." When Bill Clinton nominated Guinier to be his assistant attorney general in 1993, Abigail called Clint Bolick, her friend at the conservative Institute for Justice. Within hours, Bolick was smearing Guinier in The Wall Street Journal as a "quota queen" with "breathtakingly radical views." Before Guinier had a chance to correct these distortions, Clinton dropped the nomination.
In addition to her affiliation with the Manhattan Institute, Abigail serves on the boards of numerous other think tanks, including the Institute for Justice and the Citizens' Initiative on Race and Ethnicity (whose founders include Chavez and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao). She sits on the Massachusetts State Board of Education, a predominantly white group opposed to heroic efforts to overcome de facto public school segregation. "How can we expect these kids to compete with my children?" she told Boston Globe education reporter Muriel Cohen over lunch, explaining her opposition to METCO, a program that buses 3,000 children--mostly blacks and Latinos--to suburban public schools like the ones her children attended in Lexington.
Stephan Thernstrom, a tall, ruddy-faced man with a thick mustache, has a softer disposition than his wife, who, as he puts it, "is fonder of talking than I am." He's a self-described "lone wolf," a reader of mystery novels who avoids faculty meetings and seldom ventures to Harvard when he's not teaching except to go to the library or the squash court. Reclining in an Eames chair with a Grateful Dead mug, he cuts a retiring profile. Yet he is no less involved than his wife in the campaign to roll back racial preferences. Ever since 1988, when he was accused of insensitivity by a black student at Harvard, he has been crusading against affirmative action as if it were a cancer eating away at the sacred body of meritocracy. He has a lucrative side-gig as an expert witness who argues against the expansion of what he regards as minority entitlements in the drawing of electoral districts and in school admissions. In 1996 he was deposed by the Center for Individual Rights--a right-wing litigation group that has received money from the eugenicist Pioneer Fund--in Hopwood v. State of Texas, the case that struck down affirmative action in higher education in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Stephan told me test scores and grades alone should decide whether students are admitted to college. But when I mentioned that George W. Bush, whom he supported for president, was a poor test taker and an even worse student, he said that Dubya's detractors "greatly exaggerate the importance of academic intelligence and IQ."
It would be hard to imagine a more extreme transformation than the Thernstroms'. In the 1960s, Stephan and Abigail were left-liberals who identified passionately with the civil rights movement. Today, they're soldiers in the political and judicial assault on civil rights policies designed to redress the effects of past discrimination. The Thernstroms insist, however, that they have remained true to their ideals as "colorblind" integrationists. "We haven't changed," Stephan told a reporter for The Washington Post. "It is liberalism that has evolved." His wife, who often describes herself as "an old bleeding heart," told the same reporter, "I feel sad that the classic civil rights struggle is now called conservatism." They're on to something: In less than a generation, the rhetoric of colorblindness has passed out of the left's lexicon and into the right's. But in parting ways with racial liberalism--and in promoting the crusade against "reverse racism" as the cutting edge of a new civil rights movement--have the Thernstroms simply remained steadfast in their principles?
It's a clever argument but not an especially convincing one. Full equality and citizenship for the descendants of slaves, rather than abstract colorblindness, was the overriding goal of the civil rights movement. While some white liberals initially hoped that the destruction of legal segregation would produce this outcome, most of them came to see the need for more radical, color-conscious remedies. As President Lyndon B. Johnson put it in his Howard University commencement address on June 4, 1965, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others,' and still believe that you have been completely fair." What is more, there is little evidence of colorblindness in America in Black and White. It is a book that seems consumed to the point of obsession with the purported sins of black Americans: their educational failings, their profligate rates of illegitimacy, their propensity toward crime, their dependence on bloated government programs, their conspiracy theories about white power, their hate-whitey rhetoric.
Liberalism has evolved, to be sure; but so have the Thernstroms.
Intellectual Partners
To understand Abigail Thernstrom's politics, the first thing you have to know is that her parents were Jewish fellow travelers. Born in 1936, Abigail Mann was raised in Croton-on-Hudson, 30 miles north of New York City, on Finney Farm, a left-wing sanctuary that John Reed repaired to on his return from the Soviet Union. Her father was an unsuccessful businessman who "never made a dime," while her mother was slowly dying of breast cancer. Educated at schools for red-diaper babies, she speaks bitterly of her parents' Stalinism, their "willful denial" of Soviet realities. But her parents were right about one thing, and that was race. "I grew up in a very racially integrated scene, and that was one of the very good things about communism."
When Abigail sings the praises of Finney Farm, she sounds almost like William Bowen and Derek Bok, her adversaries in the war over affirmative action, who argue that white college students benefit from racial diversity as much as minorities do. "I lived in a cocoon in which race didn't matter, and I think that was very influential in terms of the way I think about racial issues. I'm in deep rebellion against race consciousness." In fact, as Abigail herself acknowledges, Finney Farm's racial integration was a triumph of color-consciousness on the part of the Communist Party, which through an affirmative action program of its own had vigorously recruited blacks and promoted them to positions of leadership since the 1930s.
