Читать книгу Why We Won't Talk Honestly About Race - Harry Stein - Страница 8
ОглавлениеRACISM TODAY, RACISM TOMORROW, RACISM FOREVER
For many of us who grew up during the civil rights movement, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace was the vilest figure in the rogues gallery of Southern bigots blighting the nation. True, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett was for a time equally obstructionist, but he had the look and milquetoast manner of an accountant. While thuggish Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor of Birmingham, Alabama shocked evening news watchers nationwide by siccing attack dogs on peaceful protesters, he was so stupid and oblivious he seemed less a multidimensional human being than a pot-bellied racist sheriff out of a Herblock caricature. But Wallace—the former bantamweight fighter, chin outthrust in snarly defiance as he stood literally blocking the schoolhouse door—was smart and canny and utterly self-assured; which is to say, he seemed the embodiment of all that was ugly not just in America, but in humankind itself.
Wallace’s June 1963 refusal to allow two black students to enter the hallowed halls of the University of Alabama was the fulfillment of the infamous pledge he’d made at his inauguration five months earlier. Standing at the precise spot where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office as president of the Confederate States of America a century before, he declared, “I say segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
So despicable was the thinking represented by that pronouncement that for millions of Americans it will forever remain Wallace’s epitaph; this, despite his late-career disavowal of racial bigotry and his strong support from black Alabamians in his last campaigns. In fact, in retrospect Wallace was a complicated and even a tragic figure, in many ways representative of the lightning-fast transformation of the Old South to the New South. (Hardly incidentally, he anticipated the mass disillusionment with traditional liberalism that would lead to the wholesale exodus of working-class whites from FDR’s New Deal coalition and the rise of Reagan Democrats.) I myself, very much later, came to appreciate his bizarre yet somehow apt characterization during his 1968 presidential campaign of the liberal elites as “pointy heads who can’t park a bicycle straight.” But that’s another matter.
It was the indelibility of Wallace’s earlier racism, expressed as it was with such callous and intractable certainty, that made a declaration by Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick more than 40 years later so startling. Appearing at an NAACP dinner on April 30, 2006, in the middle of a campaign launched by affirmative action opponents for a Michigan state proposition aimed at ending government racial and gender preferences in education and hiring, the mayor pledged: “Affirmative action today, tomorrow, and forever.”
Ultimately, Kilpatrick and his allies were unsuccessful, as that November Michigan’s Proposal 2 passed overwhelmingly. Nor did the mayor himself fare any better: Charged three years later with 10 felony counts of corruption, he resigned his office, and for a time found himself federal inmate No. 44678–039.
But what’s far more significant is that among his fellow liberals his eerie, repulsive echo of Wallace elicited absolutely no criticism. To the contrary, hearing it, his NAACP listeners erupted in cheers; and they, too, went without censure in the press and elsewhere. Indeed, campaigning at Kilpatrick’s side in 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama bestowed upon him a particularly heartfelt helping of boilerplate, declaring him “a leader, not just here in Detroit, not just in Michigan, but all across the country people look to him. We know that he is going to be doing astounding things for many years to come. I’m grateful to call him a friend.”
Welcome to the wide world of civil rights activism in a time when all the meaningful battles have long since been won. Which is to say, an activism that—largely for purposes of reaping liberal support and government dollars—tirelessly promotes the fraud that today’s version of racism constitutes a moral crisis nearly on a par with the virulent kind once represented by Wallace.
Which brings us to Eric Holder.
One will recall that on February 18, 2009, less than a month into Obama’s supposed “post-racial” presidency, U.S. Attorney General Holder commemorated Black History Month by declaring the American people “essentially a nation of cowards” for not talking more about race. “If we are to make progress in this area,” he piously intoned, “we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”
This was so utterly, indisputably, laughingly wrong that those of us not reduced to outright mockery were left flabbergasted. Too little discussion of race? Race has long been our national obsession, a pastime more widely followed than football—which, in fact, itself regularly gives rise to mini-racial conflagrations—or Oprah Winfrey (who’s never averse to fanning the conflagrations). Liberal commentators refuse to shut up about race; college students have it pushed in their faces from the first day of orientation on through to the de rigueur pieties about “diversity” and “social justice” at graduation; of necessity, most every Fortune 500 company has instituted policies aimed at hiring and promoting minorities, and woe be to recalcitrant managers who too adamantly adhere to more traditional standards of merit.
Seemingly each day we must endure some new illustration, large or small, of the ludicrous lengths to which this insanity has gone. Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon charges Pro Football Weekly with racism for describing up-and-coming star Cam Newton, a fellow black, as “very disingenuous” and “very scripted” with a “me-first” attitude—never mind that the publication had used exactly the same words to describe spoiled white players. According to the tabloids, “many” believed that So You Think You Can Dance judge Mia Michaels was a racist, based on her decision to vote AdéChiké Torbert from the show. (Not to worry: A distraught Michaels defended herself by revealing she has dated black men.) Even the lunatic at a Connecticut beer distributorship who gunned down five coworkers after getting fired for theft cried racism, claiming he’d been subject to racist taunts.
