Jonah Goldberg alternately entertains and infuriates, and today, he’s definitely leaning towards the latter with this column: A Race Conversation? What Are You Talking About? Writing about Barack Obama’s highly-publicized and well-received speech on race last week, Goldberg marvels:
…when one luminary after another smacks his forehead like someone who forgot to have a V8 in epiphanic awe over the genius of Obama’s call for a national conversation on race, all I can do is wonder: “What on Earth are you people talking about?”
Oh, thank goodness Obama fired the starter’s pistol in the race to discuss race. Here I’d been under the impression that every major university (and minor one for that matter) in the country already had boatloads of courses — often entire majors — dedicated to race in America.
In other words, Jonah thinks the “conversation” began a long time ago, has continued for far too long, and probably ought to be dropped. Obama’s claim that a genuinely honest discussion hasn’t even started is too much for Goldberg to bear, and Jonah uses his one good trick (the clever use of obscure cultural references) to belabor the point that, well, we’ve been talking about race forever and a day. Can’t we stop now, he wonders in his affected, privileged weariness? For God’s sake, hasn’t Trent Lott suffered enough?
Jonah reminds me of the chronically unfaithful husband who, after years of screwing around on his wife, finally makes a serious commitment to monogamy. He pledges everlasting loyalty — this time — and is incensed that after two full weeks of keeping his pants zipped, his wife wants to go to therapy to “talk through their issues.” What’s there to talk about, he wonders? Isn’t the past the past? Can’t you just get over it? We talked last week, for Pete’s sake!
White people who are tired of talking about race often behave like newly sober alcoholics, eager to “focus on the future” and “forget about the past.” Because they aren’t drinking anymore (or lynching anyone this particular afternoon), they are annoyed when those who have been victimized by their recklessness or their privilege insist on “having a conversation” about what’s happened — and what may still be happening. “But I’m different today”, says the former drunk who’s just taken his 30-day chip at an AA meeting to his wife; “you should trust me now.”
Conversation means more than talking. Conversation, from the Latin conversatio, is closely linked to the idea of conversion and change. Conversation has a purpose: not to pass the time, or to blow off steam, but to inspire and initiate transformation in all of the conversation’s participants. Since deep change rarely happens fast, conversation — especially about serious and painful issues — needs to happen often, it needs to happen honestly, and it needs to happen for years and years.
We joke about race and titter about race and make sweeping pronouncements about race, but that doesn’t mean the conversation is over. For that matter, it doesn’t mean the conversation has really started. Giving Martin Luther King, Jr., a federal holiday doesn’t mean that most Americans have really been “converted by the conversation” about race. Having a black man run for president is not “proof” that racism is no longer an issue, though it may mean — as I think Obama understands — that we have made progress to the point where we are ready to have a “new phase” in the conversation.
As a middle-class white man, my privilege sometimes tells me the same thing it tells Jonah Goldberg: that the conversation has already been had a time or six, and that it’s high time we “move on” to the really important work (like hunting down Al Qaeda or saving the whales or whatever it is we regard as a higher priority than soul-changing conversation.) But just when I get comfortable, I’m reminded – over and over again – that the need for conversation about race is still there.
My wife’s family is, for lack of a better term, multi-racial. Her littlest sister, Dev, is 22, a college senior. My wife’s family has gone through a hard time lately; as regular readers know, my father-in-law died unexpectedly just before the New Year. Dev, his youngest daughter is applying to graduate school and dealing with relationship turmoil; she’s a strong, vivacious, talented, brilliant and beautiful young woman. She’s also black, much darker than my wife.
Two weeks ago, I took Dev out for dinner on a Saturday night. My wife was in Florida for the week, and she had encouraged me to spend some time with our sister to “check in.” I took Dev to the California Pizza Kitchen out in Northridge. And though I did pretty well with a cheeseless eggplant pizza (sure hope the crust was vegan), I was acutely aware of the confused and occasionally hostile stares we got as we sat in our booth in the crowded restaurant. I look like what I am: a married white guy in his early forties. Dev looks like what she is: a black college student in her early twenties. You could read the “what’s up with that?” stares from every corner of CPK. My sister-in-law noticed, of course, but shrugged it off. She’s the only black woman in her academic program; for her, stares and questioning looks are part of her everyday life. It’s my privilege that makes the experience I had that Saturday night feel so unusual. (Lest some reader think that the age disparity, rather than race, was what lay behind the stares, let me also share that not long ago, I took one of my former youth group kids out to coffee. She’s only 17, blonde and fair-skinned. Folks apparently assumed we were Dad and daughter, and no one gave us a second look.)