After graduating from Barnard College, Abigail arrived at Harvard as a graduate student in Middle Eastern studies and later migrated to the government department; she was "desperate to get away from anything having to do with my family," and looking for a husband. "My daughter would kill me if she heard me say that, but it's true." In the fall of 1958, she was set up on a blind date with Stephan Thernstrom, a reserved, pipe-smoking graduate student in American history. Born in 1934 to Scandinavian-American parents in Port Huron, he was raised in Battle Creek, Michigan, a town where there were hardly any Jews, much less communists. Stephan's father, a telegraph boy with an eighth-grade education, worked his way up the ladder to become a railway manager. When Stephan was radicalized as an undergraduate at Northwestern, his father, a stalwart Republican, told him, "If you're a communist, I don't want you in my house."
Abigail Mann and Stephan Thernstrom met for their first date at an I.F. Stone lecture. Two and a half months later, they married.
From the start, theirs was a political and intellectual partnership as well as a romantic one. Stephan was a leader of a New Left club, a group of Harvard graduate students that included Martin Peretz, now owner of The New Republic; Michael Walzer, now a political philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study; and the radical historians Gabriel Kolko and Barton Bernstein. In offices scattered throughout Harvard's campus, a dozen or so young men and women--some liberal, others radical--met to discuss the Cuban revolution, the Bay of Pigs, nuclear disarmament, and, above all, civil rights. Nothing captured the group's imagination, or the Thernstroms', as much as the struggle for racial justice in the South. In 1961 the New Left club protested outside of Woolworth's in solidarity with the sit-ins. Three years later, the Thernstroms made plans to organize blacks in the South with the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a trip they were forced to cancel when Abigail became pregnant with their daughter Melanie.
Stephan's first priority, however, was his academic career. Like most of his Harvard classmates, he was extremely ambitious. His adviser was the eminent immigration historian Oscar Handlin, whose 1951 study The Uprooted helped establish ethnicity as a major field in American history. Stephan chose a thesis topic that could not have been closer to his mentor's heart: New England's immigrant working class in the late nineteenth century. He was interested in the sociologist Werner Sombart's classic question, "Why is there no socialism in America?" And as the son of a worker who'd become a manager and a Republican, he suspected that "socialism had a hard time in America because workers didn't remain workers over time." Surveying the lives of hundreds of laborers--mainly Irish Catholics--in the industrial city of Newburyport, Massachusetts, Stephan found that while few of them entered the middle class in the first generation, many of them bought houses, and, just as important, many of them moved. When his book Poverty and Progress was published in 1964, it was widely praised for its innovative analysis of social and geographical mobility and for its sophisticated use of quantified data.
From there, Stephan's rise was rapid. In 1967 he got a job at Brandeis University; two years later he moved with Abby and their two young children to Los Angeles, where he had been hired by UCLA for a "hugely higher salary." In 1973 he returned to Harvard as a full professor. That same year, he published The Other Bostonians, an exhaustive study of social mobility among Boston's working class from 1880 to 1970. It was a book in the Handlin mold, sober in its sifting of data, dispassionate in tone: a work of social science as much as history. Compared to the work of his New Left peers, The Other Bostonians was decidedly muted. And yet the book contained a distinct undertone of social criticism. Stephan depicted the American class system as one of both unique fluidity and appalling inequality that offered "substantial privilege for the privileged and extensive opportunity for the underprivileged." And he was particularly scathing in his treatment of American racism.
In one chapter, "Blacks and Whites," he eviscerated the view (most vividly expressed in Irving Kristol's 1966 New York Times Magazine article "The Negro Today is the Last of the Immigrants") that the experience of blacks in northern cities differed only in degree--and not in kind--from the poverty and social exclusion suffered by the European immigrants who arrived before them. This argument lies behind a great deal of white opposition to special remedies for black poverty (if blacks are merely one in a line of immigrant groups that had to overcome poverty and discrimination, then why do they merit special treatment?), and it powerfully informs the Thernstroms' America in Black and White, in which blacks are frequently and unfavorably compared with industrious immigrants. Back in 1973, however, Stephan was pointing out that second-generation blacks in Boston "did only a shade better than migrants from the rural South--unlike most European migrants including the Irish," while even third-generation blacks were consigned to menial labor. Turning next to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's argument that blacks had been increasingly held back by a self-reproducing "culture of poverty," he concluded that "the main barriers to black achievement have been not internal but external, the result not of peculiarities in black culture but of peculiarities in white culture."
Mrs. Thernstrom Goes to Washington
While Stephan made a name for himself as a bright young scholar, Abigail raised their two children, putting aside her graduate work from the time she became pregnant with Melanie until 1973, when the family settled in Lexington. She completed her dissertation in 1975, entitled "The Left Against the Court: The Supreme Court and Its Critics, 1900-1937"; it was, she laughs, "the world's worst dissertation." Still, it landed her a job teaching in the social studies program at Harvard, and she started reviewing books for The New Republic, now owned and edited by her old friend Marty Peretz.