As national obsessions go, this is quite a bizarre one, since most of us, left to our own devices, would prefer to take those we encounter in life as they come, on the merits In many cases we would scarcely notice race at all if it were not for the fact that we are constantly being harangued about it by our progressive betters. Indeed, as Ann Coulter put it in one of her more spot-on observations, “Liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race.”
Happily, white supremacists have largely gone the way of the dodo. Liberals, on the other hand, remain all too much with us, daily wielding the racism charge with all the subtlety of a caveman’s club.
Is there still white racism out there? Absolutely, there remains a scattering of genuine unreconstructed bigots hanging out in the damp cracks and crevices of the sub-basement of the grand American edifice, embarrassments to themselves and the human species. Every critic of the racial status quo readily acknowledges as much, if only in preemptive self-defense.
Then, again, one’s answer to the question depends upon one’s definition of the term. What most of us see, and celebrate, is how little there remains of the old kind, the cretinous Wallace kind, in which millions—and even the law—defined others as loathsome or inferior based on the meaningless superficialities of ethnicity and race. Today, the vast majority of Americans, almost all of us, embrace King’s admonition to judge others solely by “the content of their character.”
Yet many liberals will tell you the term carries a broader meaning—that it also has to do with what’s in people’s hearts, what we say behind closed doors. On the face of it, this view sounds reasonable enough, and it deserves its fair-minded due. For instance, to summon up perhaps the most obvious manifestation of such supposed racism, it is true that lots of white people tell racist jokes, including many who would never think of repeating them in front of a black person, and, for that matter, plenty of liberals.
Recently heard examples:
What do you call a white man surrounded by 100 black guys? Warden.
What do you call a black hitchhiker? Stranded.
True enough, in the spectrum of ethnic jokes, these are on the relatively mild side—many are frankly noxious—and, also true, they are grounded in an unpleasant stereotype about blacks and criminality. And, yes, we’d probably be better off if they never got told—as liberals will surely legislate if they can get away with it. Indeed, having grown up in a scrupulously left-of-center home, I recall being shocked at some of my supposedly enlightened college friends’ love of The Amos ’n Andy Show; my own childhood must-see TV ran from Leave It to Beaver to Wagon Train. Yet listening to them recall certain beloved episodes—like the one in which the shyster Kingfish sold the credulous Andy a “house” in Central Park that was a stage backdrop, so you went through the front door and were outside. I must say, stereotypes and all, they sounded pretty damn funny.
Call it racism if you want—by the broadest definition, maybe it is—but, if so, it’s the most benign sort of racism. Does it even need to be said that we also tell mean and ugly jokes about Poles and Italians, women and transvestites, Southerners and blondes—most based on exaggerations of presumed characteristics? I’m not exactly delighted by non-Jews telling Jewish jokes that feature penny pinching or the Holocaust. (For example: How do you get 100 Jews into a car? Toss a dollar bill inside. How do you get them out again? Mention Hitler is driving.)
But this is the price of living in a multiethnic society that places maximum value on freedom; one that also lets middle-aged women parade around in T-shirts that ask “Who Needs Big Tits When You’ve Got an Ass Like This?” Hardly incidentally, as a means of acknowledging difference, and maybe of letting off steam, it has it all over the simmering ethnic hatreds so common elsewhere in the world.
Is it channeling Pollyanna to suggest that even Holder might be well served by spending as much time celebrating how far we’ve come as he does on our supposed cowardice? Not long ago, catching Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner on TV, I was reminded that a mere 40 years ago the notion of a white woman marrying literally the most accomplished black man in America would’ve been considered shocking even by an exceedingly liberal San Francisco couple like that played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. These days, Sidney Poitier’s Dr. John Prentice—rushing off from a high-level conference in Hawaii to an even more prestigious one in Geneva, making even the words “What’s for breakfast?” sound like Shakespeare—would be a catch in almost any household anywhere in America. Nor is it a surprise that 2009’s best loved film, resonating like no other, was The Blind Side, about the love of a conservative, upper-crust Mississippi family for the black man-child they took in as their own.
In a society that decades ago reached a consensus that legal discrimination is an abomination, and has grown in innumerable other ways as a result, one can choose to be endlessly aggrieved about the incidental stuff. Or, quite simply, not be. Alas, far too many black people, as well as legions of white liberals, have opted for the former, embracing a definition of racism so expansive that almost anything—from the failure of too few blacks to pass an exam for promotion to a perceived slight at a social function—can be made to fit the bill.
