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PREFACE

When this book was published in hardcover in the spring of 2012, it was entitled: No Matter What . . . They’ll Call This Book Racist. Why is this, the paperback version, called instead Why We Won’t Talk Honestly About Race?

The answer says almost as much about race and how we deal with it as anything in the pages that will follow.

The truth is, I struggled with what to call the book from the start. There are, of course, countless books out there on the subject of race, but I believed this one was saying things that were distinctive and even important, and it needed a title that reflected that, one that would give pause and perhaps even provoke. Midway through the writing, I hit upon one I thought might work. It was lifted from the famous sex book (and Woody Allen movie) of a few decades ago: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex*—with the asterisk reappearing at the bottom of the page—*But were afraid to ask. Since one of the points of my book was that, on this most sensitive of subjects, even the most decent and fair-minded among us rarely risk saying anything that might give offense, my variation would read Everything You Honestly Think About Race*, with the second part—*But are afraid to say—serving, as in the original, as a kind of unexpected and amusing subtitle. While I suspected such a title might be seen by others involved in the title search as problematic, I thought that would be mainly because the book and film were so old that many contemporary readers would miss the joke. Instead, the resistance had to do with the words themselves; everyone with whom I conferred seemed to think that most would assume all those hidden, honest thoughts referred to in the title were, in fact, viciously, irredeemably racist.

As we went along, to one degree or another this proved to be a problem with almost every prospective title anyone proposed: there were lots of people out there ready, even eager, to misconstrue it. The list of discarded possibilities grew daily: ‘Blackmailed’; ‘Skin in the Game’; ‘Affirmative Reaction’; ‘The New Blacklist’. At one point my wife even put out the question to conservative/libertarian fellow thinkers on the Web, but they, too, came up empty.

At last, I hit on the notion of finding a title that would stick it to those whose reflexive condemnation we’d been so assiduously seeking to avoid: all those who deploy the racism charge as a blunt weapon to intimidate and silence. Or, as I like to think of them, the real race baiters. A slew of new ideas reflected this thought. While some were simple and direct (‘The Racism Smear,’ ‘The Racism Lie’), and others mock-affronted (‘Who Are You Calling Racist?,’‘Al Sharpton’s NOT a Racist and We ARE?’), all displayed rich contempt for those who’d gotten away with playing the race card for so long.

The end result was the title that appeared on the original version of the book. All right, it was unwieldy, and, on first hearing, almost impossible to remember, but it seemed to make the essential point with a bit of humor and even panache. And in case there was ambiguity as to meaning, the subtitle—‘How our fear of talking honestly about race hurts us all’—would surely take care of that. (At the last minute, we did tweak the subtitle, replacing the more accurate ‘terror’ with the less daunting ‘fear’.)

But, of course, it was all predicated on a miscalculation. I honestly—naively, stupidly, optimistically—believed that as a society we were very close to consensus on the reckless use of the racism charge; that, though it continued to be used with impunity by the academic left and some in the media, as well as for shamelessly political ends by black activists and craven liberal pols, no one with any sense was buying it anymore; that, to the contrary, with a black president in the White House, it was almost universally appreciated that the American people had made vastly greater progress on the racial front, and with far greater speed, than any other in history.

Then, a couple of weeks before the book was even out, the Trayvon Martin case exploded, and a lot of us watched with horror as the tragedy was exploited for ideological ends like none in recent memory. For weeks, a situation that was, at the very least, highly ambiguous, and quite possibly a legitimate case of self-defense, was furiously condemned by liberals everywhere as evidence that America remained deeply and irredeemably racist. Young Martin, so sympathetic commentators sadly intoned, echoing the crowds in the streets furiously demanding vengeance, was murdered for nothing more than the crime of being black. It was as if the past half-century had never happened. The case, so it was endlessly repeated, was a latter-day replay of the lynching of Emmett Till. George Zimmerman, himself a minority, was identified in The New York Times as a ‘white Hispanic,’ the tape of his panicked call to the local police that night inartfully edited by a major network to convey the false impression that he’d targeted Martin for the color of his skin. The victim, meanwhile, was portrayed as youthful innocence incarnate, just a good kid out one evening to pick up a bag of Skittles and a can of Arizona Iced Tea, rather than as the increasingly trouble-prone teen he was, under suspension from school at the time, who had allegedly been caught with a burglary tool. The Internet outrage and mass demonstrations only began to abate with the emergence of key facts—notably, that Zimmerman’s version of events was largely confirmed both by his injuries and by eyewitness accounts. Not, true to form, that those who’d been heedlessly waving the bloody shirt of racism ever retracted their charges. As always, their only reaction after being exposed once again as having gotten things completely wrong, resembled that of Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella on the old Saturday Night Live: “Never mind.”

