Mouthing Cliches

...Mouthing Cliches Retreat to the Ghetto By Thomas L Blair Hill & Wang 253 pp $8 95 Reviewed by George Gilder Author, "Sexual Suicide," "Visible Man" It is understandable, if not excusable, when politicians prattle long-outdated pieties, the voters, who tend to suffer from cognitive lag, have to be reassured It is a more egregious failing when intellectuals adhere to terms that once served some useful purpose, but now merely obstruct observation and thought A case in point is race relations The United States is no longer a "racist society " It is practically impossible to find a man bearing any significant political, economic or social power who believes either that blacks are inherently inferior to whites or that they should be denied equal opportunities The old rhetoric about bigotry might make for rousing political speeches, it does nothing to explain the contemporary obstacles to black progress Social scientists, in particular, must do better In Retreat to the Ghetto Thomas L Blair, a young black sociologist, has conscientiously assembled a large body of material on American black culture and politics, and his intelligent, comprehensive survey should be useful to anyone interested in the subject But whenever he moves bevond journalism to analysis he falls into that same old declamatory jargon, a conceptual language that has become incapable of holding ideas Blair apparently still finds objective meaning in such phrases as "while pow-ci stiucture," "white Society, "white lacist institutions,' "fundamental social change," racialist norms," "social, economic and cultuial cmancipaHon," "social revolution," and, ubiquitously, "white racism " Regrettably, he is not alone To judge from their publications, the majority of American sociologists live in a world where these concepts evoke satisfying images, where to call for "the fundamental reform of the racialist white power structure" is to issue an identifiable demand for action To most of us, though, "racialism" is simply a euphemism for "racism," which has become a term of invective rather than exposition, "fundamental reform" is another way of saying "revolutionary change," which can mean anything from day-care centers to the dry look, and "white power structure" is a catchall designating mysterious demonologies that dissolve into hundreds of varying human and institutional relationships as soon as one takes a close look at them For the fact is that too many of these words don't correspond to anything real There are people in America who believe in black racial inferiority, of course, but the one place you are very unlikely to find them is in a structure of power What is more, "white society" and "culture," however defined, are riddled with black influences, while "black society" is pervaded with white forms and notions, neither white nor black society exists in a coherent or clearly calculable way And when Blair maintains that blacks are "dependent on white social and economic structures over which they have no control," he is only stating the condition of modern man Blair's narrow racial focus leads him to underplay the vast contribution of integrated blacks to American culture Thus he faithfully follows every twist and trope, every ideological quirk and Marxist sally of the black intelligentsia, from the inevitable Imamu Baraka to Rap Brown, from Ron Karenga to Alajo Adeg-bola, yet he ignores the two areas of American life where blacks most brilliantly dominate professional athletics and serious music O J Simpson, Julius Ervmg, Bill Russell, and Mohammed Ah (who, according to Money magazine, last year earned more than any other American, black or white), are virtually absent from these pages, as are Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Herbie Hancock (Igor Stravinsky and Darius Milhaud do appear ) Prominent are Angela, Ossie, Dons A , Sammy Jr , and Communist leader Benjamin J Davis, but not Willie or Miles Reading this book, one would not believe that in the year of its publication the leading American cultural event was the multimedia onslaught of Alex Haley and Roots, Tom Morrison wrote the best novel, General Chappie James was m charge of the air defense of the United States, and O J Simpson was both the most popular figure among U S teenagers and the country's most potent advertising image Blair prefers to sort out the influence of Franz Fanon and Mao on the thought of organizations—like the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (drum) and the Congress of African Peoples—that few blacks or whites have heard of Similarly neglected are black intellectuals and politicians who are too fully assimilated to suit him Thomas Sowell, one of the nation's most original and interesting thinkers on economic and racial subjects, is ignored Thomas Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, is mentioned only m a discussion of how black mayors are neutralized by having to pursue white votes (In general, Blair writes, "the city is a vast political plantation in which blacks are as surely bound to the white machine as they were to the white master during slavery And this latter day plantation has its black overseers as well ") Upper-class blacks make Blair seethe "Stylish and well fed, they are the peacocks of black chic Sometimes when talking to them in their lavishly furnished homes, their well appointed offices, at late night soirees, or in brilliantly lit theater lobbies, one feels they have lulled themselves into a state of fairy tale like complacency from which only a brutal shock will awaken them " The author obviously hopes the shock will come soon What is more probable, is that the "peacocks" will be joined m the suburbia by many more successful blacks, hardly any of whom will be interested in the kind of revolutionary "social change" regarded by Blair as the sign of true blackness Like other sociologists, Blair implicitly compares the U S with some ideal of egalitarian purity, nowhere fulfilled in freedom, and finds our country sorely wanting He is perfectly correct that there are far too many blacks unemployed, and too few running profitable businesses He is wrong to overlook as a cause the disastrous recent breakdown of the already much-afflicted black ghetto family (largely because of the welfare and poverty programs that he wants expanded), and to argue that black poverty is getting worse in material terms When all public benefits are included, poor blacks receive incomes that would make them middle class in most societies Unfortunately, the kind of government benefits demanded by many black leaders—and white liberals—would tend further to break the wills and families of ghetto men...

...Blair is distressed, too, that U S blacks are little interested in European or African musical and ideological tastes This is the great triumph of our multiracial culture Milhaud and Fanon and Sekou Toure are far less significant to any of us than Ellington, Martin Luther King Jr and Abraham Lincoln The United States will never be a country where anyone will enjoy much ethnic purity...

...Blair and his white sociological allies are dissatisfied not chiefly with the economic and social failures of our system, but with its successes with the fact that the majority of American blacks have left the lower class and no longer feel any more compelling a solidarity with the ghetto than wasps feel with Appalachia Most blacks, and most whites, are neither remotely Marxist nor even highly egalitarian They want to move up the class ladder, regardless of race or creed...