Think of it as chip-on-shoulder racism, a.k.a., the kind that can never end; the all-purpose explanation and excuse. What’s continually curious, given the hyper-sensitivity of such people to the merest hint of racial bigotry, real or imagined, is how blithely indifferent they are to racial animus when it is directed at white people by blacks. White America was stunned when it learned of Obama’s longtime association with the vile Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 campaign, but what’s just as telling is that in the south side of Chicago, the odious black liberation theology on offer to Wright’s 8,500-strong congregation at Trinity United Church of Christ was not seen as a big deal; for variations on the same doctrine are heard in black churches each Sunday in many parts of urban America. Indeed, just sticking to Obama’s hometown, in today’s America can anyone even imagine a white equivalent of unhinged racial rabble rouser Louis Farrakhan garnering so remotely large a following?
In fact, throughout black America can be found those with a considerably less-than-generous view of white people, one grounded in the assumption that no matter the face they present to the world, on some level most are irredeemably racist. Whether expressed in anger or bemusement or resignation, there is no hesitation in airing such a view, and certainly no embarrassment. It’s just how things are. Nurtured by the omnipresent grievance industry, a pervasive sense of resentment and ill usage cuts a wide swath across educational and class lines, as evident in a black dorm at an elite university as on any street corner in urban America; and informing the thinking of many educated and successful blacks very nearly as much as that of Wright or Farrakhan. As David Mamet perceptively has his upper-crust black lawyer put it to a white colleague in his play Race: “Do all black people hate whites? Let me put your mind at rest. You bet we do.”
That may be an overstatement, but it is inevitable that the incessant message that racism lurks at every turn would breed distrust and deep antipathy toward white people among many in the black community.
While the O.J. Simpson verdict may have been the most striking instance of black solidarity trumping justice, the cogent observer of modern America will not be entirely surprised to learn it is not the only one; or that these days black racists are likely to be a good deal more candid about their biases than their white counterparts. In fact, I have before me a story from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about a black judge in the Pittsburgh area who recently rejected a plea agreement for a white man with no priors convicted of scuffling with a cop after a traffic stop. From the bench, Allegheny County Judge Joseph Williams called the deal “a ridiculous plea that only goes to white boys,” adding that “if this had been a black kid who did the same thing, we wouldn’t be talking about three months’ probation.” The shocked assistant district attorney on the case, rightly noting that “the court has essentially called me a racist,” protested “I don’t make offers based on race. I make offers based on facts.”
It is not coincidental that among Holder’s other notable early acts was his astonishing decision to drop a case, which was against members of the New Black Panther Party who’d intimidated white voters at a Philadelphia polling place, that his predecessors at the Department of Justice had already won. Though Holder never offered a plausible reason for this, it is entirely consonant with the lunatic theory, which is nonetheless advanced by seemingly serious people, that blacks cannot be racist by virtue of their experience as victims of racism and lack of institutional power.
But whites? In the eyes even of some blacks who themselves wield vast institutional power, the behavior of white people is always presumed to be governed by deep-seated racism. “I do not understand what I think is the maligning and maliciousness [toward] this president,” as Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee complained bitterly during the contentious negotiations on raising the debt ceiling in the summer of 2010. “Why is he different? And in my community, that is the question that we raise. In the minority community that is [the] question that is being raised. Why is this president being treated so disrespectfully?”
The questions leaping to mind were enough to leave one sputtering in stupefied frustration. Disrespect?! Wasn’t the partisan sniping Barack Obama faced just par for the course in such a circumstance? Was she actually pretending to have forgotten George W. Bush, or that she herself sought to have him impeached? Why was race being dragged into this already bitterly divisive matter at all?
Indeed—as long as she dragged it in—had she truly not noticed that Obama, woefully unprepared for the job though he was and increasingly revealed in office as scarily inept, had long been uniquely protected from anything approaching routine scrutiny by virtue of his race?
I remember picking up the Amsterdam News back in the early eighties, when Ed Koch was New York’s mayor, and being shocked by the none-too-subtle insinuation in a publication generally regarded as respectable and mainstream that the white (Jewish) mayor had it in for the city’s black residents simply on the basis of race. As the lauded black novelist James Baldwin titled a famous 1967 essay, without irony (and, indeed, in justification of such a view): “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.”
Obviously, no decent soul would have expressed that sort of contempt for black people even then. Yet in September 2010, (to light upon a particularly blatant recent example), the Village Voice ran a cover story titled “White America Has Lost Its Mind.” Basically a rehash of the by-then standard trope (though one accepted as fact in much of black America) that cast all opposition to Obama’s agenda as racist, it attracted significant attention for its, shall we say, vigor of expression. Its author, black staffer Steven Thrasher, claims such opposition “seemed to have taken root deep in the lizard part of the white nervous system . . . the lies and distortions of the rat-fuckers are being soaked up by the damaged crania of this country’s drooling white masses. What sort of senility is softening up the frontal lobes of America’s palefaces that they can’t see through the black hatred of a wanker like (Andrew) Breitbart? . . . Is there any hope? Can the white mind be cured? And what—other than a massive lobotomy—can salvage it? It’s hard to imagine a cure when, at this point, the patient doesn’t seem to realize that he’s sick.”
