Race and Cowardice
Back in February, 2009 – shortly after he became Attorney General of the United States – Eric Holder got on his high horse and remarked, “Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial, we have always been, and we, I believe, continue to be, in too many ways, a nation of cowards.” The fact is, Holder asserted, “we, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about things racial.”
Holder was, of course right. Most of the time, we avoid talking about race relations in this country. And, more often than not, when we do so, we are less than frank. We act as if we are walking on eggs. But Holder and those who cheered his remarks misconstrued what is amiss. For soon after he made this statement, as J. Christian Adams and Christopher Coates have recently revealed, political appointees within the Department of Justice began to press for a racially discriminatory enforcement of civil rights law, and we can be confident that this would not have happened had Holder himself not been hostile to the notion that all Americans are owed equal protection under the law.
White Americans are extremely cautious about what they say regarding race – not, as Holder and his admirers suppose, because they are secretly racist but because they have good reason to be afraid that, if they speak the honest truth, they will be branded as such. Consider what was done to Victor Davis Hanson earlier this month.
Hanson is a columnist for The Chicago Tribune, a contributor to Ricochet, and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He writes also for National Review Online and for his website Works and Days. At the very end of September, he posted a piece on Works and Days in which he commented on the manner in which “the unbelievable can become accepted,” and in this context he said the following concerning higher education:
Most of what we are told about universities is untrue. America’s reputation for higher learning excellence (in business, sciences, medicine, engineering, and finance) is despite not because of the humanities and social sciences. Current research in the liberal arts (the portfolio the English or sociology prof is tenured on) increasingly has almost no relevance to the general public or applicability to teaching or even scholarly merit.
Diversity is Orwellian: the university is the most politically intolerant and monolithic institution in the country, even as it demands the continuance of tenure to protect supposedly unpopular expression. Even its emphases on racial diversity is entirely constructed and absurd: Latin Americans add an accent and a trill and they become victimized Chicanos; one-half African-Americans claim they are more people of color than much darker Punjabis; the children of Asian optometrists seek minority and victim status.
Meanwhile on the labor front, liberal faculties prove far more illiberal than K-Mart. Part-time faculties now account for 40% of the units offered at many universities, earning 30-40% of the wages per unit of full professors, and mostly without benefits. There is no outrage from those who customarily damn CEOs from the lounge. Tuition rises faster than both inflation and the cost of health care, and yet the twin promises of a BA degree are no longer kept: today’s graduates are not so likely to get a choice job, and are not certified as literate in English or competent in math.
At some point, all this cannot go on, and we will have the academic version of September 15, 2008 — as parents no longer choose to take on $200,000 in debt to send their children to 4-year liberal arts schools, in which they will be likely indoctrinated that they should oppose the very American institutions that created the wealth and freedom that fuel their colleges and pay their faculties.
The second of these four paragraphs was soon thereafter reprinted under the rubric Notable and Quotable on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal, and five days later The Stanford Daily News extracted the last sentence from that paragraph and denounced Hanson’s remarks as “absolute trash,” as an example of “vitriolic ignorance,” as an expression of “bigotry,” as “toxic,” and “despicable.”
More to the point, the editorial ended with the following demand:
Worse yet, Hanson’s words reflect badly on Stanford through his association with a research center supported by this university and housed on this campus. The editorial board understands the Hoover Institution cannot be held responsible for all the public statements of its scholars, but strongly urges the institution to repudiate or, at the very least, review Hanson’s remarks. Surely, gross generalities couched in racially charged language cannot fit with Hoover’s mission.
It is worth stressing that the Hoover Institution includes preeminent scholars in a variety of disciplines. From Nobel Laureates to former high-level public policy officials and advisers, many of the foremost minds at Stanford and other universities contribute to Hoover’s work. These professors offer serious academic research that adds significant value to policy discussion and to the intellectual community on campus.
