[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 144 (Thursday, October 6, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: October 6, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                    A CONVERSATION WITH MARTHA MINOW

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, I confess, I was not even aware that 
a magazine called Humanities existed until I had the pleasure of 
listening to Gwendolyn Brooks deliver the annual Jefferson Lecture for 
the National Endowment for the Humanities, and someone handed me a copy 
of the magazine.
  In fact, it is 15 years old.
  It is a solid, constructive journal.
  In the current edition, there is an interview by Sheldon Hackney, who 
chairs the National Endowment for the Humanities with Prof. Martha 
Minow.
  I confess some prejudice in the matter because she is the daughter of 
two longtime friends of my wife and me, Newton and Jo Minow.
  The interview talks about the divisions in our society; where we are, 
where we must go and how to get there.
  Martha Minow recently authored a book titled, ``Making All The 
Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law.''
  That book, undoubtedly, stimulated Sheldon Hackney to have this 
interview.
  Because it contains so much common sense, in a period where we don't 
have an abundance of that quality, I ask to insert the interview into 
the Record at this point.
  The interview follows:

                    A Conversation With Martha Minow

       Sheldon Hackney: History has a way of confusing things. 
     You've written a good bit about the dilemmas of difference in 
     this country. One in particular speaks to me because of my 
     experience on a college campus, where I saw this in action--
     the paradox of how trying to do something about the problems 
     that arise because of differences actually exacerbates those 
     problems.
       Martha Minow: Yes. When you are in a community in which 
     people with certain kinds of traits or identities have been 
     less advantaged or less well regarded than others, the 
     dilemma that is created is that paying attention to that 
     trait against the same backdrop may further accentuate 
     precisely what has disadvantaged people, and yet ignoring it 
     against the same backdrop may leave those people unassisted 
     in an environment, a school, or other institution that wasn't 
     designed with them in mind. I think that an obvious example 
     in the academic context is, should there be special welcoming 
     or academic support programs for people of color or women? If 
     you create those kinds of programs, there is a danger that 
     you are singling those people out and saying that somehow 
     they're not full and equal members of the community--they 
     need something special. On the other hand, if you don't do 
     something and you leave the existing operations as they were, 
     those people may well look around and feel as if no one has 
     even noticed that they're there, and indeed that some of the 
     mores of the place seem exclusionary. That's the kind of 
     problem.
       Hackney: Precisely. I felt that keenly every day. I didn't 
     find a good solution to that. Do you have one?
       Minow: Well, it's not one solution, but it's an approach at 
     a somewhat abstract level. Figuring out how to make it 
     operational is, of course, the big challenge. The abstract 
     insight is that the background norms themselves have to 
     change.
       In that way, you won't have to single people out or create 
     special programs because you'll have changed the institution. 
     The easiest image for me to describe this is with regard to 
     disability. Rather than having a separate entrance for the 
     student who uses a wheelchair, you make the front entrance 
     wheelchair accessible. Rather than having a separate building 
     with classrooms that are wheelchair accessible, you make all 
     the buildings wheelchair accessible. Now, how you translate 
     that across the range of differences that we encounter in 
     this society is the challenge. The nature of a physical 
     disability is different from gender difference, which is 
     different from racial difference, which is different from 
     linguistic difference.
       Hackney: Yes.
       Minow: And then, of course, we have people who are in many 
     of those categories, overlapping with each other.
       Another example that I use in my book is in an elementary 
     school classroom in which there is a student who is hearing 
     disabled. A case that went up to the Supreme Court posed the 
     question, does that student have a right to have the state 
     pay for a full-time sign-language interpreter? The Supreme 
     Court said no, it's too costly, and, in any case, the student 
     is smart enough that she's making progress without much 
     assistance. I thought that was an inadequate response: 
     nothing needs to change because this student was talented 
     enough to make progress while missing one-third of what was 
     said in class. Maybe she would make much more progress if she 
     had a fuller accommodation. I understand the cost problem, 
     however, and no doubt that explained the school's opposition.
