Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (71 page)

Davis continued her innovative integrative scholarship on Black women and remained focused on reviving the abolitionist movement as the new millennium arrived. “The two millionth prisoner entered the system in America on February 15, 2000 and half of those prisoners are Black,” she said in early 2000 at the University of Colorado. Davis knew that most of these prisoners had been convicted of drug crimes. She also knew that Whites were found to be more likely to sell drugs than Blacks, as Human Rights Watch was reporting. Therefore, Davis was crossing the country and directing the attention of Americans to the unjust criminal justice system, which she viewed as the new slavery. Davis offered the natural abolitionist solution a few years later, asking the antiracist question of the age in 2003 in her new book
title:
Are Prisons Obsolete?
She imagined “a world without prisons” in the 115-page manifesto for prison abolition. “Because of the persistent power of racism, ‘criminals’ and ‘evildoers’ are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color,” Davis wrote. And “the prison” relieved America “of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers.”
³

A prominent Black linguist at UC Berkeley did not agree with Davis’s assessment. The Black proportion of the prison population “neatly reflects the rate at which they commit crimes,” maintained John McWhorter—without evidence—in
Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
. This 2000 best seller catapulted him into the spotlight as America’s best-known Black conservative intellectual. As a linguist, McWhorter of course had to spend a chapter commenting on the Ebonics debate, which had been tipped off four years earlier when word got out that the Oakland Unified School District had recognized Ebonics as a language derived from West Africa. Aside from a line saying that African Americans had a genetic predisposition to Ebonics (which was extracted in a future resolution), the 1996 Oakland resolution was amazingly antiracist and compassionate, equating Ebonics with more accepted English languages. Acknowledging those students as fluent in Ebonics, the school board wanted to maintain “the legitimacy and richness of such language” and “facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills.” They wanted to make sure these students were bilingual.
⁴

Social psychologist Robert Williams had coined the term “Ebonics” back in 1973 to replace all the racist identifiers, like “Nonstandard Negro English.” “We know that ebony means black and that phonics refers to speech sounds or the science of sounds,” he explained then. “Thus, we are really talking about the science of black speech sounds or language.” Ebonics remained a little-known linguistic term until the Oakland school board resolution set off a typhoon of assimilationist ire and antiracist defenses in the late 1990s. McWhorter made a name for himself as one of the few Black linguists opposing the Oakland resolution.
⁵

Appearing on NBC’s
Meet the Press
days after the resolution, Jesse Jackson bristled, “I understand the attempt to reach out to these children, but this is an unacceptable surrender, borderlining on disgrace. It’s teaching down to our children.” The Linguistic Society of America, on the other hand, issued a supportive statement in 1997. “Characterizations of Ebonics as ‘slang,’ ‘mutant,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘defective,’ ‘ungrammatical,’ or ‘broken English’ are incorrect and demeaning,” the statement said. Evidence showed that people could “be aided in their learning of the standard variety by pedagogical approaches which recognize the legitimacy of the other varieties of a language. From this perspective, the Oakland School Board’s decision to recognize the vernacular of African American students in teaching them Standard English is linguistically and pedagogically sound.” When Jesse Jackson learned that Oakland planned to use Ebonics to teach, as he called it, “standard English,” he backed off from his initial opposition. But Jackson’s initial opposition—let alone the opposition of people of all races who continued to oppose the embrace of Ebonics—demonstrated that despite the lip service they gave it, many Americans despised multiculturalism.
⁶

Assimilationists who came around to supporting the teaching of “Standard English” using Ebonics did not come around to discarding the racist hierarchy that places “standard” or “proper” English above Ebonics. And this linguistic hierarchy existed across the Western world. All the new languages that enslaved Africans had developed in the Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and British colonies were similarly denigrated in racist fashion as broken “dialects,” or inferior varieties of the standard European language, which in the United States was “Standard English.” Ebonics had formed from the trees of African languages and modern English, just as modern English had formed from the trees of the Latin and Germanic languages. Ebonics was no more “broken” or “nonstandard” English than English was “broken” or “nonstandard” German or Latin.
⁷

To John McWhorter, those defending Oakland’s decision to provide a bilingual education for their Ebonics speakers constituted yet another example of Black America’s self-sabotaging. He argued in
Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
that White people were better,
and better off, than Blacks because they did not self-sabotage as much. With “white racism . . . all but obsolete,” McWhorter argued, Black people’s main obstacle was Black people: their “victimology” (or race cards), their separatism (or anti-assimilationist ideas), and their “Black anti-intellectualism,” as revealed in the “Ebonics movement” and in the “acting White” putdown in schools that Black elites were raging about. McWhorter supplied his anecdotes as many other people were giving theirs. But he gave no proof that the Black children condemning other Black children for “acting White” were
always
relating intellectualism to “acting White.” Some of these high-scoring students being scolded for “acting White” may have indeed been
looking down
on their lower-scoring classmates, which, from a political standpoint, would be “acting White” (
if
“acting White” is looking down on Black people). Some of these students may have indeed been “acting White” because they could not help but act out what their parents kept telling them: that they were not like those
other
Black kids. Some of these students may have indeed been “acting White” because they lacked a fluency in Black cultural forms (
if
“acting Black,” from a cultural standpoint, is being fluent in Black cultural forms).
⁸

