Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Page 3

  In contrast to Camille Cosby's perverse view of America as a nation of racists, it is worth repeating that this is the only country in the world where children are instructed from pre-school days that racism is morally wrong, that American blacks have been the vic- tims of egregious crimes, and that expressing prejudice is socially unacceptable. In fact the only group that is allowed to vent racist venom publicly in America today are African-Americans themselves, as the deplorable outburst by Camille Cosby attests.

  In her malicious column, Cosby also quoted the most celebrated and honored African-American writer of his generation, James Baldwin, to this embarrassing effect: "The will of the people, or the State, is revealed by the State's institutions. There was not, then, nor is there now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution." Can Baldwin be referring to the Supreme Court that ended segregated schools? The White House that sent federal troops to integrate schools in the South? The schools themselves that teach youngsters that racial prejudice is wrong? The Congress that enacted all the civil rights laws? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Justice Department that enforce these laws? Yet how many African American leaders are ready to step forward to dissociate themselves from such slanders, or from the vicious hate-America, hate-whitey sentiments expressed by such prominent and publicly acclaimed figures in the African American community as Camille Cosby, James Baldwin and Derrick Bell?

  Ironically, a kind of answer was provided the day prior to the appearance of Cosby's USA Today column. On that day the chairman of the president's specially convened panel on race, and its most distinguished African-American member, John Hope Franklin, urged President Clinton to abandon the idea of creating a "color-blind" society. This should have been a warning to all Americans that the future of America's pluralistic, multi-ethnic social contract is in danger.

  2

  Hate Crimes

  WHEN A YOUNG MAN named Matthew Shepard was tortured and left to die on the high plains of Wyoming simply because he was gay, the nation was outraged. Earlier that year, an even more brutal attack was made on the person of James Byrd Jr., a black man in Texas. Like Shepard's murder, Byrd's was followed by outpourings of anger and grief from editorial pages and political pulpits across the country.

  These were appropriate, if extraordinary, responses to horrible crimes against ordinary citizens, whose untimely deaths would otherwise have been unremarkable because, gruesome as they were, they are all too common. It was the fact that the perpetrators and victims were set apart by communal bigotries, for which the crimes served as violent individual expressions, that made the acts seem so important. The enhanced sense of human depravity that colored the public reactions to these incidents lay in our shared conviction that their nature as hate crimes made them an outrage to the nation's sense of self, as well as a threat to its communal future.

  Well and good enough. These responses are signs of health in the body politic, the presence of a will to summon the better angels of our nature, and to keep the savagery that lurks beneath the surface of any civilized society safely at bay. But these expressions did not exhaust the public response to the two crimes. While libertarians and conservatives looked on in dismay, a coalition of leftwing activists, led by Congressman Barney Frank and other gay spokesmen, mounted the Capitol steps in Washington to pressure Congress into passing a bill that would extend existing federal hate crimes legislation to cover the categories of gender, sexual orientation, and handicapped status, and to make all such crimes easier to prosecute. They were joined in the call by the president himself.

  Conservatives immediately raised civil liberties concerns about the proposed legislation, arguing that probing the intentions of any perpetrator, and especially one involved in crimes against victims who are already the targets of community prejudice, poses troubling problems. One such issue was the temptation offered to aggressive prosecutors to impute such intentions where none might exist. In a sobering column, George Will recalled a recent example of perverse legal reasoning in applying the hate crime standard. In 1989, a white female jogger was raped and beaten into a coma by a gang of black and Hispanic youths on a "wilding" rampage in Central Park. The act was not deemed a "hate crime" by prosecutors, and the perpetrators did not suffer enhanced penalties under the law "because they also assaulted Hispanics that evening. They got more lenient treatment because of the catholicity of their barbarism." Of course, the act they committed — rape — could be characterized as a hate crime itself.

  In the emotional melodrama of the Matthew Shepard killing, the left once again found political oxygen. Temporarily thrown by the feminist hypocrisies surrounding the impeachment of President Clinton, the left viewed the Shepard case as a way to recover its balance and to once again rally behind society's victims against its victimizers. The absence of conservatives and libertarians among the Capitol protesters only served to confirm the enduring sense of righteousness that fuels the progressive agenda. This politics of the left is what George Will calls "a sentiment competition," which is "less about changing society than striking poses." The proposed multiplication of hate crime categories which stipulate that some crime victims are more important than others would be what Will calls "an imprudent extension of identity politics." It would work against, not for, the principle of social tolerance.

  A little more than a year before the attack on James Byrd in Texas, three white Michigan youngsters hitched a train-ride as a teenage lark. When they got off the train, they found themselves in the wrong urban neighborhood, surrounded by a gang of armed black youths. One of the white teenagers, Michael Carter, aged fourteen, was killed. Dustin Kaiser, aged fifteen, who was brutally beaten and shot in the head, eventually recovered. The fourteenyear-old girl (whose name has been withheld) was pistol-whipped and shot in the face after being forced to perform oral sex on her attackers.

