Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (9 page)

It is that same self-interest that causes the Democratic Party to defend affirmative action programs whose true (and virtually sole) beneficiaries are the black elites who are the enforcers of this political monolith. In
The Shape of the River
, a book written to justify affirmative action policies in education, former university presidents Derek Bok and William Bowen focus their attention on racial preference in admissions at twenty-eight elite colleges. Their study shows that 86 percent of the African-American beneficiaries of these racial preferences already come from the upper-middle and upper classes of the black community, and that they go on to top leadership positions in government and society.

If I were still a leftist, I would describe this privileged caste of African-Americans as a "
comprador
class" or "neo-colonial bourgeoisie" granted privileges by the imperial power to maintain its control over the colonial masses, and to secure the profits that flow from the system. The bottom line here is the aggrandizement of liberals, the Democratic Party, and their favored elites at the expense of minorities and the poor. That is the significance of the knee-jerk black support for Democratic big-government candidates in the 1998 elections.

A
PARADOX of the current civil rights debate is the way in which the terms of the historic conflict have been reversed. Martin Luther King Jr.'s triumphant crusade to extend America's constitutional covenant to all citizens is today scorned by the very heirs to his legacy. More often than not, moreover, it is the younger generation of educated, middle-class African-Americans — the primary beneficiaries of an integrated culture — who now take up the other side of the argument over segregation and racial preferences of thirty years ago.

Then the civil rights movement proclaimed as its goal a "color-blind society" and declared that racial distinctions made by government were cancers on the body politic and barriers to social progress not only in the American south, but the nation as a whole. In the current battles over "multiculturalism" and "affirmative action," however, these one-time partisans of universal standards and social integration stand on the side of racial preferences and support a double standard for government-designated groups. It is the traditional civil rights movement that now steps forward as the partisan of racial consciousness and tolerance towards racial separation, and it is the traditional civil rights leadership that supports "affirmative action" policies that result in government-enforced quotas for racial groups. It is the traditional civil rights activists who now march to oppose civil rights initiatives that seek to defend the principles for which King stood, and it is their efforts, which if successful, would put that historical process in reverse.

Clarence Page is a moderate voice in the "civil rights" camp and a bell-weather for the post-civil rights generation. A well-known television commentator and Pulitzer prize-winning columnist for the
Chicago Tribune
, Page was an adolescent at the time of King's efforts to integrate American institutions. His achievement of national influence and personal success can be taken as a symbol of the success of that movement.

Page is not enthusiastic about racial "nationalism" or even black militancy and has forcefully dissociated himself from "separatists." Unlike his more radical peers, he is not ashamed of expressing hope in the American dream. Yet, in a book-length manifesto called
Showing My Color
, Page has written an argument in defense of these disturbing radical trends. The very fact that someone like Clarence Page could write an apologia for race conscious government policies and even racial separation, shows how pervasive these trends have become.

Page takes the title of his book from a parental admonition he heard frequently in his youth: "Don't be showin' yo' color." Showing your color, he explains, "could mean acting out or showing anger in a loud and uncivilized way." More particularly, it meant playing to stereotype. In other words, "showing your color" really meant showing your
culture
— an irony that escapes the author. The title, he explains, "emerged from my fuming discontent with the current fashions of
racial denial
, steadfast repudiations of the difference race continues to make in American life [emphasis his]." Page then attacks the "'color-blind' approach to civil rights law" and laments the way the words of Martin Luther King have been "perverted" to support this view.

The argument of
Showing My Color
begins inauspiciously with a personal anecdote through which Page intends to establish that racism is, indeed, a "rude factor" in his life and, by extension, the lives of all black Americans. A problem that this anecdote shares with others that are often adduced on these occasions is that the incident he invokes to demonstrate the persistence of racism actually took place nearly forty years ago, in the segregated South. For Page, it is the memory of a trip to Alabama in the 1950s, where he encountered water fountains marked "colored" and "white." But who does not deplore this reality now? If you have to invoke a distant past to justify a present grievance, the case for the grievance is already undermined. Page seems unaware of the incongruity of his position.

Confronted by the tolerant attitudes of contemporary Americans, it has become fashionable among black intellectuals like Page to argue that even though change may appear to have occurred, it really has not. While overt racism may be behind us, a subtle and invisible system of power relationships continues to produce the same results: "Social, historical, traditional and institutional habits of mind that are deeply imbedded in the national psyche . . . work as active agents to impede equal opportunity for blacks." The name for these factors is "institutional racism": "[Racism] is not just an internalized belief or attitude. It is also an externalized public practice, a power relationship that continually dominates, encourages, and reproduces the very conditions that make it so useful and profitable." Though old-style racism may have been conquered, and is no longer an acceptable part of America's mainstream, this form of racism allegedly lives on as the defining fact of American life.

While premising his attitudes towards racial issues on this radical bedrock, Page presents himself as a more complex figure, a "progressive" inside whom a conservative struggles to emerge. In this, too, he is typical: "Conservatism resonates familiarly with me, as I think it does with most black Americans. We vote liberal, for liberalism has helped us make our greatest gains. But in other areas, we swing conservative. We want to believe that hard work will be rewarded. . . . We want to believe in the promise of America."

Page is not without courage in defending his conservative instincts, especially in view of the intimidating pressures within the black community to make visible figures like him bow to racial solidarity. Page does not hesitate to deplore the sick, anti-Semitic ravings of Louis Farrakhan, or to point out that spokesmen for the Nation of Islam have created a climate of racial hostility in the black community that led to the lynching of a Jew in Crown Heights a few years ago. Even in defending radical attitudes his arguments can be subtle. Thus Page responds to critics of black race consciousness by pointing out that "a minority that never has been allowed the luxury to feel secure in its own home culture does not easily let go of it to adopt the customs and attitudes of the mainstream culture."

