Who is to blame for the ongoing social
dysfunction – poverty, illegitimacy, drug abuse, violence – in much of the African-American
community? More reliably than almost any
other issue, your answer reveals you as a liberal or a conservative. The standard liberal understanding is that
the persistence of white racism traps blacks in bad jobs, terrible
neighborhoods, constricted lives. There
are more sophisticated liberal explanations that involve the loss in recent
decades of urban
industrial jobs as well as the legacy of centuries of slavery, deliberate segregation
and debilitating social and economic oppression. Conservatives, on the other hand, attribute
black social dysfunction to black cultural pathology, that is, to attitudes and
norms prevalent in the black community that discourage behavior broadly
associated with success, e.g. family stability, educational attainment, steady
work, self-control. The sophisticated
liberal explanations lay
some blame at the feet of African-American culture, but what characterizes
the conservative explanations is the focus on cultural explanations to
the exclusion of anything else. To conservatives,
blacks alone are to blame for their plight.
Paul Ryan, conservative Republican
congressman from Wisconsin
and the 2012 GOP Vice Presidential nominee, recently got in trouble for
expressing just that view. Here’s
what he said on March 12th on conservative Bill Bennett’s
“Morning in America”
radio show:
We have got
this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working
and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the
value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that
has to be dealt with.
The immediate, forceful reaction
from many quarters
on
the left was that Ryan was trafficking in surreptitious racism. That is, he was referring in coded language
to the black community particularly, characterizing African-Americans as work-averse
and attributing that aversion to moral failure.
That is, blacks are poor because they’re lazy. The very next day Ryan shifted into full
politician damage-control mode, labeling his comments “inarticulate”, meeting
with African-American
political leaders, denying he had meant blacks in particular, and (sounding
suspiciously like a liberal) blaming the troubles of the poor on “society
as a whole.”
Seriously? Can anyone doubt he was criticizing African-American
culture? Ryan’s radio comments are the
sort of thing conservatives always say
when addressing the troubles of poor blacks.
Some have pointed
out Newt
Gingrich’s similar remarks made while running for president in 2012:
Really poor
children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have
nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on
Monday. They have no habit of staying all day; they have no habit of “I do this
and you give me cash,” unless it's illegal.
Is it possible Gingrich wasn’t talking
about blacks? No, that’s exactly who he
was talking about! Ryan’s remarks may not
have been as artless as Gingrich’s, but his point was the same:
African-American culture does not sufficiently inculcate an ethic of work and
self-sufficiency. It’s not exactly
calling them lazy, but it comes dangerously close to that ancient and appalling
racist libel.
But it’s not the same. There’s nothing necessarily racist about assessing
a culture as deficient in some particular.
Some cultures are clearly better at some things – consider the Italian
attitude of slowing down and enjoying
life – and not so good at other things – consider the lax Italian attitude
toward bribery. Each culture arises from a unique, complex and
contingent set of circumstances and each has its strengths and weaknesses. Cultures are like unhappy families, each
imperfect in its own way. To be racist
one has to believe an ethnic group is inherently inferior, that it has some
genetically-determined quality that unavoidably causes it to fall behind. If Ryan meant to imply this about
African-Americans then he was indeed expressing racism, and if he meant to subtly
signal such notions to receptive whites he was indeed employing racist dog
whistles. But is there any reason to
think so? Ryan did himself no
favor by citing, in his original comments, Charles Murray of the
conservative American Enterprise Institute, a writer infamous for claiming that
African-American social problems result from their genetically-determined
inferior intelligence. Yes, that’s
right. Ryan says he meant nothing racist
– that he wasn’t even referring to blacks particularly! – while citing an
explicitly racist writer. This is
inarticulateness of the highest order!
But even though all conservatives
attribute black troubles to black culture, not all conservatives attribute
black cultural dysfunction to black genes.
Indeed, even Ryan probably didn’t mean that. And, as noted, many liberals believe black culture does play an important part in black
troubles. Here’s Jonathan
Chait:
The argument is
that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a
life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre
to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism,
segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a
cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success.
To these more sophisticated liberals,
the horrific historical treatment of African-Americans has left a terrible
legacy which, through normal cultural transmission, continues even now to debilitate
African-American attitudes and norms. That
is, oppression by whites caused the problems of black culture, and once such
pathologies took hold they became quite hard to mend. Non-racist conservative explanations for
black social pathology ignore those hundreds of years of oppression and instead
revolve around the liberal welfare state.
To conservatives, excessive liberal condemnation of America’s real
and imagined sins leads blacks to see themselves as victims deserving
compensation in the form of government handouts. Thus liberals provide both the rationale and
the funding for black dependency and sloth.