       Yet there is another alternative besides giving or denying 
     a paid sign language instructor. An alternative solution 
     should ask what if every student in the class learned sign 
     language? Some people say, ``How impractical,'' and yet other 
     people have written me to say that is exactly what they've 
     done in their schools, which is very encouraging. One of the 
     things I like about that particular example is that not only 
     is it the humane thing to do, but those students will have an 
     enormous benefit from learning about language generally as 
     well as learning how to make a place that's inclusive.
       So, again, it's not the details of this solution that I 
     would advocate in every place, every time, but that's the 
     kind of idea I have. The background assumption in this 
     classroom should be ``not everybody can hear''; the 
     background assumption in that classroom should be ``everyone 
     has a right to be communicated with however they need to be 
     communicated with,'' and you figure out what it takes.
       Hackney: It does provide a theoretical framework. In the 
     case of racial differences on campus, one can imagine a time 
     when the differences by race won't matter but then, how do 
     you get there?
       Minow: What do you mean by ``there''? By saying racial 
     differences won't matter, I think we mean several things. 
     One, we mean that for any of the things that we categorize as 
     benefits and burdens, the differences are irrelevant. On the 
     other hand, we don't mean therefore no one has an identity 
     related to their background. We don't mean that everyone is 
     operating behind a screen and no one sees anyone else. What 
     we mean is that race can matter to people along with other 
     kinds of personal and group characteristics that, again, 
     don't carry significant burdens in terms of institutional 
     treatment or opportunities.
       So how do we get there? And I think it's a very complex 
     process of joining together to tack against the wind. It's 
     trying to figure out what mix of special programs will 
     actually change the background norms and what changes in the 
     curriculum will ensure that not just the black students are 
     taking courses that expose them to African-American studies, 
     but the changes occur in other parts of the curriculum, so 
     they don't feel like ``Well, only we are learning about this, 
     and the dominant curriculum excludes our experience, and 
     other students are never expected to learn about it.'' The 
     important thing is to look at the university from the 
     perspective of all the students.
       On the issue of gender, imagining and constructing methods 
     for inclusion prompt painful discussions. Women's groups have 
     been divided over precisely this question. Usually it is put 
     in the form of a conflict over equal treatment or special 
     treatment, which is itself, I think an unfortunate 
     formulation. A good example is in the workplace with regard 
     to pregnancy and childbearing. Should a woman have a right to 
     maternity leave that a man does not get? For years, many 
     women's groups said yes and many others said no, contending 
     such a leave disadvantages women when they are trying to get 
     a job, and it stigmatizes them at the workplace. I think the 
     solution that the law has developed is the right one, which 
     is, the employer has to accommodate both men and women and 
     make it possible for both men and women to have a job and to 
     raise their children, and if that means a parenting leave or 
     a dependent-care leave, that's the right answer.
       Hackney: Parenting leave is the solution for a lot of 
     institutions. But in the abstract, that is to say, ``Well, we 
     will make both groups, both parties, the same.''
       Minow: We will make both parties the same by changing the 
     institution. What I think that example so nicely illustrates 
     is that most of our institutions, our workplaces and so 
     forth, took for granted a kind of societal practice that said 
     everything surrounding children is women's jobs; therefore, 
     anything that women have to do in order to take care of 
     children should take away from their place in the paid work 
     force. Whereas, if you stand back and say, anything to do 
     with children is an obligation of both parents, then the 
     workplace itself has to change. It means all or most 
     employees will have some family obligations, not just this 
     odd little group called women. It is treating both women and 
     men the same, in a sense, by the institution's saying there 
     is a dimension of our workers' lives that the workplace has 
     to accommodate. If it turns out in practice that none of the 
     men take the parenting leave, you may have a problem of 
     stigma or tracking for the women who do, but at least we're 
     going down the right road.
       Hackney: What I find interesting is this solution--much 
     like the solution of having all children in the school where 
     there are hearing-impaired children learn to sign--to give 
     men a parenting leave that is the same as what's available 
     for women. You are treating them the same.
       Minow: That's exactly right. I think that is the only way 
     out of the dilemma of difference, because the dilemma creates 
     this danger of stigmatizing the people who seem different 
     without changing the underlying institutions that produce the 
     differences. If you change the underlying institutions, then 
     you can treat everyone the same.