Three years after the release of
Losing the Race
, John McWhorter submitted his
Essays for the Black Silent Majority
. According to this 2003 book, the silent Black majority believed that African Americans’ own “culture-internal ideologies” had hobbled the group from “taking advantage of pathways to success.” McWhorter wrote
Essays for the Black Silent Majority
from the half-truth of racial progress, ignoring the half-truth of the progression of racism. “Today, black success stories,” he wrote, are “based on good old-fashioned hard work, ingenuity, and inner strength,” with “residual racism . . . as a minor nuisance they overcame by keeping their eyes on the prize.”
⁹

McWhorter’s “silent Black majority” was neither silent nor in the majority. But he was mobilizing a loud Black minority, and its expressions of cultural racism, of class racism, of struggling Black folk needing to take personal responsibility and work harder, may have been deeply personal. Some Black folks did not want to admit that they took advantage of extraordinary opportunities from their elite or even
humble backgrounds—and that there are extremely hard-working poor people who never had the same opportunities. Like racist Whites, racist Blacks believed their “success” was due to their extraordinary God-given qualities and/or their extraordinary work ethic; that if they “made it,” then any Black person could, if he or she worked hard enough. For many of these Black racists, their expressions may have been deeply political: they may have been cunningly reciting racist talking points in order to receive financial and occupational favor, whether they actually believed these racist ideas or not. Opportunities proliferated in political offices and think tanks and news mediums for Black racists willing to look down on African Americans in the twenty-first century. In 2003, McWhorter left academia for a posh position as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. But if science mattered more than self-interest, then the Manhattan Institute’s preeminent production of racist ideas would have ceased three years before McWhorter arrived.

REPORTERS CLAPPED AS
Clinton walked into the East Room of the White House on June 26, 2000. He held the answer to one of the oldest questions of the modern world: whether there was some inherent biological distinction between the identifiable races. Flanking the presidential podium were two large screens that read: “Decoding the Book of Life / A Milestone for Humanity.”

“We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome,” Bill Clinton rejoiced to an audience of reporters and cameras. “Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.” It was a map that should “revolutionize” medicine by giving scientists information about the “genetic roots” of disease. It should also revolutionize racial science, Clinton announced. The map shows us “that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.”

One of the scientists responsible for sequencing the human genome, Craig Venter, was even more frank with reporters. “The
concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis,” Venter said. His research team at Celera Genomics had determined “the genetic code” of five individuals, who were identified as either “Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian or African American,” and the scientists could not tell one race from another.
¹⁰

When the press conference ceased and the reporters broadcast their stories, the old racist saying that a human book can be judged by its cover should have ceased. The refrain of “White blood” and “Black diseases” should have ceased, and the segregationist chorus saying that human beings were created unequal, that played for five centuries, should have also ceased. Science did not start the singing, though, and science would not stop it. Segregationists had too many racist policies to hide, racial disparities to justify, scientific and political careers to maintain, and money to make. The racial progress of Clinton’s 99.9 percent announcement brought on the next segregationist theory: the 0.1 percent genetic difference between humans must be racial. First curse theory and then natural slave theory and then polygenesis and then Social Darwinism and now genes—segregationists had produced new ideas to justify the inequities of every era. “Scientists planning the next phase of the human genome project are being forced to confront a treacherous issue: the genetic differences between the human races,” science reporter Nicholas Wade shared in the
New York Times
, just weeks after Clinton’s press conference.
¹¹

Segregationist geneticists powered forward on their wild goose chase, trying to figure out something that did not exist: how the races differed genetically. In 2005, University of Chicago geneticist Bruce Lahn made the conjecture that there were two super-intelligence genes, and said they were least likely to exist in sub-Sahara Africans. When scientists demanded proof, Lahn had trouble providing it. Still no one had proven any association between genes and intelligence, let alone genes and race. “There is no such thing as a set of genes that belong exclusively to one [racial] group and not another,” University of Pennsylvania bioethics scholar Dorothy Roberts explained in her 2011 book
Fatal Invention
, in which she exposes the unscientific basis of biological races, race-specific genes, and race-specific drugs
for race-specific diseases. “Race is not a biological category that is politically charged,” she added. “It is a political category that has been disguised as a biological one.” But the biological ideas lived on comfortably. By 2014, Nicholas Wade had retired from the
New York Times
and released his own defense of biological racism,
A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History
. “The thesis presented here assumes . . . that there is a genetic component to human social behavior,” Wade wrote. “Contrary to the central belief of multiculturalists, Western culture has achieved far more than other cultures in many significant spheres,” he wrote, because of Europeans’ genetic superiority. Craig Venter, the geneticist involved in mapping the genome, writing again in 2014, reassured his readers that “the results of genome sequences over the last thirteen years only prove my point more clearly”: that there “are greater genetic differences between individuals of the same ‘racial’ group than between individuals of different groups.”
¹²

MONTHS AFTER CLINTON
evoked that timeless phrase—“99.9 percent the same”—the United States Report to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination pointed out what was now the broken US race record: there had been “substantial successes,” but there were “significant obstacles” remaining. It was September 2000, and Texas governor George W. Bush was pledging to restore “honor and dignity” to the White House, while Vice President Al Gore was trying to distance himself from Bill Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal. The report’s findings of discrimination and disparities across the American board did not become campaign talking points, as they reflected poorly on both the Clinton administration and the Republicans’ color-blind America.