State of Racial America

Columnist Dennis Prager has written an exceptional essay at NRO on the state of racism and race relations in America today. This from Mr. Prager:

When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, every prominent conservative I know was unhappy that a left-wing Democrat had been elected but very happy that a black American had won. Among conservatives, the general thinking was that it was good for America, good for blacks, and good for the world to see that America, so often (and in the conservative view unfairly) criticized as racist, could elect a black man as president.

True enough, with the caveat that it was obvious prior to the election that, Obama's promise to lead America into an era of post-racial politics was tripe. Everything in Obama's background, from his 20 year association with vile racist, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, to his role in law suits to enforce racial quotas in lending suggested otherwise.

For decades, the conservative position has been that the Left’s criticism of America as a racist country — one with “systemic” racism — was a calumny. We conservatives did not merely believe, we knew that America had become the least racist country in the world. That is why, among many other indicators, more blacks have emigrated from Africa to America than came here as slaves (New York Times, February 21, 2005). Apparently, these Africans did not believe the lie about America’s racism. They came here for liberty and opportunity and got both.

When it came to the likely consequences of the election of a black president, conservatives — including this one — were fooled. The election of a black president of the United States has evidently had no impact on the use of the lie about American racism. Just as the American people’s adoration of a black woman, Oprah Winfrey, and the appointment of two blacks — including a black woman — by a Republican president as secretary of state had no impact, so too the election of Barack Obama has had no impact.

If Mr. Prager was fooled, it was the triumph of his hope over objective reality. For more than four decades, the entire raison d'etre of the far left has been to place people in victim classes, demand special treatment, and to claim that every attack on their politics is some sort of illegitimate attack on whatever particular victim class. The flip side of that is the left's zero tolerance for any would be member of a victim class who refuses to toe the far left party line. This has nothing to do with actual racism or sexism and everything to do with political power. Thus, there is nothing that America could do, including the election of a black female lesbian transgendered disabled illegal alien president, that would convince the left to give up its politics of victimhood. They have lived by it. They will die by it. The facts do not matter.

Virtually every liberal commentator who has written or spoken on this issue has described political opposition to Obama — and not only that of the tea parties — as racist.

Now, the NAACP has demanded that the tea parties cleanse themselves of the racist elements in their midst. . . .

One year and eight months after the president’s election, one can say with certitude that the election of a black has done nothing to change the dominant story (because the Left dominates our stories) about American racism. It is as central to the liberal/left depiction of America now as it has been since the civil-rights era.

But there is one very big difference. The vast majority of non-blacks no longer cower before the charge of racism. You can see it in the anger and ferocity of various tea parties’ responses to the false accusation of the NAACP. Before the election of Barack Obama, an NAACP attack on one’s anti-racist credentials might have been debilitating. No more. . . .

That is not just a big difference, it is the unequivocal beginning of a titanic shift in American politics. When the cries of "racism" or "sexism" no longer operate to shut down debate or delegitimize an opponent, the far left will lose virtually its entire power base - and its deeply distorting hold on America's political discourse.

The charge of racism leveled by liberal organizations, whether black or white, is now regarded as the politically motivated falsehood that it is. It is rightly seen, along with its six siblings — sexism, xenophobia, intolerance, bigotry, homophobia, and Islamophobia — as the Left’s way of avoiding argument by demeaning its opponents.

People who are labeled something they know they are not — and conservatives know they are not racist — snap at a certain point. One day the charge loses all its moral power. That happened this past year as a result of the liberal attacks on conservative opposition to President Obama as racially based. Every conservative knows that opposition to the Democratic agenda has nothing to do with the president’s color. Does any liberal honestly believe that if Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid were president and pursued the same leftist agenda Barack Obama has, there would be less conservative opposition because Pelosi and Reid are white?

So, something good has come of this: the de-fanging of the “racist” label. It no longer intimidates conservatives as it once did.

But there remains a major downside. To the extent that black Americans still believe that America is racist, or even merely that conservatives are racist, they pay a terrible price. Nothing is more debilitating than to regard oneself as a victim when one is not.

For that reason, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People not only fails to advance colored people, it inhibits them. And one day most black Americans will know this.

