Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Read online

  These are striking statistics, reflecting a unique community support of the president (even feminists were more ambivalent), and prompting attempts to explain it. According to a widely quoted comment by comedian Chris Rock, Clinton's African-American 56 support was inspired by the fact that he is "the first black president." Explained Rock: "It's very simple. Black people are used to being persecuted. Hence, they relate to Clinton." The comedian was not alone in these thoughts. In an article exploring African-American reactions to the Clinton investigation, New York Times reporter Kevin Sack quoted NAACP head Julian Bond saying "You just can't help but think that some of this [investigation of Clinton] is race based," while Harvard Professor Alvin Poussaint reported that rumors were circulating in the African-American community to the effect that "[Clinton] must have had black ancestry."

  A full-blown expression of these attitudes was on display in the New Yorker, where Nobel laureate Toni Morrison wrote of the crisis: "African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetimes. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

  Perhaps one has to be a lapsed leftist like myself to react to the loopy anti-white attitudes laced into these cadences from one of our most celebrated and rewarded national literary figures. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetimes? Apparently, Colin Powell, the most popular presidential prospect in polls taken only two years before is not all that black, having been born into a two-parent household and, though poor in origins and familiar with discrimination, not known for his unhealthy food addictions or stereotypical musical tastes.

  On the other hand, perhaps the liberal identification of blackness with victimization and social dysfunction is not so wide of the mark in explaining the sympathy of political leftists like Morrison and Bond or the support of the Congressional Black Caucus for the immoralist from Little Rock. Perhaps it reflects a resonance in the black community to the White House's cynical strategy of defining presidential deviancy down: "They all do it." Roosevelt, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush — they all lie and cheat. So why shouldn't our guy? This certainly seems to be the corrosive logic behind which some blacks have rallied to the defense of other criminal politicians, like the corrupt and crack-addicted former mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry. It could easily account for the undertones of racial paranoia ("they're out to get our guys") that surfaced when African-American members of the Clinton Administration, Ron Brown, Mike Espy and Hazel O'Leary came under investigation for irregularities in office.

  Which is precisely the way Toni Morrison frames Clinton's problem: "When virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke?" According to Morrison the message from white America is clear: "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place." Or, to paraphrase the mantra of the late Malcolm X, No matter how high you rise, you're ahvays gonna be a nigger to the man.

  Putting aside the paranoid overtones of such attitudes in the era of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan — or Toni Morrison for that matter — one might still ask why Bill Clinton should be "our guy" from an African-American point of view. Isn't this the Bill Clinton who established his New Democrat credentials by delivering a verbal slap to Sister Souljah on the eve of his election in 1992 and by losing the phone number of Jesse Jackson for the next five years? Isn't this the Bill Clinton who betrayed old friend and political soul-mate Lani Guinier, and who, after nominating her as his civil rights chief, left her to the mercies of her political enemies, all the while pretending ignorance of who she was and what she believed? Isn't this the Bill Clinton whose vaunted "dialogue on race" — the centerpiece of his racial initiative — was immolated by his own sex scandal while the final report of his Race Commission ended up calling merely for . . . more dialogue? Reviewing the report, liberal columnist Frank Rich summed up the Clinton record on race as follows: "high ideals, beautiful show, one-night stand."

  Indeed, isn't this the Bill Clinton who brought Jesse Jackson back into the fold and wrapped himself in the protective cloak of the black community and its historic symbols only when he himself was in terminal trouble? Only after Democrats had lost the Congress and he no longer had the power to seriously advance the black community's agendas? Surely there have been few more repellent demonstrations of Clinton's user-ethic than his pilgrimage of atonement to Africa, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal and after he had been trapped in his labyrinth of lies and become an international laughing-stock. With Jesse Jackson and Maxine Waters and a delegation of African-Americans in tow, the President set off to wave the bloody flag, apologizing for slavery (to the wrong African country) in an attempt to wrap the sins of America around his own. Continuing his bid to hide his tarnished self under the mantle of black suffering, he went on to Martha's Vineyard to debase the memory of Martin Luther King's march on Washington, choosing the anniversary of that historic occasion for another unconvincing act of contrition. These are the kinds of gestures that give tokenism a bad name.

  But not this time-at least not among African-Americans. Instead, the most prominent voices of black leadership joined willingly in Clinton's charades and rallied to his tarnished cause. There was civil rights legend John Lewis at the Martin Luther King anniversary, solemnly, tearfully forgiving Clinton and urging the rest of the country to forgive him as well. It was terrible, apparently, to be so judgmental of another human being. This was the same John Lewis who not so long before was denouncing Newt Gingrich and congressional Republicans as "nazis" for attempting to reform a welfare system that had become destructive to inner city minorities and poor people.

