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