The Only Question is Who's Truth????

The Truth About Race in Amerikkka?..Part 1,2 & 3

BY JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, September 13, 2005 4:07 p.m. EDT

The Truth About Race in America
What does Hurricane Katrina tell us about race in America? A new Gallup poll is informative:

Six in 10 African-Americans say the fact that most hurricane victims were poor and black was one reason the federal government failed to come to the rescue more quickly. Whites reject that idea; nearly 9 in 10 say those weren't factors. . . .
Republican efforts this year to reach out to black voters have not been helped. . . . By more than 3-to-1, [blacks] say Bush doesn't care about black people. By more than 2-to-1, whites say he does.

Let's look more closely at these two questions, which are questions 14 and 3, respectively, in the poll results. By 60% to 37%, blacks think the government was slow in rescuing Katrina victims for racial reasons; by 86% to 12%, whites do not think so. By 72% to 21%, blacks think President Bush does not care about black people. By 67% to 26%, whites think he does care.

USA Today doesn't give figures for the population as a whole, but let's extrapolate them. At the 2000 census, 69.1% of the U.S. population was non-Hispanic white, and 12.9% of the population was black. Since we have no polling data on Hispanics or other ethnic groups, our analysis is necessarily limited to the 82% of the population that is either black or NH white. This subgroup is 84.3% white and 15.7% black.

Now, let's weight the black and white responses to these questions to reflect their proportions of the population (the percentages given are of the total black and NH white population):

Bush cares
Black yes
3.3%
Black no
11.3%
White yes
56.5%
White no
21.9%
Rescue racist
Blacks yes
9.4%
Whites yes
10.1%
Blacks no
5.8%
Whites no
72.5%

This means that a vast majority of blacks (72%) disagree with a solid majority of the overall population (60%) on the question of whether Bush cares, and a solid majority of blacks (60%) disagree with an overwhelming majority of the overall population (78%) on the question of whether the rescue was racist.

The truth about race that Katrina illuminates, then, is that, at least when it comes to matters involving race, black Americans are extreme political outliers. This is why attempts to play the race card are politically futile: They have to appeal not just to blacks, but to a substantial minority of whites. The Gallup poll results makes clear that the current racial appeals are not resonating with whites.

'So What?'A few readers were puzzled, even offended, by our item yesterday about a Fox News interview of a foul-mouthed New Orleans evacuee. Here's reader Peter Lee:
I was waiting for a sharp attack on the man's demands for $20,000 because he chose to live below sea level. Instead, you call attention to the fact that he's with a white woman? So what?
I guess you were trying to show some hypocrisy in his "slave ship" reference. His analogy can be rebutted many different ways, but your observation came across as borderline racist: "Look, he's dating a white woman!"

"So what?" is right. In fact, it's precisely the point. In post-civil-rights America there is nothing at all remarkable about a public display of affection between a black man and a white woman. The same was not true in the days of slavery, or for about a century after abolition. Emmett Till was lynched barely 50 years ago. To liken America in 2005 to America in the days of slavery reflects a stunning degree of ignorance, malice or both.

The Truth About Race in America--II
Perhaps the ugliest thing written in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was a post on the Puffington Host by Randall Robinson, a self-styled "social justice advocate," which appeared on Sept. 2:
It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. Four days after the storm, thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying like dogs. No-one has come to help them.

I am a sixty-four year old African-American. New Orleans marks the end of the America I strove for. . . .

My hand shakes with anger as I write. I, the formerly un-jaundiced human rights advocate, have finally come to see my country for what it really is. A monstrous fraud.

Robinson subsequently retracted the wildly implausible cannibalism claim (surely one of the most invidious antiblack stereotypes imaginable). But in a disclaimer atop the article, he writes that he "stand[s] behind everything else I wrote without reservation." Apparently that includes the statement that "thousands of blacks in New Orleans are dying," which is almost certainly (knock on wood) an exaggeration. According to the Associated Press, the latest death toll for the entire state of Louisiana is 423. (Granted, this isn't a final figure and is likely to rise.)

Robinson's views are extreme, and his way of expressing them particularly inflammatory, but as we noted yesterday, black Americans' views of racial issues tend to be sharply at variance with those of whites, and thus of the population as a whole. In a Gallup poll, 60% of blacks think that "one reason the federal government was slow in rescuing these people was because many of them were black." Eighty-six percent of whites and (by our estimate) approximately 78% of the total population disagrees with this statement, for which there is no evidence and which is almost certainly false.

Of course it is human nature to empathize with people who are "like us," which is why people care more when a disaster strikes their country than a foreign land. Thus it's perfectly understandable that black Americans would respond with a heightened fervor to the sufferings of fellow blacks after Hurricane Katrina.