  This is what the liberal melodramas of conspiracy and witch hunt are really about: not racial persecution, which thankfully has been driven undergound in America, but political loyalty to a bankrupt liberalism, and its system of bureaucratic exploitation of dependency and economic waste. The previously cited New York Times report on black attitudes noted that "many of those interviewed said they not only subscribed to Hillary Rodham Clinton's statement that a 'vast right-wing conspiracy' had targeted her husband, but also that they believed the conspirators were motivated by a desire to reverse the gains made by blacks during the Clinton administration." One paranoia is linked to another. Leftists like Maxine Waters and Toni Morrison and demagogues like Charles Rangel have persuaded the African-American community that Republicans are racists who want to reverse the gains of the civil rights era. This is the really Big Lie that locks African-Americans into Clinton's corner, blocks reform, and protects the one-party political systems of America's largest cities.

  If liberals want instances of political persecution or persecution of blacks, they need look no farther than their own character assassination of Clarence Thomas in an episode of sexual McCarthyism (to use Alan Dershowitz's inflammatory phrase) whose allegations pale in comparison to the charges against Clinton. Where are the liberal apologies for this racial outrage?

  Or consider a more unpalatable thought: the political persecution of Newt Gingrich. Liberal leaders of the House, hoping to reverse the results of the Republican victory in the 1994 election, leveled more than seventy-four phony ethics charges against Gingrich (sixty-five of which were "laughed out of committee") before they were able to make one ludicrous claim stick. Out of a hundred Gingrich-loathing liberals who might read this text, there is not one who could describe the specifics of even that charge. Yet G
ingrich was censured, fined, and politically destroyed by a relentless liberal smear campaign that included 120,000 union-financed television commercials falsely portraying him as an enemy of older Americans dependent on Medicare. There is not a single liberal now defending Clinton or bemoaning the unfairness of his prosecution who has offered any second thoughts about this witch-hunt.

  That is because Gingrich's lynching, like that of Clarence Thomas, serves a liberal purpose. Just as Thomas is the dangerous black who has left the plantation, Gingrich is the alleged organizer of the "right wing conspiracy" that is seeking to bring down the left's leader in order to "reverse" the civil rights gains of African-Americans. Cease to believe in this mythology and what happens to the president, or to the leftist demagogues in the Congressional Black Caucus? What if Republicans were no longer available to function as racial bogey-men? What if African-Americans were to see that Republican policies like educational choice and Republican values like personal responsibility might work to the benefit of their communities? What if they were no longer to vote 90 percent Democratic? What if they were to free themselves from the chains of a one-party system that feeds them tokens and shamelessly exploits their moral capital for its own agendas?

  These are the real stakes that keep the liberal melodrama alive, and that prevent a taken-for-granted community from fully entering the American polity and exercising its rightful power.

  6

  Democrats and Blacks

  WHAT IF 90 PERCENT of the white electorate had turned out in the last election to vote for Republican candidates in virtually every electoral district across the country?

  What if Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott had spent the weeks before the 1998 election visiting all-white churches and making not so covert appeals to the congregations' alleged racial interest in expanding the Republican majority, as Bill Clinton and Al Gore did for the Democrats?

  What if Senator Carol Moseley-Braun had been defeated because 93 percent of whites voted against her (instead of 93 percent of blacks voting for her as they did)?

  What if a Republican representing a white suburban district had received 94 percent of the vote against his opponent the way Charles Rangel actually did in his Harlem district? (This, mind you, was only 1 percent less than the widow of a Tennessee candidate, murdered by his opponent, received in defeating her husband's killer.)

  What if Colin Powell was President and Tom Wolfe had written a piece like Toni Morrison's fatuous New Yorker article, hailing him as the first white African-American president because he did not come from a dysfunctional family, spoke the King's English, played the violin, and favored cuisine like quiche lorraine?

  The morning after the election I received the following phone message from a member of my family who is black: "Well, I just had to call to chuckle over the election results. Black people finally got heard. I guess O. J. and Bill Clinton do have something in common." (Well, she got that last point right, though hardly in the way she probably meant it.) I decided not to respond in kind. But suppose the circumstances had been reversed, and the Democrats had lost big time, and I had called my black relative and said: "I just had to chuckle because white people were finally heard."

  Of course, the double standard by which we have come to judge the behaviors of white and black Americans has gone so far that a significant portion of the public has been persuaded that the lockstep political choices of the African-American community are quite natural and are motivated by a justifiable racial solidarity — in other words, that they have nothing remotely in common with the counter-examples I have proposed, which would rightly be regarded as expressions of deplorable racial prejudice.

