NYT: Shift Toward Skepticism (about discrimination) for Civil Rights Panel [View All]

Shift Toward Skepticism for Civil Rights Panel
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: December 10, 2004


WANSAS CITY, Mo., Dec. 9 - It is not that the new chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights doubts racial discrimination still exists, as his detractors have charged, it is that he is not quick to see it. He is not sure he has personally experienced it.

"I just assume somewhere in my life some knucklehead has looked at me and my brown self and said that they have given me less or denied me an opportunity," said the chairman, Gerald A. Reynolds, 41, an African-American lawyer. "But the bottom line is, and my wife will attest to this, I am so insensitive that I probably didn't notice."

It is an outlook that could not be more different from that of his predecessor, Mary Frances Berry, whom President Bush declined to reappoint. Instead the president chose Mr. Reynolds, a fellow conservative who once described affirmative action as a "big lie," as chairman of the 47-year-old advisory panel with a storied history of pushing the government to combat discrimination....

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...Mr. Reynolds, a bookish veteran of conservative policy groups, foresees an entirely different approach, one his associates herald as an important generational and philosophical shift for an agency they see as outmoded and nearly irrelevant in the post-civil-rights-movement era....


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/10/national/10reynolds.html