Читать книгу Progressive Racism - David Horowitz - Страница 11
ОглавлениеClarence Page’s Race Problem, and Mine
Clarence Page is a well-known television African-American commentator, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and author of the recent book Showing My Color. An adolescent in the civil rights era, Page could be taken as a symbol of that era’s success. Unlike many of his radical peers, he has forcefully dissociated himself from the separatists of the Million Man March and is not ashamed of expressing hope in the American dream. Yet, in Showing My Color, Page has written what amounts to an apologia for those same bitter and unappreciative voices that call into question the legacy of Martin Luther King. Consequently his book is also a prime example of the problematic racial attitudes of black intellectuals in the post-King era.
Page takes the title of his book from a parental admonition frequently heard during his youth: “Don’t be showin’ yo’ color.” Showing your color, he explains, “could mean acting out or showing anger in a loud and uncivilized way.” More particularly, to him it means playing to stereotype. In other words, “showing your color” really means showing your culture—a critical point that escapes him. The title, he explains, “emerged from my fuming discontent with the current fashions of racial denial, steadfast repudiations of the difference race continues to make in American life.” Having failed to make the distinction between cultural differences and color differences, Page goes on to defend affirmative action racial preferences and attack the “‘color-blind’ approach to civil rights law,” lamenting the way the words of Martin Luther King have been “perverted” by supporters of the “color-blind” view.
Page’s book begins inauspiciously with a personal anecdote with which he intends to establish that racism is, indeed, a “rude factor” in his life and—by extension—the lives of all black Americans. Unfortunately for his case, the anecdote is fifty years old, involving a trip to segregated Alabama in the fifties, where he encountered water fountains marked “colored” and “white.” It does not occur to him that outrage over an event that took place nearly half a century ago has exhausted its shelf life. Page does acknowledge that such moments are probably behind us, but goes on to argue—as the post-King civil rights activists are prone to do—that a subtle and invisible set of power relationships continues to produce the same results: “Social, historical, traditional and institutional habits of mind that are deeply imbedded in the national psyche . . . work as active agents to impede equal opportunity for blacks.”
The politically correct term for these invisible factors is “institutional racism,” which Page explains this way: “[Racism] is not just an internalized belief or attitude. It is also an externalized public practice, a power relationship that continually dominates, encourages, and reproduces the very conditions that make it so useful and profitable.” This mystical formulation, without any concrete evidence to the real world, is not surprisingly phrased in a language redolent with Marxist clichés. On the other hand, Page is also capable of a more complex understanding of the dilemmas we face. He may think of himself as a “progressive,” but there is a conservative inside him struggling to get out: “Conservatism resonates familiarly with me,” he writes in a chapter called A Farewell to Alms, “as I think it does with most black Americans.”
“We vote liberal, for liberalism has helped us make our greatest gains. But in other areas, we swing conservative. We want to believe that hard work will be rewarded. . . . We want to believe in the promise of America.” It takes courage for Page to defend his conservative instincts, especially in view of the intimidating pressures within the black community to make public figures like him observe racial solidarity on crucial political issues. Page does not hesitate to point out that the anti-Semitic ravings of Louis Farrakhan and other spokesmen for the Nation of Islam created the public climate in which a Yankel Rosenbaum could be lynched in Crown Heights a few years ago, and in which his killer could be acquitted by a jury of blacks. Yet Page remains a political liberal and Democrat, he claims, because of Republicans’ alleged assumption that “racism is no longer a problem” and that “government programs and agencies must be trimmed, even when those programs and agencies offer the last slender thread of protection the grandchildren of America’s black slaves have against further slides back into oppression.”