One day in the spring of 1978, the Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, who had recently published Affirmative Discrimination, the ur-text of affirmative action opponents, took her to lunch. (Glazer has since declared his support for a soft form of affirmative action.) Glazer, whom Abigail describes as "the single most important intellectual influence in my life," told her to "stop taking care of the kids and get to work." His advice was to "become the world's greatest authority on some one little topic." That summer, while reading one of the landmark cases on voting rights--the United Jewish Orgs. v. Carey, a redistricting case involving Hasidic Jews--Abigail discovered her one little topic. When she bumped into Glazer, he encouraged her to write on voting rights for The Public Interest, a recently established neoconservative journal.
The following spring, she published her findings in an article called "The Odd Evolution of the Voting Rights Act." The evolution was "odd" because the act was no longer being applied to eliminate obstacles that disenfranchised black voters--its original and sole purpose, in her view. The Voting Rights Act was being used instead to ensure that blacks and "language minorities," such as Mexicans, were elected to office according to their numerical strength.
Abigail wasn't entirely wrong: The focus of the act had shifted since blacks won the ballot, and civil rights attorneys were calling attention to more subtle forms of disenfranchisement, such as at-large electoral systems that effectively deprived blacks and other minorities of a say on city commissions and school boards. By "diluting" the votes of blacks who might otherwise have been able to elect candidates of their choice to single-member offices, at-large voting often had the same effect as outright disenfranchisement. In March of 1969, the civil rights community received powerful support from Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the majority decision in Allen v. State Board of Elections, Warren argued that "the right to vote can be affected by a dilution of voting power as well as by an absolute prohibition on casting a ballot." The federal government could step in to prevent such dilution, he ruled, under Section 5 of the act--the "preclearance" provision forbidding changes in electoral arrangements without the approval of the Court or attorney general.
This was, in Abigail's view, a promiscuous extension of preclearance, which until then had only protected blacks from purposeful disenfranchisement. Justice Warren's decision, she wrote in her Public Interest article, "permanently blurred the distinction between disenfranchisement and dilution, and between equality of political opportunity and equality of electoral result." And so Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act had become "a tool for guaranteeing minority groups maximum electoral effectiveness." In its zeal to guarantee that votes cast by minorities were not "diluted," the Justice Department was creating a "ward system" of "proportional representation" for minorities--affirmative action in the electoral realm. The act's "main accomplishment," she concluded darkly, may be the "political polarization of the society along racial and ethnic lines... . If our aim is to create one society--not two or four or twenty--is this the direction in which we want to go?"
Abigail's article caused a stir in conservative intellectual circles. Her writing was brash and forceful, and the "irony" she underscored--that the Voting Rights Act now posed a direct threat to the fragile fabric of race relations--was eagerly seized upon by the act's conservative critics. A year later, one such critic--Ronald Reagan--became president of the United States. A fervent opponent of affirmative action and a self-proclaimed supporter of a colorblind America, Reagan named a rabid conservative, William Bradford Reynolds, as his assistant attorney general for civil rights. Suddenly, Abigail Thernstrom had a hot subject on her hands--and a perspective that made her a potentially valuable asset to the conservative movement. If the 1960s had been a time of opportunity for liberal critics, the 1980s were boom time for critics of liberalism. "The Reagan era was a godsend for her," said Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, who has known the Thernstroms for three decades. "There was an opening for more rigorous critics of affirmative action, people who could offer a principled critique. Abby moved in to fill that slot, and it very rapidly gave her a national voice."
The tide seemed to be turning in her favor in the courts as well. Six months before Reagan was elected, the Supreme Court's ruling in Mobile v. Bolden offered a striking confirmation of Abigail's views on voting rights. The case involved a challenge by black plaintiffs to the at-large method of electing the city commission of Mobile, Alabama. The racially discriminatory impact of the system, founded at the end of Reconstruction, was undeniable: Although African Americans made up more than a third of Mobile's population, none had ever been elected to the commission. The Fifth Circuit had held for the plaintiffs, but the Supreme Court reversed the decision, asserting that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required proof of discriminatory intent, a notoriously difficult thing to establish. The strict standard of intent adopted by the Court (hailed by Abigail Thernstrom as "simple, principled, and tight") made it much harder for minorities to win in voting-rights cases.
A sense of alarm spread through the civil rights community, since the special provisions of the Voting Rights Act, including Section 5, were due to expire in August 1982. In the spring of 1981, a group of voting-rights experts hunkered down in the capital to draft an amendment to Section 2 that would make impact rather than intent the main basis for determining discrimination, and thereby override the Mobile decision. After being awarded a Twentieth Century Fund grant to write a book on the subject, Abigail followed the voting-rights experts to Washington.
"She was very charming," recalls Laughlin McDonald, the director of the southern regional office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Atlanta and one of the amendment drafters. "She told me she'd gone to Barnard and she said, 'I'm an old SNCC person.'" She became a fly on the wall of the offices of voting-rights activists. She listened as they plotted strategy, and she took notes for her book. In retrospect--if one considers the stakes involved--the degree of access she was granted seems astonishing. After all, she had become increasingly cozy with critics of the Voting Rights Act, particularly Utah Senator Orrin Hatch and his staff.
