White Weddings, The incredible staying power of the laws against interracial marriage

It's a common debating tactic to assert that some respected figure of the past would endorse your position on some controversy of the present. There is little doubt that the originals would find the views attributed to them surprising sometimes. Abraham Lincoln, for example, has been claimed as a forbear by everyone from Communists to Dixiecrats. Lately, opponents of affirmative action have donned the mantle of the civil-rights movement, claiming direct descent from Martin Luther King Jr. The idea, presumably, is to insulate themselves against charges of racism even as they pursue policies certain to prove detrimental to large numbers of blacks.

To achieve this feat, they define King as a champion of "colorblind laws," and reduce the civil-rights movement to an effort to end the classification of citizens by race. In this way, programs that take race into account can be demonized as violations of King's memory. Proponents of the ingeniously named California Civil Rights Initiative, which would forbid all state government affirmative-action policies, routinely invoke the sentence from King's "I Have a Dream" speech looking forward to the day his children would be judged not by the "color of their skin" but by "the content of their character." Calling for the abolition of affirmative action in his book, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multicultural Society, Dinesh D'Souza claims to be following in King's footsteps even though he advocates repealing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of King's crowning achievements.

Ahigh or low point in this invention of a usable King came in May. Clint Bolick, a prominent Washington conservative and frequent spokesperson for the anti-affirmative action view, used the centenary of the Supreme Court's Plessy vs. Ferguson decision (which upheld racial segregation) to argue that since segregation was a system of "racial classification," affirmative action is its modern equivalent. Thus, in Bolick's view, opponents, not proponents, of affirmative action are King's legitimate heirs.

But the revisionists are quite wrong. His writing and actions make it clear that Martin Luther King Jr. was a strong supporter of what today would be called "affirmative action." The phrase itself was not widely used during his lifetime, but King spoke repeatedly of granting blacks special preferences in jobs and education to compensate for past discrimination.

King said much the same thing in his last book. Where Do We Go From Here was published in 1967, and in the intervening four years, King's optimism had given way to foreboding prompted by the emergence of a white backlash and the realization that combating the economic plight of black America would prove far more difficult than eliminating segregation. He called for a series of programs, including full employment and a guaranteed annual income, to uplift the poor of all races. But he saw no contradiction between measures aimed at fighting poverty in general and others that accorded blacks "special treatment" because of the unique injustices they had suffered. "A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years," he wrote, "must now do something special for him."

In one sense, what King believed has little bearing on the 1990s. The civil-rights era has long passed, and affirmative action must be defended or attacked on its merits. King aside, what is most striking in current discussions of civil rights, race, and affirmative action is the absence of any sense of history. Segregation was not simply a matter of racial classification (or "thinking by race," as Justice Antonin Scalia has written) but part of a complex system of racial subordination whose political, economic, and social elements all reinforced one another. The slogan of the 1963 March on Washington was not colorblind laws but "Jobs and Freedom," and the movement's ultimate goal, King insisted, was to "make freedom real and substantive" for black Americans by absorbing them "into the mainstream of American life."

This goal remains as elusive today as it was during King's lifetime. King's real heirs are those who, like him, see affirmative action not as a panacea or an end in itself, but as one of many ways to reduce the gap between blacks and the rest of American society bequeathed to us by history.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2084

The integrationist ideal holds that blacks and whites should live, work, and study together. Government policies designed to accomplish these goals include school busing, affirmative action in public schools and in the workplace, forced integration of public housing, and laws barring discrimination in housing and employment.

Recent markers of black separatism include the Louis Farrakhan-sponsored Million Man March of 1995, to which only African-American men were invited; the debate over the teaching in public schools of Ebonics, the so-called African-American dialect; the establishment of exclusively African-American dorms on college campuses; and single-race schools, which are even supported by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, because he believes they will promote the self-esteem of African-American students.

The separatists have new academic allies, the critical race theorists, led by New York University's Derrick Bell and University of Colorado's Richard Delgado. They argue that despite its guise of neutrality, the American legal system is riddled with mechanisms for oppressing black people. Some critical race theorists argue that black jurors should acquit guilty black defendants in protest of the unjust system.

Another explanation holds that integration is out of favor because the Democratic Party has retreated from the goal. In hopes of attracting more white votes, the Democratic Party has distanced itself from civil-rights leaders like Jesse Jackson, and from issues like welfare reform and affirmative action. Cut off from the political mainstream, some civil-rights leaders and grassroots supporters have embraced separatist politicians and positions.

White critics of integration include the neo-conservatives, former liberals who supported the civil-rights mainstream until the early '70s. Theirs is now the dominant right-wing critique of integrationist programs. While continuing to endorse the ideal of integration, they say affirmative action, busing, and the rest do more harm than good. In 1984 Charles Murray wrote, in Losing Ground, that government programs sap the initiative of the black population, creating feelings of dependency and entitlement. Black conservative critics like Thomas Sowell concur, adding that government programs allow blacks to blame racism for their self-inflicted wounds.

