Slouching Towards Gomorrah (37 page)

It should be a source of great pride to bear the next generation and to train that generation’s minds and morals. That is certainly a greater accomplishment than churning out tracts raging at men and families. It is fine that women are taking up careers, but the price for that need not be the demoralization of women who do not choose that path.

Gallagher put the point succinctly: “Liberal feminism triumphed by telling a lie about nearly all women—and men. The work women do in families may not perhaps, seem great compared to oh, inventing a new morality, or discovering the cure to cancer. But it compares quite favorably, in value, meaning, and social productiveness with being a vice-president for public affairs of General Motors, say, or a partner in an advertising firm. And it is necessary that we start saying so.“
⁵⁶

Saying so can be a problem. Radical feminism has a truly impressive capacity for moral intimidation. It is very difficult for men to counter its progress or point out its untruths and its manifold harms. To do so is to be exposed to heated accusations of being hostile to women and their rights, wanting to take away the gains women have made, and wishing to reduce them to subordinate positions. Most men, afraid of such allegations, choose circumspection. That is why Kate O’Beirne, Washington editor of
National Review
, said, “In the end, our girls are going to have to fight their girls.” True, but after that, some males in the academic world, in the military, and in Congress are going to have to summon up the courage to begin to repair the damage feminism has done.

12

O
ctober 1995 was a sadly illuminating month.

Just as with the assassination of President Kennedy, everybody can remember where he was when he heard of the O. J. Simpson verdict. On October 3, I was looking out a window on Connecticut Avenue. Four or five black people stood on the sidewalk listening to the radio in a parked cab. A few minutes after one o’clock, the people on the sidewalk suddenly began shouting, leaping in the air, and pumping their fists. The driver honked his horn repeatedly and then got out of his cab to dance in the street. I knew at once that the verdict was in and what it was. Scenes like that happened all over America. Blacks of all levels of education and income were jubilant, even those who thought Simpson guilty.

Not quite three weeks later, on October 16, Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, convened his Million Man March in Washington. Despite Farrakhan’s deserved reputation as a racist and anti-Semite, several hundred thousand men came. The event was billed as a day of atonement and reconciliation, but there was racist rhetoric from the platform and racist sentiment in the crowd. Six days later, during a visit to the United Nations, Fidel Castro went to a Harlem church in the evening and was greeted by
enthusiastic chants of “Fidel, Fidel.” Why? The black people in that church were hardly admirers of communism. It is difficult to avoid concluding that the Simpson verdict was cheered, Farrakhan’s summons heeded, and Castro cheered because a great many black people wanted to express hostility to white people.

October jolted white Americans into a shocked and belated awareness that racial tranquillity is not in our immediate future, perhaps, or even probably, not in any foreseeable future. It has been over four decades since the Supreme Court’s decision in
Brown
v.
Board of Education
ended governmental discrimination against blacks, over three decades since the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed private discrimination in employment and public accommodations, three decades since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought blacks to polling places as never before, and over two decades since the inception of affirmative action. Outside the welfare-ravaged inner cities, black economic and social progress has been dramatic.

Yet after all this, we learned that race relations had only grown worse. How could that be? The answers are complex, but, as black scholar Glenn Loury noted, the roots can be traced to the excesses of the 1960s: “We learned too well during the upheavals of that decade how to be Americas pre-eminent victims.“
¹
He cites the series of killings of black children in Atlanta, which the activist Dick Gregory said was the work of a disease control center pursuing a cancer-fighting drug allegedly found in the tips of their sex organs. Jesse Jackson said: “It is open season on black people…. These murders can only be understood in the context of affirmative action and Ronald Reagan’s conservative politics.” There was great disappointment when the killer turned out to be black and was convicted before a black judge and a largely black jury.

In one way, there is no mystery to this. Americans have been intensely conscious of race throughout their history. Race has been central to our politics since Africans were brought to the colonies as slaves in the seventeenth century. Race was a difficult issue in the framing of the Constitution, which, in order to make union possible, awkwardly attempted to accommodate the fact of slavery, without ever using the word. Slavery caused the bloodiest war in our history. And race has been a subject of political and social agitation ever since. It is hardly a matter for surprise that the
subject has not disappeared. Nor is it really surprising that blacks are not reconciled to their position in America. The underclass is, for the time being, largely black, and even blacks who have moved into the middle class often remain edgy. Memories of aggressive discrimination and oppression do not fade so quickly. Nor do suspicions that latent hostility is still present and may become overt once more.

