Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Page 5
The theory of institutional racism, devised by radical academics and promoted by an irresponsible media, has also led to a religious expression of racial rage called "black liberation theology." Its chief text, written by the Reverend James Cone, was published by the Maryknoll press, an imprint of liberation theologians, who in the 1980s found Christ among the Sandinista dictators and El Salvador's communist guerrillas: "This country was founded for whites and everything that has happened in it has emerged from the white perspective. . . . What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world."
This kind of Afro-Nazism would seem hard to swallow even for a bell hooks. But she manages with little difficulty: "Cone wanted to critically awaken and educate readers so that they would not only break through denial and acknowledge the evils of white supremacy, the grave injustices of racist domination, but be so moved that they would righteously and militantly engage in anti-racist struggle." Or simply take out their aggressions on the nearest white available.
According to hooks, of course, such aggression doesn't happen. "It is a mark of the way black Americans cope with white supremacy that there are few reported incidents of black rage against racism leading us to target white folks. . . . [Whites] claim to fear that black people will hurt them even though there is no evidence which suggests that black people routinely hurt white people in this or any other culture." Actually, there is. In 1993, for example, Justice Department statistics show there were 1.54 million violent crimes committed by blacks against whites. By contrast, there were only 187,000 violent crimes committed by whites against blacks. Taking population into account, a white was fifty times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime committed by a black than vice versa. (The fact that there are many more white targets in the population may account for some of the disparity.) The crime of rape — an act of anger and aggression — stands by itself as a statistic. In 1994, there were twenty thousand rapes of white women by black men, but only one hundred rapes of black women by white men.
Of course, radical professors have an institutional explanation even for this extreme statistic. In Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile and Unequal, a book that has already become a classic of anti-white scholarship, Andrew Hacker attempts to explain the fact that while blacks constitute only 12 percent of the population, they commit 43 percent of the rapes, including rapes of white women even though, as he observes, the risk to the black perpetrators is greater:
Eldridge Cleaver once claimed that violating white women has political intentions. . . . Each such act brings further demoralization of the dominant race, exposing its inability to protect its own women from the worst kind of depradation. Certainly, the conditions black men face in the United States generate far more anger and rage than is ever experienced by white men. To be a man is made doubly difficult, since our age continues to associate 'manliness' with worldly success. If black men vent their frustrations on women, it is partly because the women are more available as targets, compared with the real centers of power, which remain so inchoate and remote.
For this white apologist for black rage, as for the 1960s radical, the act of rape is not a vicious act against a defenseless individual but an understandable attempt to strike at the real culprit: the white supremacist system.
In the last analysis, all this sophistry is of a piece with the Kerner Commission's original decision to use the concept of "institutional racism" to justify a criminal riot. It should come as no surprise that leftists would applaud the 1992 race riot in Los Angeles and similar outrages as "uprisings," as though they belonged in a pantheon with Lexington and Valley Forge. In the Los Angeles riot, individuals and establishments were targeted simply because they were not black. Inner city businessmen posted "black owned" signs wherever possible out of sheer self-protectiveness. Two thousand Korean businesses that could not post such signs were destroyed because of their Korean ownership. A typical leftist defense of this outrage was offered by Harvard Professor Cornel West, who called the race riot a "monumental upheaval [that] was a multi-racial, trans-class, and largely male display of justified social rage." If that is not an incitement to future racial pogroms, what is?
Racism, as bell hooks thoughtfully informs us, hurts. But racists also often hurt themselves. Indeed, in hooks's own case, a selfinflicted wound is revealed to be the trigger of her "killing rage."
The incident on the plane flight that inspired these meditations began, in fact, with a series of familiar urban frustrations, which the professor's politically sensitive antennae quickly converted into a racial casus belli: "From the moment K and I had hailed a cab on the New York City street that afternoon we were confronting racism. The cabby wanted us to leave his taxi and take another; he did not want to drive to the airport. When I said that I would willingly leave but also report him, he agreed to take us." There is hardly a white New Yorker, however, who has not had the same experience.
Hooks and her companion face "similar hostility" when they stand in the "first-class line" at the airport: "Ready with our coupon upgrades, we were greeted by two young white airline employees who continued their personal conversation and acted as though it were a great interruption to serve us."
She interrupts the employees' conversation and is rebuffed by one of them, who reacts with something like the following: "Excuse me, but I wasn't talking to you." Professor hooks's aggressive response then shifts into radical gear and becomes an actual racial confrontation: "When I suggested to K that I never see white males receiving such treatment in the first-class line, the white female insisted that 'race' had nothing to do with it, that she was just trying to serve us as quickly as possible."