Keeping the integrationist faith are black liberals like Professors Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West. Joining them is black economist Glenn Loury, a conservative who broke ranks to endorse affirmative action as a necessary policy.

http://slate.msn.com/id/1080

Higher being

August 04, 2000 | Huston Smith, 81, speaks slowly with the deliberate enunciation and wry playfulness of a serious scholar who is used to having what he says deeply considered. Seated in his Berkeley, Calif., living room, the authority on world religions takes out a letter he's just received from a reader of his most recently published book. The letter recounts a spiritual epiphany.

"It is so moving," Smith intones warmly and begins to read it aloud with evident respect:

"It was like I traveled into myself and broke through to the other side, and I was in the presence of God. I was in communion with all that ever could be, and experienced love beyond measure. I experienced a person loving me. Being love. Being all. Total peace. The end of all fear. Eternal joy. I was in union with an infinite person who had nothing but perfect love for me and in whom I was in union and it was ALL, capital A, double L ..."

The letter describes a "theophany," nothing less than a vision of the divine. It is also a 51-year-old man's remembrance of an LSD trip at age 18. The teenager, who got more than he bargained for when he dropped acid, grew up to be a Catholic priest.

For reasons that require no explanation, the priest never told his church superiors about this formative religious drug trip, as he confides in the letter. He's written to Smith in response to the religious philosopher's provocative new book: "Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals."

In this collection of scholarly essays on drugs and spirituality written over the past 40 years, Smith explores and entertains a venerable yet now taboo topic: how mind-altering drugs have led to divine revelation. Though Smith himself participated in Timothy Leary's famous drug experiments at Harvard, it wasn't until a maverick think tank called the Council on Spiritual Practices approached him that he decided to do the book.

Founded by a former vice president of Oracle, the council is no collection of fly-by-night Castaneda -heads who have tried to turn an appreciation for hallucinogens into a higher calling. Robert Jesse, 41, who once worked full-time with techie marketers and engineers, now spends his days with religious scholars, spiritual leaders and scientists whose work addresses "primary religious experiences." Rather than being content to just hear about the divine secondhand, these thinkers focus on ways that individuals come to perceive it, feel it and see it directly.

The Council suggests that these transcendent experiences can be triggered by a diverse variety of influences, ranging from a monk's holy visitation after days of prayer and fasting to a Native American roadman's vision after a potent hit of peyote. The Council funds academic research, publishes books, hosts speakers and has even held a conference about the nature of such religious experience. And although they are sincerely interested in any activity -- be it meditation or dancing or gobbling magic mushrooms -- their stance on the relationship between drugs, or as they put it "certain plants and chemicals," and enlightenment puts them square in the middle of the raging culture war over the legalization of drugs.

While the loudest criticisms of U.S. drug laws have come on political, social and medical grounds (with the proponents of medical marijuana most vocally grabbing the limelight), now Huston Smith has dared to make a religious freedom argument. "I was extremely fortunate in having some entheogenic experiences, while the substances were not only legal, but respectable," he said of his early experimentation with LSD. "It seemed like only fair play that since I value those experiences immensely to do anything I could to enable a new generation to also have such experiences without the threat of going to jail."

Were this statement to come from almost anyone else, it would not stand a chance of being heard. But Smith is that rare living person who adjectives like "great" and "renowned" and "acclaimed" accrue to without a tinge of overstatement. His 12 books of religious scholarship and philosophy include "The World's Religions," which has sold some 2.5 million copies around the world over more than 30 years. He has taught at Washington University, MIT, Syracuse University and most recently the University of California at Berkeley. Over his long career -- he got his Ph.D. in 1945 -- Smith has become that notable academic who also reaches a popular audience. He's even the subject of a five-part Bill Moyers PBS documentary called "The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith."

This side of a religious leader, Smith probably couldn't have a bigger voice in the popular cultural conversation when it comes to spiritual questions. Who else could get to use the platform of National Public Radio to discuss the religious importance of illegal substances? At a recent bookstore reading, Smith himself touched on his odd circumstance.

"Many people do ask why someone of my honorific age would risk something of a reputation to move into a topic that is this controversial," he quipped, drawing appreciative smiles from the audience. Here's a respected scholar with no less than 11 honorary degrees, publicly jumping into the fray of the war on drugs, and better still, all in the name of religion. It's enough to utterly stump the most "compassionate conservative."

But before anyone breaks out in choruses of " Right on s!" be clear that Smith's interest in mind-altering substances is explicitly limited to their "philosophical and spiritual," not "recreational" use. Indeed, both Smith and the Council take great pains to distance themselves from the hedonists who indulge in drugs without the divine in mind. They employ the neologism "entheogenic" -- meaning roughly "God-enabling" and coined in 1979 to replace "psychedelic." Among the spiritually minded, "entheogenic" can refer to the likes of mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, peyote, MDMA (aka ecstacy ) when they're approached as a religious sacrament and not just as a way to get high.

