artists to achieve an equally dominant position in the popular music industry? How did Oprah Winfrey, a black sharecropper’s daughter from Mississippi, become mother-confessor to millions of lower-middle-class white women (and a billionaire in the process) without affirmative action? Page has no answer. And he doesn’t even address the most striking implication of his anecdotal encounter with racism as a youth: The kind of discrimination that upset him then has, in affirmative action, been systematized and elevated to a national policy.
The primary reason most conservatives oppose affirmative action is one that is given almost no attention by progressives eager to attribute base motives to their opponents. Racial preference is an offense to the core values of American pluralism, which depends on individual rights and the neutrality of government toward all its communities. Affirmative action is a threat to inclusiveness, because privilege is established as a group right and enforced by legal coercion. Affirmative action—which is in practice, despite all denials, a system of racial preferences—is a threat to what Felix Frankfurter identified as “the ultimate foundation of a free society . . . the binding tie of cohesive sentiment.” Affirmative action based on principles like geographical diversity constitutes no such threat, but policies based on race do. Racial preferences are a corrosive acid, eating at the moral and social fabric of American life. Every time a black leader refers to the paucity of blacks on the faculty of Harvard or in the upper reaches of corporate America, the automatic presumption is that white racism is responsible, not factors contributing to individual merit or the lack thereof. The legal concept of “racial disparity” employs the same assumption. The idea that government must compel its white citizens to be fair to its minority citizens presumes that white America is so racist it cannot be fair on its own account. This involves supporters of affirmative action in an illogic so insurmountable it is never mentioned: If the white majority needs to be forced by government to be fair, how is it possible that the same white majority—led by a Republican president named Richard Nixon—created affirmative action policies in the first place?
There is no answer to this question because, in fact, affirmative action was not created because of white racism. It was created because of widespread black failure to take advantage of the opportunities made available when legal segregation was ended. Since the politics of the left are premised on the idea that social institutions determine individual outcomes, this failure had to be the result of institutional rather than individual factors. Whites led by Richard Nixon accepted this fallacious argument and, because they did not want blacks to be second-class citizens, created affirmative action programs.
If affirmative action works, as Page implies, it does so in ways he does not mention. Its primary achievement is to have convinced black Americans that whites are so racist that some external force must compel their respect and, secondarily, that blacks need affirmative action in order to gain equal access to the American dream. The further consequence of this misguided remedy has been to sow a racial paranoia in the black community so pervasive and profound that even blacks who have benefited from America’s racial opportunities have been significantly affected in the way they think. How significantly is revealed in the almost casual way the paranoia surfaces: “‘Black is beautiful’ was the slogan which made many white people nervous, as any show of positive black racial identification tends to do.” Does it? The television mini-series Roots was one of the most significant milestones of positive black racial identification—an epic of black nobility and white evil purporting to represent the entire history of American race relations. It was not only produced and made possible by whites, but also voluntarily watched by more whites than any previous television show in history. Conversely, most of the negative stereotypes of blacks in today’s popular culture are the work of black stars and directors like Martin Lawrence and Spike Lee and the “gangsta rap” industry, which celebrates black sociopathic behavior.
In gauging the size of the chip ominously perched on black America’s shoulder, few measures are so choice as the following passage from Page’s book:
Black people may read dictionaries, but many see them as instruments of white supremacy. They have a point. Dictionaries define what is acceptable and unacceptable in the language we use as defined by the ruling class [sic]. . . . The dictionary’s pleasant synonyms for “white” (“free from moral impurity . . . innocent . . . favorable, fortunate . . .”) and unpleasant synonyms for “black” (“. . . thoroughly sinister or evil . . . wicked . . . condemnation or discredit . . . the devil . . . sad, gloomy or calamitous . . . sullen . . .”) are alone enough to remind black people of their subordinate position to white people in Anglo-European traditions and fact.
In fact, white lexicographers had nothing to do with identifying Clarence Page and his racial kindred as “black” in the first place. When Page and I were young, blacks were called “Negroes” and had been called that or “colored” for hundreds of years. The word Negro has no such negative connotations, moral or otherwise. It was Malcolm X who first embraced “black” as a term of pride, and made “Negro” a term to connote the white man’s pliant black, the “Uncle Tom.” After Malcolm’s death, Stokely Carmichael and the new radical civil rights leadership aggressively took up the label with the slogan “Black Power” and demanded that “black” be used as a sign of respect. Accommodating whites complied. For more than a generation now, the majority of whites have ardently wished that black America would finally get what it wanted from them—and be happy about it.
When all the layers are peeled from the discussion of “racism” in Showing My Color, we are left with a disappointing residue of hand-me-down Marxism:
Modern capitalist society puts racism to work, wittingly or unwittingly. It populates a surplus labor pool of last-hired, first-fired workers whose easy employability when economic times are good and easy disposability when times go bad helps keep all workers’ wages low and owners’ profits high. . . . Racism is one of many non-class issues, such as busing, affirmative action, or flag burning, that diverts attention from pocketbook issues that might unite voters across racial lines.
This is simple-minded, sorry stuff, unworthy of Clarence Page or any other intellectual (black or otherwise). The problem with the black underclass is not that it is underemployed, but that it is unemployable. Blacks who have fallen through society’s cracks don’t even get to the point of being “last-hired.” The flood of illegal Hispanic immigrants into areas like South Central Los Angeles, displacing indigenous blacks, shows that the jobs exist but that the resident black population either won’t or can’t take them, or are not hired for some reason other than their minority status. The fact that one in three young black males in America is enmeshed in the criminal justice system—a fact that Page doesn’t begin to confront—doesn’t help their employability. Once again, the category of race provides a convenient pretext for a massive denial of problems that have very little to do, specifically, with racial prejudice.
In fact, the racial conflict in America is being driven not by economics or even white prejudice, but by radical political agendas—by Clarence Page’s friends on the far left like Manning Marable, Ronald Takaki and Michael Lerner, all of whom have provided blurbs for Page’s book. The very phrase “institutional racism”—necessary because there are so very few overt racists available—is, of course, a leftist invention. It is also a totalitarian concept. Like “ruling class,” it refers to an abstraction, not a responsible individual human actor. You are a class enemy (or, in this case, a race enemy) not because of anything you actually think or do, but “objectively”—because you are situated in a structure of power that gives you (white skin) privilege. Page is astute enough to see that if racism is defined as an institutional flaw, “it does not matter what you think as an individual” and therefore such a definition offers “instant innocence” to the oppressor. But he is not shrewd or candid enough to see that it imputes instant guilt as well. While absolving individual whites, it makes all whites guilty.
The belief in the power of institutional racism allows black civil rights leaders to denounce America as a racist society, when it is actually the only society on earth—black, white, brown or