       Hackney: Now, if you translate that into race and 
     ethnicity, might it not mean that one works toward a society 
     in which group differences may still be significant in some 
     way, but in which no group is privileged and no group is 
     disadvantaged?
       Minow: I think that is a perfect way to say it. It is still 
     very hard to figure out operationally what does that mean. 
     Does that mean bilingualism, trilingualism? I'm not sure. I 
     think we'd have to look at different circumstances and see 
     what makes sense. Does it mean that the basic U.S. history 
     course for everyone should have a heavy component of African-
     American and gender studies? My own sense is probably yes, 
     but not to the exclusion of other dimensions, too.
       Hackney: How do traits get selected by society to 
     categorize people, anyway?
       Minow: It's a marvelous question. One thing we know is that 
     they change over time, and yet there always are some traits 
     selected. For example, throughout American history, race has 
     been used, although there is a relatively modern conception 
     of it since the late nineteenth century. Before that, it 
     wasn't really race per se. Even at the turn of this past 
     century, when race was very much in the air, people didn't 
     know what to do with various categories. For a time in 
     California, there were racial categories that didn't have a 
     place for Chinese, so they were alternately placed in 
     categories of Caucasian and Negro. Moments like that reveal 
     the way in which the categories are not natural or 
     inevitable.
       I think that I don't want to make any vast claims about 
     human nature and the need to categorize ``the other,'' but it 
     does seem that at least in American history there has been a 
     continual struggle between groups and among groups to define 
     a place of privilege and a place of exclusion, and in part to 
     define who is American by reference to who's not American. 
     Yet there's been a shifting definition of the in and the out, 
     the boundaries. Sometimes it is ethnicity, sometimes 
     language, sometimes it is national origin.
       Hackney: Sometimes religion.
       Minow: Often religion. Sometimes skin color, which is 
     really quite a different category. Sometimes it is just 
     shared historical experience: Did you live through the 
     blizzard of 1978? One of the hopeful signs for me is this 
     very mutability in the categories. It is not as though it is 
     always the same categories.
       Hackney: That is something that everyone should bear in 
     mind; the categories do change over time. And also one's 
     membership in a group. Even if the category doesn't change, 
     individuals move into and out of those groups.
       Minow: Move into and out of, and also simultaneously occupy 
     several, which again helps to demonstrate why these are, at 
     least for most important purposes, socially-invented 
     categories. Again, if you look at American history, there 
     was a period of time in some parts of the country when 
     German immigrants were the most despised people. It's a 
     hard thing for people today to remember that, but it puts 
     in perspective some of the issues.
       I think what is very crucial to this discussion, though, is 
     the history of slavery and the unique place of people who 
     have that in their historical experience. I think it is an 
     important and critical subject to address, because too often 
     people who came from the wave of immigrants in the twentieth 
     century say, ``My family made it. Why can't you?'' I think 
     that that is a pointed question, but it is in some senses an 
     ignorant question, because as much as I find hope in the 
     mutability of these categories, one group has been 
     consistently at the bottom.
       Having said that, we shouldn't ignore the fact that in 
     terms of economic gains, there has been a dramatic shift in 
     the last fifty years for African Americans. Still, the vast 
     over-representation of African Americans in the class of 
     people who are defined as poor, in the prisons, in the most 
     undesirable places to live in this country, has to be looked 
     at.
       Hackney: Is it possible that Americans might feel the need 
     to categorize a bit more than other countries because of the 
     absence of another source of identity?
       Minow: It certainly has struck me that in many other 
     nations, there is a group sense that predates the creation of 
     the political boundaries, and we don't have that in this 
     country.
       Hackney: That's right. And we also have this ideological 
     commitment to equality.
