that you and I should get along so awfully?
-- A Perfect Circle
Everybody remembers the lyrics from this 80s song. Nobody remembers the group.
As I begin to write this essay I am in a break between meetings at work. I am surrounded by men and women who appear to me to be from all over the world. I could most certainly say at least four nations amongst the 12 people. We all speak English, in varying accents to be sure, but we understand. We are 'diverse' but we are here for a purpose. It is not to get along with each other, it is to complete a task. It is an obscure task which involves computing and accounting that gets extraordinarily complex, tedious and nerve-wracking. We get along as a function of our purpose and we naturally subordinate our differences to the ends of that purpose.
I am a consultant. When I leave this place, six months from now, chances are that I will never see these people again. I will forget their faces, names, voices, attitudes, styles of dress, favorite foods, number of children and favorite topics of conversation. For the moment however, I will enter all such notions into my iPhone. Five years from now the records will still be there but all the meaning and immediacy will be lost. All I will care about is whether the project succeeded or failed.
Here at Cobb, I don't do race relations. I have a simple, standing moral repulsion to racism, that I don't think is particularly outsized. But I really don't care if people get along on matters of race. The reasons are simple, but it takes a long time to explain them. When it comes to questions about race relations, especially as they are in the news today, you always hear people echoing the sentiment of the Perfect Circle. The answer should be obvious, which is that we lack common purpose.
Except when it comes to race, the liberals of America have pretty much hijacked the conversation. Here's why. Many Americans strongly believe that positive discrimination works, and that it is, always and everywhere the best policy. And therefore when you boil it down there are two camps.
Ideological Tribe A
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained without regard to race, creed, color.
Ideological Tribe B
We believe that America is at its best when its mainstream is maintained with special regard to race, creed, color.
If you are an anti-racist activist, as I once was, then you almost certainly belong to the second tribe. You could not logically support Affirmative Action if you didn't belong to the second tribe. And you firmly believe that you can define, control and certify that special regard, keeping it in perfect moral balance. This is why such folks, as I used to be, could recite the terms of court cases involving racial discrimination Bakke, Hopwood, Grutter, Aderand, Brown and most recently Parents vs Seattle. We were meticulously monitoring, for our moral purposes, exactly how much you can take race into account and under what circumstances. It is a regime of ideological control that has failed America miserably.
But giant populations of people, especially Professor Gates himself and those of his current staunch defenders take it as axiomatic that special regard is the way to go. For example, white people should be sensitive to black people, because they are black. To them, race relations is a purpose and an end to itself. Whenever you hear the tell-tale words 'we still have a long way to go' it is an expression of their ethics. Their purpose is not to destroy race, but to create a fixed and permanent indemnification whose implications are stamped into law but whose weights and measures are under ideological control. That is why every year and after every significant racial excressence they desire and demand to have yet another national debate on the subject of race. Just so they get their words and priorities into the court of public opinion where they have had the upper hand since the passage of Brown.
The difficulty is that proposition flies in the face of equality, and everybody knows it, which is why Tribe B uses terms like 'social justice' and 'diversity'. They bridle at the suggestion that a black cop was involved in Gates' arrest and so have to go to extreme lengths to prove that the black cop mitigated the offense of the circumstance. They can't stand the idea that white suspects are arrested by black cops and diminish the significance of that testimony all over the web. They resent the very interchangability of race and assert the necessity of difference.
For what?
I come from a generation of black Americans whose parents were, by and large, born at home - not in hospitals. I highly value the level of courage and strength they grew because they faced adversity and grew muscle and character overcoming it aimed at the purposes of self-determination. I look at Americans today and I see too many weak people, test tube babies, who can't even seem to survive the sort of Brownian motion of ordinary misunderstanding. Skip Gates is my new milktoast symbol who has become the perfect Harvard snob and disgraces his raw Piedmont roots. In fact he is the perfect symbol of the sort of black American who disturbs all of our peace because his peace has been disturbed, and tries to leverage a dead conversation of morals where he's in over his head, and wrong anyway.
You want special regard Professor? You got it.
Equality before the law, is finally what is at stake, and our regard of it. Gates will try to wordsmith his day's discomfort, which probably rocked his feeble world, into some jeremiad of oppression. I cannot imagine that any foreign language news service would dedicate a day's attention to his words. That only goes to show how self-obsessed Americans have become over such trivial offenses and how haunted we are by the ghosts of yesteryear. Equality before the law is a serious matter deserving of the best of humanity's efforts, so we have to question whether or not Gates qua #gates, now twittered interminably, presumeably some credentialed student of history is giving us humans any useful lessons. Except that he remains dedicated to the purpose of extending the depth of the American race-relations rabbit hole, I think not.
Nobody remembers The Perfect Circle. Maybe they were on to something. Try singing the song by saying white people are white people or black people are black people. Doesn't work. Why? Because I'm a black man in America?
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