Enjoining discussions about race in America is like mountain biking with nitro-glycerine in your backpack. I've been to the mountaintop, but I did so in the days before mountain bikes and backpacks when climbing was done with quiet determination. Now from a neighboring peak, I sadly witness the steady rumble of explosions like an X-Games blooper reel. I'm getting tired of listening.
What's happening in American discussions about race is disheartening to me on the whole. That is because the kinds of outrage one is most likely to hear is the kind that attends the failures of the privileged to get more privileges. Surely black politics is migrating from civil rights to social power, but too many folks have forgotten what basic justice is all about. All the high falutin' outrage doth grate mine own nerves.
A casual examination of several key incidents over the past few years leads me to the provisional conclusion that few things will correct this degrading situation. One of them is the crusade of Ward Connerly. Connerly faces two enormous challenges. The first is that his interpretation of Civil Rights Law is mostly devoid of the context of the Civil Rights Movement. Matters of racial justice are wholly different than matters of racial privilege, by conflating the two, he overemphasizes the importance of his rant against privilege and demeans the struggles of the 60s generation. He would do much better by not appropriating, but perhaps he's too old to change. The second is simple. He's not elected, he is merely a political consultant - a domain rife with hacks and charlatans. It is not enough to be a good guy on a noble mission, and the price he pays is that he is forced to lie down with dogs. Even he cringes at the mention of 'quotas' by some of his Republican cronies.
Connerly is the titular head of a cause without any rebels. Like Reparations, the cost of not addressing it is low. The failure of his proposition in California, like the failure of Pete Wilson's bid for re-election marks the end of an era. The culture wars are over, and the good guys won. It cannot be refought and every time he brings up his subjects, the shushing will get louder.
Reparations itself is yet another principled fight better left unfought. It doesn't stop people from trying, and in this matter the black senior citizen in charge of bringing the noise is Randall Robinson. I find him both singularly brilliant and utterly befuddled. His book, The Reckoning left me so profoundly disappointed I question my own abilities as a judge of character. But his character is beside the point. The Reparations debate is about as useful as that putting a human colony on Mars.
We have become a country whose racial debates are framed mostly by the opinions of a select few. Race is no longer the all consuming issue it once was. So many battles have been won, so many retired warriors keep rehashing their prior glories, the debate has become stale and ossified. This leaves most folks in a quandary. And yet the outrage that attends these debates seems both so predictable and real that they cannot be ignored - yet we do year after year, black history month after black history month. We shout, we sweat, we get frustrated, we calm down, we go home. We prepare for the next time.
I am beginning to believe that this kind of outrage becoming common is defacto evidence of the failure to create a substantial anti-racist coalition across the two parties. Much of the blame falls to liberals who have assumed a false leadership based on the premises of 'race relations', although conservative intransigence and ignorance has contributed mightily.
As David Bernstein notes, anyone anywhere seems to have license to cause a panic by claiming racism. Even as I have worked to generate dialog and consensus on the web for a few years, I find things coming apart. What I believe we are witnessing is a fundamental disagreement with what racism actually is and how closely we should examine it, if at all. We are doing so with a striking amount of unanimity that racism exists and that it must be fought, but the inability to define and put the existence and effect of racism in commonly held terms has disabled all effective combat.
This is a problem of will and priority, because of all of the problems we Americans study that of race is probably more well understandable than any. The problem remains in getting over the elementary hurdles and barriers to discussion. People have to want to talk constructively about it. By and large we don't.
As I said a few days ago, there is no question that if Johnnie Cochran were made Assistant US Attorney for Civil Rights, all racial chalkline walkers would be on immediate notice. If every tender American out there wants racism ended, why can we not make such a thing happen? I think it's because all of the partisans want total victory, which only proves an unwillingness to see eye to eye and work hand in hand.
On this MLK Weekend, you can rest assured that people will temporarily wake up their passions. That is if they are not too tired from skiing or armchair quarterbacking (Go McNabb!). This temporary lucidity is yet another step in a circular dance that goes nowhere.
America's racial history is a scar on our face long past healing and too deep for makeup. We have grown accustomed to our face. There is no getting around the fact that there will be no bipartisan adjudication. The future of race in America will be like wildflowers in Chernobyl. The catastrophe is buried in immovable concrete. What's past will never be systematically smoothed over or fixed. But those are real flowers.
Alright that was metaphor hell, but I'm too tired to talk about it and so are you.
You're not? OK go here.
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