Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Read online

  All this success and the accompanying accolades conferred on so young (and pedestrian) a mind, however, inspires only further resentment. "My rage intensifies," she writes, 'because I am not a victim." Hers is a typical radical contradiction. She enjoys the material privileges of the comfortable, but wants the moral rewards of those who lack them; she wants to wear the mantle of the scholar while posturing as a warrior for the cause.

  Of course if hooks were not both radical and black, her confession of homicidal malice might provoke public alarm. Race crimes contemplated by whites are a serious matter. But a black killing rage against whites can easily be excused. It is, after all, a comprehensible response to historic grievance or — as many blacks actually do seem to regard it — morally justified "payback." It can also be seen by progressives like hooks as a necessary path to "liberation." The development of a proper killing rage may even be praiseworthy in the oppressed who otherwise would submit supinely to their fate. Thus, the repression of black killing rage, as hooks informs us, is the agenda of white supremacists.

  "To perpetuate and maintain white supremacy," hooks writes, "white folks have colonized black Americans, and a part of that colonizing process has been teaching us to repress our rage, to never make them the targets of any anger we feel about racism." Students in hooks' classroom who resist such claims and believe that civilized order requires everyone, regardless of race, to restrain such instincts, are directed to helpful texts: "When such conflicts arise, it is always useful to send students to read Yours In Struggle," Professor hooks advises. While recommending this activist manual to her students, she nonetheless quibbles over the term "struggle," which seems too temperate for her tastes. What is really happening in America, in hooks's view, is not merely political struggle, but an "ongoing Black genocide and the patriarchy's war against women." Black rage, in these circumstances, is not merely "healing," but self-defense. Blacks who lack a proper killing rage are merely victims of the genocidal campaign that white America is waging against them: "When we embrace victimization, we surrender our rage."

  These thoughts provide a transition to the second essay in hooks's text, which is a companion meditation about an oppressed black man who did not surrender his rage. Colin Ferguson was in fact born into a prosperous Jamaican family and was a sometime college student (perhaps even one of professor hooks's fans) before he went on an armed rampage on a Long Island commuter train. Before spending his rage, he killed six people (Asian and white) to avenge what he called "racism by Caucasians and Uncle Toms."

  The Ferguson tragedy would seem to provide material for a sermon on the perils of such race-directed rages. But, for hooks, the massacre is only an occasion to renew her own. In her reading, Ferguson's deed provides a text on how the white media has turned one desperate, oppressed man into a racially-charged public symbol, with the sole purpose of baiting other blacks: "Even though the gunman carried in his pocket a list containing the names of male black leaders, the white-dominated mass media turned his pathological expression of anger towards blacks and whites into a rage against white people."

  Of course, the black leaders on Ferguson's list were there because in his demented imagination they were traitors to the race: they had collaborated with evil whites. In a perverse way hooks recognizes this. Ferguson, she writes, had a "complex understanding of the nature of neo-colonial racism," a fact that the white press was eager to obscure. "He held accountable all the groups who help perpetuate and maintain institutionalized racism, including black folks [that is, Uncle Toms]." By manipulating the facts, the white media was able to use the tragedy as "a way to stereotype black males as irrational, angry predators," rather than to use it as an occasion "to highlight white supremacy and its potential'maddening impact."' In real life, this task was left to William Kunstler, the leftist lawyer, who offered to mount a "black rage theory" defense of Colin Ferguson. According to Kunstler, white society normally drives black people into homicidal rages for which they cannot be held responsible. Ferguson was "not responsible for his own conduct"; therefore "white racism is to blame." A National Law Journal survey taken at the time of Ferguson's rampage found that fully twothirds of blacks interviewed agreed with the "black rage" theory. Professor hooks offers her own supportive anecdotal insight, explaining that while she herself did not take any pleasure in the racial murders, "I heard many wealthy and privileged black folks express pleasure. These revelations surprised me since so many of these folks spend their working and intimate lives in the company of white colleagues."

  At the time, most blacks harboring such feelings kept them to themselves. But some did not. During a rally held at Howard University, the "Harvard" of black colleges, Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Muhammad compared the psychopath Ferguson to rebel slave leader Nat Turner. Muhammad told a laughing, cheering audience of middle-class black college students: "God spoke to Colin Ferguson and said 'Catch the train, Colin, catch the train.'"

  Studies conducted at Farrakhan's Million Man March revealed that 40 percent of the participants had a college education and incomes exceeding fifty thousand dollars. More than 70 percent had incomes of more than twenty-five thousand dollars. Farrakhan is now the most popular black leader among blacks, and he and his former henchman Muhammad are easily the most coveted and wellpaid speakers for black student associations across the country. Indeed, inviting black racists to college campuses to bait whites has become a rite of African-American authenticity for well-funded black student associations at American universities. This contrasts with the historical experience of all other ethnic groups, where racist attitudes diminish with education and income.

