Why We Won't Talk Honestly About Race. Harry Stein
our awed respect, even if (and maybe also because) they scared the hell out of us.
Of course, later we would come to recognize that all along they’d been pretty thuggish, but that was also only when everyone else did, and it was safe to do so. Anyway, by then there were new positions to be taken on the racial front, like, for instance, supporting black studies and affirmative action and otherwise pushing diversity in its assorted and nefarious forms.
I only began to question—no, actually, think about—any of it when I began moving to the right; a move prompted by a number of things, not least becoming a father. It was around this time that, exploring an intellectual universe into which I’d otherwise never have dared venture, I ran across the aforementioned Shelby Steele, among other conservative thinkers. In due course, I joined them in questioning my own long-held liberal assumptions in print, eventually doing so at book length.
Only then did I come to fully understand how dangerous such apostasy could be, especially when it came to race. I’ve written the story before, so I’ll be succinct. While giving a speech about my political journey in Dallas, I made a light reference to how in my family we used to root for sports teams based on how many blacks were on the roster; then compounded this misdemeanor with a Class-A felony by closing the speech with a story about an argument between my 15-year-old son and his politically correct white high school English teacher over Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Pointing to Mark Twain’s strategic use of the n-word, the teacher claimed, to my son’s exasperation, that this classic of anti-racist literature was racist, and when he took her on, he guaranteed, as he put it, that “I’m starting off with a C in that class, and working down from there.” Except in telling the story I made the mistake—which I will not repeat here, so as not to give other idiots easy ammunition—of using not the weasel term “the n-word,” but the actual word itself. This grievously offended a black man in the audience, who rose during the question and answer portion of the program to say so. We had a spirited back and forth, and I thought that was the end of it. Except that he, or one of his friends, immediately went to the local Fort Worth Star-Telegram with a grossly distorted account of the episode, which led to a grossly distorted article coming as close as legally feasible to calling the “conservative speaker”—me—a racist; and in due course, the story was picked up by a number of other papers.
Actually, as these things go, the gruesome experience ended reasonably well. After I wrote about it in City Journal, a Wall Street Journal columnist followed up, leading a gratifyingly high number of people to cancel their subscriptions to the Fort Worth paper, and I choose against all odds to believe the liberal writer of the piece and his even more liberal editor were duly chastened. But for all my subsequent bravado, it was a searing experience and one I would only wish on my worst enemies—which, since they’re all liberals, is wishing for the impossible.
What’s ironic about being branded a racist at this point in life is that, in fact, I have more and better genuine black friends than ever before. True enough, they’re almost all on my side of the political spectrum—but, hey, isn’t friendship most fundamentally about shared beliefs and values?
All of this background is by way of lending context to all that will follow; and, yes, I suppose also as a means of rebutting some of the ugliness likely to come.
The ways in which this book will be anathema to the racial enforcers are many and varied. Start with double standards— the kind that may also be filed under “liberal-white bigotry,” i.e., the bigotry of low expectations, and how it cripples and demeans those it supposedly aims to help. It will look into the supposed sin of racial profiling—and the statistical evidence establishing that, in fact, the disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates of minorities usually reflect nothing more than disproportionate rates of criminality. Too, it will discuss how American business has long been subject to blackmail by the racial grievance industry in the name of social justice; as well as the many other ways in which the regime of racial preferences has sowed division, corruption, and resentment in this country.
Speaking of double standards, nor can the role of the media be discounted in any of this. How is it okay for liberals to endlessly belittle Clarence Thomas as an Uncle Tom, or for liberal cartoonist Ted Rall to get away with calling Condoleeza Rice a “house nigga”? Why, even after the Duke University rape fiasco, does the media continue to give credence to every charge of racism?
But beyond the manifold particulars, I aim to make a larger and overarching point: The idea that it is racism that has millions of underclass blacks mired generation after generation in physical and spiritual poverty is not just false, but the greatest impediment to fundamentally altering that dreadful state of affairs. What must be faced—above all, by its victims—is that the real problem is a culture of destructive attitudes and behaviors that denies those in its grip the means of escape.
Alas, rather than fully confront the all-too-obvious deficiencies of underclass culture, we play an elaborate, multifaceted game of let’s pretend; one that begins with the fiction that racism is the all-encompassing explanation for black (and other) social dysfunction and moves on seamlessly to the fraud that even the most soul-crushing anti-social behaviors can constitute “authenticity.”
In the end, comforting lies are no better than any other kind—arguably worse, for being so seductive. Societies that invest too heavily in them invariably reap the whirlwind. (See former Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plans or Greece circa 2012.)
In brief, this book aims to unequivocally say the sorts of things that for too long have been deemed unsayable in the public square—even when widely acknowledged in private among Americans of goodwill. Its intent is not to offend or shock, though it will likely do both, but to provoke the sort of serious thinking that liberal enforcers have heretofore rendered impossible; and by facing up to those difficult truths, to begin looking toward genuine solutions.
For all the remarkable progress this country has made on race in the past half-century, unprecedented in human history, liberals insist, for their own political and psychological purposes, on clinging to the notion of America as irredeemably racist. We—and especially black people—for too long have been living with the terrible consequences of that cruel canard.
This gets us back to where we started. One friend took me out to lunch to warn me off this book: It’s career suicide, he assured me, if not the regular kind. I’d get savaged, massacred— scalped, castrated, my body burned to such an unrecognizable crisp that no one but my dentist and that gorgeous forensic anthropologist on Bones will be able to identify it. Hadn’t I noticed that in the Age of Obama, the racism charge, rather than abating, has become more prevalent than ever?
Yes, I’ve noticed.
I’ll confess that did give me pause. So let me conclude, for safety’s sake, with a comment with which I wholeheartedly agree made by a reader called Extraneus on the excellent JustOneMinute website: “For the record, I have no problem with Obama’s black half. His white half is the most incompetent, anti-American asshole ever to inhabit the office of the presidency, but his black half is fine.”
RACISM TODAY, RACISM TOMORROW, RACISM FOREVER
For many of us who grew up during the civil rights movement, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace was the vilest figure in the rogues gallery of Southern bigots blighting the nation. True, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett was for a time equally obstructionist, but he had the look and milquetoast manner of an accountant. While thuggish Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor of Birmingham, Alabama shocked evening news watchers nationwide by siccing attack dogs on peaceful protesters, he was so stupid and oblivious he seemed less a multidimensional human being than a pot-bellied racist sheriff out of a Herblock caricature. But Wallace—the former bantamweight fighter, chin outthrust in snarly defiance as he stood literally blocking the schoolhouse door—was smart and canny and utterly self-assured; which is to say, he seemed the embodiment of all that was ugly not just in America, but in humankind itself.
Wallace’s June 1963 refusal to allow two black students to enter the hallowed halls of the University of Alabama was the fulfillment of