What's So Great About America (14 page)

I found the concept of this rich, successful man—who arrived by private jet, who speaks at the Democratic National Convention, whose son is a congressman—identifying himself as a victim of oppression a bit puzzling and amusing. But I suppressed the urge to chuckle. I reminded myself that Jackson's indignation was quite genuine, and that I was witnessing a clash between two perspectives, what may be termed the immigrant perspective and that of the leadership of indigenous minority groups. I use the term “indigenous” loosely to refer to African-Americans and American Indians. These are groups that have been in America even longer than most European immigrants.

That there is a clash of views between immigrants and indigenous minorities will come as news to some advocates of multiculturalism, who like to portray nonwhites, women, and homosexuals
as allied in a grand coalition against that oppressive enemy of humanity, the white male heterosexual. There are many problems with this morality tale, but perhaps the most serious is that nonwhite immigrants and indigenous minorities see America very differently. Ideologically, if not geographically, they are poles apart.

Immigrants today are mostly “people of color”: this they have in common with African-Americans. But this is where the similarity ends. The immigrant comes here from South Korea, Nigeria, or the West Indies and finds America to be a terrific place. Then he runs into the likes of Jesse Jackson, who tell him that he is completely wrong, he doesn't know anything, he should stick around for a while, he will soon discover the baleful influence of racism.

Why, then, do nonwhite immigrants and the leadership of indigenous minority groups see America so differently? The immigrant typically compares America to his home country. “In Nicaragua I have to work for $6 a day. You mean that McDonald's will pay me $6 an hour? Where do I sign up for overtime?” By this comparative or historical standard, America comes off looking good. Patriotism comes easily to the immigrant who has chosen to become an American.

African-American leaders, by contrast, use a utopian standard in judging the United States. Their argument is not that the United States is a worse place for them to live than Haiti or Ethiopia, but that the United States falls short in comparison to the Garden of Eden. “Why should I work for $6 an hour? That's slave labor. Look at the guy in the high-rise office building who gets $75 an hour. If I'm not making as much as he is, then I am oppressed.” This is a very different psychology.

So who is right: the immigrants, who have come recently, or the indigenous minorities, who have been here a long time? In our debate, Jackson addressed this question by pointing out that African-Americans could not be compared with immigrants, because the immigrants for the most part came voluntarily, while African-Americans came to the United States in chains. This is a good point, although its contemporary relevance is unclear. Jackson also said that earlier generations of immigrants—the Jews, the Irish, and the Italians—could easily assimilate because they were white. Blacks, he added, don't have this option.

This argument seems reasonable, but it relies for its plausibility on anachronism. Today we often have trouble distinguishing between members of ethnic groups from various parts of Europe. This, however, is only because of their high rates of intermarriage. But intermarriage between Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans, or between Protestants and Catholics, or between Christians and Jews, has only become popular in recent years. In 1850 it was quite easy to identify an Irish immigrant. That's the only way “No Irish Need Apply” rules could be enforced.
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So the notion that the old immigrants had it easy because they could pass for white is wrong. Indeed, the experience of new generations of immigrants—the Chinese, the Pakistanis, the Cubans, the Nigerians—is virtually identical to that of earlier generations of European immigrants. The problems of the newcomers—difficulties with the English language, lack of credit, a feeling of isolation—are precisely the problems that the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews had. True, it is easier to identify a Pakistani than an Italian, but what does this prove? Prejudice and hostility against the European immigrants was vastly
greater
than
anything endured by today's Asian, African, and Latin American immigrants.

Indigenous minorities, then, are a special case. They, not the immigrants, are the moral and political force behind the multicultural agenda. They are the ones pressing for multicultural education, and racial preferences, and reparations. African-Americans and American Indians are the only groups for whom patriotism is a problem. I do not mean this in an accusatory way; theirs is the natural ambivalence of any people who are deeply convinced that their life in America has been shaped by oppression.

For instance, it is commonplace among American Indians that the white man arrived on these shores with an incorrigible bigotry toward native peoples and then put into effect a policy of exterminating the Indian population. If “America” represents a country that is guilty of unmitigated hatred and genocide, how can the native Indians who were victims of this viciousness and slaughter be expected to salute the flag and sing “God Bless America”? If the white man is guilty as charged, they obviously cannot.

But is the white man guilty as charged? Even on the count of racism against Indians, the evidence is ambiguous. Many whites considered blacks to be racially inferior but they did not feel the same way about American Indians. In this respect Thomas Jefferson is typical: while entertaining doubts that blacks were as intelligent as whites, he confidently stated that any backwardness on the part of the Indian was entirely the result of circumstance.
²
True, the white man frequently portrayed the Indian as a “noble savage,” but the accent here is on the word
noble
. There is a long tradition in the West of admiring the noble savage as harkening from an age of innocence, before the corruptions introduced by
civilization.
³
It is highly significant that several leading figures during the founding period (Patrick Henry, John Marshall, Thomas Jefferson) proposed intermarriage between whites and native Indians as a way to integrate the Indians into the mainstream. “What they thought impossible with respect to blacks,” political scientist Ralph Lerner writes, “was seen as highly desirable with respect to Indians.”
⁴

