In his “nation-of-cowards” address, introducing Black History Month at the Department of Justice, Attorney General Eric Holder lamented the persistence of self-segregation, half a century after the triumph of the civil rights movement:
[O]utside the workplace the situation is even more bleak in that there is almost no significant interaction between us. On Saturdays and Sundays America in the year 2009 does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some fifty years ago. This is truly sad. Given all that we as a nation went through during the civil rights struggle it is hard for me to accept that the result of those efforts was to create an America that is more prosperous, more positively race conscious and yet is voluntarily socially segregated.27
Holder echoes Obama’s 2008 speech on Rev. Jeremiah Wright in which he invoked the “old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.”
Several months later, Patterson, writing in the New York Times, echoed Holder:
In private life blacks are almost as isolated from whites today as they were under Jim Crow.… The crucial questions that the country now faces are these: How can white citizens, who publicly embrace black citizens as athletic heroes, matinee idols, pop-music kings, talk-show queens, senators, governors and now president, continue to shun them in their neighborhoods, schools and private lives?28
Patterson poses a follow-up question: “In their insistent celebration of racial identity, how complicit are black Americans in their own social isolation?”29
What Holder and Patterson are saying is that, left to themselves, black and white separate and segregate. The evidence bears them out. In 2010 the New York Times reported on the failed effort to persuade African Americans to come and bring their children to our national parks:
[V]isitors to the nation’s 393 national parks—there were 285.5 million of them in 2009—are overwhelmingly non-Hispanic white, with blacks the least likely group to visit. That reality has not changed since the 1960s, when it was first identified as an issue. The Park Service now says the problem is linked to the parks’ very survival.… no group avoids national parks as much as African-Americans.30
If Americans of color have no interest in the national heritage of our national parks, a shrinking white majority will be unable to sustain them.
No longer mandated by courts, busing for integration is being abandoned and segregation is returning to the public schools. Parents who cannot afford private schools move away from neighborhoods when Hispanics and African Americans move in.
“It’s getting to the point of almost absolute segregation in the worst of the segregated cities—within one or two percentage points of what the Old South used to be like,” says Gary Orfield, of the Civil Rights Project. “The biggest metro areas are the epicenters of segregation. It’s getting worse for both blacks and Latinos, and nothing is being done about it.” In the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District of North Carolina, site of a famous integration decision in the Nixon era, “About half of its elementary schools have 10 percent or fewer white students, or 10 percent or fewer African American students.” Two-thirds of Latino and black children in major cities attend schools that are less than 10 percent white.31
Why? First, white students are declining as a share of public school enrollment. Second, white parents seek neighborhoods for their children to grow up in that are like the ones they themselves grew up in.
“Segregation means people are being deliberately assigned to schools based on skin color,” says Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, “If it simply reflects neighborhoods, then it’s not segregation.”32
A LOST SENSE OF NATIONHOOD
In The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, journalist Bill Bishop and sociologist Robert Cushing report that Americans are self-segregating not only by income and race but by social values and political beliefs. In one of their more arresting findings, they report that 27 percent of all the counties in the United States in 1976 were “landslide counties.” They went by 20 points or more for Carter or Ford. By 2004, however, 48 percent of all counties went by 20 points or more to Kerry or Bush.33
“People prefer to be with people like themselves,” writes Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson.
For all the celebration of “diversity,” it’s sameness that dominates. Most people favor friendship with those who have similar backgrounds, interests and values. It makes for more shared experiences, easier conversations, and more comfortable silences. Despite many exceptions, the urge is nearly universal. It’s human nature.34
Samuelson’s observation tracks that of a more famous American who discovered something about his fellow man on a pilgrimage to Mecca.
I tucked it in my mind that when I returned home I would tell Americans this observation: that where true brotherhood existed among all colors, where no one felt segregated, where there was no “superiority” complex, no “inferiority” complex—then, voluntarily, naturally, people of the same kind felt drawn together by that which they had in common.35
Mr. Samuelson, meet Malcolm X.
Reviewing The Big Sort in the New York Times, Scott Stossel wrote:
The three-network era of mass media, which helped create a national hearth of shared references and values, is long gone, displaced by a new media landscape that has splintered us into thousands of insular tribes.… Conservatives watch Fox; liberals watch MSNBC. Blogs and RSS feeds now make it easy to produce and inhabit a cultural universe tailored to fit your social values, your musical preferences, your view on every single political issue. We’re bowling alone—or at least only with people who resemble us, and agree with us.36
Again, Bishop and Cushing:
We have built a country where everyone can choose the neighbors (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of “those people” who live just a few miles away.37
Our retreat into enclaves of race and identity is far advanced. States cannot secede as they did in 1861, but people can—to places where they hope to rediscover the sense of community they recall in an America forever gone.
