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COLLECTION:
Clinton Presidential Records
Speechwriting
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OA/Box Number:
I 0989
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h(l) National security classified information [(h)(l) of the FOIA[
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b(3) Release would violate a Federal statute [(b)(3) of the FOIAI
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�JIM SLEEPER
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May. 28, 1997
Mr. Terry Edmonds
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Mr. Edmonds:
Enclosed are final proofs of a short book--due out from Viking early
in July-which I hope the President will read before he delivers his addresses
on race. I was one of the New York City journalists.who interviewed him in a
televised debate with Jerry Brown during the 1992 Democratic primary
campaign at Lehman College in the Bronx, and I have followed his work on
race closely ever since; sometimes through my friend David Kusnet.
Whether the President may be drawn to or put off by my book's title,
Liberal Racism, I'll leave to you to judge, but I want to emphasize that it is
not a neo-conservative rant about liberals. It is a summons to liberals to
recapture their historic, noble mission to frame great public American
narratives that transcend race. A portion of it, probably Chapter 1, will be
excerpted in New Democ,rat's July-August issue. Another portion (based on
Chapter 5) ran in the May Harper's and got respectful comment from Bill
Raspberry and Clarence Page (enclosed). Notice that the latter part of
Chapter 1 has an admiring portrait of the President awarding the
Congressional Medal of Honor to Vernon Baker, a black former Army
lieutenant.
The book's principles are stated clearly in the opening and closing
chapters, which have a number of lines that might be suitable for your
purposes. Note that I do not say that there should be absolutely no such thing
as feelings of racial kinship or affinity. What I do say is that if ethnic, racial,
or religious community is truly strong, it teaches its members how to rise
above the parochial in courtrooms, classrooms, and other settings where we
Americans have business in common.
There isn't much here on Beltway politics--another reason the
President should read it!--although that enters a bit in Chapter 3, "Voting
Wrongs," about racial-districting policies of the past few years. Aside from
scathing chapters on crime, voting rights, and media in the first half of the
book, the rest of the book goes deeper, raising questions about black identity
and American civic culture.
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Also of interest, to those who noted Harvard Law School Prof.
Randall Kennedy's cover essay in the May Atlantic, is my Chapter 6, which
tells how Kennedy arrived at the views expressed in that piece (I'd heard him
deliver it as the Lionel Trilling lecture at Columbia a year earlier). In the last
third of that chapter, I also describe Glenn Loury's break with the
conservative movement.·
Columnists and reviewers will be writing about the book as the
President speaks, and I believe that some of them are going to say that he
ought to see (or to have seen) it. In any case, I hope he will find it of value,
and I will thank you for passing it on.
A word of explanation about the enclosed: Viking, which should have
the finished, hard cover books on June 5, has run out of bound galleys, so I
am enclosing my last one, along with the larger, spiral-bound final page
proofs, which actually supercede the galleys in that they correct them. The
bound galleys can easily be read, but any quotes or citations would have to
come from the final page proofs. For a copy of the finished book as soon as
it's ready, please call Viking's vice president for publicity, Paul Slovak, at
212-366-2219. Thank you for taking a look.
cc: Carolyn Curiel
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About the Author
JIM SLEEPER, the veteran newspaper columnist and writer on
urban politics and civic culture, is the author of The Closest of
Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (Norton,
1990). He has been a political columnist for the New York Daily
News and an editorial writer. for Newsday. He is a member of the
editorial board of Dissent magazine and the advisory boards of
CulturefrOiit, a magazine published by the New York Council for
. the Humanities; CommonQuest, a black-Jewish magazine; and the
New York Civil Rights Coalition. His reportage and commentary
have appeared in Harper's, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The
Washington Monthly, In These Times, The Nation, and many
newspapers and other publications. A graduate of Yale College, he
holds a doctorate in education from Harvard and has taught urban
studies and writing at Harvard and Queens colleges, New York
University, and The Cooper Union.
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RACISM
.JIM SLEEPER
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"Jim Sleeper has dared to look behind the labels and report that
today's liberalism 'does not expose racism; ... it reinvents it in ways
some segregationists would applaud.' Sleeper's intruiging and
provocative confrontation with liberal ideology is in no sense a
defense of the conservative approach to race. Rather, be
challenges liberals who once fought to help America to rise above
color to get back to their abandoned program of a trans racial civic
faith. It's a point well taken, but will it take? Read Liberal Racism
and then, if you dare, take a long look in the mirror."
---C. Eric Lincoln, William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of
Religion and Culture, Duke University; author of Tlze Black
Muslims in America and Coming Tlzrouglz tile Fire.
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MA'I 5
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William Raspberry·
Th~Case.forNo
:.fdy.· dQse~frier¢s
l(inship
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will tell you that, . (affectionately, I think) conclude about idea of "racial solidarit;f: even- in the
wben:if'icOmeS :to :race, I'm hopelessly me:· Brother, _ami't you being a little furtherance of justice. As"Jor the.-idea of
~:tri() slow. to take ·offense at subtle · naive?
· .. · ·
"giving back" to the· blaCk community
racial slights, too- optlmistie thafracial
The burden Of Kennedy's argument, that nurtured him:
relations can .improve significantly and which he makes meticulously and at
"I agree that one should be grateful to
soon, and· too· willirig to· believe that, length, is that there is no morally, politi- those who have waged struggles for
where it really matters, people· are pret- cally or intellectually defensible case to racial justice, sometimes at tremendous
tr.:much people.
.
be made for the sense of racial kinship sacr'ilice. But why should my gratitude
·-!-imagine it's another of those things most black people (perhaps most people) be racially bound? ... [N]ot only cOurawhere our attitudes are formed by our feel.
geous black people, such as Medgar
experiences, and, for reasons I don't
claim to understand,. my adult racial
Racial "pride," as you might guess, is Evers, Vernon Dahmer and James Chaexperiences have been largely positive. easily dismissed. Pride is legitimate only ney, fought white supremacy in the
And though I've given up urging my with regard to ·accomplishment, not to shadow of death during the struggle for
friends to adopt my attitude, 1remain an things that we have no role in produc- civil rights in the Deep South. White
eptimist.
ing-whether the texture of our hair or · people like James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo
So why a1n I so. disturbed by Randall the size of our inheritance.
were there too, as .were Andrew GoodKennedy's remarkable piece in the curBut Kennedy goes far, far beyond man and Michael Schwerner."
rent issue of the Atlantic Monthly? Why this. He would, for example, award no
Another black law professor, Stephen
am I so ready to conclude regarding this preference for same-race couples in fos- L. Carter of Yale, once wrote of the
Harvard law professor what my friends ter care or adoptions. He rejects the enjoyment he and his wife gain from the.
annual holiday dessert they host to give
black students "an opp(jrtwlity to . tplwind, to escape, to renew· themselves,
to chat, to argue~ to eomplain'-in short
to relax." Then: "But more than that, we
feel a deep emotional connection to
them, through our blackness; we look at
their youthful, enthusiastic faces and see
ourselves. There is something affirming
about the occasion-for them, we hope,
but certainly for us. It is a reminder of
the bright and supportive side of solidarity."
.
Randy Kennedy finds such-"solidarity"
indefensible. "I contend that in the mind,
heart and soul of a teacher, there should
be rio stratification of stUdents such that
a teacher. feels closer to certain pupils
than to others on grounds of racial
kinship."
My 'Point is not to ridicule Kennedy or wretched, despised and feared of our \o
to paint him as an overeducated fool.
fellows along with the rest of us into a
Indeed, I am profoundly attracted by his single .political community of mutual
_j,notion that thoughtful people-particu- concern. One takes the social fact of ~
larly those who hold themselves out as race as a given, even celebrating it. The
f
intellectuals and academics-ought to other aims to move beyond race alto- '-'
espouse universal morality.
u
. gether."
The question is whether it is possible
Jim Sleeper's forthcoming book, "Li~ \ <V
to take such a notion too far, too soon.
erru Racism," recounts conversations ~
Glenn Loury, another academic (and With both Kennedy and Loury, as it ..J
self-styled black conservative), thinks advances his own long-held view t1at we
so.
make too much of rac1al Identity at ~
"There is an elemental tension be- expense of "our common American destween the existential necessity of black tiny."
. '.'
self-development and the moral require- .
But Sleeper, who is white, thinks
~ts of a humanism which transcends . Kennedy may go a bit too far. "The
race," Loury once wrote. "One draws on point shouldll't be that one has no ethnic:
ties of blood, shaied history and com- ~·kinship but that .if a community is strorig'
mon faith. The other endeavors to it teaches you to transcend ethnicity." -~
achieve an integration of the most
Maybe Kennedy already has.
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([bitano Cfribnnt
The journey beyond
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Wed~e_sday, May 14, 1997.·
Bre_aking new ground on how we view race
··w·
· ASHINGTQN_:.When Rachel Robinson · .
. .· · was asked .at the National Press Club on
. May 13 what she thought of the young .
·• ·.
· black ball playerS who said they hadn't
· .
heard about the struggles of her late
husband, Jackie Robinson, her response was quick
and to the point
"Well, they can't say that now," she said.
Probably not, i.Jllight of the explosion of publicity
and commemorative gestures that have
· accompanied the 50th anniversary of Jackie
Robinson's breaking baseball's color barrier.- ·
. Still. it is sad that so many younger people, not
just baseball players, are, as Mrs. Robinson puts it,
so "disassociated from anything historic."
Just as Jackie Robinson was much more than a
baseball player (H~ also became .a racial pioneer in
the worlds of civil rights and corporate business),
the. story of racial struggles like his offer signposts
. for a nation trying, in the era of Tiger Woods, to
move out of the racial forest.
It is an a ro riate coincidence that the Ma
e tlantlc, two unportant
Clarence lfllage
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News columnist, makes that point even more /
forcefully in his Harper's essay. Although his essay
is titled "Toward an end of blackness," it might as
well have been SUbtitled," ... and Whiteness, too."
Sleeper, who is white, describes how blackness was
created as a useful foil for whiteness. "For all its
wrong t~s and dead ends," writes Sleeper, "the
quest by black Americans for acknowledgment and
belonging in our national life ils the most powerful
epic of unrequited love in the history of the world."
Now is the time when everyone should be using
the lessons we have learned through working
together to expand opportw1ities for all, he says .
. "America needs blacks not because it needs
m e way Amencans oo at race.
blackness,'~ he writes, "but because it needs what
they've learned ori their long way out of
Iri the Atlaritic, Harvard law professor Randall
Kennedy; an African-American, challenges the very · blackness-what others of us have yet to learn on
the journeys we need to take out of whiteness."
notion of what he calls "racial kinship." He prefers
to seek a ''free and independent" self that does not
One of those lessons is well illustrated by the .
have to follow the party line of someone else.
experiences of Jackie Robinson. The most important
lessons of black history come not from rehashing
Racial solidarity is a potent rhetorical device,
the evils o( racism. They come from remembering
· Kennedy allows, but it also poses a danger in ·
the courage and character that overcame those evils.
distancing black Americans from those who might
be .allies and draWing us toward .those. who might
Rachel Robinson knows. When she was asked to
not always be our best friends. It also encourages
descri~ her most humiliating experience, she
double standards, like blatant "rac&card" appeals by reCalled how difficult it was for her and her
black lawyers to elicit favorable judgments from
· husband. to get to his flrst training camp in the deep
South.
·
black jurors.
Kennedy is not calling for color "blindness," he '
After they were bumped off two airplanes to make
notes, because its "bad policy to blind oneself to any room for whites, they took a bus, only to be moved
to the back once again. Her husband had been court
potentially useful knowledge/' But that useful
martialed in the Army for refusing to move to the
knowledge should include an awareness of how the
donimant form of racial kinship in American life,
back of the bus. But, this time, to get to camp on
·~the racial kinship that has been best organized and
time, he relented. In that moment, her strong
husband was reduced in her eyes "into the South's
most destructive," has been mobilized on behalf of
·whites. ·
boy," she .recalled.
· Yet; when.she was asked why she didn't sound
'; Kennedy doesn't fmd it any more attractive when
bitter about these and other insults, she said, firmly,
it is mobilized on behalf of blacks. Among other
problems, he says, it wrongly encourages everyone
"Oh, no, bitterness only erodes your own soul. Why
would you turn that in upon yourself?"
to view certain soCial problems as "black" problems
when they should be viewed and tackled as
· Why, indeed. All Americans have a lot to learn
"American" problems.·
·
from the black American experience. But I can't
Jim' Sleeper, author and former New York Daily
think of a better lesson thari that one.
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1. Life After Diversity
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2. Innocence by Association
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3. Voting Wrongs
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5. Way Out of Africa
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6. Many Colors, One Culture?
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7. What We Have Lost
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· 8. ACountry Beyond Race
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Index
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LIFE AFTER DIVERSI1Y
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• The Liberal Default
Students now enter college wt'th their group identities intact, and
they expect the institution to respond accordingly. . . . People
have come to identify themselves not only according to race,
gender, or ethnic identity, but also by class,. sexual orientation,
disability, and age.
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-Edgar Beckham,
vice president,
Ford Foundation
When I was a senior at the Bronx High School of Science, Harvard's admissions materials showed up in my mailbox, unsolicited. Out came thiS Minon·ty Student Information Request
Card and a leaflet saying, "Here are some ofthe things Hispanic
students experience at Harvard. "And I thought, "What is this? I
want to know, what do students experience at Harvard? Like,
what am I to them?" Weil, I knew what I was. I was the fulfillment ofa quota. And I have no intention of being that.
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NewYorkDailyNews '
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LIBERAL RACISM
"group identity" is now liberal doctrine. It drives the colorcoding of American public policy and civic culture, and it is a
colossal blunder. Rafael Olmeda is proud of his Puerto Rican
heritage, he has known the discrimination and bigotry to
which the term "racist" usually applies, and he accepts limited
affirmative action as a remedy for discrimination. A busy young
reporter at an urban tabloid newspaper, Olmeda doesn't read
conservative tracts or magazines. But he feels patronized and
insulted by liberal racial solicitude far more often than he feels
oppressed by the conservative racism that dominates the liberal imagination. "When I face people in a newsroom or the
street, I don't want them assuming they know anything important about me because of my name or my color," Olmeda
says. "They have no right to do that."
Many of today's liberals assume that right. They have been
trying to color-code Olmeda's sense of himself and his country since long before he felt put off by Harvard's approach to
him as a colored person. Claiming to oppose historic racism,
the liberal "diversity" project defaults on America's promise,
sometimes by reinforcing racial "awareness" on campus and
on the job in ways even segregationists might applaud. Constraining us all to define our citizenship and even our personhood more and more by race and ethnicity in classrooms,
workrooms, courtrooms, newsrooms, and boardrooms, today's
liberalism no longer curbs discrimination; it invites it. It does
not expose racism; it recapitulates and, sometimes, reinvents
it. Its tortured racial etiquette begets racial epithets, as surely
as hypocrisy begets hostility. And it dishonors liberals' own
heroic past efforts to focus America's race lens in the 1950s
and '60s, when conservative pieties about colorblindness concealed monstrous injustices.
Liberals who still challenge such injustices are right to argue
that sometimes only the power of law, vigorously enforced,
can block racial discrimination. They are right to insist that
blacks, Native Americans, and many Hispanics, incorporated
involuntarily into the American experiment, have some special claims on public institutions-the very courts, legislatures, and schools that worked so long to degrade them. They
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are right to remind us that, given half a chance, the rich will
grind the faces of the poor and need occasionally to be restrained and taught decency by the rest of us. But these truths
do not offset the bitter irony that many liberals who fought
nobly to help this country rise above color have become so
blinded by color that they have leapt ahead of conservatives to
draw new race lines in the civic sand. Conservatives may have
gotten race wrong, but that does not mean that liberals have
gotten it right, and we are well past the time when liberals can
point fingers at racist and capitalist bogeymen across the ideological divide to justify their own abandonment of a transracial
belonging and civic faith for which Americans of all colors so
obviously yearn.
In this book I recount how liberals have lost that faith, letting down their fellow citizens of all colors even while claiming to assail racism. I describe the civic balance we need to
reclaim in our public life if we are to undo the damage that
liberal myopia has done. I think I speak for many other Americans who are uncomfortable around the ideologically or racially encamped, whether on the left or on the right, and
whether in distinct groupings of blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or
whites. If we could truly eliminate racism from our national
life, neither conservatives nor liberals would emerge covered
with glory.(f"emphasize the liberal default in these pages be-cause it has been so unexpected and-given liberalism's
promises-so fateful.
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of a small audience of liberal activists and journalists that "liberals are sometimes the worst racists." Mystified though I was
by that remark, I knew it was no polemical flourish; Owens, a
child of the South and a graduate of the proud, black Morehouse College, had forged strong ties to white liberals in the
1950s on his way to becoming a librarian and activist in
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LIBERAL RACISM
Brooklyn. Still, it took me a few years to understand what he
meant. Perhaps this book can save other liberals some time.
Only gradually did I realize that liberal racism has several
dimensions. Sometimes, prompted by misdirected and selfcongratulatory compassion, liberal racism patronizes nonwhites
by expecting (and getting) less of them than they are fully
capable of achieving. Intending to tum the tables on racist
double standards that set the bar much higher for nonwhites,
liberal racism ends up perpetuating double standards by setting the bar so much lower for its intended beneficiaries that ; t
-the~ .cl ;
r Rite the satisfactions of equal accom lishment and
opportunity. Liberal racism so assumes that racial differences are so profound that they are almost primordial. The
term "racialism" is sometimes used to denote this belief that
racial differences are essential to our understandings of ourselves and society, and at times I will use it to refer to such
thinking. But the fascination with racial differences that prevents many liberals from treating any person with a nonwhite
racial physiognomy as someone much like themselves only
begets policies and programs that reinforce nineteenth-century
assumptions about race that are patently Iacist. It is time to
call this mindset what it is: tjberal racism. Yet another dimension is the visceral discomfort some
white liberals feel with nonwhites. Some white liberals, insulated from honest give-and-take with blacks and hobbled by
guilt and fear of the unknow~seem so wary of such encounters that they construct intricate latticeworks of racial rectitude
and noble stereotypes to mask their own fears. Their compensatory, fervent gestures of goodwill are some;~Jamusing,
often just sad. And some blacks-especially
irresponsible leaders and public poseurs who appear in these pageshave learned to "play'' wftttlliberal avoidance strategies for all
they're worth.
Since liberals often argue that other people's racism is all
the more dangerous for being unconscious, one might expect
them to be the first to suspect and uncover their own. But
instead of uncovering it, liberal institutions such as the Ford
and other foundations fund it; activists and politicians pander
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to it; and the New York Times and other media disseminate its
view of the world. Liberals who assume that one's skin color is
one's destiny tend to deceive themselves and others about
that belief. They behave remarkably like "quality white folks"
in the old South, who condescended sweetly to blacks while
projecting contempt for inferiors onto poor whites and onto
~ who chose not to be charmed by elite gestures of affec/
tion.Tfoday's liberal racists are more willing, even eager, to
accept black criticism-as long as it is ritualized and therefore
exculpatory, and somewhat entertainingJSuch liberals applaud society's thirty-year-long regression from trying in the
1960s to ensure that people were not categorized officially by
color and surname to ensuring now that they are so categorized, at liberals' own behest.
One could call all this "friendly racism," but its apparent
solicitude yields few friendships and little mutual respect. The
"antiracist" protocols that liberal racists impose upon publicschool teachers, bureaucrats and corporate chief executive
officers have become so emptied of meaning that those who
follow them trade mainly on petty or fabricated resentments,
which fester as proxies for real problems that remain unad- ,
dressed. As I will show in the next chapte/.\ ·
· _o_f__
crime, liberals often think that they can treat any black skin
as an automatic signifier of disadvantage and aggrievement;
yet they are shocked when urban police officers and taxidrivers-many of them black-treat blackness the same way,
treating blacks as bearers of deficiency and anger who are not
full citizens and legitimate customers. As I show in Chapter 3,
on voting rights, liberals seem to think that they can integrate
legislatures more fully by segregating voters racially. Chapter 4,
on media, shows how liberal journalists sometimes compound
such problems by reporting news in the language of racial
groupthink, applying different standards to people of different
colors-in the name, ironically, of"inclusion."
Not only are such liberal strategies racist; as Americans'
understandings of race become more fluid and ecumenical,
the strategies seem ridiculous. When an Irish-American family
tried to adopt a black baby abandoned in a Brooklyn hospital,
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LIBERAL RACISM
liberals saw a threat to black integrity: The family was told that
state regulations imposed at the behest of the National Association of Black Social Workers mandated a "culturally consistent" (i.e., same-race) environment for the child-even if that
meant that the baby must languish for months in the hospital
until a suitable black family could be found. At a hospital
meeting for prospective parents, the father of the white
would-be adoptive family protested. "All of the thirty other
people at the meeting were black or Latino," he recalls.
"These people, not an ideologue among them, agreed with
me loudly: 'What kind of nonsense is this?' The social worker
was sympathetic but said the regulations came from the
state." Apparently, white love is as threatening as white hate.
Like the parents of all colors who supported the would-be
adoptive white family, millions of liberal racism's intended
beneficiaries are disdained or distrusted when they reach
"inappropriately" across color lines. Yet such open-minded
people are our future, and if they now are voiceless, it is only
because they are leaderless. Liberal racism has gotten their
priorities and aspirations backward by insistin~ M 4;! liCit~
~uJgftt'giJ\Wk!iatP<i:! ~:.,.that more institutional "respect"
for racial identity would enhance individual dignity. This is no
longer simply a misconception; it is a lie. Beneath liberal
racists' institutional radar, a new American identity is being
forged, and, with good leadership, it will spawn a rebellion
that sends liberal "diversity" doctrine off into the past with
Chairman Mao Zedong's "Little Red Book," whose prescriptions for Third World socialism some multiculturalist advocates, teachers, consultants, and journalists used to take as
seriously as they do racialist nonsense now.