       Minow: Well, I think I talked with you once before about a 
     book that I have admired by R. Lawrence Moore called The 
     Religious Outsider in America. It goes chapter by chapter 
     about each of the religious groups in America and examines 
     how they have defined themselves as outsiders, and how in a 
     curious, paradoxical way, helped them all be Americans, 
     moving through the Mormons and the Quakers, and then the 
     Jews, and then the Catholics, and then even the mainline 
     Protestants. There is both the struggle to say we are 
     outsiders, and that is why we are uncomfortable, and at the 
     same time a way of saying, this makes us truly American, 
     because we are all outsiders. There are no insiders. In a sad 
     and tragic way, the Native Americans, who might be considered 
     the insiders, of course, have never been treated that way by 
     the occupiers of this country.
       Hackney: It does make equality a problematic concept. What 
     does equality mean in a system where there are all these 
     differences?
       Minow: Equality is itself a very curious commitment. We are 
     far better able to define what we mean by equality when we 
     talk about the political sphere--equal access to the vote, 
     equal participation in other aspects of the political 
     process, equal opportunity to serve on a jury--because then 
     we are talking about access to the instruments of the state, 
     and that state has, for the most part, the possibility of 
     entire control over those instrumentalities. When we talk 
     about equality in the aspects of the society in which the 
     state is a regulator but not the creator of the activity--
     take, for example, the workplace or perhaps even the schools, 
     although that may be a special instance of a public 
     institution that reflects private family and property 
     systems--it is a more complicated problem. Do we mean, 
     then, social equality? Do we mean equality in the realms 
     of life in which we also cherish freedom, freedom of 
     association? That is one reason that I think equality is a 
     very difficult notion in this country.
       Another reason, though, is that equality is for the most 
     part an empty concept, as some theorists have described. It 
     is almost like a mathematical equation. If so and so gets 
     this, then you get this. But what's the ``this''? There is no 
     substantive context that tells us ``same as what''--same as 
     some back-ground norm, same as what someone else gets. One of 
     the great tragedies of efforts to use the commitment to 
     equality to bring about the practice of equality, is that a 
     state can say, ``Okay, you want us to treat you equally? 
     We'll take away the benefit from everybody. Now you're all 
     equally disadvantaged.'' It is surprising and disappointing, 
     obviously, to people that that is what equality has at times 
     meant, at least in legal and sometimes political matters. In 
     most people's hopes and dreams, equality carries with it not 
     just this brute sameness, but also some vision of access, 
     participation, inclusion, opening up into the realms of 
     opportunity.
       Hackney: I think you're exactly right. I've been doing a 
     number of trial conversations about pluralism with people in 
     different parts of the country, and after those groups have 
     been talking for a good while, if I press them to try to 
     identify some core American shared values or concepts, they 
     very easily come up with the political system, the 
     Constitution, that nexus in the political realm, and say, 
     ``Yes, that's something that we all believe in or should 
     believe in. And even if we don't realize the high ideals in 
     the Declaration and the Constitution, we aspire to them, and 
     everyone should.'' If I press a little bit further and say, 
     ``What else outside the political sphere, the governance, 
     would you think of as being very American?'' equal 
     opportunity almost always comes up. But struggling to define 
     what that means is very difficult.
       Minow: It is difficult, and yet I am not surprised that 
     equal opportunity seems to many people to be so essentially 
     American. In a very, very simple-minded sense--I'm worried 
     about saying this to a historian--I usually think about the 
     United States as the first country to try to create itself 
     without feudalism.
       Hackney: That's true, yes. Born free.
       Minow: Born free. I think that is well understood even by 
     people who have never studied history--that you are not 
     assigned a status here by birth. And though feudalism is 
     supposedly long dead in other parts of the world, its legacy 
     is there, and certainly many, many important institutions 
     reflect it. In contrast, there is a deep feel for individual 
     possibility in this country, which, of course, is what has 
     attracted so many people from around the world.
       Hackney: Almost every group came to America to find 
     economic opportunity.
       Minow: That's right, and economic opportunity, of course, 
     usually requires a means to other kinds of opportunities and 
     freedoms--an ability to be independent from a state and 
     independent from oppressive groups, or ability to exercise 
     religion freely and the chances for self-fulfillment and 
     self-affirmed identity. I think that is important--that equal 
     opportunity for economic success is for most people a means 
     to other ends, not an end in itself. All the freedoms that 
     are necessary to produce economic equality, not just 
     coincidentally but necessarily, involve other kinds of 
     freedoms that people want as well--freedom of speech, 
     freedom of association.