In the fall of 1981, Abigail made her first trip down south. The civil rights attorneys she met there, she says, envied her ease among blacks. "There was a level of comfort on my part in moving in an interracial setting that wasn't true for these lefties, these white lefties, who were saying, 'How come you're spending all this time with blacks, you know, and they're having completely forthright conversations with you? And you're having a grand time, and, you know, they love you, and you love them.' It was precisely their race consciousness that created a barrier for [them]. And again I had such a history and a level of comfort you know, hangin' around with blacks, that it stood me in very good stead."
The "white lefties" who showed her around the South have different memories of her visit. "She came into our offices and said, 'This is the first time I've been in Atlanta,'" McDonald told me. "This sounded strange to me, since the headquarters of SNCC were in Atlanta and she said she was an old SNCC person." The voting-rights historian Peyton McCrary, who received Abigail in Mobile a few weeks later, says, "It was like she was in a foreign country. She seemed naive. I mean, everyone in Mobile understood that if you changed from at-large to district elections, blacks would get elected, and a lot of whites considered that a bad thing."
Abigail told McDonald she wanted to speak to his clients in Rogers v. Lodge, a districting case in nearby Burke County. "I told her we didn't want anyone talking to our clients with litigation pending. That's just legal theory 101, because people say things to the press that come back to haunt you." According to McDonald, Abigail took her complaints to Morris Abrams, a civil rights attorney whose views on race had become increasingly conservative over the years. Abrams then wrote a letter to ACLU President Norman Dorsen in which he accused the organization of betraying its commitment to freedom of the press.
It wasn't the last time Abigail deployed this tactic. In early 1982, she asked J. Morgan Kousser, a voting-rights historian at the California Institute of Technology, to help her arrange an interview with the plaintiffs in Mobile v. Bolden, which was being tried on remand in an Alabama court. According to Kousser, who had been friendly with the Thernstroms since their days in Los Angeles, "She made a statement which I took to mean that if she weren't given access, she would testify against the amendment to Section 2 in the Senate. So reluctantly, thinking that it might cause my friends to distrust me for the rest of my life, I called Jim Blacksher, an attorney for Bolden who'd argued the case before the Supreme Court." When Armand Derfner, a prominent South Carolina voting-rights attorney, heard that Abigail was coming down to Mobile in the fall for an interview with the plaintiffs, he nearly exploded. "You've got to be crazy!" he remembers telling Blacksher. "She's one of the generals in the fight to make sure Section 2 doesn't get amended, one of the generals in the fight against the Voting Rights Act! How do we know she's not going to report back to the other side?" Blacksher withdrew the offer, telling Abigail she was welcome to look at his public documents but that she couldn't talk to his witnesses until they'd testified.
She was livid. Derfner, she complained to Kousser, was stonewalling her research. Kousser was frightened that she'd strike back. Abigail didn't testify against Section 2 at the 1982 hearings. But it appears she chose a more revealing form of revenge. On March 19, 1982, an editorial by John H. Bunzel, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, appeared in The Wall Street Journal under the title "Hardball Voting-Rights Hearings." Without identifying any of the parties by name, Bunzel wrote that some long-time supporters of the Voting Rights Act, who were invited to testify before the House or Senate Judiciary subcommittees, were subjected to harassment and intimidation.... A recognized authority on the Voting Rights Act, scheduled to testify on the opening day of the hearings, had planned a research trip this fall to a Southern city. In preparation for the trip, she called an attorney (and a friend), who said he would help set up some interviews with politically active blacks. But a week later she was told that non-cooperation had been ordered by a leading strategist working closely with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, unless she backed out of the Senate hearings. It was also made clear that no one else active in civil rights in the South was likely to help her as long as she planned to testify. She withdrew as a witness.
The subject of--and source for--this could only have been Abigail Thernstrom.
For Abigail, the sense of hurt, of betrayal, is still raw. "I was a good liberal Democrat, and the Democrats and civil rights attorneys treated me like dirt. Meanwhile, the Republicans, who knew perfectly well I was a good liberal Democrat--the Republicans, for instance, on the Hill--were delighted to let me see material and talk to me. These were the people who kept teasing me about my politics but were completely open to me. I mean, it was just ridiculous. Whereas the Democrats couldn't have been more hostile. And this was a very important fact in my evolution."
In June of 1982--with overwhelming support from the Senate and the House--the amendment to Section 2 passed and Section 5 was upheld. And thanks in large part to Peyton McCrary and J. Morgan Kousser, the historians who demonstrated the discriminatory intent behind the adoption of at-large elections in Mobile in 1874, an agreement was reached ending at-large elections. Curiously enough, Bolden's victory received not a single mention in Abigail Thernstrom's 1987 book Whose Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Rights. Featuring a blurb by her friend Michael Walzer and dedicated to her husband, Whose Votes Count? was an elaboration of the arguments Abigail had made in her Public Interest article. Likening the Voting Rights Act to "a curfew imposed in the wake of a riot--an emergency measure taken with the expectation that it would be lifted as soon as conditions allowed," she declared that it was time for the Justice Department-imposed curfew to be lifted.
