Why We Won't Talk Honestly About Race. Harry Stein
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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