So liberals blame the present-day troubles of blacks on their historical
mistreatment at the hands of the dominant white power structure, as well as the
persisting white racism that liberals find all too evident. That is, traditional American society – the
society that liberals fought so hard to improve and that conservatives fought
so hard to preserve – is at fault. Meanwhile,
conservatives fault many of those same liberal improvements (while failing, of
course, to credit liberalism’s clear successes, such as civil rights laws). When it comes to the problems of
African-Americans, liberals and conservatives, unsurprisingly, blame each
other.
Birmingham, Alabama, 1963 |
But conservatives never seriously
address the historical and traditional oppression – cruel, violent, horribly destructive
– of blacks by whites. Conservative
analysis of African-American dysfunction begins with the Great Society, as if
nothing relevant happened before then. They
seem embarrassed by discussions of slavery and Jim Crow, by the thought that America could
have committed such momentous and monstrous crimes. And this reluctance, this touchiness, is of a
piece with conservative hyper-sensitivity to charges of racism. When liberals accused Ryan of race-hustling,
conservatives howled
at the injustice. Every time
conservatives talk about racial problems they blame blacks, and every time
they’re accused of racism they blame liberals.
They’re desperate to escape any accountability on race! No rational person believes all of conservatism
is tainted by racism, but there is no denying the historical fact that modern
American conservatism was founded upon implacable antipathy toward three huge threats
to traditional society: international communism, the welfare state and racial
integration. Liberal success in
substantially actualizing that third threat has ironically given some cover to
the conservative claim that whites no longer hold blacks back. Conservatives mock liberals for what they call
“white guilt”, i.e. the desperate liberal shame over being part of the race
that treated blacks so badly for so long.
They believe white guilt enervates liberals by robbing them of the moral
authority needed to place blame where it belongs: at the feet of blacks
themselves. But consider the absurd
conservative refusal to confront not only present-day racism but even historical
racism,
particularly conservative complicity in
historical racism. We can only call this
preposterous denial the conservative
version of white guilt. While there
is some truth to the notion that liberals too readily let African-Americans
avoid their responsibilities, it’s conservatives who scramble like madmen to
avoid their own.
And the notion of conservative
white guilt helps explain another quite strange phenomenon: white fear of
oppression by blacks. To be conservative
is to believe that in present-day America whites
are more mistreated by blacks than the reverse. This putative oppression takes many forms: black-on-white
crime, liberal taxation to pay for plush welfare benefits for blacks,
affirmative action programs that take jobs from deserving whites and give them
to undeserving blacks, black intimidation
of white voters, black calls for reparations for slavery. Rush Limbaugh famously referred to Obamacare
as “reparations.” Indeed, it’s black
self-pity and resentment that causes our racial troubles. Whites are now the true victims of racism,
mostly at the hands of a “racial
grievance industry” run by “race
hustlers”, the most infamous being Al
Sharpton. And the most vicious form
such vile race hatred takes is the constant liberal accusation of conservative
racism. In this view, Paul Ryan is more
of a victim than the poor “inner city” denizens to whom he condescends. Conservatives are hyper-aware that racism of
the old-fashioned kind is now so comprehensively and thoroughly delegitimized
that any taint of it instantly undermines any position or policy. In this view no charges of white racism are ever valid; they’re all transparent attempts to silence or marginalize conservatives
and conservative ideas, as bludgeons used to beat down whites fighting for fair
treatment. In the 60’s it was Bull Connor spraying
demonstrators with fire hoses, now it’s the Huffington Post spewing defamation
of conservative whites.
But the worst white fear, going
back at least as far as Reconstruction,
is fear of blacks in power. When Obama
first ran for president in 2008 he received more votes in almost every county
than had his 2004 Democratic predecessor, John Kerry. But in a broad swath of the Upland
South, stretching from West Virginia
through Kentucky, Tennessee,
Alabama, Mississippi,
Arkansas, Oklahoma,
Louisiana and Texas, Obama got a smaller percentage of the
vote than Kerry. We need
not wonder why this area bucked the national trend. When (in another context) voters in this area
were asked why they didn’t vote for Obama they expressed fear of “minorities
in positions over the white race”. This
is the fear of black revenge. But revenge for what? Deep down conservative whites know blacks are
right to be so profoundly aggrieved, and so profoundly aggrieved at them.
This is conservative white guilt: if the Negroes get in charge they’ll
screw us the way we’ve screwed them. To
such people, all liberals are carpetbaggers and all liberalism
is reparations.
