Why We Won't Talk Honestly About Race. Harry Stein
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on freedom; one that also lets middle-aged women parade around in T-shirts that ask “Who Needs Big Tits When You’ve Got an Ass Like This?” Hardly incidentally, as a means of acknowledging difference, and maybe of letting off steam, it has it all over the simmering ethnic hatreds so common elsewhere in the world.
Is it channeling Pollyanna to suggest that even Holder might be well served by spending as much time celebrating how far we’ve come as he does on our supposed cowardice? Not long ago, catching Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner on TV, I was reminded that a mere 40 years ago the notion of a white woman marrying literally the most accomplished black man in America would’ve been considered shocking even by an exceedingly liberal San Francisco couple like that played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. These days, Sidney Poitier’s Dr. John Prentice—rushing off from a high-level conference in Hawaii to an even more prestigious one in Geneva, making even the words “What’s for breakfast?” sound like Shakespeare—would be a catch in almost any household anywhere in America. Nor is it a surprise that 2009’s best loved film, resonating like no other, was The Blind Side, about the love of a conservative, upper-crust Mississippi family for the black man-child they took in as their own.
In a society that decades ago reached a consensus that legal discrimination is an abomination, and has grown in innumerable other ways as a result, one can choose to be endlessly aggrieved about the incidental stuff. Or, quite simply, not be. Alas, far too many black people, as well as legions of white liberals, have opted for the former, embracing a definition of racism so expansive that almost anything—from the failure of too few blacks to pass an exam for promotion to a perceived slight at a social function—can be made to fit the bill.
Think of it as chip-on-shoulder racism, a.k.a., the kind that can never end; the all-purpose explanation and excuse. What’s continually curious, given the hyper-sensitivity of such people to the merest hint of racial bigotry, real or imagined, is how blithely indifferent they are to racial animus when it is directed at white people by blacks. White America was stunned when it learned of Obama’s longtime association with the vile Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 campaign, but what’s just as telling is that in the south side of Chicago, the odious black liberation theology on offer to Wright’s 8,500-strong congregation at Trinity United Church of Christ was not seen as a big deal; for variations on the same doctrine are heard in black churches each Sunday in many parts of urban America. Indeed, just sticking to Obama’s hometown, in today’s America can anyone even imagine a white equivalent of unhinged racial rabble rouser Louis Farrakhan garnering so remotely large a following?
In fact, throughout black America can be found those with a considerably less-than-generous view of white people, one grounded in the assumption that no matter the face they present to the world, on some level most are irredeemably racist. Whether expressed in anger or bemusement or resignation, there is no hesitation in airing such a view, and certainly no embarrassment. It’s just how things are. Nurtured by the omnipresent grievance industry, a pervasive sense of resentment and ill usage cuts a wide swath across educational and class lines, as evident in a black dorm at an elite university as on any street corner in urban America; and informing the thinking of many educated and successful blacks very nearly as much as that of Wright or Farrakhan. As David Mamet perceptively has his upper-crust black lawyer put it to a white colleague in his play Race: “Do all black people hate whites? Let me put your mind at rest. You bet we do.”
That may be an overstatement, but it is inevitable that the incessant message that racism lurks at every turn would breed distrust and deep antipathy toward white people among many in the black community.
While the O.J. Simpson verdict may have been the most striking instance of black solidarity trumping justice, the cogent observer of modern America will not be entirely surprised to learn it is not the only one; or that these days black racists are likely to be a good deal more candid about their biases than their white counterparts. In fact, I have before me a story from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about a black judge in the Pittsburgh area who recently rejected a plea agreement for a white man with no priors convicted of scuffling with a cop after a traffic stop. From the bench, Allegheny County Judge Joseph Williams called the deal “a ridiculous plea that only goes to white boys,” adding that “if this had been a black kid who did the same thing, we wouldn’t be talking about three months’ probation.” The shocked assistant district attorney on the case, rightly noting that “the court has essentially called me a racist,” protested “I don’t make offers based on race. I make offers based on facts.”
It is not coincidental that among Holder’s other notable early acts was his astonishing decision to drop a case, which was against members of the New Black Panther Party who’d intimidated white voters at a Philadelphia polling place, that his predecessors at the Department of Justice had already won. Though Holder never offered a plausible reason for this, it is entirely consonant with the lunatic theory, which is nonetheless advanced by seemingly serious people, that blacks cannot be racist by virtue of their experience as victims of racism and lack of institutional power.
But whites? In the eyes even of some blacks who themselves wield vast institutional power, the behavior of white people is always presumed to be governed by deep-seated racism. “I do not understand what I think is the maligning and maliciousness [toward] this president,” as Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee complained bitterly during the contentious negotiations on raising the debt ceiling in the summer of 2010. “Why is he different? And in my community, that is the question that we raise. In the minority community that is [the] question that is being raised. Why is this president being treated so disrespectfully?”
The questions leaping to mind were enough to leave one sputtering in stupefied frustration. Disrespect?! Wasn’t the partisan sniping Barack Obama faced just par for the course in such a circumstance? Was she actually pretending to have forgotten George W. Bush, or that she herself sought to have him impeached? Why was race being dragged into this already bitterly divisive matter at all?
Indeed—as long as she dragged it in—had she truly not noticed that Obama, woefully unprepared for the job though he was and increasingly revealed in office as scarily inept, had long been uniquely protected from anything approaching routine scrutiny by virtue of his race?
I remember picking up the Amsterdam News back in the early eighties, when Ed Koch was New York’s mayor, and being shocked by the none-too-subtle insinuation in a publication generally regarded as respectable and mainstream that the white (Jewish) mayor had it in for the city’s black residents simply on the basis of race. As the lauded black novelist James Baldwin titled a famous 1967 essay, without irony (and, indeed, in justification of such a view): “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.”
Obviously, no decent soul would have expressed that sort of contempt for black people even then. Yet in September 2010, (to light upon a particularly blatant recent example), the Village Voice ran a cover story titled “White America Has Lost Its Mind.” Basically a rehash of the by-then standard trope (though one accepted as fact in much of black America) that cast all opposition to Obama’s agenda as racist, it attracted significant attention for its, shall we say, vigor of expression. Its author, black staffer Steven Thrasher, claims such opposition “seemed to have taken root deep in the lizard part of the white nervous system . . . the lies and distortions of the rat-fuckers are being soaked up by the damaged crania of this country’s drooling white masses. What sort of senility is softening up the frontal lobes of America’s palefaces that they can’t see through the black hatred of a wanker like (Andrew) Breitbart? . . . Is there any hope? Can the white mind be cured? And what—other than a massive lobotomy—can salvage it? It’s hard to imagine a cure when, at this point, the patient doesn’t seem to realize that he’s sick.”
Roger Ebert pretty much summed up the reaction of white liberals to the piece with his tweet: “Just got around to reading ‘White America Has Lost Its Mind.’ Pulls it all together and makes sense.”
Why does black racism, unlike the white kind, get away with it scot-free? Why does even something as odious as the flash mobs of wilding black teens that in recent years have terrorized Milwaukee, Denver, and Chicago, among other cities, targeting only whites and Hispanics