Even the effort to smooth over the situation is taken racially by hooks. She looks over her shoulder and sees that a line of "white men" has formed in back of them, and concludes that now her tormentors "were indeed eager to complete our transaction even if it meant showing no courtesy." To spite them all, hooks makes everyone wait anyway, summoning a supervisor to whom she complains about the racism of the airline employees. The supervisor listens and apologizes, while the tickets are processed by the "white female." When the transaction is complete, hooks glances cursorily at the tickets she has been given. She raises her eyes just in time, however, to catch the hostility of the employee she has humiliated. "She looked at me with a gleam of hatred in her eye that startled, it was so intense."
Somewhere in these emotional minefields, hooks's friend, fails to get her ticket properly marked for upgrade, and both of them then fail to catch the error. It is this confluence of mistakes (wholly understandable in light of the ruckus hooks needlessly creates) that later causes K to be "ejected" from her first-class seat. Her upgrade has been given to the white male, who probably waited patiently in the same line behind them and had his ticket processed correctly.
The entire incident and commentary on it reveal bell hooks to be a woman driven by racial resentments she has not begun to come to terms with, and in over her head on a university faculty. But she is also typical of the tenured left that has come into its own in the last decade in the American academy, a perfect expression of the misery the "multicultural" university has inflicted on itself and on the nation as a whole. In the real world, the term "institutional racism" is properly applied only to race-specific policies such as affirmative action itself. Its current vogue is an expression of racial paranoia — and little else. It is true that even paranoids have enemies. But it is also true that by projecting their fear and aggression onto those around them, paranoids create enemies, too.
* * *
*The lower-case affectation is hers.
†Among the self-styled critical race theorists (and "critical race feminists") are Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Regina Austin, and Anita Hill.
‡Of course this is maliciously faulty history. It was the slaveholders at the constitutional convention whose representatives wanted to count each slave as a full hu
man being so as to maximize the slave states' voting power. It was the anti-slavery faction that did not want the votes of slaves to be equated with free votes. Eventually a compromise was reached to count a slave's vote as three-fifths that of a free person's, whether white or black (there were more than three thousand black freemen who owned slaves in the United States). Nowhere in the Constitution are the words "black" or "white" to be found, and nowhere is race specified or mentioned.
II
BLACK CAUCUS
4
Martin's Children
DURING THE DARKEST DAYS OF THE COLD WAR, the Italian writer Ignazio Silone predicted that the final struggle of that great conflict would be between the communists and the ex-communists. And so it seems to be among civil rights activists in the war over affirmative action.* Jesse Jackson and the opponents of California's Proposition 209, which outlawed government race preferences, claim for themselves the mantle of the civil rights movement. They even staged a protest march in San Francisco on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous Washington event to make the point. But, on the other side of the barricades, the architects and principal spokesmen for Proposition 209 are also veterans of King's movement. It is no accident that Proposition 209 was called "The California Civil Rights Initiative" by its proponents or that its text was carefully constructed to conform to the letter and spirit of the landmark Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.
Obviously it is not the goal of ending racism that divides the former activists. It is their conflicting memories of the past and differing strategies for the future. How much racial progress has been made since the federal government embraced the civil rights agenda? What is the best way to overcome the racial inequalities that persist?
For those opposed to Proposition 209, the answer is simple: racism has not changed its substance, only its form. In their view, whatever gains blacks have made have been forced upon a recalcitrant white populace. If the government were to be race neutral, historic prejudice would reassert itself despite the existing anti-discrimination laws. Even without this resurgence of prejudice, existing inequalities themselves create injustice. The remedy, therefore, must be continued government intervention to ensure equality of results. For the nation to eliminate affirmative action policies, as both Jesse Jackson and President Clinton have warned, would be to invite the "re-segregation" of American life.
A scholarly study by two civil rights veterans has now been introduced into this debate. Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom's America In Black and White reconstructs the history of racial progress and conflict in the postwar era and examines the impact of affirmative action solutions. The authors cite a statement made in 1996 by Atlanta's black mayor articulating the view implicit in the position of Clinton and Jackson that every black person in America "has benefited from affirmative action. There's not been anybody who's gotten a job on their own, no one who's prospered as a businessman or businesswoman on their own."
Yet consider these unruly facts presented in the Thernstroms's book:
In 1940, 87 percent of American blacks lived in poverty. By 1960-five years before the Civil Rights Acts and ten years before the first affirmative action policies-the figure was down to 47 percent. This twenty year drop was an even greater and more rapid decline in black poverty than the one that took place over the next thirty-five years, a period which saw the black poverty rate come down to 26 percent as of 1995
In 1940, only 5 percent of black men and 6.4 percent of black women had middle class occupations. By 1970, the figures were 22 percent for black men (a nearly four-fold increase) and 36 percent for black women (a more than five-fold increase) — larger again than the increase that took place in the twenty years after affirmative action was put in place (roughly 1970) when the figures reached 32 percent and 59 percent.