Is it progress that no one physically assaulted Dev or me as we left CPK? Is it progress that no one said anything to our faces? Maybe. But the looks and the whispers were not my imagination, and they were a powerful reminder that if nothing else, more conversation — and conversion — is still needed.
Mitt Romney’s primary campaign crashed and burned not least because he (with almost touching naivete) underestimated the depth of anti-Mormon bigotry in many parts of America, particularly the South. Barack Obama’s campaign is threatened by the very real and enduring spectre of anti-black sentiment. If the 2008 campaign has shown us nothing else, it has shown us that when it comes to both race and religion, we have come a very long way – and still have one whole hell of a long way to go.
In nations, as in families, dysfunction takes a long time to overcome. Dad’s alcoholism touches everyone in the family, and even after he stops drinking and gets into recovery, the family continues to be deeply and profoundly impacted by what he did and what he continues to do. Stopping the physical consumption of alcohol doesn’t mean you aren’t still an alcoholic, just as ending the worst elements of racism (Jim Crow, lynching, etcetera) doesn’t mean that America doesn’t still have an enormous problem getting honest about race. The conversation must continue until the healing has happened, and we’re a damned long way from that. The wounds are still bloody.
The newly sober, newly faithful husband whines “Why can’t you trust me? Why can’t the past just be the past?’ And the answer is that trust takes time, and it takes accountability, and it takes ten thousand conversations. To converse is to be open to conversion. And though the conversion process has indeed begun, we are all very much works in progress. There is a long way yet to go, and so the conversation about the enduring stain of racism, the ugliest stain on our national fabric, must continue. And for some people, like Jonah Goldberg, it may be necessary to start over at the very beginning.
Hugo,
On first reading your post, I thought you were overreacting, or at least guilty of a deeply uncharitable reading - from the bit you quote, it seems that Goldberg is just upset that Obama is receiving credit not wholly due to him (not a very sophisticated point, but certainly not the privileged patter you charge him with).
I was of course wrong; the piece starts with a reasonable enough point, but by the end he sounds self-parodic. Good work calling him to task here.
Oh, thank goodness Obama fired the starter’s pistol in the race to discuss race. Here I’d been under the impression that every major university (and minor one for that matter) in the country already had boatloads of courses — often entire majors — dedicated to race in America.
Notice the hidden premiss: our national discussions are either conducted or dominated by academics. It seems to be a very common conservative premiss. And also a bizarre one. Is there any class of highly-trained professionals more marginalised from policy decisions than teachers at all levels? Maybe artists. But I’m not even sure about that.
Giving Martin Luther King, Jr., a federal holiday doesn’t mean that most Americans have really been “converted by the conversation” about race.
An anecdote: I’m part of a network of grad students who have a vegan potluck roughly once a month. As you might imagine, we’re a pretty uniformly progressive bunch, with one or two moderates depending on who exactly shows up. We’re also pretty uniformly European American; I think the only regular potlucker who might not consider herself white is from Colombia, with a `mixed’ heritage common in that part of the world.
Two potlucks ago, we got into an extended discussion about the nature of racism. A handful of us just couldn’t get our moderate friends to understand what we meant by structural or institutional racism. It wasn’t a problem of psychological resistance, or political naïveté, or anything like that. The idea of racism that couldn’t be directly attributed to the actions or attitudes of an individual was just completely foreign to their ways of thinking about race.
If utterly typical, highly educated, politically thoughtful, middle-class white folks like my friends have so much trouble with the idea of structural or institutional racism, then it seems clear to me that a national discussion on race, whether we had one in the past or not, is desperately needed today.
