This denial has costly social consequences that Page and others like him are willing to overlook. The emphasis on nonexistent racism diverts attention from the real problem, which is the poor preparation of black students and the poor performance of public schools. Rigging academic standards, on the other hand, has resulted in dropout rates for affirmative action students that are dramatically higher than for students who do not have the standards rigged for them. These dropout rates are more than 50 percent, and sometimes as high as 70 percent. As Thomas Sowell points out, these are unnecessary failures produced by liberals who would rather feel good about recruiting unqualified black students to make their elite institutions "diverse," than sending them to middle-range (but perfectly adequate) schools, where they would have a chance of success. Looked at another way, affirmative action supporters would rather recruit minority achievers to institutions where they will feel inferior, than place them in settings where they are appropriately skilled and where they would have a chance to feel academically adequate and possibly superior.
Page opens his chapter on affirmative action with an anecdote about being passed over in his first attempt to get hired as a journalist. As a high school graduate in 1965, he applied for a summer newsroom job but was beaten out by a girl less qualified and younger, but white. Then came the Watts riot, after which Page was hired. Page's comment: "You might say that my first job in newspapers came as a result of an affirmative action program called 'urban riots.'"
This is a familiar cliche of the left. White people only respond fairly to blacks when they have a gun to their heads. Malcolm X scorned the civil rights movement, referring in a 1963 speech to "the recent ridiculous march on Washington" because he believed, wrongly, that Americans would never give blacks their rights. But in retrospect many black intellectuals see him as a force behind the civil rights movement, because his violent racism scared whites, who reasoned: "Better King than a 'crazy nigger' like Malcolm X." What is striking about Page's reflection on his experience is that he does not pause to consider that this was his first job application out of high school, or that it was only for a summer position. Perhaps the men doing the hiring, for example, merely wanted to have a girl around the office, an unprofessional but not implausible reason for the choice.
More importantly, Page gives no thought to the possibility that he would have been hired eventually, even without the riots. Recognizing that changes like integration take time is not the same as saying that they require force. Was it the threat of riots or of affirmative action laws that eventually made black athletes dominant in sports leagues whose owners (Marge Schott comes to mind) hardly rank among the socially enlightened? Or was it affirmative action that allowed black cultural artists to achieve an equally dominant position in the popular music industry? How did Oprah Winfrey, a black sharecropper's daughter from Mississippi, become mother confessor to millions of lower middle-class white women (and worth 550 million dollars in the process) without affirmative action? Page has no answer.
The principal reason conservatives oppose affirmative action is one that is given almost no attention by progressives eager to attribute base motives to their opponents: racial preference is an offense in principle to the core value of American pluralism-the neutrality of American government towards all its diverse communities. Affirmative action is a threat to inclusiveness, since privilege (and therefore exclusion) is established under affirmative action policies, not by achievement, but by law. The principle of affirmative action, which is inevitably a principle of racial preference, is a threat to what Felix Frankfurter identified as "the ultimate foundation of a free society . . . the binding tie of cohesive sentiment." Affirmative action based on principles like geographical diversity constitutes no such threat, but policies based on race do.
Another reason for opposing affirmative action is its social corrosiveness. Every time a black leader refers to the paucity of blacks on academic faculties or in the upper reaches of corporate life, the automatic presumption is that white racism is responsible. The legal concept of "racial disparity" embodies the same assumption. The idea that government must compel its white citizens to be fair to its minority citizens presumes that white America is so racist it cannot be fair on its own account. But this involves supporters of affirmative action in illogic so insurmountable it cannot be addressed. If America's white majority needs to be forced by government to be fair, how is it possible that this same majority (led by a Republican president, Richard Nixon) created affirmative action policies in the first place?
There is no answer to the question because affirmative action was not created in response to white racism. It was created because of the widespread failure of blacks to take advantage of the opportunities that became available when legal segregation was ended. Since liberals believe that social institutions are responsible for what happens to people, this failure had to be the result of institutional rather than individual factors.
The corrosive effect of thirty years of affirmative action policies has been to convince black Americans that whites are indeed so racist that some external force must compel their respect and, secondarily, that blacks need affirmative action in order to gain equal access to the American dream. The further consequence of this misguided "remedy" has been to foster a racial paranoia in the black community that is so pervasive that even the thinking of blacks who have benefited from America's racial generosity has been significantly affected. How significantly is revealed in the almost casual way the paranoia surfaces: "'Black is beautiful' was the slogan which made many white people nervous, as any show of positive black racial identification tends to do." Does it really? The television mini-series Roots, after all, was one of the most significant milestones of positive black racial identification-an epic of black nobility and white evil purporting to represent the entire history of American race relations. It was not only produced and made possible by whites, but also voluntarily watched by more whites than any previous television show in history. Conversely, most of the negative stereotypes of blacks in today's popular culture are the work of black stars and directors like Martin Lawrence and Spike Lee, not to mention the infamous gangsta rap industry, which celebrates black sociopathic behavior, and whose most profitable labels are owned and operated by blacks.