       It has always struck me as somewhat ironic that many 
     immigrant groups came here and, within a generation, seemed 
     to abandon many of the characteristics that had held them 
     together. But it is also interesting to watch, then, as 
     several generations go on, and the younger generations try to 
     reclaim aspects of that identity. It is another expression of 
     the freedom of being an American. It need not be costly to 
     retain or regain the language of your ancestors. You can make 
     it economically and still celebrate the holidays and rituals 
     of your religion. Those reclaimings of identity seem to me as 
     much an expression of the freedom here as the abandonment of 
     them. Both are crucial.
       Albert Otto Hirschman, the economist, describes it well. He 
     says, ``exit,'' ``voice,'' and ``loyalty'' are the three ways 
     in which individuals can express their relationships with 
     groups. This country has been very big on exit and voice, 
     making those real possibilities for people, and yet loyalty 
     is crucial to people's identity as well.
       Hackney: I think that, in Hirschmanesque terms, that is the 
     conversation, basically, exploring those options.
       Minow: Yes.
       Hackney: What is the relationship between equality and 
     tolerance? Is there one? I think most Americans would think 
     of themselves as being tolerant of people with differences. 
     Is that enough to achieve equality?
       Minow: Tolerance is certainly something to be admired 
     compared with the alternative of intolerance. It is an 
     advance over intolerance. It suggests a willingness to put up 
     with people who are quite different from yourself and to 
     refrain from regulating them or criticizing them in some 
     active way. Yet it seems to fall short of what it is we hope 
     for from equality and from the conception of individual 
     liberty that we've just been alluding to. Tolerance itself 
     implies, I think accurately, that there is a power 
     differential, that the group that is expressing itself as 
     tolerant has the ability to withhold that tolerance and to 
     express intolerance. Tolerance implies that there is a 
     continuation of background norms that make some groups 
     privileged and other groups not privileged, and the 
     privileged groups are willing to tolerate the others. But 
     that means that the privileged ones still hold the keys to 
     the door, they still in some sense run the shop. They will 
     let other people in, but it's still their house. I think that 
     is why to many groups, tolerance sounds unacceptable, or at 
     least inadequate. And I think I would share that view if 
     tolerance means the failure to challenge background 
     assumptions and to preserve institutions that were designed 
     without some people in mind--again, our discussion of our 
     universities is a good example. ``Tolerance'' here does 
     not suggest the kind of change it takes, so that the 
     institutions really belong to everyone, including those 
     who were previously excluded.
       Hackney: So they can be successful.
       Minow: Exactly. It seems to me the great moments of pride 
     for institutions like the University of Pennsylvania and 
     Harvard are when there are alumni associations of African 
     Americans and women who say, ``This is our place. This is 
     ours, and we are committed to it, and we are committed to its 
     past and to its future.'' That's when you should feel very 
     good, because then this means that the institutions haven't 
     just tolerated them, the institutions have changed. The 
     newcomers change what they find, that is what participation 
     means.
       Hackney: Let us leap from that parochial setting to the 
     same sort of relationship on the national level. I would 
     assume that when alumni say, ``This place belongs to me,'' 
     they, in that statement, recognize there relationship to 
     other alumni. This is a question or a subset, a form of the 
     general question: What do Americans owe to each other because 
     they are citizens? Do I owe anything different, either more 
     or less, to a person because he or she is a member of my 
     racial group, or because that person is not a member of my 
     racial group?
       Minow: Well, it's back to exit, voice, and loyalty. What's 
     the loyalty part? Is the loyalty to a subgroup or to a larger 
     group, or can it be to both, and what if there is a tension 
     between them or a conflict between them?
       I think one of the negative aspects of the dominance of 
     legal and political ideology in the binding of Americans to 
     one another is that it tends to use individual liberty as the 
     organization framework rather than a notion of responsibility 
     or duty. I don't think it has to, and I think in other 
     periods of American history, there has been a greater 
     informal culture of responsibility and duty rhetoric. Yet, if 
     you look simply at the language of the political documents, 
     it's not there. So wherever a since of duty came from, it 
     wasn't written down, and it hasn't been transmitted as well 
     as some of the other aspects of our Constitutional heritage.
