Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (19 page)

Racism—or the absence of it—can also be discerned in survey data about white attitudes not only toward black inferiority but also toward racial intermarriage.
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Blacks know it too: ask blacks today to recall when they personally experienced racism—when for example
someone called them “nigger”—and many are hard pressed to give a single example. While old-line activists continue to recycle horror stories from decades ago, the new consensus is reflected by sociologist Orlando Patterson: “America, while still flawed in its race relations, is now the least racist white majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all of Africa; and has gone through a dramatic change in its attitudes toward miscegenation.”
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Patterson wrote that in 1991 and it’s even more true today.

Among the younger generation, racism is virtually a non-issue. This is not to say that racism isn’t endlessly talked about in diversity workshops and mandatory seminars in schools and colleges. Such events, however, have assumed a surreal quality. The only race-based discrimination that young people actually experience is affirmative action policies that benefit blacks and Hispanics and disadvantage whites and Asian Americans. If racist countries don’t elect black presidents, neither do they establish preferential policies benefiting minority groups over the majority. So the persistence of affirmative action over more than a generation is, like Obama’s success, a testament to how far racism has receded in America.

Why did racism decline? It is tempting to answer: because of the Civil Rights revolution. In reality, however, there wasn’t much of a “revolution.” Ask yourself: If it was a real revolution, how come hardly anyone died? The very fact that we can remember the isolated incidents shows how isolated they were. Martin Luther King scored an easy intellectual victory over the Southern segregationists and racists. The best they could do against him was to unleash police dogs and water hoses. Yet, dogs and hoses were no match for federal troops that were eventually sent in to enforce court decisions and
federal legislation. So why didn’t the South answer Martin Luther King? Why didn’t Southerners say, “Of course we think blacks are inferior and we are justified in thinking that way.” The simple answer is that racism had greatly eroded before the Civil Rights movement. The biggest reason for this is World War II. It was Hitler who helped to discredit the idea of racial supremacy, and ever since 1945 racism has been on the defensive.

Incredibly, there are Civil Rights activists who deny the magnitude of racial progress, and the massive falling-off in discrimination against blacks. I am not suggesting that we have reached the “end of racism,” a title of one of my earlier books. That title was intended to convey a goal—where we are heading—rather than to announce racism’s disappearance. Obviously, in a big country like America we can find examples of racism, but consider this: if you look at the crime statistics, there are innumerable black assaults on whites every day and no one notices; one black delinquent like Trayvon Martin gets shot and there is a national scandal. Perhaps the best way to summarize is that racism used to be systematic, but now it is merely episodic. Racism today is not strong enough to prevent blacks or any other group from achieving its aspirations.

Still, racism used to be a very powerful force in America. For the first half of the twentieth century black inferiority was pretty much taken for granted. In the early 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had more than two million members. The group organized a march in New York that attracted more than fifty thousand Klansmen. Today the Klan could scarcely drum up a hundred marchers, and they would be vastly outnumbered by protesters against the Klan. So things have changed for the better. During the very heyday of racism, however, two very different strategies emerged for combating it. These were the protest strategy of W. E. B. Du Bois and the self-help strategy of Booker T. Washington.

Du Bois argued that blacks in America face a single problem: white racism. And he recommended a simple strategy to fight it, summed up in a phrase first used by Frederick Douglass: “agitate, agitate, agitate.” As Du Bois himself wrote, “We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a free American, political, civil and social, and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.”
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In keeping with this approach, Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which quickly established itself as the leading Civil Rights organization in America. Its approach could easily be summed up in that slogan, “agitate, agitate, agitate.”

Booker T. Washington argued that blacks face two problems in America. One was racism, and the other was black cultural backwardness. As Washington put it, “The Negro should not be deprived by unfair means of the franchise, but political agitation alone will not save him… . He must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence, and character. No race without these elements can permanently succeed.” Washington believed in the ultimate triumph of the meritocratic idea. “Merit, no matter under what skin found, is in the long run recognized and rewarded… . Whether he will or not, a white man respects a Negro who owns a two-story brick house.”
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Here Washington is saying that just as important as rights is the ability to compete effectively and take advantage of those rights. Moreover, he added that black success and achievement are the best ways to dispel white suspicions of black inferiority.

When Washington pointed out shortcomings in the black community—such as the high black crime rate—Du Bois erupted with outrage. “Suppose today Negroes do steal,” he thundered, “Who was it that for centuries made stealing a virtue by stealing their labor?” Washington never denied the bad habits cultivated in this way; his point was that they existed, and had to be changed. “In spite of all
that may be said in palliation, there is too much crime committed by our people… . We should let the world understand that we are not going to hide crime simply because it is committed by black people.” If Du Bois’s motto could be summed up as “agitate, agitate, agitate,” Washington’s could be summed up as “work, work, work.”
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The Civil Rights movement, led by the NAACP and by Martin Luther King, was based on the politics of protest. This movement was successful not because it represented a revolutionary departure from American principles, but because it made a direct appeal to those principles. When Martin Luther King declared he was submitting a “promissory note,” and demanded it be cashed, we may pause to ask: What note? Did the Southern segregationists make him a promise and then renege on it? Of course not—the promissory note was none other than the Declaration of Independence. In other words, Martin Luther King appealed not for new rights but for the enforcement of rights already granted in 1776. Remarkably this twentieth-century black leader relied for his moral and legal claims on the charter of a white Southern slave-owner. Thank you, Mister Jefferson!