Roger Ebert pretty much summed up the reaction of white liberals to the piece with his tweet: “Just got around to reading ‘White America Has Lost Its Mind.’ Pulls it all together and makes sense.”
Why does black racism, unlike the white kind, get away with it scot-free? Why does even something as odious as the flash mobs of wilding black teens that in recent years have terrorized Milwaukee, Denver, and Chicago, among other cities, targeting only whites and Hispanics for robbery and brutal beatings go largely unremarked upon by the media and society at large? Because the elites who decree cultural norms (and once did so with a fair amount of rigor) today bring to any matter involving black behavior a toxic mix of condescension and excuse making. Black people are not the same as us, so the implicit thinking goes, and given their tragic past, it is not just reasonable but understandable that they not be held to the same standards.
Of course, occasionally unavoidable, an especially high-profile instance of anti-white bigotry will cause a serious stir. The Reverend Jesse Jackson gave rise to much hand wringing in left-liberal circles when he was caught on tape in 1984 referring to New York as Hymietown. And then there was Wright, the plus ultra in black racial demagoguery.
Yet even in such cases, the denouement is predictable. A lot of anguished commentary, followed by explanations/apologies and the earnest determination to put it all behind us. In brief, the usual double standard on especially vivid display.
What too rarely gets observed is how profoundly damaging this endless nursing of resentments is to blacks themselves in alienation from the American mainstream, or the incalculable damage the victim mind-set does to race relations in general.
Then, again, for some, it is damage with a purpose, and the costs more than justify the reward. For it is also only the specter of racism that keeps in business a civil rights establishment long since given over to economic and moral corruption. The NAACP and other “social justice” outfits need the racism charge every bit as much as in their day the George Wallaces and Ross Barnetts needed the bugaboo of integration: as a means of holding and exercising power. They depend for their very existence on the perpetuation of the notion that white racism in its varied and nefarious forms remains the overriding impediment to minority progress, and so must be confronted via the expenditure of bottomless amounts of government cash and corporate capital until the source of the vile inequity ceases to be or the end of time, whichever comes last.
That over the years they’ve exploited the charge to the fullest is a melancholy matter of public record. Indeed, with the actual white racists of old happily a distant memory, they’ve had remarkable success in endlessly conjuring up new ones, largely imagined and always exaggerated.
It hardly needs to be said that the masters of this debased art are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. But among white progressives, Morris Dees and his colleagues at the Birmingham, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, surely lead the pack. Ostensibly “dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society” by “monitoring hate groups,” the SPLC is a veritable fund-raising behemoth, forever sending out ominous warnings as fund-raising appeals to its massive list of credulous supporters. Alas, as Mark Krikorian writes in the National Review Online, with the all-but-nonexistent “Klan an increasingly improbable stand-in for the SA,”—Hitler’s brownshirts—“the SPLC needed new enemies to keep the cash registers ringing. So, after the collapse of the Bush/Kennedy/ McCain amnesty push in 2007, it joined with [the National Council of La Raza and other open-borders groups that wanted to effectively criminalize disagreement with their positions to find new ‘hate groups’ among immigration skeptics, designating the Federation for American Immigration Reform as a ‘hate group. . . . Who will be the next ‘hate group’? The Catholic Church? The Southern Baptist Convention? The Orthodox Union? Or maybe they’ll go after Second Amendment groups next, or anti-tax groups, or the anti-Islamists.” In fact—no joke—it turned out the next group to make the list was the Family Research Council, deemed a “hate group” for its opposition to gay marriage. Hey, if you’re going to “claim in fund-raising letters that there’s been a 54 percent increase in the number of hate groups since 2000,” as conservative columnist Ashley Herzog observes, “you do what you have to do.”
Yet by far the most fruitful instrument in the racial extortionist arsenal in recent decades has been the concept of “institutional racism,” a term invented by Carmichael in the late sixties, which he defined as “the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture, or ethnic origin.” The beauty part, of course, is that it is organizations, as opposed to mere individuals, that are to be held responsible for the racism and made to make restitution; a circumstance that no one has exploited with greater gall than Jackson, dubbed with endless justification the Godfather of Shakedowns. Among the many organizations that over the years have shown the “civil rights icon” their neck, and thanked him for the privilege, are Toyota, Viacom, Ameritech, Anheuser-Busch, and Coca-Cola.