Since the story of liberal racism is not one of conspiracy but
of folly, this book must track a mindset that barely knows
itself, in a country that knows itself little better. After describing liberal racism's colorization of I cfifflinal justiee,~ting
rights~and Ithe news media in the'rlext three chapters, we
leave ~uch1orror stories aside to explore in Chapter 5 some
mysteries of black identity that have deepened amid growing
confusion about American identity and the classical liberal
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principles upon which black progress so fatefully depends. In
Chapter 6, we share in the cogitations and soul-searching of
two black thinkers who have wrestled with liberal assumptions about race, one moving from the left toward the center
of our national experiment, the other moving toward it from
the right. In Chapter 7, we consider what we might salvage
from the best of American civic culture, which liberals abandoned on the assumption that it was inherently and inevitably
racist. First, let me establish a few principles to guide us on
our journey.
..
• Liberals' Lost Mission
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This book's premise is that precisely because the United
States is becoming racially, ethnically, and religiously more
complex than institutional color-coding can comprehend, liberals should be working overtime to nurture some shared
American principles and bonds that strengthen national belonging and nourish democratic habits. Alone among the
nations, such as France and the Soviet Union, that have made
globe-girdling, universal claims, the American nation abducted
and plunged into its "white" midst millions of black people
who, in consequence, had the highest possible stakes in the
country's fulfillment its oft-stated creed. This gives us opportunities and challenges unprecedented in human history. By
the accidents of history and the irrepressible logic of the
founders' intent, it is America's destiny to show the world
how to eliminate racial differences-culturally, morally, and
even physically-as factors in human striving.
Liberals should herald this truth, not shrink from it, as they
so often do now. They should champion a common civic culture that is strong enough to balance parochialism with universalism, and deep enough to sustain individual freedom
amid a robust sense of obligation to the common good. They
should teach every American who enters a jury room, teaches
a class, or reports a news story to make it a point of pride to
mute and even abandon his or her racial affinities in order to
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stand, at least briefly, for the whole. That is possible only if
American civic culture and identity are "thick" enough to live
in on race-transcendant terms. Liberals should be weaving
that thick social fabric.
Since early in this century, liberals. have been the great
framers of race-transcending American public narratives that
struck the right balances between parochialism and universalism and between individual autonomy and communal obligation. Liberals dared and helped people of all colors to rise
above whatever was keeping. them isolated and small. The
socialist labor leader Eugene Victor Debs did that; the two
presidents Roosevelt did it; everi the Communists of the
Popular Front in the 1930s did it, albeit for reasons that few
now care to defend. Today's liberals have abandoned all
national moral storytelling to conservatives because they are
afraid to take the lead in wresting our racial discourse from
ethnocentric activists as well as white supremacists, from the
left as well as the right-and, yes, from blacks as well as
whites.
Why are so many liberals toeing the color line instead of
crossing it or even trampling it? The most obvious reason is
that liberals remain sensitive to the fact that black and white
Americans have been locked in a three-century-old physical
and psychic embrace. That embrace was as intimate as it was
miserable, and, even now, as it loosens, fears as well as hopes
are stirring the hearts of the newly disentangled. Many just
aren't ready to let go, because they long ago let the terms of
past racial encounters define what they are. "Few of us would
choose to be rendered raceless-to be suddenly without a
tribe," writes the black journalist Ellis Cose. But the stark truth
is that neither whiteness nor blackness in America harbors any
lasting cultural meaning(apart from the ones imposed and
sometimes lovingly emb'ellished under segregation. From the
---'B-.~~~ack
Baptist and Methodist churches to the blues and jazz,
;
· black culture has been a treasure chest of survival tools-the
finest ever created in America. But as the terms of survival
change, so must the tools. Liberals, black as well as white, are
shrinking from their obligation to acknowledge this. Appar-
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ently they cannot bear to learn that when blackness and
whiteness are no longer locked together, neither can define
itself clearly enough to serve as a vessel of hope.
Liberals often try to justify their fixation on color by citing
Supreme Coun Justice Harry Blackmun's wise dictum in the
Bakke affirmative-action case: "In order to get beyond racjsm,
we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And
in order to treat some persons· equally, we must treat them
differently." It was in that hopeful spirit that liberals first
imposed racial remedies upon settled civic and communal arrangements, from election districting to neighborhood schooling. But that is not the spirit in which they have continued to
color-code our public and private lives. The new spirit is one
of fatalism. They give no sign of wanting truly to "get beyond
racism."
Blackmun's claim that we must "first take account of race"
(he might better have written that we must sometimes or temporan"ly take account of it) should make us ask whether and
when it is still useful to racialize civic interactions. Sometimes
it is; often it is not. Liberals' refusal or inability to draw that
distinction has cost them political credibility and power. Edgar Beckham's claim that students enter college with racial
and other group identities "intact" and that institutions should
be configured to "respond accordingly" is as far from Blackmun's dictum as one can get. Yet Beckham's is a succinct
statement of today's liberal folly.
So deeply are lib~rals in denial about this default that the
moment the conservative "revolution" of 1994 began to falter
on its own hypocrisies and inherent contradictions, they predicted that, reincarnated as "progressives," they would win
back enough power in the 1996 elections to curb economic
injustice and racial division. Instead, as I will show in Chapter 3, some of the returns suggested that liberals, under whatever name, will never sustain a governing agenda that has
broad public suppon until they reckon more deeply with how
they have gotten race wrong. Liberals can always gain some
electoral ground by capitalizing on conservatives' lies and
blunders, as conservatives have capicil.ized on theirs-with
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facile repositionings toward the "center" and with tit-for-tat
scandal-mongering and scare tactics. But unless liberals come
clean about their own racism, nothing will come of all their
fingerpointing at others' bigotry.
Absent such a reckoning, many Americans have actually
had to outfox liberals to advance racial justice. In the 1996
elections, for example, hundreds of thousands of moderate
white voters in white-majority congressional districts in the
South elected black incumbents who, had come seeking their
support. These voters were able to rebut the presumption
that they were racists only because, prior to the election, a
conservative Supreme Court majority, ignoring liberal prophecies of racial doom, invalidated the establishment of racially
determined congressional districts drawn by liberals (with help
from cynical conservative Republican operatives) who had insisted that fair-minded white majorities simply didn't exist.
Liberals have defaulted in such controversies partly because they have lost touch with, and faith in, civil society-the
web of voluntary associations in families, churches, neighborhood groups, and civic, educational, and labor organizations
where democratic dispositions are nourished and given practical scope. The early civil rights movement knew better. It
won what most Americans recognized as justice by affirming
that even a flawed civil society should be embraced and redeemed, not deconstructed and micromanaged as inherently,
eternally racist. Practicing a politics of persuasion that distinguishes this country from Serbia, Rwanda, and even France,
the movement made canny but resonant appeals to "angry
white men's" decency, even as it exposed their shortcomings.
It unqerstood that while this is a nation of laws, ultimately it is
more than a courtroom.
Today's liberals have forgotten that law works best when it
is introduced deftly, on the cusp of a civic consensus nourished by the politics of persuasion and not by assumptions
that everyone is operating in bad faith. So deep is the liberal
default that Barry Goldwater has become a better friend of racial integration than Benjamin Chavis Muhammad, the former
president of the National Association for the Advancement of
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Colored People who has joined the Nation of Islam, and Newt
Gingrich is less prone to exploiting racial fears and resentments than is Congresswoman Maxine Waters of South-Central
Los Angeles. When it comes to race some conservatives are
more "progressive" than liberals.
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But only some. Many conservatives hypocritically praise
civil society as an antidote to the bureaucratic state, even as
they champion market forces that disrupt and erode traditional American networks of sharing and trust. For all their
celebrations of color-blindness and their testimony that in a
free-market society the only important color is green, many
conservatives' notions about race seem to doom them to spin
and subsidize geneticist propositions about black inadequacy
and pathology. Time and again they find themselves beating
embarrassed retreats from such obviously un-American stuff
and from the cynical, "wedge-issue" politics that divides people
by color.
But liberal racism also divides people that way, and there is
no better proof than in the support or indulgence it gets from
opportunistic conservatives. Liberal "voting rights" activists
cannot explain why their race-based election redistricting
proposals have been backed by conservative foundations
and Republican operatives, or why their notions of racial
"identity" and "diversity'' are embraced and even inculcated by
the nation's meanest, leanest corporations. But it really isn't a
mystery. Since the law in a classical liberal capitalist society
responds better to claims of racial discrimination than to
claims of economic abuse, liberals have gone to court over
race, not economic class. Imperative thought 1t was to secure
civil rights that way, the liberal strategy has become a permanent evasion of liberals' true moral and intellectual responsibility-recognized by e• 'Jii0mt5'!:(1\dam Smith and John
Stuart Mill-to set reasonable limits on free markets that
erode civic virtue. Color-coding is cheaper than trust-busting
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LIBERAL RACISM
or denouncing Time-Warner for promoting gangsta rap, but
color-coding is no better a solution to racism than is a conservatism that occasionally tries to put markets in their place.
Liberal racism thwarts a transracial, class politics that could
seriously challenge abuses of economic power, and there is
no clear evidence that most liberals are up to making ,that
challenge. And racism eclipses the American identitY· ~nd
national narratives that once gave such class politics some
traction.
Conservative racial ideas and initiatives do sometimes serve
as necessary correctives to ghastly liberal blunders that might
otherwise have remained unacknowledged and unstopped.
Conservatives also have important lessons to teach the left
about markets, which sometimes stimulate civic virtue by
throwing people together across old lines of racial enmity,
confounding ancient superstitions· and feuds. Fifteen years
ago, the writer Susan Sontag told a shocked audience of fellow leftist-liberals that the relatively conservative Reader's
Digest had long been a better guide to the Cold War than the
leftist weekly The" Nation. Certainly the Digest was more accurate and morally right abou~mumsm, but Sontag didn't
mean that just because it sou-mied alarms about Communism,
it was therefore Americans' best guide to democratic foreign
policy making. Nor are conservatives our best guides to rejuvenating civic culture now, even when th~y're right about the
absurdities of liberal racism.
To its great glory and unending consternation, the United
States will remain a capitalist country, and the question is
whether liberals can temper its excesses more wisely than by
subdividing it into imagined racial "cultures" (African American, European American, Hispanic American, Asian American,
and Native American), a scheme that hobbles good pedagogy,
politics, and public policy. The best of the civic culture which
the early civil rights movement tried to embrace and redeem
presumes not that our racial and ethnic story lines and affinities should disappear, but that they should not prevail as the
central organizing principles of our public life. Yet some liberals support racial remedies as sops to their own conscience~
.
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perhapslcause they are complicit in a flawed liberal capitalism which they do not actually oppose yet cannot quite
bring themselves to defend. They support such remedies
because they have no serious intention of redressing deeper
inequities that divide not only whites from blacks but also
whites from whites (and, increasingly, blacks from blacks).
·.,..
• Americanism and Universalism
Liberals have lost touch nGt ot~ly witfl the best Ameriea:R
~lnie tra:eitions, B~.Jt with the basic principles of classical liberalism itself. No movement for social justice can make headway
in a pluralist society without keeping classical liberal commitments to rational analysis-to the rimacy of often rovisional
and evolving public truths
ver the mythic, communal ones
that are enshrouded in racial narratives. Nor is justice possible
without a commitment to individual over group rights in a
context of civil and moral obligation to other individuals
across race lines-the right, for example, to dissent from or to
leave one's own subculture without fear. Without a working
faith in such principles, movements and societies sink into a
tribalism whose brutality is all too well known.
Necessary as they are, the classical liberal commitments are
still insufficient. People who stake everything on them find
themselves soaring into universalisms so removed from human reality that they end up creating holy inquisitions or
gulags. We need a better way. And there is one. It involves the
American civic cultural genius for tempering the universal
with the parochial, without succumbing to the tribal. Liberal
constitutional democracy and the civil society that sustains it
aren't perfect, but they embody historic human gains that
more ambitious revolutionaries have repealed only at great
cost. As a self-conscious social experiment, the United States
is the only multiracial civilization to nourish the seeds of its
own transcendence. People of all colors, believing this, have
watered those seeds with their blood and tears. Yet liberal
educators no longer show young Americans how to think of
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such people as their own forebears whatever their race, and
how to keep faith with their legacy.
The costs of such pedagogy are evident not in the number
of people who actually believe it, but in the extent to which it
distracts~revents them from helping the American
promise..-come\m)true. They are left confused and impotent
before the more brutal turns which "identity politics" often
takes on urban streets and in hard-pressed rural areas. Perhaps the only thing that inner-city gangs, white militias, and
the Nation of Islam have in common is thousands of young
men bereft of an American civic culture that is potent enough
to draw them into rites ofpassage that would make them all
they can be-and reward them credibly for becoming it.
Hence the invasion of the public square by Louis Farrakhan
and Snoop Do&:,ay Dog}y Pat Robertson and Timothv MeVeigh-all disowning orle another but all "united" in being
marketed by political and media producers who profit handsomely from sensationalizing their assaults. "Fundamentalists
rush in where liberals fear to tread," warns the political phi. losopher Michael Sandel. Liberal racism is no answer to these
fundamentalisms; it is a capitulation to them.
But sl:ac issue c sa, dfii!iazhwkmid +t.A4$?$1S! 'E iul p ?&
-lil:!lll?fost as liberals will get nowhere by obsessing about white
malevolence, malingering, and myopia, they will fail in their
mission, as conservatives have, if they profess colo 1 ne
too sweepingly and too soon. The challenge
must face is
the mystery at the center of American blatk identity, especially, that has been exposed by the vacuum at the center of
classical liberalism itself.
• An American Mystery
Early in 1997 I happened upon a C-Span telecast of the
awarding of seven Congressional Medals of Honor to black
World War II veterans, each of whose "gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life" had been ignored for more than
fifty years. President Clinton strode across the East Room of
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the White House to present the medals to Vernon Joseph
Baker, at seventy-seven the only recipient still living, and to
the families of the others. "History has been made whole
today," the President told the assembly, adding that the honorees had "helped us find a way to become a more just, more
free nation ... more worthy of them and true to its ideals."
History has not been made whole for American blacks, of
course, and yet something almost archaic in the recipients'
bearing and in the ceremony itself reminded me that none of
us in the younger generations can say with certainty what an
American wholeness might be, or, within it, what blackness or
whiteness might mean. If we have trouble thinking about
race, it's because we no longer know how to think about
America itself.
At least Second Lieutenant Baker seemed to have less
trouble half a century ago than we do now. In April 1945, he
single-handedly wiped out two German machine-gun nests in
Viareggio, Italy; drew fire on himself to permit the evacuation
of wounded comrades; and led his segregated battalion's
advance through enemy minefields. Asked by reporters after
the East Room ceremony whether he had ever given up hope
of winning the medal, he "sounded sur rised ... as if the
question presumed arrogance,"
e New York Times reported. "I never thought about etting it," Baker said. Asked
why he had joined the army in the first place, he responded,
'Well, I was a young black man without a job."
Ah, yes, that. Prodded to comment on having risked his life
for his country while in a segregated unit, he answered, "I was
an angry young man; we were all angry, but we had a job to
do, and we did it .... My personal thoughts were that I knew
things would get better, and I'm happy I'm here to see it."
Anyone might be happy if, after fighting in a segregated black
unit, he lived to see a black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. But of course, that isn't all Baker has seen, for "intrepidity" like his is often eclipsed now by that of young black
Americans killing one another. When he said, "I knew things
would get better," perhaps he was measuring his words for
the occasion.
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Asked what the ceremony meant to her, Arlene Fox, widow
of First Lieutenant John Fox, who died in Italy in 1944, said, "I
think it's more than just what it means to this family. I think it
sends a message ... that when a man does his duty, his color
isn't important." Perhaps she, too, was measuring her words.
Yet I think not. Even in the prime of their anoer Vernon Baker,
John Fox, an
ac eaders and writers of their generationsucH as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Richard Wright, and
Ralph Ellison-did not urge the importance of color as much
as they found color imposed on them in ways that affronted
something inside them that was not black at all, or was black
only ironically, or even absurdly, as Ellison would portray it.
Proud though they were of what blacks had endured and
overcome (as Baker "kn~ they would), they shared with
u t at
whites an im ort t elierA~ ot yet, alas a
racism was wron~ v a certainty that even despite it, they
were all bound pal"sionately to the promise of the nation.
Soon after the war in which Baker fought, that certainty
became the country's best weapon against racism itself. If
General Colin Powell succeeded Lieutenant Baker, it was
thanks not only to affirmative action and other explicitly racial
remedies but also to what people like Baker had affirmed and
embodied: an America incandescent with a promise that
cannot be comprehended by race. Neither blacknes~or whiteness could be of much use in fulfilling that promise; tor blackness was, at best, the noble survivor of a whiteness that had
no coherent meaning outside of its oppression of blacks.
But what is that national promise? Whatever the answer,
nothing can come of it if we fear letting go of race because we
think that we would have nothing of value to say or give to
one another once racism lost all weight in our social equations or disappeared entirely through interracial marriages
and offspring. If we find it difficult now to say that a black
person's color isn't important, it is because we no longer
know how to say that being an "American" is important
enough to transcend racial identity in a classroom, in a jury
room, or at the polls.
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A5 the writer James Alan McPherson posed the black
American experience of this dilemma, in a 1993 essay,
. . . something very tragic happened to a large segment of the
black American group during the past two decades. Whatever the
causes of this difficulty were, I believe that they were rooted
more in the quality of our relation to the broader society than in
defects in our own ethos. That is to say, we entered the broader
society just at a time when there was the beginning of a transformation of its basic values. The causes of this transformation are a
matter of speculation. In my own view, we became integrated
into a special kind of decadence ... one which leads to personal
demoralization.
The problem is indeed deeper than racism. It is that, since
the 1960s, whites have opened doors to admit blacks into a
great civic and cultural hall whose walls have been falling
down. A5 early as thirty-five years ago, writer James Baldwin
asked, "Do I really want to be integrated into a burning
house?;' It's a good question, asked not about a brick-andmortar structure but a spiritual and emotional home.
For hundreds of years, the very rigidity of racism in our triumphalist national procession gave blacks at least some moral
footholds in their struggle to belong to the society into which
they had been plunged, yet from which they were kept apart.
But American blackness cannot sustain itself in "solidarity"
against a whiteness that no longer knows itself, and no longer
should. Black Americans who cling to fantasies of a separate
racial destiny are doomed to careen in unanswered reproach
and desperate flailing, from 0.]. Simpson's acquittal to Ebonies, from Farrakhan's pseudo~Islamic gew-gaws and posturings of defiance to the bizarre "exoneration" of Martin Luther
King, Jr.'s murderer, james Earl Ray, by King's own son Dexter
and other members of his family who seem bent on uncovering a much wider conspiracy.
There will be no racial justice until blacks are willing to
affirm-and whites, at last, are ready to understand-that the
descendants of slaves are in some ways the most "American"
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of us all: Precisely because this is a society. which blacks didn't
choose to join and cannot hope to dominate, yet cannot really
leave, they have much more at stake in society's fulfilling its
stated, oft-violated promises than most of the rest of us comprehend. There always will and should be communities based
on common memory, cf loss ana longing and pride, but the
best that blacks can expect of the rest of us (and the most that
most have ever asked of us) is to embrace ~dge themand to let ourselves be embraced and judged by themas individual participants in a common national experiment.
As brothers, some used to say. Only a joint renunciation
of blackness and whiteness as arbiters of our public life can
lift the burdens of white supremacy and a retaliatory black
demagoguery.
The black religious historian C. Eric lincoln recalls that,
since growing up under segregation during the 1920s, he has
thought of white liberals as "friends who have done something to relieve me of the ponderousness of a system that is
bearing down on me all the time." But many of today's liberals
betray blacks by casting them all as the bearers of disadvantage and aggrievement whose end is not in sight. like the old
segregationist establishment, the new liberal racist one has
black retainers w o reinforce 1ts 1 usion , me u mg "critics"
such as the law pro essor Derrick Bell, the black historian
Robin Kelley, and the political minstrel and street-theater
impresario the Rev. AI Sharptory(They aoerhberal raclSm by
telling professional anti-racists w~at they want to hear, without expecting or effecting substantive change. Today's liberal
racist establishment notorious! lacks the self-confidence and
self-definition of · predecessors; what it wants, as I have
noted, are rituaitondemnations of its racism that implicitly
credit it's virtue.
Those who know how to deliver such condemnations
profit handsomely. It is one thing to defend a community that
has developed a distinct identity in oppression. It is another
to foresee a Sisyphian struggle against racism that will never
end. "Racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible
component of this society," writes Derrick Bell. The blackness
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he, Kelly, andSharpton espouse is oppositional only, as if they
were s!ying, "I am excluded; therefore, I am." Full inclusion
~ implosion. So would full exclusior»ot course;
so they strike evasive, sometimes ingratiating poses1of dignityin-adversity, resisting inclusion just gently and sorrowfully
enough to make white liberals uneasy and eager to offer support. Playing this game ·involves finding racism in every leaf
that falls while relying on reservoirs of white racial guilt and
deference whose existence black racists deny even as they
accept media pulpits, book royalties, academic tenure, and
constitutional protections,
Nice work, if you can get it-and skilled race pros certainly
do. Robin Kelley's New York J.!niversity voice-mail message,
when I called in Marcl){1997, included this advice:
... If you're calling about speaking engagements, reading a manuscript, serving as a consultanLjoining an editorial board, participating in a conferencc;(or writing an essay, the answer is probably
no: I will not be undehaking any new projects until the spring of
1998. Thank you very much.
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At Harvard, the black leftist philosopher and preacher Cornel
West's machine included the following:
... At the beep, please leave a detailed message and it will be personally relayed to Professor West. Due to the high volume of
calls, it is impossible for him to respond to all the calls received.