Some of her criticisms were legitimate. By carving districts composed primarily of black voters, the Justice Department had "whitened" adjoining districts, thus leaving them vulnerable to Republican takeover. As Abigail noted, "When whites on a city council or other legislative body owe nothing to black support, blacks in the minority may find themselves consistently outvoted and thus isolated." But her tone was so shrill and her treatment of black claims of discrimination was so dismissive as to distract attention from the book's merits. The "appalling level of black teenage pregnancy," she wrote, "is not an argument for creating a maximum number of 65 percent black districts."
Not surprisingly, the book was skewered by the voting-rights advocates Abigail had met and interviewed. In a withering critique published in The Journal of Law and Politics in the spring of 1988, Peyton McCrary and Pamela S. Karlan argued that "Whose Votes Count? so distorts the evidence that it cannot be taken seriously as scholarship." They continued: "It is ironic that Thernstrom insists that at-large systems adopted years ago--when blacks were largely disenfranchised--are the product of democratic process, while recent local decisions to adopt systems that more accurately reflect the political strength of minorities are not."
Abigail says she took such criticism in stride: "I knew what was coming by then. But, you know, I'm very stubborn, and I don't let people push me around. It's what I believe. And all this race-conscious stuff, I don't believe it's in the public interest, I don't think it's in the interest of black Americans, and I think it's going to walk us down the same wrong road. It's not what I grew up with, and I've never changed my view on that."
By this point, Abigail also, she says, "had a name." But even with her new reputation, tenure eluded her; she ended up in an adjunct position in Boston University's school of education. She insists she was never interested in being a full-time professor. According to Orlando Patterson, however, "Abby is as invested in academic life as Steve is, and it basically hasn't worked out for her. I suspect there's some bitterness there, and I think that factor has played into her sense of grievance and driven her to take an even stronger position against affirmative action."
The "Rape" of Stephan Thernstrom
Stephan Thernstrom's rage against liberalism, like his wife's, is a profoundly personal conviction that reflects an acute sense of victimization. Like his wife, he sees himself as an embattled intellectual who has suffered for his principles at the hands of an angry, intolerant left. Abigail's break with the left occurred in Washington; Stephan's took place painfully closer to home, on the Harvard campus. While he was in Los Angeles, Harvard had undergone some of the most divisive battles in its history. There was the struggle for a separate black studies department, led by the fiery Caribbean lawyer Ewart Guinier, Lani Guinier's father. There were the anti-ROTC protests by Students for a Democratic Society, which culminated in the April 1969 occupation of University Hall. And then came feminism.
To Stephan's closest friends at Harvard--men like Oscar Handlin and the political theorist Harvey Mansfield, men who had supported the Vietnam War and sided with Harvard's administration--this was all very frightening. The campus wars of 1969 and beyond had driven Handlin and Mansfield sharply to the right. Stephan still considered himself a liberal, but like them he was a fierce Harvard loyalist and he abhorred the left's assault on the university and its values. In 1979, as a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, he saw "social democracy in action" and concluded that Margaret Thatcher was "injecting some bracing, and long overdue changes in English government." And though he didn't vote Republican until 1988, he found himself "very irritated at the Harvard conventional wisdom about Reagan--'Ha, ha, ha, he's so stupid!' when, as we looked around, it seemed to us that he was doing some things quite successfully."
On campus, Stephan struck some of his colleagues as isolated and embittered. In Mandarin fashion, he enjoyed poking fun at examples of "political correctness"--a poisonous influence, he thought, on the life of the mind. In February 1988, a black woman attending his class on "The Peopling of America" took offense at a passing remark he made about black men abandoning their wives and children. She told some friends of hers in the black students' organization; they proceeded to file a complaint with Harvard's Committee on Race Relations. One day, Stephan opened The Harvard Crimson to find himself a man on trial, charged with racial insensitivity by an anonymous accuser.
"What Steve said about black men was statistically true," Orlando Patterson says. "The problem was the way he'd said it, the tone." Patterson found out who the student was and met her for coffee. "She went back to Steve and said she understood that it wasn't a racist remark and they shook hands. So I thought things had settled. But Steve was convinced that this was a clear case of academic freedom. When his colleagues decided this wasn't a battle they wanted to wage, I think he felt betrayed. The whole thing was blown way out of proportion." A month after the incident, Dean of Faculty Michael Spence issued a statement assuring that Stephan's academic freedom would be protected, but it was too little, too late. "I felt like a rape victim," Stephan said in Dinesh D'Souza's 1991 anti-PC diatribe, Illiberal Education.
For Stephan, Harvard's tepid defense of his academic freedom was bad enough. Now that his reputation was stained by an accusation that he was a racist, he felt shunned by his colleagues. And where were liberal friends like Michael Walzer? As an old comrade, Stephan thought he deserved an outpouring of support, a letter-writing campaign to Harvard that would testify to his antiracist credentials, his record of liberal activism. "After that episode, he and Abby just withdrew from the university," Patterson remembers. "Steve felt that all his colleagues had abandoned him. I thought I was a friend of Steve's. We'd been visiting fellows at Cambridge together. And then suddenly, boom! It was the same with all his other friends. He and Abby just withdrew to a whole new group of people, mainly conservatives."
