WHAT IS IT THAT WE FEAR? RACE, GENDER ISSUES MASK THE REAL DEBATE

By Eileen McNamara, Globe Staff

WEDNESDAY, August 16, 1995

The most salient fact of modern American social history is that no issue involving race or gender is ever really settled.

The courts may outlaw discrimination, but Congress can amend the definition. The schools may desegregate, but whites can move. Women may work, but men can block their advancement.

The tension between men and women and between whites and minorities so permeates this culture that it obscures the reality of broader economic conditions that have much more to do with who does or does not succeed in the United States.

On opposite coasts yesterday, in Boston and Los Angeles, we caught a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror. Reflected was a face full of fear.

In Boston, a father angry and disappointed that his bright and talented daughter has been denied admission to the city's most prestigious public school looks for someone to blame and he finds the 103 black and Hispanic students who were admitted to what he is certain was ''her'' place.

In Los Angeles, a white police detective posturing for an interviewer spills over with resentment toward the women he encounters in the halls of the police department and with hatred for the black and Hispanic residents he boasts of hassling in the streets.

There are plenty of legitimate questions to be asked about affirmative action and about the role of women in the workplace. Why don't we adequately fund urban education at the preschool and elementary level to eliminate the need for race-based admission standards later on? Why don't we restructure the workplace to acknowledge what we all know: That parenthood is important work with demands on mothers and fathers that are at least as important to society as our jobs?

But those are not the questions we ask. Instead, we retreat to the visceral. Why did he get admitted when my test scores were higher? Why does she get to work flextime when I'm here until midnight finishing this report? Changing demographics and an uncertain economy have more than a little to do with all the anger and the fear. Inundated border states demonize illegal immigrants. Struggling taxpayers demonize welfare mothers. Out-of-work white men searching for jobs with an unemployment rate approaching 6 percent can't vent their anger at something as ephemeral as ''the economy.''

The changing American landscape has provided some ready scapegoats. The complexion of the country has changed more in recent years than at any time this century. In the 1990 Census, nearly one in every four Americans claimed African, Hispanic, Asian or American Indian ancestry. That was up from one in five in 1980.

White women poured into the workforce. They now hold 40 percent of all jobs nationwide, compared with 30 percent three decades ago. But, according to a report of the federal Glass Ceiling Commission released last spring, white men still hold 95 percent of all senior management positions.

White women have done better at the middle management level, garnering 40 percent of those jobs and incurring the wrath of white men like Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman, who for the first time had to answer to a female boss.

For all the complaints about the unfair advancement of minorities in the workplace, the commission found that only five percent of middle management positions are held by black women and only four percent by black men.

But the uncomfortable truth is that the tension about race and gender in this country is not about facts; it is about fear.

In the '60s and '70s, we settled all this on paper. We desegregated the schools. We admitted women to the Ivy League. We granted women control of their reproductive lives.

And in response? White, middle-class families abandoned our cities and schools to poor minorities. Universities educated the women they had admitted, then denied them tenure (''a damned matriarchy,'' in John Silber's memorable phrase about the influx of women into Boston University's English department).

We thought our ''firsts'' were behind us -- the first woman astronaut, the first black mayor. But there Shannon Faulkner is this week in Charleston, S.C., reviled but determined, after a 2 1/2-year fight to become the first female cadet at The Citadel.

We thought we had granted women the right to abortion in 1973. But barely a year goes by that the US Supreme Court calendar does not include a case attempting to limit the right to abortion outlined in Roe v. Wade.

We thought we had encouraged the likes of Marcia Clark to work in the same world as Johnnie Cochran, and yet there she was early in the Simpson trial defending her*childcare*duties as a mother to a roomful of men.

We thought that in 1991 Anita Hill had established once and for all the seriousness of sexual harassment, but there is the Senate Ethics Committee shielding Bob Packwood from public hearings and attacking Barbara Boxer for being so strident.

It was John F. Kennedy who told us that life is not fair. But when he made that startlingly obvious observation, he looked out on a nation whose public face was more white and more male than it will ever be again. Neither he nor the rest of us could have envisioned then just how wrenching the changes of the next three decades would be.

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