Today we hear from progressives that the Civil Rights movement is “unfinished,” and they are right, but not for the reasons they think. Progressives are still chasing the windmills of old-style racism, whipping the nation into a frenzy every time there is some obscure incident. The reason blacks remain so far behind whites, however, has very little to do with racism. It has to do with African American cultural backwardness. Martin Luther King recognized this. In a statement that has gone largely ignored, he said, “We must not let the fact that we are victims of injustice lull us into abrogating responsibility for our own lives. We must not use our oppression as an excuse for mediocrity and laziness… . By improving our standards here and now, we will go a long way toward breaking down
the arguments of the segregationist… . The Negro will only be free when he reaches down into the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own Emancipation Proclamation.”
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Here King places himself directly in the line of Booker T. Washington. But King’s advice, just like Washington’s entire philosophy, has been largely disregarded by the Civil Rights leadership. Even now that group continues with “agitate, agitate, agitate.” But today Americans enjoy equality of rights under the law, and the challenge for black Americans is to compete effectively in school and in the marketplace. Rights by themselves have a limited value. What is the benefit of having the right to compete in the Olympics if you don’t know how to run fast or swim well? More to our point here, what good is it to have a right to work at Google or Oracle if you don’t know how to do software programming? Rights are a prerequisite to success but success also requires the skills to take advantage of those rights.

Even though Du Bois knew this, he didn’t emphasize it. What he emphasized was discrimination and theft, and his solution was that the thief owes the victim and the thief must pay. Booker T. Washington’s insight was deeper: even if there has been a theft, sometimes it is the victim who is in the best position to mitigate the damage and restore his opportunities. In other words, society may have put him down but he is in the best position to get up. Ultimately Du Bois became disgusted with America because he didn’t see blacks achieve the same status as whites and other groups. Consequently Du Bois became an enthusiast of Soviet Russia—even an admirer of Stalin. He also tried to inject himself into the Third World anti-colonial movement, organizing a Pan-African Congress in 1945 for various African independence leaders. In 1961, Du Bois renounced his American citizenship and emigrated to Ghana. He was one of very
few American blacks who actually took the step of going back to Africa, although he did it when he was ninety-three, two years before his death.
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While Booker T. Washington is ignored or reviled among the mainstream of the Civil Rights leadership, there is one group that is silently following his strategy of “work, work, work.” That group is the non-white immigrants in America. I am thinking here of the Koreans and Haitians and West Indians and South Asians and Mexicans. These groups are all beneficiaries of the Civil Rights movement, as I am. Yet we seem to know, in a way many African Americans don’t, that America has changed. Rather than protesting the remaining obstacles, we look for the broad vistas of opportunity. Rather than agitating for white sympathy and government largesse, we work our way up the rungs of success.

Today we can simply compare African Americans with non-white immigrants to see whether the protest strategy or the self-help strategy is better. This is one of the benefits of multiculturalism. It offers what Friedrich Hayek termed “a framework of competing utopias,” and we can compare them to see what works and what doesn’t. Today the verdict is clear—protest is a dead end when rights are already available to you. In twenty-first-century America, Du Bois is irrelevant and Booker T. Washington is indispensable. Consistent with Washington’s philosophy, little guys of every race and color can move up from the bottom and through “work, work, work” write the charter of their own Emancipation Proclamation.

CHAPTER 10

THE VIRTUE OF PROSPERITY

There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently occupied than in getting money.
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S
AMUEL
J
OHNSON
,
B
OSWELL S
L
IFE OF
J
OHNSON

I
n 1893 the historian Frederick Jackson Turner published a famous essay declaring that the American frontier was closed and that the American dream based on the acquisition of new land must finally end. Jackson argued that the frontier had defined America from the beginning. But now, he said, we have reached the Pacific Ocean and there is no more land to discover and occupy. Jackson identified the specific traits the frontier brought out in Americans. “The coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, the practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients, that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are the traits of the frontier.” One can see that Jackson
is not uncritical of frontier traits, but he also knows the role they played in building the country. Jackson declared that the closing of the frontier represented the end of an era. “Four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”
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Jackson’s thesis has been hotly debated. The first question I want to consider is whether he’s right that there is no more frontier. I don’t think he is. Jackson presumes that the American dream is built on land, and for more than a century, it was. People of limited means would move west in order to find someplace new. But now there is a new frontier, and it is new wealth and new technology. Instead of finding someplace new, we make something new. Today’s wealth is not primarily in land; it is in making things that didn’t exist before. I’m not just thinking about the wealth created by new communications technology—we have computers and cell phones now that didn’t exist in 1893—but also of the countless innovations and amenities in medicine, recreation, work efficiency, and home life. Someone has to come up with this stuff, and in a way it’s more difficult than simply to push west and develop new tracts of land. My point is that, under entrepreneurial capitalism, once the land is gone there are new ways for America to create wealth and opportunity. The frontier is never closed.