Please understand that Professor West appreciates your interest,
and we respectfully request that you do not call a second time. If
you are calling concerning a Harvard engagement, please leave a
message for (name, number]. For outside engagements, please
call Professor West's agent [name and number in New York].
Thank you for calling.
•
Such are the w es of oppression. Even the old cal~
Louis Farrakha fascinates many white liberalsAtut
}t
since he goes too far, he gets overtures from conservatives
like Jack Kemp and the columnist Robert Novak.
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Our destiny hinges on whether countless individual blacks
and whites can leave the old black-white embrace to create a
new culture together, as we see and feel some doing every
day. A lot depends on the steadiness and good sense of
people who won't be corralled or stampeded in the name of
race loyalty or racial guilt.
-.-.
• Where To?
"Everybody has two heritages: ethnic and human," says the
black jazz musician Wynton Marsalis. "The human aspects give
art its real enduring power.... The racial aspect, that's a
crutch so that you don't have to go out into the world. Jazz
music teaches ·you what it is to live in a democracy, to be
American." That is the astonishing story that unsung civic
heroes, from Vernon Baker to Rafael Olmeda, are trying to tell
and to live every day. Their Americanism is no more conservative than jazz or baseball. Its ethos is what the American literary historian Daniel Aaron calls "ethical arid pragmatic,
disciplined and free." It confounds the liberal imagination
because it scrambles its moralistic and ideological thinking.
That is why a rediscovery of American civic traditions can
spare us the Balkanization and religious absolution that grip
so much of the rest of the world.
When it is well told and well lived, our civic story has two
levels. On one, many Americans ground their personal dignity
in ethnic and religious subcultures, the best of which prompt
universal aspirations even while providing for their own members along parochial lines. On a second level, many of the
same Americans "graduate" into a national civic culture, some
of it drawn from their subcultures yet transcendant of them.
When the larger civic culture is alluring enough, ethnic enclaves become staging grounds for transethnic leaders. The
rural yet outward-facing Southern black Baptist subculture
taught something about the promise of America not only to
Martin Luther King, Jr., and his followers, but, through them,
to many whites as well.
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"The law can open doors and knock down walls, but it
cannot build bridges," Thurgood Marshall wrote. 'We will only
attain freedom if we learn to appreciate what is different and
muster the courage to discover what is fundamentally the
same." Do we violate that vision and betray its raceless promise? All the time. Midj:entury liberalism's greatest achievement
was to assail and stop such violations more than ever before in
our history. The new liberal racism is reviving them in sugarcoated but poisonous form.
Full citizenship in the American republic entails a commitment to join in a race-transcendant human experiment. Our
civic culture cannot be blueprinted or parceled out along race
lines. We affirm individual dignity when we refuse to treat
any citizen as the delegate of a subculture or race. Our best
leaders are those who show their neighbors, every day, how
to leave subgroup loyalties at the doors of classrooms, jury
rooms, hiring halls, and loan offices. They will embrace liberalism's preeminent challenge: to dissolve the color line by
ceasing to treat whiteness and blackness as vessels of hope.
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CHAPTER
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INNOCENCE BY ASSOCIATION
• Color-coding Crime
Six days before Christmas 1996, Charles Davis, a New York
City police officer, was slain with the owner of a check-cashing
store where he was moonlighting to make extra money to buy
holiday gifts for his six-year-old daughter, Arielle. By all accounts, Davis, thirty-eight, was an adoring father who put
Arielle to bed every night, making her giggle with funny jigs
and sweet songs. He and his wife, a former assistant district
attorney, "were just two people who you could see were
totally wrapped up in each other," a friend told the New York
Times. By accounts that transcend the pieties one usually
hears at funerals, Davis was a very good cop, and a tough one.
He was popular not only with fellow officers but also with residents of the Queens neighborhood where he ran youth basketball tournaments and an organization for kids who might want
to join the New York Police Department. His large presence,
sharp eye, and obvious caring strengthened "community policing,'' which had helped cut the city's murder -rate in half in
less than five years. When he was killed on December 19, the
1996 rate hovered below one thousand for the first time in
three decades.
Davis died while throwing his body in front of the check-
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cashing store's owner, Ira Epstein, forty, in a futile effort to
protect him from being murdered, too. These two men, who
contributed nothing to the city's glitter but much to its glue,
were destro edina botched robbery attempt by two or three
·
young black men.
· 0 ·
nineteen-yearold George Bell readily acknowledged that h~ had pull~dthe
trigger. During a break in the questioning, he hummed, "Have
Yourself a Very Merry Christmas," then got scared and kept
asking what ~en to him. Remorse never seemed to
~ enter~his mind.~
In keeping with jewish custom, Epstein was buried quietly
the day after his death!Davis' Episcopal funeral mass a week
later in suburban Garden City, Long Island, was a vivid
"tableau of pomp and grief," as the Times put it, replete with
thousands of saluting, white-gloved officers, a somber Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani and Governor George Pataki, the police
Emerald Society's mournful bagpiping, and a fly-over by police helicopters. "Arielle, your daddy, who loved you, who
adored you, who cared for you, will always be a hero of New
York City," Giuliani told Davis's daughter from the pulpit. The
mayor asked the congregation to give Arielle something she
would remember, and all present responded with a long,
wrenching ovation. Giuliani noted that Ira Epstein's widow
had told him that Davis was a role model for the city's youth.
"She was right," he said, calling Davis "an example of what it
means to be a real man .... when he died Saturday morning
he was doing what he was fained to do-he was trying to
protect another man."
If funerals such as Davis's are tableaux of pomp and grief,
typically they are also dramatic renderings of the chasm between inner-city blacks and suburban ethnic whites, b~tween
the so-called "underdass" and the so-called "occupying army"
of police in the ghetto. Not to put too fine a point on it, spectacles of slain officers, grieving families, and ranks of police in
parade dress seldom fire the liberal civic imaginatio~er
tainly there was no outcry from liberal activists or institutions
over Davis's murder). Uberals who can recite with near reverence a roll call of black victims of white ·hatred-Rodney King,
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Yusuf Hawkins (a black youth set upon and murdered by a
gang of whites as he walked innocently through their Brooklyn neighborhood), Michael Griffith (chased by young whites
to his death on a parkway in Queensj{Howard Beach, Darrell
Cabey (paralyzed for life by subway gunman Bernhard Goetz
in 1984), and many others-would be hard put to recall
whites murdered by blacks, especially if the victims are police
officers.
But liberals forgot Charles Davis for a different, more troubling reason: He, like his killers, was black. That barred him
from the pantheon of martyrs that would have received him
had his killers been white. In a cruel irony, some of the black
victims who did gain admission to that pantheon had records
of criminal violence, like the men who killed Charles Davis.
But this discrepancy in public attention is more than an irony;
it is an indictment of liberal racism, which draws from the history of racism the false lesson that racial differences are far
more profound than they really are-andf far more exculpatory than they really should be.
Just as murders register more strongly in the traditional
racist imagination when committed by blacks against whites,
they register more strongly in today's liberal imagination when
committed by whites against blacks. Both mindSets, blinded
by color, eclipse the human reality that transcerlds it. In reality, most murders involve perpetrators and victims of the same
race. In reality, proportionately more such murders are blackon-black than white-on-white. In reality, according to the Federal Bureau of Criminal Justice Services, more blacks in the
United States are killed by other blacks_in a single day than are
killed by whites in a week. Yet black victim after black victim is
lowered into urban America's choking soil without a word
from any liberal commentator, activist, or politician, black or
white.
Charles Davis was one of those victims. Once upon a time,
he would have been a liberal hero in death, because he would
already have been a liberal hero in life. He wasn't New York
City's first heroic black cop, but his winning personality
and his effectiveness with fellow officers and the public tran-
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scended race. in ways liberals used to admire. Surely he did
more to break down racism in the NYPD than any critic of
police racism has done. Yet, now, he seemed as invisible to
most liberals as he would have been vivid to their predecessors. When he was killed, there were no memorials to Davis or
expressions of outrage toward the suspects by liberal advocacy groups whose members had taken to the streets over
white-on-black murders. There were no protests by AI Sharpton, New York's premie1(impresano of racial street theater.
The wonder is that liberal racial moralists have been so
slow to understand that racism is more likely to be diminished
when transracial standards are strongly upheld. In a 1992
speech, "Race and the American City," former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley lamented that many whites, stunned by rising
urban violence, wanted to say to some black males, ''You litter
the street and deface the subway, and no one, black or white,
says stop .... You snatch a purse, you crash a concert, break a
telephone box, and no one, white or black, says stop. You rob
a store, rape a jogger, shoot a tourist, and when they catch
you, if they catch you, you cry racism. And nobody, white or
black, says stop."
Why? Now that the City of New York has, through its policing of minor "quality of life" offenses, posted a sign saying
"Stop," many of its residents have discovered that not only is it
not racist to do so, it enhances a sense of public order and
helps to reduce the murder rate in poor, nonwhite neighborhoods more than anywhere else. That hasn't stopped people
like Sharpton from crying that police brutality is rising-and it
shouldn't stop him and others from protesting it, or a city
from punishing it. But it should remind liberals thin when
society takes blacks seriously enough as individuals to condemn and punish them whenever they do wrong, it is more
likely to provide all its citizens, but especially its black citizens,
with safety and a sense of decency in public places.
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The renouncing of the inaction Bradley described didn't
begin because liberals, both white and black, repented their
tendency to exempt blacks from moral reproach. It began
with a surge of feminist outrage, especially at black men's
assaults on white women. It was high-profile trials involving
t.il=wse assaults that changed public reckonings about {ace,
prompting people who weren't racists to speak up without
fear of being misconstrued.
..
The rape and near murder of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989 by young black and Hispanic men unleashed
a torrent of white rage. That rage summoned the worst spectres of black history, prompting the black Amsterdam News
editor, Wilbert Tatum, and a number of activists to insist that
the trial was "a lynching," reminiscent of a hundred years of
hanging innocent black men accused of merely looking the
wrong way at white women. However, few acquiesced in that
kind of defense in this case; a black minister led a vigil for the
victim, even as Sharpton brought Tawana Brawley-whose
false charges of rape against white men in 1987 had already
been exposed-to the jogger-trial courthouse to shake hands
with the defendants, one of whom had already confessed
while viewing photographs of the woman he had battered.
Brawley and Sharpton's tale had aroused and then betrayed
widespread sympathy for her and outrage against white-male
sexism and racism. In the jogger case, the. tide turned: Women
whose hearts had gone out to Brawley weren't about to let
charges that the defendants were being "lynched" supercede
charges of sexist abuse. Certainly they had no tolerance for
lies like those told by the racial lawyer William Kunstler during the Brawley case: "It makes no difference whether ~rye at_..
. D ''Th
tack ... really happened," he said as her tale
•·'
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black~ommunity knows that there are a lot of Tawanas out
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0
f\
woman who is raped by a white man, at least five white
0~
women are raped by black men?
~
Few people believe that the long, sordid history of rapes of
~
black women by whites excuses Kunstler's dissembling, which
c.!:)
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exemplified eftist racism that robs blacks of personal dignity
and f'esponstbiiity by turning them into mere props or character actors in antiracist theatrics. The one cruel irony in the
othervJise salutary rejection of Kunstlerite thinking was that,
the same week as the Central Park rape and beating, the rape
and murder of a black woman by black men on a housingproject rooftop in Brooklyn attracted no more attention than
Kunstler himself woulci have given it. Only when some news
reports drew attention to that contrast did Donald Trump,
who had taken out a full-page ad to express his outrage and
demand justice in the jogger assault, send a donation to
Brooklyn. A black observer might legitimately have felt that
whites were simply turning their backs, not correcting ·the
imbalances on both sides.
Then came the murders in Los Angeles in 1994 of Nicole
Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, charged not to hapless
youths but to a wealthy black celebrity whom many whites
had admired, befriended, or loved. Now liberals:~~~~ choose
clearly between, on the one hand, knee-jerk ·
excuses
for blacks who violate basic standards of decency and, on the
other, tough affirmations of individual responsibility that transcend race. In the name of redressing racism, too many liberals
dodge such choices every day by race-norming their decisions
and trimming their candor in academic departments, classrooms, newsrooms, political meetings, and casual enco~~ters. ~
0
But now, in the same name of redressing racism, ~~
Cochran transformed the trial of 0.]. Simpson for murder into
the trial of Los Angeles police officer Mark Fuhrman for his racist abuses of black people.
Not only were liberals appalled; some understood that
Cochran, no less than Kunstler, was abusing black dignity by
grasping for one standard of justice at the expense of another.
Even as Cochran rightly condemned an abuse whose depth and
power cannot be denied-that some police officers keep lawabiding blacks in a constant state of low-grade intimidationhe was manipulating that reality to distract attention from
Simpson's, where it didn't apply or, even if it did, shouldn't
have been decisive. Blacks deserve better ways to make whites
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acknowledge and curb racist abuses. The deliberate coloring
of trials with racial histories and loyalties retards reform and
separates the races even further. It reinforces racial resentments by turning individual victims, perpetrators, and even
jurors into racial delegates, diminishing their dignity. If anything, Simpson's criminal acquittal based on Cochran's argument recalled the dark days when white juries often acquitted ·
white killers of blacks such as NAACP leader Medgar Evers.
The civil rights movement rejected such tit-for-tat responses, even in the teeth of open racism. Its disciplined,
loving tactics shamed whites by making calculated appeals to
their integrity even while exposing their shortcomings. So
doing, it sowed seeds that were still bearing fruit in the 1994
retrial and conviction ofEvers[assassin. In contrast, Cochran's
victory in a case that shouldn'"t have turned on race deepened
black isolation. He made an important point at a price so
steep that it has almost eclipsed the point he was trying to
make.
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· \ W~
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What, really, is the best wa to puncture white denial about
racism?
describe fifty-seven varieties of white ostility, condescens~n. and myopia, but ' their estimates of
racism were more realistic, their risks and
" strategies against it
~be shrewder, more supple, and more effective. Are those
~h~ want an honest conversation about police abuse willing
to have ordinary police officers at the table? Are liberals willing
to learn what decent cops see on patrol that prods or tempts
some of them to act badly? In an essay in the December 12,
1990 issue of the socialist weekly In These Times, the writer
Salim Muwakkil described his torments as a black man whose
presence in Chicago's Loop after dark prompts sickeningly
predictable responses from purse-clutching women and hostile cops. Then he added, as few others do, "But what about
the indignities forced on those frightened by my approach?
Their fear is a demanding burden. But it's a fear confirmed by
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crime statistics, if not experience. The police, to whom I fit a
'profile,' certainly are playing the odds when they stop me ....
The tensions produced by these differing, though equally
valid, perceptions are unravelling.the civic culture."
What does it cost Muwakkil, and blacks generally, to make
that admiss· ? I think it costs far less than it does to deny the
odds the police
p aying. Are 1 er s,
willing to be candid ~out what those odds reveal? It isn't
enough to blame racism and strike "Fight the Power" poses
on behalf of criminal defendants and demagogues. Such postures rely, ironically, on substantial reservoirs of white guilt,
goodwill, and constitutional protection, even while denyiog
the very existence of these goods~(jne can do that for only so
long. After the Brawley hoax, the civil rights convictions of
Rodney King's assailants, and the Simpson civil trial verdict,
race hustlers such as Cochran, Sharpton, and their apologists
may be finding it more difficult to sidetrack judgments of personal responsibility by charging racism. The more difficult
that becomes, ironically, the easier it will be to win some
ground against racism itself.
In the meantime, stripped of the exemptions from moral
and intellectual standards which too many legal activists,
journalists, university administrators, foundation officers, and
activists granted them, impresarios of racial theater are flounderino. After the Simpson criminal verdict, Cornel West, au'<
thor of
bestselling book -eaHc:d 1 Race Matters, made a
tortured a¢gument, backed by no evidence, that the murders
in Brentwood must have been committed not by 0.]. Simp!':\
son but by some itinerant drug dealer, his race conveniently
~~
y
::>Imllarly, years earlier, Kunstler (who died. in 1995) told
American Lawyer magazine that he had agonized about putting personal responsibility above race by defending Pang
Ching Lam, a Chinese immigrant storeowner who had killed a
black intruder. "It was the first time I had ever represented
someone who killed a black person," Kunstler recalled. "Pang
was Third World ... it was clearly self-defense. And even then
I had misgivings .... I'm not sure if Pang had been white that I
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would have taken (the case]." Had Pang been white, and had
the black intruder killed him, Kunstler would probably have
defended the intruder. Had Charles Davis been white, Kunstler might well have defended those charged with his murder, more so because Davis had been a cop. That Davis was a
black cop who died trying to protect a white man would have
left even the mellifluous Kunstler tongue-tied.
Aside from Pang, Kunstler never did defend anyone, black
or not, who was charged with harming a black person. The
only time he ever came close was in 1981, when a young black
man named Wayne Williams was charged in a horrifying string
of murders of black boys in Atlanta. Kunstler descended upon
the city in a media blaze with fellow lawyer Alan Dershowitz,
proclaiming Williams the innocent fall guy from redneck conspirators who, the lawyers charged, were being hidden by
the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Good reponers and investigators, including Atlanta's black police chief Lee Brown,
later the national drug czar, proved Kunstler and Dershowitz
wrong.
In 1994, when Kunstler and his associate Ronald Kuby were
trying to represent Colin Ferguson, a black man who gunned
down passengers on a Long Island Rail Road train, I asked
them whether they would want to do so had Ferguson been
charged with murdering blacks, not whites. They admitted
that they wouldn't; the point of their effon on Ferguson's
behalf was to introduce the idea of a "black rage" defense. Joel
Dreyfuss, a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists, called this an insult to blacks that reflects "white liberalism's tolerance of blacks based on a deficit model. ...
According to the 'black rage' defense, black folks are barely
able to control themselves."
The Kunstlerite mind-set wouldn't matter very much were
it a sectarian anomaly among liberal approaches to criminal
justice. But it is a perfectly logical extension of many liberals'
tendency to subordinate affirmations of personal responsibility and color-blind justice to claims that such standards
are inherently racist. Even as most of the public rejects such
thinking, we find it gaining ground now in imponant law
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schools and on many national stages besides the one where
Cochran told Simpson's jurors to "send a message." The many
lawyers, activists, and journalists who honor Kunstler's memory are among its bearers. A year after his death, a committee of
the New York Civil Liberties Union's board of directors voted
to hold an event in Kunstler's name; only a vigorous dissent
by New York Civil Rights Coalition director Michael Meyers
dissuaded his colleagues.
Liberal racists' indifference to every outrage they can't
recast as a confrontation with white bigotry is an insult and a
danger to every Charles Davis. It cedes the political initiative
to conservative racists, except when law-and-order centrists
like New York's Mayor Giuliani emerge to save liberals from
themselves. How long it now seems since the time when liberals would have taken heart, even in tragedy, from the fact
that the clergy and most of the congregation whom Giuliani
addressed at Davis's funeral were black; that, still, the throng
was racially well-integrated; and that most of the thousands of
cops honoring Davis's memory and supporting his widow
were white. Now there is only silence. In life, as in the circumstances of his death, Davis confounded too many liberal
presumptions.
• Liberal Racism's Writ Runs Out
One thing that did tweak liberal sensibilities two years before Davis's death was Giuliani's aggressive policing of"quality
of life" and other minor-crime infractions-the strategy that
later yielded the suspects in Davis's case. "Quality of life"
enforcement was begun under David Dinkins, the city's first
black mayor, but when Giuliani, his successor, intensified it, it
was denounced as the harbinger of a police state by lawyers
for the Legal Aid Society, the executive director of the New
York Civil Liberties Union, the usual assortment of left-liberal
activists, and liberal editorial writers and columnists. Misdemeanor enforcement was little more than an excuse for police
brutality, declared New York Supreme Cour1 judge Bruce
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Wright, a liberal black jurist whom cops called "Turn 'Em
Loose Bruce."
Yet George Bell and three other suspects in' murders of
Davis and Epstein were apprehended separately,~ a citywide
dragnet prompted by the murde~(brought in hundreds of
people who had already been tssued warrants for petty
crimes. There are several reasons for issuing more desk warrants and summonses for petty offenses, and then following
up on them in serious cases like these. First, policing minor,
"quality of life" offenses-especially in poor neighborhoods
where graffiti writing, littering, drinking on the street, and
petty vandalism are routine-makes life more pleasant and
dignified for the law-abiding residents. Second,,{restoring a
sense of public order discourages criminal activity among
people acute! aware of shifts in local conditions.
ma y, and in the Davis/Epstein case most importantly,
enforcing minor-crime laws generates names and addresses of
people who have often committed more serious crimes-or
are about to commit them, like subway fare-beaters who are
found packing guns when they are arrested for leaping over
turnstiles. After the murders of Davis and Epstein, it was Mark
Bigweh, twenty, rounded up on charges of selling a five-dollar
bag of marijuana, who acknowledged that he had been present when Davis and Epstein died and who then led cops to
Bell.