But it makes no sense to expect nonblacks to empathize with blacks because they are black. Transracial empathy must be based on what people of different races have in common: that we are fellow Americans, or fellow human beings. The use of a natural disaster as an occasion for racial grievance is a hindrance, not an aid, to national solidarity and empathy.

Robinson followed up his cannibalism post with a call for dialogue last Monday:
Long ago white America stopped talking to black America about what black America needed to talk about. Indeed, white America long ago stopped talking about what all of America needs badly to talk about--race, and the origins and causes, exceptions notwithstanding, of intergenerational white wealth and black poverty in America.

Perhaps now, we can begin to talk. Honestly for once. For the good of us all.
But if Robinson is willing to conclude--based on urban legends, rumors and his own prejudices--that America is "a monstrous fraud," what can there possibly be to talk about?

The Truth About Race in America--III
Thursday, September 15, 2005 4:10 p.m. EDT

Yesterday's installment in this series argued that racial special pleading is at odds with interracial compassion:

It makes no sense to expect nonblacks to empathize with blacks because they are black. Transracial empathy must be based on what people of different races have in common: that we are fellow Americans, or fellow human beings. The use of a natural disaster as an occasion for racial grievance is a hindrance, not an aid, to national solidarity and empathy.

But of course the culture of racial grievance is not about compassion or empathy, which is why the racialization of Hurricane Katrina has struck such a discordant note. The only appropriate response to a natural disaster is to offer concern and help to the victims; claims about justice and guilt are out of place and beside the point.

Yet it is upon claims about justice and guilt that racial politics in America are built. And since those who make such claims have seized on Katrina to press them, it's fair to respond by taking a critical look. Let's begin with our friend Randall Robinson, whose Puffington Host post we cited yesterday, and who is an intelligent defender of an extreme position. Here's an excerpt from the Amazon.com review of Robinson's 2000 book, "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks":

He goes further than any previous black public figure in calling for reparations to African-Americans for the present-day racism that stems from 246 years of slavery. Citing compensation that Jews and Japanese Americans have received, he writes, "No race, ethnic or religious group has suffered as much over so long a span as blacks have and do still, at the hands of those who benefited . . . from slavery and the century of legalized American racial hostility that followed it." In making his case, Robinson utilizes facts and figures that highlight the disparity between African-Americans and whites.

"Reparations" for slavery are not really a serious idea, but the question Robinson raises in his title is worth asking: What does America owe to blacks?

Up to a point, almost everyone can agree on the answer. America owes blacks full citizenship, which as a formal matter means equal treatment in matters of law, politics, commerce and education. Hardly anyone argues against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, or the outcomes of landmark civil rights cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia.

In post-civil-rights America, racial matters become contentious when the issue is preferential, rather than equal, treatment. "Reparations"--Write me a check, you racist!--are the crassest version of this idea, easily dismissed as silly (remember this guy?). But the policies that fall under the rubric of "affirmative action" are based on the same concept: that white Americans today continue to be guilty for wrongs committed by white Americans of the pre-civil-rights era.

This notion of collective guilt is at odds with America's individualist ethos, and for that reason both the politics and the jurisprudence of affirmative action are muddled. Racial preferences persist largely out of bureaucratic inertia, even though they have been rejected on the rare occasion that they were put to a political test. In 1996 voters in liberal California approved Proposition 209, banning all racial preferences in state and local government, with 54% of the vote.

The U.S. Supreme Court, meanwhile, has long held that any distinction by race, even a "benign" one designed to help minorities, is subject to "strict scrutiny" under the Constitution. But in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which allowed colleges to impose racial preferences so long as they are somewhat vague about what they're doing, the court preposterously decided that the University of Michigan had met this high standard merely by offering bromides about the importance of "diversity" in education. Muddying the waters further, Justice Sandra O'Connor opined that this justification would expire in 25 years.

Affirmative action is deeply entrenched in America's governmental, educational and corporate institutions. But political support for it--already weak, as we saw in California in 1996--is likely only to become weaker. That's because white guilt is a fading force in America. Every American now under 40 was born after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, so they have no memory of pre-civil-rights America. In two more generations, there will be hardly anyone left with even childhood memories of segregation.

It's hard to make people feel guilty when they personally have done nothing wrong. It's hard to argue that racial disparities are the product of extant racism when there is no direct evidence that such racism is anything but extremely rare, and when public policy actually favors blacks over whites.

On Tuesday we noted that black Americans have sharply different views on racial matters than do white Americans and, therefore, than do Americans as a whole. What we are arguing today is that the views of whites are likely to move even further away from those that blacks now hold.
We do not think there is any serious danger of old-fashioned racism resurging; the post-civil-rights consensus in favor of equal citizenship is as solid as anything in American political life. But the divergence between blacks and whites is still a problem for America, and a much bigger problem for black America. Black leaders would be well advised to spend less energy cultivating grievances and more cultivating an understanding of their fellow Americans. That is the path to integration.

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