Posted by
Patrick Henry on Thursday, February 19, 2009 5:57:38 PM
Newly confirmed U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has stirred a hornet's nest of public comment by his recent controversial assertion that America is "a nation of cowards" for not talking more about issues of race. His one-dimensional grasp of the issue is somewhat staggering in light of the powerful post to which he has been appointed.
Holder's problem is that he has confused frustration with cowardice. Conversations about race with liberals or persons of color usually begin with "pre-conditions." When someone asks you if you have stopped beating your wife, a positive answer is an admission of past spousal abuse and a negative one suggests its continuance. Most conversations about race are conditioned by the axiom that whites have always systematically abused blacks and continue to do so, that contemporary whites are fully accountable for what their ignorant or malicious ancestors did, and that whites today must defer to blacks because they are the source of all the shortcomings of today's black community. Now most people are not going to willingly enter into a converstaion in which they are expected to say, up front, "Yes, I acknowledge that because I am white I am also racist scum, and that I owe you because George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slavers." That's just not going to happen because healthy people avoid games the object of which is simply to point fingers, attach labels and score points.
` If you listen to the drumbeat of black rhetoric, to the likes of Maxine Watters in congress, or the poster in the ACORN offices that says, "You Owe Us," you'll see the point. If those are the types of assumptions that underlie every opportunity for interracial dialogue, then there is hardly any point in having it, and most people simply won't. It will always just be the proverbial elephant in the corner because no one knows how to get their arms around it. Here are a few suggestions about how to move a meaningful conversation forward.
Focus needs to be on the present. Where are we really, statistically and factually. As long as we dwell on how we feel and not on facts, there will be no meeting of the minds because there is nothing whites are likely to concede that will exorcise the bitterness of blacks who feel they've gotten a raw deal. Until we know to a certainty what the actual present facts are, we can't fix the problem.
Renunciation of the past has a place. Some states have made public apologies for their racist or slave histories. The Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan are racist blights on American history. One was vanquished, and the other prosecuted and punished into near non-existence. The Jews, whose persecution dwarfs the treatment of American blacks, have built memorials and museums to the Holocaust, and made their motto "Never Again." All Americans, black and white, should do the same. Lifting it up and acknowledging the evil of it gives objectivity to past failures and points a way forward to a world in which such travesties are simply not permitted.
Discussions require rules, and so does a fruitful racial dialogue. Namecalling invoking terms like "racist," "bigot" and "Uncle Tom" ALWAYS moves the discussion backward, not forward. If the point to racial discussions is simply to force whites to admit that they are the principal source of bigotry in America and that they owe blacks (financial) reparations for what happened to their forbears, then there is absolutely no incentive for whites to engage. Liberals have preyed extensively on white middle class shame and guilt, forcing the race card into every political campaign and legislative debate, and forcing every white candidate to start their race one down. Such manipulation only consolidates resentment and keeps the illusion of rampant discrimination in the media and the public eye at all times. But its utility is nearly at an end, and the backlash is coming. You can't simply insult and patronize a whole class of people, many of whom are guilty of nothing more than having been born white Americans, and expect them to stand for it indefinitely. It's time to find a new dog, because this one won't hunt much longer.
Goal setting needs to come front and center. What will be the targets and benchmarks by which we'll measure the road to a useable future together in America? If the goals are to make one class of people feel good, or another comfortable then we are doomed to fail as a society because feelings can't be legislated. You could give any generic black youngster a free education, a nest egg to start professional life and a promise that in any promotional contest he would automatically go to the top of the list. But if he will not let go of the past, if he harbors racial hatred and resentment in his heart and believes that white people will always owe him then two things are inevitably true about him? (1) He has a rude awakening coming when he finds out that not all have signed on to that program, and (2) while he may prosper economically, he'll still be an emotional dwarf because of the malevolence inside him. Conversely, if you force a white youngster to defer to his black peers, tax him to benefit persons of color and deprive him of truly equal opportunities and expect him to have good and benevolent feelings about it, you are simply deluded. If the notion is to make white people today feel what black people have felt then (a) it will fail miserably, and (b) whites will always push back.
So goals need to be clearly enunciated, meaningful and achieveable, and they require buy-in from both parties to the dialogue. More than facts, it's attitudes that keep us from talking race. We can legislate behavior (e.g., the Civil Rights Laws, Affirmative Action, etc.), but we cannot legislate attitudes (feelings). Healing at that level must be far more grassroots, bottom-up. So we need to be looking seriously at what facilitates that. The "have you stopped beating your wife" approach will NEVER produce anything but resentment, rejection, loathing and more frustration.
AG Holder is right in his assertion that Americans don't talk about race. But he is embarrassingly wrong in attributing it to cowardice. It's frustration at an accusatory and adversarial climate and the employment of terminally dumb intimidation tactics that will only produce more of the same. Whatever happened to the biblical mandate? "Come now, and let us reason together."