This article ran in the Tallahassee Democrat on March 12, 1995. It created a great deal of discussion, some of it critical. On March 26 two articles on the front of the Comment section attacked this article.

Many African-American leaders these days seem to be having trouble distinguishing their friends from their enemies. As a white liberal supporter of the black community, my advice to them is to get the distinction straight.

Take the case of Rutgers president Francis Lawrence who accidentally insulted blacks with an offensive remark about their genetic aptitude. Have black leaders bothered to investigate the context of his comment? Lawrence, while vice president of Tulane University, helped increase its minority population from 1 percent to 10 percent and make it the private university with the highest percentage of African-Americans. At Rutgers he instituted new minority scholarships, established tutoring centers, and promoted black administrators.

Last November, at a national conference of university leaders, Lawrence complained to other presidents that admissions tests could unfairly screen out students from culturally impoverished backgrounds. Then, that same month, Lawrence warned the Rutgers faculty senate about the damaging effects of judging black candidates by their SAT scores. "Do we set standards in the future so we don't admit anybody?" he asked the gathering of professors. "Or do we deal with a disadvantaged population that doesn't have that genetic, hereditary background to have a higher average?" That was a harmful statement, but Lawrence claimed he didn't mean it.

Indeed, Lawrence so objected to genetic explanations for blacks' low SAT scores that he and his wife refused to read The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, because they considered "morally wrong" the book's conclusion that there was a genetic connection between race and intelligence. The Rutgers president suggested that he made the verbal mistake because he recently had been denouncing the genetic assumptions of the book. Who would choose to endorse Lawrence's unfortunate remark? Yet does one slip in a 35-year career dedicated to helping minorities identify him as a racist enemy?

Roosevelt Wilson, a columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat, seems to think so. In a recent column, Wilson correctly warned that offensive speech can't be tolerated simply by saying that First Amendment rights permit it, or by accusing critics of racist speech of being "politically correct." While laws justifiably protect racist statements, Wilson is right that harmful words shouldn't pass without criticism.

But neither should we focus narrowly on the letter rather than the spirit of a person's words. Despite Lawrence's career of promoting affirmative action and minority opportunities, Wilson reports that his "record will be tainted forever because I know in his heart he believed he was working with inferior people." Wilson suggests that Lawrence, like those people who "abhor affirmative action," feels that minorities are racially less qualified. "Compared to these racists," Wilson concludes about Lawrence and others like him, "the Klan are rank amateurs."

On the local public radio station a few days later, Wilson's colleague Elizabeth Holifield concluded a rambling tirade against Lawrence by suggesting that the Rutgers president should be dismissed. So the lesson that Wilson and Holifield draw from Lawrence's distinguished career on behalf of minorities is that he is worse than a member of the Klan and should be fired?

What did Wilson and Holifield suggest when Jesse Jackson made his famous "Hymietown" remark in the New York presidential primary a few years ago? Did they want the nation to focus on Jackson's single sentence or instead consider his longstanding support of a harmonious "rainbow coalition?" If Florida A&M University president Frederick Humphries were to make an unfortunate racial comment, would Wilson and Holifield lead the charge to dismiss him despite his record of support for multicultural tolerance? Where were their reprimands about harmful speech when Leonard Jeffries spoke a few weeks ago at FAMU, their institution, and compared Jews to skunks?

Blacks should attack their enemies, not their friends. They should distinguish between conservatives and those liberals who have decades of commitment to minority opportunity. Otherwise blacks will lose not only important allies like Lawrence, but liberal friends across the country as well. In this period of accelerated conservatism, when the Republican Congress and Democratic White House both want to reassess the worth of affirmative action programs, the black community needs all of the Francis Lawrences they can gather.

Now is not the hour for blacks to alienate needlessly their liberal white allies who continue to support their positions. The clumsy and unjustified attacks on Lawrence have done as much to alienate the liberal friends of multiculturalism as anything in a decade.