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