Progressive Racism. David Horowitz
like Martin Lawrence and Spike Lee and the “gangsta rap” industry, which celebrates black sociopathic behavior.
In gauging the size of the chip ominously perched on black America’s shoulder, few measures are so choice as the following passage from Page’s book:
Black people may read dictionaries, but many see them as instruments of white supremacy. They have a point. Dictionaries define what is acceptable and unacceptable in the language we use as defined by the ruling class [sic]. . . . The dictionary’s pleasant synonyms for “white” (“free from moral impurity . . . innocent . . . favorable, fortunate . . .”) and unpleasant synonyms for “black” (“. . . thoroughly sinister or evil . . . wicked . . . condemnation or discredit . . . the devil . . . sad, gloomy or calamitous . . . sullen . . .”) are alone enough to remind black people of their subordinate position to white people in Anglo-European traditions and fact.
In fact, white lexicographers had nothing to do with identifying Clarence Page and his racial kindred as “black” in the first place. When Page and I were young, blacks were called “Negroes” and had been called that or “colored” for hundreds of years. The word Negro has no such negative connotations, moral or otherwise. It was Malcolm X who first embraced “black” as a term of pride, and made “Negro” a term to connote the white man’s pliant black, the “Uncle Tom.” After Malcolm’s death, Stokely Carmichael and the new radical civil rights leadership aggressively took up the label with the slogan “Black Power” and demanded that “black” be used as a sign of respect. Accommodating whites complied. For more than a generation now, the majority of whites have ardently wished that black America would finally get what it wanted from them—and be happy about it.
When all the layers are peeled from the discussion of “racism” in Showing My Color, we are left with a disappointing residue of hand-me-down Marxism:
Modern capitalist society puts racism to work, wittingly or unwittingly. It populates a surplus labor pool of last-hired, first-fired workers whose easy employability when economic times are good and easy disposability when times go bad helps keep all workers’ wages low and owners’ profits high. . . . Racism is one of many non-class issues, such as busing, affirmative action, or flag burning, that diverts attention from pocketbook issues that might unite voters across racial lines.
This is simple-minded, sorry stuff, unworthy of Clarence Page or any other intellectual (black or otherwise). The problem with the black underclass is not that it is underemployed, but that it is unemployable. Blacks who have fallen through society’s cracks don’t even get to the point of being “last-hired.” The flood of illegal Hispanic immigrants into areas like South Central Los Angeles, displacing indigenous blacks, shows that the jobs exist but that the resident black population either won’t or can’t take them, or are not hired for some reason other than their minority status. The fact that one in three young black males in America is enmeshed in the criminal justice system—a fact that Page doesn’t begin to confront—doesn’t help their employability. Once again, the category of race provides a convenient pretext for a massive denial of problems that have very little to do, specifically, with racial prejudice.
In fact, the racial conflict in America is being driven not by economics or even white prejudice, but by radical political agendas—by Clarence Page’s friends on the far left like Manning Marable, Ronald Takaki and Michael Lerner, all of whom have provided blurbs for Page’s book. The very phrase “institutional racism”—necessary because there are so very few overt racists available—is, of course, a leftist invention. It is also a totalitarian concept. Like “ruling class,” it refers to an abstraction, not a responsible individual human actor. You are a class enemy (or, in this case, a race enemy) not because of anything you actually think or do, but “objectively”—because you are situated in a structure of power that gives you (white skin) privilege. Page is astute enough to see that if racism is defined as an institutional flaw, “it does not matter what you think as an individual” and therefore such a definition offers “instant innocence” to the oppressor. But he is not shrewd or candid enough to see that it imputes instant guilt as well. While absolving individual whites, it makes all whites guilty.
The belief in the power of institutional racism allows black civil rights leaders to denounce America as a racist society, when it is actually the only society on earth—black, white, brown or yellow—whose defining creed is anti-racist; a society to which blacks from black-ruled nations regularly flee in search of opportunity and refuge. But the real bottom line is that the phantom of institutional racism allows black leaders to avoid the encounter with real problems in their own communities which are neither caused by whites nor solvable by the actions of whites.
The problem with the discontent now smoldering inside America’s privileged black intellectuals, so well expressed in Showing My Color, is that it can never be satisfied:
Nothing annoys black people more than the hearty perennial of black life in America, the persistent reality of having one’s fate in America decided inevitably by white people. It is an annoyance that underlies all racial grievances in America, beginning with slavery, evolving through the eras of mass lynchings and segregated water fountains, and continuing through the age of “white flight,” mortgage discrimination, police brutality, and the “race card” in politics.
In Page’s view, the unifying and ultimate goal of all black reformers, whether radicals like bell hooks or conservatives like Clarence Thomas, is “black self-determination.” What Clarence Page and blacks like him want is “to free the destiny of blacks from the power of whites.” But outside of Africa and some Caribbean countries, this is obviously an impossible goal and those who advocate it must know this. (Does Page want to go back to Stokely Carmichael’s ridiculous demand in the Sixties for blacks to be given Mississippi?) The goal is precious to them precisely because it can never be realized and thus, to turn one of Jesse Jackson’s slogans on its head, keeps rage alive. Those who push for “black self-determination” in the American context are destined to be frustrated and angry and to look on themselves as “oppressed.” The irony, of course, is that America’s multiethnic society and color-blind ideal—the equality of all citizens before the law—provides the most favorable setting for individuals to enjoy freedom and the opportunity to determine their destinies, even if they happen to be members of a minority. Ask Jews. For two thousand years, Jews of the Diaspora have not been able to free their destiny from the power of gentiles. But in America, where they are a tiny minority, they have done very well, thank you, and do not feel oppressed except, perhaps, by black demagogues like Farrakhan and company.
Heterodoxy, May/June 1996, http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/May-June%201996.pdf.
Fifty years ago this spring, Jackie Robinson broke the color bar in baseball. The events that followed provide a lesson that many civil rights leaders seem to have forgotten. Following Robinson’s historic breakthrough, as everybody knows, other black athletes followed his example and professional basketball and football also became multiracial sports. Over the years, however, there were many doubters that these gains were possible or that the revolution would continue. The doubters said whites would never accept more than a few black players; there would always be quotas to limit the number of blacks. Whites, they said, would never allow blacks to become managers or quarterbacks or the owners of clubs. Most ominously, they said that if blacks became the majority of the players in professional basketball, for example, whites wouldn’t go to see the games.
History has shown that on all counts the doubters were wrong. Blacks did become quarterbacks and managers and general managers. Superstars like Isiah Thomas and Magic Johnson became owners. So thoroughly did blacks come to dominate sports that were once the exclusive province of whites that in basketball