       Hackney: This may come also from the born-free nature of 
     this. We're bound together by a contract rather than by 
     natural relationship.
       Minow: And perhaps the very legalism of the contractual 
     idea is corrosive of bonds that otherwise would exist. That's 
     a worry that some people have.
       That said, I think it is fair to say that the framers of 
     the Constitution felt strongly that duty and loyalty and 
     commitment and responsibility were crucial aspects to the 
     pursuit of happiness, the same way they believed that 
     maintaining one's family in safety and security were crucial 
     to the pursuit of happiness. Again, they didn't write that 
     down. I guess I think it is important to rescue and 
     revitalize those unwritten aspects of our traditions 
     alongside the written aspects.
       It is still not answering your question, though, about the 
     relationship between those sentiments and commitments vis-a-
     vis your immediate group. With regard to that, I guess I do 
     believe that some of the teachings about family bonds are 
     relevant here. You cannot order people, because of family 
     membership, to be loyal, caring, or responsible, but you can 
     imbue them with a sense that that is the right thing to do 
     both by example and by winning their loyalty. That, I think, 
     is the same challenge to the nation.
       Hackney: With respect to family responsibilities, a person 
     is more likely to feel those and to act them out if the 
     entire society expects him to.
       Minow: Yes. Reinforced by the social messages and cultural 
     messages.
       Hackney: If he doesn't, people disapprove of him.
       Minow: It's true. Peer and cultural pressures are 
     extraordinarily powerful and able to be mobilized. But it is 
     interesting to me how ready people are to accept certain 
     kinds of responsibilities when they are made visible to them.
       An example to me is these programs like City Year and 
     others through which people, after high school, can go and 
     serve the country, not in a military fashion but doing other 
     kinds of service. These youth service programs are springing 
     up around the country. There are people for whom, in their 
     peer group, such service work is the thing to do; it's the 
     right thing to do. And it's not just peer pressure; it 
     resonates in some place that is deeper. If you can mobilize 
     both the peer culture and the larger culture, I think that 
     there is something to summon up here in the sense of giving 
     back to the community.
       Hackney: One could also argue that that sort of service 
     freely given is of long-term self-interest.
       Minow: I absolutely agree. I think it is one of those 
     debates like nature versus nurture in human psychology. Is 
     philanthropy or charity selfish or altruistic? It is one of 
     those endless debates that probably we should put aside, 
     because it is both, and it should be both, and that is why it 
     works.
       Hackney: But it only works if people really identify with 
     the society, think of themselves as owning it.
       Minow: I think that's one way it works, but it may be that 
     the very process of engaging in this kind of service can give 
     one a sense of participation and ownership.
       Hackney: Excellent point.
       Let me give you a brief vignette from one of my discussions 
     in which a very diverse group of people was exchanging 
     stories about the particular values of their group, what held 
     them together, what they valued as members of this group, how 
     important group loyalty was, how important their group 
     identity was to them--these are racial groups--and how they 
     felt a sense of obligation to do something for the group, to 
     give back, to help build it. So I posed the question: What 
     would they do if they happened to own a factory that 
     employed, say, five hundred people, and they wanted to 
     help their community and decided that they would hire only 
     people from their racial group? Would that be good? It 
     really stumped them. They were surprised at the question 
     because they had never thought about it in those terms. We 
     actually have some law in this area, I guess.
       Minow: Yes, we do, which would not allow that practice. But 
     I think that it's a fascinating question, and it probably 
     challenged them to imagine that they have access to greater 
     resources than they usually imagine.
       Hackney: That may be right.
       Minow: Many of the usual ways of thinking about group 
     loyalty are expressed by people who feel that they are at the 
     margins of the society and they are struggling as outsiders. 
     When you pose the question, ``Let's imagine you're actually 
     more of an insider, now what do you do?'' my suspicion is 
     that more people would feel the obligations that come with 
     power--the obligations not to replicate the patterns of 
     exclusion that they find so offensive.
