CLASS NOTES
Reed, Adolph Jr.
CLASS NOTES Adolph Reed Jr. Yackety-Yak About Race So what the heck is a "national conversation on race," anyway? Like so much in what passes for public discussion in America these days, the...
...He'd have to explain his own half-hearted stand on affirmative action ("mend it, don't end it") and why he refused to provide any support for the mobilization against California's hideous Proposition 209...
...Some even blame attempts to preempt those market forces—through the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments and 1964 Civil Rights Law and 1965 Voting Rights Law—for creating racism...
...As it turns out, this national-conversation idea is just Bill Clinton's cup of herbal tea...
...He's only doing what comes naturally...
...The region nonetheless has undergone changes that would have seemed unimaginable thirty years ago...
...This brings us back to Bipartisan Bill's attraction to the conversation...
...It's the norm these days to make public issues a matter of personal feelings, and to separate beliefs from their social context...
...I remember hearing calls for this conversation a few years ago, first from former University of Pennsylvania President Sheldon Hackney, then from Lani Guinier and performance artist Anna Deveare Smith...
...Their argument boils down to this: Had there been no legal abolition of slavery, there would have been no white-supremacist restoration in the South, and had there been no civil-rights legislation, there would be no white racism...
...So they grant state employees the option to choose either Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday or Robert E. Lee's as a mid-January holiday...
...This interaction has begun to erode racist stereotypes and bigotry by establishing the basis for a shared mundane humanity in workplaces, schools, and other public venues...
...DuBois and American Political Thought" (Oxford University Press...
...For all his limitations—the Vietnam War chief among them—Johnson understood that the point in pursuing racial justice is not to stimulate conversation...
...No doubt Hackney and Guinier and others calling for this national conversation are well-intentioned...
...It doesn't make sense to feel betrayed by Clinton, however...
...Presenting white Southerners with a fait accompli was the only way to counter the cultural force of white-supremacist ideology...
...I certainly didn't suspect that the notion would go anywhere...
...What would the ground rules be...
...In the current anti-statist, market-worshipping climate, it is fashionable to deny that public authority can influence behavior and attitudes...
...A climate in which this kind of thought is credible makes twaddle like the need for a national conversation about race seem to make sense...
...Civil-rights laws, and affirmative action in particular, just stir up white hostility, since they are coercive, and an affront to properly market-based notions of justice and equity...
...What made these changes possible was civil-rights law, not attitude adjustment...
...He'd have to explain why he signed and supported the odious welfare-reform bill...
...Take, for example, the outrageous disparity in sentencing for possession of crack and powder cocaine...
...He'd have to explain why he proposed and pushed through a draconian crime bill that not only trades on the coded racist rhetoric of the anti-crime hysteria but also disproportionately targets inner-city minorities...
...forts to change whites' individual attitudes rather than on changing laws, Johnson made it clear that he was less interested in changing people's hearts than their public behavior...
...None of these notions is objectionable on its face, but that's partly because none of them means anything in particular...
...And the remedy isn't an elaborately choreographed pageantry of essentializing yackety-yak about group experience, cultural difference, pain, and the inevitable platitudes about understanding...
...He'd have to explain why his Administration resorts to the racialized language of inner-city pathology to justify its attack on the principle of providing public housing for poor people...
...Like so much in what passes for public discussion in America these days, the notion soothes and reassures, conveying a sense of gravitas, while at the same time having no clear, practical Aeaning whatsoever...
...It is this climate that makes it possible for a supposedly progressive magazine like Mother Jones not only to attack affirmative action as divisive, but to call for its demise in order to "reestablish racial healing as a national priority...
...It's an ideal vehicle for him to express his concerns about race, because it's not connected to any real substance...
...is a professor of African-American studies and political science at the Univerity of Illinois at Chicago...
...It is racial inequality and injustice...
...Blacks and whites can share public space more or less routinely, interact publicly in ways marked by the civility that presumes social equality, share work stations, and maintain the casual conviviality that normally pertains among co-workers...
...He'd have to explain why he made a central prop in his 1992 campaign an element of the lexicon of coded racism—his pledge to "end welfare as we know it" and his constant harping on an invidious distinction between those who supposedly "play by the rules" and those who supposedly don't...
...It just goes to show that Bipartisan Bill has the soul of a talk-show host...
...We should accept the equal humanity of those who support Operation Rescue, the Promise Keepers, the Christian Coalition, or the militia movement, but that cannot mean that we grant the legitimacy of their reactionary political programs...
