A comment on racism and opportunity in the black experience

...In short, I don't think Steele and other neoconservative proponents of the "enemy-memory" argument know what they are talking about...

...In a similar vein, we find Shelby Steele claiming, "Victimization is a form of innocence and innocence always entitles us to pursue power" —a strictly Epsteinian formulation, with all the implicit crypto-racist Epsteinian lampooning of blacks' incredible travail under the racist yoke of American civilization...

...for, from the neoconservative and right-wing perspecA Reply to Shelby Steele tive, the source of blacks' problems is located in black individual psyche and individual behavior patterns, not in American social, economic, and political processes...

...Just recently two stratification analysts (Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen, The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America, 1987) revisited Thomas Sowell's data on West Indian mobility, such as his claim that "West Indian representation in professional occupations is double that of blacks, and slightly higher than that of the U.S...

...and what is particularly bad about this "enemy-memory" is that this "dangerously powerful memory . . . can pull us [blacks] into warlike defensiveness at a time when there is more opportunity for development [mobility] than ever before...

...Quite the contrary...

...The above-mentioned issues overlap another facet of Steele's argument—namely, his claim that blacks typically confuse what he calls the "elimination of discrimination" with what he terms "racial development...

...It happens that the vestiges of America's racist past are massive (both today and over the past twenty years), and although the black version of "enemy-memory" may certainly distort blacks' measurement of these vestiges, this is hardly a reason for the right-wing claim that such racist vestiges no longer prevail or are operationally no longer significant...

...They also have spawned a plethora of professional associations for the purpose of combating the massive and vicious vestiges of American racism, seeking public policies (affirmative action for instance) to overcome the effects on black mobility of our centuries-old racist past—effects that only ahistorical neoconservatives could possibly believe dissolved with the enactment of the Civil Rights Act...

...Here again the ahistorical nature of the "enemymemory" argument—or this ancillary facet of this argument—is manifest...

...For blacks this individualistic imperative has been capriciously and massively circumscribed by America's racist realities...

...Furthermore, as Seymour Lipset has recently observed, despite a mobility level unmatched by any other American ethnic groups, Jews cling to an intense feeling of being victims, with some 75 percent of Jews believing that American society could be readily tipped in an aggressively anti-Semitic direction...

...Thus it is the height of naiveté—and perhaps just plain intellectual dishonesty, too—for analysts like Steele and Epstein to suggest that the Civil Rights Act created for blacks the equivalent of a "colorblind society," offering blacks a level playing field with whites...

...Twelve percent of the native men worked in the lowly-paid blue collar category of handlers, cleaners, and laborers compared with 7 percent of the foreign-born...

...Though Steele is correct in suggesting that ultimately blacks must master the individualistic imperative if they are to approximate mobility-parity with other ethnic groups, he is massively in error in his neoconservative pretense that this individualistic mastery by blacks can proceed without reference to America's racist past and this past's current racist vestiges...

...Again, I don't think Shelby Steele and other right-wing 520 • DISSENT COMMUNICATION proponents of the "enemy-memory" argument know what they are talking about...

...The pursuit by blacks of desegregation is putting the cart before the horse, as it were...

...Epstein indulges in unseemly rhetorical wordplay on what he considers to be blacks' oversensitivity about America's racist legacy—a kind of rhetoric Epstein would never apply to the vicious history of anti-Semitism in the West and the Holocaust in particular...

...Steele, himself black, surprisingly takes this nonvictim view of blacks' status as far as militant white neoconservatives like Joseph Epstein, who, in a New York Times Magazine article titled "The Joys of Victimhood," mocks any notion of blacks-asvictims, claiming that "a victim . . . is someone who insistently declares himself a victim...

...Hence, if in the America of the post–Civil Rights Act era, strong, individualisticminded, self-identifying blacks (the type preferred by neoconservatives) do not aggregate themselves into organizations and coalitions to combat the massive vestiges of American racism, no amount of what Steele glibly calls "racial development" is either conceivable or attainable...

...These racist patterns were even partly authoritarian with regard to housing patterns and many job markets outside the South in this era, the era in the North of numerous white-mob riots against black communities and police-lynching practices against thousands of individuals...

