The theme of race has received heightened attention recently as a result of the premature firing of an Obama Administration official who was believed to have made racist remarks against white people. In addition, allegations have been made for awhile now regarding undertones (and overtones) of racism present in the "Tea Party" movement. Furthermore, data has shown that African Americans have been hit harder by the recession than any other group (unemployment is substantially higher among blacks than other racially identified groups), implying for many that this is more evidence of continued race-driven inequality in the United States. The four articles below offer widely divergent perspectives within the contemporary debate on race in America (although the fourth deserves the closest reading). I think that there are few debates in America today which comprise more confusion and dishonesty than this one. -NB
The New York Times “You’ll Never Believe What This White House Is Missing” (July 24, 2010)
By Maureen Dowd
The Obama White House is too white.
It has Barack Obama, raised in the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia, and Valerie Jarrett, who spent her early years in Iran.
But unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.
The first black president should expand beyond his campaign security blanket, the smug cordon of overprotective white guys surrounding him — a long political tradition underscored by Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 when she complained about the “smart-ass white boys” from Walter Mondale’s campaign who tried to boss her around.
Otherwise, this administration will keep tripping over race rather than inspiring on race.
The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong.
Charles Sherrod, Shirley’s husband, was a Freedom Rider who, along with the civil rights hero John Lewis, was a key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the ‘60s.
As Lewis, the longtime Georgia congressman, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, he knew immediately that something was amiss with the distorted video clip of Sherrod talking to the N.A.A.C.P.
“I’ve known these two individuals — the husband for more than 50 years and the wife for at least 35, 40 — and there’s not a racist hair on their heads or anyplace else on their bodies,” Lewis said.
We may not have a “nation of cowards” on race, as Attorney General Eric Holder contended, but we may have a West Wing of cowards on race.
The president appears completely comfortable in his own skin, but it seems he feels that he and Michelle are such a huge change for the nation to absorb that he can be overly cautious about pushing for other societal changes for blacks and gays. At some level, he acts like the election was enough; he shouldn’t have to deal with race further. But he does.
His closest advisers — some of the same ones who urged him not to make the race speech after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue exploded — are so terrified that Fox and the Tea Party will paint Obama as doing more for blacks that they tiptoe around and do less. “Who knew that the first black president would make it even harder on black people?” asked a top black Democratic official.
It’s the same impulse that caused Obama campaign workers to refuse to let Muslim women with head scarves sit in camera range during a rally. It’s the same impulse that has left the president light-years behind W. on development help for Africa. In their rush to counteract attempts to paint Obama as a radical/Muslim/socialist, Obama staffers can behave in insensitive ways themselves.
“I don’t think a single black person was consulted before Shirley Sherrod was fired — I mean c’mon, “ said Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina, a black lawmaker so temperate that he agreed with an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal on Friday by Senator James Webb of Virginia, which urged that “government-directed diversity programs should end.”
“The president’s getting hurt real bad,” Clyburn told me. “He needs some black people around him.” He said Obama’s inner circle keeps “screwing up” on race: “Some people over there are not sensitive at all about race. They really feel that the extent to which he allows himself to talk about race would tend to pigeonhole him or cost him support, when a lot of people saw his election as a way to get the issue behind us. I don’t think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite.”
Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s House delegate, agreed: “The president needs some advisers or friends who have a greater sense of the pulse of the African-American community, or who at least have been around the mulberry bush.”
And why does the N.A.A.C.P. exist if not to help clear a smeared champion of civil rights who gave a stirring speech about racial reconciliation at an N.A.A.C.P. banquet? Its president, Ben Jealous, shamefully following the administration’s rush to judgment, tweeted Monday night that Shirley Sherrod was a racist without even calling his Georgia chapter president or reviewing the N.A.A.C.P.’s own video of the speech.
It was Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist, who, after hearing the entire speech, pushed to get it out and helped clear Sherrod’s reputation on CNN.
The president shouldn’t give Sherrod her old job back. He should give her a new job: Director of Black Outreach. This White House needs one.
The New York Times “Obama’s ‘Race’ War” (July 30, 2010)
By Charles M. Blow
Americans are engaged in a war over a word: racism.
Mature commentary on the subject has descended into tribal tirades, hypersensitive defenses and rapid-fire finger-pointing. The very definition of the word seems under assault, being bent and twisted back on itself and stretched and pulled beyond recognition.
Many on the left have taken an absolutist stance, that the anti-Obama sentiment reeks of racism and denial only served to confirm guilt. Many on the right feel as though they have been convicted without proof — that tossing “racism” their way is itself racist.
The “racists crying racism” meme is being pushed hard, on multiple fronts, all centered around the president.