       Hackney: I think you're right. In this group, there were a 
     couple of small shop owners and when pressed about whom they 
     employed, they talked about hiring people from groups 
     different from their own. But they talked about it almost 
     entirely in practical terms. ``I hired that person who's not 
     from my group because some of my customers are from that 
     other group, and I found it very useful.'' It was very 
     difficult to get them to think about an abstract right.
       Minow: That's another example of why I think that economic 
     freedom so nicely requires other forms of freedom in this 
     country. The virtue of the marketplace is not merely that it 
     is a solvent of our differences, if money is the coin of the 
     realm. More importantly, to be successful in the marketplace, 
     you have to produce an environment of equality and 
     multilingualism, if that's what you need as well. Though I 
     also wonder--and this is an important and difficult topic--
     when people are working in small mom-and-pop type shops, 
     oftentimes they feel that it's an extension of their family, 
     their community.
       Hackney: Indeed, the law recognizes that.
       Minow: The law does recognize it. This is an environment in 
     which it is their own comfort level that is crucial to them, 
     and, as you say, the law has exempted small operations from 
     most of the coercive powers of the civil rights laws, 
     probably for that reason. The same is true of our small 
     landlord-tenant relationships. But as much as face-to-face 
     communication and small settings are appealing, that's where 
     many forms of prejudice are most likely to be expressed. More 
     importantly, we are increasingly not a society where those 
     are the building blocks. We're increasingly a society where 
     the building blocks are large entities, commercial 
     enterprises owned by other commercial enterprises. In that 
     kind of world you cannot, I believe, let the personal comfort 
     level of the managers operate. That is why the abstract 
     commitment to rights is crucial.
       Hackney: I couldn't agree more.
       Let me double back to something you were saying earlier, 
     and ask you if you can imagine a society in which Americans 
     are equal with each other--in whatever sense that is going to 
     come to mean--yet a society that does not require people to 
     shed their racial or ethnic identities.
       Minow: I must be able to imagine it because it is what I 
     hope we can achieve. I am sure of this: that it will be 
     different from the world that we live in right now in 
     fundamental ways, and yet continuous in other fundamental 
     ways. It is always that problem of imagining a future, that 
     sometimes we fear it won't resemble us at all. The future can 
     only proceed one moment at a time, each step making possible 
     the next. Our future must resemble us; otherwise we'd have to 
     give up everything we know. On the other hand, there will be 
     some changes that we can't quite imagine.
       Somebody was recently talking with me about Hawaii and how 
     it is the future of America. I've never been to Hawaii, but 
     my understanding is that, certainly with regard to racial 
     composition, Caucasians are a minority. I'm not sure it 
     that's the future that we're imagining, but it is certainly 
     not what most people think of when they imagine the future 
     for America.
       I guess I am hopeful. I look at how younger people are 
     comfortable having friends from different kinds of 
     backgrounds, but also more comfortable than perhaps their 
     parents in saying, ``Yes, this is who I am, and this is what 
     I am.'' At the same time, every year I'm being educated by my 
     students. I had a student this year who wrote a paper about 
     rejecting racial classification when your parents are from 
     different races, which was her own experience. That is 
     another way to think--that at some point over time the 
     significance of many of the classifications, particularly 
     race, will diminish. There will be a relinquishing of the 
     tendency to say, ``Any drop of black blood means you're 
     black,'' which is a rule you come up with in a racially 
     oppressive society. If you reject that rule, then the 
     significance of racial identity will diminish and there will 
     be many, many different kinds of identities that people can 
     lay claim to. As this particular student says, ``Look, I'm 
     black and I'm white. I am my mother's daughter and I am my 
     father's daughter. Why do I have to pick?''
       Indeed for me, the great hope and promise for this country, 
     and indeed for the world, is not just from these younger 
     generations, who always give us hope, but also from the sense 
     that identity can be more complex than the rigid categories 
     we presently use tend to suggest. As individuals and 
     societies grow more comfortable with that, I think that the 
     vision that you've described could be achieved.
       Hackney: That's a wonderful note on which to end.
       Let me thank you very much.

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