I am extremely reluctant to talk about racism, both in person and in the blogsphere. I come from a deeply racist family. Of course, all cultures experience racism; it is not something unique to white America. However, I feel ashamed to talk about the truth of what my family says during family gatherings. They make racist jokes and take pleasure in blaming all of their problems on illegal immigration. As a young white person, I wonder what to do in the sense that I can’t really talk about it at school, because people might assume that I too am racist. I am guilty of being a bit tired from talking about it. I am tired of talking about it not because I deny that it still happens, but because, for the most part, I think my generation has come a long way in combating it. I would marry outside of my race, for example, whereas my parents were not allowed to date anyone other than whites (my mother was strongly encouraged to marry an ITALIAN man. Imagine the horror when she brought home my Polish/Norwegian father!). Anyway, I suspect that my generation does not have the cultural context to truly understand - at least as well as my parents’ generation does - how little time has passed since the Holocaust and the Civil Rights movement. I cried when I heard Obama’s speech, because it reminded me that we still have so much work to do.
Hugo wrote:
“Mitt Romney’s primary campaign crashed and burned not least because he (with almost touching naivete) underestimated the depth of anti-Mormon bigotry in many parts of America, particularly the South.”
I think the scope and effect of anti-Mormon bigotry is greatly overestimated. He did well in Michigan, and was endorsed by Bob Jones Jr. Huckabee’s success was more of a pro-evangelical vote than anti-Mormon.
Regarding Obama, Wright, and Race, I see Hillary took the low road again today, and Obama’s response was once again brilliant. He refused to join her in the gutter.
A significant part of the issue over the Rev. Wright imbroglio, I think, is that whites have felt for a long time that what we’ve been having about race is not a conversation, but rather a lecture, something that goes along the lines of: “Irrespective of your own circumstances of life and birth, you must suffer and be deprived in some measure in order to divert unearned resources and opportunities to others to make up for the sins of persons long dead, most of which were committed before your ancestors came to this country, but who happened to share your skin color. You must likewise accept and bear responsibility for some nebulous and poorly-defined privelege that you have enjoyed at the expense of others. If you complain about these circumstances too loudly, you can and should expect to suffer social and professional censure.” A real conversation would involve discussing how whites feel about these sorts of things, rather than the tired routine of lecture on one side and hand-washing and ignoring on the other.
What stung Obama on this score, as far as I can see, is that he initially seemed to be offering some sort of out of this pattern, in some way or another. Getting associated recently with the lecturing side pulled him back down to earth among exasperated and resentful whites.
I should have said in the eyes of exasperated and resentful whites.
We may still have a ways to go, but the issue that I have with the progressive types is a failure to acknowledge that any progress has been made. I am 40 and personally do not know anyone my age or younger whom I would consider racist. I realize that this is anecdotal, but every year it seems that racism recedes a little more or, possibly due to the wave of political correctness, simply hides itself–a condition which can never be rectified, I believe, and is probably exarbated by the programs which seek to redress the problems in the first place.
Despite improvements year over year, it seems that the issue of racism becomes more and more prevalent to those who benefit by perpetuating the perspective that it is getting worse. The goal of completely eradicating racism is Utopian and can never be achieved completely, but because we have not achieved perfection and many continue to gain from race baiting, the problem seems to be increasingly worse in terms of the rhetoric used by those who decry it.
It is a shame that you and your sister-in-law were the victims of brazen mumbling and staring, but presumably this is a significant improvement from being kicked out of the establishment and worrying about being beaten upon your departure forty years ago or even arrested or lynched 80 years ago. In another 20 years, and already in many parts of the country, you would not have received a second look.
We are very close to electing a black president, who won caususes and primaries in Iowa and the like, for God’s sake. This was inconceivable in the 1970s or even the 1980s.
We may have been raging, lunatic alcoholics in 1850s and mean drunks through 1960, but we did as a nation try to get on the wagon then and have done so. The recovery period has been bumpy and imperfect and there is still some risk of a relapse, but the situation now is vastly improved.
Nobody likes to be continually hammered on something that has been improving for their entire lifetime (as is the case for those of us born in the mid 1960s or later), as if no effort has been made. Particularly when it appears to us that most people are at the point where they are not really interested in taking a drink anymore.
Jonah’s point is that we have been following the 12 step program for years, so at least some acknowledgement of the progress would be appreciated. The notion that this conversation just began now with Obama is ludicrous. It may have entered a new phase with him, but some credit for the last four decades should be given.