To support this dire view, Page points to conservative opposition to minimum-wage laws, affirmative action employment policies, and welfare aid to mothers with dependent children. But a deeper cultural dimension to Page’s differences with Republicans is evoked by sentences like this: “Klan membership dropped sharply in the early 1980s, according to researchers for the Anti-Defamation League and other Klan-watching groups, as many found a new, satisfying voice and vehicle in Republican Party politics. Enter David Duke.” But this is almost as far-fetched as recalling the segregated water fountains of a distant past. Duke’s influence, unlike Farrakhan’s, doesn’t reach outside Louisiana or into the chambers of Congress. Duke has been publicly condemned by the Republican Party leadership, including three former Republican presidents, something Page neglects to mention.
This lapse into partisan race-baiting prompts me to show my own color. I am a Jewish Republican, who nearly fifty years ago marched in support of Harry Truman’s civil rights legislation and have been active in civil rights struggles ever since. Moreover, I can produce a personal anecdote of anti-Semitism that, unlike Page’s encounter with segregated facilities as a child, is actually current. My fiancée is a non-Jewish woman who has been confronted by several friends who have said to her, “How can you marry a Jew?” Prejudice exists, but there is no need to make more of it than it deserves.
The level of Jew-hatred in America actually is higher today than it has been in my entire lifetime, thanks not only to the poisonous rants of Louis Farrakhan but also to the collusion of large sections of the black intelligentsia in legitimizing his viewpoint for African-Americans. It is black anti-Semites who have legitimated public anti-Semitism in a way that no other group in America could. Nor does it seem that Jews or other minorities can feel as protected today by the American mainstream as blacks. When Marlon Brando launched an attack on Hollywood Jews on a Larry King show and went on to talk about “kikes,” “chinks,” and “niggers,” it was only the “N-word” that got bleeped by the CNN censors. “Institutional racism,” if we want to grant that mythical construct a modicum of reality, can cut more than one way.
Anti-Semitism has real-world consequences for Jews, just as surely as racism does for blacks. For example, a Jew knows not to seek a career in the auto business without taking into account the fact that Jews are few and far between in the auto industry and almost invisible at executive levels. I have stood in the living rooms of Grosse Pointe mansions and felt the disdain caused by my ethnicity. But this does not lead me or my fellow Jews to call for government-enforced preferences for Jews or to seek the source of this prejudice in the institutional heart of the nation.
For a voting liberal, Page has an unusually broad familiarity with conservative writers, and his readings are mostly respectful. It is not surprising, therefore, that his defense of affirmative action is often shrewd, even if his arguments remain unconvincing. Like other defenders of an indefensible policy, Page begins by denying that affirmative action is what it is: “Despite myths to the contrary, affirmative action is not intended to promote people who are not qualified. It is intended to widen the criteria for those who are chosen out of the pool of the qualified.” Unfortunately for this argument, there are a plethora of examples that prove just the opposite.
Journalist Roger Wilkins was made University Professor of History at George Mason University despite the fact that he had no qualifications as a historian, never having written a scholarly monograph. Wilkins was chosen, it happens, over my friend Ronald Radosh, who at the time had been a history professor for twenty years, had published widely in scholarly journals, and had also written several highly respected books in his field. Nor is Wilkins an isolated case. Julian Bond’s failed political career has led for no apparent reason other than the politics of race to concurrent professorships at two universities (Virginia and Maryland), also in history. Cornel West and Angela Davis hold two of the highest-paid and most prestigious university chairs in America, despite their intellectual mediocrity (in Davis’s case, compounded by her disreputable career as a Communist Party apparatchik and lifelong apologist for Marxist police states). Indeed, the weakness of the affirmative action case is exposed by the very fact that its most intensely contested battlefields are elite universities, which rank among the nation’s most liberal institutions.
Page actually defends the beleaguered affirmative action programs at the University of California with the argument that enrollment levels of blacks are expected to drop when affirmative action is ended. Would Page have us believe that the admissions departments of liberal universities like the University of California are infested with angry whites conspiring to keep black enrollment down? Or with built-in “institutional biases” that exclude blacks? The reality is that since 1957, when the California regents adopted their famous “Master Plan,” every single California resident, regardless of race, who graduates from high school with certain achievements has been guaranteed a place in the university system. Matriculation from various points in the system, starting with community and junior colleges to positions at Berkeley and UCLA (its academic pinnacles), are based on grade-point averages and achievement tests, and these alone.
