Harry Stein, the author of How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace) and the recently published I Can’t Believe I’m Sitting Next to a Republican, has written an insightful (and ultimately hopeful) article for City Journal that I highly recommend.Using astute cultural analysis and his own personal battles against false charges of racism, Stein does a much better job of beginning a truly progressive "conversation about race" than Eric Holder or Barack Obama, for all their blustering about it, have managed to do in a year.
...Genuine racism is a terrible thing, and for far too long it was a virulent strain running through our national life. This is so patently obvious that it scarcely bears repeating. Yet those of us who point out how much our nation has changed for the better invariably feel obliged to repeat it, early and often, lest our very sense of optimism about race relations make us subject to the charge. So while we’re at it, let’s dispense with the other essential pro forma acknowledgment: yes, even in today’s America, traces of the vilest racism persist in some dark hearts and twisted minds.
But those liberals who’ve lately been issuing the racism charge so promiscuously (speaking of aberrant hearts and minds) are aiming it not at skinheads living in their parents’ basements or at would-be Klansmen, but at decent Americans with the temerity to object to presidential policies that they believe would damage both the quality of their lives and the nation itself: in short, at Americans acting in the best tradition of democratic citizenship. This is so preposterous that literally millions who’ve never before given the matter any thought are taking notice.
And what they see is what has long been true: that the charge of racism is invariably a crock; indeed, that more than simply an expression of (often contrived) liberal moral outrage, it’s intended to be the ultimate conversation stopper. Ward Connerly, long the leader of the fight against racial preferences in America, observes that he’s had the experience more times than he cares to count of speaking before an audience, knowing that 99 of 100 people agree with him. “But if there’s one angry black person in the audience who disagrees,” he says, “that person controls the room. He’ll go on about the last 400 years, and institutional racism, and ‘driving while black,’ and the other 99 will just sit there and fold like a cheap accordion.” And Connerly is black himself. For the liberal opinion makers and trend setters who’ve set themselves up as America’s racial referees, the accused racist is always presumed to be guilty of at least something...
That conversation is long overdue, so let’s have at it. Let’s talk, for starters, about the shocking double standard in the way liberals and conservatives are allowed to deal with race and racism. Why is it okay for liberals to belittle Clarence Thomas endlessly as an Uncle Tom? And how does liberal cartoonist Ted Rall get away with calling Condoleezza Rice a “house nigga,” and his colleague Jeff Danziger with drawing her as a mammy in a caricature as cruelly demeaning as anything in Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer?
Let’s talk, too, about racial profiling—and start paying appropriate attention to the statistical evidence cited by Heather Mac Donald establishing that the disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates of minorities are explained not by racism but by disproportionate rates of criminality. Let’s talk about how American business has long been subject to blackmail by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in the name of social justice, and about the many other ways in which the regime of racial preferences has sowed division and corruption in this country. Let’s talk about how even after the Duke rape fiasco, the media continue to give credence to every racism charge; indeed, how just this week, vicious (and transparently phony) statements about race attributed to Rush Limbaugh uncritically disseminated by mainstream outlets helped sink Limbaugh’s bid for NFL ownership. And yes, let’s talk about white liberal bigotry, the bigotry of low expectations, and how it cripples and demeans those it supposedly aims to help...
Very good stuff.
