First Couple of Affirmative Action

Two Georgetown professors put a human face on the policy debate

Living Proof: Husband and wife Charles Lawrence and Mari Matsuda decided to collaborate on a book on affirmative action when it became clear that their students lacked perspective on the issue. "We'd go into a coffee shop with a yellow legal pad," Matsuda explained. "We'd get into an argument and we'd leave the coffee shop with an outline."

by Frank Wu

Charles Lawrence and Mari Matsuda are two people who believe that "racism," "oppression," and "white supremacy" are, among other things, words that have meaning, phenomena that exist, subjects worth discussing. The two law professors at Georgetown University, a husband and wife team that has been as influential among scholars as they have been shy about public life, together recently published, We Won't Go Back: Making the Case for Affirmative Action (Houghton Mifflin). They have also started the difficult task suggested by their subtitle.

At their offices at the Georgetown University law school in downtown Washington, D.C., the two academics discussed their lives and their work.

Lawrence and Matsuda are as serious about their academic work as they are about raising a family. They have three children between them--one natural born, one Lawrence's by a previous marriage, and one adopted.

But in an age when professors can become celebrities by debating on radio talk shows and lecturing on the campus circuit, the couple have remained private people. Many of their colleagues in law teaching did not know they were married until recently.

Sharing the story of their meeting and courtship, they revealed themselves as the type of couple that do not hesitate to finish one another's sentences, in a comfortable flow of conversation back and forth between people and ideas.

Matsuda recalled, "I met him for the first time at a very small minority law professor meeting in Philadelphia in 1983, but he doesn't remember, so he met me for the first time at a conference in Los Angeles a few years later."

Lawrence interjected, "It's impossible for me to believe I didn't notice her in the crowd." When they began their relationship, and he insisted he couldn't remember her presence at their earlier introduction, she proved it to him with her notes from his lecture.

"At the time, there were only a handful of people of color in law teaching, and most of them were black," Matsuda said. "When I started, I was the only Asian woman teaching law, so when I went to [conferences] I hung out with the black people.

"We were political allies before we had a romance," she added, "and that's the best way to do it, in case anyone wants advice."

Now, they have become very visible as a team. But when they began their book, it was a struggle.

Originally, Matsuda wanted her husband to update an earlier book he had written about the Bakke case; she herself wanted nothing to do with the project. "For a long time, I didn't want to talk about affirmative action," she recalled. "People would ask me to talk about it, and I refused to do it. I realized I was conceding ground to the right and weak-kneed liberal defenders of affirmative action, who were always apologizing for it.

"This is a horrific debate," she explained. "The terms have gotten ugly. We've been yelled and screamed at. This is an issue that people don't use rational language when they talk about, it gets emotional, aggressive, racist."

Matsuda was persuaded, however, by the need for a different approach. "One audience that prompted us to write this book was our students," she said. "They didn't know the history. They had heard only the right-wing rhetoric, 'reverse discrimination,' 'stigma,' 'unqualified people' getting jobs. The rhetoric had eclipsed the history of the civil rights movement. Many of our Asian American students didn't realize Asian Americans had played a key role in [the civil rights movement], with nationwide organizing, coast to coast."

Lawrence added that he believes, "The kind of hopelessness that we think informs some of the conservatism and lack of activism among young people. You ask them, 'If you had the power, what changes would you make?' and they are very limited in their visions. A lot of this Generation X stuff has to do with buying into the idea that we can't do anything about it, it's all too big a problem." He lamented that student protesters today, "feel, like, well, we can go in and say we're concerned about this issue, but if the dean, the provost, the president says we can't do it, then we can't do it."

Both of them offered examples of the type of social change they hope to achieve. Matsuda said that the public today has forgotten that less than a generation ago, "There was a welfare rights movement led by poor people. It won significant concessions, though they didn't last. But in that short period, people standing up for their rights made a difference and kids got an education, they got health care--kids who weren't supposed to have gotten an education and health care."

Lawrence cited the Asian American Studies Center at the University of California at Los Angeles, which came about through a series of campus protests and involved the famous case of tenure denial to professor Don Nakanishi, who proved that the decision had been motivated by racial prejudice. "It showed that a fairly small, supposedly powerless group of people could achieve a very specific institutional change by saying, 'No, you cannot do this to us,'" Lawrence said. "Those kinds of disruptions of the system will be responded to."

In writing the book, the two argued endlessly about how best to resolve moral dilemmas and what would be the most persuasive prose. "This is exactly how we wrote the book," Matsuda explained. "We'd go into a coffee shop with a yellow legal pad. We'd say, 'What are the five most important things we have to say in chapter one?' And we'd get into an argument and we'd leave the coffee shop with an outline."

She offered an example of the problems they confronted. "Inevitably we'd figure out what the hard part was, we didn't want to finesse it, we wanted to work it out with our readers," Matsuda said. "For instance, the claim of Native Americans, that their claim is superior to that of all others, I have a lot of sympathy for that claim, but how do you work it out with a civil rights coalition, where you're trying to work with others?"

They also tried to address tensions among racial minorities, especially between African Americans and Asian Americans. Each offered an example of the reasoning they were offering to the different communities, in an effort to show them that they had common interests.

Lawrence remembered that when they were in Los Angeles, "Several rap artists, such as Ice Cube, were doing anti-immigrant and particularly anti-Asian lyrics in their work. The powerful part of their work was speaking to a felt and experienced subordination of black people, but it is important to be critical of the kinds of expression of subordination."

Lawrence argued that when African Americans used racial epithets to describe Asian Americans, they were "contributing to white supremacy, instead of resisting it, using epithets of Asians that had their origins in the same place as epithets of you, adopting white folks' ways of describing people."