...or "It takes a village . . ." Well, I didn't take into account the significance of a New South, psychobabbling baby boomer whose political opportunism comes with cybertechie, New Age flourishes...
...It's impossible, for instance, to imagine Lyndon Johnson using the Presidential bully pulpit to call for a national conversation on race in 1964 or 1965...
...I presumed that it would have the shelf life of slogans from political ads...
...When people like Everett Dirksen protested that the struggle for black civil rights should rely on efAdolph Reed Jr...
...Who would participate in this conversation...
...As we've seen, opponents of affirmative action also base their argument on their desire to stamp out "racial division...
...Segregation and other forms of discrimination were already on the decline after World War II for the same reason, say the market moralists...
...And to what end...
...A century earlier, opponents of Reconstruction made the same claim against people who supported black citizenship...
...Ironically, the "conversation" also reinforces a fundamentally racist assumption: the idea that individuals automatically can articulate the mindset of a group is a vestige of Victorian notions of racial temperament...
...I couldn't imagine how this call could possibly translate into anything concrete, though...
...A generation ago, segregationists charged civil-rights activists with creating racial divisiveness...
...It was also the only way to create an environment in which casual contact would occur between blacks and whites as presumptive equals...
...He has decided to keep this strange idea alive by formalizing it into a Presidential race-relations advisory board...
...Prohibiting discrimination by law not only enforced blacks' civil and citizenship rights, though that certainly was its intent and most important consequence...
...Bill Clinton has absolutely no interest in that kind of talk, however, and it's easy to understand why...
...If exuberant reformers hadn't gone mucking around with the larger rationality of the system of individual choices and transactions that drive market forces, everything would have turned out fine...
...Public intervention inevitably fails, so this twisted reasoning goes, because its artificiality breeds resentment...
...But the "conversation" also highlights the profound shift over the last generation in American liberals' ways of talking about racial inequality...
...Several Southern state governments have embraced a brand of multiculturalism that treats foes and advocates of white supremacy as equivalent "voices" equally deserving of respect...
...The saccharine language of multicultur-alism and respect, diversity, awareness, and healing is wonderfully evanescent...
...Economists and others who worship market theology contend that slavery and racial discrimination would have been eliminated by the natural workings of the market if abolitionists and civil-rights activists had just been a little more patient...
...As a mass-media metaphor, it seemed harmless enough: a way to evoke a national commitment to honesty and democracy...
...Where would it be held...
...It's just part of the fundamentally empty rhetoric of multicultur-alism: diversity, mutual awareness, respect for difference, hearing different voices, and the like...
...it amounts to a kind of racial-equality lite...
...Now that Clinton has glommed onto the national conversation, it won't just dissipate through the airwaves over time...
...Rather, we need a clear commitment by the federal government to preserve, buttress, and extend civil rights, and to use the office of the Presidency to indicate that commitment forcefully and unambiguously...
...But that doesn't mean the idea is any less vapid—or potentially destructive...
...If he did, he'd have to explain why he and his Administration have repeatedly pandered to the resurgent racist tendencies he purports to bemoan...
...Besides (and here's where this sophistry most clearly approximates religion), the white South would eventually have eliminated slavery on its own because the system was irrational economically...
...If progressives don't begin thinking in a more rigorous way about this kind of charade, we'll never stop talking in circles...
...The problem isn't racial division or a need for healing...
...You know, like "Where's the beef...
...His latest book is "W.E.B...
...The transformation of the South's racial politics has been incomplete, as the electoral success of governors Kirk Fordice in Mississippi and Fob James in Alabama demonstrate...
...As the lesson of the past three decades in the South makes clear, this is the only effective way to change racist attitudes and beliefs...
...The only difference between the two forms of the drug is the racial breakdown of users...
...Never mind that the Confederacy fought tooth and nail to preserve slavery and that white southerners fought nearly as hard to maintain Jim Crow...
...More than at any point in this century, white elites take for granted the need to take some notion of black interests into account when making public policy...
...Johnson understood that assertive government action can define acceptable practices and behavior, and ultimately change the world in which attitudes are formed...
...At the time, it seemed to be just a well-intentioned soundbite, a way to express in newschat a concern with racial injustice and anger...
...And whether or not we are willing to talk with them about our differences is less important than that we defeat their political objectives and repudiate the larger social vision from which those objectives derive...
Vol. 61 • December 1997 • No. 12