  Though the six African-Americans responsible for the deed were arrested and convicted, their attack was not prosecuted as a hate crime. More to the point, most of the nation never knew that the crime had taken place. It was not reported on page one of the national press, and there was no public outrage expressed in the nation's editorials or in the halls of Congress. Indeed, the few papers that reported the incident nationally did so on their inside pages. Beyond the Great Lakes region, the stories often failed to mention the races of the participants at all. The crime took place on July 21, 1997, but among the readers of this book, there will not be one in a hundred who has even heard of it, because, as a hate crime, it was in a perverse sense politically incorrect. To notice that black people, as well as whites, can be responsible for vicious crimes of hate, is improper. Hate crimes can only be committed by an oppressor caste; therefore, what happened in Michigan was not a hate crime at all.

  Two years ago, the most celebrated trial of the century focused on a black man accused of murdering two whites in what was apparently an act of blind rage. The idea that O. J. Simpson might have murdered his wife and a stranger because they were white was never even hinted by the prosecution, although the defense managed to turn the proceedings into a circus of racial accusations against whites.

  The fact is that it is not tolerable in America to hate blacks, but it is okay in our politically correct culture to hate white people. Hollywood understands this rule of progressive etiquette. A recent film, American History X, features (for the umpteenth time) white neo-Nazis as the villains of a homily about racial bigotry. The idea is that race hatred is synonymous with "skin-heads" who are white. But a few years ago a sensational mass murder trial in Miami spotlighted a black cult leader named Yahweh Ben Yahweh, who required his cult members to kill whites and bring back their ears as proof of the deed. One of his recruits was a star football player. Seven people were murdered. But there was no Hollywood scramble for the rights to the Yahweh cult story, as there would have been if the colors were reversed or everyone had been white. As a result, few Americans are even aware that these murders ever took place.<
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  In the fall of 1998, a German tourist was shot to death in Santa Monica, California, in front of his wife and children. The catalyst for the killing seems to have been his failure to understand the English commands of his attackers. The crime was committed by two African-American men and one African-American woman, though one would never know this from reading the Los Angeles Times or Associated Press accounts. (I had to verify their racial identities by calling the Santa Monica police department directly.) The word "hate crime" never surfaced in connection with the deed, either in the press accounts or in editorial commentaries that followed. But suppose that three whites had gone to a Hispanic neighborhood to rob inhabitants and had murdered an Hispanic immigrant because he could not speak English. Does anyone imagine that the press accounts would hide the identity of the attackers or that the question of whether it might be a hate crime would never come up?

  According to Department of Justice figures, 85 percent of the crimes of interracial violence nationwide are committed by blacks against whites. Not surprisingly, the first hate-crime conviction to be appealed to the Supreme Court involved a black perpetrator and a white victim. Of course, the social redeemers who are in favor of hate-crinie legislation rarely reflect on the practical consequences of the reforms they enact. It is enough if the thought behind the legislation feels moral and right.

  How many of the interracial crimes of violence committed by blacks and other minorities are actually the result of black racism, and therefore hate crimes? There is no real way to tell. There is, however, plenty of anecdotal evidence that suggests the problem is not negligible. A recent spate of brutal and random murders in a single Los Angeles district, for example, was explained by one black inhabitant to a Los Angeles Times reporter as retaliation for the "fact" that "whites had taken all the black jobs."

  Of course, the leftist academy has a ready answer for every question about black racism: Only whites can be racist. The alleged reasoning behind this assertion is that in our society only whites have power. This is the kind of absurdity that only an intellectual could think up. Forget the thousands of public officials great and small, police chiefs, judges, administrators, and members of congress, petty bureaucrats, corporate executives, and military officers now drawn from the ranks of minorities, who wield social power in a variety of forms. At the most elemental level, a black outlaw with a gun — and there are many — has the power of life and death over an unarmed law-abiding citizen of any race or color.

  The doctrine that only whites can be racist is, in fact, itself an instigation to hate crimes. It is a doctrine that has already spread to the secondary schools. The week after the Shepard killing, a Seattle father called a national radio talk show on which I was a guest and told the audience that his son's class in junior high school had been discussing the hate crime concept because of the killing. During the discussion, the teacher informed the class that only heterosexual whites could be racists. The caller's son was unconvinced and brought up the savage beating of Reginald Denny by a group of black gang members during the Los Angeles riots. Surely, he suggested, this was a hate crime. But his teacher corrected him. Even though Denny was pulled from his truck solely because he was white, and then beaten within an inch of his life, he could not be the victim of racial attitudes. The attempted murder of Reginald Denny was actually an act of rebellion by people who were themselves the victims of a white racist system, and the act they committed, therefore, could not be considered a hate crime. This is the perspective of academics who teach Whiteness Studies, oflaw professors who teach "critical race studies," and no doubt of education professors busily transmitting the progressive worldview to the next generation of junior high school instructors.

  This is one reason why conservatives and libertarians did not join Barney Frank and the left in promoting politically correct hatecrime legislation that would create a few more specially protected categories among us, as a kind of human Endangered Species Act. Sorting Americans into distinctive racial, ethnic, and gender groups, while designating whites and heterosexuals to be their "oppressors," makes the latter into legitimate targets of hate themselves. It thus becomes a way of exacerbating, rather than correcting, social disorder.

