Dinesh D'Souza's The End of Racism

...But this culture, dysfunctional in a free society based on open competition and limited government, today cripples black efforts at advancement and has spawned the illegitimacy, criminality, and hostility to hard work and educational advancement that, according to him, characterizes black America...

...Born in India and educated at an elite Jesuit school, Dinesh D'Souza came to the United States as a teenager and went on to attend Dartmouth, where as editor of the Dartmouth Review he became the darling of conservatives...

...What discrimination takes place today is a "rational response to black group traits"—illegitimacy, criminality, and a desire to live off the government rather than work...

...It contains truly outrageous assertions, such as that blacks owe American society a debt of gratitude for slavery, which brought them "into the orbit of modern civilization and Western freedom...

...The "Boasian ideology" of cultural relativism played a useful role in discrediting racism, but also, D'Souza insists (caricaturing the idea so as to make it unrecognizable) meant the end of any absolute values or standards of judgment...

...Two centuries ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote that blacks were inferior to whites in physical and mental capabilities...

...D 'Souza's account of American slavery begins with the truism that slavery has existed in many societies without resting on racial difference...

...D' Souza fails to understand that racism has always flourished as part and parcel of a system of power...

...It includes the Enlightenment but not the Inquisition, John Locke but not the Holocaust, Charles Darwin but not the Salem witch trials (or, presumably, the legions of creationists at the grass roots of modern conservatism...

...The only way to end such discrimination is for blacks to shape up and abandon their pathological behavior_ For a conservative attuned to the sanctity of individual rights and advancement based on merit—hence his attack on affirmative action and sympathy for its "thousands" of white victims—D' Souza is oddly indifferent to the social costs and individual injustice that would arise from unleashing "rational discrimination" as he proposes...

...Although D' Souza seems unaware of it, The End of Racism belongs to a genre that has long flourished in this country, one proclaiming the shortcomings of the character and intellect of black Americans...

...He calls, at the end of the book, for a renewed sense of morality and community, but his "public ethic of responsibility" does not include responsibility for less fortunate citizens, other than to let them sink or swim according to their "civilizational" abilities...

...The evidence, as in his first book, consists of anecdotes and sound bites, not careful social analysis...

...But, contrary to D' Souza, the loudest calls for stricter law enforcement today emanate from crime-plagued black neighborhoods themselves...

...He quotes my own work on the era of Reconstruction, but does not seem to fathom that the freedpeople's record of working hard, striving to educate themselves and their children, and establishing stable families refutes his idea that they carried out of slavery a culture unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom...

...it is apparently inconceivable to him that ordinary blacks had something to do with this history...

...Perhaps it is simply the lure of the cheap vote...

...Indeed, D'Souza favors the repeal of laws barring discrimination, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so that firms and individuals can act on the basis of real differences between groups...

...It tries to rewrite American history by demonstrating that slavery and segregation were far less racist and oppressive than is generally supposed...

...D' Souza credits Martin Luther King, Jr., with "almost single-handedly" bringing down segregation...

...Fortunately, says D'Souza, discrimination based on the belief in biological inferiority has disappeared...

...It seeks to demonstrate that liberal policies and the culture and behavior of African Americans, rather than racism, lie at the root of black Americans' problems...

...Beneath a façade of reasonableness, The End of Racism is a mean-spirited polemic whose constant allusions to "failure," "incapacity," and the "breakdown of civilization" among blacks pander to the basest prejudices of its readership...

...The belief that racism persists is a myth invented by the black civil rights establishment...

...He calls Boas the "founder of American antiracism," apparently unaware that long before Boas, black and white abolitionists had challenged the premises of biological racism...

...This argument is so absurd that he subsequently abandons it, referring to America's "racial slavery...

...Throughout the book, D' Souza describes racism as nothing more than an "opinion," a "point of view...

...But a few observations are in order...

...D' Souza acknowledges that drug use and illegitimacy are growing among whites...

...It does, however, raise some interesting questions about modern conservatism, and about the American Enterprise Institute, which nurtured the book and has done its best to promote it...

...David Duke has been "marginalized...

...Its account of history is misleading, its discussion of world cultures sophomoric, its analysis of current race relations simplistic...

...The role of government is not to offer day care or job training—that would be paternalistic— but to outlaw antisocial behavior such as childbearing by welfare mothers...

...No more satisfactory is D'Souza's portrait of contemporary black society and politics, ostensibly the main focus of his book...

...True, blacks tend to view the police and criminal justice system more skeptically than other Americans, a "rational response," to use D'Souza's language, to their historical experience...

...The free market has never been an equal opportunity employer...

...Jefferson worried that mastership inculcated among whites a domineering personality, a penchant for resorting to violence to settle every dispute...

...Europeans did not encounter other cultures as tourists or disinterested scientific investigators...

...But here is a book whose writing is pedestrian (it abounds with language like "racism requires biological inferiorization"), command of facts shaky, and arguments often incoherent...

...He utilizes William H. McNeil's writWINTER • 1996 • 107 Books ings on world history, but D'Souza's effort to demonstrate the superiority of the West to all other civilizations repudiates McNeil's lifetime of scholarship...