After the N.A.A.C.P. asked the Tea Party “to condemn extremist elements” within its ranks, the right went on a witch hunt for black racists in the N.A.A.C.P. Not finding any, it created one. Andrew Breitbart presents: “The Sherrod Charade.”
Journalism is being tarred with the sins of some on JournoList, a now defunct listserv through which a handful of people wrote heretical things like the possibility of calling conservatives racist to divert attention from Obama’s connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr.
This was hardly a vast left-wing conspiracy, but it fed the right’s defensive narrative that the word “racism” has become a weapon — not the shot of a rifle carefully aimed at a clear target, but a shotgun blast sprayed wide and loose at all things anti-Obama.
There’s also the charge that the president is protecting the New Black Panthers from voter intimidation charges. This nonstory has been knocked down more times than a blind boxer, but the right keeps pushing it.
And then there’s Glenn Beck. He’s on a crusade to convince the lemmings of Foxland that President Obama is governing under the principles of Black Liberation Theology, a “grave perversion” of Christianity in which “minorities are saved in the sense that white people constantly confess and repent of being racist and meet the economic demands of minorities via the redistribution of wealth as a consequence of, in some form or another, reparations.” What? Oh, Glenn.
I have to say, I don’t know how these Fox viewers do it. Listening to a Beck argument is like living in an M.C. Escher drawing — fantastical illusions that defy logic and strain the brain.
Blacks, stunned by this new topsy-turvy world of racial politics, continue to rally around Obama. In opinion polls, they consistently rate Obama’s performance and policies highly, I suspect as much out of solidarity as conviction.
Whether the president likes it or not, he’s the nexus of this debate. I, for one, think that he should stand up and redirect it from the negative to the noble. There will be some grumbling to be sure, but there already is.
It’s your choice, Mr. President. I say stand up — for America, for common humanity, for civil discourse. To paraphrase the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they can’t ride your back unless it’s bent.
The Washington Examiner “Pick Pookie from Baltimore's Park Heights” (August 2, 2010)
By: Gregory Kane
In what may go down as the anti-white-bashing piece of the year, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd opened her July 24 op-ed column with this sentence: "The Obama White House is too white."
Dowd is a talented writer, but who knew she was an absolute hoot as well?
It's one thing to take a president to task because he or she may not have enough black advisers, but can you believe a white woman chiding President Obama for not having black advisers "who are descended from the central African-American experience"?
And exactly what, Ms. Dowd, is the "central African-American experience"? Ask 20 different black Americans and you might get 20 different answers.
But Dowd didn't write her column without consulting with black elected officials first. She's too good a columnist for that. She quoted someone she described as a "top black Democrat" who knew exactly what the "central African-American experience" is. Obama, according to Top Black Democrat, needs black advisers who "understand the slave thing."
Let me dispose of this nonsense here and now: Top Black Democrat has no better understanding of "the slave thing" than you or I do because he -- or she -- has never been a slave. TBD and I do know that our ancestors were slaves, and that the experience was brutally dehumanizing. We know the history after slavery supposedly ended in 1865 was pretty gruesome as well. Other than that, we have no understanding of "the slave thing."
In fact, I may have one up on TBD in understanding the slave thing. I have black ancestors who were slaves, and at least one white one. She was my great-great-grandmother, who, in 1852, married what was called a "free man of color" in Southern Maryland. She was an indentured servant from France, one of many European female immigrants of that era who were indentured servants as well. I suspect TBD would dismiss their experience with a snort and a sneer.
But back to Dowd: She quoted South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn and District of Columbia House of Representatives Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton to bolster her case. Obama, Clyburn and Norton contended, needed to consult at least one black adviser to avoid the embarrassing fallout from the Shirley Sherrod affair. Dowd ended her column by suggesting that the Obama administration not give Sherrod that "unique position" in the Department of Agriculture, but a job as "Director of Black Outreach" instead.
I give Sherrod a thumbs down when it comes to that position. Her statement about conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, black Americans and slavery clearly shows she needs to spend more time with her brain in drive and her mouth in park. But I have a perfect candidate for a proposed "Director of Black Outreach" in the Obama administration.
That would be Pookie from lower Park Heights in Baltimore. Or it could be Bey Bey from Southeast Washington, D.C. What are the advantages of having a Pookie or a Bey Bey as a director of black outreach? Oh, several.
1. Pookie or Bey Bey might -- or might not -- have an understanding of "the slave thing," but they probably wouldn't give a tinker's dam about it either.