The first and most important beneficiaries of Giuliani's
"quality of life" policing-against panhandlers, drug addicts,
and vandals in city parks and other public spaces-were poor
black and Hispanic tenement dwellers, who, lacking yards, let
alone vacation homes, need green oases and recreation facilities. Only as conditions in such places improved during the
mid-1990s did self-styled advocates for the nonwhite oor
begin to moderate their prote~Aadvocates had also
denounced as "racism" the aggressive apprehensions of young
men caught jumping subway turnstiies, but a surprisingly high
proportion of "fare-beaters" were found to be carrying weapons, and, with their arrests, crime in the subways dropped
dramatically. Only then, it seemed, did those who had charac-
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terized the fare-beaters as victims of racism notice how many
law-abiding black and Hispanic people depended on safe
subways.
It seems, however, that racial poseurs cannot learn from
substantive gains. Two weeks after Giuliani's inauguration in
1994, producers of the racial demonstrations that had convulsed the city in the Howard Beach, Tawana Brawley, Bensonhurst, Central Park jogger, Crown Heights, and other bloody
cases stood with the Rev. Al Sharpton as he declared that
cops' attempt to enter a Nation of Islam mosque in Harlem to
answer a robbery call was "the opening round of [Giuliani's]
war on black New Yorkers." (Actually, the only people injured were cops, one of them female, whom worshippers
had shoved down the stairs as the officers tried to enter the
mosque.) Nearly a year later, Sharpton led two hundred
marchers to disrupt Christmas shopping on Fifth Avenue in a
protest against what he insisted was an unprecedented surge
in police brutality since Giuliani had taken over from David
Dinkens, the city's first .black mayor. But, in the eleven
months between the mosque incident and the march, the
city's homicide rate had dropped 18 percent, which meant that
perhaps two hundred African Americans who would otherwise
have been murdered were still walking around. Even had Giuliani deserved no credit for the gains in public safety, it was
hard to see how he deserved condemnation. When I mentioned this to Sharpton during a television debate, he blinked;
that all those lives had been saved seemed not to have
occurred to him. What had really bothered black politicians
and liberal media commentators about the mosque incident
was that Giuliani, who considered it a police matter and not
an occasion for high-level diplomacy, had refused to meet
with Sharpton and others claiming to represent "the black
community" in the matter.
Had Giuliani been playing racial politics, he might have capitalized on the incident to claim that black nationalists are violent and antipolice. He refused to do that, too. "I don't have a
special message for any group," he said. "People in this city
don't need special things. They need more of certain general
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things-safety, education, jobs. The officers who went into
that mosque didn't ask the color or gender of the people they
were trying to protect. That's how most New Yorkers conduct
themselves, and it's how I'll run this administration."
After the tortuous racial etiquette of liberals' "gorgeous
mosaic" politics, such professions of race-neutrality sound
almost otherworldly.· Liberals suspect that such talk masks ~o.cJo-.1
double standards. Giuliani hasn't always resisted temptations
to play ethnic and racial politics, but he ·neither baits nor condescends to racial provocateurs, and his comments about the
mosque incident were consistent with his message almost
three years later, by which time Harlem's homicide rate had
dropped 67 percent: He hadn't done anything for black New
Yorkers, he said, but for the whole city.
But the politics of racial posturing dies hard. When a dead
tree in a middle-class black neighborhood fell on a van,
crushing four black children to death, Sharpton charged that
Giuliani had failed to prune the trees in black neighborhoodsuntil it emerged that it was Dinkins who had decimated the
city's tree pruners in an austerity move and that Giuliani had
restored som~.f theffi...J}r'wo black ctty council members
denounced Giuliani's observation that safety is the most
important "civil right"-until they learned that Dinkins had
said it first. In Brooklyn, a police officer killed a black minister's son, drawing Sharpton to the scene, cameras in towuntil he learned that the officer, too, was black and had shot
the young man, a drug dealer, in a raid on a drug den. During
Giuliani's first three months in office, two blacks were killed
by black police officers, and two white cops were killed by
nonwhites. No one drew racial conclusions from this body
count, because there
.none to be rawn.
The eradication of cffminal violence should be a primary
goal of any society and, indeed, of any social movement. Only
someone possessed by racialist fantasies can conceive of criminal violence as a force for justice. Even Karl Marx, who cautioned his followers against romanticizing the victims of
capitalist oppression, would have dismissedAWilliam Kunstler
with contempt.
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But what about the "root causes" of criminal violence? Consider a response that exemplifies white liberal denial not of racism but of racial equality. In 1992, the Los Angeles riots made
a bestseller of white political scientist Andrew Hacker's Two ·
Nations: Separate, Hostile, and Unequal, which attempted to
convict whites of being more deeply racist than they think
they are. In Hacker's view, if more blacks are killed by other
blacks every day than are killed by whites in a week, this is
because racism is more insidiously demoralizing now than
when it was
formally institutionalized. According to
Hacker, "While in one sense these (killings of blacks by other
blacks] are 'free acts,' ... they must also be seen as expressing
a despair ·that suffuses much of their race .... It is white
America that has made being black so disconsolate an estate."
The root of the problem, Hacker thinks, is not only that many
cops are bigots but that they act on behalf of a white consensus about blacks that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as
blacks internalize it from childhood on. Unlike avowed segregationists, Hacker warns, most. whites have managed to isolate
and condemn blacks without spelling out what they're doing.
In Hacker's view, white contempt not only makes it easy to
blame the victim, it makes the victims blame themselves.
There is truth here, but it is not the whole truth, and we are
well past the time when anything can be gained by denying
blacks a larger measure of both credit and responsibility for
their own liberation, even in the teeth of racism itself. Hacker
cannot imagine such a liberation. Giuliani is sustained by "a
fear white vote," he said on a New York 1 News television
program late in 1993, characterizing e
as the political
creation of whites who think, "It used to be ou1 city and 'they'
are tal~mg it awa"YJ .. "Again, racial symbolism ~echpsed
reality: Giuliani won 3~ percent of the Hispanic vote and 77
percent of the Asian vote. (He won only 5 percent of the black
vote because he was running against the city's first black
mayor and was being characterized by Dinkins supporters as a
"fascist" and "racist" and by the New York Times as an apostle
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LIBERAL RACISM
of "civic Reaganism" and a champion of white-ethnic restoration.) "Crime; welfare, drugs, guns-all those have a black coloration" in the election, Hack'er insisted, surely thinking that
he was speaking only of whites who "want a certain kind of
city; they want the troublemakers controlled .... "
"Don't you?" interrupted Peter Medona, a gentle Bronx
baker also on the television program who had been one of the
"Faces of Hope" at Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration. Hacker 9-:sputtered, spread his hands, and said not a word. Medona haE'
caught him applying to all whites the insidious "they" which
bigoted whites apply so roundly to blacks. Hacker's disdain
for working-class white ethnics is unrelenting01llif palpably
aristocratic. But there is also a hint of racial self-loathing.
Lynne Duke, a black reporter for the Washington Post, asked
Hacker whether he thinks himself exempt from the evils he
attributes to whites. "Oh, believe me," he replied, "I need my
whiteness as much as Joe the truck driver does." Or Pete the
~ -sal)_e~ X
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y/"Aiid there is even a hint of displaced racism, a contempt for
blacks, which seeps out of Hacker's own prose even as he
struggles to project it onto working-class whites. Reviewing
~. the black economist and social critic Glenn
-Loury carrec:f"kA"an example of "libera:t ractsm" that portrays
black Americans "as a confused, defeated, and disturbed collection of people, obsessed with what whites have done to
them and incapable of doing anything for themselves .... "
Loury condemned "Hacker's refusal to take blacks seriously,
as morally responsible agents capable of shaping their lives
according to their will. ... "
Similar concerns were raised even in the liberal New York
Review of Books, to which Hacker frequently contributes, by
David Brion Davis, the distinguished (white) historian· of
slavery, who reviewed Two Nations in its July 16, 1992 issue.
Hacker's assertions that blacks can't be expected to conform
to "white" behavioral and intellectual standards because their
racial culture is so distinctive "remind one of the romantic
racialism of the past," Davis wrote, regretting that "Hacker is
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still partially trapped by the tendency ... to make racial differences displace all other explanations of behavior.... "
But suppose that Hacker is right and that racism has forced
blacks to internalize a despair so deep that their norms and
values are different from ours. Surely a despair this profound
cannot be dissolved by white repentance and repara~ions.
That is why even blacks who wince at candor like ·Salim
Muwakkil's also wince at Hacker's and other white liberals'
moralistic contortions about racism. In Hacker's discussion of
crime, the contortions become insulting. He observes, accurately, that violent crime is disproportionately black and that
"black Americans have a three times greater chance than
whites of dying from a policeman's bullet. As it happens," he
continues, "a disproportionately high number of these killings
of blacks are by black policemen, which suggests that departments tend to give black officers assignments where they
encounter suspects of their own race .... There is a tendency
to use blacks to control blacks." Here, anaiysis has given way
to ideologically driven evasion. If proportionately more blacks
than whites are dying from policemen's bullets, isn't that
largely because-as Hacker's own findings affirm-violent
crime is so heavily black? Isn't this all the more plausible if, as
Hacker also reports, so many cops who kill blacks are them-.
selves black? And what on /arth is Hacker saying about departments' hiring policies? That they shouldn't hire more
blacks? That they should assign fewer of them to black
neighborhoods?,...
White cops often do misread cues in black youths' behavior. But if black cops are less likely to misread, they aren't
necessarily more merciful. Perhaps, Hacker muses, "experience has jaundiced so many officers that they see even lawabiding blacks as belonging to the 'other side.' Compounding
these stereotypes is the fact that the typical police officer is a
high school graduate, from a working-class background, who
had never previously set foot in the areas he now patrols ....
And at least a few police officers still move in circles where no
censure attaches to using the word 'nigger.' "
How does this explain why so mariy blacks are killed by
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LIBERAL RACISM
black cops? It doesn't, of course. Hacker seems simply to have
forgotten that there are black cops at all, and he's back to
talking about "working class" whites who say "nigger." A dis_skew~
cussion sowaFpeel:f5"y denial of the glaring realities it has docu1\
mented can't parfe the real problem of police racism in a way
that serves black or whites well. Hacker wants to show whites
how hypocritical and indifferent they remain about the intolerable burden of being black in America. But when he
mischaracterizes that burden and caricatures its ·sources by
suggesting that police exams using words such as "disposition" and "unsubstantiated" are racially unfair, he only increases the burden of blackness and insults both races. His
discussion of policing is an example of how racialist analysis
slides from reality into cant. It's a mystery how liberals can
posit a monolithic white world and a hapless -AelplessJ~b,.la~c~k~--~
one-and at the same time hope to change either.
Like Hacker, the white writer Benjamin DeMott thinks that
while irresponsible acts are in one sensef"free," they're all but
predestined by caste-like poverty. Midway through his ofteninsightfulThe Trouble With Friendship: .Why Americans Can't
Think Straight About Race Qlew York. A:t:iaRti~ HoAtfily Pre33,
~ DeMott laments the trial of Joyce Ann Moore, a black
welfare mother in Milwaukee who was convicted in 1990 of
homicidal neglect of six of her seven children after they
burned to death when she left them alone at home one night.
It wasn't the first time she'd left them unattended or permitted them to live amid such dangers as a kitchen floor
smeared with feces. After a four-day trial, Moore was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison.hhe severity of
the sentence is heartbreaking; Moore is u~ikely to be a
danger to other people's children./
·
But DeMott is even more troubled by the conviction than
by the sentence, and here, I think, he gets carried away in
making what amounts to a liberal racist argument: Since society bears "responsibility for Moore's situation as a mother," he
argues, the court's color-blind assumptions about personal
responsibility. should be mooted by her "bottom-caste" status
as a school dropout, pregnant at fourteen, deserted by the
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three men whose children she bore, and lacking a family support system or public day care. "Black America includes millions of welfare mothers, the majority overwhelmed by their
lives," DeMott declares. "But her case, like numberless parallel
cases, is instructive ... because of counsels' insistence on her
capability. Judicial denials of caste truth invariably begin with
tacit agreement, by the prosecution and the defense, that
bottom-caste defendants should be presented as free agents
acting and executing on their own .... "
Few black welfare mothers are as dysfunctional as Moore,
but to suspend judgment of her in deference to "caste" is
to desert and insult them all. Perhaps DeMott thinks they
shouldn't serve on juries or vote. Precisely because the imposition of cast~ indeed an affront to personal dignity, liberal
justice should not reinforce it by erasing presumptions of personal capability. DeMott ought to check this with Nelson Mandela, or, for that matter, Farrakhan: Only by insisting on
personal responsibility can a movement against injustice uplift
and mobilize the oppressed.
"Much of the injury to African Americans caused by educational deprivation, demeaning job ceilings, and ascribed inferiority can be read in ... street drunkenness, gang gunfire in
projects, whole schools engaged in teaching child-mothers
how to discharge parental responsibilities," DeMott reports,
adding, like Hacker, that the deepest damage is internalized in
self-defeat and self-loathing. Again, there is truth here, but
caste distinctions are reinforced, not eroded, by liberals who
equate moral censure with repression.
The "blame racism, not the victim" argument now has an
almost archaic sound. The tightening of many white liberals'
jaws in response to the Brawley hoax, the jogger-trial defense
strategies, and the Simpson verdict may signal the turning
tide, but, as we will see in Chapters 5 and 6, many blacks, too,
are rethinking the balance between personal and social
responsibility-with harsh consequences, incidentally, for
conservative as well as liberal doctrines that emphasize one
side or the other. Liberals must admit that their charges of
"racism" are often so extenuat.ed and exotic that they rein-
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for~e r~cism by making blacks seem an exotic appendage ~ ~f c I;~ , ~
~most liberals have qualms about saying this, they
·
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grasp at other explanations: ·"Blame the economy as well as
racism; blame class as well as race." But, like DeMott's conflation of race and caste to absolve Joyce Ann Moore of all moral
._..,.
and legal responsibility in the deaths of her children, these
explanations don't tell the whole truth either. The most
important recent attempt to blame crime on a mix of class and
_ J ve.ry us~u \
race is black sociologist William Julius Wilson's When Work
Disappears, a formidably detailedfo'tudy of inner-city Chicago
that was grasped like a lifesaver oy tM A'ett~ l~r'k Times and L.
~ liberaq~~ilaRtfiPe15ie fot:!Rdationf whose "racism" explanations
---.!l._
were Hrowning empirically, politically, and culturally.
As do Hacker and DeMott, Wilson portrays criminal behavior as a product of "factors beyond the control" of innercity residents. Like Hacker, Wilson provides evidence of
self-destructive behavior from which he doesn't draw cultural
and moral conclusions. He finds, for example, that many black
as well as white employers disdain young African-American
males but hire equally poor first-generation black and Hispanic immigrants, whose cultural habits and predispositions
make them reliable workers. Yet Wilson doesn't conclude that
. findings like thiS\mcicrmitJ<iracial and economic excuses for
black unemployment and crime. Similarly, he laments that
jobs have gone to suburbia, "a particular problem for innercity blacks because they have less access to private automobiles and, unlike Mexicans, do not have a network system
~:.t h12resn•t a~k)
that supports org
carpools"~wit:trnlllt'~M£(
A
don't set up carpools, too. h Sue/.. o.voloanCR~
Larry Nachman, a professor at the College of Staten Island,
has an answer worth considering. Writing about Hacker's Two
Nations, Nachman characterizes the book's fundamental assumption this way: "If there are disparities ... between blacks
and other Americans, it must be either because blacks are biologically inferior or because of the ... racist environment."
Since liberals who think this way rightly reject the false assumption of inferiority, they are left with only racism to
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blame. But Nachman denies that racism renders blacks morally helpless. He marvels that Hacker doesn't recognize a third
possibility that presents blacks neither as inferior nor as hapless victims: "He cannot bring himself to think about elements
in black culture which might work against success;.:..'_'~-..,.,.-----t A~ric.o.n.J
To which one must add "elements~Aculture," or,
A
more precisely, liberal racists' cluelessness about how civic culture holds even poor. societies together-including much
more of black inner-city society than liberals themselves are
prone to admit. Such myopia condemns liberals to continuing
political defeat. Like Charles Davis, who grew up in low-income
public housing in Brooklyn, many decent, hardworking blacks
live near joyce Ann Moore and her children without succumbing to despair. If the rest of the country is to encourage,
instruct, and employ such people, liberal scholars, journalists,
activiSts, and advocates must contribute something to a shared
American moral consciousness besides handwringing and
reproach.
Racism against black defendants in the criminal justice
system is a great, historic wrong. Liberal activists, opinion
makers, legislators, lawyers, and judges did much to curb it in
the 1950s and '60s, and an unsung few continue to do so
today. But lately liberals have been curbing systemic racism in
favor of a racism that refuses to pay blacks the compliment of
holding them to the same, elementary civil standards as
,
J
everyone else. Reforms based on rationalizations like Hacker's~n~ Oe.M~tt ~ wou 1 _;
only deepen the misery of black crime victims, at mounting
;\
cost to poor black neighborhoods' safety and morale. With
stunning callousness, "civil rights" attorneys from Kunstler to
Cochran have goaded black juries into political, "send a
message" acquittals of black assailants of whites, never considering that not only are such acquittals morally indistinguish- 9-able from those of white assailants of blacks in the old Sout~1.\
they also encourage liberals' shameful neglect of black victims J
killed or raped by blacks.
The liberal racist diversion of crime fighting to shadowboxing with "roo~ causes" has been a tragic failure. It has so
weakened public safety that it has undermined "progressive"
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political organizing logistically and morally. The question isn't
whether liberals have done this; it is why they can't see that
they have-and why, instead of admitting that the tactics of
Kunstler and Cochran and the rationalizations of Hacker and
DeMott have backfired, ·
keep denouncing only whiteon-black murderers, crime fig ters such as Giuliani, church
burners, and phantoms in black robes, blue suits, or white
sheets. Fingerpointing at racist bogeymen, real and imagined,
may bring liberals prompt, temporary relief from feelings of
moral vacuity, but it doesn't advance justice. Instead of invigorating our public life and strengthening our faith in one
another, it denies people like Charles Davis and his many
emulators and mourners the nurture and the honor we owe
them.
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CHAPTER
3
VOTING WRONGS
• Losing Faith
"It is wrong--deadly wrong-to deny any of your fellow
Americans the right to voteR Lyndon Johnson told a joint
session of Congress on March 15, 1965, following a week of
interracial marches led by blacks whom Sheriff Jim Clark had
barred from registering at the courthouse of the old Alabama
plantation town of Selma. Invoking the nation's "outraged
conscience" after Clark's deputies and state troopers assaulted the marchers-among them a quiet, intense seminary
student named John Lewis-Johnson said that it was time to
overcome a "crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice." Then
the president paused, looked up from his text at Congress and
seventy million television viewers, and said-evenly, firmly, in
his West Texas accent-"And we shall overcome."
Amid the long congressional ovation, some of the segregationists in Johnson's audience, such as Senator Strom
Thurmond from South Carolina, sat stone-faced, their hands
unmoving. "Watching the speech from Jean and Sullivan Jackson's living room in Selma, Martin King was overcome by
emotion," writes David]. Garrow in his book Bearing the
Cross. "His colleagues and friends had never seen him cry before. 'Tears actually came to Dr. King's eyes when President
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Johnson said, "We shall overcome,"' John Lewis remembered.
Never before, in nine years' time, had the movement received
the breadth of national support, and the strength of federal
endorsement, that this week had witnessed."
No one knew better than King that blacks could not hope
to exercise the rights guaranteed them by the Fifteenth
Amendment without the help of new laws, court rulings,
administrative regulations, and enforcement by federal marshals and troops. Yet King knew, too, that something essential
to blacks' vindication couldn't be legislated, mapped, or
enforced: the strangely vulnerable faith he and millions of
Americans shared with Johnson. If one believes that power
belongs ultimately to ordinary people who are free to choose
leaders and policies in the uncoerced privacy of voting
booths, then one's only reliable support for that belief is what
the historian Fred Siegel calls "the politics of persuasion,"
which instructs and moves people through cogent arguments
and moral witness instead of manipulating or ordering them
· 'cs of persuasion alone can't win justice, but
around. A
without it, freedom
exist.
In Siegel's view, liberals have stopped talking to the American people and fled to the courts and, I would add, to a moralistic journalism that censures "bad" thinking rather than
persuades. Thirty years after Johnson had spoken, Newt Gingrich stood at the same podium, delivering his "inaugural"
address as Speaker of a new Republican-run House of Representatives, and he surprised many by drawing his colleagues
into an ovation to liberal Democrats and the civil rights movement: "No Republican here should kid themselves about it;
the greatest leaders in fighting for an integrated America in
the twentieth century were in the Democratic Party. The fact
is, it was the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that ended
segregation .... And the fact is, every Republican has much to
learn from studying what the Democrats did ;.:ri:l:loc;h~t....."_________ /\1; Ke..
This time, it was liberal Democrats
Kweisi Mfume of
Maryland and Nydia Velazquez of New York who sat s
faced, their hands unmoving, looking for all the world as if
they thought Gingrich's tribute a subtle ploy to divide his
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national audience by reminding whites whom to blame for
color-coding politics. His subtext: "Thanks to you liberals, we
can now transcend you and carry on your work at a higher
level." For Gingrich, that "higher level" consisted not of more
civil rights legislation, rulings, and enforcement, but of freer
markets, which he believed would sweep away cobwebs of
color and caste and stimulate the enlightened self-interest
that sustains free communities and free selves.