The cause of black poverty, as the Thernstroms show (and the dramatic expansion of the black middle class should make self-evident), has little to do with race. Consequently, its solution will not be affected by affirmative action set-asides. Currently, 85 percent of all poor black children live in fatherless families. In other words, the poverty rate for black children without fathers is nearly six times that for black children with two parents. A far more effective antipoverty program would be to promote black marriages.
Even in higher education, affirmative action has not been the indispensable agent its advocates imply. The rate of gain for blacks in college enrollments was greater between 1960 and 1970, before affirmative action policies were instituted (enrollments for blacks increased from 4 percent to 7 percent of the total college population), than it was in the decades after, between 1970 and 1980, when black enrollment went from 7 percent to 9.9 percent and between 1980 and 1994, when it went from 9.9 percent to 10.7 percent.
Of course, before affirmative action, many of these students were attending all black colleges in the South. The really significant gain from affirmative action was greater "diversity." The proportion of black students enrolled in predominantly white schools quadrupled between 1960 and 1980. This made white liberals and — to be fair — whites generally, feel good. But was it as good for the blacks who were enrolled, particularly those who were accepted to schools because of affirmative action double standards?
In 1965 — before these policies were put in place — blacks were only about half as likely to actually graduate from college as whites. In 1995 — after affirmative action took effect — the figure was exactly the same. As of 1995, almost half of African-Americans in the twenty to twenty-five age bracket had been enrolled in college, but barely one in seven of them held a bachelor's degree.
In the economic sphere, affirmative action policies had the net effect not of employing greater numbers of blacks or raising their living standards, but of shifting black employment from small businesses to large corporations and to government. In higher education, the net effect of affirmative action has been more perverse. In a system organized as a hierarchy of merit, a good student who can get As at Boston University might flunk out at Harvard. In 1995, there were only 1,764 black students nationwide who scored as high as 600 on the verbal SATs (the math scores were even worse). But, under affirmative action guidelines, all those students were recruited to Berkeley, Harvard, and similar elite schools where the average white student (not to mention the average Asian) normally had scores at least 100 points (and more likely 200) higher.
In short, at every level of the university system, the net effect of affirmative action has been to place Arican-Americans in college programs that exceed their qualifications. As a result, affirmative action students have lower grade point averages and higher dropout rates (by fifty percent and more) than students who are admitted without benefit of racial preferences. At Berkeley, for example, the gap in SAT scores between blacks and whites is nearly three hundred points. As this disparity would predict, blacks drop out of Berkeley at nearly three times the rate of whites. This is the unspoken nightmare of affirmative action's impact on the very minorities it was designed to help.
It is a poignant irony that the college that comes closest to racial equality in actually graduating its students in the era of affirmative action is Ole Miss, once the last bastion of segregation in the South. Now integrated, Ole Miss has resisted the new racial duplicity in admissions standards. The result is that 49 percent of all whites who enter Ole Miss as freshman graduate, and so do 48 percent of all blacks.
On the basis of the actual results, it is clear that affirmative action based on racial preference is unnecessary to racial progress, damaging to its supposed beneficiaries, and ineffective in terms of closing the income and education gaps between blacks and whites. While it may create additional privilege for some members of an already privileged black elite — 86 percent of the affirmative action students at elite schools are from upper middle-class or wealthy backgrounds — its more durable effect is to create failure that is unnecessary. In addition, it aggrieves those whose achievements are real, but who become suspec
t because of the circumvention of standards. Finally, racial preferences incite the resentment of other groups, not only whites but also Asians, who see themselves displaced on the basis of race from their hard-won places of merit. In his book, Liberal Racism, veteran civil rights activist Jim Sleeper addresses the toxic effect of these good intentions. "Liberalism no longer curbs discrimination," he writes. "It invites it. It does not expose racism; it recapitulates and, sometimes, reinvents it."
Thus does the Cold War between the children of Martin Luther King beget ironies without end.
* * *
*For an account of these battles, see Lydia Chavez, The Color Bind: Cahfornia's Battle to End Affirmative Action (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1998).
5
Amen Corner
A REVEALING ASPECT of the White House crisis that engulfed President Clinton in 1998 was the racial gap in public opinion polls, which was almost as wide as after the verdict in the O. J. Simpson murder case. When the world discovered in January that the president was having sex with a twenty-two-year-old intern, a New York Times poll found that 81 percent of blacks (as compared to 58 percent of whites) nonetheless approved the way the president was doing his job. When asked whether the president shared the moral values of most Americans, fully 77 percent of blacks (in contrast to less than half that fraction of whites) said yes. Nine months later, after the discovery of the stained dress and the release of the Starr report, 63 percent of blacks still thought the president-now a proven liar and philanderer — shared the nation's morality. It was three times the number of whites (22 percent) who did.