Читать книгу Why We Won't Talk Honestly About Race - Harry Stein - Страница 7

INTRODUCTION

Before I wrote even a word of this book, a number of people who wished me well suggested I drop the project. They knew the kind of books I’d done in the past, and of my tendency to kid around in print, and they suggested that in this instance that would be a very, very bad idea. As one bluntly put it, “You don’t make light about race in this country.”

That was not my intention, I countered. My aim was to talk honestly about race, conveying views that, however legitimate or widely held, have been effectively branded as racist by defenders of the lamentable status quo, and so largely banned from public discourse. Indeed, the book’s original title was drawn from the famous Tea Party sign first spotted, as far as I can discern, in the hands of an anonymous witty soul at a 2009 rally in Cincinnati: “It Doesn’t Matter What This Sign Says, You’ll Call It Racist Anyway.”

And, by the way, what’s wrong with a little irreverence on the subject? After all, there are those who make light about race all the time. Richard Pryor built a whole career on it, and so have dozens of his successors and imitators, more than a few of them wildly profane.

Okay, I got it: What my solicitous friends meant is that white people can’t make light about race. Or, for that matter, say things in deadly earnest that violate the ever-evolving rules of what is permissible. And that holds especially true for white conservatives.

I sincerely appreciated it all—I too live in the world of Al Sharpton and the New York Times, if only at its margins—but their concern also provoked a question: Why not? Aren’t the issues surrounding race, from the social fallout of single-parent families to the ways racial preferences distort the very meaning of equity and justice as embodied in the nation’s founding documents, of concern to us all? Moreover, hasn’t the impulse to ignore or justify or even celebrate behaviors that once would have been everywhere condemned as dysfunctional led to the collapse of standards generally? As a reformed white liberal I can say with complete assurance that white liberals share many of the same concerns, even if they’d be mortified to be overheard voicing them among strangers.

Quite simply, the fear and unspoken prohibitions that have long governed the conversation about the single most important issue on the public agenda have served only to undermine genuine progress on the racial front.

And the time has come to move past that.

There are of course deeply compelling reasons that as a subject race is the extremely sensitive and awkward thing it is. As the historians aptly have it, slavery was America’s “original sin,” and in the century to follow, even second-class citizenship was a status denied to most of the nation’s blacks. The very terminology associated with the era—“separate but equal,” “poll taxes,” “lynching”—bespeaks a nightmarish state of affairs all but incomprehensible to the contemporary mind. It is wonderfully good (and quite remarkable) that, though that time was so recent that tens of millions living today vividly recall it, we almost universally look back upon it with shame and even incredulity.

But shame is a psychologically complex thing, and never more so than when applied to Americans and race. For even as it has impelled us to examine our ugly past with unflinching honesty—with every elementary school kid nationwide versed in the horrors of the Middle Passage, and slave narratives all the rage with history grad students, and black oppression the leitmotif of every Ken Burns documentary—it has precluded anything approaching an honest view of race today; indeed, it has much to do with why such honesty has itself been routinely cast as racist.

No one has written more compellingly about this deeply dispiriting phenomenon than the brilliant Hoover Institution scholar Shelby Steele. Since Steele is a conservative—and a black one, at that—people who read publications like the New York Times have mostly never heard of him, but he nailed the source of their racial attitudes more succinctly than anyone in the two-word title of his most important book: White Guilt. It is the widespread guilt over the terrible inequities of the past (and to a lesser extent, the obvious hardships faced by many blacks in the present) that causes white people, especially those who identify themselves as “enlightened” or “progressive,” to over and over, ad infinitum, give blacks a pass on behaviors and attitudes they would regard as unacceptable and even abhorrent in their own kind. This guilt has repeatedly, in fact, induced liberal whites—and even some not so liberal—to embrace policies that institutionalize not fairness but its opposite so as to appear to be on the right side of the racial divide. “The great ingenuity of interventions like affirmative action,” Steele writes, “has not been that they give Americans a way to identify with the struggle of blacks, but that they give them a way to identify with racial virtuousness quite apart from blacks.”

Each of us, of course, has his own unique set of experiences with race, but having come of age during and in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement—that is, believing, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s most fundamental precept had it, that we should be seen as individuals rather than as members of a group—I suspect the ones that inform this book are representative of a great many well-intentioned Americans. That is why I raise Steele right up top. The moment I read him on white guilt, I experienced what certain feminists have taken to calling an “ah-ha moment.” I was in my late 30s at the time and, no question, he was describing not just me but pretty much every well-meaning white person I had ever known: All of us who had gone lazily along with the mainstream liberal racial flow.