The Speaker's unspoken point was that because liberals
didn't understand this, they were compounding racial divisions they meant to heal and thickening cobwebs of suspicion
they meant to dispel. "He's really tweaking liberals for being
less committed to integration than be is," said a conservative
acquaintance of mine, watching the speech. "What he really
means is that Republicans should study what liberal Demo. {)
crats did ~. .,;:o;.;.n.:s; g~,;. . '_'-:-------:---:------~---:----i--l How h~d ii- Game 1-o +his?
L..J'----tlltr,-,Id~e~e'"fti4-,{Gingrich was at that podium in no small part be'-cause liberals had led in amending Johnson's original Voting
Rights Act to intensify racial congressional districting, laying the
groundwork for their own isolation and defeat. In order to produce more black and Hispanic Democrats like Mfume~
Velazquez, '1-it:Jcra:ls sai~ the new districting plans ~ack~d.
minorities more tightly into "their own" districts. But doing this
had the effect of whitening the neighboring districts, depriving
incumbent white Democrats of reliably Democratic nonwhite
voters and strengthening Republican challengers, enough of
whom won to help the GOP take over the House. liberals who
seemed programmed to view these Republican victories as
racist couldn't acknowledge, much less interpret, the fact that,
after thirty years of liberal-led struggles to "overcome," the only
two black members of the House that Gingrich was addressing
who represented majority-white districtS were Republicans]. C. Watts of Oklahoma and Gary Franks of Connecticut. No liberal commentator, activist, advocate, or politician took note of
this anomaly,..H10eh less tFieel to @JEf3laiR tEJ
~
The story of how liberals blundered on voting rights is a~ooderfull~ i"'.s-h-vc:hv-t>)
parable of their noble beginnings and subsequent bad faith on
many fronts touching race. It shows how racialist thinking 2 e.fhocen-trl~rn )..J
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LIBERAL RACISM
gel€ z :bezel up 1:iNileftist ideology, mo..ilism, and rank politi-
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• From Empowerment to Apathy
Afcer 1965, libetals made many precedent-setting revisions
ri"' rs le · lation and jurisprudence, each wellintentioned, even imperati'Ve
time. But the racial battle
lines that evolved wouldn't C?ave become so entrenched had
liberals been smartc::r practitioners of the politics of persuasion. As voting righ!:S activists tested the outer limits of liberal
racism, they revealed a shocking misunderstanding of liberto votin
al democracy.
At first, the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) made ~ segre-
gationists like Sttom Thurmond more responsive to blacks.
Although he refused to applaud)ohnson's speech, Thurmond
began hiring black congressional staff as bl~ enfranchisement grew, and he serviced his black constituents assiduously
enough to win'their support at the polls. The VRA also helped
to increase the number of black elected .officials nationwide,
from fewer than 100 in 1965 to more than 2,500 today, by
some counrs. Most of them were chosen by hea:vily black electorates in local contests for lower offices. But the VRA helped
tO change white voters' attitudes, too: In 1966, MassachusettS' .S
electorate, 80 percent white, made Edward Brooke the first 1\
black U.S. senator since Reconstruction. Herman Badillo won
the Bronx borou h
i~cy in New York CityJUl 1966,
w 01 on y 10 percent of
. oters were HispaniC' In 1972,
Andrew Young was e!ecteG'w Congress by a mostlyVJhite dis·
trict in Atlanta. On similar terms, millions of white voters have
since made 1.. Douglas Wllder the governor of Virginia, seat of
the old Confederacy; C~ol Moseley Braun a senator from llli-
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ho..s done •
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no is; a dozen blacks statewide officials in nearl.:._y_::::.as:.....:m=a~n________ w h 1le:.. mo. of·, ~
states; another dozen the mayors of
cities; and
~
yet another dozen members of Congress from majority-w ite
districts.
(\
Still more to its credit, the original VRA curbed discriminatory racial districting. In such actions, politicians who belong
to the party in power in a state often "gerrymander" its district
lines into convoluted shapes to increase their partisan
strength, packing loyal constituent groups into certain districts and removing them from others. Race has no appropriate relation to such partisan line-drawing, for individuals
can change their interests, views, and political loyalties without changing the colors of their skins. For example, in the
1930s, blacks made a mass exodus from the party ofLincoln to
the party of Franklin Roosevelt. But, back then, even in "liberal" states such as New York, blacks' conversion from Republican to Democrat didn't necessarily endear them to white
Democrats, who tried to co-opt their votes with fine phrases
and patronage crumbs, but kept shifting them around among
districts to keep them from electing black Democrats.
Quite properly, the Voting Rights Act disrupted such hypocrisy. Enforced through bold, arduous litigation, it stopped
district-line drawers from dispersing bits of otherwise coherent minority communities among mostly white districts in
order to deny blacks homegrown representation. Thanks to a
1967 suit, for example, a long-standing concentration of black
neighborhoods in Brooklyn, New York, whose potential clout
had been parceled out among several mostly white congressional districts, was consolidated into one district that sent
Shirley Chisholm to Congress the next year. The VRA made
the bosses acknowledge that, whether through de facto segregation or voluntary affinity, a large black community did
exist; that it encompassed several school districts, police precincts, and other jurisdictions; and that, like any other geographical community of whatever color (or mix of colors), it
had a right to send one of its members to Congress. VRA suits
also stopped bosses from changing the mechanisms for
electing county commissioners and city councilmembers from
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district-based to at-large elections, which, in majority-white
jurisdictions, kept minority-black voters from electing anyone
of their own race.
But here we approach the line that liberals unwisely
crossed. Despite dramatic black electoral gains under the
Voting Rights Act, many activists, advocates, and journalists
decided that whites' perceptions and interests would remain
so irreconcilable with nonwhites' that few whites would ever
vote for blacks or Hispanics. Therefore, they insisted, nonwhites' right to vote could be exercised meaningfully only if
they were "empowered" to vote en bloc, as members of "protected" racial classes, in districts drawn to elect blacks or Hispanics. "That's an incredible expansion of the meaning of the
right to vote," notes Abigail Thernstrom, author of Whose
Votes Count? Affirmative Action and Minority Voting Rights.
It was also an incredibly blind move toward what David
Garrow calls "the unspoken assumption that black empowerment is a zero-sum game" against whites and that "justice
means proportional representation by race."
None of this was envisioned in the original VRA. While
it insisted that line drawers respect existing communities
enough not to disperse their votes, it never confused defending the right to vote with presuming that blacks and Hispanics
had an inherent need, and therefore a special "right," to elect
candidates from racial groups to which all of them were presumed to belong politically. In states with long histories of
segregation, blacks might indeed shar<;Q"nterests regardless of
where and how they lived, and regardless of whether legal
segregation had been abolished a few decades earlier. Yet
some states' black populations were read too thinly to form
geographic communities. Worse yet for
Rn 1980 the
Supreme Court raised the standards of proof that district-line
drawers who didn't create "black" or "Hispanic" districts were
discriminating racially, not just gerrymandering for traditional,
partisan reasons.
So, in 1982, liberal voting-rights activists and legislators
amended the VRA to expand remedial racial districting. The
motive was noble but the method mistaken: Instead of
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requiring proof that line drawers had intentionally discriminated, the new criteria measured a districting plan's fairness
by comparing the proportion of a state's elected nonwhites to
the proportion of its nonwhite residents. And instead of
merely thwarting the backroom racial gerrymandering that
had denied a community like black central Brooklyn the
chance to send one of its own leaders to Congress, the
amended VRA in effect told states whose numbers of black
and Hispanic officials weren't proportionate to their black and
Hispanic populations that they must actually create convoluted districts to produce officials of the right colors. Instead
of just preventing racial gerrymandering, the new VRA, as
interpreted by courts and enforced by the Justice Department, virtually ordered more of it for "protected classes,"~
matter how far apart from one another they lived(arid
.
no matter how different their circumstances.
To satisfy this notion of "empowerment" by skin .color or
surname, the new districts resembled wild ink spills. In most
states, Democratic-controlled legislatures did the redistricting, often making the new minority-majority districts even
more convoluted than they had to be to satisfy the VRA; their
partisan purpose was to keep some blacks and Hispanics in
neighboring white Democrats' districts and give them an edge
against Republican-leaning whites. The most telling objection
to the new, tentacled districts wasn't that they were aesthetically displeasing; it was that they violated every notion of community except a racialist one.
New York City's new "Hispanic" congressional district, for
example, created during the 1992 reapportionment, jumps
from lower Manhattan across the East River to Brooklyn, and
then runs overland for miles along corridors only a few blocks
wide into Queens-all to connect dissimilar Hispanic enclaves. Dubbed "the Bullwinkle district" because of its shape,
the 12th Congressional District's boundaries separate mothers on welfare in heavily Puerto Rican high-rise public housing
projects on Manhattan's Lower East Side from mothers on
welfare in similar but blacker projects nearby, in order to link
the Puerto Ricans to working-class Mexican and Dominican
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immigrants in Brooklyn and to South American immigrant
homeowners in leafy neighborhoods in Queens. The district
slices through moderately integrated neighborhoods to create
an empty ethnic solidarity for people who have neither demanded it nor mobilized for it.
In the late 1970s, I ran a newspaper in Brooklyn's Williamsburg section, a gritty, polyglot area of Polish and Italian Americans, orthodox Jewish Hasidim, and Dominicans and Puerto
Ricans. The 12th...ffistrict's boundanes now shce through that
area to embraceonly the Hispanic enclaves. At meetings of
the community planning boards and hospital advisory groups
where federal programs, services; and regulations are addressed, the Hispanics in the room now have one member of
Congress, many of the whites another. Even as such districting intensifies racial discord, a majority-minority district
created this way ensures its own voters' apathy by taking in
portions of so many different school districts, police precincts, and local election districts that its representative in
Congress cannot respond to them well.
This is not "empowerment'"; it is an evisceration of civil
society and local democra in the service of an ideology
which on y a racist could endorse.
~ thought a plaintiff
against the 12th district, Angel Diaz, ~ho handles patient
accounts at a hospital in the area. Diaz didn't feel empowered
at all by the new district-and not just because he was the
Republican who had run against Velazquez in 1992. "It's irresponsible to the American way of life to tell me I must agree
with [the district's defenders] because I'm Puerto Rican," he
told me. "By cutting up my neighborhood, they left out some
buildings where I lived for twenty-seven years. So my friends
there-a few are Italian-Americans--<:ouldn't vote for me."
The suggestion, aired in a New York Times news story, that
Diaz might lack standing to sue because he was Hispanic
reflected racial groupthink at its worst-unless one compared
it to what a Times editorial said on December 24, 1994, when
majority-black districts in North Carolina were invalidated
after challenges by white resident plaintiffs: "There is no
shortage of people who want to block minority districts; their
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perverse argument is that whites are the real victims of racial
redistricting, and some courts are buying i~
d ;I he 1imes m~ the point: While the law does constrain a
/\
plaintiff to show that he or she has been harmed, it is civic virtue, not racial self-interest, that makes suits against these districts legitimate. Ironically, and even more perversely, w,hen
white Hasidim sued to abolish another majority-Hispanic district in Williamsburg in 1975, a· more liberal Supreme Court
found that, as whites, they had no standing because white
members of Congress from districts nearby would represent
them, even though the plaintiffs couldn't vote for them.
In 1992, the newly drawn 12th District elected Nydia Velazquez, whom we saw earlier refusing to applaud Gingrich's "inaugural" address two years later. A native of Puerto Rico, she
had worked for five years as its government's liaison to Puerto
Ricans in the United States, winning recognition in what
would become the 12th District by running an Hispanic voter
registration campaign financed by the Commonwealth of
Puerto Rico. Velazquez spent so much time in such work that,
in 1992, she spoke English poorly and seldom appeared on
English-language programs. She has been reelected twice
since then, but with the lowest voter turnout of any congressional district in the United States.
There is a double irony here: Under the VRA, the Justice
Department had found two reasons to assume jurisdiction
over the area in which the 12th District was later create ..~ /.~
lots were not being provided in Spanish, and voter turnouts
were low, supposedly reflecting line drawers' failure to empower Hispanics. But, when Spanish-language ballots were
readily available, and when the 12th was created under what a
federal court would later call "misguided and unlawful instruc~Department of Justice" that segregated Hispanics like
A
Diaz from their immediate, non-Hispanic neighbors, turn,-,
out plummeted even further. In 1996, approximately 64,000
people voted in Velazquez's race, giving her 84 percent of the
vote. Next door, in a redrawn version of the old Chisholm district, whose long-standing black community was represented
by Major Owens, almost 90,000 people voted, even though
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Owens's assurance of reelection was even greater than Velazquez's. To the south, in a whiter district represented by
Charles Schumer, the turnout was 129,000. Nationwide, the
average congressional district turnout in that election was
nearly 200,000. The Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund claims that low turnouts in the district reflect the
high proportion of noncitizens, non-English-speakers, poor
single mothers, and children under voting age. A more telling
reason for the apathy is that liberals have created a Puerto
Rican pacification program, replete with segregated voting,
bilingual education that ghettoizes the young, and a district
with so many geographical twists and turns that no local challenger to Velazquez could build support in enough of its farflung communities to mount a serious campaign. It is as if
liberals issued every Hispanic voter a pair of crutches to get to
the polls, and then were surprised to see few turn up. The district is what the British would call a "rotten borough," in
which elections are merely ceremonial. The fact is, in all such
specially drawn "majority-minority" districts around the
country, voter turnouts are fabulously low.
• Victory and Denial
..
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Soon after the creation of districts like Velazquez's, the
Supreme Court began ruling against making race the dominant factor in districting. Decisions invalidating some of the
districts drove the race industry to howls of outrage and
prophecies of doom: Miller v. johnson, which knocked:._d::.o;..w.;..;..;.;n:....___, (I
two majority-black districts in Georgia in 1995, was ~finite
~
setback," said Deval Patrick, Assistant U.S. Attorney General
1\
for Civil Rights. It portended "a return to the days of all-white
government," warned ACLU voting rights specialist Laughlin
McDonald. "The noose is tightening," said Elaine Jones,
director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education
Fund; because of the rulings, said Theodore Shaw, the fund's
associate director, the black congressional delegation would
be able to fit "in the back of a taxicab." When the Court invali-
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dated two Texas districts in Bush v. Vera in June 1996, Jesse
Jackson foresaw "a kind of ethnic cleansing."
On November 5, 1996, five black incumbent members of
Congress whose black-majority districts had been eliminated
by court orders faced the voters in new, nonblack-majority
districts in Georgia, Florida, and Texas. And they all won, exploding the liberal certainty that whites so seldom vote for
blacks that the latter can exercise their voting rights fully
enough to elect a candidate of their choice (presumed to be
of the same color) only when they're "empowered" to vote
en bloc as members of a "protected" group. The 104th Congress had had thirty-eight black members of the House of
Representatives under racial gerrymandering; with six fewer
majority-black districts, the 105th has thirty-seven. The only
black representative who didn't return as a result of the rulings
was Cleo Fields, who decided not to run when his Louisiana
district was invalidated. Connecticut Republican Gary Franks
was defeated in aJ88 percent white district, but that had nothing to do with voting rights litigation, and, for racial headcounters, it was offset by black Democrat Julia Carson's 53
percent victory over a white opponent in a 69 percent white
Indianapolis district.
Redistricted black incumbents who chose to test the presumption of white bigotry by facing majority-white electorates
found their courage rewarded. White "crossover" voting for
blacks was clearest in Georgia, where Sanford Bishop (whose
52 percent black VRA district was displaced by one that was 35
percent black) won with 54 percent of the vote. When the
Supreme Court nixed Cynthia McKinney's 60 percent black,
Atlanta-to-Savannah district in 1995, she complained that black
officeholders faced "extinction" and was adored as a martyr at
the Harvard/New Yorker "Plessy v. Ferguson" conference a
few months before the 1996 elections. But she won her new,
65 percent white district with 58 percent of the vote. In
northern Florida, Corinne Brown (her electorate down from
55 to 42 percent black) won 61 percent of the vote ..
In Texas, two black women-Democrats Sheila Jackson Lee
of Houston and Eddie Bernice Johnson of Dallas-won
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reelection against multiple opponents in districts that had
been reconfigured by court rulings to contain fewer black
voters. Actually, their former black constituents had been
replaced mainly by Mexican Americans, not by whites; still,
their districts were a little bit whiter and a lot less black. So it's
remarkable that Lee, whose constituency had gone fro~ 51
percent black to 42 percent black, won 77 percent of the vote
against three opponents, and that Johnson (whose district
went down from 51 to 44 percent black), won 55 percent
of the vote against five opponents, two of them fellow Democrats.
Why didn't the supposed "ethnic cleansing" occur? Because, as liberal activists refused to acknowledge, the landmark Voting Rights Act was never at risk in the Court rulings;
only the advocates' subsequent, ill-advised amendments to it
were at risk. The racial districting fiasco was a dramatic departure from the original act's intent and is an example of civil
rights law that heightens racial divisions without proving discrimination. It's the kind of overreaching the Court began
rejecting in 1993-and which liberals defended unthinkingly
because it had become their status quo: "Right now, two
things can change the situationiSelwyn Carter of the Southern Regional Council told the Village Voice in June 1996 after
the Court invalidated the Texas districts. "We could get a new
Supreme Court justice who supportS democratic values. (Or]
minority voters ... can begin to mobilize." He, other activists,
and liberal editorialists missed a third option: Enough white
voters could "support democratic values" strongly enough to
cross racial lines.
It was a big thing to miss. A June 1996 New York Times editorial accused the Court of ignoring the "inescapable fact that
racially polarized voting makes it hard to elect minority candidates in majority-white districts." Yet it was millions of white
voters, not advocates and judges, who had also made L. Douglas Wilder the governor of Virginia and Carol Moseley-Braun a
senator from illinois; who had elected a dozen blacks as the
mayors of big, majority white cities; and who had sent Andrew
Young, Alan Wheat, Ron Dellums, Harold Ford, J.C. Watts,
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Gary Franks, and Julia Carson to the House from majoritywhite districts since 1972-all without voting rights litigation.
Voters, not judges, had been telling liberals to stop making
official what should be shameful-defining one's citizenship
mainly by color.
One. Mi,q~+ ~)t'pecA ~.....J
~ A4isbt tbir.:tk t~cflVlsts an journalists who believed
that white voters were so ineradicably racist that black Americans could be electe.d only with state-mandated gerrymandering would be delighted to find it unnecessary in 1996.
But for people who are chasing mirages of racial destiny, constantly on the lookout for racist threats to quicken their steps,
good news can be bad news: The Court's reintegration of politics must be "segregation," and blacks' victories at the hands
of white voters spell aefea~e
P, the ACLU,
the Times editorial ~oard, and other ofganizations and newspapers didn't celebrate the 1996 victories. "I must confess I
was surprised," the ACLU's McDonald told me a few days after
the election, ''but it is a mistake to rely on anecdotes to show
that voting is no longer polarized." The NAACP's Penda Hair
said that she would have to study exit polls and counts of registered voters by race before deciding what the results meant.
But no sifting of the results could deny the obvious: Even if
every black voter in the Georgia and Florida districts had gone
to the polls in 1996, and most whites had stayed home A
Bishop, McKinney, and Brown would still have to have gotten )
a lot of white votes to win as they did in these white-majority
districts. In fact, the white turnout in all three districts was
higher than the black.
Disoriented by the decline in racially polarized voting, some
VRA-district defenders argued that the black members' victories actually proved racial gerrymandering was essential. Without it, McDonald and Hair claimed, the victors would never
have become incumbents in the first place, and so wouldn't
have had the standing and track records white voters found
credible in 1996. The NAACP's Theodore Shaw, who had predicted that congressional blacks would be able to fit into a
taxicab, told the New York Times, "There was a question in my
mind whether incumbency would trump race, and it appears
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that it has." Before the election, neither Shaw nor other voting
rights activists had posed that question, much less expressed
the hope that incumbency would give the redistricted blacks a
fighting chance with nonblack voters; all, except David Bositis
of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, had
announced that they would lose.
As soon as some of the redistricted incumbents surprised
.Q..
observers by winning the 1996 Democratic primaries in their
new districts, the old, invalidated districts were~
having powered their victories. After Cynthia McKinney and
Sanford Bishop won the Georgia primaries in July, Atlanta
journal-Constitution editor Cynthia Tucker wrote that the
Supreme Court's rulings "accidentally ... handed them a
more suitable kind of affirmative action: a foot in the door and
no more. Given majority-black districts for only one election
cycle, [they had] the chance to prove themselves .... Affirmative action programs of that kind tend to be less divisive
because they do· not guarantee equal success, only equal
opportunity." That's nice; but even nicer-and, therefore,
unnoted by voting rights activists-is the truth that if incumbency helped blacks win white majorities in areas they'd never
represented before, then something fairly ordinary does
count more than race. The redistricted blacks "weren't incumbents in these districts. These were new districts," votingrights analyst Abigail Themstrom told the Times. Besides, the
list of blacks, like Indiana's newly elected representative Julia
Carson, who were winning without being incumbents in the
offices they sought, is growing. So another lesson of 1996 is
that while racial bloc voting persists and should not be dismissed out of hand, neither should we dismiss cross-racial
victories as aberrations. We should be studying them as
precedents.
Still another is that, even if the old VRA districts were a kind
of affirmative action, they were inappropriate in ways workplace affirmative action may not be. Elected officials are more
than public employees, and voters are more than employers:
Each elected official is "hired" not by an individual or company but by a diverse collection of citizens with varied
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commitments, views, and whims. Even if workplace hiring can
be micromanaged by affirmative action, political sovereignty
can't be, for it is ultimately about freedom, including the
freedom to make bad decisions. A democracy that relies on
civic virtue makes voting rights activists uneasy, because they
think only in terms of supposedly monolithic and undifferentiated racial groups: "Even when minority representatives can
be elected from districts that are not majority black, they
cannot be as effective if they find themselves serving two masters," activist Anita Hodgkiss told David Grann, writing for the
New Republic. That puzzled voting analyst Jerry Skurnik. "I
always thought representatives had thousands of masters," he
said.
