NRO: What Is Racism? The rhetorical vs. reality.

National Review ^ | 8.5.02 | Mark Goldblatt

[mhking]

August 5, 2002, 9:00 a.m.
What Is Racism?
The rhetorical vs. reality.

By Mark Goldblatt

So far, this summer has been a down time on Wall Street, but it's been a bull market for traders in racial arson. First came the bizarre joint press conference by Michael Jackson and Al Sharpton to allege racism in the music industry. Jackson, whose latest album Invincible tanked despite a massive publicity effort by his record label, and whose career has been in decline ever since he paid out 20 million dollars to settle his Close Encounters of the Third Grade lawsuit, initially raised the R-word against the industry as a whole, but, as is custom among the significantly demented (see: O'Connor, Sinead) wound up fixating on one person, Sony executive Tommy Mottola, calling him "mean, racist and . . . very, very devilish." The personal attack on Mottola apparently blindsided Reverend Al, since he at once began to backpedal, saying, "I didn't know that Michael planned to personally attack Tommy. . . . I have known Tommy for 15 or 20 years, and never once have I known him to say or do anything that would be considered racist."

Following on the heels of the Sharpton-Jackson spectacle came the annual cartoon parade and shakedown jamboree that now passes for the NAACP National Convention. Predictably, the halls of the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas echoed with charges of racism — against individual police departments, against the entire criminal-justice system, against corporate capitalism. Conservative politicians, led of course by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Attorney General John Ashcroft, were singled out and slimed, right-of-center blacks such as Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Clarence Thomas were written off as tokens or Uncle Toms, wild conspiracy theories were floated . . . and the few genuine impediments that remain to black achievement, such as teachers' unions who struggle to preserve Stalinist levels of corruption and ineptitude in the public schools, were given a free pass.

There's no reason whatsoever to take Jackson, Sharpton, or the NAACP seriously at this point, but their outbursts provide a useful excuse to reconsider the concept of racism itself. What does it mean nowadays to call someone, or something, "racist"? Is racism in the eye of the beholder, or does it have a proper sense? For me, this is no academic question; I've been called a racist dozens of times over the last few years for things I've written . . . not the least of which is my recent novel Africa Speaks which is narrated in all black voices, and which portrays black characters in some highly unflattering ways.

So let's begin with an uncontroversial, even self-evident, observation: There's no such thing as a racist truth; put another way, acknowledging what is true is never a racist act. After the Amadou Diallo shooting in 1998, for example, I noted in a newspaper column that 16 of the previous 19 cop killers in New York City had been black or Hispanic males — a relevant point, I thought, in explaining why cops might be edgier around dark-skinned males than any other demographic. For digging up that statistic, I was accused of racism. Yet the numbers were accurate; even though they concerned race, even though they cast dark-skinned males in a negative light, the numbers themselves were unequivocal, undeniable, and unbiased. Again, the mere acknowledgement of truth, however unpleasant, is never in itself evidence of racism.

If the mere acknowledgement of a truth is never racist, it is nevertheless clear that certain beliefs are racist — even if they seem to be supported by factual evidence. For example, if I inferred from a list of black pathologies that black people are in some way, or in several ways, innately inferior to white people, that would without question constitute a racist belief. (So, for that matter, would the belief that blacks are innately superior to whites.) The reason? Such a belief is rooted in the false premise that "black" and "white" are anthropologically coherent categories. They are not — as an overwhelming consensus of anthropologists themselves assure us. Human populations vary subtly and continuously from one geographic region to another, and have for millennia; the conceptual lines drawn in the 19th century dividing humanity into three races correspond with no fixed set of biological distinctions; there is, in fact, greater genetic variation within races than among them. To cite an obvious example, South Asian Indians are variously classified as Negroids, Caucasoids, or Mongoloids — by arbitrary criteria. If you prioritize skin color, you can make a case for the Indians as Negroid; if you prioritize facial features, Caucasoid, if you prioritize hair texture, Mongoloid.

Given then that racial categories are anthropologically dubious, how do we account for trends (such as the statistics on black pathologies) that seem to follow them? The answer lies in the method of studying racial differences. Comparative race studies rely on self-identification by their participants; in other words, you're black if you say you're black, white if you say you're white, etc. The results of such studies, therefore, do not establish biologically rooted correlations but rather perceptually-rooted correlations . . . in the case of standardized test scores, for example, the data establish correlations between thinking of yourself as black, and scoring lower on standardized tests.

Such perceptually correlated disparities are aggravated by the culture of victimization that permeates black communities — a culture dominated, in recent years, by hip hop which, literally and figuratively, drums into the brains of young black people that to be black is to be racially oppressed, and which has largely succeeded, in the case of gangsta rap, in equating pathological behavior and black authenticity.

The phenomenon of perceptual differences translating into actual disparities leads us, at last, to a meaningful distinction between the rhetoric of racism, which is increasingly easy to deploy, and the reality of racism, which is increasingly difficult to find.

What is racism, rhetorically?

It's a reflexive, irrational, all-encompassing alibi for black failure derived from a hyper-sensitivity to racially disparate outcomes; it is also, more familiarly-with few exceptions — whatever a black person says it is.

What is racism in reality?

It's the false belief that the intellectual, moral, or spiritual potentials of individual human beings are limited by the geographic origins of their distant ancestors; it is also any action predicated on that belief.

Only when the rhetoric of racism ceases to be confused with the reality of racism, and only when the likes of Jackson, Sharpton, and the NAACP are met with ridicule, contempt, and deep heartfelt yawns, can an honest, rather than Clintonian, dialogue on race begin.

— Mark Goldblatt is the author of the novel Africa Speaks.

[Red Jones]

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