Why We Won't Talk Honestly About Race. Harry Stein

       INTRODUCTION

      Before I wrote even a word of this book, a number of people who wished me well suggested I drop the project. They knew the kind of books I’d done in the past, and of my tendency to kid around in print, and they suggested that in this instance that would be a very, very bad idea. As one bluntly put it, “You don’t make light about race in this country.”

      That was not my intention, I countered. My aim was to talk honestly about race, conveying views that, however legitimate or widely held, have been effectively branded as racist by defenders of the lamentable status quo, and so largely banned from public discourse. Indeed, the book’s original title was drawn from the famous Tea Party sign first spotted, as far as I can discern, in the hands of an anonymous witty soul at a 2009 rally in Cincinnati: “It Doesn’t Matter What This Sign Says, You’ll Call It Racist Anyway.”

      And, by the way, what’s wrong with a little irreverence on the subject? After all, there are those who make light about race all the time. Richard Pryor built a whole career on it, and so have dozens of his successors and imitators, more than a few of them wildly profane.

      Okay, I got it: What my solicitous friends meant is that white people can’t make light about race. Or, for that matter, say things in deadly earnest that violate the ever-evolving rules of what is permissible. And that holds especially true for white conservatives.

      I sincerely appreciated it all—I too live in the world of Al Sharpton and the New York Times, if only at its margins—but their concern also provoked a question: Why not? Aren’t the issues surrounding race, from the social fallout of single-parent families to the ways racial preferences distort the very meaning of equity and justice as embodied in the nation’s founding documents, of concern to us all? Moreover, hasn’t the impulse to ignore or justify or even celebrate behaviors that once would have been everywhere condemned as dysfunctional led to the collapse of standards generally? As a reformed white liberal I can say with complete assurance that white liberals share many of the same concerns, even if they’d be mortified to be overheard voicing them among strangers.

      Quite simply, the fear and unspoken prohibitions that have long governed the conversation about the single most important issue on the public agenda have served only to undermine genuine progress on the racial front.

      And the time has come to move past that.

      There are of course deeply compelling reasons that as a subject race is the extremely sensitive and awkward thing it is. As the historians aptly have it, slavery was America’s “original sin,” and in the century to follow, even second-class citizenship was a status denied to most of the nation’s blacks. The very terminology associated with the era—“separate but equal,” “poll taxes,” “lynching”—bespeaks a nightmarish state of affairs all but incomprehensible to the contemporary mind. It is wonderfully good (and quite remarkable) that, though that time was so recent that tens of millions living today vividly recall it, we almost universally look back upon it with shame and even incredulity.

      But shame is a psychologically complex thing, and never more so than when applied to Americans and race. For even as it has impelled us to examine our ugly past with unflinching honesty—with every elementary school kid nationwide versed in the horrors of the Middle Passage, and slave narratives all the rage with history grad students, and black oppression the leitmotif of every Ken Burns documentary—it has precluded anything approaching an honest view of race today; indeed, it has much to do with why such honesty has itself been routinely cast as racist.

      No one has written more compellingly about this deeply dispiriting phenomenon than the brilliant Hoover Institution scholar Shelby Steele. Since Steele is a conservative—and a black one, at that—people who read publications like the New York Times have mostly never heard of him, but he nailed the source of their racial attitudes more succinctly than anyone in the two-word title of his most important book: White Guilt. It is the widespread guilt over the terrible inequities of the past (and to a lesser extent, the obvious hardships faced by many blacks in the present) that causes white people, especially those who identify themselves as “enlightened” or “progressive,” to over and over, ad infinitum, give blacks a pass on behaviors and attitudes they would regard as unacceptable and even abhorrent in their own kind. This guilt has repeatedly, in fact, induced liberal whites—and even some not so liberal—to embrace policies that institutionalize not fairness but its opposite so as to appear to be on the right side of the racial divide. “The great ingenuity of interventions like affirmative action,” Steele writes, “has not been that they give Americans a way to identify with the struggle of blacks, but that they give them a way to identify with racial virtuousness quite apart from blacks.”

      Each of us, of course, has his own unique set of experiences with race, but having come of age during and in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement—that is, believing, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s most fundamental precept had it, that we should be seen as individuals rather than as members of a group—I suspect the ones that inform this book are representative of a great many well-intentioned Americans. That is why I raise Steele right up top. The moment I read him on white guilt, I experienced what certain feminists have taken to calling an “ah-ha moment.” I was in my late 30s at the time and, no question, he was describing not just me but pretty much every well-meaning white person I had ever known: All of us who had gone lazily along with the mainstream liberal racial flow.

      Good intentions. These have long been the currency in which liberal whites have traded, and where race was concerned, the family into which I was born boasted some of the best. Though by the time I was aware of such things my parents were Stevenson Democrats, they had been Communists, and remained proud of that fact (though for a time secretly) the rest of their lives. And in good measure—indeed, this is a large part of the romance of the left in general—it was because in the twenties and thirties the Communist Party was way ahead of the curve on the big social issues: fighting (and incessantly sloganeering) against poverty, sexism and especially racism. Nor was this merely a theoretical or tactical pose. For instance, it was CP lawyers who led the fight to save the Scottsboro Boys, the nine hapless black teens unjustly accused of raping a pair of white girls in Depression-era Alabama. My mother for a time worked as the secretary for James Ford, the black former postal worker who in the thirties twice ran for vice president on the Communist ticket. Decades later, she would tell us of hearing the stories of indigent blacks who’d journeyed to New York from the rural South to tell rapt young Communists of taking their lives in their hands organizing their fellow sharecroppers. “There was one fellow,” she recalled, and I have this