Alas, in the wake of the Martin case, reminders that the racism smear is as alive and intimidating as ever have continued to come in an endless, dispiriting parade. And what’s especially telling is that even when the charge is utterly preposterous, it continues, as ever, to set off panicked denials. Take the ginned-up controversy that arose with the release of Sports Illustrated’s latest Swimsuit Issue. Since one of the photos of a bikini-clad babe showed her standing alongside an African bushman, the shot was seized upon as racist. As Columbia University’s Marc Lamont Hill had it, it reinforced the crippling stereotype of Africans as “primitive” and “almost uncivilized.” But rather than find a polite way to dismiss such critics as the idiots they are, SI’s public relations people immediately came forth with a groveling mea culpa, apologizing “to anyone who has taken exception to the way their culture was represented.”

Then there was the case of the Caledonian Record, a newspaper in über-liberal Vermont, that made the mistake of supporting a local basketball team in its contest against archrival Rice by publishing a full page poster for fans to hold up at the game. In type suggestive of Chinese calligraphy, it read: ‘Fry Rice.’ In the storm that followed, the paper vigorously denied the racism charge, yet it also regretfully opined, in an editorial voice not unlike that of the hyper-sensitive men who populate NPR, that “the outcry reminds us that racial and ethnic stereotypes can offend—regardless of intent.”

Think of it as a missed opportunity. Given the absurdities that abound on this issue, and the fact that there exists in contemporary America a racial pecking order nearly as rigid as the one that prevailed in the segregationist South, they might’ve made a far more important point by observing how much worse it could have been: for what if the rival school’s mascot had been a chicken?

But also, needless to say, there have been plenty of more serious instances in recent days of the race baiters doing their dirty work. For instance:

Naomi Schaefer Riley, a key contributor to the influential Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Brainstorm” blog, was fired in response to complaints from the publication’s readership, overwhelmingly comprised of academics. Her offense? A column on the lack of intellectual rigor that marks black studies programs on the nation’s campuses. “Ms. Riley’s blog posting did not meet The Chronicle’s basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles,” the publication’s editor piously explained, never mind that in posting so challenging a piece, (one saying out loud what many have long acknowledged privately), the writer was doing precisely what she’d been hired to do. “. . . As a result, we have asked Ms. Riley to leave the Brainstorm blog . . . I sincerely apologize for the distress these incidents have caused our readers and appreciate that so many of you have made your sentiments known to us.”

A terrific writer, Riley can happily take care of herself. As she succinctly summed up the reasons for her dismissal in a Wall Street Journal piece, “black studies is a cause, not a course of study. By doubting the academic worthiness of black studies, my critics conclude, I am opposed to racial justice—and therefore a racist.”

It might be worth noting, though Riley herself pointedly did not, that she is married to a black man, and her three children are half-black. Not that this would carry any weight with the race-baiters, since both she and her husband are conservatives, and thus denied the presumption of legitimacy that skin color otherwise confers. As a useful point of contrast, a few months later, the very liberal actor Alec Baldwin was also accused of racism, in his case for allegedly calling a bothersome black New York Post photographer outside his East Village apartment a “coon,” a “crackhead,” and a “drug dealer.” But that story went largely unreported by the mainstream press, and Baldwin—who insisted he couldn’t possibly be a racist, citing the fact that his foundation’s last grant was $50,000 to the Arthur Ashe Learning Center—wasn’t fired from any of his lucrative jobs or even reprimanded.

From her perch at MSNBC, talk show host and Tulane political science professor Melissa Harris-Perry let it be known that henceforth criticism of unmarried teen mothers should be considered out of bounds. Her outburst, received with enthusiasm in left-liberal precincts, was specifically directed at New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, after the city launched a subway ad campaign aimed at clueing in young (and, yes, primarily minority) teens to the obvious: for a young girl to have a child is invariably to doom both to lives of profound distress. As one ad cogently observes: “If you finish high school, get a job, and get married before having children, you have a 98% chance of not being in poverty.” That that message has not been sufficiently heard over the past five decades has everything to do with the tragedy that close to three-quarters of black children in America now grow up in homes without fathers.

But the ad campaign infuriated Professor Harris-Perry, who denounced it as an attempt to “blame young mothers for America’s deepening poverty crisis rather than putting the blame where it belongs, on a financial system that concentrates wealth at the top and public policies that entrench it there.”