Paul
Krugman, in a piece on the Ryan controversy, argues that “American
conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that
liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those
People. Indeed, race is the Rosetta
Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics,”
such as conservative support for Medicare paired with opposition to Medicaid. Krugman is right to see white populism lurking
behind many domestic conservative policies, particularly white opposition to
the welfare state (of course, such opposition has perfectly legitimate non-racial
motivations, as well). But there’s more going
on in the racial churn than just white anger over paying taxes for Those
People. There’s white fear of retribution
and there’s the stubborn white refusal to face responsibility. And, importantly, there’s the boiling
resentment at liberal attempts to force that responsibility upon them. No one likes to be reminded of the guilt
they’re trying so hard to repress. This
is less about income tax rates and more about the shackle and the poll tax and
the lynching noose and the long
shadow they cast over white American pride.
And that illuminates what liberal
charges of racism are really after.
Sure, sometimes liberals use those charges to bully, to intimidate, to
silence. “Racist” is for liberals what
“socialist” is for conservatives: a clumsy but powerful rhetorical weapon. And sometimes liberals honestly see racism
where none exists; for some liberals it’s always 1965 on the march from
Montgomery to Selma. But deeper down
is the earnest liberal wish that conservatives face up to the persistent hard
realities of race in America
and undertake the hard work of racial expiation as liberals have tried to do. Before
the Civil Rights era, liberalism largely ignored the problems of blacks; to
maintain the partisan unity that made the New Deal possible the Democratic
Party acquiesced to the demands of its southern conservative wing and denied
government benefits to blacks. But, starting in the 1960’s, liberals atoned for
their racial sins by trying substantively to address these issues. Indeed, the entire conservative critique of
racial liberalism is that it has atoned all too well – and that the atonement is
underwritten by those in strenuous dissent.
But that dissident resentment helps perpetuate the antipathy toward
African-Americans that keeps them in their collective place. Why does the party that espouses small
government and individual freedom find it so necessary to justify even obvious
and genuine
expressions of white animosity? The
issue of past and persistent African-American misery is not one issue among
many, it is central to the acrimonious
and hateful ideological divide that plagues us.
The hard feelings of guilt, resentment and fear it elicits polarize and
poison all of our politics. Liberals
react to every remotely insensitive conservative remark as the second coming of
Bull Connor. And conservatives
react same way to every liberal accusation of racism (even those with clear
merit) and thereby harden racial alienation and deepen our ideological polarization.
But let’s stand
athwart that vicious cycle and yell Stop!
There are few genuine Bull Connor’s still around. But there are some (don’t you know any?) and
liberals are right to expose them. But how
bleeding obvious is it that liberals must be more fair and circumspect in their
accusations, but also that conservatives must respond with more open and honest
self-examination. Even though there are
the more sophisticated liberal explanations for African-American troubles, the
liberal instinct is to blame only white racism and excuse almost any bad black behavior. That’s because liberals are so exquisitely
aware of the terrible reality of white-on-black oppression – both historically
and in its current
subtler forms – that blaming black culture at all feels to them like blaming
the victim. And conservatives are
working so tirelessly to avoid that
same awareness that they cannot blame anyone else. But liberals need to remember that victims
can act badly too. And they need to
understand that racial resentment and racial bigotry may be closely related,
but they are not the same. It may be
more gratifying to stomp the latter, but they’d do better to soothe the former.
But here is the crucial question:
Can conservatives be made to acknowledge and appreciate the historical and
continuing immiseration of African-Americans?
They must, but they almost certainly won’t. There are so many obstacles that seem so
insurmountable: a conservative communications complex invested in pushing racial
hot-buttons,
the social and economic separation of whites and blacks, the worsening of political
polarization and mutual mistrust, and – most importantly – 60 years of
smoldering resentment. But just as
African-Americans must acknowledge their own cultural shortcomings and assume
the responsibility and hard work needed to overcome them, so must conservatives
take responsibility for how their own denial of racial reality contributes to
our painful political polarization. Conservatives
may comfort themselves with the thought that African-Americans vote for Democrats
in overwhelming numbers because liberals enable their victimhood, but blacks easily
perceive conservative racial irresponsibility and resentment. Thus, as the demographics
slowly move America
in a more racially diverse direction they also move it in an irrevocably liberal
direction. But the conviction that whites
owe blacks nothing – not transfer payments, not preferential treatment, not
protection for voting rights, not even understanding – is so central to conservative
ideology and psychology that they couldn’t give it up without a radical
reworking of their worldview. Conservative
white guilt is at the heart of our ongoing political dysfunction and
unhappiness. Unable to come to terms
with the enormity of the moral failure of traditional American culture, unable
to concede the persistence of racial mistreatment, unable to accept their own
complicity, they consign African-Americans to unequal treatment, themselves to resentful
alienation, and all of us to bitter division and strife.
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