In defending policies under which racial preferences trump achievements, Page compares them to the “geographical diversity” criteria of the Ivy League schools, commenting, “Americans have always had a wide array of exotic standards for determining ‘merit.’” Page doesn’t seem to realize that “geographical diversity” criteria were introduced to restrict the enrollment of Jews rather than to provide affirmative action programs for students from Wyoming and Utah. Page even quotes, without irony, a friend who said he was convinced he got into Dartmouth because he was the only applicant from Albuquerque: “I’m sure some talented Jewish kid from New York was kept out so I could get in.”
When I was a student at Columbia in the Fifties, the geographical diversity program was in place and the Jewish enrollment was 48 percent. That was the Jewish quota. As Jews we were well aware of the anti-Semitic subtext of the geographical program and talked about it among ourselves. But we did not launch protests or seek government interventions to abolish the program. Once the principle of Jewish admission was accepted, even residual (or “institutional”) anti-Semitism could not keep Jews, who constituted only 3 percent of the population, from flooding the enrollment lists of Ivy League schools. Liberals like Clarence Page support affirmative action because they are in a state of massive denial. The problem of low black enrollment at elite universities is not caused by racist admissions policies. It is caused by poor academic performance among blacks.
In defending affirmative action policies, Page reveals the underlying element in most expressions of “black rage” these days. This is the displacement of personal frustrations, the unwillingness of many blacks to go through the arduous process that other ethnic minorities have followed in their climb up the American ladder. Thus Page opens his chapter on affirmative action with a personal anecdote. As a high school graduate in 1965, he applied for a summer newsroom job but was beaten out by a girl who was less qualified and younger, but white. Shortly after that, the Watts riot occurred and he was hired. Page’s comment: “You might say that my first job in newspapers came as a result of an affirmative action program called ‘urban riots.’” This is a thinly veiled justification for criminal behavior and a familiar cliché of the Left: white people respond fairly to blacks only when they have a gun to their heads. Thus Malcolm X, who scorned the civil rights movement—in a 1963 speech he referred to “the recent ridiculous march on Washington” because he believed, wrongly, that Americans would never give blacks their rights—is seen in retrospect by many black intellectuals as its author because his violent racism scared whites into yielding. But what is immediately striking in Page’s reflection is that he doesn’t pause to consider that this was his first job application and that it was only for a summer position. Perhaps the men doing the hiring wanted to have a girl around the office for a couple of months. This would be an unprofessional rationale for the hiring, but not racist. Nor would it require a riot to remedy.
Page gives no thought to the possibility that he would have been hired eventually anyway. Recognizing that significant changes take time is not the same as saying that they require force to implement. Was it the threat of riots or of affirmative action laws that eventually made black athletes dominant in leagues whose owners often do not rank among the socially enlightened? Or that allowed black cultural artists to achieve an equally dominant position in the popular music industry? How did Oprah Winfrey, a black sharecropper’s daughter from Mississippi, become mother-confessor to millions of lower-middle-class white women (and a billionaire in the process) without affirmative action? Page has no answer. And he doesn’t even address the most striking implication of his anecdotal encounter with racism as a youth: The kind of discrimination that upset him then has, in affirmative action, been systematized and elevated to a national policy.