One poster especially set her off. It showed a bawling black toddler alongside the words: “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen.” Raged Harris-Perry, “In a society that constantly tells black girls and women through popular culture and public policy that we are easily disposable, un-marriageable and wholly unlovable, this image of a child mocking her young mother with partner abandonment is a step too far.”

What, of course, is truly a step too far for those like Ms. Harris-Perry is talking straight about teen pregnancy. It is not as if she really has anything against stigma, rather that, as always, she chooses to stigmatize those who seek to meaningfully address the tragic deficits associated with inner city culture.

But among the many liberal/left racial enforcers working so assiduously to keep a lid on potentially productive conversation, none has been quite so brazen lately as Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, who reacted to a piece in a local magazine entitled ‘Being White in Philly’ with a call to essentially scuttle the Constitution.

By contemporary standards, the piece in Philadelphia magazine was indeed daring. Setting out to elicit the honest feelings among white people about “the elephant in the room” issue of race, reporter Bob Huber canvassed residents of the gentrifying, middle class neighborhood of Fairmont. While the piece is seasoned by more than a dollop of Shelby Steele’s famous ‘white guilt’—the interviewee with whom the reporter most clearly sympathizes is a woman who bucked local group-think to send her child to the overwhelmingly black neighborhood school—he provides a diversity of views and voices, some of them highly uncongenial to sensitive liberal ears. Almost all the critics pointed to a woman identified as ‘Anna,’ the first Fairmont resident quoted in the piece: “Blacks use skin color as an excuse. Discrimination is an excuse, instead of moving forward. It’s a shame–you pay taxes, they’re not doing anything except sitting on porches smoking pot . . . Why do you support them when they won’t work, just make babies and smoking pot?”

While such an observation is so commonplace it will surprise no one with a functioning set of eyes and ears—in the privacy of their lives, people generally say what they mean and don’t worry what The New York Times thinks about it—it was way, way too much candor for some.

So it was hardly surprising that the Mayor, who is black and a conventional liberal Democrat, would be upset to see such a thing in the pages of his local city magazine, or even that he would term the piece “disgusting” and “pathetic”; while he would have been mistaken, public officials are as entitled as anyone else to be intemperate and hyperbolic. But His Honor went far beyond that. In his official capacity, he dispatched a letter to the city’s Human Rights Commission, asserting that, since free speech is “not an unfettered right,” he wanted “the Commission to evaluate whether the ‘speech’ employed in this essay is not the reckless equivalent of ‘shouting, “fire!” in a crowded theater,’ its prejudiced, fact-challenged generalizations an incitement to extreme reaction.”

It was, in short, the kind of outright abuse of governmental power that should have had liberals everywhere up in arms, especially those in the media. But, no, not in defense of a piece that dared, however tentatively, to move beyond conventional thinking on race.

Of course, that non-reaction surprised no one, for it is a given that the elite media have as long been in league in the great cover-up on race as the politicians they favor. “At the heart of the left-liberal ideology that dominates American debate about race is a glaring contradiction,” as the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto observed of the episode. “In theory, white attitudes toward blacks are all-important, in that any difficulties blacks experience are said to be the result of white racism. But as we have seen with Mayor Nutter’s reaction to Huber’s article, there is no interest in pondering actual white attitudes toward race, and every interest in suppressing—or stereotyping—them.”

But what for so many of us is every bit as distressing as the profound dishonesty of liberals on race is that so many of those on the other side of the political spectrum continue to timidly concede them the moral upper hand.

This is a phenomenon amply discussed in the pages of this book. But it is worth noting that since the publication of the hardcover, the GOP has blown yet another great opportunity to meaningfully set itself apart on the issue.

I speak of the 2012 presidential campaign.

In Barack Obama, Mitt Romney found himself with a rival whose actions and policies had been an even more colossal disappointment on the racial front than in other respects. Indeed, the election of the man who many in 2008 had hoped and believed would serve as a one-man antidote to America’s long and terrible history of racial division had instead resulted in greater ill feeling between the races than at any time in recent memory, as key administration figures, not excluding the President, had repeatedly played the race card to demonize perceived opponents. While Attorney General Eric Holder shamelessly took the lead in this regard, even managing to cast attacks on his department’s calamitously bungled Fast and Furious gunrunning scheme as motivated by his and the President’s race, other Obama appointees, like former ‘green jobs czar’ Van Jones and FCC ‘diversity czar’ Mark Lloyd, were not far behind. The President himself, while more measured, likewise needlessly stirred the racial pot, weighing in on highly volatile situations before the facts were in, and always endorsing the familiar liberal narrative of white culpability and black victimhood. Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates’s 2009 arrest for attempting to break into his own home prompted a precipitous presidential declaration that the Cambridge police had “acted stupidly,” with Mr. Obama citing “a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” Even worse was the President’s pointed observation, as the fury over the killing of Trayvon Martin was reaching a crescendo, that “if I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” Delivered wholly out of context, on the occasion of the appointment of the new head of the World Bank, the remark could only serve to enflame, as indeed it did, that already volatile situation.

