WASHINGTON — We were at a reception honoring the latest accomplishment of a highly successful friend the other night when a fellow celebrant mentioned how our friend had made the most of his opportunities. He had developed friendships, relied on networks, taken advantage of a sprinkling of race-specific opportunities and carefully nurtured political ones.
"But the key thing," said my fellow celebrant, "is that he has been incredibly competent at everything he's done. There's no substitute for competence."
Since that evening, I've been toying with a modest alteration of the "serenity prayer." In the new, admittedly less elegant, version, I'd pray for the courage to protest the denial of opportunity, the will to overcome our failure to take advantage of opportunity, and the courage to acknowledge the difference.
The civil rights movement was, at its essence, a protest against the deliberately — sometimes brutally — enforced denial of opportunity for black Americans. We were powerless, on our own, to avail ourselves of the franchise, to open up the job market or to desegregate schools or places of public accommodation. We could only protest, hoping that when white America saw the starkness of our situation it would have enough of a conscience to change. The movement was a plea that white America do the right thing.
To a degree we are sometimes reluctant to acknowledge, it did. Most of us are now doing reasonably well, and a few of us — like the friend we celebrated the other night — are doing extraordinarily well.
Still, roughly a third of us aren't doing well at all. And because the children of this hapless third are likely to attend underfunded and inadequate schools and to be cut off from the positive role models that might help them overcome their disadvantages, there is little prospect that the next generation will be any better off than their parents.
And here's where my revised prayer comes in. We are tempted to analogize the plight of this underclass to that of the opportunity-starved strivers — ourselves — of an earlier generation. If protest opened up universities and white-collar professions and government jobs for those of us who have used the opportunity to gain competence, then why shouldn't we mount protests on behalf of those who still haven't made it?
Well, sometimes we should. Inadequate funding of public education (based, absurdly, on local property taxes) might be a fit target of protest, particularly where we lack the political clout and coalition-building power to enact fairer legislation.
But much of the disadvantage suffered by these have-nots and their children is not imposed from the outside. It is, rather, a failure to take advantage of — sometimes even a failure to see — existing opportunity. There is a world of difference between keeping black children out of school to serve the interests of plantation owners and the underperformance of black children who are required by law to be in school.
And yet, our first recourse is to protest. Our children fail, we say with great earnestness, because America's white-run economy needs their failure in order to keep a ready supply of unskilled, low-paid workers. Maybe if we mounted an adequate protest . . .
We protest the disparity in punishment for use of crack and powder cocaine — and we ought to. But shouldn't we devote at least as much effort to stopping our young people from using cocaine in any of its forms? We spend more time protesting the disproportionate deaths of black men from AIDS than in teaching our people how to change their behavior in order to avoid the disease in the first place.
A good deal of the black-white health "gap" we feel moved to protest is attributable far more to our own behavior than to what anyone else does to us. I include not just diseases induced by alcohol and narcotics and tobacco but also hypertension and too-high infant mortality rates that often result from poor diet and exercise.
No, it's not all our fault. The health care afforded poor Americans (a category that still disproportionately includes black Americans) is frequently inadequate. Too many of us still work, if we work at all, at jobs that don't provide health insurance. There is still denial of opportunity that is unquestionably race-based. Racism abides, and I'm glad there are among us those who have the courage to protest it.
But I also wish we could learn the difference between opportunity denied and opportunity forgone. Protest is fine, but it's no substitute for competency.
William Raspberry's e-mail address is willrasp@washpost.com.