Intellectuals and Race (16 page)

By this time, Progressives had begun calling themselves liberals, so this now became the prevailing liberal vision, as it evolved in the second half of the twentieth century.

Broadly speaking, while in the Progressive era socioeconomic differences between races were attributed to race— genetics— in the liberal era such differences between races were often attributed to racism. In neither era were alternative explanations taken seriously by much of the intelligentsia. In the liberal era, attributing any part of the differences between blacks and whites in incomes, crime, education, etc., to internal causes— even if social or cultural, rather than genetic— was often dismissed as “blaming the victim,” a phrase preempting the issue rather than debating it.

If heredity was the reigning orthodoxy of the Progressive era, environment became the reigning orthodoxy of the liberal era. Moreover, “environment” usually meant the
external
contemporary environment, rather than including the internal cultural environment of minorities themselves. If minorities were seen as the problem before, the majority was seen as the problem now.

These premises were stated quite clearly in the introduction to
An American Dilemma
, where that dilemma was described as “a white man’s problem” and Myrdal added, “little, if anything, could be scientifically explained in terms of the peculiarities of the Negroes themselves.”
⁷
Despite the invocation of science, so reminiscent of the earlier Progressive era intellectuals, this was an arbitrary premise which, if followed consistently, would treat black Americans as simply abstract people with darker complexions, who were victims of what Myrdal called “confused and contradictory attitudes” in the minds of white Americans.
⁸
Yet Myrdal’s own massive study brought out many behavioral and attitudinal differences between blacks and whites, though in the end none of this changed the basic premise of
An American Dilemma
, which remained the central premise of liberal intellectuals for decades thereafter.

This premise— that the racial problem was essentially one inside the minds of white people— greatly simplified the task of those among the intelligentsia who did not have to research the many behavioral differences between blacks and whites in America— or the many comparable or larger differences between other groups in other countries around the world— that have led to other intergroup complications, frictions and polarizations, which were in many cases at least as great as those between black and white Americans. Nor did intellectuals have to confront the constraints, costs and dangers inherent in group differences in behavior and values. To the intelligentsia of this later period, racial problems could be reduced to problems inside people’s minds, and especially to racism, not only simplifying problems but enabling intellectuals to assume their familiar stance of being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil— and morally superior to the society in which they lived.

Life
magazine, for example, greeted publication of
An American Dilemma
as showing that America was a “psychotic case among nations.”
⁹
As with many other such sweeping pronouncements, it was not based on any empirical comparisons. For example, the number of blacks lynched in the entire history of the United States would be a fraction of the Armenians slaughtered by Turkish mobs in
one year
in the Ottoman Empire, the Ibos slaughtered by Hausa-Fulani mobs in one year in Nigeria, not to mention
the number of Jews slaughtered by mobs in one year in a number of countries at various times scattered throughout history. While specifically black-white relations in the United States— especially in the South— were more polarized than black-white relations in some other countries, there were even more polarized relations between other groups that were not different in skin color in many other places and times, the Balkans and Rwanda being just two examples in our own times.

Gunnar Myrdal’s basic premise— that racial problems in America were fundamentally problems inside the heads of white people, and that the resulting discrimination or neglect explained black-white differences in economic and other outcomes— was to remain the fundamental assumption of liberal thinking and policies for decades thereafter. As Professor Alfred Blumrosen of Rutgers University, an important figure in the evolution of federal racial policies, put it, discrimination should be “broadly defined,” for example, by “including all conduct which adversely affects minority group employment opportunities.”
¹⁰
This particular formulation preempts the very possibility that any behavior or performance by minorities themselves plays a role in the economic, educational and other “disparities” and “gaps” which are common among racial or other groups in countries around the world.

Such feats of verbal virtuosity were not peculiar to Professor Blumrosen, but were common among the intelligentsia of the liberal era. Even where there were demonstrable differences in behavior among racial or ethnic groups— whether in crime rates or rates of unwed motherhood, for example— these were more or less automatically attributed to adverse treatment, past or present, by the white majority.

Celebrated black writer James Baldwin, for example, claimed that blacks took the building of a subsidized housing project in Harlem as “additional proof of how thoroughly the white world despised them” because “people in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else.” Therefore “they had scarcely moved in” to the new housing project, before “naturally” they “began smashing windows, defacing walls, urinating in the elevators, and fornicating in the playgrounds.”
¹¹

From this perspective, anything negative that blacks do is the fault of whites. But however much Baldwin’s picture might fit the prevailing vision
of the 1960s, anyone who is serious about whether it also fits the facts would have to ask such questions as: (1) Was there a time before the 1960s when it was common for blacks to urinate in public areas of buildings where they lived? and (2) If not, was that because they felt that whites had higher regard for them in earlier times?

