Missing the Point: A Dissent

Since the winter of last year, no fewer than five books have been published by political conservatives (or “conservabals”--liberals who sound like conservatives) telling us that America’s racial problems are not as bad as we think and certainly not as bad as many blacks maintain. Ellis Cose (“Color-Blind”), Jim Sleeper (“Liberal Racism”), Orlando Patterson (“The Ordeal of Integration”), Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom (“America in Black and White”) and Tamar Jacoby (“Someone Else’s House”) want us to believe that America would be a colorblind society if blacks would stop bringing up race and racism all the time. Conservatives, black and white, want us to believe that blacks have never had it so good because racism is on the wane and that blacks who can’t see this are morally irresponsible.

Given that conservatives have never been known for their support of civil rights, one is almost forced to admire the arrogance in their sanctimonious lectures about race. During the school desegregation and civil rights struggles of the ‘50s and ‘60s, conservatives did not walk through mobs holding the hands of black children integrating schools, nor were they singing “We Shall Overcome” with Martin Luther King Jr. They were too busy arguing for the doctrine of states’ rights, while maintaining that integration had to come gradually and could not be imposed on the South by “outside agitators.”

Yet, in all honesty, they are not entirely wrong. There are all too many blacks eager to call whites racist for imagined and trivial offenses. All too many blacks blame whites for their own failings and do not take as much responsibility for themselves as they could. But this is not news. Any number of black intellectuals, including this writer, have been saying the same thing for more than 20 years.

What is sad is that as we as a nation stand on the doorstep of a new century, we have still not learned how to talk to each other about race and, in fact, may be more racially polarized now than when the Civil War ended 133 years ago. Blacks wag fingers of recrimination at whites, and whites point fingers of chastisement at blacks and both mistake the rank odors of their self-righteousness for fine perfume. Blacks and whites, liberals and conservatives seem more intent on arranging information to intellectually confirm what they already believe, rather than listening and learning from each other. No one acknowledges that his own ideological rigidity may be part of the problem making impossible the extended conversation we as a nation so desperately need.

Since the advent of affirmative action, a linchpin of conservative ideology has been the notion of a colorblind society. Of course, conservatives conveniently overlook that blacks were asking to be judged on the basis of merit and individuality more than 200 years ago. Conservatives conveniently overlook that whites have benefited from affirmative action since colonial times (and racism is affirmative action for white people). Now that race is accorded in favor of blacks (as race has always been accorded in favor of whites), conservatives ring the bell of meritocracy and want blacks to believe that whites are capable of judging blacks on their individual merits. (I know that there are black conservatives who oppose affirmative action; as Vladimir Lenin said almost a century ago when told that there were black conservatives, “but what do they have to conserve?”)

A colorblind society is not possible until whites no longer mistake color for an ethical value. I do not mean equating black with evil but white with good. How whites view blacks grows logically from how whites view themselves. As long as whites view whiteness as the apotheosis of physical beauty and moral perfection, they are doomed to see nonwhites, and especially blacks, as ugly carriers of congenital moral defects. If many blacks talk so much about racism, it is only because so many whites have talked about the superiority of their race for most of this nation’s history. Conservatives continue this grand tradition because they never sound more racist than when they proclaim their colorblindness.

Their real blindness is evident, however, in how they distort, ignore and twist history to fit their ideological preconceptions. Tamar Jacoby is especially egregious in this. (I focus on Jacoby merely because her book is the most recent entry in the effort of conservatives to rewrite America’s racial history in their image.) Her ideological biases are so strong that one cannot trust the accuracy of her information. Two examples of which I have direct knowledge:

In writing about the civil rights movement, she says that the ministers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference “organized the rural South in the early sixties, spurring people into the streets to demand desegregation and voting rights,” while those working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (of whom I was one) who later “traveled the same areas had little to propose--little but racial bitterness and revulsion for the system.” Any book on the civil rights movement will verify that SNCC initiated, participated in or inspired the sit-in movement (1960-61), the Freedom Rides (1961) and voter registration campaigns in Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama (1961-66).