Meanwhile the NAACP, routinely accorded the respectful designation as “America’s most venerable civil rights organization” by the mainstream press, has repeatedly resorted to gutter tactics to pass for relevant, tossing out the racism angle with disgraceful abandon. It might well have hit bottom with its ad during the 2000 presidential campaign accusing candidate George W. Bush of complicity in the 1998 murder of a black man named James Byrd Jr. by three white men. “On June 7, 1998, in Texas my father was killed,” intoned Byrd’s daughter in the ad, which ran the final week of the campaign. “He was beaten, chained, and then dragged three miles to his death, all because he was black. So when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.”
Nor was it coincidence that Bush’s rival, Al Gore (who in the 1988 Democratic primaries unearthed Willie Horton and used him to beat up rival Michael Dukakis before George H. W. Bush did so in the general) chimed in on the NAACP’s behalf. “James Byrd was singled out because of his race in Texas, and other Americans have been singled out because of their race or ethnicity,” Gore piously intoned during the second presidential debate. For, needless to say, a relationship between the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party that at its inception was largely grounded in high principle has long since been reduced to a corrupt bargain; the race baiters posing as champions of social justice receiving legitimacy and consistent infusions of public money in return for assured and overwhelming black electoral majorities.
What’s surprising, and deeply disheartening, is how intimidated even otherwise principled conservatives have invariably been by the threat of being branded racist. When accused of racial insensitivity of any kind, the impulse of many on the right has been to retreat in panic and confusion, slavishly apologizing or claiming to have been misunderstood or misquoted.
To be sure, the reasons for such feckless behavior are varied and complex. For some, it is at least partly driven by the recognition that having often been on the wrong side of the civil rights movement when it counted, conservatives must now make a point of their commitment to inclusion; Barry Goldwater, for one, who opposed the landmark civil rights bills of the mid-sixties (on principled if, he later decided, mistaken states rights grounds), spent much of the rest of his career doing a kind of penance.
But more often, preemptive surrender—or invisibility—on race-related issues is just easier for conservatives than taking on the massed forces of civil rights orthodoxy. This is, of course, understandable: Who the hell needs the media questioning your racial bona fides, which is to say, your very morality? Still, to be MIA on an issue of such incalculable importance to the nation’s well-being is not just a gross abdication of responsibility, it lends credence to the charge at the very heart of progressives’ worldview that, in contrast to their profoundly decent selves, those on the right are callously indifferent to the plight of the underclass.
It hardly need be said that the racism charge remains a particular problem for conservatives from the Deep South. When Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour was considering a presidential run in early 2011, the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson asked the prospective candidate why his hometown of Yazoo City had been spared the racial violence suffered by other Southern towns. Barbour gave what seemed like a reasonable response. “You heard of the Citizens’ Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town.”
But, of course, “up north” is where the history of the civil rights revolution is written and revered, largely by those who know of it secondhand, and in the accepted version the White Citizens’ Councils were themselves among the era’s chief villains, bitter obstructionists in suits and ties, instead of in white robes bearing nooses, as one liberal pundit had it. On the other hand, Barbour was there, and the town had been peaceful, so he presumably spoke with some authority. Still, inevitably, the media pounced, making much of his evident unconcern for intolerance—both then and, presumably, still. The firestorm “lasted 72 hours or so, during which he went from plausible and respected presidential prospect to the subject of an Economist story with the death-rattle headline ‘Is Haley Barbour Racist?’ ” later observed Ferguson, the best writer on contemporary media behavior going. He added that “I had a good vantage on Barbour’s descent because I wrote the article that got him into so much trouble. No, that’s not quite right: better to say, I wrote the article that was read by the people who used it to get him into so much trouble.”
Inevitably, Barbour quickly issued a statement of clarification: “. . . My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the Citizens’ Council, is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.” Soon after, Barbour chose not to make the race, and who can blame him?
The truth of what actually occurred in Yazoo City back then? It didn’t matter.
More than one leading Republican has deluded himself in recent years that the way for Republicans to square themselves with the black community, and thus break the Democrat hammerlock on the black vote, is to embrace affirmative action and the other aspects of the multicultural agenda as enthusiastically as those on the other side. Ken Mehlman, the Republican Party’s national chairman during Bush’s second term, was especially keen in this regard. While his stance led to praise from the New York Times, which lauded him for having repeatedly “apologized for what he described as the racially polarized politics of some Republicans over the past 25 years” and for “what civil rights leaders view as decades of racial politics practiced or countenanced by Republicans,” it didn’t exactly have the desired effect on voters, black or white. In 2006, for example, when a highly controversial initiative to ban affirmative action was on the ballot in Michigan, Mehlman pushed the GOP’s gubernatorial candidate, Dick DeVos, to oppose it. The result: in the face of a powerful Democratic tide nationwide, the anti-affirmative action proposition passed 58 percent to 42 percent—the same percentages by which DeVos lost, while garnering the standard sub-10 percent of the black vote. An object lesson of what happens when caution morphs into outright cowardice.