But in another way, the intensely unsatisfactory state of race relations is a mystery. The opportunities for blacks to advance in the United States have never been greater. Despite the incessant talk about racism, by white liberals as well as by blacks, racism has never been at a lower ebb. Yet black anger seems at its zenith. Shelby Steele, a professor of English and black intellectual, offers a partial explanation that is remarkably similar to Midge Decter’s explanation for the anger of the feminists. In both cases, the problem is the sudden and dramatic widening of choices about life, a new freedom and responsibility that frightens. For women the new choices are available largely because of technology, for blacks because of the success of the civil rights movement. Steele speaks of “race-holding” and defines a “holding” as any self-description that justifies to that person or camouflages his fears, weaknesses, and inadequacies. Race-holding allows a black to retreat into his racial identity as an excuse for not using his talents to the full out of fear that he really cannot compete. “With the decline in racism the margin of black choice has greatly expanded, which is probably why race-holding is so much more visible today than ever before. But anything that prevents us from exploiting our new freedom to the fullest is now as serious a barrier to us as racism once was.“
²

Steele thinks that the black students in his classes perform far below their abilities because they expect to do poorly and fail to recognize the margin of choice open to them. “I think they
choose
to believe in their inferiority, not to fulfill society’s prophesy about them, but for the comforts and rationalizations their racial ‘inferiority’ affords them. They hold their race to evade individual responsibility. Their margin of choice scares them, as it does all people.”
³

Decter and Steele have identified a major part of the problem in each case. But neither of them would deny that there is more to
the problems of male-female and black-white relations than the sudden expansion of choice. It is difficult for most whites to realize the intensity and depth of blacks’ suspicion of whites. A
New York Times/CBS News
poll of black New Yorkers in 1990 found that 10 percent agreed that AIDS “was deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people.” Another 19 percent thought that it “might possibly be true.” And 25 percent of blacks agreed that the government “deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods,” while another 35 percent said that was possibly true. Clarence Page, a black syndicated columnist for the
Chicago Tribune
, said, “There’s a lot more talk about conspiracy than there used to be. You could call conspiracy theories about AIDS and drugs fringe ideas, but they seem to have a large following among the black intelligentsia. And it’s present at the grass roots too. You find it at all levels.” John Singleton, who made
Boyz ‘N the Hood
said, “If AIDS was a natural disease, it would have been around 1,000 years ago. I think it was made in order to kill undesirables. That would include homosexuals, intravenous drug users and blacks.“
⁴

Paranoia is fed by the race hustlers, most visibly men like Farrakhan and A1 Sharpton, but also by many others, including some university professors of black studies, who teach resentment and fear. These are persons whose careers would be diminished or ended by progress in racial reconciliation; it is in their interest to preserve and exacerbate racial antagonisms.

An additional factor which suggests we will never know racial peace is that the problem is not peculiarly American or black-white. It is more often the rule than the exception that different ethnic groups living in close proximity display hostility to one another. That is evident from Canada to the former Yugoslavia to Rwanda to Malaysia. There have been few, if any, completely peaceful multiethnic societies, and America is becoming ever more multiethnic. Still, matters are worse than they have to be.

Whites’ responsibility for the present state of race relations goes beyond the obvious point that they oppressed blacks for centuries. Whites—and here I mean primarily modern liberals—deserve blame as well for the way they went about ending discrimination and seeking to eliminate discrimination’s lingering ill effects. No one doubts the good intentions of modern liberals,
at least on this topic, but there is every reason to doubt their intelligence and prudence. Radical egalitarianism leads them to believe that, absent discrimination, equality of results in every area of endeavor would be the natural outcome for different ethnic groups. Their cultural relativism insists that no culture is superior to any other in preparing individuals to succeed in a complex commercial society. The danger of tribalism is always present when ethnic groups share the same territory, but nothing could have been better calculated to intensify tribalism than the rhetoric and prescriptions liberals have advanced. For decades they have told blacks that their problems were caused entirely by racism. It should not be surprising that many blacks came to believe just that. It is human to want to blame your troubles on someone else and, in the case of American blacks, that message rang true because for centuries their troubles
were
caused by someone else. The unacknowledged difficulty was that if racism had utterly evaporated in 1964, most blacks were in no position to compete on equal terms. The years of segregation and discrimination had produced educational, attitudinal, and cultural disadvantages that would take years to overcome.

But liberal rhetoric continued on the line that discrimination was the only problem long after the dangers of that rhetoric had become apparent. The civil rights statutes and reforms were pushed on the implicit and sometimes explicit promise that all would immediately be well once discrimination was outlawed. It did not turn out that way, of course; it could not have, and black hopes were disappointed. For many blacks, indeed, the results of compassionate welfare policies made matters worse than they had been under segregation and discrimination. The predictable result was increased anger at whites, who must be responsible since whites themselves had said that racism was the only problem.

There were two other unhappy consequences. One was that some blacks developed a fatalistic attitude that hampered their progress. Why try if whites made it impossible to succeed? The second was the belief that nothing need be done but demand more laws, more subsidies, more affirmative action. Surely civil rights laws could have been advocated to deal with real discriminations without teaching such simplistic, false, and destructive lessons.