Hanson’s despicable words provide the Hoover Institution the perfect opportunity to clarify its role in American politics. Purposeful academic research or derisive, unfounded cheap shots: which will it be? The editorial board expects and hopes that an institution producing distinguished research to inform policy debates will wholeheartedly reject the sort of remarks Hanson made.
Thus, we issue this editorial as an open challenge to the Hoover Institution. If you find fault with Hanson’s grossly generalizing remarks and wish to be a leader in the discussion of modern American universities, then please: let us know.
If you do not, we hope you realize the damage you do to this university’s standing and to the well-being of higher education in America.
What the editors of The Stanford Daily failed to realize was that – in attempting to silence Hanson, to put the Hoover Institution on the spot, and to intimidate others who might be tempted to join Hanson in indicting what amounts to an ethnic spoils system, they were proving his larger point. The “diversity” that universities such as Stanford purport to embrace really is “Orwellian,” for in recent years – in part because what passes as “diversity” serves as a tool for enforcing ideological uniformity – our universities have become “the most politically intolerant and monolithic” institutions in the country. Certainly – as the editors of The Stanford Daily have unwittingly demonstrated – the last place in America where one could hope to have a frank discussion concerning the sad state of racial relations in this country is on its campuses.
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Jul '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
Let me try a bold tie-in to the bullying nonsense currently in the news.
Young people (teens, young twenty-somethings) are fanatical about enforcing social norms. While some bullying is old-fashioned male dominance enforcement, most of it is actually norm-enforcement. Whether the accepted norm is good, bad or neutral, young people will seek to beat into submission (usually metaphorically) anyone who deviates from the norm.
Diversity is, today, one of those norms on campus. To question it is to threaten the standing of those whom embrace it.
As with all bullies, the proper response is to (metaphorically) punch these little twerps in the nose.
Re: Race and Cowardice
Patrick Shanahan: Let me try a bold tie-in to the bullying nonsense currently in the news.
Young people (teens, young twenty-somethings) are fanatical about enforcing social norms. While some bullying is old-fashioned male dominance enforcement, most of it is actually norm-enforcement. Whether the accepted norm is good, bad or neutral, young people will seek to beat into submission (usually metaphorically) anyone who deviates from the norm.
Diversity is, today, one of those norms on campus. To question it is to threaten the standing of those whom embrace it.
As with all bullies, the proper response is to (metaphorically) punch these little twerps in the nose. · Oct 15 at 6:08pm
Amen.
Aug '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
Shanahan's analogy opens more truths: the academy is clogged with faculty members that are in a profound state of arrested adolescence. They are unable to interact with adults to the same degree as, say, people in business or the military, or even certain sectors of government. But, then again, their Peter Pan universe is replenished with a new crop of freshman every twelve months. These academic gangs work in disciplinary fiefdoms juiced up with cash from government and Lefty foundations and certified by august, prize-granting organizations. Essentially, it is all organized around gatekeeping. Oh, the profs don't molest the undergrads too much (apart from scrambling their thoughts), except the really vulnerable ones. But the graduate students and fellows seeking admission to the community, these are ground under the most extreme, intolerant, political scrutiny. The journal articles--no so much works of creative brilliance and rigorous inquiry as they are conforming as assignments from the feudal lords--are the academic version of tattoos. Long live Hanson!
Edited on Oct 15, 2010 at 7:31pmMay '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
Just yesterday I posted a response to a law professor's comments about racism in the Tea Party movement. Wondering what the Executive Director of an "Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity" is paid at Ohio State, I looked it up. This was a mistake, as I learned my salary is below one-seventh that of a faculty member whose political commentary is indistinguishable from the average MSNBC anchor's.
Aug '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
Jason, do not loose heart. Your comments were, indeed, much more cogently constructed than the drivel from that law professor. Regarding the relative disparities of your respective salaries, remember, ill-gotten wealth is the certain destruction of its possessor. Your salary is your advantage. The faux conservatives, deluded by the superficiality of the American-Dream, as though that were what it is all about, will be also be forgotten. Keep thinking, keep writing and keep fighting!
