Liberal Racism
by Jim Sleeper
Viking. 195 pp. $21.95
Rare among liberals, Jim Sleeper declines to credit the good faith of everyone who claims to work on behalf of American blacks. In his first book, The Closest of Strangers (1990), the former New York Daily News columnist delved into a number of then-recent racial flare-ups in New York—the Tawana Brawley case, the black boycott of Korean-owned convenience stores, the controversy around the “wilding” attack by blacks on a white jogger in Central Park—and showed how self-appointed “healers” had manipulated racial feelings in the city in order to aggrandize themselves. In Liberal Racism, Sleeper again focuses on New York but also casts a wider net, scrutinizing not only activists but the elite academics and journalists who have shaped the politics of race in the country at large. He also states emphatically the controversial notion his earlier book only suggested: that “liberalism no longer curbs discrimination; it invites it. It does not expose racism; it recapitulates and, sometimes, reinvents it.”
For Sleeper, much contemporary liberal thought betrays an unhealthy fascination with the idea that “racial differences are so profound that they are almost primordial.” His opening chapters take aim at a number of examples. Thus, he dismisses the political scientist Andrew Hacker, who in Two Nations (1992) portrayed a monolithically racist white society holding down a monolithically hapless black one. And he revisits Alex Haley’s Roots, greeted as a classic upon its publication a quarter-century ago but in Sleeper’s view an essentially fraudulent book. To Sleeper, Haley’s well-documented plagiarisms are symptomatic of a larger imposture: the attempt to create a wholly separate historical mythology for American blacks. “The notion,” he writes,
that skin color carries a common destiny is itself the detritus of the bad scientific and cultural beliefs that bedraped 19th-century European imperialist states in all their clanking, blundering glory.
Sleeper devotes the middle of his book to the institutions that help promote the categorizing of Americans by race. For him, the New York Times is the Holy See of liberal racism. As evidence of the paper’s pervasive double standard, he points to two columns by Frank Rich. Writing of the 1995 Million Man March, Rich managed to condemn its organizer, Louis Farrakhan, while praising the “impassioned desire” that brought 400,000 of Farrakhan’s followers to Washington to pledge themselves to their families and their communities. But when, under the banner of the evangelical group Promise Keepers, a largely white male crowd filled Shea Stadium in New York to make a similar commitment, Rich could not damn the event vehemently enough: if Farrakhan’s legions represented the hope of black America, the Promise Keepers were nothing but extremists, “pushing the full religious-Right agenda.”
In the most penetrating passages in the book, Sleeper dissects the outlook not only of the Times editorial page but of its editor, Howell Raines. He is especially withering on a Sunday Times Magazine piece entitled “Grady’s Gift,” in which the Southern-born Raines mawkishly narrated the story of how a black housekeeper opened his eyes to the evils of segregation. All this gives bite to one of Sleeper’s keenest generalizations about liberal racists: “They behave remarkably like ‘quality white folks’ in the Old South, who condescended sweetly to blacks while projecting contempt for inferiors onto poor whites.”
The Times is hardly alone in exacerbating our racial—and ethnic—divides. Civil-rights organizations like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, loudly seconded by spokesmen for other minorities, invariably demand that group differences be codified in such quasi-separatist measures as the 1982 amendments to the Voting Rights Act. This legislation has produced outcomes like New York’s 12th Congressional District, which trickles out of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, crosses the East River, and runs off in a squiggly line through a half-dozen far-flung enclaves of Brooklyn and Queens—all to ensure that Hispanics can win a seat in Washington. The result: heightened tensions in neighborhoods now divided by a political boundary as well as by race. Thus do the politics engendered by liberal racism foster and deepen the very polarization they claim to combat.
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For all his disenchantment with today’s liberals, Sleeper is no conservative on race. If liberals err in their obsession with skin color, conservatives, he writes, are naive to insist that we can all compete on an equal footing. The free-market principles pushed by the Right do not reckon with the special historical disadvantages of blacks.
Between the Left and the Right, Sleeper thus concludes, there is very little to choose from in American politics today. And so in the last third of his book he tries to envision an alternative, one that will partake equally of universalist principles and particularist solutions. For Sleeper, that alternative lies in encouraging the forces of “civil society,” by which he means the network of informal and voluntary associations—“Little Leagues and bowling leagues, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, neighborhood-improvement groups, churches, parent-teacher associations”—that allow people to choose companions according to shared interests and to treat one another as individuals rather than as racial types.
It is through the medium of such associations that blacks can find, in Sleeper’s view, a way into the American mainstream. For a model of what he has in mind, he turns to the “Calvinist” society of 19th-century Great Barrington, the Massachusetts town that produced W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), the great historian, philosopher, and champion of black equality. Despite its sometimes ruthless parochialism, Du Bois’s hometown, with its high expectations of civility and public-spiritedness, did something right that we are getting wrong. Sleeper quotes Du Bois himself on “the gift of New England to the freed Negro”: “not alms, but a friend; not cash but character.”
Unfortunately, it is the institutions of civil society—from union halls to block associations—that liberals have most doggedly targeted as racist and, therefore, in need of a race-based reconstruction. Sleeper urges his fellow liberals to turn away from that approach and to focus instead on the moral possibilities of a thriving civic culture. Such a culture might draw on any particular “taproot”: the “passional communalism” of Southern black Baptists, the “class-tinted folkways” of West Virginia coal miners, the “solid, working-class black traditions” of South Side Chicago. But to succeed, it must aspire to goals shared by all Americans.
Liberal Racism is a welcome contribution to the current debate over race. But it is also disappointing. For one thing, the book is already somewhat dated, rehashing far too many episodes from The Closest of Strangers and dwelling on matters distant from today’s disputes. It would be hard to think of a deader horse to flog than Andrew Hacker’s five-year-old Two Nations, and racial gerrymandering has likewise become a less urgent subject now that the Supreme Court has thrown out as unconstitutional the more egregious congressional districts created by it.
More importantly, Sleeper’s admirable faith in civil society and his defense of it against contemporary liberals are deeply tinged with nostalgia. There is no going back to the small-town New England of Du Bois or even the working-class Chicago of the 1950’s. Civic cultures mature over generations; once you wipe one out, there is nothing to do but wait for another to grow.
Finally, Liberal Racism fails to show that any movement for black progress within liberalism is still viable. Capitalism may take no account of civil society, but government intervention of the kind prescribed by “liberal racists” destroys it. Sleeper’s own arguments leave a reader with the impression that economic progress—of the kind promised by capitalism—is the most trustworthy route to the color-blind citizenship for which he longs. But his on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand style of reasoning leaves a different impression: of a thinker stubbornly resisting being dragged any farther along the path to saying so.
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