Married Tom -
the issue that I have with the progressive types is a failure to acknowledge that any progress has been made
Who’s doing this? Where the progressives who act as though there was no Civil Rights Act of 1964 or that an African-American man isn’t quite likely to be President a year from now? Maybe you have some friends or acquaintances who are like this, but I don’t know of any in my circle of friends, and I don’t see it on the blogs I read. (Hugo certainly doesn’t have this attitude — search in-page for “Martin Luther King, Jr.”.) That makes me suspect you’re falling for a conservative red herring. Arguing over whether or not progressives are so willfully ignorant that they think race relations haven’t improved over the last four decades is, after all, much easier and more comfortable than trying to understand, say, how one might benefit from racism in subtle ways and without having racist attitudes.
I don’t believe my point was that progressives are “willfully ignorant”. More like “deliberately exploitative” despite, or perhaps due to, progress.
Once you are a professor of an African Studies department in a university or an “activist”, is it really in your interest to say “hey, things are a lot better now. I am pleased that there has been such improvement over the last 30 - 40 years. Good job everyone.” When your livelihood is tied up in perpetuating the controversy of race, you will personally tend to see more of it and when your career is tied up in it the more strident the language used to describe it–”ala God Damn America”–the better.
Again, I am not denying that racism is out there and that there is not room for improvement. But it seems like the more victories that are won or concessions made, the worse the problem gets.
No, the more victories are won, the more freedom the victims of racism have to point out that its happening. If people are lynched or beaten up for calling out racist behavior, then you will naturally be exposed to less calling out of racist behavior. When things have improved such that dissidents do not FEAR FOR THEIR LIVES if they speak, you can expect more vocal criticism. It doesn’t reflect their perception that things are worse, it reflects their increased freedom to do something about that which still occurs.
Married Tom, you’re making the wild leap from Obama’s speech (in which he called for a conversation) to one excerpt from Jeremiah Wright’s prophetic sermon — which Obama explicitly repudiated. Next thing you know, you’ll start using the coded language (dog whistles) of authentic bigots, talking about “race hucksters”.
You and I are the same age, Tom; racism is alive and well in my generation and yours. We have come a long way, true. But it’s rather like taking a flight from New York to Los Angeles and having the plane stop in Kansas City. The pilot says “Hey, we’ve come so far, and we’re tired of all this flying. You pushy passengers are so demanding. You should be grateful we’re here and not back in New York; look at how far we’ve come!” But if you know that you want to go to Los Angeles, the fact that you’ve come some of the way doesn’t mean that you’re going to be pleased at any hesitation on the journey.
We’ve got promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep.
Once you are a professor of an African Studies department in a university or an “activist”, is it really in your interest to say ….
Well, is it? Success as a professor of African Studies doesn’t depend on denouncing as much racism as possible. And, even if it did, this doesn’t mean that there are any actual professors of African Studies who refuse to admit that things have gotten better over the last 40 years. People do things that aren’t in their interest all the time.
Which brings me right back to the request I made in my last comment: show me someone who actually thinks that no progress as been made towards dismantling racism over the last 40 years.
So when, exactly, do we stick a fork in it and call it done?
Having a conversation is fine, but at what point exactly do we wrap this up? When DO we say it’s time to move on? In concrete, specific terms please…no airy pieties about “when all people are accepted equally” or “when we are all judged on the content of our character,” etc, etc. What specifically is going to make race activists happy? X amount of reparations paid out to Y group of people in Z manner? X percentage of black people in Y class of employment, regardless of whether there are enough black people qualified for and interested in the job? A law saying that you can’t stare at a white guy dining with a black woman almost half his age for more than two seconds? Until race activists make clear what they want (instead of just milking it all and making an industry out of it), I’m not sure how productive this “conversation” would be.
But hey, go ahead and start the conversation. Start talking. I’ll just sit here quietly at the back of the auditorium and not say a word, which is pretty much all the Professionally Indignant On Race really want from a white, non-liberal guy. Honest, I’m listening, talk away.
(Creates a crude mannequin out of a broomstick, a balloon, his hat and his coat, sets it in the auditorium seat and then slips out the back door).
A law saying that you can’t stare at a white guy dining with a black woman almost half his age for more than two seconds?
Um, how about when it doesn’t even occur to anyone to stare?
Um, how about when it doesn’t even occur to anyone to stare?
The assumption that the staring was because of race is in and of itself presumptuous.
Granted, someone might mistake white forty something Hugo out with white twentyish woman as father and daughter because of their race. White Hugo and twentyish black girl obviously aren’t - so what’s the old guy doing out with the young hottie? He’s white too - is he a perv looking for some exotic strange?