2. Pookie and Bey Bey would be more concerned about adequate schools in their communities.
3. They'd be more concerned about the drug dealers and criminals ravaging their communities.
4. And they might understand that poor black folks need firearms for their protection.
Sherrod as Obama's "Director of Black Outreach"? Better go with Pookie from lower Park Heights.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
First Things “Why We Didn’t Overcome” (Aug/Sept 2010)
By Glenn C. Loury
By James T. Patterson
Basic Books, 228 pages, $26.95
The memo declares, “The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations.” “A national effort is required,” it explains, “directed to a new kind of national goal: the establishment of a stable Negro family structure.” One sees the problem immediately: A government official in 1965 baldly states that expectations for equality are bound to be disappointed, not merely because of racism but also because the fabric of social life in the black ghettos is in tatters.
For many at the time, this kind of talk was simply unacceptable. How dare a white man say these things? What will happen to reform if studies like this are allowed to issue from the government? The author—an assistant secretary at the Labor Department named Daniel Patrick Moynihan—had to be made an example of.
And so he was. A firestorm of protest from journalists and civil-rights activists greeted the public release of his policy document. By calling attention to the instability of family life in poor black communities, Moynihan was said to downplay the importance of racial discrimination. By ascribing this trend in part to cultural factors, he was said to “blame the victim.” (Indeed, that now familiar phrase was coined in response to the Moynihan Report by the sociologist William Ryan.) By rehearsing the arguments of such distinguished black sociologists as W.E.B. Du Bois and E. Franklin Frazier—arguments that chattel slavery had ruined gender relations among the slaves, with profound consequences that reach into the twentieth century—Moynihan was said to be a flat-out racist.
In what might be understood today as political correctness run amok, productive discussion of “the Negro family” became impossible to sustain. This was the 1960s, after all. Civil-rights victories over implacable Southern opposition were fresh in everyone’s mind. Cities were burning during a series of long, hot summers. And, in tonier precincts, radical chic had become the fashion of the day, with the moral authority of racism’s victims unquestioned.
Nothing, it was said, is inherently good about two-parent families and nothing inherently bad about single motherhood. The weakness of black family life, it was alleged, is a distraction that shifts focus from what’s wrong with America to what’s wrong with black people. Moynihan—a dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrat whose principal policy recommendation in his report was to expand public employment for black men—became for many the personification of anti-black sentiments dressed up with a Harvard pedigree.
Those willing to defend him, even while disagreeing with his analysis, were hard to find in the media, the civil-rights establishment, or the Democratic party. So intense was the negative reaction that the White House quickly scuttled a conference on the topic.
There was only one problem with all this. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was mostly right in 1965: right about the Negro family, both in his diagnosis of its condition and in his forecast of the likely implications. Looking across the social landscape today, nearly a half-century after his dire warning, we can see the plain fact that conventional family relationships in the black ghettos have collapsed. What is more, nothing approaching equality of results for the bulk of the black American population has been, or soon will be, achieved. More speculative, but still entirely plausible, is the conclusion that these two undeniable facts are closely connected, with the former a primary reason for the later.
But in 1965, critics were much more interested in what they supposed to be Pat Moynihan’s motives than in the acuity of his analysis. Fast and furiously came the accusations of ill will. A period ensued, lasting nearly two decades, during which little critical assessment of black family life was undertaken, and no policy response was fashioned. The story is by now a familiar one, even to the casual student of American social policy: Discussion of the internal cultural dynamics that might underlie black poverty in America must be left to those with racial standing to talk about such matters. Failing that, such discussion must be avoided altogether.
James T. Patterson tells this story masterfully in Freedom Is Not Enough. Ford Foundation Professor of History emeritus at (my own) Brown University, he has written numerous distinguished works on American social and political history and has won nearly all the prizes the field of history has to offer. I can still recall how much I learned as a young scholar in the early 1980s from my encounter with his wide-ranging America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century.
Now, in Freedom Is Not Enough, Patterson returns to this terrain of American social policy to study the legacy of Moynihan’s controversial 1965 policy memorandum. Along the way he also provides an engaging if cursory political and intellectual biography of that memorandum’s ambitious and resourceful author—for Moynihan, of course, did not disappear after the firestorm of his memo. He went on to be a Harvard University professor, United Nations ambassador, and four-term United States senator.
After a brief recounting of Moynihan’s early life and professional ascendancy, Freedom Is Not Enough provides a useful account of the genesis of the Moynihan Report, its unhappy reception, and the ensuing political fallout. Along the way Patterson pays close attention to the scholarly and the popular literatures on the subject, and he repeatedly emphasizes Moynihan’s prescience by documenting the ever rising rates of unwed childbearing and single parenthood among black Americans—and in the broader national population as well.
Although Patterson avoids saying so directly, the fiercely negative reactions to Moynihan’s report were a brand of intellectual thuggery that became all too familiar afterward. Smug in their certitude, the thought police in the universities, the government, the editorial pages, and the foundation boardrooms managed, in effect, to censor public discourse on crime, affirmative action, school desegregation, voting rights, antidiscrimination enforcement, urban renewal, welfare policy, and much more.