If it sounds like a tough distinction to draw, consider that the Pentagon itself has come to grasp it. When the military formally allowed Native American soldiers to use peyote in religious services, a Pentagon spokeswoman told the Associated Press in 1997: "If they're using peyote in their religious practice, it's a sacrament, not a drug, just as sacramental wine is not considered a drug." While peyote remains a "Schedule 1" controlled substance today, a 1994 amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1974 created an exemption for Native American use of peyote in their traditional religious ceremonies. It's the only such exemption, where an otherwise illegal substance is legal for use by a designated group in the U.S. on grounds of religious freedom. The Brazilian government has gone even further with regard to ayahuasca, a substance which, like peyote, has a long history of religious use. First provisionally in 1986, and then permanently in 1992, Brazil legalized the religious use of the substance.

Smith's essays in "Cleansing the Doors of Perception" range from scholarly to personal and some even revel in Smith's own drug experiences. One piece, "Empirical Metaphysics," recalls his time with Timothy Leary in the early 1960s. "We felt like we were on the cutting edge," he writes of his Harvard cohort. "On the new frontier to new knowledge about what the human being is and can be." There was no need to go "underground," he explains. "Getting down to business, we pulled out our date books to schedule a session with mescaline."

One essay details a mescaline session at Timothy Leary's home, reprinted from the official trip report Smith wrote in 1961: "The experience was momentous because it showed me a range upon range of reality that previously I had only believed existed and tried without much success to imagine." The essays reveal the impact that Smith's own primary religious experiences -- "occasioned," as he would say, by "entheogens" -- had on his spirituality. They took him to a place where some 20 years of meditation had not. "I was a pretty flat-footed mystic," he confided to the amusement of a bookstore audience, adding that he still meditates today.

But the collection also plunges into the most difficult philosophical questions surrounding the use of mind-altering substances: What is the real religious import of drugs? What does it mean to have such a religious experience triggered by a mind-altering substance? Does that make that experience somehow less authentic? What role have these substances played historically in other faiths, from the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece to the use of peyote by the Native American Church? And what role might these substances have played in the formation of other traditions that have since been lost to prehistory? And perhaps most importantly, how can such a religious experience be carried over into living a more religious life?

Smith is not out to proselytize the spiritual benefits of hallucinogens: "The first thing that is very clear to me is that these substances are not for everybody" he says. "So, the last thing I do in this book is to advocate." In fact he calls the drug culture that grew out of the '60s "wild, chaotic and irresponsible" and in part blames it for the current anti-drug "hysteria" of today. But the issues raised in the book will resonate with many whose own drug use falls somewhere between "recreational" hedonism and rigorous spiritual practice. At their most subversive, Smith's essays invite questions: What do the spiritual insights that many casual drug users report have in common with an authentic apprehension of the divine? Who's to say where recreation ends and spirituality begins? After all, if we have real religious freedom in this country, then just as we should have the right to use mind-altering substances for religious rites, so too then should we have the right to define the very nature of our spiritual practices and beliefs. These contentious issues have been debated since so-called recreational drugs went mainstream in the '60s.

Until the Council on Spiritual Practices dug up these essays and presented them to Smith to consider republishing, most of them had been yellowing in obscurity in aged scholarly journals in university library vaults. Now, they're once again in circulation, this time in a much more mainstream context, published in the Tarcher/Putnam imprint of popular publisher Penguin Putnam.

"This can be seen as something of a coming out," says Jesse of the Council on Spiritual Practices. "Huston has never been secretive about his early experiences with mescaline and other entheogens, but he wrote about them in the early '60s, and those accounts were published in places where not a lot of people saw them. Since that time, Huston's own public exposure has grown enormously."

So, why is he stepping into the limelight now? Smith's position is that given the current state of our society we really need to keep all our options for religious experience open.

"I am convinced that we live in the most secular, reductionistic, consumeristic, this-life-now-is-all-there-is society," he says. "There has never been in human history a people for whom transcendence -- or another world -- has been so occluded. Our culture is living in Plato's Cave. We have been stripped -- and I hold the universities and intelligentsia in every area responsible for this -- we have been stripped of belief in a reality outside the cave of mundane ho-hum, more-of-the-same life. The only ideals we have that are operative are success and maybe fame." He adds, "We need all the help we can get to resist this tidal wave of materialism and stand up to it. Now, for some people, they not only find themselves told that there is another world waiting, but they are actually ushered out of the cave and see it."

Today, the experiences that ushered Smith out of that cave are obviously forbidden by law. Jesse puts it simply: "I do not know of a mechanism now that would allow what happened for Huston in 1961 to happen in the year 2000 or 2001."

Yet they persist underground. Of course, it's virtually impossible to divine exactly how many people are having their sacred practices criminalized. But a perusal of the Net finds scads of descriptions of experiences under the influence of various substances which the writers clearly deem religious. Some even explicitly address the religious freedom issues at stake. Of course, most imbibers are not willing to speak openly about their unusual spiritual practice for fear of legal or social reprisal, maybe even from their own church. Complicating the issue is the fact that by no means do they all approach the drugs through religious traditions that have long histories of using the sacrament, like the Native American Church or the Santo Daime in Brazil. From pagans to Christians, the covert takers of entheogens for religious purposes would appear to range all over the map.

http://dir.salon.com/health/feature/2000/08/04/spirituality/index.html?sid=937741