The assumption that the disapproval of it being mixed race is one among many.
People of color get the short end of the stick in the following areas:
healthcare - 1)exposure to racism worsens health 2) patients are treated less aggressively than whites
education - 1) children of color are routinely punished more often and more harshly than white children even though all children misbehave at the same rate 2) children of color are also routinely academically tracked beneath what their standardized test scores suggest
employment - 1) people of color are still passed over for hiring and promotions in favor of whites who are either less qualified or less experienced 2) a white man with a criminal record has an easier time getting a job than a black man without one 3) white women are the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action programs
I could go on, but I’m tired. There’s more to racism than lynching and verbal assaults. You don’t have to lynch me or call me the n-word to be racist or to negatively impact my life. All you need to do is secretly think that even though I performed very well on a standardized test, I don’t deserve to be placed in a more rigorous course. And to that extent, not much as changed since the Civil Rights Acts were passed.
Before you complain about being lectured to, notice how little you really know about how horrible the situation is.
And lastly, Rev. Wright’s comments were accurate. Even if you don’t think the US govt created AIDS, an idea I’ve heard for years, after the Tuskegee Experiment and the govt’s response to the current AIDS epidemic in THIS country - the idea is hardly unbelievable.
To expand on no1kstate’s point: Chief, we don’t yet know when the conversation on race will be `done’, because we don’t yet fully understand the nature and extent of racism. That’s a big part of the reason for having the conversation, after all.
Chief, why don’t we turn that around? What, specifically, is going to make “exasperated whites” happy? When black people STFU about racism for all eternity? When the NAACP issues a big “Thank You White People!” card because lynching almost never happens anymore?
This actually fits very neatly into Hugo’s analogies. Because the “god, why are they lecturing us?!” thing sounds very much like the serial philanderer getting mad because hey, I only flirted with five guys at that party last night, I didn’t actually have sex with any of them like I would have ten years ago, so why can’t you ever say anything nice about me and tell me how much better I’m doing?
What’s that Chris Rock line: “What do you want? A cookie?”
At the same time, mythago, if you never tell the former-serial-philanderer “hey, I’m glad you’ve made so much progress” she quickly gets demoralized. She’s been trying and working and achieving and really feels like things have improved hugely… and all she hears is more of the same.
However much we need to keep improving, and we do need to keep improving, the fact remains that when people keep saying the same things they start to lose their impact. And especially when you’ve been hearing all your life about how awful race relations are, but you personally have friends of many races, think mixed-race kids are cute, have dated out of your race, and have never heard a racist comment that wasn’t immediately villified… no wonder people, especially in more cosmopolitan parts of the country, think the rhetoric is getting old.
It takes new information to make the conversation interesting again. “Some old Southerner white guys are still racist” isn’t news, whereas “well-to-do urban professionals like resumes with white names on them better than the same resumes with black names” may well be.
The conversation needs to happen, but the same two sides (”it’s awful!” “shut up, it’s fine!”) have been yelling back and forth for so long that it’s hard to hear anything interesting over the din.
Well put, Lisa. I believe this captures the state of things.
I have strived to never treat anyone differently, good or bad, due to their skin color, ethnicity, etc. I am teaching my four children to so the same, and would punish them and seek to teach them differently if I became aware of any instance in which I thought they exhibited any form or racist behavior. Although it is impossible not to be aware of race, it is highly possible to not let it impact either your actions or your decisions.
What is exasperating to me is, what else do I need to do? Should I feel guilty for a the results of a culture that, to me, is ancient history? Should I feel guilty that I do not feel guilty enough and linger on past malfeasances? I don’t.
The flip side of effort to “do more” is that most actions now taken to try to make things better seem to actually make things worst, or at a minimum have a negative unintended consequence which perpetuates the problem.
In No1KState’s example above, I think that if the criteria for something is a standardized test, then this should be the criteria, period. Were there no such thing as affirmative action, there would be absolutely no doubt of one’s academic credentials in the interviewer’s mind. Similarly, if I could fire someone without worrying about a discrimination lawsuit, as is only the case nowadays with white men under 50, then I would hire them with less trepidation knowing that if things do not work out for whatever reason my severance costs are more predictable. This is how a rational marketplace adapts to these programs. This is not acting differently due to racism, this is acting differently to the predictable impact of these programs and seeking to compensate for the situations that they cause.