Good intentions. These have long been the currency in which liberal whites have traded, and where race was concerned, the family into which I was born boasted some of the best. Though by the time I was aware of such things my parents were Stevenson Democrats, they had been Communists, and remained proud of that fact (though for a time secretly) the rest of their lives. And in good measure—indeed, this is a large part of the romance of the left in general—it was because in the twenties and thirties the Communist Party was way ahead of the curve on the big social issues: fighting (and incessantly sloganeering) against poverty, sexism and especially racism. Nor was this merely a theoretical or tactical pose. For instance, it was CP lawyers who led the fight to save the Scottsboro Boys, the nine hapless black teens unjustly accused of raping a pair of white girls in Depression-era Alabama. My mother for a time worked as the secretary for James Ford, the black former postal worker who in the thirties twice ran for vice president on the Communist ticket. Decades later, she would tell us of hearing the stories of indigent blacks who’d journeyed to New York from the rural South to tell rapt young Communists of taking their lives in their hands organizing their fellow sharecroppers. “There was one fellow,” she recalled, and I have this verbatim, because I got it on tape before she died, “who looked like the Hollywood stereotype of what a Negro should look like, very black, huge ears, white teeth—like Stepin Fetchit. But this man had such dignity! I never forgot what he said about this dual life he had to live: ‘The only reason I’m alive today is that down South I shuffle, I say, Yassush, yas m’am.’ Otherwise, he said, they’d have lynched him a long time ago. It made such an impression on me!”

And when my parents told such stories, they made quite an impression on my two brothers and me, too, as did what we heard from our more progressive teachers. My fourth-grade teacher in particular, the wonderful Mrs. Levin, talked ceaselessly about prejudice. She’d have us sing “You’ve Got to Be Taught” from South Pacific, and her rendition of the poem “Incident,” by Countee Cullen, had such a powerful effect on me I can still recite it by heart more than 50 years later.

Once riding in old Baltimore, Heart-filled, head-filled with glee; I saw a Baltimorean Keep looking straight at me. Now I was eight and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.” I saw the whole of Baltimore From May until December; Of all the things that happened there That’s all that I remember.

Still, by then my father had a successful career going in capitalist America, we were living in an affluent, all-white neighborhood in suburban New Rochelle, and the only two black kids in my elementary school were the sons of the United Nations ambassador from Ghana. So my brothers and I couldn’t help wonder sometimes: What’s going on here? Because pretty much the only Negroes our family had anything to do with on a day-to-day basis were the ones who worked for us—Edward, who did occasional odd jobs around the house and drove my older brother to Little League practice, and the various young women from the South who were our housekeepers. Among these, we grew especially fond of one who stayed a couple of years with us when I was approaching my teens. Her name was Del, and one evening my older brother and I, partly to be pains in the ass, but also because we meant it, began pressing our parents about her. Why was it that she was “Del,” while they were “Mr. and Mrs. Stein”? Why, for that matter, did Del serve us dinner, but never sat with us at the table? In their youth my parents had picketed Gone with the Wind for its portrayal of black people in general, and the black servants in particular, and it was clear this line of questioning made them extremely uncomfortable, which was highly gratifying. But to my mother’s credit, she at least tried to formulate coherent answers. That wouldn’t be the kind of relationship Del wants either, she said, such familiarity would make her uncomfortable. When we went on to press them about Del’s salary—if memory serves, less than a hundred dollars a week—she argued that that was the going rate, in fact more than the going rate, and infinitely more than she could make down South, and let’s not forget she also got room and board.

At that point, we relented. It was fish in a barrel and just too pathetic.

Listen, I don’t want to overstate this—both my parents are gone now, and can’t defend themselves. And no one can doubt their good intentions. For in this regard, as in many others, my liberal parents truly were par for the course. Just about everyone we knew had a black maid, which is surely why within their circle their small hypocrisies were so rarely challenged. This is not to say that the young black women living inside those large white homes were ever demeaned or mistreated. To the contrary, many were almost members of the family—emphasis on almost. The family of one of my friends had a “girl” named Willie Mae—it always made me think of the great center fielder for the Giants—who stayed with them for decades, so couldn’t really have been a girl at all. Nor, apparently, was it all that different even in parts of the country where most people’s parents regarded Communists with roughly as much sympathy as did Joe McCarthy. Alabama-born Howell Raines, the deeply unpleasant individual who would go on to become the top editor of the New York Times, wrote a 1991 piece for the paper’s Sunday magazine about what he had learned of life as a child from his family’s devoted black maid. His “early relationship with Grady,” as Raines later recalled, “prepared me for the civil rights story and made me receptive to it perhaps in a way many white Southerners might not have been.” The piece won a Pulitzer Prize, and it may truly be said that, in all the long history of that degraded award, none was ever more of a gimme. (It is somehow—what’s the word: fitting, ironic, unsurprising?—that the ever-smug Raines would ultimately lose his vaunted Times post in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal for having tolerated in a black reporter practices that would have led to instant dismissal had he been white.

