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."
Michael Lind, a white liberal and author of The Next American Nation, calls for a massive rehabilitation program for poor blacks, one aimed at the personal problems and behaviors that have effectively barred the black underclass from entry into mainstream culture. He suggests a project akin to Jane Addams's turn-of-the-century settlement houses for European immigrants, an effort to separate poor blacks from the ghetto culture and provide incentives "for learning standard English, mainstream manners and useful skills."
A project in values. Following on the controversy over Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve last year, these frank discussions are making squeamish liberals more squeamish and angry African-Americans angrier. But the authors argue, and many critics agree, that nothing is more harmful to blacks than avoiding the uncomfortable topics of race, merit and achievement.
None of these books shares in The Bell Curve's genetic explanation for poor black performance; indeed, most explicitly reject the notion that intellectual and cultural deficits are race-based and heritable. But that doesn't make the analyses any less incendiary, because they call attention to what the authors, black and white alike, consider very real cultural deficits: young blacks' defiant attitude and gait, for instance, or their use of improper English. All emphasize the importance of mainstream manners, character, comportment--what Loury collectively calls "deservingness." And all emphasize the need for a massive black self-help movement to bring about the needed social rehabilitation.
Echoes of the past. Several of the current critics--D'Souza, Loury and Keyes among them--trace their positions on self-help and social skills back to the educator Booker T. Washington and the acidic turn-of-the-century debate he had with Harvard-educated activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Washington, a former slave, argued that it was unwise for American blacks to demand equal rights until they could demonstrate they deserved equal status in society. He advocated gradual assimilation into mainstream American society through personal discipline, "industrial education," enterprise and self-reliance. Du Bois scathingly rejected Washington's positions as degrading to blacks and too accommodating to oppressive white society, arguing instead for political activism and a focus on securing constitutional entitlements.
Du Bois won the day, leading to the eventual overturning of Jim Crow laws and the advances of the civil rights movement. But while the current critics celebrate the achievements of the civil rights movement, they also see in Du Bois's victory the seeds of today's black underclass. Argues D'Souza: "Du Bois basically said blacks have one problem: white racism. Washington said blacks have two problems: white racism and black cultural dysfunctionality." Du Bois's followers, like Martin Luther King Jr., focused on the defeat of legal segregation to the exclusion of cultural rehabilitation. "My argument is that Du Bois may have been right then, but Washington is right now," D'Souza says. "Now the best anti-racism is to reform the cultural pathologies of the black community so that blacks are competitive with other groups."
Loury goes further, hailing a "new era" in racial discourse based on the rediscovery of Booker T. Washington's principles. He points out that when Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his doleful assessment of the deteriorating black family 30 years ago, he was roundly attacked for "blaming the victim" and imposing white middle-class values on blacks. Today, Loury notes, black pathologies are twice as severe, adding: "There are worse things than blaming the victim."
But Loury is also harshly critical of much of D'Souza's analysis, particularly his suggestion that black culture is something separate from--and threatening to--mainstream values. "There's another way to look at it: American civilization has so degenerated that at the extreme what we see happening in the underclass is a manifestation of that degeneration. It was not blacks who made dope a form of cultural expression in the '60s. It was not blacks who said the constraints of the 1950s had to be thrown over in order to find one's true meaning. I don't recall any underclass people writing the foundational texts of the counterculture. I watched that building disintegrate in Oklahoma City, and I'd say there are greater threats to civilization than the extremes of black culture."
Charges of "tomming." The liberal reaction to the Washington renaissance has been equally emotional and disdainful. Historian Roger Wilkins, for example, says that Washington is still considered a "sellout" by leading black intellectuals, and he dismisses D'Souza's contention that overt racism is rare as "absurd." "America is addicted to racism," he insists. New York University law Prof. Derrick Bell dismisses what he calls the "bootstrap argument" as "historically naive," recalling that a 1920s effort to encourage black enterprise and self-reliance led to hundreds of lynchings of economically threatening black entrepreneurs. D'Souza counters that the drugs and crime that plague underclass neighborhoods kill more blacks each year than all the lynchings in American history. Focusing obsessively on past injustices, he suggests, is no longer a fruitful intellectual activity.
All of the current critiques blame black cultural problems on the excesses of the civil rights movement and in particular the civil rights establishment's abandonment of the poorest and neediest African-Americans--an argument bound to provoke outrage. D'Souza dismisses "professional blacks" who he claims depend on the persistence of underclass black misery for their own continued relevance. Lind says the notion that whatever benefits upper-income blacks benefits all blacks is "racial mysticism"; only the black "overclass," he contends, has benefited from the rights movement. Keyes is no less harsh, arguing that civil rights leaders who once preached moral integrity and local economic initiative later abandoned those traditional values for the more high-profile rights battles. In aligning themselves with white liberals on the national stage, he claims, black leaders found themselves espousing such liberal rights-based causes as reproductive choice that were irrelevant or even antithetical to traditional black values.
Keyes and others are also harshly critical of what they see as the black church's abandonment of its traditional role of moral education and its transformation into a political arm of the civil rights movement. Both civil rights leaders and clergy, they say, play on fears of racism to enlist blacks in the fight for more group entitlements, like those secured through the affirmative action policies that these critics strongly oppose. Indeed, Lind argues that racial preference is conservative policy and a fraud, appealing to affluent whites and the business world because it's less expensive than the programs that would be needed to truly salvage the underclass.
D'Souza concedes that the exploitation of racial paranoia has been an effective political strategy. But persisting in an obsession with the last remnants of racism, he contends, is unlikely to raise blacks' cultural standards so they can truly compete for their fair share of the American dream. It's an argument Booker T. Washington very likely would have embraced. And latter-day W.E.B. Du Boises have to contend with.
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[Illustration captions]: SCENE 1 A young African-American man has been passed by five empty cabs. It's after midnight; he's bitter. Those cabbies know they can be fined for not stopping, but each fears he might have to drive to the ghetto and therefore rationalizes: "I'd rather be fined than have my wife a widow."
Blacks make up 12 percent of the population but 44 percent of arrests for violent crimes. Driving a cab is the riskiest job in the country.
SCENE 2 A black physician is driving to a late shift at the hospital. He is breaking no laws, but a white policeman spots him in his new car and pulls him over. The cop reasons: It's OK to offend an innocent citizen's feelings once in a while in order to keep the community safe. The driver seethes at being stereotyped.
African-American adults are arrested for a disproportionate share of property crimes, including 2 of every 5 automobile thefts.
SCENE 3 A young professional couple have their eyes on a tidy bungalow in a largely black neighborhood of a large city. They have good credit, but their loan application is rejected. The loan officer is worried about risking the bank's money in a neighborhood with a few boarded-up homes and lots of renters.
Blacks are rejected for mortgages at twice the rate of whites. The denial rate is higher in minority-occupied neighborhoods.
This story appears in the September 18, 1995 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.