The Scourge of Racial Preferences
Meanwhile, even though the country seemed to be moving in one direction, electing Bill Clinton, a vocal supporter of affirmative action, to the presidency in 1992, the Rehnquist Court was moving in another, solidifying the Reagan-era backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement. Pilloried by voting-rights advocates when it was published, Abigail Thernstrom's Whose Votes Count? began to enjoy a new lease on life in the courts.
In the 1993 case of Shaw v. Reno, the Supreme Court made the first in a series of rulings invalidating majority-minority districts as an unconstitutional form of racial gerrymandering. As a result of the creation of these districts (all drawn after the decennial census of 1990), 39 blacks were elected to Congress in 1992, up from 24 in 1988. Black politicians won in states where not even one African American had been elected to Congress since Reconstruction--Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana. But in the majority opinion in Shaw v. Reno, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, in effect quoting Abigail Thernstrom, declared that "racial classifications of any sort pose the risk of lasting harm to our society" and that black-majority districts bear "an uncomfortable resemblance to political apartheid." Two years later, the Court struck down Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney's district in Georgia; in June of 1996, it nullified majority-minority congressional districts in Texas and North Carolina.
McKinney ran again and won--a victory that Abigail held up as evidence that there are no longer barriers to black candidates in majority-white settings in the South--but most voting-rights experts, and McKinney herself, believe she owed her victory partly to incumbency. Douglas Wilder, the first black governor of Virginia and a politician Abigail promotes as a model for his ability to appeal to white voters, won his first campaign in a majority-black district, as have a number of other successful black politicians in majority-white districts.
"Abby's thinking has given a scholarly covenant to the five-member majority on the Court," says J. Morgan Kousser. "Abby is the first scholarly citation in Clarence Thomas's concurrence in Holder v. Hall, which is the most extreme statement on voting rights that anyone has made since '69. In fact, it directly calls for overturning the '69 Allen ruling [regarding preclearance]."
Despite the growing influence of her book, Abigail Thernstrom has appeared only once in court as an expert witness--unlike her husband, an expert witness for hire who is paid $200 an hour for his services even though he has no academic expertise in voting rights. It's a strategic division of labor. In 1986 Katharine Butler, a conservative law professor at the University of South Carolina, asked Abigail to be an expert witness in a redistricting case in Georgia. "My line from the very beginning," Abigail remembers, "was, 'Get Steve. He'd be much better at this than I am.' He went to college on a debate scholarship, with a B.S. in public speaking, of all things, and he's fast on his feet verbally, and he also has an ability to go through mounds of material very fast. I don't have those talents, so he does the voting-rights stuff rather than me." Since then, when school boards and city commissions have found themselves challenged in court by minorities claiming they've been denied a voice in local affairs, Stephan Thernstrom has readily made himself available.
In the spring of 1997, for example, after a two-week vacation in the Galápagos Islands, he squared off with Laughlin McDonald, Abby's old adversary, in a courtroom in Montezuma, Colorado. (Actually, Stephan testified by phone, having never set foot in the town.) McDonald was representing a group of Ute Mountain Indians as they challenged the at-large method of electing the local school board. The Utes, who comprised nearly a fifth of the county's population, had been entirely excluded from the process. Stephan had been hired by the school board--at a fee of nearly $10,000--to refute an expert report filed on behalf of the Utes by a historian of the American West.
Under cross-examination, Stephan admitted not only that he had done no primary research on the history of American Indians, but that before he was hired by the school board he "had never heard of the Ute Mountain Indians specifically, though a mention or two of them appear in a book I edited, The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups." Asked about the level of support Indian candidates had received from Indian voters in past elections, he drew a blank: "Two weeks in the Galápagos, where the airport was closed by snow, et cetera, I'm--this all seems very remote to my memory now." The court ruled in favor of the Utes.
Nothing has engaged Stephan's energies as an activist more intensely than the scourge of racial preferences in college and high school admissions. From his home office in Lexington, on Harvard University stationery, he has written to dozens of schools, requesting that data on grades, test scores, and family income be sent to Linda Chavez's Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO). The CEO scours the data for evidence of a minority quota system in violation of the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision. The schools in question can either curtail their affirmative action programs (as the University of Massachusetts did after receiving a letter from Stephan in the summer of 1998) or face a possible antidiscrimination lawsuit. Stephan's 1998 letter was featured in a booklet by the right-wing Center for Individual Rights. Distributed at public colleges in an effort to recruit the future Bakkes of America, the pamphlet reassured presumptive victims of affirmative action: "Remember that you do not need proof of exactly how you have been discriminated against in order to file a lawsuit."
Stephan claims that he has the best interests of black students in mind and notes, correctly, that their graduation rates at public universities are much lower than those for whites and Asians. The fact that Proposition 209 drastically reduced the number of black students attending Berkeley might actually be a good thing, he says, because they're better off attending, say, Riverside, where they'll be able to keep up. But here Stephan has got it wrong: Rigorous schools have lower dropout rates for black students, because, as James Traub observed in The New York Times Magazine, "Once you have been admitted to the rarified community of a Harvard or a Yale or a Berkeley, you are almost not allowed to fail."