...He also argues, however, that these "pathologies" did not arise until the last thirty years...

...D'Souza never pauses to contemplate what lasting effects slavery and racism may have had on white culture...

...Despite the author's claim courageously to speak the "unspeakable" and offer a startling new outlook, his prescriptions consist of familiar conservative bromides—an end to affirmative action, faith that the free market will solve all social problems, a call for blacks to prove themselves worthy of equal treatment...

...Blacks may rely excessively on government handouts, but on this basis, defense contractors, farmers, real estate developers, and others also suffer from "civilizational" deficiencies...

...D'Souza seems incapable of viewing black Americans as actors in the nation's history...

...In the 1890s, as the nation retreated from its Reconstruction commitment to racial equality, prominent white educators and reformers gathered at Lake Mohonk for conferences on the "Negro Question," and concluded that blacks' problem was deficient "personal conduct and character," and that self-help, not national assistance or political agitation, offered the best route to racial progress Similar works in this century legitiWINTER • 1996 • 105 Books mated segregation and disenfranchisement...

...D' Souza belittles the long history of white violence against blacks (after all, he observes, only an "infinitesimal fraction" of the black population was lynched) without assessing the "civilizational" standards of people who brought their children to witness blacks burned alive in carnivals of hatred...

...Early in this century, the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students undermined the intellectual justification for racism by explaining the "civilization gap" between whites and nonwhites on the basis of history, environment, and culture, not innate inferiority...

...D'Souza has no empathy for the millions of black Americans struggling against difficult odds to carve out better lives for their families...

...Since racism has somehow disappeared, the main relevance of history for D' Souza lies in the culture blacks developed under slavery, to whose survival he attributes their current problems...

...he blames this on—you guessed it—cultural relativism...

...Faming D' Souza's argument about the present is a misconceived account ofAmerican and world history...

...race is a readily available proxy for individual capacity...

...It was perfectly logical for slaves to sympathize with criminals, denigrate hard work, take little interest in education, and, during and after the Civil War, look to the federal government for protection and advancement...

...But at what cost to American society...

...How do we know that black culture is hostile to education...

...While wishing to remove the state from regulating the economy or interfering with private discrimination, D'Souza would have it intervene in the most intimate details of private life, a common contradiction in conservative thought nowadays...

...His first book, Illiberal Education, strung together a series of anecdotes and incidents (many, it turned out, described inaccurately) to demonstrate that politically correct radicals had taken over American universities...

...Nor does history support his argument—based on laissez-faire ideology rather than any investigation of the facts— that employers in a market economy will find unwarranted discrimination inefficient...

...D' Souza writes that among poor black women it is a "common practice" to exchange sex for drugs...

...Later, D'Souza credits streetcar companies with organizing opposition to segregation around the turn of the century, ignoring the far larger black movement against these laws...

...Because of a few newspaper articles about students who resent those who study hard (not unlike the contempt for "grinds" when I was in high school...

...D'Souza's Western tradition is rational, liberal, and scientific...

...q WINTER • 1996 • 109...

...This may well happen among members of the drug subculture, but it is hardly "common" among poor black women in general, and D' Souza offers no evidence whatsoever for his assertion...

...D'Souza borrows factual information from scholarly works while ignoring the authors' overall arguments...

...D' Souza acknowledges that many blacks have moved into the middle class (although he never offers a breakdown by income or occupation of black Americans...

...But it allows him to argue that the Constitution was an antislavery document that respected the basic rights of slaves (an idea that would have surprised the Founding Fathers...

...Employers who refuse to hire blacks or banks that decline to offer them mortgages are obeying the law of averages, not acting on racial prejudice...

...Racism, which D'Souza defines as belief in the innate biological inferiority of certain racially defined groups, arose in the early modern era as an explanation among Europeans for the backwardness of societies they encountered in Africa, Asia, and the New World...

...The scope of the book's ambition is matched only by the extent of its failure...

...Jefferson admitted to a certain diffidence about advancing arguments that might wrongly degrade an entire race of people...

...Poor Boas: D' Souza holds him responsible for virtually every ill of modern society, from Afrocentrism, multiculturalism, and affirmative action to America's economic difficulties (since firms forced to hire culturally backward employees cannot compete effectively in the world market) and even the "new white racism" of David Duke (as valid an outlook as any other to relativists...

...He ignores Orlando Patterson's powerful demonstration that slaves themselves originated the notion of freedom as a universal right, as well as the fact that the first large-scale emancipation in this hemisphere occurred in Haiti, as a result of a slave insurrection by men and women mostly born in Africa...

...He went on to become a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where this book was written...

...Like many self-proclaimed defenders of "Western superiority," D' Souza fails to notice that "the West," as he uses the term, is as much an invention as the Africa imagined by the Afrocentric scholars he deprecates...

...Racism arose not simply to explain difference but to justify conquest, colonization, 106 • DISSENT Books enslavement, and economic domination...

...no such hesitation deters D'Souza...