But this is just talk about the white man's feelings; we also need to discuss the white man's actions toward the native Indians. Aren't the European settlers guilty of genocide? As a matter of fact, they are not. Millions of Indians perished as a result of contact with the white man, but for the most part they died by contracting his diseases: smallpox, measles, malaria, tuberculosis. There are isolated instances of European military commanders attempting to vanquish hostile Indian tribes by giving them smallpox-infected blankets. But as William McNeill documents in
Plagues and Peoples
, the white man generally transmitted his diseases to the Indians without knowing it, and the Indians died in large numbers because they had not developed immunities to those diseases. This is tragedy on a grand scale, but it is not genocide, because genocide implies an
intention
to wipe out an entire population. McNeill points out that, a few centuries earlier, Europeans themselves contracted lethal diseases, including the bubonic plague, from Mongol invaders from the Asian steppes. The Europeans didn't have immunities, and the plague decimated one-third of the population of Europe.
⁵
Despite the magnitude of deaths and suffering, no one calls this genocide, and they are right not to do so.

None of this is to excuse the settlers' injustices, or to diminish the historical misfortune of the American Indians. In his
famous “Essay on the Three Races,” Tocqueville contrasts the situation of the native Indian with that of blacks. Tocqueville's essay makes revealing reading because we are taught by multicultural educators to regard the circumstances of blacks and native Indians as very similar: both suffered miserably at the hands of the white man. But Tocqueville captures a nuance that has eluded our present-day ideologues. The Indian, he writes, never wanted Western civilization, but the white man was determined to shove it down his throat. In short, the Indian is faced with the problem of
forced inclusion
. Blacks, Tocqueville said, want nothing more than to share the privileges of white society, but whites will not allow them to do so. In short, blacks are faced with the problem of
forced exclusion
.

The charge of forced exclusion is the more serious one, and in this chapter I focus on African-Americans. Most blacks believe that they have suffered, and continue to suffer, terrible injustice at the hands of the white man. The great black scholar W. E. B. DuBois said his life in America was defined by a kind of double consciousness, resulting in a divided loyalty. DuBois wrote, “One ever feels this two-ness: an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
⁶

The problem of patriotism for black Americans was even more dramatically stated in the late nineteenth century by the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. “This fourth of July,” he said, “is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. I have no patriotism. I have no country. What
country have I? The institutions of this country do not know me, do not recognize me as a man. I have not—I cannot have—any love for this country, as such, or for its constitution. I desire to see its overthrow as speedily as possible.”
⁷
Douglass's statement borders on treason, yet it is an honorable treason. His argument is one that Aristotle would recognize. What he is saying is that one cannot be a good citizen in a bad country.

The United States military is disproportionately made up of black Americans. These men and women are apparently ready and willing to fight for their country, but it is not unreasonable to wonder why. If Douglass is right, this is not their country, it has not treated them well, it continues to treat them badly, so they are at best (as the popular T-shirt has it) “Africans in America.” To speak in the language of Malcolm X, are blacks in the armed forces nothing more than “house Negroes” foolishly risking their lives to protect the master's plantation? This seems a very harsh assessment, but it is undoubtedly true that there is very little in the black literary tradition, and very little said by contemporary black leaders, that makes the case for why black Americans should love America and fight for America. Why, then, should they?

L
eading black scholars such as John Hope Franklin say that the problems of African-Americans go back to the beginning—to the American founding. Franklin argues that the founders “betrayed the ideals to which they gave lip service.” They wrote “eloquently at one moment for the brotherhood of man and in the next moment denied it to their black brothers.” They chose
to “degrade the human spirit by equating five black men with three white men.” The consequences have been unremittingly painful for African-Americans. “Having created a tragically flawed revolutionary doctrine and a Constitution that did not bestow the blessings of liberty on its posterity, the founding fathers set the stage for every succeeding generation to apologize, compromise, and temporize on those principles of liberty that were supposed to be the very foundation of our system of government and way of life.”
⁸

Such views have become commonplace among African-Americans, and they are routinely promulgated in multicultural textbooks. Interestingly Franklin's criticism of the founders relies on the same reasoning that Justice Taney relied on in the infamous
Dred Scott
decision. Writing for the majority in this notorious 1857 case upholding slavery, Taney argued that since several of the founders, including Jefferson, were slave owners, these men could not have really meant that “all men are created equal.” They may have written “all men,” but what they really meant was “white men.” As for black slaves, Taney concluded that they have “no rights that the white man is bound to respect.”
⁹

Are Franklin and Taney right? Are the founders guilty as alleged? Let us consider the evidence fairly, beginning with the notorious “three-fifths” clause to which Franklin alludes. To the modern mind, this is one of the most troubling pieces of evidence against the founders. And yet it should not be, because the clause itself has nothing to say about the intrinsic worth of blacks.

The origins of the clause are to be found in the debate between the northern states and the southern states over the issue of political representation. The South wanted to count blacks as
whole persons, in order to increase its political power. The North wanted blacks to count for nothing—not for the purpose of rejecting their humanity, but in order to preserve and strengthen the antislavery majority in Congress. It was not a proslavery southerner but an antislavery northerner, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who proposed the three-fifths compromise. The effect was to limit the South's political representation and its ability to protect the institution of slavery. Frederick Douglass understood this: he called the three-fifths clause “a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding states” which deprived them of “two-fifths of their natural basis of representation.”
¹⁰
So a provision of the Constitution that was antislavery and pro-black in intent as well as in effect is today cited to prove that the American founders championed the cause of racist oppression.