In Whitopia, Rich Benjamin describes what white Americans are retreating to:
Whitopia is whiter than the nation, its respective region and its state. It has posted at least 6 percent population growth since 2000. The majority of that growth (often upward of 90 percent) is from white migrants. And a whitopia has a je ne sais quoi—an ineffable social charisma, a pleasant look and feel.38
Among the new whitopias are St. George, Utah; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Bend, Oregon; Prescott, Arizona; and Greeley, Colorado. These migrants to whitopia have seceded from the new America to the old nation they grew up in.
Americans, writes Bishop, “lost their sense of a nation by accident in the sweeping economic and cultural shifts that took place after the mid-1960s. And by instinct they have sought out modern-day recreations of the 19th-century ‘island-communities’ in where and how they live.”39
Bishop’s point bears repeating. Since the middle of the last century we Americans have been losing our sense of nationhood, our sense that we are one nation and one people. Out of one, we have become many.
Nor are Americans out of step with the world. In a 2007 Pew poll of 45,000 people in 47 countries, “people from nations rich and poor worry about losing their traditional culture. In 46 of 47 countries, majorities say their traditional way of life is getting lost.… 73 percent of Americans fretted about the trend.” Three in four U.S. respondents wanted new restrictions on immigration.40
Do Americans believe our diversity is our strength? Do they love the “beautiful mosaic” America is becoming? In December 2009, the National Journal reported on a USA Network poll by Peter Hart which found that “
just 25% … believe America’s diversity is an indisputable advantage for the country [while] fifty-five percent believe discord among Americans of different stripes has worsened in the last ten years.” More than half the nation says America remains excessively divided on ethnic lines while only one in twenty says race relations are no longer a problem.41
Among the unmentionables that explain racial separation is crime. An analysis of “single offender victimization” figures from the FBI for 2007 finds blacks committed 433,934 violent crimes against whites, eight times as many as the 55,685 that whites committed against blacks. Interracial rape is almost exclusively black-on-white, with 14,000 assaults on white women by African American males in 2007. Not one case of white sexual assault on a black female was found in the FBI study.42 Are not such crimes of both interracial violence and sexual degradation hate crimes?
Newspapers rarely or never report such statistics. But in making decisions about where to live, shop, and socialize, people act on this reality. In retort to Eric Holder’s nation-of-cowards speech, Heather Mac Donald wrote that before “Holder and his attorneys” start blaming racism for racial separation, he might glance at those crime statistics:
For instance, the homicide rate for black men between the ages of 18 and 24 is well over ten times that of whites.… In New York City … 83 percent of all gun assailants were black during the first six months of 2008, according to victims and witnesses, though blacks make up only 24 percent of the city’s population. Add Hispanic perps and you account for 98 percent. That explains why someone might feel a sense of trepidation when approached by a group of black youths. That’s not racism, it’s the reality of crime.43
If Mac Donald’s statistics are accurate, 49 of every 50 muggings and murders in New York are the work of minorities. That might explain why black folks have trouble getting a cab. Every New York cabby must know the odds, should he pick up a man of color at night. They are forty-nine to one that if he is assaulted or never makes it home his assailant will be a man of color.
In “Is Racial Profiling Racist?” Washington Times columnist Walter Williams, himself black, explains the practice and defends the profilers.
If racial profiling is racism, then the cab drivers of Washington, D. C., they themselves mainly black and Hispanic, are all for it. A District taxicab commissioner, Sandra Seegars, who is black, issued a safety-advice statement urging D.C’s 6,800 cabbies to refuse to pick up “dangerous-looking” passengers. She described “dangerous looking” as a young black guy … with shirttail hanging down longer than his coat, baggy pants, unlaced tennis shoes.44
Seegars also urged cabbies to stay out of poor black neighborhoods.
After a cabbie in New York City was shot four times by a robber wearing a hooded sweatshirt, identified by police as Hispanic, Fernando Mateo, president of the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers, advised his drivers to profile blacks and Hispanics for their own protection. Said Mateo, “the God’s honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these drivers are blacks and Hispanics.”45
Mateo is himself black and Hispanic.
When charges of race discrimination were lodged against Papa John’s pizza delivery service in St. Louis, Williams writes, more than three-fourths of the drivers were black. They refused to deliver in the neighborhoods where they lived—out of fear of muggings or worse.
Even Jesse Jackson seems to understand that racial profiling is not necessarily racist. Said the reverend: “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”46 When Jackson attended a “Rebuild America” rally in Detroit on Labor Day in 2010, the Cadillac Escalade chauffeuring him around was stolen and stripped. Detroit Mayor Dave Bing’s official vehicle, a GMC Yukon Denali, also went missing and was found sitting on bricks, wheels and rims gone.47
SELF SEGREGATION
In its editorials the New York Times may deplore “Resegregation Now,”48 yet what is taking place reflects the decisions of free people about where they wish to live and with whom they wish to socialize. And if ours is to remain a free society, neither Big Brother nor the social engineers should interfere with that freedom of association.