Still, mixed as Raines’s motives surely were, his enthusiasm for the civil rights movement was certainly genuine, for it was the great moral crusade of all our young lives. As a 14-year-old, in 1962, I joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to do my bit, which consisted of occasionally picketing the speaking appearances of alleged racists, but more often of getting together to hold hands with other young activists to sing songs like “Down By the Riverside” and “We Shall Overcome”; and it was exhilarating to believe we were connected to the earthshaking events unfolding every evening on TV in places like Mississippi and Alabama. My father, for his part, actually flew down to Alabama to take part in the final leg of King’s legendary Selma to Montgomery march.

As it happened, we had our own mini-civil rights crisis in my hometown of New Rochelle, precipitated when a cohort of parents at the all-black Lincoln School insisted that the city, instead of erecting a new building for their elementary school-aged kids, bus them to the all-white schools in the better parts of town. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People soon came aboard on their behalf, and the battle lines were drawn: the black parents, the NAACP and their liberal white allies, including us, versus the other white parents, whose arguments for preserving the neighborhood school system we naturally brushed aside as cover for racism. In short, it soon got ugly, literally neighbor against neighbor. In the end the fight went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the busing advocates at last prevailed. By then I was in high school, long gone from the schools in question—and within a system where, ranked by academic merit, kids like me rarely had more than a couple of Negroes in our classes. But stories of the newly integrated elementary schools were everywhere being spread by wide-eyed younger siblings, a fair number of whom were regularly getting the crap beaten out of them by their new classmates.

Still, as good liberals, who had time to dwell on actual consequences? We were caught up in the grand sweep of history, change, even when it was just for its own sake.

Actually, the rough stuff wasn’t nearly as much a surprise to us kids as it seemed to be to our parents. Though we’d been raised to believe Negroes were like us in every vital respect—why else would you have to be carefully taught to love and hate?—somewhere along the way we’d come to grasp that some of them weren’t exactly like us. I’d personally figured this out back when I was eight or nine, and our parents would drop us off Saturday afternoons at the movies on Main Street. More than once, I was accosted at the soda machine by black kids demanding, with a show of menace, to “borrow” a quarter. The first time this happened I remember thinking, in my naiveté. Borrow? But we don’t know each other, so how will you pay me back? But I was quickly led to understand that was not the transaction they had in mind. Relatively painless as those encounters were, at the time they were pretty scary. I mean, there were some crummy kids in our neighborhood—chronic liars, cry babies, bullies, and fools—but no actual robbers!

Not that I ever bothered to tell my parents. I must’ve understood on some level that while I’d get some sympathy, there’d be no satisfaction, and I might have to endure an “explanation”—a suburban version of the young Woody Allen’s father’s defense of the cleaning woman caught stealing in Annie Hall: “She’s a colored woman from Harlem! She has no money! She’s got a right to steal from us!”

In any case, in the immutable way these things happen, I came to share their understanding that, having been so deeply wronged by history, black people were always to be given the benefit of every doubt. By the time I was in college, Vietnam may have been atop the agenda as an animating campus issue, but race was not very far behind. Like every other right-thinking white kid, I seamlessly went with the new direction dictated by posturing black activists. Sure, King had been fine in his day, but that day was done—now it was Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Panthers, and all the other strutting Black Power types who commanded our awed respect, even if (and maybe also because) they scared the hell out of us.

Of course, later we would come to recognize that all along they’d been pretty thuggish, but that was also only when everyone else did, and it was safe to do so. Anyway, by then there were new positions to be taken on the racial front, like, for instance, supporting black studies and affirmative action and otherwise pushing diversity in its assorted and nefarious forms.

I only began to question—no, actually, think about—any of it when I began moving to the right; a move prompted by a number of things, not least becoming a father. It was around this time that, exploring an intellectual universe into which I’d otherwise never have dared venture, I ran across the aforementioned Shelby Steele, among other conservative thinkers. In due course, I joined them in questioning my own long-held liberal assumptions in print, eventually doing so at book length.