In Massachusetts, Stephan has played a small but significant role in the politics of secondary education. Since the 1960s, the state has seen some of the bloodiest battles over school integration north of the Mason-Dixon line. It was in Boston in 1974 that U.S. District Court Justice W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., issued the original forced-busing order, which set off a near civil war as South Boston Irish children threw rocks and bottles at black children from Roxbury. Today, public schools in Massachusetts are more segregated than ever, with blacks and Latinos generally attending the worst ones.
Even so, Stephan thinks minority children in his state are a privileged class, beneficiaries of unearned preferences. In 1996 he served as a consultant in the case of Michael McLaughlin's daughter against Boston Latin, an elite public school in Boston. Julia McLaughlin was a 12-year-old white girl who until then had always attended Catholic schools. When she was denied admission to Boston Latin, she sued on the grounds that the school's 35 percent set-aside for black and Latino applicants violated her civil rights under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The judge presiding in the case was none other than W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., who on August 29, 1997, decided in favor of McLaughlin. And while the ruling was a shock to those who remembered Garrity as the liberal judge behind court-ordered busing, it was in step with other decisions handed down in recent years. The Rehnquist Court may eventually rule that consideration of race in school assignment is unconstitutional and effectively override Brown v. Board of Education. For fear of inviting such a decision, Boston school officials declined to appeal Garrity's ruling. When I asked Stephan about his role in the case, he described it as "pro-bono," although Michael McLaughlin later asked the court to pay the witness $14,050--a request Garrity denied, characterizing Stephan's long sessions coaching Michael and Julia McLaughlin as "an odd exercise whose purpose eludes us."
America in Black and White
In 1997 the Thernstroms' magnum opus, America in Black and White, was published by the Free Press. The product of seven years of research, it was written with the support of several right-wing think tanks and foundations, including a $180,000 grant from the John M. Olin Foundation. A hymn to racial optimism, America in Black and White was intended as a sequel, and response, to Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma. In the Thernstroms' view, there was no longer an American dilemma, or at least not the one that Myrdal had described. African Americans, they demonstrated by way of numerous statistical charts, were doing better than ever, entering the middle class at unprecedented speed. Unfortunately, blacks and liberals were continuing to berate America as if it hadn't changed. "The stereotype [of black poverty] serves an important political purpose: it nurtures the mix of black anger and white shame that sustains the race-based social policies implemented since the late 1960s."
The first section of the book, "History," was a balanced and often horrifying survey of race in America up to the civil rights movement. The second, dominant part of the book, "Out of the Sixties," was a tale of blacks who misbehave and the liberals who coddle them. Downplaying the significance of black protest, the Thernstroms argued that the civil rights movement had triumphed because of a "quiet revolution in attitudes"--white attitudes. When Martin Luther King, Jr., took the movement north, they wrote, he went too far. He lost the sympathy of the very whites whose change in attitudes had allowed his cause to succeed. "From their perspective, the Irish, Italians and Jews had all lived in their own 'ghettos' when they first settled in American cities; it seemed to have done them no harm." If blacks in the ghetto complain of joblessness, that's "in part a consequence of black crime." ("We speak of black crime as a convenient shorthand, hard to avoid.") As for the inflammatory Willie Horton ads, they were "factually sound, and they raised serious policy issues: the risks to the public that furlough programs entail."
Reading America in Black and White, one cannot help wondering what, if anything, America owes the descendants of slaves. I asked Abigail Thernstrom whether the debt had been paid. "Oh, my God. Of course it owes black Americans something in that there's been a terrible, horrible history here... . But you know talk of reparations and so forth is not gonna do anything." So what does the country owe blacks? "It owes a commitment to racial equality." In retrospect, however, she says: "There were points [in America in Black and White ] that had a backlash tone that I would take out today. I was very angry at the time. I do think it's more polemical than I would have made it today." And yet that polemical tone served its purpose: It gave the Thernstroms a national platform, complete with invitations to the White House and appearances on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and CNN.
Embraced by the right, America in Black and White led to a rupture with the black economist Glenn Loury, one of the couple's close intellectual friends. A leading architect of black Reaganism in the 1980s, Loury knew that the Thernstroms were drawn to him in part because of his race, but he enjoyed their company nevertheless. "Steve and Abby appreciated the difficulties of doing the kind of thing I was trying to do," Loury remembers. "They understood that I wanted the best 'for my people,' but that by my lights what I thought was best had put me at odds with institutions like Harvard and the Ford Foundation. I was taking a line that had a certain amount of courage, and I was paying a price."
By the mid-1990s, however, the friendship began to cool. When Abigail published an article arguing that it was unfair to place the burden of proof on employers in discrimination cases, Loury wrote her a friendly letter pointing out her errors. "I told her if the civil rights laws of 1964 are going to mean anything, you can't go around forcing plaintiffs to prove motives. I think she felt I was pulling rank with her as an economist." At a barbecue in the summer of 1996, he and the Thernstroms got into a heated quarrel about the black underclass. "I said we cannot give up on these people. And they said, 'That's all very well and good, Glenn, but what do you propose to do? By implication and tone, you suggest that you care more about this than we do.' Things were smoothed over a little bit, but there was a clear strain."
