258 View Point
Race to the Bottom
President Jimmy Carter’s recent comments on racism in
America -- while no doubt well intentioned -- were ill-advised. Not because
racism is dead but because it is not dead.
But the brute fact of racism cannot be undone by pronouncement.
It simply does no good to attribute racial motives to your
opponents. It is both a non-starter and a non-finisher. If you’re wrong and your opponent is as
virtuous as Caesar’s wife you have committed an inexcusable breach of judgment not
to mention etiquette; if you’re right -- and your opponent is an unvarnished
racist -- let the facts speak for themselves. Your voice doesn’t need to join
that chorus. In matters of race, j’acuse gets
you nowhere.
It won’t transform a bigot into someone else nor will making
such a claim advance debate.
This is not to say that race doesn’t matter – it does – but
no one of us can see into another’s soul; at best, views on someone else’s
racism are exercises in speculation, saying as much about the speaker as the
subject. The Socratic admonition to “Know thyself” is as far as most of us can
hope to get. And as one person’s
speculation is as good – or as bad – as another’s there is simply no way to
know if someone is a racist (absent self-declaration). Indeed, better someone
guilty of closet racism go unremarked than innocents be falsely labeled.
Hold your tongue Mr. Carter.
I say this because one of President Obama’s great gifts to
the nation is a formal, de jure, end
of racism in our public life. While the taint of racism will be with us for
longer than I care to think about, it is slowly fading. The White House was the last bastion of white
privilege; (that it remains the last bastion of male privilege is another
matter.)
With official and even unofficial segregation behind us, no
longer is racism as blatant as it was in times past. Indeed, the public policy
successes in making officially sanctioned racism illegal have made it socially
unacceptable to be a racist in public. Thank God for small blessings. But ironically, because racism is no longer
socially acceptable, “measuring” racism is almost impossible except in the most
imprecise manner.
This is not to say that all measures of racial impact should
be abandoned – so long as race or social class is a predictor of performance in
school, for example, it is appropriate to consider race as a factor. (Though the potentially corrosive effect of
publically linking race and performance is worrisome; surely it must be painful
to be labeled as a potential low performer because of your race).
As President Obama has done it is far better to stick to policy
issues and rise above race. Policy issues can be debated on their merits;
racism cannot. It is flatly wrong and
brooks no compromise and tarring your opponents with the brush of racism simply
deflects discussion. Even if some of the criticism leveled at this
administration is racially motivated, pointing a finger of blame simply does no
good and serves no good purpose. Better
to rise above the ugly fray and take policy issues head-on.
Denis P. Doyle
September 22, 2009