In gauging the size of the chip ominously perched on black America's shoulders, few measures can be so choice or familiar as the following passage:
Black people may read dictionaries, but many see them as instruments of white supremacy. They have a point. Dictionaries define what is acceptable and unacceptable in the language we use as defined by the ruling class (sic). . . . The dictionary's pleasant synonyms for 'white' ('free from moral impurity . . . innocent . . . favorable, fortunate . . .') and unpleasant synonyms for 'black' ('. . . thoroughly sinister or evil . . .wicked . . . condemnation or discredit . . . the devil . . . sad, gloomy or calamitous . . . sullen . . .') are alone enough to remind black people of their subordinate position to white people in Anglo-European traditions and fact.
This is the standard racial canard repeated by Camille Cosby and others. But white Americans (dictionary-makers included) had nothing to do with identifying Clarence Page and his racial kindred as "black" in modern times. When Page and I were young, blacks were called "Negroes" or "coloreds." The words "Negro" and "colored" have no such negative connotations, moral or otherwise. It was Malcolm X who first embraced "black" as a term of pride, interpreting "Negro" as a term to connote a pliant black or "Uncle Tom." After Malcolm X's death, Stokely Carmichael and the new radical civil rights leadership aggressively promoted the new label with the slogan "Black Power" and demanded that the identification "black" be employed as a sign of respect. The white liberal cultural establishment — including the nation's principal press institutions, the universities and other legitimating agencies-swiftly obliged. It was then acquiesced in by the majority of white Americans who, for more than a generation now, have ardently wished that black America would
finally get what it wanted from them and be satisfied.
When the layers are peeled from Page's discussion of "racism," what we are left with is a disappointing marxist residue: "Modern capitalist society puts racism to work, wittingly or unwittingly. It populates a surplus labor pool of last-hired, first-fired workers whose easy employability when economic times are good and easy disposability when times go bad helps keep all workers' wages low and owners' profits high. . . . Racism is one of many non-class issues, such as busing, affirmative action, or flag burning, that diverts attention from pocketbook issues that might unite voters across racial lines."
This is simple-minded, sorry stuff, but not unusual for liberals, black and white. The problem with the black underclass is not that it is underemployed, but that it is unemployable. Blacks who have fallen through society's cracks do not even get to the point of being "last-hired." The flood of illegal Hispanic immigrants into areas like south central Los Angeles, where they are rapidly displacing the indigenous blacks, shows that the jobs exist but that the resident black population either will not or cannot take advantage of these opportunities. The fact that one in three young black males in America is a convicted felon-a reality that Page does not begin to confront-does not help their employability. Once again, the specter of racism provides a convenient shield for the massive denial of problems that actually have very little to do with race.
In fact, the racial conflict in America is not driven by economics or even white prejudice. Rather, it is driven by radical political agendas-by Clarence Page's friends on the left like Manning Marable, Ronald Takaki, and Michael Lerner (names lifted from the back jacket blurbs for his book)-who keep up the drum beat of complaint about American racism and "oppression."
The very phrase "institutional racism" is, of course, of leftist provenance. Like "ruling class" it refers to an abstraction. It is a totalitarian term. It does not specify particular, accountable individuals. You are a class enemy (or, in this case, a race enemy) not because of anything you actually think or do, but "objectively" — because you are situated in a structure of power that provides you (white skin) privilege. Page is astute enough to see that if racism is defined as an institutional flaw, "it does not matter what you think as an individual" and therefore such a definition offers "instant innocence" to the oppressor. But he is not candid enough to acknowledge that the definition imputes instant culpability as well. While absolving individual whites of guilt, it makes all whites guilty.
The belief in the power of "institutional racism" allows black civil rights leaders to denounce America as a "racist" society, when it is the only society on earth-black, white, brown, or yellow whose defining public creed is anti-racist, a society to which black refugees from black-ruled nations regularly flee in search of refuge and freedom. The phantom of institutional racism allows black leaders to avoid the encounter with real problems within their own communities, which are neither caused by whites nor soluble by the actions of whites, but which cry out for attention.
The problem with the discontent now smoldering inside America's privileged black intellectuals, so well expressed in Showing My Color, is that it can never be satisfied: "Nothing annoys black people more than the hearty perennial of black life in America, the persistent reality of having one's fate in America decided inevitably by white people. It is an annoyance that underlies all racial grievances in America, beginning with slavery, evolving through the eras of mass lynchings and segregated water fountains, and continuing through the age of 'white flight,' mortgage discrimination, police brutality, and the 'race card' in politics."
In Page's view, the unifying and ultimate goal of all black reformers, whether radicals like bell hooks or conservatives like Clarence Thomas, is "black self-determination." What Clarence Page and blacks like him want is "to free the destiny of blacks from the power of whites."
Within a single national framework, in which blacks are inevitably a minority, this is obviously an impossible goal. Those who advocate it are destined to frustration and anger, and thus to consider themselves perpetually "oppressed." The irony, of course, is that America's multi-ethnic society and color-blind ideal provides the most favorable setting for individuals of all origins to enjoy the freedom to determine their destinies, even if they happen to be members of a minority. Ask the Jews. For two thousand years Jews of the diaspora have not been able to free their destiny from the power of gentiles. But in America, they have done very well, thank you, and do not feel oppressed.