Only then did I come to fully understand how dangerous such apostasy could be, especially when it came to race. I’ve written the story before, so I’ll be succinct. While giving a speech about my political journey in Dallas, I made a light reference to how in my family we used to root for sports teams based on how many blacks were on the roster; then compounded this misdemeanor with a Class-A felony by closing the speech with a story about an argument between my 15-year-old son and his politically correct white high school English teacher over Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Pointing to Mark Twain’s strategic use of the n-word, the teacher claimed, to my son’s exasperation, that this classic of anti-racist literature was racist, and when he took her on, he guaranteed, as he put it, that “I’m starting off with a C in that class, and working down from there.” Except in telling the story I made the mistake—which I will not repeat here, so as not to give other idiots easy ammunition—of using not the weasel term “the n-word,” but the actual word itself. This grievously offended a black man in the audience, who rose during the question and answer portion of the program to say so. We had a spirited back and forth, and I thought that was the end of it. Except that he, or one of his friends, immediately went to the local Fort Worth Star-Telegram with a grossly distorted account of the episode, which led to a grossly distorted article coming as close as legally feasible to calling the “conservative speaker”—me—a racist; and in due course, the story was picked up by a number of other papers.

Actually, as these things go, the gruesome experience ended reasonably well. After I wrote about it in City Journal, a Wall Street Journal columnist followed up, leading a gratifyingly high number of people to cancel their subscriptions to the Fort Worth paper, and I choose against all odds to believe the liberal writer of the piece and his even more liberal editor were duly chastened. But for all my subsequent bravado, it was a searing experience and one I would only wish on my worst enemies—which, since they’re all liberals, is wishing for the impossible.

What’s ironic about being branded a racist at this point in life is that, in fact, I have more and better genuine black friends than ever before. True enough, they’re almost all on my side of the political spectrum—but, hey, isn’t friendship most fundamentally about shared beliefs and values?

All of this background is by way of lending context to all that will follow; and, yes, I suppose also as a means of rebutting some of the ugliness likely to come.

The ways in which this book will be anathema to the racial enforcers are many and varied. Start with double standards— the kind that may also be filed under “liberal-white bigotry,” i.e., the bigotry of low expectations, and how it cripples and demeans those it supposedly aims to help. It will look into the supposed sin of racial profiling—and the statistical evidence establishing that, in fact, the disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates of minorities usually reflect nothing more than disproportionate rates of criminality. Too, it will discuss how American business has long been subject to blackmail by the racial grievance industry in the name of social justice; as well as the many other ways in which the regime of racial preferences has sowed division, corruption, and resentment in this country.

Speaking of double standards, nor can the role of the media be discounted in any of this. How is it okay for liberals to endlessly belittle Clarence Thomas as an Uncle Tom, or for liberal cartoonist Ted Rall to get away with calling Condoleeza Rice a “house nigga”? Why, even after the Duke University rape fiasco, does the media continue to give credence to every charge of racism?

But beyond the manifold particulars, I aim to make a larger and overarching point: The idea that it is racism that has millions of underclass blacks mired generation after generation in physical and spiritual poverty is not just false, but the greatest impediment to fundamentally altering that dreadful state of affairs. What must be faced—above all, by its victims—is that the real problem is a culture of destructive attitudes and behaviors that denies those in its grip the means of escape.

Alas, rather than fully confront the all-too-obvious deficiencies of underclass culture, we play an elaborate, multifaceted game of let’s pretend; one that begins with the fiction that racism is the all-encompassing explanation for black (and other) social dysfunction and moves on seamlessly to the fraud that even the most soul-crushing anti-social behaviors can constitute “authenticity.”

In the end, comforting lies are no better than any other kind—arguably worse, for being so seductive. Societies that invest too heavily in them invariably reap the whirlwind. (See former Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plans or Greece circa 2012.)

In brief, this book aims to unequivocally say the sorts of things that for too long have been deemed unsayable in the public square—even when widely acknowledged in private among Americans of goodwill. Its intent is not to offend or shock, though it will likely do both, but to provoke the sort of serious thinking that liberal enforcers have heretofore rendered impossible; and by facing up to those difficult truths, to begin looking toward genuine solutions.

For all the remarkable progress this country has made on race in the past half-century, unprecedented in human history, liberals insist, for their own political and psychological purposes, on clinging to the notion of America as irredeemably racist. We—and especially black people—for too long have been living with the terrible consequences of that cruel canard.

This gets us back to where we started. One friend took me out to lunch to warn me off this book: It’s career suicide, he assured me, if not the regular kind. I’d get savaged, massacred— scalped, castrated, my body burned to such an unrecognizable crisp that no one but my dentist and that gorgeous forensic anthropologist on Bones will be able to identify it. Hadn’t I noticed that in the Age of Obama, the racism charge, rather than abating, has become more prevalent than ever?

Yes, I’ve noticed.

I’ll confess that did give me pause. So let me conclude, for safety’s sake, with a comment with which I wholeheartedly agree made by a reader called Extraneus on the excellent JustOneMinute website: “For the record, I have no problem with Obama’s black half. His white half is the most incompetent, anti-American asshole ever to inhabit the office of the presidency, but his black half is fine.”