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