His message to the rap artists? "You have to understand that you are doing, it isn't making [African Americans'] claim come before [Asian Americans'] claim, but it is my participation in your oppression, not just dividing us, but reinforcing my own oppression."

Matsuda pointed out that blacks and Chinese "were being lynched at the same time in this country, with the same images, the same dynamics: sex, danger, 'they're taking our jobs.'"

Matsuda offered an opinion on the desegregation of the San Francisco schools, including the prestigious Lowell High School, a subject they also address in the book. "If a Chinese grandmother or a black parent wants their child there, why do they want their child there? It is access to privilege." She said that even in the recent past, "Lowell High was the white school, set up so kids could go to the Ivys, to Stanford. We should talk about why there shouldn't be more than one school like that, but meanwhile, why is that a place that makes it attractive for Harvard to recruit?"

She suggested that "because kids have had a diverse experience that Harvard is trying to achieve, that is a thing that makes a Lowell applicant in some sense more qualified. If Lowell became 80 or 90 percent Chinese American, not Asian American but Chinese American, would Lowell still be the same place you are trying to get into, even apart from the question of whether you could get public support for it?"

As a consequence, Matsuda believes, "Even in the short term you have to think about this in a more complex way. You have to engage in a coalition to expand opportunities, increase opportunities for quality education, and so kids could get to go to school together."

Turning the statistics, laws, anecdotes, and personal experiences into a book was not easy for Lawrence and Matsuda. Past the publisher's deadline and the final pass at revision, Matsuda's parents came to town for a visit. The couple handed the grandparents the children and checked into a hotel across the street from the Georgetown law school. Shuttling back and forth between their hotel room and their law school offices, they did nothing but work around the clock to meet the new deadline.

Since publishing the book, the two have increased their profile, primarily through radio talk shows. On the air, they have learned that many people vehemently disagree with their viewpoints. At the same time, they have tried to empathize with individuals who feel threatened by affirmative action.

Lawrence said many of the hostile individuals "asked all of the questions you'd expect given the way the debate has been framed: 'Isn't this anti-merit?' 'Isn't it true that white people can't get jobs anymore?' 'Isn't it true that Asian Americans will do better without affirmative action programs?' Many people are extremely angry, calling less to ask a question than to vent."

Lawrence has tried to respond, "We want to empathize, trying to ask where the feeling is real, where the feeling has been directed is wrong. I think one of the things we try to say in the book a lot is that the feeling comes out of the way in today's economy. So many people are so close to the margin. With managed health care, we're all one sickness away from huge debt. The stock market is zooming way up, but people are in danger of being downsized and laid off. It's true that there are angry white males out there. We don't want to deny people's sense that there is something unfair going on. But what is it--no estate tax, cutting the capital gains tax--what is real unfairness here?"

As an example, Lawrence said that some "angry white males" believe "that all these women and minorities are getting jobs, but when you look at statistics, that's not so." Nonetheless, according to Lawrence, "The data shows African Americans don't lose jobs to Asian immigrants, but that's the story we are told in the way white supremacy works. It's blacks with whites on immigration, Asians with whites on affirmative action."

In contrast, Lawrence also has appeared on some radio shows aimed at a predominantly African American audience. On them, he has been asked very different questions. "One is the question, 'Isn't it true that affirmative action is just asking for handouts from the white man?' Sometimes it's posed as self-reliance, sometimes it's posed as, 'Don't we have to take power.'"

In response, Lawrence agrees that "affirmative action came about because people of color were demanding more radical changes, about community control and power. The people protesting a university building a medical center, with an all-white contractor, they were saying, 'We want a piece of the action.'"

Lawrence explains that he and Matsuda are trying to point out, "The current versions of affirmative action are a compromise. Historically, they really were an attempt to buy off people. Instead of giving you real power over curriculum, over who gets hired, over what research is done, over what gets built, they say, 'We'll just take in a few more students.'"

In We Won't Go Back, instead of defending affirmative action they are proposing a "return to community control." The book is already attracting strong opposition.

Lawrence Stratton, a conservative scholar who has written a book attacking affirmative action, submitted testimony to Congress criticizing Lawrence and Matsuda. Stratton reviewed their book for the Washington Times, beginning his analysis by declaring, "We should take our hats off to [Lawrence and Matsuda] for so clearly enunciating the Marxist basis for racial quotas." The reviewer went on to compare Lawrence and Matsuda to Hitler as well as Stalin, reading their work as advocating "violence" and "vengeance" toward "'white male privilege.'"

Another reviewer concluded, "The authors earnestly believe that attaining a freer and more just society will benefit everyone and justify the difficulty of a contentious transition. ... But not everyone will buy into their communal vision of justice, which will remain anathema to unreconstructed rugged American individualists."

Whatever else critics may say about their book, unlike some who might disagree with their prescriptions for progress, Lawrence and Matsuda obviously wrote their book with a sense of positive purpose. "This book is for those kids organizing against Prop. 209 in California, not people who will come ask stupid questions over and over again and again because they don't think there is racism in America," Matsuda said. "We had to remind ourselves who we were writing for."

Matsuda concludes on a pragmatic note. She admits her ideas for change "are not going to happen tomorrow in this country." She added, "But since I don't want to see it get a whole lot worse, I am committed to the project of making it a whole lot better."

Houghton Mifflin, the publishers of We Won't Go Back, and Chinese for Affirmative Action host a reception for Lawrence and Matsuda next Wednesday, June 4, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Yank Sing restaurant on Battery Street in San Francisco. For information, call 415-274-6750. Oliver Wang is the founder of the Asian Community Online Network (www.acon.org/acon) and can be reached at: oli@uclink4.berkeley.edu. Larry Wong is associate editor of AsianWeek.

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