...From this, and the fact that a handful of free blacks owned slaves, he concludes that slavery in the United States was not a racist institution...

...He condemns black scholars who write about underclass violence in "a tone of moral neutrality," yet he deploys the language of superiority and inferiority heedless of its effects on readers, and presents the most retrograde theories of pseudoscience (such as J. P. Rushton's linking of black brain and penis size, or Jans Eyseneck's "explanation" of black intellectual deficiencies based on the selection of slaves by traders for their physical strength) as "provocative," or "flamboyant," not insulting, reprehensible, or simply wrong...

...Antebellum southern writers produced innumerable works demonstrating blacks' innate suitability for slavery...

...What has happened to standards at the AEI, or, for that matter, editing at the Free Press...

...Actually, Duke received a majority of the white vote when he ran for governor of Louisiana, and The Bell Curve, whose arguments on the relationship of race, genetics, and intelligence fit D' Souza's description of the "old" racism, was a best-seller...

...Black culture lionizes criminal behavior, a residue of slavery, when the "bad nigger" was admired in the black community...

...Of course, some talented blacks may be unfairly denied opportunity, but one can hardly expect prospective employers to investigate closely the qualifications of each job applicant...

...He thus fails to see how historically it has been embedded in unequal power relations between groups defined as races...

...evidently the culture of slavery lay dormant for a century until unleashed by liberal "permissiveness...

...Indeed, D'Souza argues, while slavery has existed everywhere, only the West developed the idea of a natural right to freedom...

...Relativists, he claims, believe that all behavior, however pathological, must be respected and that no culture has the right to criticize another...

...As history and social analysis, The End of Racism cannot be taken seriously...

...Blacks should be grateful that white America freed the slaves "on its own initiative"—an odd way of describing a Civil War that left over six hundred thousand Americans dead, and in which blacks played a major part...

...Conservatives may in the future, as in the past, ride to power by stigmatizing black America as degraded, immoral, and "civilizationally" inferior...

...But he insists that the values and behavior of the "underclass" shape the "cultural norms" of all blacks, with their "vicious, selfdefeating, and repellent underside...

...Indeed, D'Souza's foray into world history, a tirade against what he considers distortions of the subject caused by multiculturalism, is among the book's more embarrassing sections...

...Moreover, while crime, illegitimacy, and the like are serious problems in some sections of black America, many of these "pathologies" are on the rise among whites as well...

...As black congressman Robert Elliott asked during Reconstruction, commenting on the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan, "Who is the barbarian here...

...Nowhere does D' Souza consider the effects of deindustrialization on black job prospects, the decline in the real value of the minimum wage, and other mundane matters that might have some bearing on the plight of poor blacks...

...In the end, D'Souza makes one wonder about the soul of modern conservatism...

...Like these predecessors and many others, D' Souza's investigation ends up blaming blacks for their own condition and justifying national indifference to racial inequality...

...American children should study other cultures, he believes, but only as "horrible examples" of barbarism and injustice...

...Private industry happily cooperated with and benefited from the segregation and disenfranchisement of blacks, and businessmen throughoutAmerican history have garnered profits from the relegation of black workers to menial, low-paid employment...

...In principle, there is no reason why this country cannot produce a coherent conservative outlook free from the taint of racial bigotry...

...The End of Racism typifies what happens 108 • DISSENT Books when one examines social problems from the cozy confines of a think tank, with no evident sense of real life and real people...

...Despite weighing in at nearly 600 pages of text and 140 of footnotes, The End of Racism is both superficial and endlessly repetitious, and its main arguments do not take long to summarize...

...Without real understanding of current historical debates, he simply reasserts the ideas that Columbus was the discoverer ofAmerica, Indians were savages, and that all one needs to know about Aztecs is that they practiced human sacrifice...

...It attempts to dismantle pragmatism and cultural relativism, central elements of twentieth-century thought, in favor of the nineteenthcentury idea that cultures exist within a fixed hierarchy ranging from savage to civilized, atop which sits Western civilization...

...Conservatives nowadays are fond of decrying the decline of intellectual and stylistic standards, caused allegedly by liberal academics...

...But such behavior, he adds, is more destructive among the poor than the well-to-do, since rich heroin users have access to expensive treatment programs not available to crack addicts on the street...

...Yet time and again, conservatives have found appeals to prejudice irresistible...

...He cites Edmund Morgan on the development of colonial slavery without confronting Morgan's insight that the evolution of American democracy was fundamentally tied to the exclusion of blacks from the body politic and that, contrary to D' Souza's account, Jeffersonian liberalism, slavery, and racism coexisted quite happily for many decades...

...Is this because the ideas of states' rights and local autonomy are so closely tied in our history to the defense of slavery and segregation, or because the federal government despised by free marketeers has been so powerful an instrument for challenging racial inequality...

...Of course, the reader might conclude from this that the government ought to offer more effective drug treatment to blacks...

...Space does not allow a full examination of the book's numerous inaccuracies (a task that has been assayed at greater length in devastating critiques by George Fredrickson in the New York Review of Books and Sean Wilentz in the New Yorker...