We hoped that day would be Election Day 2008. Many Americans believed that the fact that a black man was elected president — and the fact that among 300 million people there was virtually no identifiable negative reaction to America’s having a black president — would finally prove that this country is essentially race-blind.

But that apparently did not happen.

Therefore, if the NAACP’s preoccupation with white racism reflects the thinking of most or even many blacks, it means that there is nothing white America can do to undo the ongoing perception of endemic racism in this country — a perception that is now considerably more destructive to blacks than to American society as a whole.

Unfortunately Mr. Prager's assessment is spot on. The most ill served by the far left's victim politics are the victims themselves.

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The Death of MLK & Racism In America Four Decades Later

Today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Eugene Robinson, writing in the Washington Post, takes stock of the strides we have made towards a post racial society as well as the lingering problems. What he does not address are the causes of the lingering problems as well as the limitations the left's identity politics imposes on our ability to debate and discuss solutions.
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This from Eugene Robinson writing in today's Washington Post:

Forty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, we sometimes talk about race in America as if nothing has changed. The truth is that everything has changed -- mostly for the better -- and that if we're ever going to see King's dream fulfilled, first we have to acknowledge that this is not an America he would have recognized.

On April 4, 1968, it was possible to make the generalization that being black in this country meant being poor; fully 40 percent of black Americans lived below the poverty line, according to census data, with another 20 percent barely keeping their heads above water. African Americans were heavily concentrated in the inner cities and the rural South. We were far less likely than whites to go to college, and our presence in the corporate world was minimal.

Today, about 25 percent of African Americans are mired in poverty. In many ways, being black and poor is a more desperate and hopeless condition now than it was 40 years ago. For those who managed to enter the middle class, however, most of the old generalizations no longer apply.

There remains a significant income gap between whites and blacks in this country, although it shrinks when educational level is factored in. But the gap in wealth, or net worth, is huge, even when you control for education, age, family size and whatever else you want to throw in. Still, African Americans control an estimated $800 billion in purchasing power. If that were translated into gross domestic product, a sovereign "Black America" would be the 15th- or 16th-richest nation on earth.

Forty years ago, not even 2 percent of black households earned the equivalent of $100,000 a year in today's dollars. Now, about 10 percent of black households have crossed that threshold. George and Louise Jefferson aren't so lonely anymore in that "deluxe apartment in the sky."

Then again, if "The Jeffersons" were being produced today, George and Louise probably wouldn't live in an apartment at all. More realistically, they'd be on a cul-de-sac in a suburban community. In Washington and a growing number of cities, more African Americans now live in the suburbs than within the city limits.

In a sense, then, the most striking measure of how far African Americans have come since 1968 isn't the rise of Barack Obama. It's the story of Stanley O'Neal.

That's not to minimize the prospect that a nation midwifed by slavery could soon have its first black president. But O'Neal did something that would have been equally unimaginable 40 years ago. He rose to become chief executive of Merrill Lynch, one of Wall Street's biggest firms; by all accounts, he was a taskmaster of a boss who cared less about whether subordinates liked him than he did about the bottom line. He placed big bets on mortgage-backed securities, generating record profits for the firm. When he got caught in the mortgage crisis several months ago and was forced to write off billions in losses, he resigned -- and floated back to earth with the help of one of the loveliest golden parachutes Wall Street has seen.

Oh, and his grandfather was born a slave.

Lacking family wealth accumulated by prior generations, middle-class black Americans are right to worry that their economic success is more precarious than that of many whites. But no one can deny that most African Americans today have opportunities that weren't remotely possible 40 years ago.

For those who haven't made it into the middle class, however, things are different. Inner-city communities were hollowed out -- a process accelerated by the riots that followed King's death -- and left fallow for decades. Middle-class professionals fled, businesses closed, schools disintegrated, family structures fell apart. Drugs and crime were symptoms of the general rot; the gentrification of recent years has just shifted the pathology from one part of the city to another, or perhaps to a close-in suburb, sweeping it into a corner.

The African American poor are a smaller segment than they were 40 years ago, but arguably they are further from full participation in society than they were in King's era. It's not that they have no interest in climbing the ladder, it's that too many rungs are missing.

