Dominion (83 page)

“Yeah. Why?”

“I don’t know. You don’t sound yourself.”

“Had a rough night.”

Clarence got his second cup of
Trib
coffee, his fifth of the day, and sat down to edit the column he’d rough-drafted the day before. He was grateful for the head start. A dull brain could handle revision better than creation. He absentmindedly ran his finger beneath his right ear.

I’m convinced Charles Murray is wrong and there is no genetic cause for black failure. But many liberals quietly suspect he’s right. They think blacks
can’t
succeed if placed in equal competition with other races. This makes them exactly what they call everyone else—racists.

People once believed blacks were inferior and couldn’t compete with whites in athletics. Nobody says that any more. Black athletic success has disproved the thesis. Likewise, black academic success will accomplish far more for our children than endlessly repeating the mantra ‘No more racism.’ Heaping all the blame on racism has fostered failure by distracting the black community from raising our competitive standards.

We have endless campaigns against white racism. We have mandatory sensitivity classes and campus multiculturalism lectures. We have speech codes and hate crime laws. Racism has become the windmill in a quixotic crusade. Liberals are redoubling their efforts to topple racism, while we neglect the
real
solutions of raising the standards of two-parent families, lasting marriages, moral training, discipline, and academic excellence.

According to its admissions application test scores, if University of California at Berkeley were to admit students on merit, few Hispanics and blacks would qualify. So how have we dealt with this problem? By working to raise the academic standards in schools attended by blacks and Hispanics? No, instead we implemented racial quotas. Ironically, most of the black and Hispanic students admitted to Berkeley under this camouflage flunk out. The tests don’t lie, and students with lower scores
cannot
compete with those who score higher. They flunk out of Berkeley, when they would have succeeded at any number of other colleges. Under quotas, blacks and Hispanics become failures—dropout statistics—when if they’d gone to a college where they were admitted on test scores, they would have succeeded. Ironically, many will believe they flunked out of college because of racism, rather than because they entered a college for which they weren’t qualified.

We must make a concerted effort to strengthen black families and improve black education, to raise the bar instead of lowering it, to transform inner-city schools back into true institutions of learning, and to assist black families who want their children in private schools.

We
cannot
succeed at eliminating racism. We
can
succeed at fostering discipline, determination, and self-improvement. And that is our young people’s true ticket to success.

Harley won’t speak to me after this one.

Joe, the
Tribune
security guard, looked respectfully but uneasily at the blue-and-black-uniformed policeman who walked in the lobby of the
Trib.
Joe’s eyes focused on the prominent gold badge, a slightly rectangular shield, directly above the officer’s left pocket.

“May I help you, officer?” Joe asked, in his most professional, we’re-law-enforcement-colleagues tone.

“Officer Guillermo Rodriguez.” He handed him a business card. “I’m here to see Clarence Abernathy.”

“Anything I can help you with?”

“No.”

“Okay. Well, uh, can you please check in at the receptionist’s desk over there?” The officer went to Elaine’s desk. She’d been listening to the exchange.

“So,” Elaine said, choosing her words carefully, “Mr. Abernathy is expecting you?”

“No, he’s not,” Rodriguez said.

“All right, well, let me call him and ask him to come down.”

“Actually, I’d rather go up and see him unannounced. What floor?”

“Fourth floor. But if he’s not expecting you—”

“Please don’t call him. I’ll find him myself. Thanks.”

He placed his handcuffs and gun on Elaine’s desk, walked through the metal detector, picked them up on the other side, and went to the elevator.

Clarence sat in his cubicle, trying to cut through the fog of his migraine and revise the column staring back at him from the terminal. He was finally making progress when suddenly, despite his earplugs, he sensed a presence behind him. He turned quickly, to see a uniformed policeman. His heart raced.

“Clarence Abernathy?”

“Yes?” He heard the blunted voice and fumbled to take out his earplugs with some appearance of dignity.

“Officer Guillermo Rodriguez, Portland police.”