With respect to other examples from No1KState, some of them seem wildly implausible (such as the implication of a massive health care treatment disparity based on race, or the Tuskegee happened–which I don’t deny–thus the government may have created or impacted the AIDS epidemic to attack the black community). But even if every example of these were true, the question is still to me, what do you want me, personally, to do about it?
My answer now is what it always has been–nothing. I will not judge, like, dislike, speak differently to, or act differently to anyone based on their race or other factors. Neither will my wife or children, and I will not befriend people or spend any time with anyone else who does. Is this enough?
See, when I hear a line like that, I immediately know that the speaker isn’t actually listening to what’s being said; they’re using Hey, I Have Black Friends as sound-deadeners so they can immediately dismiss any uncomfortable discussion about race as “rhetoric”.
Because the discussion has changed over the years. It’s no longer a question of whether we should allow schools to be integrated, or whether states should have the right to ban “mixed” marriages. It’s questions about how drug laws lead to the mass incarceration of black men by making certain drugs more illegal than others, for example, or how the primary beneficiaries of efforts to help struggling boys in school are white boys (when the real gap in achievement is among minorities). To simply say gee, everybody knows racism is wrong so stop TALKING about it is a white-guilt overlay for telling minorities to STFU.
Lisa, I’m talking about a philanderer who continues to misbehave but less badly, and expects to be praised because things aren’t as bad as they used to be. Sorry, I don’t much understand the idea that one deserves a cookie for simply behaving the way one always should have behaved in the first place.
Married Tom, the overblown fear of lawsuits ought to be tempered in your mind by the knowledge that plenty of overprivileged white people will play the reverse-race card.
> See, when I hear a line like that, I immediately know that the speaker isn’t actually listening to what’s being said;
I agree, Mythago. But also, when I hear implicit accusations that the “other side” is *whining*, e.g.
> “What do you want? A cookie?”
… I immediately know the speaker isn’t actually listening to what’s being said.
I’ve seen The Chief and Married Tom say what they want, in this case. They want to know the scope of the discussion. “Is this enough?” “Where does this end?” etc.
Hugo mentions “ten thousand conversations” and “start(ing) over at the very beginning”. He talks about change, and by analogy, conversation, “happen(ing) for years and years.” This makes sense to me. But, Hugo, your analogy with a philandering husband is an unfortunate choice. Doesn’t this suggest a situation where fault has already been assigned, and where a victimized party does all of the talking, and the guilty party does all of the listening? (Couldn’t you have made a “Hatfields and McCoys” analogy? IRA vs. Provos?)
The Chief makes an analogy about sneaking out of a lecture, and the lecturer(s) not even realizing he is gone. Jonah Goldberg mentions in his book “the permanence of white sin, and therefore the eternal justification of white guilt.”
I see a big disconnect. I see two sides disagreeing on so many levels, there may not even be common ground for them to stand on. I imagine the therapist telling this hypothetical couple, “You two are not yet ready to have this conversation, but your homework assignment is to come up with one thing you respect about the other person.”
“the conversation has already been had a time or six, and that it’s high time we “move on”
…
And though the conversion process has indeed begun, we are all very much works in progress.”
So, you end up pretty much restating Goldberg’s actual point- the conversation on race was started long ago, not by Obama’s speech. And where do you base your claims that Goldberg feels that the conversation “has continued for far too long, and probably ought to be dropped” or that we should “move on”? I saw nothing in his piece to substantiate that assumption. That seems to be a rather unfair characterization of his argument.
Despite your attempt to put a much finer point on the definition of “conversation” as requiring a conversion of beliefs, I think it’s pretty safe to say that most do not share such a requirement. In common parlance a conversation is simply seen as a discussion of views.
White people talk among themselves about certain things relating to race which are not part of the national (as in publicly discussed) discussion.
It might not be all that wonderful to hear some of this stuff discussed in areas where the progressives are not in a position to shush the speakers.
Oops.
However, it seems reasonable that progressives would want a part in such conversations. Currently, they are, inadvertently, restricting it to venues where they have no input.
All the “examples” I used are factually based.
My point about AIDS isn’t that the govt is spreading it, but that for good reason the idea that the govt would do such isn’t “ridiculous” to everyone.