It's misleading, then, to make any general statement about the condition of black Americans without recognizing black America's diversity. Economically speaking, there is one group of black Americans that has achieved success and one that hasn't -- and the distance between those groups is growing. To make more progress toward Martin Luther King's dream, we have to make an honest assessment of how far we've come -- and honestly account for who's been left behind.

Read the article. I believe Mr. Robinson accurately and eloquently states the tremendous progress towards a post racial society in America. And I beleive that he accurately identifies, in part, that there are lingering problems that have resulted in a disproportionate amount of our black population below the poverty level and, in many cases, rejecting traditional values.

Unfortunately, Mr. Robinson does not address the causes or solutions. Liberal solutions are not working, yet the left's identity politics has made any reasonable discussion about the problem impossible. If I ever hear Mr. Robinson or Mr. Obama state that criticisms of affirmative action programs or our other policies that impact on this situation are not inherently racist, then I think we may be moving into the final stages of Rev. King's dream of equality among the races.

Ironically, the initial promise of Barack Obama was to be able to end the identity politics and lead us onto that higher plane where honest and open discussion of race could occur. Obama's post-racial promise was to heal the divide brought on today far more by the left's identity politics than the shibboleth of systemic white racism. It promised to be a plane where the problems of the lower strata of blacks today could be realistically addressed without race cards being played.

That promise went out the window when Barack Obama spoke on race several days ago in order to defend his two decade long association with the poisonously racist Rev. Jerimiah Wright. He billed the speech as the start of a much needed dialogue on race. Yet he opened that speech by discussing the founding of our country and referring to slavery as white America's "original sin." That wasn't the start of any open dialogue on race, it was a game of 52 race card pick-up designed to forestall any cricitism of his association with Rev. Wright and Rev. Wrights vile racism.

I look forward to the day when America when MLK's dream of true racial equality becomes the complete reality. We are, in many ways, but a step away. It is unfortunate that I do not see anyone on the horizon who will help us to take those last few steps.

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Obama Is Not JFK

Tomorrow, Obama has stated that he will address race and his two decades of close association with Rev. Jerimiah Wright during a speech in Philly. I have seen several commentors on other blogs say they expect this to be Obama’s Kennedy – Catholic speech moment. It cannot possibly be.


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Tomorrow, Obama supporters are hoping that their candidate - already compared to JFK by many in the press - will assuage the national consciousness about racism in the same way JFK did on the issue of his Catholic faith. But JFK's issue with Catholicism and Obama's issues with racism are fundamentally different.

John F. Kennedy was baptized a Catholic at his birth. Unlike Obama, who made a conscious decision to join Rev. Jerimiah Wright and Trinity United Church as an adult, JFK’s religion was simply a part of his inheritance. Obama's adult choices reflect upon his judgment and character in a way JFK's Catholicism never reflected on JFK.

At issue with JFK in 1960 was the question of whether his Catholicism would dictate how he would lead America on social issues and the issue of religious freedom. JFK had to give assurances that as President, he would make decisions based on what he felt was best for America, not on the basis of Catholic dogma. There was no inherent dissonance between his religion and his duties as President. As he put it in his 1960 speech, "I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President who happens also to be a Catholic."

The situation with Obama is quite different. The central promise of his candidacy lies in his promise to be a post racial candidate who can heal the black white divide and, indeed, all other divides. It is a utopian promise indeed – and it is in direct contradiction to the fact that he has spent twenty years in a close relationship with a man who is an ardent, anti-American and divisive racist. It is in direct contradiction to the facts that he described Rev. Wright as a mentor on spiritual and secular matters, and that one of Obama's central themes - the audacity of hope - is based on a racist sermon given by Rev. Wright.

There is inherent dissonance between those facts and Obama's carefully crafted persona. I simply do not see how this can be "contained" with anything approaching intellectual honesty. What Obama cannot say is "I am the post racial candidate for President who happens also to have a decades long relationship with a man I chose as my pastor and whose raison d’etre is racism and claims of victimization by whites and jews."

As I said, I will wait for the speech. But all I expect from Obama is pure dissimulation. More and more, I am convinced that he is nothing more than an incredible con man.

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