Oct '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
“Holder was right ... we avoid talking about race relations in this country.”
I agree with every major point (so shouldn’t write one word more) but I’m compelled to quibble. “We” don’t avoid talking about “race relations” any more or less then we avoid talking about other hopelessly jargonized dribble seeping like mental sludge out of the academy. Most people care about ethnicity or race only to the extent it means an invitation to someone’s home might involve an unusual and flavorful meal combined with interesting and preferably funny stories about their family life and upbringing. “Race” (more accurately, selective race- and ethnicity-based grievance mongering) is an obsession of the chattering class, especially its politicized members (like Holder) for whom it has identifiable utility. Most people get along just fine in our remarkably diverse society with nary a thought about “race relations,” save a legitimate concern about fetishistic manipulators foisting race-based double standards on them (see Cambridge police arrest of H L Gates). They hope not to have their reputation destroyed or their career harmed with baseless ‘guilty-till-proven-innocent’ accusations or unfair labor practices (see Sotomayor ruling in New Haven firefighter exam case.)
Re: Race and Cowardice
I wonder. My sense is that there is very little socializing between African-Americans and those who are not African-Americans and that African-Americans exhibit dislike and distrust for whites on a considerable scale. One crucial indicator -- the intermarriage rate -- suggests that we remain strangers to one another. One cause of this is our past history, of course. Affirmative action -- now there we have a euphemism! -- is another. It is a public policy that teaches that racial difference is important.
Aug '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
I've had a few black friends over the years, and broached the subject of race with each of them more than a few times; but none of them ever wanted to talk about it on any level. Was it cowardice? It appeared so to me, but I can't be sure.
Some blacks of the Jesse Jackson variety are getting rich off of this national wound, prodding, poking, and scraping it raw for the shakedown value. Jackson regularly profits from rule #13 of Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals; 1971): "Identify, isolate, freeze, and escalate".
Jackson looks for a corporation with a perceived vulnerability and identifies it as "racist", isolates it by using the media, freezes it by exaggerated or false accusations, and then escalates the issue by threatening legal action. At this point, corporations know it's cheaper to pay off in cash rather than fight an extended battle in court.
Barack Obama and Attorney General Holder are trying to accomplish on a grand scale what Jackson and others of that ilk do on a small one. If they succeed, the United States of America - as we have known it and loved it - will be finished.
Jul '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
My son graduated this year with honors from a university and entered graduate school in Texas. He has a mildly conservative bent, but I have urged him to conceal this because of the hostile sea in which he swims. "Act like a double agent," is the advice I gave. And he has, concealing his views in spite of the most arrant nonsense spouted from the head of the classroom. But just about every week he says, "Dad, it's so hard." Much of a recent class session was devoted to pondering how a respected writer fifty years ago could have used the phrase "drunk as a Navajo." Anyone who has spent any time on an Indian reservation knows how genetic-based alcoholism has devastated the culture. But the pitilessness light of fact-based observation is unwelcome in the toxic smog of political correctness that shrouds discourse in modern times lest feelings be hurt. And forget commonsense. It reminds me of Soviet times when language was manipulated to create a official reality to which its cynical subjects played only lip service. Meanwhile, there are promising auguries that society has awakened and is withdrawing financial and other support from higher education.
Oct '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
Professor, I’ll defer to you on that … presume there’s social scientific data that affirms a particular problem with African-American cross-racial interaction. We have to own our abominable history of oppressing blacks, a history that makes mistrust unsurprising. Then too, we have an abolitionist and civil rights history to be proud of. In any event, this narrows the topic considerably—to one racial minority with a unique history in America. This discussion was focused broadly, where the picture is similarly mixed but intermarriage, for instance, is perhaps more pronounced.
I’ll confess I swim in an unrepresentative sea . . . the most racially and ethnically integrated major institution in America, the military. It does seem that the prospect of bleeding for one’s country tends to evaporate unimportant distinctions.