I mean, really. The Bush administration has not looked into one complaint of racial employment discrimination but has prosecuted a number of reverse-discrimination complaints even people of color are discriminated against at a much, much higher rate than white reverse-discrimination. Some govt action.
Here’s the problem as I see. The conversation goes beyond how you treat people or even whether or not you hate them. The issue has to do with the constant disadvantages people of color face from just about every sphere of life in the US. We say to white Americans that there’s a problem. Not a few of you deny there’s a problem. We give you a truncated list of some of the barriers people of color face. You say, “Well, IF it’s true . . .” There’re no “ifs.” It’s just true! What you personally can do, unless you’re a teacher or police officer or bank manager or a DA or school board member or doctor, ect, and so on, is not deny what’s obvious to us. At least own up to the truth that people of color face grave disadvantages.
And as for acknowledging improvements. Seriously, what do you want? A cookie? “Yay! You don’t lynch me any more when I vote! Yippie!” Meanwhile, in Texas, you’re prosecuting elderly people of color because they forgot to sign their names to the back of the mail-in ballot envelope. They now have criminal records, 6 months probation, and $2000 fine, but at least they’re not hanging from a tree! This, while conservatives in Texas stuff the ballot box and face not even a raised eyebrow. - What’s more is that the income gap has been increasing since 2001. The gap in accumulated wealth is at its widest in decades. Even though blacks make up on 13% of drug abusers, we make up well over 50% of nonviolent, drug offense prisoners. People are disturbed by the rate of high school drop among black boys, and rightfully so, but few bother to mention that these schools count on students dropping out because otherwise, they’d be even more overcrowded.
And I suppose it would be natural enough that whites discuss race in your homes. I assume you teach your children to treat everyone the same no matter what. Besides that, I only wonder what your conversation is based on. Much of what is “known” about black people is myth. We save money at the same rate. We use illegal drugs at a slightly lower rate. Once you hold for socioeconomic status/income, crime rates are the same. Education is equally important in the black community - black students spend as much if not slightly more time studying as white students. “Gangsta rap” is what’s choking the market because that’s what the market buys, and 80% of gangsta rap listeners are young, white males.
A big part of the disconnect here comes, I think, from a fork in understandings about white sentiments with regards to race issues. We’re all familiar with the image, perhaps the caricature, of the defensive and self-justifying white, the “but some of my best friends are black!”, “let’s move on” type that Hugo compares to the newly sober alky or philandering husband. That’s the type that, to extend the marriage metaphor, seeks premature reconciliation and closure.
There’s another type, I think, that may be even more prevalent among many whites. That is the disconnected, wash-our-hands of this, got-enough-to-worry-about, I’ve-already-moved-on type, the type that is more dismissive rather than defensive or angry regarding whatever dialog or lecture or whatever we’ve been having for decades or centuries. Extending the marriage metaphor yet again, this is the mindset preceding divorce or parallel marriage. That’s more the type that I think Jonah Goldberg speaks to.
We hear about one problem after another, about the criminal justice system or the education system or a hundred other things. That stuff is all a mile above our heads too. We’ve got our own bills to pay and jobs we hate and kids to put through school, none of which are any easier given the current implosion in the economy, so the easiest response to the perennial racial ills of America, apologies to Jerry Seinfeld, is “Well, good luck with all that.”
We’ve had these issues with us for decades now. Many of them don’t seem to be improving past a certain point. Much of what we might try to do only seems to make the problem worse. The issue with crack cocaine, to cite one example, is a case in point. It was only 20 years ago that crack was hollowing out American cities and turning them into war-zones. For that matter, the crack boom coincided with, and was likely a major contributing factor, to the end of the steady progress of black Americans on most socioeconomic indicators since the 1960s (income, education, child mortality, homicide rates, incarceration rates, etc.) Crack was a by-product of a lot of trends from the 70s: economic and political unrest in Latin America caused most directly by the oil crunch and debt crisis, the federalization of the wars on drugs and organized crime unleashed against the last crime problem of the late 60s and early 70s, urban deindustrialization, and at the very least, the nonchalance of the CIA as to many of its Latin American assets’ side businesses. Big, complex tangle of root causes that. But we couldn’t wait 20 years for another big change in the winds. So the criminal justice system stepped in. And now we have had two generations of black men who were pulled away from their communities and families for stupid things they did in their teens and 20s, and who come back in their 30s and 40s without much to show for their lives except for major-league felony raps. Mistakes were made. What exactly ought we have done? If nothing else, at least our cities stopped looking like Beirut.
