Ward Connerly Gets Pinched

...Having established that, at worst, Connerly is no less truthful than most people who mythicize their pasts, Bearak slogs into pits of racial self-loathing...

...his paternal grandfather, of French Huguenot and black descent, passed for white at the elite Cheshire Academy...

...This untoward probing of an unorthodox black thinker's personal life recalls the Times magazine's long, intrusive "story" two years ago about a personal estrangement between the essayist and scholar Shelby Steele, also a noted foe of affirmative action, and his brother, the psychologist Claude M. Steele...

...Shouldn't everyone at the Times become more "aware" of this...

...Perhaps I can be of some help, in the spirit of "diversity": My Lithuanian-Jewish background makes me exquisitely "sensitive" to some underappreciated cultural differences between German Jews and WASPs...

...Variety must be enhanced "through training...

...The paper campaigned against him and Proposition 209 and is devoting its resources not to understanding why 40 percent of black voters supported the initiative but to an effort to dismiss Connerly, who has galvanized revulsion against racial groupthink...

...Why not carry the battle into Sulzberger's private life, as his newspaper has into Connerly's...

...Suppose that, following Sulzberger's admonition, we asked him to help us understand how tensions between his own paternal German-Jewish heritage and his maternal Episcopalian upbringing (he grew up with his mother after his parents were divorced) have driven him to create 23 "diversity action teams" at the Times...

...Now, the Times's crude ascription of primordial differences to skin shades and surnames has revived 19th-century notions of race that are viciously divisive...

...Nor does Bearak note that many black leaders, such as W.E.B...

...Bearak has torn open a family's tragic, hidden hurts to stage a morality play whose lesson is that true blackness cannot be reconciled with a principled opposition to racial preferences...

...It marks the paper's demise as an arbiter of racial discourse...

...Let Sulzberger answer by explaining, as he has made Connerly do, the peculiar, conflicting roles his own ethnic shadings and personal family history played in creating the worldview he now holds...

...However much a hindrance [Connerly's blackness] may have been in other endeavors, it now offers him a paradoxical advantage," Bearak advises us...

...and since my book argues that diversity training is presumptuous, intrusive, and subversive of good journalism, I would have been guilty of those very crimes had I followed my first impulse...

...I suppose I could claim to be Irish," Connerly admits under questioning, "but who wants to stand there and argue the point every time...

...Most remarkably, Bearak tracked down the father Connerly has long believed abandoned him when Ward was an infant and died soon after...

...This excursion, too, yields less than Bearak lets on: He doesn't tell us that intraracial color prejudices have long run deeply and tragically among many blacks...

...If, for example, group "differences" are as important among whites as Bearak makes them seem among blacks, let's unpack them...

...The Times can't abide Con-nerly's insistence that blackness doesn't constrain him to understand the world as liberals think blacks must...

...The Times found, photographed, and interviewed the 84-year-old man, whose "mental faculties have gone dim," which understandably rattled Connerly...

...No such elitism bedevils Connerly, yet Bearak highlights his distance from one Eddie Hall, a poor, 72-year-old black Everyman who often shines Conner-ly's shoes in a garage...

...We have long known that liberal thinking on race has become so patronizing that it debilitates its intended beneficiaries...

...There, in an unprecedented 5,000-word front-page profile, reporter Barry Bearak examines the murky racial bona fides of Ward Connerly, champion of California's Proposition 209 against affirmative action and a formidable opponent of all racial preferences...

...Albert Schweitzer...

...Hall "has watched his own dreams diminish and then disappear," Bearak advises us, and he prompts Hall to comment that a colorblind society is "utopia and there's no such thing...

...Bearak opens by telling us that Connerly is only dubiously black because he has Irish, French, and Choctaw bloodlines...

...Jim Sleeper is the author of Liberal Racism, just published by Viking...

...It was not only impolitic but improper...

...Du Bois's own preoccupation with a black "talented tenth" may have figured in his abandonment of black America for fantasies of a pan-African destiny in Ghana...

...It is not enough just to hire a more racially and sexually varied work force," Sulzberger has told anyone who'll listen...

...It signals the Times's desperation in a losing battle over racial color-coding that it does not comprehend...

...Du Bois, were even more racially mixed than Connerly...

...Bearak does argue the point, not so much to deny Connerly's blackness, which would be impossible, but to discount the moral and political strength Connerly has found in being black while refusing to think "black...

...We are all going to have to understand those differences, be aware of them, know what they mean, understand that we don't all see the world or a moment in time in the same way...

...The story ends portentously with Connerly calling the father he never knew— who asks him, in the final words of the piece, "When you coming back this way...

...Du Bois was descended on his mother's side from a Dutch settler who married a slave...

...He can't find any noteworthy misdeeds in Connerly's personal or professional life, so he devotes six paragraphs to interviews with disgruntled relatives to establish that Connerly may have embellished tales he has told of leading a childhood in abject poverty...

...If I go to work at the New York Times, can I share this cultural wisdom with Arthur and others in a diversity workshop, like the one where a Puerto Rican Times reporter was told he needn't be ashamed because His-panics have "wonderful family values...

...Adolf Hitler...

...The Con-nerly story represents the full triumph at the Times of a mindset that the real Connerly and other Americans who have found their voices and courage are overthrowing everywhere else but on West 43rd Street...

...Bearak's mix of tabloid witch-hunting and dime-store psychoanalysis reinforces the notion that Connerly's strong beliefs grow partly from a shaky, perhaps twisted sense of his blackness...

...If this is acceptable journalism, then so would be an exploration of the family origins of Sulzberger's obsession with diversity on the other side of the battlefield...

...and that there is no greater peril to the social fabric than a guilt-ridden Episcopalian (unless, of course, it is an Episcopalian who feels no guilt...

...Ward Connerly Gets Pinched by Jim Sleeper AS I WORKED THIS WINTER on my book Liberal Racism, I had an impish notion: Why not examine how New York Times publisher Arthur ("Pinch") Sulzberger Jr.'s tangled ethnic and religious roots have nourished his obsession with diversity...

...We Lithuanian Jews "know" that German Jews can be repressed, abstract, and snooty (Shall I count the ways...

...He reveals that Connerly's maternal grandmother, who raised him after his mother died, seems to have had contempt for darker blacks and even for Con-nerly's father, whom she may have driven away during Ward's infancy...

...It is, in other words, a case study in liberal racism, in that it reduces an independent black man to a psychic can of worms...

...I nixed the project the instant I thought of it...

...Bearak also portrays Connerly as alienated from his family...

...Arthur keeps talking about the day being long past when the news will be told only through the 'straight, white male' point of view," a Times reporter told the journalist Robert Sam Anson for Esquire...

...For an object lesson in journalistic malfeasance of this sort, we need look no further than Sulzberger's own New York Times—specifically, to the Sunday, July 27 edition...

...Who is this white male...

...Instead of exploring other possibilities, Bearak takes great investigative and literary pains to suggest that Connerly is not an entirely honest man...

...There was Sulzberger's privacy to consider, public figure though he is...

...His blackness, he agrees with some reluctance, grants many whites a kind of absolution, allowing them to protest affirmative action 'without having to feel like they appear racist.'" The implication: Whites who support Connerly are racist, and Connerly fronts for them...

...So I'm black...

...The piece serves to reduce the political to the personal, to discredit Connerly by locating his opposition to affirmative action in a self-hating black grandmother...

...Since Hall never utters a word against Connerly, and asserts that "hard work, not affirmative action, is the answer," a desperate Bearak strains to fix Connerly as an elitist by informing us that even though he likes Hall, he doesn't know Hall's name...