To ask such questions is to answer them, and the answer in both cases is clearly
No!
*
But few asked such questions, which remained outside the sealed bubble of the prevailing vision. What was different about the 1960s was the proliferation of people like James Baldwin, promoting resentments and polarization, and making excuses for counterproductive and even barbaric behavior. Nor is this a phenomenon peculiar to blacks or even to the United States. Writing about lower-class whites in British public housing projects, Dr. Theodore Dalrymple observed: “The public spaces and elevators of all public housing blocks I know are so deeply impregnated with urine that the odor is ineradicable. And anything smashable has been smashed.”
¹²

The people behaving this way in Britain have none of the history that is supposed to explain black behavior in the United States. What is the same in both situations has been a steady drumbeat of grievance and victimhood ideologies from the media, from educational institutions and from other institutions permeated by the vision of the intelligentsia. In the United States, the racial version of such notions has not been confined to a fringe of extremists. Urban League director Whitney M. Young, regarded as a racial moderate, echoed the same 1960s vision when he said, in an article in
Ebony
magazine, “most white Americans do not link the rapid spread of blight and decay of our central cities to racism. But it is the main cause.” He added, “The white man creates the ghettos and brutalizes and exploits the people who inhabit them— and then he fears them and then he flees from them.” The white man, according to Young, “creates a climate of despair and then acts surprised when the protest marches fill the streets and riots erupt.”
¹³

Jean-Paul Sartre has been credited, if that is the word, with originating the practice of excusing violence by depicting the violence of some as reactions to other things that have been analogized to violence or redefined as violence.
¹⁴
That verbal tactic has since crossed the Atlantic. After the ghetto riots of the 1960s, whose violence shocked many Americans, Professor Kenneth B. Clark, best known for his work being cited in the case of
Brown v. Board of Education
, responded by saying:

               The real danger of Harlem is not in the infrequent explosions of random lawlessness. The frightening horror of Harlem is the chronic day-to-day quiet violence to the human spirit which exists and is accepted as normal.
¹⁵

A writer in
The Nation
magazine likewise referred to “the quiet violence in the very operation of the system.” The “institutional form of quiet violence operates when people are deprived of choices in a systematic way by the very manner in which transactions normally take place.”
¹⁶
A committee of black clergymen took out an ad in the
New York Times,
deploring “the silent and covert violence which white middle-class America inflicts upon the victims of the inner city.”
¹⁷

Although many of those who said such things spoke in the name of the black community, or claimed to be conveying what most blacks believed, a 1967 poll found that 68 percent of blacks said that they had more to lose than to gain from rioting.
¹⁸
After the Rodney King riots in 1992, 58 percent of blacks condemned those riots, while only 32 percent found the violence even partially justified.
¹⁹

This, however, was not the impression created in the media, after either the earlier or the later ghetto riots. In 1967, under the headline, “The Hard-Core Ghetto Mood,”
Newsweek
quoted those individuals, inside and outside the ghetto, who expressed the militant vision accepted by the intelligentsia. “Rage is common to all of them,” black academician Alvin Poussaint said of ghetto blacks. A white academic in California likewise said that the Watts riots represented “the metamorphosis of the Negroes” from victims to master. “The people of Watts felt that for those four days they represented all Negroes; the historic plight of the Negroes; all the rebellions against all injustice… What must be understood by the rest of America is that, for the lower-class Negro, riots are not criminal, but a legitimate weapon in a morally justified civil war.”
²⁰
None of those who made such sweeping pronouncements had to offer hard evidence to have their pronouncements echoed throughout the media.

Nothing is easier than to find some individuals— in any group— who share a given writer’s opinion, and to quote such individuals as if their views were typical. This approach became common in media coverage of ghetto riots.
Newsweek
magazine, for example, quoted various black youths, including one described as “
a child of Detroit’s ravaged ghetto
,”
²¹
even though (1) the poverty rate among Detroit’s black population before the riots was only half of that of blacks nationwide, (2) the homeownership rate among blacks in Detroit was the highest in the nation, and (3) the unemployment rate of blacks in Detroit was 3.4 percent— lower than that among
whites
nationwide.
²²

It was
after
the riots that Detroit became a ravaged community, and remained so for decades thereafter, as businesses withdrew, taking jobs and taxes with them. But here, as elsewhere, an idea that fit the vision did not have to meet the additional requirement of fitting the facts.

At the heart of the prevailing liberal vision of race today is the notion of “racism”— a concept with multiple, elusive and sometimes mutually contradictory meanings. Sometimes the term refers simply to any adverse opinion about any racially different group, whether a minority in a given
society or a group that may be a majority in some other society. This immediately transforms any adverse judgment of any aspect of a different racial group into an indictment of whoever expressed that adverse judgment, without any need to assess the evidence or analysis behind it. In short, this approach joins the long list of arguments without arguments.

At other times, the term “racism” refers more specifically to an adverse conclusion based on a belief that the genetic endowment of a particular racial group limits their potential. Other meanings include a preference for advancing the interests of one race over another, with or without any genetic theories or even any adverse assessment of the behavior, performance or potential of the group to be disfavored. For example, an argument has been made in various countries around the world for policies preferring one group over another on the ground that the group to be discriminated against is
too
formidable for others to compete against on even terms. This argument has been made in Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Malaysia, in India’s states of Assam and Andhra Pradesh, and even in early twentieth century America, where Japanese immigrants were feared on grounds that their high capability and lower standard of living would permit them to undercut the prices charged by white American farmers, workers, or commercial business owners.
²³

In other words, racism defined as a preference for one race over another need not depend upon any belief that the group to be discriminated against is inferior in performance or potential, and at various times and places has been based on the opposite belief that the group that is to be discriminated against was
too
proficient for others to compete with on equal terms, for whatever reason. As a book advocating group preferences for Malays in Malaysia put it, “Whatever the Malays could do, the Chinese could do better and more cheaply.”
²⁴
A leader in a campaign for preferential policies in India’s state of Andhra Pradesh said: “Are we not entitled to jobs just because we are not as qualified?”
²⁵
In Nigeria, an advocate of group representation policies deplored what he called “the tyranny of skills.”
²⁶