* * *
*Booknotes, C-SPAN 2, 2 April 1999, "The Festival of the Book."
8
The Politics of Race
THE Communist Manifesto is probably the only marxist text that the millions of activists who responded to his message actually read. Inspired by its vision of a social redemption, Marxists went on to kill a hundred million people in the twentieth century and create the most oppressive tyrannies ever known. It is almost a decade since the empire that marxism built collapsed in ruins, but it is already evident that the lessons of this tragedy have not been learned. The progressive left and its political faith have survived even the catastrophe of their socialist dreams.
Of course, few people outside the universities today think of themselves as marxists, or will publicly admit to socialist aspirations. But behind protective labels like "populist" and "progressive," the old left is resurrected among us and with its destructive agendas fully intact. This makes the ideas of the Manifesto, discredited as they are, worth attending to again.
In fact, three destructive ideas advanced in Marx's tract form the core of the contemporary leftist faith. The first and most important is that the modern, secular, democratic world is ruled by alien powers. According to Marx, the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth-century did not establish true democracies. Even though the citizens of industrial nations had dethroned their hereditary rulers and vested sovereignty in themselves, this did not mean they were free. Though liberated from serfdom, workers were now "wage-slaves," captives to capital, the alien power alleged by Marx to rule the modern world in a fashion analogous to the aristocracies and oligarchies of the past. Behind the façade of political democracy, governments are controlled by "ruling classes," the owners of capital who just as effectively keep the citizenry in chains.
The second idea of the Manifesto flows naturally from this analysis: Politics is war conducted by other means. It is this attitude that inspires the viciousness of left-wing politics, the desire to destroy the opposition entirely, to eliminate adversaries from the field of battle. It is also the perspective that creates the reckless disregard radicals have for institutions and traditions, for what has been created by the generations that went before. In order to create true freedom, the civil orders and binding faiths of democratic systems must be subverted and then destroyed. Treachery and lies are justifiable means to achieve such fiercely desired ends.
The third Marxist idea is the hope that inspires the destruction itself. The extinction of the existing order can lead without much forethought or preparation to a liberated future — a break with the entire history of humanity's enthrallment to these alien forces. It is a mystical creed: the very state which is to be destroyed as the instrument of class oppression, in the very act of destruction will be transformed into a means of human liberation. Animating the leftist faith is the idea that the left itself is the redeeming power, the social messiah through whom a world of social justice will be born.
Today the alien power thought by the left to control our destinies is only rarely described as a "ruling class," although it is still perceived as that. Refuted by the history of communist empires, the left has turned to new vocabularies and concepts to rescue it from its defeats. Today the ruling class is identified as the "patriar- or the "white male oligarchy," or in disembodied form as the force of "institutional racism" or "white supremacy." The result is a kitsch marxism that follows the basic marxist scheme but results in true intellectual incoherence. Marx's idea of a cl
assless society may make a certain sense in theory even if it is unworkable in practice, whereas the idea of a race-less society or a gender-free society makes no sense at all.
The leftist agenda can be clearly seen in the heart of present conflicts over race, which pose a fundamental challenge to America's multi-ethnic social order. Thus, the proclaimed goal of affirmative action advocates is to "level the playing field." It is defined this way to highlight the left's claim that traditional civil rights solutions have failed to achieve "real" equality, by which is meant equality of results. Traditional civil rights solutions were focused on the fairness of the institutional process, the elimination of legal barriers to political power and individual opportunity. For Martin Luther King Jr. and the traditional civil rights movement, leveling the playing field simply meant extending to black southerners, the constitutional protections accorded to all Americans. It meant making all citizens, regardless of color, equal before the law. Leveling the playing field meant creating neutral rules that did not encompass color or ethnicity but made both irrelevant to the contests of civic and economic life. This was the idea of a "color-neutral" society. It was not that color would be unseen or denied, but that color would not affect individual outcomes, certainly not through the agency of the state. By these standards, the playing field became level once government ceased to play racial favorites, a goal achieved through the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.
But though the civil rights battles of the 1960s eliminated racial barriers, the results did not become equal. In the left's perspective, this could only be explained by a hidden racism. According to the left, procedural fairness merely masked an institutional bias that effectively preserves the status quo. Just as traditional marxists deride "bourgeois" democracy as a political sham to preserve the power of a ruling class, so the civil rights left dismisses equality of opportunity as a sham to preserve the superior position of a dominant race. In the old model, an institutionalized class system subverts the democratic form of free elections to preserve a hierarchy of social power. It does not matter that the political process is formally democratic, because the economic class system creates institutionalized inequality. (Of course, this marxist idea is refuted by the fluidity of the American class structure. Currently, 70 percent of American millionaires are first generation; in short, they earned their fortunes. Individual opportunity does exist, and thus individual freedom to succeed or fail.) The contemporary left and its liberal allies merely transpose this analysis (fatuously, it must be said) to the issue of race.
Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Page 8