The primary reason most conservatives oppose affirmative action is one that is given almost no attention by progressives eager to attribute base motives to their opponents. Racial preference is an offense to the core values of American pluralism, which depends on individual rights and the neutrality of government toward all its communities. Affirmative action is a threat to inclusiveness, because privilege is established as a group right and enforced by legal coercion. Affirmative action—which is in practice, despite all denials, a system of racial preferences—is a threat to what Felix Frankfurter identified as “the ultimate foundation of a free society . . . the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.” Affirmative action based on principles like geographical diversity constitutes no such threat, but policies based on race do. Racial preferences are a corrosive acid, eating at the moral and social fabric of American life. Every time a black leader refers to the paucity of blacks on the faculty of Harvard or in the upper reaches of corporate America, the automatic presumption is that white racism is responsible, not factors contributing to individual merit or the lack thereof. The legal concept of “racial disparity” employs the same assumption. The idea that government must compel its white citizens to be fair to its minority citizens presumes that white America is so racist it cannot be fair on its own account. This involves supporters of affirmative action in an illogic so insurmountable it is never mentioned: If the white majority needs to be forced by government to be fair, how is it possible that the same white majority—led by a Republican president named Richard Nixon—created affirmative action policies in the first place?
There is no answer to this question because, in fact, affirmative action was not created because of white racism. It was created because of widespread black failure to take advantage of the opportunities made available when legal segregation was ended. Since the politics of the left are premised on the idea that social institutions determine individual outcomes, this failure had to be the result of institutional rather than individual factors. Whites led by Richard Nixon accepted this fallacious argument and, because they did not want blacks to be second-class citizens, created affirmative action programs.
If affirmative action works, as Page implies, it does so in ways he does not mention. Its primary achievement is to have convinced black Americans that whites are so racist that some external force must compel their respect and, secondarily, that blacks need affirmative action in order to gain equal access to the American dream. The further consequence of this misguided remedy has been to sow a racial paranoia in the black community so pervasive and profound that even blacks who have benefited from America’s racial opportunities have been significantly affected in the way they think. How significantly is revealed in the almost casual way the paranoia surfaces: “‘Black is beautiful’ was the slogan which made many white people nervous, as any show of positive black racial identification tends to do.” Does it? The television mini-series Roots was one of the most significant milestones of positive black racial identification—an epic of black nobility and white evil purporting to represent the entire history of American race relations. It was not only produced and made possible by whites, but also voluntarily watched by more whites than any previous television show in history. Conversely, most of the negative stereotypes of blacks in today’s popular culture are the work of black stars and directors like Martin Lawrence and Spike Lee and the “gangsta rap” industry, which celebrates black sociopathic behavior.
In gauging the size of the chip ominously perched on black America’s shoulder, few measures are so choice as the following passage from Page’s book:
Black people may read dictionaries, but many see them as instruments of white supremacy. They have a point. Dictionaries define what is acceptable and unacceptable in the language we use as defined by the ruling class [sic]. . . . The dictionary’s pleasant synonyms for “white” (“free from moral impurity . . . innocent . . . favorable, fortunate . . .”) and unpleasant synonyms for “black” (“. . . thoroughly sinister or evil . . . wicked . . . condemnation or discredit . . . the devil . . . sad, gloomy or calamitous . . . sullen . . .”) are alone enough to remind black people of their subordinate position to white people in Anglo-European traditions and fact.
In fact, white lexicographers had nothing to do with identifying Clarence Page and his racial kindred as “black” in the first place. When Page and I were young, blacks were called “Negroes” and had been called that or “colored” for hundreds of years. The word Negro has no such negative connotations, moral or otherwise. It was Malcolm X who first embraced “black” as a term of pride, and made “Negro” a term to connote the white man’s pliant black, the “Uncle Tom.” After Malcolm’s death, Stokely Carmichael and the new radical civil rights leadership aggressively took up the label with the slogan “Black Power” and demanded that “black” be used as a sign of respect. Accommodating whites complied. For more than a generation now, the majority of whites have ardently wished that black America would finally get what it wanted from them—and be happy about it.
When all the layers are peeled from the discussion of “racism” in Showing My Color, we are left with a disappointing residue of hand-me-down Marxism:
Modern capitalist society puts racism to work, wittingly or unwittingly. It populates a surplus labor pool of last-hired, first-fired workers whose easy employability when economic times are good and easy disposability when times go bad helps keep all workers’ wages low and owners’ profits high. . . . Racism is one of many non-class issues, such as busing, affirmative action, or flag burning, that diverts attention from pocketbook issues that might unite voters across racial lines.