Once every citizen has an equal vote on a basis that doesn't
prejudge his or her commitments or views, everything else is
up to the politics of persuasion. If citizens are bigoted or reckless in the voting booth, government can't stop them, because, at least on election day, they are the government.
Ultimately, civic virtue and the democra.tic arts must be cultivated in and by the people, not imposed by self-appointed
monitors. When the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, its Puerto
Rican analogue, and other groups insist otherwise, they are
not "civil rights" organizations, as the media call them, but
ethnic-advocacy groups.
Understanding this danger, the early civil rights movement
refused to write off all white voters as racists. It reached out to
them, even as it challenged them. The final lesson of 1996 is
that that politics of persuasion still works and that there is
more civic virtue in the people than their would-be keepers
assume. 'EJfheBtate must follow and not lead the character
and progress otche citizen," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in
his essay: "Politics;" "... the form of government which prevalls 1s ~e expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it. The law is only a memorandum.''
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Why can't activists on the right or the left grasp Emerson's
insight? The answers are rooted in leftist ideology, black ethnocentrism, white racial moralism (driven by guilt), and
simple partisan opportunism among both Republicans and
Democrats.
Leftist Ideology
q..-..._be
«n
~~n
The racial districting story
the odysseys of
leftist lawyers who got into the race business to make black
"empowerment" drive "progressive" economic change. In their
view, oppressed and excluded blacks bear not only special
wounds but a special social wisdom. Dr. King and John Lewis
bore that wisdom, and they, too, wanted to mobilize it in the
struggle against economic as well as racial divisions. At the
1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C., King
characterized constitutional guarantees of liberty as a kind of
"promissory note" which blacks had come, at last, to cash.
"We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt," he
added, putting liberals on the line not only politically but, as
his metaphor suggested, economically.
·
But because he was so close to ordinary black folk and· to
a Christian sense of human frailty, King was realistic about
the limited prospects of "overcoming" economic injustice
through poor people's movements. To academic leftist analysts, by contrast, who were breezier and at the same time
more dogmatic because they were more distant from the
ground, aggrieved blacks are the vanguard of revolutionary
change. In their view, a capitalist society must marginalize
some of its population in a "reserve army of the unemployed"
whose desperation keeps wages down. Thus, they say, capitalists employ racism to push blacks into that "army," giving
white America a continuing rationale for somebody's permanent marginalization. In contrast, the left champions racial
equality in order to expose the fiction ofwhite America's fantasies of an equal-opportunity society with no permanent.
class divisions. In this view, weaving the black thread right
into the center of the social fabric, as in racial districting, isn't
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only the right thing to do; it's also a way to unravel the fabric
itself, exposing its contradictions and lies.
Concentrating on race, not class, seems an astute tactic in a
society where law addresses injustices based on race but not
on class. Because law protects private property and its
owners' freedom to invest or disinvest as they see fit, it cannot
uproot economic inequities. So leftists, drawing upon King's
and Lewis's courage, learned to charge "racism" against public
officials and private corporations in court in order to destabilize the system by extracting material and political benefits for
the black poor. The activist sociologist Frances Fox Piven was
explicit about this in trying to flood New York's welfare rolls
with hundreds of thousands of blacks and Hispanics in the
1960s, when unemployment was low; in an unwitting analogy
to President Nixon's use of affirmative action to divide whiteethnic Democrats from black Democrats, Piven argued that
black demands for more welfare would so anger white taxpayers, thus disrupting the Democratic coalition, that nervous
liberal politicians would replace welfare with an even more
ambitious guaranteed minimum income for all Americans.
For activists steeped in this tradition of using race as a
proxy for class, voting rights litigation is but another front of
the struggle. In their hearts and minds, though riot on their
lawyerly lips, the language of racial "inclusion" is a proxy for a
language of economic transformation. But it is also an expression of leftist racial opportunism, for most people with dark
skins want to join the system, not serve as the vanguard of an
anticapitalist revolution. That is why black and white voters
together helped to reelect Florida's Corinne Brown, who had
proved herself a reliable provider of "pork" in military spending, and Georgia's Sanford Bishop, who looked after the interests of his "redneck" peanut farmers. However, many on the
left consider such blacks the victims of "false consciousness";
civil rights attorney and former Clinton nominee for U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Lani Guinier did write
that blacks who win in majority-white districts may not be
"authentic" representatives of their people. After the 1996
elections, the ACLU's Laughlin McDonald sounded almost
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mournful as he told me that Sanford Bishop's "voting record
is more Republican, to the right; that explains his success."
But since the law and the careers of activists like McDonald
constrain them to argue in terms of race, not class, they
couldn't object very loudly when, in 1996, some black politicians addressed white voters in the name of shared middleclass values and aspirations. The advocates and their Justice
Department colleagues were trapped defending a racial "inclusion" that subverted their more "progressive" political
agenda. Guinier was one of the few black voting rights activists to try to break out of that trap by calling for an end to all
geographical districting and the introduction of other systems
of voting that are beyond our scope here.
In fairness, voting rights liberals who aren't anticapitalist
face a poignant dilemma, too: The expanding black middle
class, living in mostly black suburbs and preoccupied with corporate success and consumption, is not quite what the civil
rights movement's "beloved community'' envisioned. Unease
and even regret about this are understandable, but they
hardly justify campaigns for "solutions" such as proportional
racial representation.
Black Ethnocentrism
J
Not all blacks do want to join the capitalist system, of course.
The more rudderless and valueless consumer culture becomes, the more people of all races are tempted to seek
havens in subcultures rooted in a particular ethnicity, ideology, or doctrine, not markets. Blacks, so long and so harshly
excluded from capitalist culture and so vulnerable to its enticements, have often felt ambivalent about joining it, even
when they could. The structures of endurance and resistance
they created across centuries of exclusion may not have been
"progressive" in an anticapitalist sense, but they were formidable redoubts of dignity. When such structures have
succumbed to the seductions of consumer marketing and
government entitlements, they are often sorely missed; it
can be as tempting to withdraw into folkish discipline, as
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c..!r\ tevo.:h~)
Louis Farr~han urges, as it is to seek ~n that
sense, Farrakhan's sympathizers and Christian fundamentalists often understand one another quite well.
Black leftists are more torn, and their voting rights confusion reflects it. On the one hand, they, like Farrakhan, want
blacks to deepen their solidarity against the system. On the
other, as "progressives," they want blacks to integrate the
system enough to join interracial coalitions that will change
the system itself. But if black solidarity has decayed into little
more than a collection of orchestrated insecurities, the
prospect of integration can be frightening. As the writer
Shelby Steele explains in The Content of Our CharacterA~A
brings "the shock of being suddenly accountable on stric~y
J
personal terms. [Integration shock] occurs in situations that
disallow race as an excuse for personal shortcomings and it
therefore exposes vulnerabilities that were previously hidden"
behind postures of group defiance and withdrawal. ''When
one Jacks the courage to face oneself fully," Steele continues,
"a fear of hidden vulnerabilities triggers a fright-flight response to integration shock. Instead of admitting that racism
has declined, we argue all the harder that it is still aljve and
more insidious than eve~(Hence the search for a proportional
racial representation that seems to keep blacks "authentically"
black, and whites white.
But if racism is thought to be on the rise and if black identity is inherently oppositional, then victories like Corinne
Brown's and Sanford Bishop's thanks to white voters must be
explained away. And as long as there are enough guilt-ridden
whites eager to make amends for racism, there is some
apparent reward for voting-rights activists' persistent claims of
victimization. They can try to have it both ways: They want
representation by reparation-the simulacrum of empowerment that comes with "safe" legislative seats-but not the real
power and responsibility that would come from organizing
and mobilizing thousands of voters. That is why turnout in the
districts they create is so low, and why the districts' champions are eerily untroubled by the apathy.
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White Liberal Moralism
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Some of the gloomiest black racists achieve an odd serenity
when they find whites who are guilt-ridden enough to defer
to their otherwise nonsensical ideas. It is one of the great
· incessant charges of racism: Those who
ironies behind
condemn whites the most flamboyantly tend to be those
who know that they can count on a deep reservoir of white
remorse and goodwill. On the night of her 1996 Democratic
primary victory in her new, majority-white district, Cynthia
McKinney did have to acknowledge this. She seemed at once
,
0
delighted and nonplussed: "The people of the ~nfffi Eiis£fiet
.. r4 ~
'..S }r-eo\- }
decided to get on board the history train!" she exulted,~ ~-r-----'
without specifying where she thought the train was heading. · ~
Two months later, she was back in court seeking the return of
her old, majority-black district-an irony that irritated some
white residents of her new district who had voted for her. The
New York Times ran a photograph of a smiling McKinney
resting her head endearingly on the shoulder of Laughlin
McDonald, the ACLU voting rights lawyer who had predicted a
return to the days of all-white government when the old district was invalidated. The story never mentioned that the two
were trying to get McKinney out of the district that had just
elected her.
.·
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Political Opportunism
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If ideologues, ethnocentrists, and moralists are driven to
racism by their illusions,/p"oliticians are drawn to it by opportunism. In public contfoversies over important principles,
most politicians are moral dilettantes: When they see narrow
political opportunities in moral posturing, they take them.
Republican operatives who helped liberal Democrats create
the majority-minority districts in some states saw an opportunity to escape from the Democratic habit of packing Republicans into a few GOP districts while spreading blacks, who are
usually Democrats, into mostly white districts, giving white
Democrats an edge against Republicans.
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As we have seen, the original VRA had already stopped
some of these practices, enabling real black and Hispanic
communities to send candidates of their choice to Congress.
But now that the 1982 amendments to the act had made race
as important a factor as partisan gain and were packing even
geographically dispersed minorities into special districts, the
adjacent white districts could become whiter and, potentially,
more susceptible to "us versus them" appeals by Republicans.
The GOP had avoided such talk when its representatives had
had black or Hispanic constituents. Now, they made race a
"wedge issue" to divide and regroup the electorate along partisan lines. Since districting is almost inherently partisan, no
one could blame Republicans for grabbing any legal tool to
counteract years of Democratic-run districting. Still, the GOP's
embrace of racial gerrymandering was cynical. For years, the
administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush had
denounced racial quotas and proportionalism. Now, the Bush
Justice Department had helped racial advocacy groups draw
districts pursuant to the 1982 amendments.
Activists who believed that minority "empowerment" would
come from corraling blacks and Hispanics into special districts
should have sensed their own tactical, if not philosophical,
blunder when they started getting logistical and financial support from conservative foundations and Republican Party
operatives. But black politicians seeking more "safe" seats for
themselves and their colleagues got greedy. "I'm not going to
sacrifice a black district to be a Democrat. I was black before I
was a Democrat," Kay Patterson, a South Carolina state senator who chaired that legislature's Black Caucus, told the conservative journalist Peter Brown. Such thinking made possible
the hypocritical collaboration of voting rights activists and
Republicans-"the ultimate political one-night stand," Brown
called it, knowing who'd feel "had" by morning: In 1994, the
newly whitened districts helped Republicans win Congress. As
the Supreme Court began to invalidate the new minoritymajority districts that had made this possible, Republicans fell
silent for awhile and seemed to acknowledge their hypocrisy.
But early in 1997, former Republican National Committee
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counsel Benjamin Ginsberg told representatives of black civil
rights groups at a Washington conference that a good deal of
racial districting remains possible under the new Court strictures and that the advocates' "best deal will again be with
Republicans'
But ·
emocrats hop back into bed with Republicans
--""'w~en redistricting resumes in 2001? White Democrats who
had backed the '82 amendments found themselves ~~
office after losing their nonwhite constituents. ~Contgressional Black Caucus grew by nine members,Gt found ttself
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more isolated in a Republican-run legislature, ~tripped of its
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powerful House committee chairmanships. ~I'
foreswear racial districting, even if it meant_losi~
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was enacte , emocrats .... au ~
~hvsys bargained ethnically and racially. They ~-Q_,
urban machines that preached "the American Way" while
catering to loyalists along carefully patrolled ethnic and racial
lines. In a sense, the 1982 VRA amendments merely ratcheted
_~
up this unofficial practice into a legally mandated formula.
~
_ __.,.. But there is something to e sat or the o , arm bal~o
ancing of ethnic and "American" loyalties. Because it did not
make racial or ethnic identity the official foundation of public
policy, this balancing offered more incentive for such graduates of the old ethnic spoils systems as Barbara Jordan and
Mario Cuomo to transcend their parochial ethnic and racial
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as proportional racial representation cost such Democrats
white support, it left them more dependent on keeping black
and Hispanic activists and politicos happy, even if that meant
encouraging Balkanization.
Some have learned better since 1994 and again since 1966,
when, ironically, Supreme Court rulings against racial districting shifted some of Cynthia McKinney's and Sanford Bishop's
former black constituents back into neighboring white districts. The Republicans there were reelected but by smaller
margins, and they may now be more responsive to blacks'
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:!. SpoKe
concerns. Most liberal Democrats PYe spolEeR with acknowledge111that racial districting h .\Jbeen a 1s s er. But the black
incumbents among them were trapped in their short-run
gains, even if not in racial loyalty or ideology-trapped, that is,
until the voters liberated them almost despite themselves.
Since good racial news discomfits those who tout racial,vic....
timization, messengers bringing good news can't be endured.
In 1982 two lobbyists for the VRA amendments told Abigail
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"If you testify against
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the amendments, we will blacklist you with every politician
and voting rights lawyer you want to interview for your book."
d.tsfr,··c..fi ~J
Although her Whose Votes Count? won four impressive awards
from organizations such as the American Bar Association, a
review by University of Virginia law professor Pamela Karlan
and voting rights activist Peyton McCrary claimed that it "so
distorts the evidence that it cannot be taken seriously as
scholarship." The liberal Twentieth Century Fund, which
sponsored the book, forgot to list it among all its other books
in a seventy-fifth anniversary publication.
"We need electoral arrangements that deliver the right messages," Thernstrom wrote in the Washington Post in 1991.
"And the right messages are: that we are all Americans, that
we're in this together, that the government thinks of us and
treats us as individual citizens with individual (not group)
rights, that whites can represent blacks and blacks can represent whites, that we have no need for legislative quotas,
since distinct racial and ethnic groups are not nations in our
society~ ... " Her essay, entitled "A Republican-Civil Rights
Conspiracy," condemned both sides for betraying that vision.
Liberal voting-rights activists dismissed Thernstrom's words
as naively ahistoric,Aor, worse, as pieties covering racism. But
in 1996, the words took on an historic ring. "I am not your
African-American candidate; I am the Democratic candidate
for Congress," said Indiana's Julia Carson on the eve of her
victory in a heavily white congressional district, sounding the
winning note that unnerves liberal racists because it reverses
their view of the world.
Ethnocentric activists, their conservative collaborators, and
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LIBERAL RACISM
others who have supported racial districting need a new language that begins with three simple words: 'We were wrong."
They were wrong about the intent and spirit of the Voting
Rights Act. They were wrong about the Supreme Court's rulings again~t using race as the dominant factor in districting.
They were wrong about messengers of the good news that
Americans will reward something better; indeed, they were
wrong about the voters. themselves. And they are still wrong,
because their unspoken goal remains not integration but proportional racial representation that has no place in an America
that is overcoming its racism, past and present.
I first understood that racial destiny is a fantasy as I
watched Lyndon Johnson say, 'We shall overcome," and realized that he had been driven to say it by the moral example of
John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. Lewis was right to say,
during the 1992 reapportionment, that when he defied
Selma's Sheriff Clark he was hoping "to create an interracial
democracy in America ... not separate racial enclaves," and
that the VRA's purpose should be "to create a climate in which
people of color will have an opportunity to represent ... all
Americans." He risked his life for that vision; King lost his life
for it. In the 1996 elections, unsung heroes in voting booths
instructed those who were sliding away from that vision not to
give up on it. What they should give up on instead are their
fantasies of racial destiny .
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• What's at Stake
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One New York Times reporter who covered the voting
rights marches in Selma in 1965 was the future bestselling
author Gay Talese, whose The Kingdom and the Power is a
history of that paper. In March 1990, when civil rights leaders
returned to Selma to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the
marches, Talese got the Times to send him back, too, to
describe how the town had changed since Sheriff Clark's billy
clubs had prompted Lyndon Johnson's "We shall overcome."
Talese learned that Randall Miller, a black man who had taken
injured marchers to the hospital in 1965, was now the city's
personnel director, and that, on the day when Selma would
commemorate the marches, Miller would marry a white woman in an integrated gathering and neighborhood within earshot of the public ceremonies.
Talese and a Times photographer covered the wedding with the couple's permission, photographing them and
Selma's mayor to produce vivid testimony to profound racial
change. The Times published Talese's account, beginning on
page 1, but not the wedding photo, which, Talese learned,
a black editor had objected to running. Years later, at a symposium on the yedia, Talese asked the paper's assistant
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LIBERAL RACISM
managing editor, Gerald Boyd, whether it was he who'd
dropped the photo, and, if so, why. Boyd replied that he had
indeed nixed the picture, because, he said, it was "boring ....
To show an integrated couple on the front page wasn't news.
The picture didn't represent anything new."
"In Selma?" Talese asked incredulously. Boyd stuck tQ his
argument.
"I didn't feel he was being candid," Talese told me later. "I
grew up in the North but attended the University of Alabama
from 1949 to 1953, and what I saw in those four years was a
separate country, a different America. It was still that way in
1965, when I went to Selma for the Times. We all bring our
own experiences to what we write; there's no such thing as
purely objective reporting. But here, I thought this man's
judgment was just wrong. I mean, to see this couple hand in
hand, with no Klan outside the door, not far f
Edmund Pettus Bridge [where the marchers were confronted
by state troopers J,1well, that says something."
Not to everyone, it doesn't. For some, "good" racial news
implies more progress than they would like. What may strike
whites as progress may not be welcomed by blacks: Some may
dislike racial integration in adoptions, sexual relations, and
matrimony, for example, tolerating it as the private choice of
individuals, yet resenting it as a betrayal of black pride.
Boyd denies having been uncomfortable in any of these
ways. At an International Press Freedom Awards ceremony
late in 1996, Talese felt a tap on his shoulder, turned, and saw
a smiling Boyd say, "I didn't do what you think I did"meaning (in Talese's estimation, since Boyd didn't elaborate)
that he had vetoed the photo, but not for any "racial" reason .
But, with all due respect to whatever Boyd's feelings about
highlighting the marriage may have been, such a photo in the
Times would indeed have been striking. Given millions of
Americans' memories and hopes, the marriage was a cultural,
even historic, event. The Times would have been wrong to
withhold it in deference to anyone's discomfort with interracial marriage. (At one time, such a photo would have been
withheld in d~fere~segregation~is<•~'~ .)J
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Talese couldn't shake his doubts about the decision because he had come to feel that the Times deferred too often
to a new liberal racism. At the symposium he complained that
the paper's news reporting was too "correct" and often Jacked
"a sense of reality." This matters, for the Times is the cerebrum of national print and broadcast journalism: Every evening at around 9 PM, Eastern Time, the first edition of the next
day's paper is delivered or faxed to editors at other newspapers and to senior producers of network television news
departments around the world. The Times helps them to decide what to select as "news that's fit to print" from the day's
torrent of voices and events, and what to publicize "without
fear or favor"-as the paper's own mottos put it. Talese's and
Boyd's discomfort over the photograph demonstrates the
high stakes at which even relatively unimportant decisions are
made.
Also influential are the Times~ own opinions about people
and events, presented in editorials that are the paper's "official," institutional voice, and in essays written by half a dozen
Times columnists on the "op-ed" (short for "opposite the editorial") pages. At issue here is not only what positions the
Times takes on controversial issues, but also how it takes
them: The most constructive way to debate an issue in an
open society is to take one's opponents' best arguments into
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account, for the goal is not to score points, as student deba1\ ~rs do, but to find intellectually and politically viable solutions
to real problems. Doing that in editorials requires intelligent
thinking and persuasion, not cheap shots or intimidation.
Every news medium must earn its audience's trust every
day. Like the Pope, after all, the Times has no troops to make
anyone defer to its judgments. Its credibility depends ultimately on the respect accorded it by readers who are active in
civic life, politics, industry, the arts, and in a shared, if complicated, national civic culture. Times editorials affirm these
readers' integrity by serving up smart insights and sound arguments upon which busy and powerful people depend, and by
articulating standards by which they are willing to be called to
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LIBERAL RACISM
account. Readers want to be informed and persuaded, not
peppered with propaganda or cheaply shamed.
·Yet even the cerebrum of a strong national community is
but a fragile craft in history's tides; it can drift, lose course,
and founder. A growing number and variety of observers, writing in publications as diverse as the Columbia journalism Review, the Forbes Media Critic, the San Francisco Chronicle,
and .the Washington Post, have been complaining that the
Time4cultural and political coverage has become less responsible m the ways I've just mentioned and too much in harness
to assumptions that ought to be subject to more debate in its
pages. They charge that Times reportage and commentary are
skewed by racial and sexual groupthink-by a "diversity"
mind-set that hobbles good journalism because it lacks "a
sense of reality," as Talese put it.