In 2009, under a banner headline, “Black Sorority Protests ‘Old South’ Days,” the Montgomery Advertiser ran a story supporting Orlando Patterson’s thesis about black complicity in “their own social isolation.”49
Tuscaloosa—Members of a black sorority at the University of Alabama had gathered for an anniversary celebration when the street in front of their house filled with white men, some wearing Confederate uniforms and carrying rebel flags.
It was Kappa Alpha Order’s annual parade celebrating the antebellum South, and it prompted members of the black sorority to ask university officials to stop the event in the name of racial sensitivity.50
What was surprising was not white students wearing Confederate uniforms and carrying the Rebel battle flag. Reenactments of Civil War battles and gatherings of Sons of Confederate Veterans are common occurrences in the South. Moreover, Kappa Alpha Order was founded in 1865 at Washington and Lee while Robert E. Lee was the college president.
What was noteworthy was the phrase “black sorority.” Half a century after Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door to block integration, many of the brightest black women at the University of Alabama still voluntarily segregate themselves in sororities. Indeed, Alpha Kappa Alpha, the sorority offended by the Rebel marchers, had just celebrated the centennial of its birth at Howard University in 1908 and invited Michelle Obama to join. AKA is one of the “Divine Nine” black sororities and fraternities that date back a century. That they endure, fifty-seven years after the Brown decision, testifies to the truth of what Holder had asserted: Americans remain committed to desegregated schools and sports teams, but when it comes to socializing, they prefer their own. Our political elites preach a gospel of diversity, but the people do not practice the faith in their private lives.
Still, while the self-segregated black sororities and fraternities endure, the Kappa Alpha Order, because of the incident in Tuscaloosa, has banned the wearing of Confederate uniforms at Old South week celebrations.51
IS DIVERSITY A STRENGTH?
Are Americans a stronger people because tens of millions of immigrants and their children speak a language other than English in their homes and our fastest growing radio and TV stations broadcast in Spanish? Do we diminish ourselves by demanding that new citizens read English and immigrant children be immersed in English in public schools?
What other nation truly believes that its diversity is its greatest strength? Great Britain is a far more diverse nation than it was in the Days of Hope and Glory of Victoria and Churchill. Is she a stronger and better nation now that London is Londonistan, now that mullahs defend Muslim bombers, now that there are race riots every year? If diversity is truly a strength, why do Scots and Welsh seek to follow the Irish into secession and independence?
Has the ethnic diversity of the Balkans been a source of strength? Is Germany stronger for the diversity the Turks brought? Is France stronger for the five to eight million alienated Muslims in the banlieues of Paris?
Do the Israelis seek to build a multiethnic society, or do they wish to preserve a land where Jews alone are welcome to come and settle? Do they welcome the return of the Palestinians who once inhabited the land? Has the religious and ethnic diversity of Lebanon—Christian and Muslim, Sunni and Shia, Arab and Druze—been a blessing? Or does its diversity portend the breakup of Lebanon?
If diversity is a strength, how have such monochromatic nations as South Korea and Japan been so successful? Does Beijing believe “diversity is our strength” as it moves millions of Han Chinese into Tibet and Xinjiang to swamp Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims?
If diversity is a blessing, why does Mexico treat Guatemalans cross
ing into Mexico so harshly? Are the Mexicans fools for failing to appreciate the beauty and benefits of diversity? Or are we the fools for inviting the world into our own country?
Has the ethnic diversity of Africa—Kikuyu, Luo, and Masai in Kenya; Mashona and Matabele in Zimbabwe; Zulu, Xhosa, Bantu in South Africa; Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi; Yoruba and Ibo in Nigeria—proven a blessing for those countries? Or has diversity been the primary cause of the massacre of millions? Would not these peoples have all been happier, had their national boundaries been drawn up along tribal lines?
“At the end of their careful review of 40 years of research on diversity (including racial and ethnic) in organizations,” writes Skerry, “psychologists Katherine Williams and Charles O’Reilly conclude: ‘the preponderance of empirical evidence is that diversity is likely to impede group functioning.’”52
Which raises some questions.
Where is the empirical evidence behind General Casey’s assertion that “the strength of our Army comes from our diversity”? Is the diverse army of today really superior to Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia that resisted the Union’s mighty Army of the Potomac for four years? Is it superior to the U.S. Army that went ashore at Normandy? How so? Where is the evidence that an army enhances its strength when its enlisted ranks and officer corps become a mosaic of white, black, Asian, Hispanic, male, female, straight, and gay soldiers?
No one would say a surgical team or hockey team or debating team was superior because it included people of all races and ethnic groups. We would judge each team by its performance. What General Casey seems to be saying is that the strength of the U.S. Army stems from the fact that we now have a smaller share of white male soldiers. Does anyone really believe that?
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 25