  A parallel phenomenon is the tolerance by social elites of all colors for racist outrage when it is committed by blacks. In the wake of the Million Man March, blacks burned a white man alive in a Chicago neighborhood, with no accompanying press.comment. In Illinois, three blacks murdered a pregnant white welfare mother and her two white children, while "rescuing" her black fetus by cutting it out of her womb. No one called the attack racial even though a second black child of the woman was spared. A black city worker in Fort Lauderdale gunned down five white co-workers, again without the press intimating a racial element might be involved, even though several survivors testified the killer had used anti-white epithets in the workplace before. In Harlem, seven white customers were burned alive in a store torched by a black racist after Al Sharpton and other racial demagogues had led protests against its presence in the neighborhood because the owner was white. This did elicit some editorial commentary, but without a single acknowledgment by any public figure of any color that the black community might have its own racial problem.

  Actually both anomalies — the epidemic of black middle-class rage against whites and the absence of outrage at racism by blacks — are connected by the ideological perception that racism is a systemic problem, rather than the result of individual acts. It is generally acknowledged that white racists in America — though an ugly presence-are harder and harder to find in positions of responsibility and power. Legal discrimination has been eliminated, and a large government bureaucracy has been created to punish acts of discrimination that are now forbidden by law. To sustain the idea that antiblack racism is still the paramount social issue, it has become necessary to suggest that the problem is "institutional," therefore both "subtle" and "pervasive." But this perspective automatically renders every black a victim and therefore every outrageous act committed by blacks potentially "understandable."

  The phrase "institutional racism" originated in the Kerner Commission Report on the inner city riots that erupted following the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 that ended legal segregation in the South. It was an attempt to explain — and to justify — the paradox of "rebellions" against a body politic that had just achieved equality before the law for all Americans. (That these riots might just be criminal eruptions apparently was not a political option.) The commission's reaction to the 1960s riots served to define the "second c
ivil rights era," the distinguishing feature of which has been the squandering of the moral legacy of the first and the restructuring of the civil rights agenda as a radical cause. Its legacy has been the system of racial preferences called "affirmative action."

  While intellectually more respectable than Farrakhan's crackpot religious claims, the theory of institutional racism inspires no less sweeping indictments of whites. Developed into a full-blown ideology by the "multicultural" academy, institutional race theory regards any statistical disparity of black representation anywhere in the culture as proof of white malevolence and of the necessity of racial preference remedies. The unspoken assumption of every such policy is that institutions where whites predominate must be forced to be fair to black applicants, even where there is no actual evidence of unfairness. But does even the most fanatical advocate of affirmative action quotas believe that Harvard, Yale, and other institutions of the liberal elite contrive to bar qualified African-American students from entry, and would continue to do so in the absence of these affirmative action laws? Then why are such laws necessary? Because, their proponents argue, the influence of "institutional racism" is so subtle that Harvard and Yale would nonetheless exclude qualified African-Americans without the coercive intervention of the state.

  It is precisely because the theory of institutional racism and the affirmative action policies it has spawned are a radical rejection of the American system — of individual rights, equal opportunity, and equality before the law — that the most dramatic anomaly of the second civil rights era has been produced. Whereas the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King's leadership achieved its aims with the support of 90 percent majorities in both houses of Congress, a majority of Americans — roughly 70 percent — oppose the current civil rights agenda that embraces racial preferences. This opposition reflects the inability of most Americans to understand or respect the persistence of "black rage" in the face of the enormous social, cultural, and economic gains made by African-Americans, as well as their own sense that they accept African-Americans as fellow citizens and full partners in America's civic contract. This self-understanding is corroborated by every major opinion survey on race relations taken in recent years.

  It is this reality that has spawned the peculiar angst of bell hooks. "Why," writes hooks, "is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation?" In other words, for radical ideologues like hooks, actual racism is not the issue. The issue is a marxist fantasy of domination and subjugation. In conceding that individual racists are not the problem, hooks is neither original nor alone. She is simply a camp follower of the political left. In an issue of the New Yorker devoted to race relations, Angela Davis laments the passing of the 1960s when "there was a great deal of discussion about . . . the importance of understanding the structural components of racism. There was an understanding that we couldn't assume that racism was just about prejudice — which, unfortunately, is what not only conservatives but liberals are arguing today."

  For the radicals, racism is not about prejudice but about imaginary structures of domination, which are evidenced in any disparity in the status of blacks and whites that appears to them to be in blacks' disfavor. Just as marxists are convinced that there is class "oppression" when everyone is not economically equal, so race radicals claim that racial oppression exists when any disparity appears between racial groups. As long, that is, as the disparity works against the "oppressed." No one, for example, argues that the diminishing presence of whites in major athletics is the result of a racial conspiracy by blacks or requires a government remedy.