Aug '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
Beginning as a casual observation, then as a more deliberate practice, I use to try to see how often I could get a black passerby to greet me when I smiled and tried to make eye-to-eye contact. The frequency of accomplishing this is much lower than with other whites. Of course, I--being white--am unable to do the necessary complimentary trail: how many eye contacts with smiling initiated by blacks are responded to by whites. My guess is that American blacks shoot themselves in the foot with their irrational hatred of whites. Many of these whites are from ethnic groups that had not even arrived on the American stage until well after the Civil War (e.g. the Slavs, who were--by the way--noted by the Romans to be very easily enslaved, thus a potentially sympathetic group for the American Black). This indiscriminate, unwarranted hatred of white individuals (there are no other kinds of whites), is a self-imposed handicap.
Re: Race and Cowardice
For what it is worth, my experience is that relations are less fraught in the South than in the North.
Oct '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
Down here in the south, we haven't been discussing Barack Obama's presidency much with our black friends and co-workers. But this has nothing to do with cowardice and everything to do with good southern manners and respect. We rednecks understand the emotional investment than many African-Americans have in the first black president. But we also know that they see what we white folks see. They read what we read, hear what we hear, feel what we feel... but we leave it alone out of respect and friendship.
I was reminded of the column written by Mike Royko in 1972, the week Jackie Robinson died. It's the second essay on this webpage
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/730719.html
So please read it and tell me that if would be a good and decent and courageous thing, right now, to open up unwanted conversations with our African-American friends about Barack Obama's presidency. Or would it be better to leave things unsaid for awhile? Me, I'm going to leave it alone. If that makes me a coward, so be it.
Jun '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
Not just "our black friends and co-workers," Herb. Many of us have probably found that President Obama is not a subject for honest conversation with any of our liberal friends, not if we value the friendship. During the campaign, my view that "You can't seriously think that this community organizer, adjunct professor, Chicago-machine state senator, and partial first-term US senator is qualified to be president?!" was answered with a moon-calf adoration that seemed totally based in racial-guilt (and extensive self-congratulation). The better part of valor was to distance one's self from Bull Connor and change the subject. Now, the same friends are twice as sensitive due to inchoate buyer's remorse. There is nothing I could say on the subject that wouldn't be heard as "Told you so"
Oct '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
David Schmitt
Beginning as a casual observation, then as a more deliberate practice, I use to try to see how often I could get a black passerby to greet me when I smiled and tried to make eye-to-eye contact. The frequency of accomplishing this is much lower than with other whites. Of course, I--being white--am unable to do the necessary complimentary trail: how many eye contacts with smiling initiated by blacks are responded to by whites. My guess is that American blacks shoot themselves in the foot with their irrational hatred
Remember how much America varies by regions. I was recently disappointed to learn there are few isolated poor black neighborhoods on the west coast I can volunteer in (one of my life goals is figuring out how to teach poor blacks to take advantage of economic freedom, which their leaders actively discourage since it involves hard work, responsibility, marriage, etc--and undercuts the power of victimizers).
Edited on Oct 18, 2010 at 1:16amAug '10
Re: Race and Cowardice
Holder, as Solicitor General under Clinton, spoke to one of my classes while I was in law school. He didn't shy away from talking about things racial then.
On the other hand, one of the best classes I ever had while in undergraduate school was a history class called "Southern Autobiography." In it we read a broad range of authors like Samuel Watkins' Co. Aytch, Will Campbell's Brother to A Dragonfly, Melton McLaurin's Separate Pasts, Anne Moody's Coming Of Age in Mississippi, Harriot Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Wm. Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee, etc. The lesson I learned from the class is that I don't know what it is like to walk a mile in another's shoes because I can only walk in mine and my life is not "the universal." But, neither is anyone else's and we should try to seek to understand & correct ourselves when necessary first, then seek to educate others.
Edited on Oct 18, 2010 at 6:41am