Intellectuals and Race (19 page)

Chapter 7

T
he kind of collective justice demanded for racial or ethnic groups is often espoused as “social justice,” but could more aptly be called
cosmic
justice, since it seeks to undo disparities created by circumstances, as well as those created by the injustices of human beings. Moreover, cosmic justice not only extends from individuals to groups, it extends beyond contemporary groups to intertemporal abstractions, of which today’s groups are conceived as being the current embodiments.

Against the background of world history, the idea that an absence of an even distribution of groups in particular endeavors is something strange, or is weighty evidence of discrimination, is a dogma for which evidence is seldom asked or given— and a dogma that defies vast amounts of evidence to the contrary. Yet that dogma survives on the basis of contemporary peer consensus, even among those who take pride in considering themselves to be “thinking people.” Yet this unsubstantiated presupposition of the prevailing vision is so powerful that its reverberations are felt, not only among people in the media who are ready to burst into indignation or outrage at statistical differences in outcomes among groups, but even in courts of law where employers, mortgage lenders and others whose decisions
convey
some of the differences among groups are presumed to be the
cause
of those differences— and are charged with proving their innocence, completely contrary to the practice in most other aspects of American law.

Among intellectuals who confuse blame with causation, the question-begging phrase “blaming the victim” has become a staple in discussions of intergroup differences. No individual or group can be blamed for being born into circumstances (including cultures) that lack the advantages that other people’s circumstances have. But neither can “society” be automatically assumed to be either the cause or the cure for such disparities. Still less can a particular institution whose employment, pricing or lending decisions
convey
intergroup differences be automatically presumed to be
causing
those differences.

Even if one believes that environment is the key to intergroup differences, that environment includes a cultural legacy from the past— and the past is as much beyond our control as the geographic settings and historic happenstances that have left not only different individuals or races, but whole nations and civilizations, with very different heritages. Too often “environment” is conceived as the immediate surroundings today, when the cultural legacy of the past may be an equal or greater environmental influence, depending on the circumstances.

If the dogmas of multiculturalism declare different cultures equally valid, and hence sacrosanct against efforts to change them, then these dogmas simply complete the sealing off of a vision from facts— and sealing off many people in lagging groups from the advances available from other cultures around them— leaving nothing but an agenda of resentment-building and crusades on the side of the angels against the forces of evil— however futile or even counterproductive these may turn out to be for those who are the ostensible beneficiaries of such moral melodramas.

Nor can whole cultures always be left unchanged while simply tacking on new skills, since the very desire, efforts and perseverance required to acquire and master those skills are not independent of the existing culture. Moreover, the corollary of the presumed equality of cultures— that existing disparities are due to injustices inflicted by others— reduces a felt need to subject oneself to the demanding process of changing one’s own capabilities, habits and outlook.

The perspective of cosmic justice is implicit in much of what is said and done by many intellectuals on many issues— for example, best-selling author Andrew Hacker’s depiction of people like himself who tend “to murmur, when seeing what so many blacks endure, that there but for an
accident of birth, go I.”
¹
However valid this may be as a general statement of the vision of cosmic justice and cosmic injustice, the word “endure” implies something more than that. It implies that the misfortunes of those on the short end of cosmic injustices are due to what they must endure at the hands of other people, rather than being due to either external circumstances that presented fewer opportunities for them to acquire valuable human capital or internal cultural values which worked against their taking advantage of the opportunities already available to them.

In this, Professor Hacker has been in the long tradition of intellectuals who more or less automatically transform differences into inequities and inequities into the evils or shortcomings of society. Among the many feats of verbal virtuosity by Andrew Hacker and others is transforming negative facts about the group that is considered to be the victim of society into mere
perceptions
by that society. Thus Professor Hacker refers to “what we call crime,” to “so-called riots,” and to “what we choose to call intelligence.”
²
Such exercises in verbal cleansing extend to racism, from which blacks are definitionally exempt, according to Hacker, by the newly minted proviso of possessing power
³
— a proviso which serves no other purpose than providing an escape hatch from the obvious. All this clearly puts Hacker on the side of the angels, rather explicitly when he says, “On the whole, conservatives don’t really care whether black Americans are happy or unhappy,”
⁴
as presumably liberals like himself do.

Professor Hacker expresses empathy with those blacks who work in predominantly white organizations and “are expected to think and act in white ways”
⁵
— the same kind of objection made by Latvians and Czechs in times past, when acquiring another culture was the price of their rising in a world where their own culture did not equip them with the same prerequisites for achievement as Germans already had. Apparently people are to think and behave as they have in the past and yet somehow get better results in the future— and, if they don’t get better results, that is considered to be society’s fault. Achieving the same results as others, without having to change, in order to acquire the same cultural prerequisites that others acquired without changing, would be cosmic justice,
if it happened
, but hardly a promising agenda in the real world.

Multiculturalism, like the caste system, tends to freeze people where the accident of birth has placed them. Unlike the caste system, multiculturalism holds out the prospect that, all cultures being equal, one’s life chances should be the same— and that it is society’s fault if these chances are not the same. Although both caste and multiculturalism suppress individual opportunities, they differ primarily in that the caste system preaches resignation to one’s fate and multiculturalism preaches resentment of one’s fate. Another major difference between caste and multiculturalism is that no one was likely to claim that the caste system was a boon to the lower castes.