Hardly incidentally, support for the Michigan anti-preference proposition came from voters across the political spectrum, as had also been the case when similar measures appeared on the ballot in other blue states such as California and Washington. According to exit polls in the latter, for instance, while 80 percent of Republicans supported I-200, so did 62 percent of independents and 41 percent of Democrats.
In short, standing up to the racial bullies of the left, in addition to its other considerable virtues, is a clear political winner. And how could it not be, in a nation that in overwhelming measure still holds fast to the ideal of taking others as individuals rather than as members of a group, and judging them solely on the merits; and that thirsts for honesty on the subject of race?
Indeed, the most pernicious consequence of the left’s incessant depiction of well-meaning Americans as driven by racism may be the chilling impact it has had on the no-holds-barred conversation on race that we need to have; one that would look unflinchingly at the culture of dependency and how it undermines the self-reliance and independence of mind that have traditionally led to success in this culture.
Of course, that’s precisely the conversation the civil rights establishment and liberal Democrats are most anxious to avoid. “The definition of a racist today,” as radio host Chris Plante observes of their most effective means of making sure we don’t have it, “is anyone who is winning an argument with a liberal.”
Indeed, what was most telling about Holder’s invocation of American racism was its timing. After all, this was understood everywhere to be a celebratory moment—more, a historic one. Events having not yet revealed Obama as a left-wing partisan and well-tailored empty suit, his election was being widely lauded as proof we’d forever left the worst of our past behind. Even many of us who’d seen through him from the beginning, and shouted ourselves hoarse to friends and relatives too smitten to see, were pleased with what his election said about the citizens of this great land: That easily bamboozled as we Americans can be, we are not bigots. That, indeed, though parts of our country abandoned legally sanctioned bigotry a mere two generations ago, we have embraced true racial tolerance—which is to say, indifference to skin color—more fully than any other people on Earth.
Yet it is clear now that this is not the message Obama and his circle took from this election, and certainly not the one they wished to see Americans in general embrace. For the world as they see it to make sense, racism must be ever-present as a root cause, the all-purpose explanation for every problem faced by minorities in America. In fact, the very last thing Holder wants is a serious examination of why, in this freest and most prosperous of nations, so many minorities continue to lag economically and educationally, or why rates of criminality in the inner cities are so appallingly high. What the Obama factotum—whose department would in short order turn the very idea of justice on its head by enforcing only those voting rights cases in which minorities were the victims—was after was a fresh reading of the old indictment, with its too-familiar bill of particulars. As the estimable Heather Mac Donald enumerates several of the chief counts: “Police stop and arrest blacks at disproportionate rates because of racism; blacks are disproportionately in prison because of racism; blacks are failing in school because of racist inequities in school funding; the black poverty rate is the highest in the country because of racism; blacks were given mortgages that they couldn’t afford because of racism.”
For those who cling to the agenda of today’s rotting hulk of a civil rights establishment, the possibility of losing racism as an issue—i.e., as a weapon—is intolerable, provoking the Pavlovian reaction of ginning up the rhetoric about how America remains an unremittingly racist nation, indifferent if not outright hostile to anyone not born to fair skin and privilege. Their mantra: “Racism now, racism tomorrow, racism forever!”
As his department began setting policy in the racial arena, Holder aimed, at the very least, to put his opponents on the defensive. Certainly, there seemed to be no downside. After all, for the liberal opinion makers and trendsetters who set themselves up as America’s social-justice referees, the reaction to any such invocation of racism, past or present, personal or institutional, has always been deeply respectful—anyone thus accused, even if it’s an entire population, is presumed guilty of at least something.
Decades of liberal control of the race conversation in America have had basically the same result as Dear Leader Kim Jong-il’s brutal rule over the North Korean populace; what is permitted to be said is so ingrained, and the consequences of transgression so severe, that approved behavior is self-enforced. My friend Ward Connerly, long the leader of the fight against racial preferences, once observed that he’s had the experience more times than he cares to count of speaking before an audience and knowing that 99 of 100 people agree with him. “But if there’s one angry black person in the audience who disagrees,” he said, “that person controls the room. He’ll go on about the last 400 years, and institutional racism, and ‘driving while black,’ and the other 99 will just sit there and fold like a cheap accordion.” And Connerly is black himself.
In his autobiography, Connerly tells another story that serves to remind that a full decade before Holder’s empty call for a more honest national conversation on race, another Democratic administration struck the identical theme. Bill Clinton’s version of that conversation, dubbed “One America in the 21st Century: The President’s Initiative on Race,” was announced in a speech to the graduates of University of California, San Diego in June 1997. Its aim was to promote dialogue “in every community” in America. To this end, Executive Order 13050 set up an advisory panel on race, headed by the ardently liberal, “distinguished” black historian John Hope Franklin and including six others—also “distinguished” and liberal. The panel soon hit the road, holding town meetings and university conclaves throughout the country, looking for and invariably finding evidence that racism remained rampant. So stacked was the deck that even some in the media began to remark on the panel’s absence of ideological (if not ethnic) diversity. As a result, Clinton belatedly convened a White House conclave of prominent conservatives on the front lines of the racial debate in America. Among these was Connerly.