Still, the relationship was healthy enough that when the Thernstroms' publisher asked Loury to blurb America in Black and White, he agreed, even though he hadn't read it. Shortly thereafter, however, The Atlantic Monthly asked him to review the book. Loury called Abigail to ask whether she'd mind if he did the review instead of the blurb. After speaking with her publisher, who told her that "it's much better to have Glenn's review in the Atlantic," she encouraged him to take the assignment.
Loury's review was quietly devastating. Describing the book as "an important, learned and searching statement on our age-old social dilemma," he praised his friends for presenting "a wealth of evidence ... on the progressive liberalization of racial attitudes among whites of the past half-century" and for telling "hard truths unsparingly." What America in Black and White lacked, however, was "an appreciation of irony, and a sense of the tragic." "Reading it," he observed, "one cannot escape the impression that the enemy is being engaged... . A great many adherents of the civil rights vision remain at large among us, and the authors seem determined to ferret them out and prove them wrong."
Loury cited econometric studies showing there was almost no evidence for the Thernstroms' assertion that "black crime" was a cause of black poverty. Loury also assailed the Thernstroms' argument that Afrocentrism and underqualified black teachers were to blame for the low performance of K-12 black students. Afrocentrism, he noted, remains a fringe phenomenon in education, while three-quarters of public school teachers are white.
Most damaging of all, Loury showed that the Thernstroms carelessly misread their own data in places. Attempting to expose as a liberal shibboleth the idea that the war on drugs had increased the incarceration rate among African-American males, the Thernstroms wrote: "African Americans are a bit less likely to be arrested for drug offenses than they are for most other crimes." But the table they referred to, Loury pointed out, "shows no such thing. It provides the per capita arrest rates of blacks relative to the population as a whole, for various offenses, allowing one to see, for example, that in 1995 a randomly chosen black person was 2.9 times as likely to be arrested for a drug offense and 4.3 times as likely to be arrested for murder as a randomly chosen person from the general population. But this does not mean that in absolute terms fewer blacks were arrested for drug offenses than for murder. Indeed, just the opposite is true."
As a matter of courtesy, Loury e-mailed the review to the Thernstroms before it went to press. "Their response was pure vitriol. They said it was morally reprehensible and intellectually dishonest, and they refused to speak to me," Loury says. "I had no sense I was going to end our friendship by writing this review." A few months later, William F. Buckley, Jr., and John Newhouse hosted a dinner in New York and invited Loury. When the Thernstroms learned that Loury would be among the guests, they boycotted the event. "The Thernstroms' reaction to Glenn's review showed that they have become as politically correct in their responses as the left is," Orlando Patterson says. "They brook no criticism."
The Thernstroms' rightward evolution has been gradual, so gradual it surprises even them. When Abigail told me that she voted for Clinton in 1992, Stephan exclaimed, evidently flabbergasted, "Those are grounds for divorce!" To which Abigail replied: "I voted Republican for the first time in 1996. Look, I don't think this is political. I think this is tribal. I identified myself as being a liberal Democrat, and I couldn't face the fact that's not who I was. That's the group I belonged to."
Leaving the tribe, she says, has not been easy. It has involved not just a change of mind but the loss of friends. When I mentioned Michael Walzer, she picked her nails and looked down sadly. "So how are the Walzers? I think Michael is unhappy about the direction we've taken politically. Whereas I'm not at all unhappy with his politics. There's a kind of imbalance. It's a big world. I mean, I just don't understand it. People differ... . Some of my best friends are liberal Democrats." (The Walzers and Thernstroms have seen one another just once in the past decade. For his part, Michael Walzer says, "I've avoided reading their big book, out of sadness or fear of some kind of final breach.")
Abigail fled from the tribe--the tribe of bien-pensant Cambridge liberalism--because she found it as stifling as the communism her parents espoused. "I've got a problem," she told me, "with being stuffed into boxes. Put me in a room of conservatives and I start running to the left; put me in a group of liberals and I start running to the right. I mean, I just have problems with ideologically coercive environments--I get claustrophobic." That may be true, but if so, her record of public activism is all the more striking. For the only positions to which she has advanced over the course of her 20-year career place her far to the right along the American political spectrum. No one, apparently not even her husband, would have guessed that she was still, in her heart of hearts, a liberal Democrat until a few years ago.
In the end, Abigail Thernstrom has not so much rejected ideological boxes as she has sought security in another container--one that, unlike the integrated setting of her childhood in Croton-on-Hudson, is nearly all white. When I asked the couple whether they were troubled that hardly any black Americans support their ideas on affirmative action and racial justice, Stephan said: "Well, look, it's actually more complicated than that... . The disagreement, I think, has to do with the fact that not many blacks actually understand the magnitude of the racial preferences within, for example, higher education--"
Just then, Abigail cut him off: "No, no, Adam's right. Look, I have to figure out the issues for myself and call the shots as I see them. Do I wish that I had, you know, more black company? That would be nice, but at the end of the day, I'm me, and I can't be anybody else."
