Liberal Racism

...Sleeper recognizes that that's a pretty heady brew, too strong for most humans...

...Indeed, the only relationships that really matter are those consciously and intentionally undertaken...

...As it turns out, Sleeper can summon the most powerful sort of proof for the wisdom of his argument here...

...E Don Wycliff, a black man, is editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune...

...It told of a program at the University of Illinois at Chicago that gives virtually all minority students the benefit of early registration for classes while virtually all white students must wait...

...It was a grotesquely unfair characterization, of course...

...Don Wyelirtf D tiring my college years in the late 1960s, the high tide .,i black militancy, some of my more cynical and deeply t 1"1 : r, i H ick classmates were given to remarking that the only difference between a liberal and a conservative was that "a liberal will hang you from a lower tree...

...God knows, there are those of us who want to believe that...

...So much for the liberal racist view that whites would be intractably hostile to black candidates...

...The wonder is that this racial spoils system survived as long as it hassome say it's been around as long as ten years...

...The chapter on Alex Haley's Roots is a demolition derby...

...These latter pieces are particularly strong, especially the chapter focusing on Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy and Boston University economist Glenn Lourv, two of the most thoughtful and intriguing black intellectuals in the nation today...

...In the interest of defeating white racism, they have bought into a "racialist" ideology that in many respects is as pernicious and destructive as what they fight and, very often, is all but indistinguishable from it...

...True enough, those black incumbents did win re-election in their redrawn, majority white districts...

...With an alacrity that at times is disturbing, Sleeper smashes the Africa myth that Haley attempted to create...

...I€ liberalism is to be a force again for justice and progress in American society, Sleeper says, it must forswear this sort of policy and the racialist rationalizations that undergird it and begin fostering a notion of citizenship and civic culture that transcends race and all such particularisms...

...Clinical Family Counseling • Master of Business Administration (MBA) Church Management 4) Oxford/Rome Programs combined with short-term residencies leading to the Ph.D...

...Thus, he introduces Loury, who unapologetically recognizes an affinity with and obligation to other blacks and even broke with his former neoconservative comrades because of their indifference to the situation of poor blacks...

...The story of how liberals blundered on voting rights is a wonderfully instructive parable of their noble beginnings and subsequent bad faith on many fronts touching race," Sleeper writes in the test chapter of his analysis of liberal racism...

...in Theological Studies or in Pastoral Psychology • Doctor of Ministry in Spiritual Direction, Pastoral Counseling, Health Care Ministries, Hispanic Ministries, Applied Ministries • Doctor of Religious Education (concentration in RCIA/CCD) • Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D...

...er says, from an instrument of empowerment and inclusion for disfranchised black voters in 1965 into an instrument in the 1980s and 1990s for segregating black and Hispanic voters in districts unto themselves-all on the basis of faulty, racist assumptions...

...He asks that we believe white America is prepared to play by the colorblind rules that the conservatives all like to talk about...

...The inescapable fact is that what Sleeper asks, at least of blacks, is an act of faith...

...Over time, however, and in the careless, sloppy way that so many policies evolve, it became sufficient just to be black or Hispanic, disadvantaged or not...

...But one wonders whether they ever would have won election in such districts in the first place...

...Sleeper has written an important book that deserves to be read and carefully considered, especially if Americans are going to engage fruitfully in that "national conversation" about race that President Bill Clinton has promised...

...The fact is that the civil rights movement and the effort to secure equality among all Americans was a (philosophical) liberal project-and a largely and proudly successful one, at that...

...The result of this, Sleeper notes, was the odd coupling in 1982 of black Democrats and white Republicans that rewrote the Voting Rights Act to mandate the drawing of more minority districts-and in the process to secure more reliably Republican districts...

...Is it America...

...So much also for the view that blacks (or Hispanics or any other minority) necessarily share sufficient common interests as to require the sort of exertions required to gerrymander them into districts with one another...

...Is it Africa...

...That Sleeper isn't just baying at the moon is clear from almost any day's headlines...

...Actually, Sleeper has written two books in one volume...

...Jim Sleeper's is far from a perfect book...

...INFORMATION PACKET 1-800-423-5983 or (219/936-4263) Graduate Theological Foundation, Donaldson, IN 46613-0006 Commonweal 3 3 September 12, 1997...

...Consider, for one modest example, a story that appeared in early July in the Chica,'o Sun-Times...

...Academic civdit awarded by the Graduate Theological Foundation...

...degree...

...OXFORD *ROME* INDIANA MINISTRY EDUCATION OPPORTUNITIES 1) Oxford University Theology Summer School (one week/summer) 2) Centro Pro Unione/Rome (three weeks/summer) 3) Graduate Theological Foundation programs (summer/fall/spring) • Ph.D...

...And he ends with the quite correct observation that "Black Americans' only coherent memories and myths begin in the holds of the slave ships to which other Africans consigned them...

...Initially, apparently, this policy (vas the result of a not entirely unreasonable assumption that minority racial status was a proxy for disadvantage that warranted special consideration...

...The Supreme Court eventually outlawed many of the black majority districts created in the South pursuant to the 1990 census, holding that such overwhelming race-consciousness as went into their drawing was unconstitutional...

...Is it anything...

...Nevertheless, all but one of the black incumbents from those outlawed districts ran in new, reconfigured majority white districts-and won...

...No wonder Newt Gingrich at his installation as Speaker of the House in 1995 could be so gracious in praising the "liberal wing" of the Democratic party-they made him Speaker...

...What's no wonder is that eventually, white students carried their disgruntlement to state legislators and now the university is scrambling to rectify what is not just an obvious injustice, but a terrible political mistake...

...Liberal racism ...assumes that racial differences are so profound that they are almost primordial," Sleeper observes, adding that "the fascination with racial differences that prevents many liberals from treating any person with a nonwhite racial physiognomy as someone much like themselves only begets policies and programs that reinforce nineteenth-century assumptions about race that are patently racist...

...In the second, he seeks a way out of the liberal racist trap in a series of provocative essays on black identity and what lie contends is our lost Civic culture...

...Quite frankly, some of his answers are simply too facile...

...Then there is the powerful and challenging examination of Randall Kennedy's and Glenn Loury's approaches to the problem of black identity...

...or the D.Min...

...Now, thirty years later, comes Jim Sleeper, a white man and a liberal, with a much more serious and creditable complaint against liberalism...

...Despite dramatic black electoral gains under the Voting Rights Act, many activists, advocates, and journalists decided that whites' perceptions and interests would remain so irreconcilable with nonwhites' that few whites would ever vote for blacks or Hispanics," writes Sleeper...

...Sleeper's three chapters on various aspects of black identity actually are an extended meditation on the question of what African-Americans have in common...

...In other words, it is the human mind and will that create kinships...

...The Voting Rights Act evolved, SleepCnurrrrnrrat a ar 3 2 +rlrte irr(rrr 1?, 1N9...

...In truth, it is not really a problem for Kennedy, for he takes his philosophy straight, with no chaser: There is (or ought to be) no racial kinship, no sense of racial or ethnic affinity...

...Therefore, they insisted, nonwhites' right to vote could be exercised meaningfully only if they were 'empowered' to vote en bloc, as members of 'protected' racial classes, in districts drawn to elect blacks or Hispanics...

...Short-term intensive residencies designed for the active professional...

...In the first, he makes the case against liberal racism in three uneven chapters dealing with crime, voting rights, and the news media (Read: the Ne u, York Time's...

...Liberals, Sleeper asserts, have sold their birthright of high principle for a mess of pottage...