This is simple-minded, sorry stuff, unworthy of Clarence Page or any other intellectual (black or otherwise). The problem with the black underclass is not that it is underemployed, but that it is unemployable. Blacks who have fallen through society’s cracks don’t even get to the point of being “last-hired.” The flood of illegal Hispanic immigrants into areas like South Central Los Angeles, displacing indigenous blacks, shows that the jobs exist but that the resident black population either won’t or can’t take them, or are not hired for some reason other than their minority status. The fact that one in three young black males in America is enmeshed in the criminal justice system—a fact that Page doesn’t begin to confront—doesn’t help their employability. Once again, the category of race provides a convenient pretext for a massive denial of problems that have very little to do, specifically, with racial prejudice.
In fact, the racial conflict in America is being driven not by economics or even white prejudice, but by radical political agendas—by Clarence Page’s friends on the far left like Manning Marable, Ronald Takaki and Michael Lerner, all of whom have provided blurbs for Page’s book. The very phrase “institutional racism”—necessary because there are so very few overt racists available—is, of course, a leftist invention. It is also a totalitarian concept. Like “ruling class,” it refers to an abstraction, not a responsible individual human actor. You are a class enemy (or, in this case, a race enemy) not because of anything you actually think or do, but “objectively”—because you are situated in a structure of power that gives you (white skin) privilege. Page is astute enough to see that if racism is defined as an institutional flaw, “it does not matter what you think as an individual” and therefore such a definition offers “instant innocence” to the oppressor. But he is not shrewd or candid enough to see that it imputes instant guilt as well. While absolving individual whites, it makes all whites guilty.
The belief in the power of institutional racism allows black civil rights leaders to denounce America as a racist society, when it is actually the only society on earth—black, white, brown or yellow—whose defining creed is anti-racist; a society to which blacks from black-ruled nations regularly flee in search of opportunity and refuge. But the real bottom line is that the phantom of institutional racism allows black leaders to avoid the encounter with real problems in their own communities which are neither caused by whites nor solvable by the actions of whites.
The problem with the discontent now smoldering inside America’s privileged black intellectuals, so well expressed in Showing My Color, is that it can never be satisfied:
Nothing annoys black people more than the hearty perennial of black life in America, the persistent reality of having one’s fate in America decided inevitably by white people. It is an annoyance that underlies all racial grievances in America, beginning with slavery, evolving through the eras of mass lynchings and segregated water fountains, and continuing through the age of “white flight,” mortgage discrimination, police brutality, and the “race card” in politics.
In Page’s view, the unifying and ultimate goal of all black reformers, whether radicals like bell hooks or conservatives like Clarence Thomas, is “black self-determination.” What Clarence Page and blacks like him want is “to free the destiny of blacks from the power of whites.” But outside of Africa and some Caribbean countries, this is obviously an impossible goal and those who advocate it must know this. (Does Page want to go back to Stokely Carmichael’s ridiculous demand in the Sixties for blacks to be given Mississippi?) The goal is precious to them precisely because it can never be realized and thus, to turn one of Jesse Jackson’s slogans on its head, keeps rage alive. Those who push for “black self-determination” in the American context are destined to be frustrated and angry and to look on themselves as “oppressed.” The irony, of course, is that America’s multiethnic society and color-blind ideal—the equality of all citizens before the law—provides the most favorable setting for individuals to enjoy freedom and the opportunity to determine their destinies, even if they happen to be members of a minority. Ask Jews. For two thousand years, Jews of the Diaspora have not been able to free their destiny from the power of gentiles. But in America, where they are a tiny minority, they have done very well, thank you, and do not feel oppressed except, perhaps, by black demagogues like Farrakhan and company.
Heterodoxy, May/June 1996, http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/May-June%201996.pdf.
