Why We Won't Talk Honestly About Race. Harry Stein
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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.
MEDIA ENABLERS AND OTHER RACE MONGERS
Will someone please answer me this? How in the name of all that is good and decent did the self-promoting racial hustler par excellence Al Sharpton ever get to be respectable? So much so he was handed his own TV show on an NBC outlet?
No, just kidding. Foolish question, because it’s all too clear: We’re talking nearly three decades of mainstream media enabling. Actually, there’s a kind of frightening logic to it. The media has treated Sharpton with kid gloves all these years because, in the end, the view he so tirelessly promotes—of an irredeemably racist America, in which black people’s failures are more society’s fault than their own—is one they share.
Quite simply, whether in ignorance, ideological blindness or simple fear, the media, ever fixated on the racism angle, has doggedly refused to face the harder truths of race in America. Indeed, an excellent case can be made that it is in the racial arena, more than in any other, that its distorted worldview has done the most grievous harm.
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