It even became dangerous to celebrate the success of the civil-rights revolution by noticing the emergence of a new black middle class. The signature tactic was to accuse the politically incorrect of being racists. A willingness to entertain certain hypotheses—that forced busing could cause white flight, that proliferating criminal violence among blacks might retard urban development, that affirmative-action programs could stigmatize their beneficiaries—came to be seen as evidence of a lack of fidelity to progressive values.
Reliance on ad hominem argument grew more commonplace: What kind of person would say such a thing? And the list of unsavory characters lengthened. To Moynihan’s name were added those of Edward Banfield (for his reflections on urban decline), James Q. Wilson (for worrying about rising crime rates), Nathan Glazer (for noticing affirmative action’s racial discrimination), James Coleman (for exposing the limits of school desegregation), Abigail Thernstrom (for questioning racial gerrymandering), and Charles Murray (for suggesting that welfare payments could create dependency among long-term recipients).
I am not saying that these writers were correct in every detail, or that the policies they championed are ones I endorse. Indeed, I have publicly disagreed with many of them over the years. What I am saying is that, like Moynihan, all these social critics made cogent and important arguments that were rooted in often quite astute social observations, and they deserved to be taken seriously. What is more, all these critics have, in one way or another and to varying degrees, been vindicated by the subsequent evolution of events.
The furiously negative reaction to Moynihan’s report—and the subsequent suppression of the issue of family structure and interpersonal behaviors among the poor—was a disaster, both politically and sociologically, for the newly liberated black masses. It reflects what must be seen in retrospect as one of the great failures of that period of American social history.
In Freedom Is Not Enough, Patterson recalls Lyndon Johnson’s bitterness and Richard Nixon’s cynicism over the intellectual inflexibility of the liberal critics. There can be no doubt that the black poor were hurt, not helped, by such bitter resignation and cynical manipulation in the White House. Worse yet, it now seems clear that these were the surface manifestations of a deeper, more debilitating political injury.
Just look at the history of social policy over the past quarter-century. The liberals won most of the battles in the decade or so after 1965, but they have surely lost the war. And it is, in my view, the black poor who have paid the terrible price for this folly. Not that Moynihan was right in every detail, or that he was above criticism and without foibles and vanities. But he was right about the big questions, and it needs to be acknowledged that his political values were progressive to the core.
It must be said that Banfield, Coleman, Wilson, Thernstrom, Murray, Glazer, and others (this list could be considerably lengthened) were equally often right about the larger themes of the late-twentieth-century American social-policy debate: negative unintended consequences from progressive social interventions, limits of liberal reforms to create genuine equality, the importance of social order and the irreplaceable role in maintaining it of the traditional institutions of civil society. Events have consistently borne them out. Gifted and instinctive politicians, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, have moved social policy consistently, and with considerable popular support, in the directions advocated by these critics of the liberal orthodoxy.
Unfortunately—from my perspective, anyway—these conservative critics who have trod the path of Pat Moynihan have not always shared the late senator’s progressive political commitments. Much to Moynihan’s chagrin, it was Charles Murray’s ideas more than his own that emerged victorious in the welfare-reform debate of the 1990s. Likewise, Jim Wilson has exerted more influence on anti-crime policy than any of his detractors, with staggering results in incarceration among the lower ranks of American society. Nat Glazer’s criticisms seem friendly to affirmative action when compared with recent federal court opinions, and Abigail Thernstrom’s critique of racial gerrymandering in the interest of guaranteeing the voting rights of black Americans may yet come to rule the day.
Generally speaking, the ostracized and demonized neoconservatives who gathered around Public Interest magazine in the late 1960s and through the 1970s have swept the table in the public debates. Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson’s Second Reconstruction has proved an utter failure if understood in the terms Johnson himself invoked in his fabled speech at Howard University in 1965—a speech that Moynihan had a large hand in writing, and that found Johnson declaring as his administration’s goal that “We seek not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
With a third of black children now living in poverty, with more than one million black men in jail, with an average deficit of three years in acquired reading skills for black youngsters relative to whites by the end of adolescence, with more than two out of every three black babies born to unwed mothers, with hard-core ghettos in Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Oakland, St. Louis, Houston, New Orleans, Baltimore, and dozens of other American cities continuing to fester in their marginality and hopelessness—with all of this wreckage so readily at hand, it is clear that we Americans have not yet overcome.
Freedom is definitely not enough. Good sense, even temper, openness to criticism, intellectual honesty, and faith in the good intentions of those with whom one disagrees—these things are also necessary if the legacy of America’s shameful racial past is ever to be superseded. Now, thanks in part to a bygone generation of self-righteous and feckless liberals, we face the prospect that it never will be.
Glenn C. Loury, a member of First Things’ editorial and advisory board, is Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University.