The old Times could be narrow and flawed, but at least it
was grounded in classical liberal principles that emphasized
individuals' rights, empirically based rational analysis, and,
with these, a healthy skepticism about the pronouncements
and policies of anyone in power. The "old" journalism was
sometimes deferential and sentimental toward established
power and custom, but its humanist principles made it
sensitive to injustices the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War
movements exposed and quick to spot obfuscation and
obstruction. The same principles make good journalists skeptical of even insurgent groups or movements, which, as they
grow in power, are prone to obfuscate and obstruct. When
the gains of the civil rights and other social "revolutions" are
institutionalized-as in racial districting for "voting iights"-it
may not be long before the classical liberal principles to which
those revolutions appealed are abused, betraying even the
supposedly "empowered." Good journalists are not crusaders
or missionaries. Their job is to uncover the truth, even when
it hurts.
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• What Wasn't Fit to Print
By the mid-1990s, observers like Talese suspected that a
new Times mind-set was enforcing an unfeeling obeisance to
liberal racial myths that are corrosive of true liberal principles,
and, with them, of freedom. That disquieting shift, the subject
of this chapter, was all too evident in the Timesfc"ommentary
and coverage of the 1996 voting rights controversies-a stark
illustration not only of liberals' misplaced moralism, ethnocentrism, and opportunism, but also of .the media's astonishing deference to them.
As the Supreme Court began to invalidate congressional
districts shaped more by race than by the usual partisan linedrawing, Times editorials and even news coverage reinforced
the civil rights establishment's belief that challenges to racial
districts foretold a return to the segregationist past. Editorial
after editorial accused the justices of using "topsy-turvy logic"
that "could start a second post-Reconstruction movement
in American politics, strangling fledgling efforts to secure a
more integrated national legislature" (December 24, 1994). In
a 1993 ruling, according to the Times, Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor practiced "Jurassic Park jurisprudence" by posing
hard questions about racial districting and ordering a lower
court to hear arguments against a convoluted majority-black
district in North Carolina.
By 1996, this inability to consider other obvious explanations had become a disability. When the Supreme Court invalidated racial districting in Texas, bringing to seven the number
of "majority-minority" districts it had struck down, a Times
editorial cried, "One hundred years after the Supreme Court's
decision in Plessy v. Ferguson set back the cause of racial justice by approving a doctrine of 'separate but equal,' a majority
of the current Court members have demonstrated a perverse
determination to resegregate the nation's politics. A century
from now, fair-minded Americans are bound to view the
Court's evisceration of the Voting Rights Act this week with
regret and even shame" Qune 6, 1996).
Actually, as we saw in the last chapter, it took fair-minded
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Americans less than six months to return a true verdict on the
effect of racial redistricting, by reelecting five black incumbents who'd moved to new, majority-white districts. The only
people with occasion for shame turned out to be those voting
rights officials, activists, and editorial writers who endorsed
- 13\./"t fo..r
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using race as the dominant factor in districting. J}i.ore sur.tf
prising than the Times~myopia about th1s was 1ts stark malfeasance in refusing to acknowledge the results. Its election
coverage simply didn't report or comment on the momentous victories by blacks whose old districts had been eliminated by the rulings the paper had protested so loudly. Only
.- s
after I had called attention to the Times' Sifence in the New
.
Republic did it run a news story, on a Saturday, about the victories. The story was thorough, balanced-and three weeks
late.
The editorial page remained silent. ':Journalists are prone
to vanity, and we do like to think of ourselves as threats to
power and foolishness," editorial-page editor Howell Raines
has written. Apparently, after the 1996 elections, it was he
who felt threatened. Six months before the election, Raines
had emphasized the importance of challenging conventional
wisdom in his critique of the journalist James Fallows's argument in Breaking the News, that reporters should spend less
time chasing "horse-race" election stories and more time
working with communities to improve public debate and civic
consensus. "[The] wisdom of democracy is forged in the
rowdy ceremonies of the campaign trail and ... unrestrained
debate," Raines retorted, and "the participation of mainstream
print journalists in this process as skeptical observers, cri~---\ .. ~
and analysts is a high, venerable and independent calling~t\
X
Raines saw an "insidious danger when reporters and editors'
become public-policy missionaries with a puritanical con--e___
tempt for horse-race politics~ZQw ¥or le 'Fime&, Eebmaey 25,
1~~6)~
.
Yet when the rowdy ceremonies of the campaign trail
forged a new wisdom about racial districting, the Times opinion pages suppressed all debate. Before the elections, no
ruling against racial districting had escaped Raines's denuncia-
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tion. After them, the editorial page never mentioned, much
less applauded, the "fair-minded Americans" who, oblivious of
doomsaying, had reelected black incumbents. No essay submitted to the op-ed page on the subject was published. Times
columnists ducked, too. Before the elections, Anthony l;ewis
had warned that "the reality in the South is that black men
and women, however well qualified, have little chance of winning in white districts." After the elections, Lewis said nothing
at all.
The Times remained silent a few months later, when, in its
own backyard, the federal court in New York's Eastern District
invalidated the "Hispanic" 12th congressional district. There
was no editorial. There were no op-ed pieces. There were
news stories on the decision, but the Times did not report any
~ew with Angel Diaz, the lead plaintiff (see.£bapter 3)
/
who)\ Rep. Velazquez now charged was a "puppet""" of rightwing conservatives. Perhaps liberal racism led reporters to
take her word for it, to assume that an Hispanic Republican in
n
a poor Brooklyn neighborhood must be someone's inarticuO 1
-late dupe. lll'e eRe 'ee~ieesrNewsday editorial writer Joseph \: n Y
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Once again, the Time~function~ore as a social policy
f\
missionary than as a newspaper. Its "social and political values
are easily discerned in its pages," noted Washington Post
ombudsman Richard Harwood in a column commenting on
Raines's essay about Fallows. And the perils of a liberal racist
mind-set are all the more dangerous when its very existence is
denied. "People get notions of how Machiavellian the Times
is," Susan Rasky, a former staffer there,
n Francisco
Examiner media critic David Arrnstrono· "It's a big, lumbering
machine; it wouldn't know how to be politically correct." But
the problem is not a Machiavellian conspiracy; it is the subtle
transformation of editors' and reporters' thinking by unspoken assumptions that gain ground at a paper as they do in
the liberal professional social stratum from which its journalists increasingly come.
The Times is hardly the progenitor of liberal disdain for
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74 • LIBERAL RACISM
ordinary people of all colors, but its pres.tige and its pose as a
defender of helpless blacks against oppressive white majorities serve to chill reasonable criticism of outlandish racial
assumptions. In 1991, when Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., inherited
the publisher's · office from his politically more moderate
father, he announced that news would no longer be viewed
only from a "white, male, and straight" perspective. Whether
there is such a perspective · most news oug t to ave been
debated, not assumed. "Arthur keeps talking about the day
being long past when the news will be· told only through the
straight, white, male point of view," a Times reporter told the
journalist Robert Sam Anson for Esquire magazine. "Who is
this white male? Adolf Hitler? Albert Schweitzer? MefWFio, for
that matter, are black males? Asian females? The answers are
not as simple as they seem in the news coverage and commentary of most liberal media.~
• Diversity's Rich lr~m~es mtnd.·sy/
, C.hClro.cfen~ ( ~ ' tiJJ
To understand how thet\fim':ijiits race wrong, consider a
pair of columns by Frank Rich, the paper's former theater
critic, whom Sulzbergerfpicked to review the theater of politics on the op-ed page"under editorial rpage editor Raines's
supervision. In an October 18, 1995 coh~mn about the Million
Man March entitled "Fixated on Farrakhan," Rich condemned
Louis Farrakhan but was even more emphatic about the
underlying social causes of his rise:
The pre-march attacks on Mr. Farrakhan did nothing to deter
400,000 African-Americans, only a minority of whom support the
Nation of Islam, from turning up in Washington to express their
impassioned desire to stem the economic and social collapse of
their own communities .... By continuing to fixate on Mr. Farrakhan, rather than the legitimate concerns of the 400,000
marchers, white politicians only give their nemesis more credibility and power. It is the failure of the entire political establishment to heed the spiraling crisis of the black underdass in the
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75
first place that gave the extremist Mr. Farrakhan his opening to
seize a resonant mainstream issue as his own .
This admonition to hear the dissatisfied, not the demagogue,
was a legitimate contribution to public debate. Although Rich
didn't mention it, Newt Gingrich had said much the same
thing, opining to 1V talk-show host Larry King that if blacks'
level of pain was so great that only a Farrakhan could speak to
_in
it, politicians ought to pay heed. What was wrong ~-Ki-c"'"h"T's---· I'
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mind-set was clear a year later, when he wrote about a "mostly
white million man march" which, he reported, is coalescing
under the aegis of Promise Keepers, an evangelical men's
·~~
movement, one of whose rallies h7{ittended at Shea Stadium.
This time, he reversed his emphasis· completely, fixating on
the supposed demagogues, not the dissatisfied. The latter he
dispatched as follows: "During a ·marathon rally of sermonizing, singing and praying, the [35,000 men at Shea] also
repeatedly sobbed and hugged each other-or, more joyously, slapped high-fives while repeating the chant, 'Thank
God I'm a man!'" (September 25, 1996).
How many actually sobbed while hugging one another is
unclear in Rich's column, but Rafael Olmeda, the Daily News
reporter quote m
_s.Tiapter 1 and who covered the Shea
Stadium rally, told memat most of the behavior resembled
that at Farrakhan's event, which also h~d tears, hugs, highfives, and elements of religious revival. More troubling was
Rich's failure to report that the stadium crowd was about 25
percent black and Hispanic and that whites and nonwhites
greeted and sat next to one another as individuals. Perhaps
because he shares Sulzberger's belief that 'We're all going to
have to understand [our racial and sexual] differences, be
aware of them, know what they mean, understand that we
don't all see the world ... the same way," Rich did not report
or comment on what Promise Keepers founder ;Bill McCartney, who is white but the grandfather of two interracial
children, told the rally: A "spirit of white racial superiority,"
warned McCartney, deepens "insensitivity to the pain of people
of color."
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LIBERAL RACISM
Because Rich saw the crowd as white, he did not detect any
~mpassioned desire to stem the economic and social collapse"
f\ of these men's communities. Many at Promise Keepers rallies
have endured family breakdown, driven in part by economic
and cultural upheavals that leave them feeling materially and
emotionally bereft. Rich sneered at them. "The Promise
Keepers I met at Shea seemed more motivated by a Robert
Blyesque hunger to overcome macho inhibitions and reconnect with God than by any desire to enlist in a political army.
But an army PK [Promise Keepers] most certainly is."
Having caricatured the men at Shea, Rich devoted most of
his column to the rally's organizers, whose counterparts at
Farrakhan's march he had all but ignored:
.
._ ,
Alfred Ross, who researched Planned Parenthood's early, preOklahoma City warnings about the militia movement, says that
PK is the heir to Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertso_n ·s
Christian Coalition as "the third wave of the religious right's
assault on American democr.acy and values"-a view he airs in
the current issue of Tbe Nation. The journalist Fred Clarkson
writes ... that PK is "the most dynamic element of the Christian
right of the mid 1990s" and "a front and recruiting agency" for its
political ambitions.
These and other critics cite PK's anti-feminist call for men to
"take back" power from women, its cult-like psychology and its
authoritarian, military-modeled organization, with its proliferating network of local cells. Particularly ominous are the many
ideological and financial links between the PK hierarchy and
ort,>anizations that are pushing the full religious-right agenda of outlawing abortion, demonizing homosexuals, and bringing prayer
and the teaching of creationism to public schools .
This agenda is the same as Louis Farrakhan's, of course; the
Nation of Islam is nothing if not cultlike and militaryA'fiodeled.
At Shea, the News'f.Olmeda saw and spoke with liberal black
and Hispanic pastors from Brooklyn and the Bronx. "They're
against abortion," he told me, "but that's as far right as they
go. The closest thing to a demagogue I saw was Chuck
Colson, and neither he nor anyone else said a word about
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77
politics, except to say that the event crossed all political and
racial lines." What Rich encountered at Shea was a mass of
people who reject many of his beliefs, as did many on the
Washington Mall the year before. Back then, Rich's sensitivity
to black suffering numbed his reaction to the demagoguery
on the podium; now, no such inhibition blocked him from
taking alarm at a demagoguery he thought he saw, in whiteface, at Shea. He ended his Promise Keepers column with a
warning:
The mainstream media , , . mainly cover PK as a human-interest
story. But if the press was right (and it was) to ask how the leader
of the last, black Million Man March might exploit that event's
honorable goals and participants for his own insidious political
aims, surely it's past time to apply the same scrutiny to a mostly
white million man march of equally controversial provenance and
porentially far greater political force.
The disingenuous twist here is that, actually, the media had
covered the Million Man March mainly as a benign human
interest story, not an occasion to probe Farrakhan's exploitation. Rich had warned the media not to "fixate" on how Farrakhan might manipulate the event for his own insidious aims
but to focus instead on the yearnings of the men in attendance. Again, that is fair. But there were similar yearnings at
Shea, and Rich didn't mention them. And since he is a perceptive fellow, such an omission can have but one explanation:
His liberal racism determined what he could bring himself to
observe and report.
Rich missed yet another development relevant to these rallies, but, then, so did every other commentator at every other
liberal publication in the United States. Two days after OJ
Simpson's acquittal divided the nation, and ten days before Americans were riveted by Farrakhan's march, Pope john
Paul II led hundreds of thousands of worshippers of all colors
at masses in an inner-city cathedral, a racetrack, and a sports
stadium in New Jersey and New York. The Times covered the
visit lavishly, yet no editorial or column after the Farrakhan
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march assessed
even notedlche remarkable contrasts
between it and the racially integrated outpouring of social and
religious faith led by the Pope. Racial groupthink and "religiophobia" denied some journalists a full awareness of what was
unfolding before them under the aegis of a Roman Catholic
Church that, mirtil/e dictu, Fiad become one of racial mtegration's best hopes)\
My point is not that journalists should applaud the Church
but that they should ponder the ironies in its influence. What
does it mean to Frank Rich and the New York Times that the
Archie and Edith Bunkers whom the Pope led in prayer might
well have flocked to the polls to support Colin Powell had he
become the Republican presidential nominee against Bill
Clinton? What does it mean to Rich and the Times that of the
five Catholic high schools built in northern Manhattan at the
start of this century, when the area's population was white, all
five are still operating and sending disproportionate numbers
of their poor black and Hispanic graduates on to college, while
other religious institutions moved on as the area's ethnic and
racial composition changed? If news features, editorials, and
columns are evidence, these things mean nothing at all.
Nothing Rich has written suggests that he sees the Catholic
Church as anything but a redoubt of sexism, homophobia,
and priestly obscurantism. Show him masses of white-ethnic
men yearning together with blacks and Hispanics, and, somehow, he sees militias forming. As a columnist, he is entitled to
his opinions. My point is that his columns explicate the mindset that governs Times coverage of the news under Sulzberger. Such is the paper's distance from ordinary New Yorkers,
and, indeed, most Americans, that few who attended the Shea
...1!adium rally would have read Rich's column about it, and
=anyone who did would have found himself portrayed as a
rather dangerous fellow or a dupe, preoccupied with "macho"
predilections and sexist fears.
Most Times coverage of political and social movements and
trends isn't as pointed and accusatory as Rich's. Yet much of
it assumes and ignores what he assumes and ignores. Any
reporter who is unlucky enough to view the world as smugly
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and myopically as Rich does-and, remember, he is Sulzberger's choice for an important columnist's perch-is going
to miss or mischaracterize people who are decent but different in ways that don't conform to approved and internalized notions of "diversity.".
..
• Mindless Diversity
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How can such a mind-set get hold of journalists, who are
skeptical and irreverent by nature? One answer is that mindsets come in handy under pressure. Plunged daily into a torrent of actors and events out of which they must make some
sense on a deadline, journalists use whatever story lines or
narratives are already in their heads or easily at hand. All of us
do this, but journalists are supposed to interview stranaers
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an ta e leaps of social and moral imagi:J
nation to explain wlfat they see. A journalist's best asset is a
· f\.
mind well trained and furnished by liberal education-the
kind of mind Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy
characterizes as "animated by a liberal, individualistic, and universal ethos which is skeptical of ... the particularismsnational, ethnic, religious, and racial-which seem to have
grown so strong recently.... "
When pressures to impose certain racial and sexual story
lines come not only from,(fhe street but from managers hellbent on reforming a newspaper itself, some journalists will
adopt the quasi-official mind-set as a matter of both convenience and conviction. They will do it about as thoroughly as
their predecessors adopted and internalized the institutional
racism of white-male newsrooms, where liberals of goodwill
believed (or kept telling themselves) that they were standardbearers of justice. Journalists at conservative papers such as
the New York Post and the Washington Times adopt mindsets, too. It is bad enough that most of us become creatures of
habit as we age, but it is sadder to see bright young reporters
closed off to freedom of thought.
Times editorials and news stories about racial, sexual, and
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other cultural controversies often read as if they were hatched
in corporate management seminars that conscript simplistic
notions of identity into battles for bigger market shares.
Sulzberger believes that "managed diversity" is as good for
business as it is for social redemption. :'Diversity is the single
most important issue facing this paper," he has said. "If we
were only doing this to change the paper and not to make
money, then it legitimately would be a harder thing to do. But
I don't think we have a problem here .... " But he does have a
problem. To reconcile its corporate bottom line with "diversity training" and multicultural news coverage, a newspaper
has to caricature individuals and the subcultures to which
they may or may not belong.
"Managed diversity is even bigger than affirmative action,"
Sulzberger says. It is not enough just to hire a more racially
and sexually varied workforce, he says. The company must
embrace that variety "through training. We are all going to
have to understand those differences, be aware of them,
know what they mean, understand that we don't all see the
world . . . in the same way. . . . Managed diversity is about
changing the way we view each other and the way we view the
news .... You can see it reflected in the pages of the paper
every day."
Americans certainly don't all see the world in the same way.
But neither do they like to think that their differences run
unerringly along racial and sexual group lines, as opposed to,
say, individual, religious, class, or geographical lines. Part of
the story of every racial and ethnic group that has entered the
United States in significant numbers-from Anglo-Saxon
Protestants to the latest Chinese immigrants-is bitter exploitation or repression by members of its own group, even in
America. Yet the Times too often assumes that the racial and
sexual differences are the important ones, and, like Frank Rich
at Shea Stadium, it is inclined to report that they are even in
when they aren't.
For ample historical reasons, black people do tend to
express themselves along racial-group lines in opinion polls
more often than do Hispanics, Asians, and even whites, but
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there is no good reason for news media ·to defer and even to
pander to that tragic tendency. The history of black racial solidarity and exceptionalism, fostering a feeling of entitlement to
play by different rules, is as old as racism itself. Yet differences
that are vital to serious undertakings, be they business ventures or politidtl movements, have little to do with cultural
differences coded by color, surname, or sex. Coding people
this way and calling it "awareness" eclipses important, raceneutral standards and needs. Sulzberger insists that manaaed
diversity shakes up the white
ractst arrangements and
assumptions: "If white men weren't complaining, it wou
e
an indication that we weren't succeeding and making the
inroads that· we are." But by labeling people much as the old
white male system did, managed diversity reinforces the
assumption that skin colors betoken profound differences.
_The strategy is reductive and counterproductive, as is evident
from this note accompanying a survey report in A Changing
Times, the newspaper's in-house "diversity newsletter":
An apology from the Mentoring team: Becoming more sensitive
to and better understanding diversity is a learning process for
all of us, and mistakes are bound to be made. We inadvertently
overlooked "Asian" as a designated choice among the various
ethnic groups represented. We apologize for the oversight
(October/November 1994).
The "mentoring team," one of twenty-three diversity action
teams which Sulzberger has "challenged and empowered ...
to assist in the creation of a Human Resources infrastructure"·
to promote "diversity" at the paper, had taken a survey to correlate employees' mentoring patterns or preferences with
their race or ethnicity. It meant to ask whether "Asian"
employees tended to have mentors and whether those mentors were "Asian," too, or of another "designated" ethnicity.
But no useful information about individual employees is conveyed by labels such as "Asian," "Hispanic," "Caucasian," and
"African American." For example, two years ago an Hispanic
Times reporter protested that he was being patronized by a
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LIBERAL RACISM
diversity trainer who assured him that Hispanics have "strong
family values." Which values? And who are Hispanics? Puerto
Ricans in the Bronx? Mexican Americans in East Los Angeles?
Cubans in Coral Gables?
Surely the word "Asian," for whose omission the mentoring
team apologized, is a white imposition upon people& as
diverse as Afghanis, Pakistanis, Indians, Vietnamese, Chinese,
Koreans, Japanese, and twenty others. What cultural characteristics do they share? Should editors and reporters be
"aware" of such differences as they work with individuals designated as "Asian"? What if Pakistani Muslims have beliefs
about family structure, women's roles, and homosexuality
that are anathema to Sulzberger? What will his understanding
"that we don't all see the world ... the same way" do for
them? Should an "Asian" reporter and a black reporter (who
may be from Ghana or Baltimore) ·be sent together to cover
an angry black boycott of Korean stores in Brooklyn? Qr IL
<2/ ~culo humanist principles count more than racialist ones in
guiding a paper's coverage of a boycott that dishonors truthtelling and even civil disobedience? Diversity "is reflected in
our news coverage, and in our ability to cover the news,"
Sulzberger says. If so, how?
And what about the impact of diversity labeling on whites
in-house? Should we be "aware" of cultural differences among
whites, too? If so, should we be "aware". of Sulzberger's own
mixed, German-JeWish and WASP heritage? By his logic, aren't
such differences also important? Shouldn't he participate in a
diversity-training session with top management to air and
explore them?
