The Fate of Racism
A new debate: How much does it hold blacks back? Is it fading away?
Conservative social critic Dinesh D'Souza tells a story that cuts to the heart of America's continuing race problems. Riding in a Chicago cab, the dark-skinned author and white cabbie began discussing the risks of driving a taxi in the city. The cabbie volunteered that he had no aversion to picking up blacks, but added that he never picked up ... and then he used the most odious epithet anyone can use about an African-American.
The difficulty that black men have in hailing a taxi is well known, and civil rights activists have often used that appalling fact as evidence of the persistence of bigotry and racial hatred in 1990s America. But D'Souza, author of a book called The End of Racism that hits the bookstores this week, thinks the cabbie is misunderstood. Although his behavior may look like racism, D'Souza argues, it is in fact prudent and rational decision making, the kind of statistical risk assessment that takes place in other contexts every day.
Two cultures. The cabbie is a doubly powerful metaphor for D'Souza, capturing not only the psychological process of "rational discrimination" but also the fact that there are two distinct black cultures in America today. The cabbie knows intuitively what social scientists have been discussing in heavily footnoted analyses for years--that the dominant black culture of hard work, family solidarity, middle-class dreams, church and biblical values has been completely severed from another black culture that is a social and cultural wreck. Social scientists call it the black underclass: the 1.6 million blacks (some 5 percent of the black population in 1990) living in neighborhoods with disproportionately high illegitimacy, welfare dependency, school dropout rates, male unemployment and--most salient to the urban cabbie--rates of violent crime. "In this context," D'Souza concludes, "a bigot is simply a sociologist without credentials."
His defense of rational discrimination is already igniting fireworks. For starters, the cabbies who refuse to pick up African-Americans leave many good citizens on the sidewalk just because their skin is black: Unadorned racism cloaked in "rationality" is no less despicable. This argument also comes at a time when many Americans are focused on the racial dimensions of the O.J. Simpson trial--and on the hateful supremacism reflected in former Los Angeles cop Mark Fuhrman's fondness for the epithet "nigger." Many will heatedly dispute D'Souza's contention that most old-fashioned racism is a thing of the past. But the former Reagan policy adviser isn't shying away from his thesis. Indeed, some critics see The End of Racism and several other publications ushering in a new debate characterized by a willingness to confront uncomfortable arguments about race. Consider:
Black economist Glenn Loury's new collection of essays, One by One from the Inside Out, urges poor blacks to stop acting like victims and to learn the habits of civility necessary to make it. "Blacks' problems," he argues, "lie not in the heads of white people but rather in the wasted and incompletely fulfilled lives of too many black people."
Former college president and GOP presidential candidate Alan Keyes, an African-American, argues in Masters of the Dream: The Strength and Betrayal of Black America that civil rights leaders have hurt the black underclass by abandoning self-help and economic self-sufficiency efforts--preferring legal battles that do not aid the poorest blacks. At the heart of social renewal, he insists, must lie "a determination to reassert black America's deeply rooted moral commitment to the marriage-based family."
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