Politically, Page chooses to be a Democrat because of what he describes as Republicans' assumption that "racism is no longer a problem," and their view that "government programs and agencies must be trimmed, even when those programs and agencies offer the last slender thread of protection the children of America's black slaves have against further slides back into oppression." In particular, he singles out conservative opposition to minimum wage laws, affirmative action employment policies, and welfare aid to mothers with dependent children, as examples of such attitudes. But there is also a cultural dimension to Page's differences with Republicans: "Klan membership dropped sharply in the early 1980s, according to researchers for the Anti-Defamation League and other Klan-watching groups, as many found a new, satisfying voice and vehicle in Republican Party politics. Enter David Duke." Well, yes, enter David Duke. But Duke was instantly proscribed by the Republican Party leadership including three living Republican presidents (one sitting at the time) which is a lot more than could be said about Louis Farrakhan and the two living Democratic presidents who have had many chances to condemn him by name and have not. Unlike Farrakhan's influence, Duke's does not reach outside Louisiana or into the chambers of Congress, while much of Duke's current rhetoric and argument is lifted directly from the pages of the multi-cultural left.

This lapse into partisan race-baiting provokes me to show my own color. I happen to be a Jewish conservative and a Republican, who nearly fifty years ago marched in support of Harry Truman's FBIr Employment Practices Act and has been active in civil rights struggles ever since. Moreover, I can share personal anecdotes of anti-Semitism that are more current than Page's encounter with "white" and "colored" water fountains in the 1950s. When my wife, who is not Jewish, and I became engaged, she was confronted by several friends with the comment: "How can you marry a
Jew
? It's like marrying a black."

Given this kinship between scorned minorities (and Jews and blacks have no monopoly on such anecdotes), a more candid dialogue seems in order. The level of Jew-hatred in America is higher today than it has been in my entire lifetime, thanks largely to its legitimation through the poisonous rantings of Farrakhan and his followers, and the tolerance of these views by large sections of the black intelligentsia. No conservative politician would be seen in the company of David Duke, but a wide spectrum of liberal black political leaders have embraced Farrakhan. And that is in no small part a consequence of the free ride patronizing liberals in the national media give to such attitudes.

Black anti-Semites and their tolerant peers have legitimized public anti-Semitism in a way that no other group in America could. Nor does it seem that Jews can afford to feel as protected today by the American mainstream as are blacks, despite the eyebrows such a claim is sure to raise. When Marlon Brando launched an attack on Hollywood Jews on the Larry King show and went on about "kikes," "chinks," and "niggers," it was only the "N-word" that got bleeped by the CNN censors. "Institutional racism" can cut more than one way. If Yankel Rosenbaum had been a black lynched by a Jewish mob in Crown Heights, does anyone think an all-Jewish jury would have been selected or that the Jewish assassin would have been acquitted, as Rosenbaum's killer was?

Anti-Semitism has real-world consequences for Jews, just as surely as racism does for blacks. A Jew knows not to attempt a career in the auto business in Detroit, for example, without taking into account the "institutional" bias of the industry and thus the hazards of such an effort. I have stood in the living rooms of Grosse Pointe mansions and been made to feel like an intruding bug by their occupants on the basis of (what seemed to me at least) my ethnicity. But this does not lead me or my fellow Jews to call for affirmative action programs that would amount to a preference system for people of Jewish origin.

America is a large marketplace of job and living opportunities, with communities that are extremely tolerant at one end of the spectrum and bigoted at the other. Part of the challenge for ethnic minorities is to find the openings and opportunities that are already there for them. One has only to observe the entrepreneurial explosion among inner-city Koreans and Vietnamese, and to contrast that to the absence of similar success in adjoining black neighborhoods, in order to realize opportunity does exist and no government program can solve the problems endemic to some communities-because the source of those problems lies within the family, the individual, and the community's attitudes as well.

For a voting liberal, Page's familiarity with conservative writers is unusually broad. Consequently, his defense of affirmative action policies is unusually thoughtful. As a conservative who does not fit the liberal caricature of the angry white male threatened by minority advances, however, I still find his arguments off the mark. Like other defenders of these policies, Page begins in denial: "Despite myths to the contrary, affirmative action is not intended to promote people who are not qualified. It is intended to widen the criteria for those who are chosen out of the pool of the qualified." Unfortunately, the facts say otherwise. To refer once again to
The Shape of the River
, Bok and Bowen inadvertently show that without racial preferences and unequal academic standards, black enrollment at the top tier of these elite schools would drop by 73 percent.

The Bok-Bowen study was not available when Page wrote
Showing My Color
. But there were numerous public examples of racial double standards available to him at the time. The prominent black journalist Roger Wilkins, for example, was made University Professor of History at George Mason University despite the fact that he had no qualifications as a historian, never even having written a scholarly monograph. In a C-SPAN talk, Wilkins said that he was actually offered the choice of teaching anything he wanted and decided on history "because I was totally ignorant of history and figured that by teaching it I would learn it."
^*
Wilkins was selected for the post over (among others) Professor Ronald Radosh, who at the time had been an academic scholar for twenty years, had published in professional journals, and had written several highly respected books in his field. Nor was this an isolated case. Julian Bond's failed political career led for no apparent reason other than the politics of race to concurrent professorships in history at two universities (Virginia and Maryland). Cornel West and Angela Davis hold two of the highest paid and most prestigious university chairs in America, despite their widely recognized intellectual mediocrity (in Davis's case, compounded by her disreputable career as a Communist Party
apparatchik
and a lifelong apologist for marxist police states).