The officer didn’t extend his hand. Clarence’s eye went not to the officer’s badge nor the radio positioned near his shoulder, but to the huge black belt housing handcuffs, asp baton, pepper-spray, and a large 9 mm Glock, along with two extra magazines.

“What do you want?”

“I need to talk with you. I’ve discussed it with Mr. Foley, and he said we could use that room over there.” He pointed to an editorial conference room.

“I’m busy. Need to finish up a column.”

“I can wait. A little. Ten minutes?”

“Fifteen or twenty.”

“All right.” The officer’s politeness didn’t cover the fact he wasn’t pleased at the delay. “Come in as soon as you’re done.”

Between the hammer beating on his brain and the uniformed officer pacing in the conference room, Clarence’s revisions went nowhere. He made a few cosmetic changes, pressed the send button, and delivered to Winston his premature and underweight column, still sixty words short.

Clarence cleared his throat and went to the conference room. There the officer was studying several white report forms and a yellow notepad. He looked like a journalist prepping for an interview. Except journalists don’t carry weapons and handcuffs.

“What’s going on here, officer?” Clarence asked.

“I’m here to get your side.”

“My side of what?”

“You’ve been accused of some serious crimes.”

Clarence stared at him in disbelief. Was Pete getting back at him for all those practical jokes? But this didn’t feel like a prank. “What crimes?”

Officer Rodriguez looked down at the papers. “Possession and use of a controlled substance, that’s a class B felony. Delivering a controlled substance to a minor, that’s a class A felony.”

“Drugs? You’re accusing me of doing
drugs?”

“And rape three—contributing to the sexual delinquency of a minor. That’s a class A misdemeanor. Statutory rape.”

“My wife’s the only woman I’ve ever had sex with. And she’s not a minor. What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you having sex with a seventeen-year-old girl.”

“You’ve got the wrong man, officer. I don’t do drugs, and I never touched a girl. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The girl’s name is,” Rodriguez looked down at the sheet, “Gracie Miller.”

“The nearest telephone pole always looms largest to them,” Lewis said to Dani and Torel. “It becomes their reference point, so the newest so-called ‘truth’ is the most popular.”

“My brother talked about political correctness,” Dani said. “Is that what you mean?”

“Often, yes,” Lewis said, “although sometimes what is politically correct is also true. Usually, however, it is simply the latest in an endless string of wrong perspectives, each of which seems right for the moment because of its newness. Of course, silly things said now are as silly as they would have been if said long ago. But in the Shadowlands, men live by the myth of moral progress.”

“What do you mean?” Dani asked.

“They regard failure to change moral standards as stagnation,” Lewis said, hands clasped behind his back, pacing in professorial style. “The old fashioned becomes synonymous with the bad, the new synonymous with the good. But the square of the hypotenuse does not become outdated by continuing to equal the sum of the squares of the other two sides. An unchanging standard is not the enemy of moral progress. On the contrary, it is the necessary condition for it. If the destination is as mobile as the train, the train can never arrive.”

“But some of the old standards
were
wrong,” Dani said.

“Of course. But the
oldest
standards are Elyon’s, and they are always right. Certain old standards of men were wrong, such as slavery and oppression and the doctrine of racial inequality. Other old standards were right, such as the sanctity of unborn human life and the wrongness of sexual immorality. To progress, you must change the old that was wrong by conforming instead to that which is older still, the ancient and eternal truth of God. But you must not change the old that was right. To do so is not moral progress but moral disintegration. What they see as lack of progress is often moral permanence. They fail to realize truth can be discovered on earth, but it can only originate in heaven.”

“That’s always been the message of prophets, hasn’t it?” Dani asked.

“Exactly,” Lewis said. “The prophet is not the revolutionary he appears. He does not call people to what is new, but to what is old. Not to human prejudice but to eternal values, which are always right. Prophets resist the current of their time by holding to the truths of eternity. They take us forward by pointing us back to truth we have departed from, truth just as true now as it always was. Ironically, the beliefs of the present age that take pride in not being old fashioned, tomorrow
will
be old fashioned. Truth, however, never goes out of date.”