This is where the story gets interesting. As Connerly describes the meeting, Clinton was his usual eager-to-please self, alternately gregarious and earnest, and otherwise making every effort to appear open to his conservative guests’ views. But Vice President Gore, sitting beside him, openly seethed. While Connerly, who had recently gained national recognition leading the successful fight for passage of California’s anti-affirmative action Proposition 209, was certainly accustomed to hostility, he was taken aback to encounter such naked loathing in such a setting. Always exceedingly civil with opponents, he tried to engage the vice president but without success. But it was Gore’s farewell that left the strongest impression. As Connerly describes it, after a cordial word of farewell from the president, he turned to Gore. The vice president grabbed his hand, “but instead of shaking it, he ground my palm and fingers in his grip as hard as he could. I felt the cartilage compress and almost cried out in pain. I looked at the vice president and he stared back at me with a slight smile as we walked out.”
Think of Gore as the very embodiment of advanced liberal thought (as indeed he thinks of himself proudly), and it makes a kind of horrific sense. For of course the aim of the racial Torquemadas is to crush free inquiry, especially if it involves innovative thinking from the right; and, whenever possible, to destroy reputations and careers along the way. Ask Newt Gingrich, who, in the wake of the 1994 Republican landslide that would make him House Speaker, famously broached the subject of orphanages as a possible means of salvaging the lives of inner-city welfare children doomed to lives of degradation and criminality. The reaction in the “child-advocacy community” was as immediate as it was predictable. Gingrich wanted “to take children away from their parents just because they are poor,” declared a spokesman for the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, while “pro-child” activist Joan Criswell wrote that “What Willie Horton was to Bush, the teenage welfare mother is to the Republican proponents of the Contract with America.” For its part, the mainstream press was little short of giddy at having been handed such a gift. “The party that professes to support family values seems excessively eager to yank poor children away from their mothers and dump them in institutions,” mocked the editorialists at the New York Times. Time magazine, also harping on “the proposal’s obvious incompatibility with ‘family values,’ ” was just one of the big-time outlets to summon up the term “Dickensian”; while Newsweek saw the new “Republican revolution” already slipping “toward enfizzlement.” The “idea of putting children into orphanages because their mothers couldn’t find jobs,” piled on Hillary Clinton, was “unbelievable and absurd,” and a few days later her husband devoted his weekly radio address to the subject. “There is no substitute—none—for the loving devotion and equally loving discipline of caring parents,” he intoned. “Governments don’t raise children; parents do.”
Gingrich briefly stood his ground, declaring he couldn’t “understand liberals who live in enclaves of safety who say, ‘Oh, this would be a terrible thing.’ ” But when he suggested that perhaps his opponents should take a look at the vintage Mickey Rooney orphanage film Boy’s Town, the mockery reached new heights, with presidential advisor George Stephanopoulos snickering that if Gingrich was looking for a work of fiction as a model, a far more useful one would be Oliver Twist.
Within days, Gingrich threw in the towel. Yet even now, at the very mention of the word “orphanage,” liberals rush to recall Gingrich and his misbegotten scheme. Indeed, it is a testament to how committed they remain to their discredited worldview that 27 years later—27 years that have only exacerbated the intractable problems of underclass Americans—another out-of-the-box Gingrich suggestion (that child labor laws might be modified to help imbue underclass kids with the work ethic so clearly absent in their communities) was greeted with equal scorn. NBC’s David Gregory spoke for many of his colleagues in denouncing the idea as “grotesque,” while others summoned up Ebenezer Scrooge and—who else?—Oliver Twist.
All of which brings us back to the attorney general’s fantastical—and calculated—call for honesty on race. In its wake, something funny started happening—something Holder and his boss and the hordes of professional race baiters in government, academia and the media never counted on: Lots of us have stopped playing along. There was more than a hint of it during the brouhaha over Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, the Harvard professor and presidential friend who in the summer of 2009 had a meltdown when cops stopped him trying to break into his own Cambridge home. Gates’s reflex to proclaim himself a victim of racism—and, Obama’s, to endorse that view, without so much as a wisp of evidence—turned the incident into the “teachable moment” the president declared it to be. But what it taught was not, as from long experience they had every reason to expect, that bigotry and police maltreatment of minorities thrive even in supposed bastions of tolerance and inclusion like Cambridge, but that instantly jumping to such a conclusion is itself prima facie evidence of a distorted worldview; and, more, that even the most blameless and forward-looking whites (for in this case, the accused cop had an exemplary record of service and racial sensitivity) can suddenly find themselves in the crosshairs of the racial enforcers. For here was Obama himself, so famously cautious and deliberative it took him months to choose a family dog, making it all too clear that, facts be damned, on this issue, the former community organizer wholeheartedly embraces the black victim/racist cop trope as fully as does the loathsome Al Sharpton.