  The racialist view of American social institutions propounded by hooks, Davis, and other leftists has even been incorporated into a school of jurisprudence. Not since the segregationist era has the buttressing of a racialist philosophy been the work of American law schools. But now, at Harvard, Stanford, and other founts of legal scholarship, "critical race theorists" argue that blacks can do no wrong and whites can do no right. These law professors defend the importance of a "race-conscious perspective," elaborate the theory that only whites can be racist (because "only whites have power"), and defend common criminals, if they are black, as rebels against an oppressive system.†

  The theme of institutional racism dominated Jesse Jackson's semi-literate rant at the Million Man March: "We've come here today because there is a structural malfunction in America. It was structured in the Constitution and they referred to us as three-fifths of a human being, legally.‡ There's a structural malfunction. That's why there's a crack in the Liberty Bell. There's a structural malfunction; they ignored the Kerner Report. Now we have the burden of two Americas: one half slave and one half free."

  The utility of "structural" racism for demagogues like Jackson is that even while acknowledging that the vast majority of whites are no longer overtly racist, the concept makes all whites guilty nonetheless. No individual white has to be a racist in actual thought or deed to participate in the racist system or to reap its privileges.

  Since the system appears to benefit whites the most, only whites as a group can properly be called its beneficiaries, and therefore racist. By the same token, since the black "half" of the nation is "unfree," its members can hardly be held accountable for themselves.

  In this, as in other aspects of contemporary racial cant, bell hooks is an unfailing guide. Like Farrakhan, she prefers the term "white supremacy" to "racist" when describing enemies of the people — because the latter term suggests a search for individual culprits, while sophisticates know that it is the system that is at fault. Professor hooks, in fact, tells us that her own moment of truth came when she encountered white women in the feminist movement who sought the comradeship of blacks but who "wished to exercise control over our bodies and thoughts as their racist ancestors had." Whatever specifics lie behind this paranoid image (hooks fails to provide details), the emotional bottom line is clear: insofar as hooks feels less powerful in any relationship she has with whites, for whatever reason, she will regard herself as a victim of racism. Thanks to the widespread acceptance of the politics of victimhood, there are many successful blacks who see racists under the bed, and for similar reasons respond positively to demagogues like Farrakhan.

  The concept of institutional racism not only insulates blacks from the charge of racism, but actually exculpates them in advance for any racial crime they might commit. Thus hooks, in a kind of preemptive jury nullification, finds herself innocent of the airplane murder she wanted to commit: "Had I killed the white man whose behavior evoked that rage, I feel that it would have been caused by . . . the madness engendered by a pathological context." In other words, even if she had done it, she did not do it. In fact, white people did it.

  When blacks commit crimes, the truly guilty party is the white devil who made them do it. Even when hooks does not fully identify with an odious act committed by an African-American, she still finds a way to mitigate it. She disavows Farrakhan and his antiSemitic screeds, but nonetheless asks: "From whom do young black folks get the notion that Jews control Hollywood? This stereotype trickles down from mainstream white culture. . . . Indeed, if we were to investigate why masses of black youth all over the United States know who Louis Farrakhan is, or Leonard Jeffries, we would probably find that white-dominated mass media have been the educational source."

  In other words, if blacks are anti-Semitic, it is the white devil who taught them to be so. Of course, hooks's reasoning is so circular, she could just as well praise the "white-dominated media" for imposing the leftist view on the public that America is institutionally racist, since the media have generally embraced this canard. A representative front page "news article" in the Los Angeles Times, for example, purported to show that the traditional ladder of upward mobility for America's minorities no longer exists for blacks a
nd Hispanics, thanks to institutional racism:

  WHITES EARN MORE AT ALL LEVELS, CHALLENGING BELIEF THAT EDUCATION IS THE KEY TO PARITY DATA SHOWS

  Whether they have dropped out of high school or invested years in a graduate degree, whether they have struggled to master English or not, California's minorities earn substantially less than Anglos — a disparity that challenges the long-held tenet that education is a key to equality . . .

  This Times report was probably more powerful in persuading middle-class blacks who read it that the system is stacked against them than all the speeches of Louis Farrakhan. But the Times study, which was conducted from census figures by the Times's own analysts, showed nothing of the kind. The term "Anglo," its euphemism for "whites," included minorities — Jews, Armenians, Arabs — who are victims of ongoing prejudice and hate crimes and yet (for reasons unexplained in the study) are successful and thus provide the Times's yardsticks of "privilege." The category "Hispanic" — though ideologically useful — is sociologically spurious, since it includes South American Indians, Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, low-earning Puerto Ricans and high-earning Cubans.

  The Times's analysts made no allowance for the kind of educational degrees, graduate or otherwise, that its target groups possessed. It is well known that more blacks and Hispanics seek college degrees in low-paying fields like education rather than in higherpaying professions like physics or engineering. The Times's analysts also failed to take into account age or on-the-job experience, obviously critical to earning potential. Yet the editors of the Times chose to print essentially meaningless but racially inflammatory statistics and to weave them into an analysis that corroborated the existence of "institutional racism." The article appeared on January Io, 1993. After reading it, I called the reporters responsible. They sheepishly admitted that they did not have the data to make the claims they had, but defended the decision to print the story anyway.