  It is time to go back to the wisdom of the Founders, who wrote a constitution without reference to ethnic or gender groups. They did so in order to render us equal before the nation's system of law.

  It was an imperfectly realized ideal then, but that should be no excuse for abandoning the ideal now. We need to end the vicious libels of political correctness that have percolated their message of anti-white racism into our mainstream culture. The vast majority of white people do not hate or oppress black people, just as the vast majority of heterosexuals do not hate or oppress gays. We need to single out those individuals who do — whatever their race or gender — for condemnation and social ostracism. And we need to do the same to individuals who belong to minorities and are haters themselves. Most of all, we need to go back to the task of treating all Americans as individuals first, and as members of groups only secondarily, if at all.

  3

  A Rage to Kill

  I am writing this essay

  sitting beside an anonymous

  white male that I long to murder.

  bell hooks, A Killing Rage

  WHEN I READ THIS SENTENCE, I found myself looking around the room nervously. For these are not the open ing words of a new novel by Brett Easton Ellis, but a nonfiction essay by bell hooks,* an intellectual icon of the tenured left. Though only in her forties, hooks is a Distinguished Professor of English at the City College of New York, a former faculty member at Yale, and a phenomenon of the politicized academy. An awkward writer of ideological formulas and agitprop prose she has a wide-ranging influence in the politically correct university culture. The collection for which "A Killing Rage" is the title essay is one of a shelf of similar tracts that hooks has published, earning her a sobriquet from the New York Review of Books as "the most prominent exponent of black feminism" in America.

  The occasion for professor hooks's homicidal urge turns out to be nothing more than a lost seat on a commercial airline flight. As hooks relates the episode, she had seated herself in the first class cabin alongside a female friend, who is also black and identified only as "K" — perhaps an allusion to Kafka, so cultivated is hooks's sense ofvictimization. No sooner are the two women settled in their firstclass seats, however, then a voice on the plane's speaker system calls K to the front of the cabin where her ticket is inspected. The stewardess informs K that she does not have a claim to the seat because her upgrade has not been properly completed. It is too late, moreover, to correct the fault.

  The stewardess also introduces K to the anonymous white male who is the putative target of hooks's murderous intent, and who is holding the appropriately designated ticket. The man tells K that he is sorry to see her inconvenienced and sits down. Resigning herself to the inevitable, K gathers her belongings and relocates herself in coach.

  No such passivity governs the reaction of bell hooks. She is unwilling to give up her own first class accommodation to join her friend in coach, but is ready instead to launch her attack: "I stare him down with rage, tell him that I do not want to hear his liberal apologies, his repeated insistence that 'it was not his fault.' I am shouting at him that it is not a question of blame, that the mistake was understandable, but that the way K was treated was completely unacceptable, that it reflected both racism and sexism." Her target, however, is no liberal wimp and lets her know "in no uncertain terms" that in his view the apology was sufficient. The professor "should leave him be to sit back and enjoy his flight."

  But Madame Defarge is not to be appeased. "In no uncertain terms I let him know that he had an opportunity to not be complicit with the racism and sexism that is so all-pervasive in this society, that he knew no white man would have been called on the loudspeaker to come to the front of the plane while another white male took his seat. . . . Yelling at hi
m I said, 'It was not a question of your giving up the seat, it was an occasion for you to intervene in the harassment of a black woman.'"

  Her invective temporarily exhausted, hooks takes out a pad and starts to pen the notes from which she will later compose her account. "I felt a 'killing rage,'" she recalls. "I wanted to stab him softly, to shoot him with the gun I wished I had in my purse. And as I watched his pain, I would say to him tenderly 'racism hurts.'"

  While hooks is thinking these sensitive thoughts, her intended victim becomes aware of her hostility towards him. "The white man seated next to me watched suspiciously whenever I reached for my purse. As though I were the black nightmare that haunted his dreams, he seemed to be waiting for me to strike, to be the fulfillment of his racist imagination. I leaned towards him with my legal pad and made sure he saw the title written in bold print: 'Killing Rage.'"

  Two pages after this bizarre account, which is by now, undoubtedly, an assigned course text about racial oppression, hooks makes the following myopic comment: "Lecturing on race and racism all around this country, I am always amazed when I hear white folks speak about their fear of blick people." Apparently hooks is unable to connect the aggression she projects to the reaction it provokes.

  I searched through hooks's text to find a more substantial source for her "killing rage," one less. . .well. . . trivial. But I was destined to be disappointed. There was no litany of personal abuse or racial assault that might justify her murderous passion.

  Still a relatively young woman of limited intelligence and modest talent, hooks has already achieved the kind of academic eminence once reserved for intellects of extraordinary reach. It is a position that any of her peers, white or black, would surely envy. Her perks include ari adoring following, a six-figure income, and a global itinerary. Her lectures on "white supremacy" and related battle themes take her across America and Europe, where she is able to advance her cause not in the coffee-house venues of political vanguards, but in the temples of high culture once reserved for the intellectual aristocracy.