As for more general questions about racial or ethnic identity, the costs of an identity ideology include not only the advancement that is forfeited, but also the needless disadvantages of letting people who represent the lowest common denominator of a group have a disproportionate influence on the fate of the group as a whole.

If criminals, rioters and vandals from within the group are to be automatically defended or excused for the sake of group solidarity, then the costs of that solidarity include not only a lower standard of living, since such people raise the costs of doing business in their neighborhoods and thereby raise the prices of goods and services above what they are in other neighborhoods, such people also cause fewer businesses to locate in their neighborhoods and fewer taxis to be willing to take people to such neighborhoods. Worst of all, the damage committed by those representing the lowest common denominator— encompassing crimes up to and including murder— is overwhelmingly against other members of their own group.

The high costs of putting race-based solidarity ahead of behavior and its consequences include letting the lowest common denominator become a disproportionate influence in defining the whole community itself, not only in the eyes of the larger society but also within the community. When middle-class black youngsters feel a need or pressure to adopt some of the counterproductive attitudes, values or lifestyles of the lowest common denominator, including negative attitudes toward education, lest they be accused of “acting white,” then the life chances of whole generations can be sacrificed on the altar to racial solidarity. Yet a sense of the overriding importance of solidarity based on race extends far beyond children in school
and goes far back in history. Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 classic,
An American Dilemma
, pointed out that it had long been the practice of black Americans to “protect any Negro from the whites, even when they happen not to like that individual Negro.”
⁶

When outsiders’ criticisms of any segment of a community cannot be either accepted or refuted, the response is often to claim that these critics are “blaming the victim.” But this whole concept confuses blame with causation. The masses of less educated and less acculturated blacks, whose migrations out of the South in the twentieth century and whose arrival in Northern cities led to retrogressions in race relations in the early part of the century— and whose later arrival in west coast cities during the Second World War led to similar retrogressions on the west coast— could hardly be blamed for having been born where they were and having absorbed the culture which existed around them in the South. But that does not deny these migrants’ causal role in the changes for the worse which occurred in cities outside the South after the Southern blacks’ arrivals there.

No one in John Rawls’ “original position” as a disembodied being contemplating alternative circumstances into which to be born would have chosen to be born black in the South of that era. From a cosmic perspective, it was an injustice to those who were. But that is very different from saying that their mass migrations in search of a better life did not impose large costs on both the black and white populations already residing in the Northern cities to which they moved, or that these latter had no right to resent these costs or to try to protect themselves from them. The inherent conflict of these different legitimate desires and interests in each of these groups is part of the tragedy of the human condition— as contrasted with a simple moral melodrama starring the intelligentsia on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.

The intelligentsia’s feats of verbal virtuosity reach their heights— or depths— when discussing the crime rate among blacks in America. For example,
New York Times
columnist Tom Wicker responded to an incident
in which a white woman jogging in Central Park was gang raped by black youths, by denying that this was a racially motivated crime. Wicker said, “the fact that the victim was white and the attackers black does not seem to have caused the crime.” He added:

          But if race does not explain this crime, race was relevant to it. The attackers lived surrounded and surely influenced by the social pathologies of the inner city. They hardly could have reached teen age without realizing and resenting the wide economic and social gap that still separates blacks and whites in this country; and they could not fail to see, and probably return, the hostility that glares at them undisguised across that gap. These influences are bound to have had some consequences— perhaps long repressed, probably not realized or understood— in their attitudes and behavior.
⁷

The “wide economic and social gap” between blacks and whites that Wicker referred to was even wider in earlier years, when it was common for whites to go up to Harlem at night for public entertainment or private parties, and common for both blacks and whites to sleep out in the city’s parks on hot summer nights during an era when most people could not afford air-conditioning. But sleeping in parks— or in some cases, even walking through some of those same parks in broad daylight— became dangerous in later and more prosperous times. Yet here, as elsewhere, the prevailing vision often seems impervious to even the plainest facts.

The role played by many people who, like Tom Wicker himself, have incessantly emphasized “gaps” and “disparities” as injustices to be resented, rather than lags to be overcome, is seldom considered to be among the candidates for inclusion among the “root causes” of crime, even though the rise of crime is far more consistent with the increasing prevalence of such grievance and resentment ideologies than with other things that are considered to be “root causes,” such as poverty levels, which have been declining as crime rates rose. Resentments, based on ideologies of cosmic justice, are not confined to the intelligentsia but “trickle down” to others. For example, right after charges of gang rape of a black woman were filed against white students on Duke University’s lacrosse team in 2006, angry reactions from a black college in the same town reflected that same vision, as reported in
Newsweek
:

          
Across town, at NCCU, the mostly black college where the alleged victim is enrolled, students seemed bitterly resigned to the players’ beating the rap. “This is a race issue,” said Candice Shaw, 20. “People at Duke have a lot of money on their side.” Chan Hall, 22, said, “It’s the same old story. Duke up, Central down.” Hall said he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted “whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past.”
⁸

Implicit in these statements are the key elements of the cosmic justice vision of the intelligentsia— seeing other people’s good fortune as a grievance, rather than an incentive for self-improvement, and seeing flesh-and-blood contemporaries as simply part of an intertemporal abstraction, so that a current injustice against them would merely offset other injustices of the past. There could hardly be a more deadly inspiration for a never-ending cycle of revenge and counter-revenge— the Hatfields and the McCoys writ large, with a whole society caught in the crossfire.