...First, Steele's notion of "enemy-memory" (his major explanatory proposition) and its corollary, "objectivecorrelatives," rests on a major premise that is never explicitly articulated...

...For Steele, "racial development" is the correct response to American racism, for it concerns essentially "individuals within the race bettering their own lives...

...Racial development," then, should be the primary concern, for it "demands individual initiative, challenging personal aspirations, focused hard work, and a strong individual identity [my italics...

...On the other hand, the "elimination of discrimination" perspective is, for Steele, altogether different, for it concerns "largely a collective endeavor . . Jrequiring] group solidarity, collective action, and a positive group identity...

...Jews represent a unique twist on the neoconservative "enemy-memory" argument...

...In Steele's analysis, the cart is truly before the horse...

...I daresay that few American ethnic groups can compare with Afro-Americans in regard to energy, initiative, and pragmatism, especially when such a comparison controls for the clearly more vicious and violent nature of the ethnic denigration of blacks compared to, say, Asian Americans, Jews, Italians, or the Irish...

...Notice, too, that Steele includes West Indians among those ethnic groups who, despite discriminatory patterns, have properly grasped the individualistic imperative and thus gained social mobility...

...Furthermore, it is clear that right-wing analysts will not allocate a causal role to the American racist legacy when analyzing the relative social mobility differentials between blacks and other ethnic groups, preferring instead to, as it were, blame the victim—in this case blacks' presumed failure to grasp the salience of the individualistic imperative in American culture...

...And unless blacks face up to this psychoemotional irrationality and give it up, the current black/white mobility gap will remain indefinitely...

...After all, if racism—whether structural, normative, attitudinal, and so on—is not eliminated or at least reduced to a benign level, the chances for development (social mobility) of any black individual are problematic at best and rigidly circumscribed at worst...

...But in emphasizing a greater individual responsibility among Blacks for social mobility and achievement, these progressive analysts take care to make clear that the life chances of black individuals (however fervent and pristine their individualistic identity) do not operate in a social and power vacuum, as right-wing analysts believe...

...One last point...

...This is pure fantasy, not serious and responsible analysis...

...This group includes myself, William Wilson, Troy Duster, Orlando Patterson, George Bond, Clement Cottingham, and Elijah Anderson, among others...

...That premise is this: that there is only an American racist past (that is, legalized housing segregation, public accommodation segregation, segregated public and private universities, lynchings, and so on), but there is no American racist legacy, owing to the Civil Rights Acts and subsequent legislation...

...If any American ethnic group warrants the "enemy-memory" prize I should have thought it goes to American Jews...

...If this fundamental premise is accepted, then the neoconservatives' denial of a legitimate victim status FALL • 1990 • 519 COMMUNICATION to Afro-Americans assumes a certain credibility...

...Steele goes so far as to claim that blacks' failure to grasp this dichotomy between desegregation and "racial development" is "one of the reasons why blacks have fallen farther behind whites on many socioeconomic measures in the last twenty years even as actual discrimination has declined...

...In other words, Steele and other neoconservatives posit that blacks' mobility over the past twenty years has not been hampered by a racist legacy in the form of persistent attitudes, values, norms, informal practices, private mechanisms, and so on, nor by formal institutions (economic, political, social) that, though legally desegregated, are in fact still riddled with racist forms...

...Indeed, for the neoconservative and right-wing analysts, blacks' mobility crisis is compounded by the political style of black leaders, who, according to Steele, "collectivize" blacks' "enemy-memory" by erroneously interpreting events like recent Supreme Court limitations on affirmative action as a correlative to black oppression (say, the equivalent to lynchings of the past...

...Second, inasmuch as the late-1960s civil rights legislation outlawed formal discrimination, this lack of black mobility cannot be attributed as such to American racism...

...Life chances of most black individualistic achievers are intricately conditioned and calibrated by myriad vicious racist patterns and motifs— patterns that were, in the 1880s to the 1960s, explicitly authoritarian in the South, where some 80 percent of blacks resided...

...population as a whole" (Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?, 1984, p. 77...