  But are these racial reflexes of the African-American community so obviously appropriate to African-American interests, as liberals claim? Larry Elder, a black libertarian talk-show host in Los Angeles thinks they are not. Recently, Elder published the following list of "15 Reasons Why Blacks Shouldn't Support Clinton":

  Tax hikes. During the Reagan years black teenage and adult unemployment fell dramatically because lower taxes stimulated business formation and expansion, creating employment opportunities for unskilled labor.

  Affirmative action. This promotes the fallacious idea of the "Big Bang Theory of the Black Middle Class" — that the black middle class owes its existence and success to government preferences rather than its own achievement. In fact, the growth of the black middle class was more rapid before affirmative action programs were put in place.

  Minimum wage increases. The Nobel Prize economist Milton Friedman has observed that the minimum wage is "one of the most ... anti-black laws on the statute books" because it destroys entry level jobs for second paycheck earners, teens, and other unskilled workers.

  Welfare. Clinton vigorously opposed welfare reform until Republicans forced him to sign on to it, and he threatens to undo the reforms in place. Yet welfare reform has liberated thousands of black Americans from the prospect of lifetime dependence on government handouts, at minimal levels of existence.

  Gun control. Clinton and the Democrats oppose concealed weapons permits, yet inner city blacks remain the most vulnerable to violent crime. Meanwhile, studies show that in states that allow concealed weapons, murder rates have fallen.

  Opposition to school choice. Threats of Clinton vetoes and Democratic opposition to voucher programs deny poor blacks the same options Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, and other Democratic leaders take to rescue their own kids from the traps of dangerous and failing public schools by sending them to the private schools of their choice.

  Opposition to the privatization of Social Security. Blacks have shorter life expectancies than whites and hence stand to gain less from the Social Security benefits they are now forced to fund. They would gain enormously by being able to control their own retirement funds.

  Expansion of government in health care. Government mandated health insurance programs have vastly increased the costs of health care and decreased the chance that small businesses can afford ample benefit programs for their employees. As usual, the least skilled and most vulnerable get whacked the most.

  The betrayal of black friends. Clinton lured Vernon Jordan and Betty Currie into positions of legal jeopardy through his self-serving lies.

  Expansion of the war on drugs. In this area, black leaders have employed a double standard, opposing drug laws that penalize urban blacks disproportionately while remaining silent over Clinton's responsibility for these measures.

  The Rate Advisory Board. This Board promoted the tired liberal red-herring that what ails black America is a "lack of understanding" on the part of whites instead of welfare dependency, bad public schools (that liberals and Democrats run), illegitimacy, and criminal behavior.

  The reopening of the inquiry into the assassination of Martin Luther King. The original investigation headed by black liberal congressman Louis Stokes (D-Ohio) closed the case years ago, after proving that James Earl Ray was the assassin. Re-opening the case keeps the "blacks-are-victims" cottage industry pumping.

  The White House defense of lying under oath. This puts blacks, who are more likely to suffer from the perjuries of law enforcement officers, at greater risk.

  Expansion of hate-crime legislation. This exaggerates the frequency of such crimes, while depreciating the significance of the same-race crimes from which blacks suffer most.

  The war on cigarettes. The tax penalties on smoking will fall disproportionately on lower income people who smoke more and can afford the taxes less.

  It is not necessary to agree with all or even most of these points to see that there is no particular reason why the black community should vote like the populations of communist countries who lacked the ability to exercise free choice. By contrast, the Asian community in California split 55-45 percent in the race pitting a Chinese American, Matt Fong, against incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer. (Fong actually received a lower percentage of Asian votes.)

  But while black Americans do not live in a tota
litarian country, those blacks who do dissent from the liberal party line experience a level of hostility and intimidation in their own community that is unusual for democracies. Larry Elder himself has been the target of constant vicious attacks from the principal black newspaper in Los Angeles, numerous death threats inspired by such attacks, and finally a boycott from a radical black group called Talking Drum. The boycott caused Elder's employer, radio station KABC in Los Angeles, to lose millions of dollars in advertising. A year ago, the station's management informed Elder that he would be removed from his four-hour drive-time air slot. A replacement was hired and Elder's hours were reduced. Meanwhile, there was not a single editorial in the Los Angeles Times about the political movement to silence his voice, or a single protest by the ACLU and other liberal organizations normally quick to oppose such moves for censorship.

  It took a conservative organization (which I happen to head) to mount an effort to defend Elder in the form of a half-million dollar television advertising campaign. This resulted in a dramatic boost in Elder's ratings, the firing of the station manager and Elder's replacement, and the restoration of his hours. Today, Larry Elder is the number one drive-time radio talk show host in Los Angeles and is about to be syndicated nationally.