Jacoby refers to the reading of an anti-Semitic poem on my radio show in New York during the teacher’s strike in 1969. She characterizes me as “a militant nationalist” (something few blacks agreed with, then or now; Huey Newton’s and Eldridge Cleaver’s description of me as a “black hippie” was closer to the truth). Jacoby asserts that I appeared on television with Les Campbell, the black teacher who read the poem on my show, and we both said the poem was “beautiful” and true. Campbell and I did not appear on television together and the poem we called beautiful and true was “Night,” another poem he read on my show. She goes on to write that “Lester aired the verse again then again, every week for three weeks.” True, but Jacoby did not add that I did so to give listeners the fullest opportunity to call in and express their views about the poem, which Jacoby must have known because it was in the source she cited for this information. I can only conclude that the information was deliberately omitted because it did not fit her ideological bias.

These examples may seem minor, and in the grand scheme of things, they are. However, if we cannot trust an author to get right the things we as readers have knowledge of, how can we trust what an author says on matters about which we know nothing?

How can we learn to trust each other if we are so intent on hearing nothing that might threaten our point of view? Conservatives do not explain why black men with professional degrees earn 21% less than white men with the same degrees in the same job categories. Or why medical studies are finding correlations between the stress of racism and disease in blacks. Or why the majority of whites do not endorse the ideals of equal opportunity and equal treatment for blacks when the result would be close, frequent or prolonged contact with blacks. Or why 75% of whites think that blacks and Latinos are more likely than whites to prefer living on welfare, to be lazy, violence-prone, less intelligent and less patriotic. We seem more intent on proving others wrong than in learning how to live together with respect for our differences, racial and ideological.

Jacoby evinces little interest in fairness, even in her choices of words. She writes that prosperous black professionals are wary of prejudice and often prefer to buy homes and worship and spend their leisure time in the racial comfort zones of self-segregated suburbs. But since the dawn of the republic, whites have been living in realms apart, buying homes, worshiping and spending their leisure time in racial comfort zones of self-segregated suburbs, many because they do not want to live around blacks, prosperous ones or not.

Jacoby is also intellectually dishonest when she writes that the 14th and 15th amendments gave blacks “the right to vote, to own property and claim legal standing in court and still integration did not ensue.” Notice the benign innocence of that phrase, “still integration did not ensue.” Integration did not ensue because of Ku Klux Klan terrorism, the sharecropping system, which amounted to feudal slavery and the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, which made segregation the law of the land. Integration did not ensue because whites did not want it to.

Jacoby also trots out the old canard that “the immigrants’ escalator is still the best way for any impoverished group to make it into the system.” But blacks are not immigrants. We bear the mark of slavery in the color of our skin, which makes us different than any other group in this country. Jacoby lacks the intellectual courage to look at the terrifying uniqueness of the black presence in America and thus is incapable of facing the historical and very present reality of racism.

Conservatives believe the answer to America’s racial problem is integration and integration means black acculturation. But acculturation must be mutual if integration is to be anything except a subterfuge for white supremacy, as Stokely Carmichael so aptly put it 30 years ago. The current and sometimes overwrought emphasis on multiculturalism is an attempt by many Americans, including many whites, to say that if integration is to exist, it cannot be something already defined by whites to which the benighted “colored” masses are expected to pay allegiance. Real integration can be reached only by a process that involves all Americans.

But integration is not high on the black agenda. Most blacks would be satisfied with equitable treatment by the police and the court system, by not being followed by clerks when they go shopping, by being assured of receiving the same quality medical care whites receive, et cetera, et cetera.

Maybe so many blacks carry on about racism ad nauseam because all too many whites still do not understand that they benefit from the whiteness of their skin color. Sometimes I look at anonymous white people and wonder what it must be like to go out in public and know that if you are stared at, it is because of what you look like as an individual. I wish I knew what it is like to live without racial anxiety. But I can’t, not as long as all too many white people look at me as if I am an object of curiosity.

As long as conservatives are convinced that they, and they alone, have the answers to our national racial agony, there is no possibility of finding ways to resolve that agony. But perhaps we are comfortable in our state of racial polarization and find this preferable to making a leap of faith and daring to trust our fragile humanity. But when all is said and done, isn’t that all we have?