...Finally, somehow it never occurs to Sowell, Steele, and other right-wing analysts who glibly use FALL • 1990 • 521 COMMUNICATION West Indian data that, in comparison with black Americans, foreign-born blacks are, first, highly selective immigrants, and, second, were not victims of America's uniquely vicious and authoritarian racist past...

...They concluded that Sowell's sanguine claim "is quite exaggerated since in 1980, 14 percent of the foreign-born blacks compared with 11 percent of the native blacks held professional or executive jobs...

...Steele also claims that "objective-correlatives" — his phrase—are the sustaining psychocultural mechanism of blacks' obsessive "enemy-memory," by which he means a proclivity for interpreting or decoding current dissatisfactions in terms of some past oppressive or racist realities...

...Though his use of the West Indian example is appealing because West Indians in some respects experienced the same racist mode most black Americans suffered, it is not as favorable a comparison for his argument as he pretends...

...Even though Jewish Americans have structured a fierce "enemymemory" into a powerful world-Zionist mechanism, this "warlike defensiveness" (Steele's term) has not thwarted Jewish social mobility one bit...

...522 • DISSENT...

...Those groups that have somehow maintained this distinction (for historical and cultural reasons too complex to explore here) have thrived in America despite racism, anti-Semitism, and outright discrimination...

...Toward the end of his article Steele chastises blacks for favoring an excessive ethnocentric packaging of their "enemy-memory" and their collective identity (he calls this excess "inversion...

...First, he asserts that since the early 1970s the opportunity-structure in American society offers more space for social mobility and achievement than black Americans have effectively seized...

...My first response to this part of Steele's argument is that his dichotomy between "elimination of discrimination" and "racial development" is both ahistorical and false...

...Above all, blacks must recognize that no public policy solution is applicable to this situation...

...In short, in Steele's phrase, blacks suffer not from American racism but from a self-imposed "enemymemory...

...And, indeed, if glib right-wing critics of the black civil rights legacy took a moment to study what real-life black individual achievers are doing politically, they'd discover that it is precisely the new bourgeois class of black engineers, advertisers, capitalists, corporate lawyers, air pilots, computer technicians, and so on who attend by the thousands the annual convention of the Congressional Black Caucus...

...Another problem with Steele's argument is the suggestion that blacks outdo all other American ethnic groups in "enemy-memory" and its corollary "objective-correlatives...

...But because for Steele and other neoconservatives, oppressive or racist realities are all but extinct in today's America, "objective-correlatives" are an irrational mechanism...

...From where I stand, Shelby Steele should know better...

...There is a group of black American intellectuals (call them independent progressives) who have argued a progressive variant of Steele's basic position, which is that too many blacks shirk individual responsibility for social mobility and achievement...

...In this claim Steele and other right-wing analysts are actually calling for the veritable depoliticization of black Americans, at least insofar as such depoliticization entails a retreat from the aggressive use of public policy intervention as a means to combat the racist constraints upon the black American quest for the individualistic imperative...

...The point is that the individualistic imperative that is so much cherished by analysts such as Steele has, in fact, been massively qualified for the typical black American...

...There are numerous problems with Steele's new version of the right-wing attack on liberal and progressive approaches to overcoming the incredible marginalization of black Americans resulting from our society's racist past and racist legacy...

...Shelby Steele's argument ("The Memory of Enemies," Dissent, Summer 1990) has two intertwined parts...

...Steele claims that this impulse toward inversion . . . mudd[ies] the distinction between societal change and group development...

...This is the distinction that allows the group to assign responsibility for development to the individual...

...Instead, Steele and other neoconservatives attribute this black deficiency to blacks' obsessive identity-dependence upon a historical victim status, though classic racist victimizing realities are—according to neoconservatives—now minimal, not maximal features of American life...

...Only neoconservatives and other right-wingers have the insensitivity to assert or pretend that this authoritarian, capricious, and violent racist past lived by black Americans is somehow magically resolved by the mere enactment of civil rights legislation (legislation, by the way, many of them opposed when it was in the making), thereby putting blacks at competitive parity for social mobility with other ethnic groups...

...Asians, Jews, West Indians, and others have found their avenue for development in the aspirations of their individuals who have approached American society with initiative, energy, and pragmatism...