Nor were such episodes out of character. Even while Mr. Obama presented himself as a uniter in 2008, his reflex was to cast the other side as eager to exploit America’s none-too-latent racism. “We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid,” Obama warned. “They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?” Even Bill Clinton, hitherto accorded honorary status as America’s first black president, found himself targeted during the heat of the 2008 primaries, noting in astonished indignation that Obama was “playing the race card on me.”

Taking the hint, in his run against Obama that year, John McCain steered so clear of race that he’d become furious if any of his supporters dared mention his rival’s longtime intimate association with the notorious racial arsonist Jeremiah Wright.

Unfortunately, like McCain, Romney was in the gutless tradition of the modern GOP on race, so the likelihood of his ever seriously addressing the issue in 2012 fell somewhere south of the odds that the Mets would win the World Series. Lest we forget, this was a guy who refused to even take on Obamacare.

A strategist’s dream, Romney paid absolutely top dollar for absolutely the worst possible advice. So when it came to race, his handlers played it strictly by the book. Knowing that the media would endorse any charge by Obama that his rival’s bringing up race was more evidence of Romney’s, and his party’s, not-so-latent racism, they urged what they always do: caution.

And it was true, of course, that had Romney dared speak out in unexpected ways on the subject he’d have been eviscerated. Early on, as if to send a warning shot across his rival’s bow, the President suggested to Spanish-language Univision that Romney supported racial profiling, and, soon after, one of the President’s chief media enthusiasts, Chris Matthews, felt free to blithely refer to Republicans as “the Grand Wizard crowd.” Other mainstream liberals were soon repeating the fiction that Republicans are adept at ‘dog whistle racism,’ subtly communicating to white voters a shared antipathy toward blacks in general and, in particular, the black man in the White House. When Romney delivered an economics speech in Ohio before a banner reading “Obama isn’t working,” the liberal blogosphere pounced, one indignant columnist at Mediaite fuming it called to mind “the stereotype of the ‘lazy,’ ‘shiftless’ black man.” Meanwhile, media outlets across the board were broadcasting reminders that Romney’s church did not admit blacks to the priesthood until 1978.

So, throughout the campaign, Romney remained dutifully silent, never addressing the lamentable state of the nation’s inner cities or the cultural deficits that have so much to do with it; or America’s epidemic of children growing up without fathers and the desperation and lawlessness that will be visited upon the nation as a result; or the profound inequity of racial preferences; and certainly not that this president, who’d pledged to unite us, has instead endlessly dwelt on past injustices long since remedied, while further empowering the racial bean counters who hold such sway in the nation’s life.

Would taking on Obama on this most crucial and dangerous of subjects have made a difference electorally? Hard to know. What is certain is that Americans have a keen sense of fairness; polling consistently reveals that we believe in equal opportunity and a level playing field, that no one should be either penalized or privileged by race or ethnicity. Most of us know full well that racial discrimination is no longer the obstacle to life success that liberals relentlessly, and often cynically, claim.

But, yes, Romney would have been pummeled by the press and would have aroused Bush-Cheney levels of detestation among the elites.

But he’d at least have shown himself capable of something he so conspicuously failed to display during the long months of the campaign: leadership.

In a roundabout way, this brings us back to the original title of this book and why it is no more. Yes, from the beginning I realized it would put off some liberals, and that was okay, because my hope was that it would elicit curiosity and the occasional smile from conservatives and libertarians, its intended audience. Instead, it seemed to put off, or at least rattle, most who saw it, and to be misunderstood by just about everyone else.

It is hard enough for a book out of a small conservative house to draw notice in a crowded marketplace. A title that very few want to get caught reading in public doesn’t help. This hit home with particular force during the promotional phase. I’ve been writing for a long time, and this was my first book ever for which I was not asked to do a single minute of TV.

So think of this new title, bland as it is, as a nod to McCain, Romney, and the ignoble GOP tradition of safety at all costs. But forget the packaging. For any ‘progressives’ out there looking to be offended, there’s still the content.