Before it was over, even casual news followers understood that the very phrase “teachable moment” was a liberal dodge, hauled out whenever a prominent liberal gets into a serious fix involving race, and dutifully echoed by a compliant press. Lest we forget, Obama’s previous “teachable moment” had come at the low point of his presidential campaign, with the revelation that the man he’d embraced as his spiritual advisor regularly spouts the vilest kind of hateful tripe.
But the recognition that the racism trope was starting to lose its terrible power really took hold as the Tea Party movement came into prominence. Suddenly liberals were making the charge more promiscuously than ever, aiming it not at skinheads living in their parents’ basements or at would-be Klansmen, but at decent Americans with the temerity to object to presidential policies they believed damage both the quality of their lives and the nation itself: in short, at Americans acting in the best tradition of democratic citizenship. This was, pure and simple, as George Will observed, “McCarthyism of the left—devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data . . . a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas.”
Indeed, when a 2008 Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll reports that a mere 3 percent of Republicans (as opposed to 4 percent of Democrats) would refuse to vote for a black man for president, the charge was so obviously preposterous, and profoundly offensive, that literally millions who’d never before given the matter any thought could not but take notice. And what they saw is what has long been true: That the accusation of racism is almost invariably a crock—and that more than just an expression of (often contrived) liberal moral outrage, it’s intended to be the ultimate conversation stopper. As the conservative essayist and blogger Timothy Dalrymple aptly observed, “The accusation says more about the accusers than the accused.”
As Hollywood might say, this is the great reveal of Obama’s abortive “post-racial” candidacy and presidency. Early on, by virtue of his calculatedly moderate presentation, Obama seemed to a very great many to be precisely the idealized black leader (and, more, representative black man) that whites of all political persuasions yearned for in a national leader, someone who fully embraced, along with other traditional middle-class attitudes and values, their time-tested understanding of justice and fairness, and so would at last put an end to the racial divide. Instead we got an administration more recklessly promiscuous in its misuse of the racism charge than any in living memory. As cartoonist Bruce Tinsley had his cartoon duck reporter Mallard Fillmore mockingly intone at the height of the liberal attacks on Tea Partiers: “In other news, the Democratic National Committee has issued a recall of millions of race cards. . . . In a statement released yesterday, they admitted that while the cards had worked reliably for half a century, they have become worn-out and ineffective . . . and may blow up in users’ faces.”
Talk about unintended consequences! Through sheer overuse, the most potent weapon in the liberal racial arsenal is today increasingly ineffective. The result is that at long last there exists at least the possibility that Americans can begin to have the essential conversation on race that our “candor-phobic elites,” in Andrew C. McCarthy’s wonderfully felicitous phrase, have so long ruled beyond the pale; the one that moves beyond the self-serving pieties of contemporary liberalism to focus on the actual causes of—and even address—the intractable social and economic dysfunction so widespread in parts of the black community.
Think back on the Gingrich orphanage episode. In retrospect, what’s especially telling is that the idea may well have had considerable merit. Haphazardly tossed into the public arena as it was, and lacking in definition, it was a starting point for what might have been a highly original policy initiative with the potential to salvage many young lives. What’s worse is that more than a few of those on the other side, including the Clintons, surely recognized that—yet they attacked and belittled anyway, not only to rack up easy political points but to play to a key element of the Democratic base. Why? Precisely because implicit in Gingrich’s proposal, as in others put forth by those seriously interested in addressing the failure of generation after generation of the underclass to grasp America’s brass ring, was a fundamental challenge to the nefarious, all-consuming fiction. That is to say, the understanding that it is not the color of their skin that minimizes the life chances of inner-city kids, or even their undeniably difficult economic circumstances, but the culture into which they are born; from the near-certainty they will grow up fatherless to the attitudes they are likely to internalize about education and hard work to general chaos and lack of order in their homes.
It goes without saying that your basic liberal will take such a frank assessment, or even more equivocal musings along the same lines as—what else?—racism. Yet what’s so odd about that is that everyone knows it’s true. The reality of black inner-city life is inescapable in contemporary America, common knowledge, as evident on network TV crime shows, and the stand-up routines of black comics as in the impenetrable sociological studies turned out by mirthless academics. For all that, racial activists and their liberal allies have long managed to see to it that anyone with the temerity to raise the matter of values or behavior in a policy context is marginalized.
But now, at long last, in the Age of Obama all that can start to be discussed. You want to talk irony? As once, two generations back, George Wallace enabled a long overdue national conversation about the evils of segregation, so Barack Obama is making possible the conversation he surely never wanted about race.