Precious little any of us can do about any of this, whatever magical powers are ascribed to us whiteys. I don’t have any Congressmen or Senators or CEOs on my speed dial. I don’t know any secret handshakes, or have a preppy secret-society nickname, or any of that. None of the other white people I know do either. If we did, things might be different. As such…
I will say this, with regards to comments of the sort that Reverend Wright made. None of us particularly care to be put on the spot over half the world’s ills that we can’t do much about ourselves. A lot of us tend to keep a little mental box, I’ll call it the “Farrakhan box”, for loud and angry people blaming us for things. Once someone is in the Farrakhan box, it becomes very easy for us to just say back at them, with no small degree of amusement: “Right. Thank you for calling. Appreciate your input. Take a number. Get in line,” and go on about our day with a very light conscience indeed. That, ultimately, is the danger that I think that the Rev posed to Obama, and what I think Obama has been working to keep himself out of. It’s not that Obama is in danger from starting a dialog that whites don’t want to have, but that he could get pigeonholed in the minds of many whites into a monologue that we figure that we’ve heard, and comfortably ignored, many, many times before.
Interesting that you see this in terms of two, binary, opposed “sides”, which you seem to imply break down on race. That’s unfortunate.
Complaining that minorities are being unfair because a) I’m not a racist! and b) geeziz haven’t we beaten this subject to death already? is, yes, whining. Worse, probably, than whining is your repeated attempt to obscure the problem (racial injustice and pervasive racism) by putting yourself as the Arbiter of the Golden Mean and telling everyone they’re equally at fault.
Using your marriage-counselor analogy, if the wife is physically violent and abusing the husband, we wouldn’t nod sympathetically if she said “But he complains when I spend too much money and, you know what, he makes a big deal out of it when I hang the toilet paper the wrong way!” We wouldn’t, I hope, lecture the abused husband on how he needs to think of all the nice things his wife has done for him and how he really needs to pay more attention to the times she *doesn’t* hit him, and by the way, they should go home and do their homework and find nice things to say about one another.
(I didn’t see The Chief’s comment as any kind of analogy, by the way, more as a “fuck all y’alls, I’ve said my piece, now I’m outta here.”)
Tom, while I agree with much of what you say, “mistakes were made” is a deliberate use of language to obscure and erase blame. Nobody MADE mistakes, certainly not us; the mistakes just made themselves! Those darn mistakes, whatchagonnado? As for what *we* can do, really the first step in doing anything is not saying that we simply can’t do anything and it’s nobody’s fault really.
Mythago, excuse me if I didn’t make it clear. I was being somewhat ironic with that comment. I was under the impression that the expression “Mistakes were made” had already become hackneyed as an obscurantist and evasive device. Perhaps not the best use of irony in context on my part.
Still, the point that I was trying to make regarding the crack epidemic was that we were in a dilemma, a Catch-22. In 1985-1991, we could have sat back and done nothing. If you believe Steven Leavitt, we had been aborting our way out of the problem since 1973, which may have been a pretty effective though rather unpalatable solution. Even if you do believe that, there’s no way we could know it then. So we went with what we believed would work, getting tough. And it was a consensus solution, it became a consensus solution when Bill Clinton turned “tough on crime” during the 1992 election (going back to Arkansas to put down Ricky Ray Rector, for one example). If I were going to put an actual name to the negative results, I’d call them “unintended consequences”, rather than mistakes.
I’d say that “haven’t we beaten this subject to death already?” is quite different from “minorities are being unfair”. It’s a procedural question. Let me quote from Robert’s Rules of Order and hopefully not bore people to death:
What Precedes Debate.
Before any subject is open to debate it is necessary, first, that a motion be made by a member who has obtained the floor; second, that it be seconded (with certain exceptions); and third, that it be stated by the chair, that is, by the presiding officer. The fact that a motion has been made and seconded does not put it before the assembly, as the chair alone can do that. He must either rule it out of order, or state the question on it so that the assembly may know what is before it for consideration and action, that is, what is the immediately pending question.
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So, is this discussion “out of order”? What *exactly* is the immediately pending question?