By mid-1996, it was clear to many that the quasi-therapeutic
s.
t':;a,-ey-=»---a-:b:-s-u.._r_d~ of managed diversity caused more problems -t•h-a-n-~than they resolved, and that not all opposition to them could
be dismissed as racist. Irving Levine, a seasoned intergroup
relations expert who worked for Jewish organizations during p
the 1950s and '60s, told me years ago that~ "ethnotherapy''
"<..
workshops uncovereQ'"" participants' "extraordinary ambivalence about their identity. Ethnicity is as explosive as sex,
death, and money .... Ten different explosions can be waiting
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to happen in a room." Happen they do, as the political
philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain told me recently:
I mean, here are all these diversity trainers running around
earning a living keeping people divided. The last thing they want
is for other people to be anything but divided and suspicious.
Otherwise, the trainers would be out of work. They treat people
like infants, like jerks. They make it morally acceptable for some
people to beat up on others because they were born a certain sex
or gender. What do they invite? Only more hostility (IJ:mmcie•;H ey
untRor, )nne ~ ·
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··"
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Confronted with this truth, the Times and other large corporations are adjusting their policies. When Sulzberger was
crusading openly for liberal racism at the paper in 1994, he
said:
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The culture change has to start with senior managemenb
[But] if the rest of the organization is going to wait for 100 per- •
cent of senior management to do 100 percent of diversity, we're
never going to get anywhere. And middle managers and all
the other employees have to commit to this just as strongly,
because some senior managers aren't going to change until the
pressure from the bottom is as strong as the pressure from the
top. . . . Increasingly, any middle or senior manager's or any
employee's advancement is going to depend on how he or
she deals with these fundamental issues (A GhR1'1@.1'1€; 'FimeJ,
_9_
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controversy at Texaco
Now some companies have added pragmatism to idealism ....
Besides sending managers to diversity training they are telling
them to change their behavior: either you help promote minorities and women with their careers, they are told, or your paycheck, and maybe your job, will be in jeopardy.... Of course,
there are chief executives who believe that bigotry can be trained
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out of existence. It is often the people in the trenches, the ones
who have tried that route, who say it is futile .
. . . Edward N. Gadsden, a black man who became. Texaco's
direcwr of diversity three years ago, puts much more stock in a
new program to base part of managerial bonuses on the retention of minorities and women. "I am not in the business of attitudinal change," he said. "We need to establish a culture rhar
specifies the behaviors you will exhibi~ - -
•
Champions of managed diversity seem to have forgotten, or
never to have known, that there is an alternative to either
heightening "awareness" of presumed cultural differences or,
~iling that, to parceling out rewards along color-coded lines,
--g._
\Se.£1'\t'\.S to be cloi~. J
a5\fl.e Texaco 6tory eY~ests is beiAg doAJ"The better alterna--r;:
tive is to nurture and reward people who can implement .Q
I.\,. Thurgood Marshall's observatio~~ "we wdl only attain
')
freedom if we learn to appreciate what is different and muster
the courage to discover what is fundamentally the same."
Sulzberger wants employees to muster the courage to disI
cover what is different. What does he fear mig~h.;.:t~h=ar:Ps;.P.::e:.:....:ni::..f______-EB-~::...._- believ~J..
they epLiated mme cannily on the a;,!t!mptiOi{iliat, in most
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matters that count in public ·life, everyone is fundamentally
the same?
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What Sulzberger fears but will not say, I think, is that if
every manager adhered faithfully to classical liberal procedures and to standards scrubbed free of racial bias, fewer
blacks would make the grade. Yes,~sometimes a low estimation of blacks' readiness to compete is prompted by racism.
But sometimes its prompte by ard eVI ence
seasoned
managers wish they had never seen but can no longer eny.
For every story a black reporter tells about the "glass ceiling"
that blocks black promotions, a white colleague can tell a
story about "going the extra mile" for a young black reporter
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with substantial skill deficiencies and even, perhaps, a head
full of demons that scrambled others' signals.
The point at which "different folkways" become "deficiencies" is a matte~dispute and confusion, of course. But there
is nothing racist about acknowledging skill deficienciessome of which may, indeed, reflect the legacies of racism that
also become easier to acknowledge in a climate of candor
about racism's costs. In When Work Disappears, the sociologist William julius Wilson surveys urban employers, black as
well as white, who are reluctant to hire young black men.
0
These men described by the employers iA Wil5eH'5 beel!,_a_r_e--<~
culturally different, but is theirs a "difference" which anyone
with work to do can respect? A shipping company or foodprocessing plant hasn't time or resources to cut damaged
~---!....----,.:......._
people
slack, least of all by characterizing their deficienuc.h
u..:~~J----:c:::ie~s=-=as=-=-c:::ultural differences.
A
At Harvard University or the Times, matters look different.
Work at these institutions demands an extraordinary repertoire of skills, but they have their pick of the most talented
black students, teachers, or journalists. If few blacks are hired
or promoted, either racism in these institutions is worse than
it is in businesses studied by Wilson, or there aren't enough
blacks who've overcome racism's educational and emotional
damage sufficiently to succeed. Both conclusions are troubling. And both are compatible: There can be both racism in a
company and a terribly small pool of well-qualified black applicants. Yet the Times and most other upscale institutions
lean toward the first assumption, which impels them to treat
most disparities in black employees' performance as "cultural"
differences.
That is a dangerous thing to do. In his Two Nations, Andrew
Hacker, thinking he ;was~~posmg w~1te preJudice against le3
gitimate cultural "difference,"~ that "unless blackS are
willing to deny large parts of their selves," they are unlikely to
succeed in "white" institutions such as airlines or university
physics departments, where people "are expected to think and__..R_
act in white ways." More respect should be given, he argue~
·S
the fact that black culture is more "earthy" and less "linear"
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LIBERAL RACISM
than white. Thus does liberal "diversity" become racism. If
there were more candor about real deficiencies-measured
not by standardized tests but by assessments of on-the-job performance by managers committed to "diversity"-there might
be greater pressure from enlightened corporations like the
Times and from national business councils for a concerted
effort to enrich blacks' early educational experiences.
The less candor, on the other hand, the more likely a corporation will take refuge in unacknowledged double standardsor, when these fail, resort to rationalizations like Hacker's or
like Rutgers University president Francis Lawrence's liberal
"Freudian slip" about blacks' allegedly "genetic hereditary
background"-a comment he made in 1994 during a feverish
defense of campus double standards that had the effect of
turning every black student into a walking placard for disadvantaa
racist as[Arthur Sulzerger, William Kunstler, or Andrew Hacker. Imagine running
an institution that has separate admissions standards (though
it denies it) for blacks and whites and chat coddles disproportionate numbers of blacks with separate orientation sessions,
shallow racial caucuses, and decorously second-rate evaluations. Even liberals who set up such systems soon find themselves assuming things about the intended beneficiaries which
they never mention-except in a "slip" like Lawrence's. The
result is precisely what liberals claim to find in others' racism:
that it is all the more damaging for being unconscious. Now
we know how they know.
Liberal racism of this sort leaves blacks in an excruciating
bind. On the one hand, they can accept the condescension of
liberals who, for political, moral, or ideological reasons, won't
pay them the compliment of holding them to universal standards of achievement. (Some multiculturalists cop out by pretending that there aren't any universal standards.) On the
other hand, blacks can assume that the only alternative to the
unwitting disdain of a Francis Lawrence is the witting disdain
of a Jesse Helms. In that case, they'll settle for Lawrence and
defend his race-specific programs, as long as he'll promise
never again to say what the programs imply. In their different
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ways, blacks and white liberals who accept this sad bargain
hope to gain blacks enough mileage to offset disadvantages
and insecurities. Yet racial corraling ill-equips the most disadvantaged of blacks for success in market-driven venues. No
wonder Lawrence's "slip" caused such embarrassment and
pain.
One alternative to such debacles in education is the schol-
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arly "boot camp" run by the historically black ~~:~~; ~~~~!!~ __9.-Xavier College in Louisiana. As described by
·
·
Ellis Cose, the Xavier program is rigorous and unrelenting in
every way that most Rutgers programs for black students are
not. A high proportion of Xavier graduates go on to good
medical and other professional schools. They can do so because their mentors said to them what white liberals seem
unable to say in institutions bent on "diversity" for its own
sake: "Come on, we know you can achieve this! Stop grousing, work much harder, and we'll be there for you every step
of the way."
Another alternative is the one which liberals claim would
decimate black populations on campuses and in professional
workplaces: Hold everyone rigorously to the same performance standards. That needn't mean dropping the black proportion of some student bodies from, say, 10 percent to 2. In
1995, when it seemed likely that California voters would defy
liberal racism and pass a proposition to abolish affirmative action in state government (as they did 1996), the University of
California organized rigorous precollege courses and training
programs for thousands of black and Hispanic youths. The
best of the programs are now applauded by whites, whose
support is tempered only by wonderment that it took a "conservative" assault on racial double standards to prompt them.
Translating the applause into serious support will require
less political vision and hard work than racist liberals think but
more, apparently, than they themselves are ready to give. At
the very mention of a possibility of a short-run drop in the
proportion of black students at Berkeley or Rutgers, too many
liberals stop thinking precisely where they should begin. If
one pedagogical purpose of "diversity" is to break down com-
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LIBERAL RACISM
monly held stereotypes of people who are "different," why
shouldn't an educational institution ensure that any black student its white students encounter is fully as qualified as they?
Wouldn't that banish every excuse for stigma and give young
whites more experiences with blacks who are truly their
equals? When that principle is violated in the name of "diversity," students separate racially and barely communicate.
And if Sulzberger and other publishers are truly as committed to black opportunity as they say, why don't they set up
the journalistic equivalent of a Xavier College for young black
reporters who need extra seasoning and discipline? Genetic
racial deficiencies do not exist. Racist damage does exist. Yet
rather than face it and deal with it at some short-run cost
to their pocketbooks and their pretensions, liberals, no less
than conservatives, keep slipping into the half-conscious, unfounded assumption of congenital inadequacy when they
deny the realities before them-realities which the media,
ironically, are supposed to report "without fear or favor."
When even an organization as hell-bent on achieving diversity as the Times find itself hitting a wall in minority hiring, it is
time to realize that while all employers can and must stop perpetrating racist damage, few can repair damage already done.
Neither a factory nor a college can tum itself into a remediation center; nor can a newspaper become a therapy group.
Nor does it help matters to complain that distinguished institutions harbor mediocre whites, too, for, if that's true, and if
those institutions aren't complacent about the racism, patronage, nepotism, or corruption that may have created the
problem, then this is a new problem for management, not a
solution for blacks who need more and deeper training.
Yet the mind-set that blocks candor extends not just to
hiring but to news coverage and commentary-as Sulzberger
insists it must. Let us explor:Jthat problem's origins in racial
guiltf"bit more closely
• A Proud Racial Penitent
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In 1993, Sulzberger, devoted to the rigors of managed
diversity, gave command of the editorial page to Howell
Raines, then fifty, a racially penitent white Southerner whose
literary roots go back to a segregationist mind-set he has tried
hard to leave behind. The black religion scholar C. Eric Lincoln, like Raines a native of Alabama, wrote recently that he
first understood "the limitations of the journalistic enterprise
as a reliable index of ... our racial dilemma" in 1941, while
reading W.]. Cash's newly published The Mind o[the South, -S
which nicely anticipates some of Raines~preoccupations with
1\
unmasking racist ideas for the enlightenment of Northern as
well as Southern readers. Cash, himself a journalist, had
migrated from South Carolina to Chicago, and, according to
Lincoln, "his clever revelations caused a substantial ripple of
excitement and titillation among the circles of northern and
eastern literati who were always on the alert for a new Thomas
Wolfe, or a William Faulkner ... to rise up out of the South to
entertain them with the charming drollery of that region.
'Penetrating and persuasive,' wrote the New York Times of
The Mind of the South.~
.- ~
In Cash's often sardonic account, Southern whites kept
blacks "out of mind" altogether, reducing them to "singing
sad songs in the cotton" except when they affected to :awaf'el SL re W4."d
them by addressing them as Uncle Tom or" 'A'nt Mattie' with
A
the peculiar affection and respect quality white folks reserve
for their favorite black retainers," as Lincoln put it. Such solicitude, at once heartfelt and hypocritical, eased the consciences
of elites who were keeping blacks down by turning poor
whites against them. Gestures of affection served to displace
elites' racism-and blacks' own resentment of it--onto "po'
white trash," who, under such pressure from above and
below, proceeded to richly deserve the contempt in which
they were held. "[B]ehind the so-called rednecks who so
readily laid down their bibles ... to go 'coon huntin'. was all
the time the stealthy hand of the 'quality white folk' who
taught the blacks to hate the 'white trash' in the first place,"
Lincoln recalls. "Mr. Cash calls these 'the best people,' and
it was not until he laid bare the controlling mind of the
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South ... that the vision of quality so carefully nurtured in the
big house and its derivative institutions began to fade and
drip."
Fifty years after Cash caused a ripple of excitement in
Chicago and New York, Raines, then the Times~Washington
bureau chief, wrote a long, sentimental article in the newspaper's Sunday magazine about the hard life and high dignity
of his ovm affluent family's canny black housekeeper, who
had opened a pampered young white boy's eyes to a segregated world he couldn't otherwise have recognized as the
soul-eating "jungle" it was. Times editors found "Grady's Gift"
penetrating and persuasive enough to pull some strings to
win a Pulitzer Prize for what snickering black reporters
dubbed "Howell's mammy story." Like Cash's "best people,"
Raines seemed to sentimentalize blacks and, in other writing,
to displace onto "white trash" a more explicit condescension,
laced with contempt.
Whatever Grady taught young Raines, it did not propel him
down from the campus of Birmingham-Southern University,
where he was a student in the early 1960s, to join civil rights
marchers in the city streets below. But later he did collect
their reminiscences of the struggle in My Soul Is Rested, a
nicely arranged oral history of the movement's glory years. "It
was my way of saying I didn't have the courage to walk with
Dr. King in 1963, but I plan to walk with him the rest of my
life. That book represents a public declaration," Raines told
Atlanta journal-Constitution writer Don O'Briant thirty years
later, when such public declarations brought honors, not
risks. Rising through the ranks of Times correspondents,
Raines wrote about racism in johannesburg and London. He
wrote about how elites in his and C. Eric Lincoln's native
Alabama still used racism to mire the state in quasi-colonial
subservience to distant corporate landholders.
Raines deserves respect for acknowledging the racism in
his own roots; would that we were all as searching and candid
about matters so close to home. Creditably, he turns his
accounts of Southern life against Alabama's failed populism,
rotten public finance, prison chain gangs, and tribal football
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rivalries. If he overpraises voting rights activists and can't see
how others in the civil rights establishment have gone wrong,
that is because he knows what the best of them endured
while fighting real injustices. They had to steel themselves
against whites' syrupy professions of colorfillndness and train
themselves to attack the oppression sm~ldering behind fa....
cades of goodwill.
In an interview in My Soul Is Rested, the journalist Eugene
,· .
Patterson tells Raines how the legendary Ralph McGill, editor
of the Atlanta Constitution in the 1950s, at first tried gently to
help Southern elites comprehend that segregation had to go,
only to conclude that "sometimes you have to come right out
and punch a guy in the nose." Raines does a lot of punching,
too, but sometimes he hits the wrong "guys," as in his attacks
on all who criticize racial districting. "Every Southerner must
choose between two psychic roads, the road of racism or the
road of brotherhood," he has written. Such moral certitude,
the New Yorker's Peter Boyer observed, "can come across to
other Southerners, even some 'good' ones, as wearisome
piety."
It strikes good Northerners that way, too, especially when
Raines tackles racial disputes that aren't best viewed through
the lenses he carries with him. McGill was immersed selfeffacingly in the life of a region he loved, and before he
started "punching" anyone, he had to wrestle with his own
long attachments to a segregated society. In contrast, Raines
i?:;es.
left the South and, the moment he got to the~ ed1tonat page,
L
-:- l
came out punching. Clinton's federal crime bill "deserves to
1\
die," he wrote in 1994, because it excluded a proposed Racial
Justice Act. Never mind that most of the Congression'al Black
Caucus voted for the crime bill without that act; Raines would
keep their consciences. Patronizing blacks was part of the
package: In Brooklyn, the long, ugly, often violent "boycott"
of two Korean-owned stores by histrionic, hate-filled militants
became, in a Times editorial, a demonstration by "a black
neighborhood," which it certainly was not.
Uberals' obligation now is not just to expose and censure
0
racism but to discredit the "diversity" mongering that -E~H'flrl'.I,.,--''<-----
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LIBERAL RACISM
....
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• A Comeuppance
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gives racism a new lease on life. Today's Ralph McGill will
need both the sympathy and the guts to show the civil rights
establishment and chief executive officers that "managed
diversity," like racial districting and the color-coding of criminal justice, bungles the pursuit of true integration and democracy. To say so isn't to roll back the clock to the days of
all-white newsrooms and Jim Crow government; it is to acknowledge the irony in the spectacle of a few powerful white
men, like Sulzberger and Raines, directing people of all colors
toward diversity, inside and outside the Times.
u
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Raines's moralism and Sulzberger's manic "diversity" mindset reached something of a climax in the Timesjcoverage and
commentary during New York City's 1993 mayoral race. The
paper reversed almost every truth about the former U.S.
Attorney Rudolph Giuliani's winning campaign against David
Dinkins, the city's first black mayor. The TimesX'Ciisdam for
ordinary New Yorkers' resentment of Dinkins's record (much
of that resentment felt by nonwhites) reached so high and
I
shrill a pitch that it prompted unprecedented criticism in journalism reviews and other venues.
There was no good reason to think of Dinkins as any more
successful a mayor than Abraham Beame, the city's first
Jewish one, who had been turned out after one term. But the
Time~racial mind-set would not be denied. A Giuliani victory
would fail to keep the city's "politics in line with its demographics .... In a profound sense, this son of the 1950s is running against history" read an important Times profile (July 25,
1993), of the candidate during the election. "Even if he wins,
he may be the last white man for years to lead this city."
It was also accepted wisdom at the Times that .Giuliani
would "play the race card," stoking racist fears. Giuliani, understanding that a majority of the electorate consisted of
blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and white liberals, made strenuous
efforts to present himself as the apostle of racial inclusion. "If I
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Media Myopia
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could make up the two points I lost by in 1989 with only black
votes, it'd be healthier for me and the city," he told me at the
start of the 1993 campaign. Yet Times news coverage cast hitn
relentlessly as the candidate of a white-ethnic restoration.
When Giuliani called the election a referendum on Dinkins's
competence, a Times reporter wrote that he was tryi~g to
"give voters a race-free excuse for voting against Mr. Dinkins."
When he protested the Dinkins camp's characterizations of
him as a "fascist" and "racist," Raines found the protest reminiscent of "the heyday of [former Republican political guru]
Lee Atwater"-never mentioning that Reagan administration
veterans William Bennett and Edwin Meese had disowned
Giuliani as "too liberal" and that Meese had endorsed his Conservative Party opponent.
When Giuliani won, the Times lost, not because the paper
had endorsed Dinkins as much as because its coverage and
commentary had distorted the city. Democracy is diminished
when people with authority, especially the moral authority of
a great newspaper, proclaim that racial differences, which
they can barely define, are and should be "significant" in
public and corporate life. To insist that such differences
govern "how we see each other and how we see the news" is
to encourage vulnerable people of all colors to view one
another through ever-narrowing eyes. It is to let down those
who are trying to keep faith with something American in
everyone they meet.
_ __;.------'<.o.c:_
News coverage and commentary should ~peciiHif avoid
encouraging readers and viewers to think of their fellow
citizens, whatever their colors or surnames, as tiles in a "gorgeous mosaic." A mosaic never changes shape, size, or composition. If each of us is a tile in a fixed pattern, who or what is
the bonding agent that holds society together? The paper's
publisher? The marketing director? The U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights? The question diversity trainers
seldom pose is, How can all of us be trained to give part of
ourselves to the social glue that binds us across differences of
color in public meetings, workplaces, and on the street?
Since America really isn't a mosaic.bi.Jt an organism whose
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Terry Edmonds
Creator
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Office of Speechwriting
James (Terry) Edmonds
Date
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1995-2001
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
<a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/36090" target="_blank">Collection Finding Aid</a>
<a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7763294" target="_blank">National Archives Catalog Description</a>
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2006-0462-F
Description
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Terry Edmonds worked as a speechwriter from 1995-2001. He became the Assistant to the President and Director of Speechwriting in 1999. His speechwriting focused on domestic topics such as race relations, veterans issues, education, paralympics, gun control, youth, and senior citizens. He also contributed to the President’s State of the Union speeches, radio addresses, commencement speeches, and special dinners and events. The records include speeches, letters, memorandum, schedules, reports, articles, and clippings.
Provenance
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Clinton Presidential Records: White House Staff and Office Files
Publisher
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William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
Extent
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635 folders in 52 boxes
Text
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Paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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UCSD [University of California at San Diego] – Essays About Race in USA (2) [1]
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of Speechwriting
James (Terry) Edmonds
Identifier
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2006-0462-F
Is Part Of
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Box 41
<a href="http://www.clintonlibrary.gov/assets/Documents/Finding-Aids/2006/2006-0462-F.pdf" target="_blank">Collection Finding Aid</a>
<a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7763294" target="_blank">National Archives Catalog Description</a>
Provenance
A statement of any changes in ownership and custody of the resource since its creation that are significant for its authenticity, integrity, and interpretation. The statement may include a description of any changes successive custodians made to the resource.
Clinton Presidential Records: White House Staff and Office Files
Publisher
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William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
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Adobe Acrobat Document
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Reproduction-Reference
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12/9/2014
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42-t-7763294-20060462F-041-019-2014
7763294