Excerpt: No Matter What ...They'll Call This Book Racist

By Harry Stein

INTRODUCTION 

Before I wrote even a word of this book, a number of people who wished me well suggested I drop the project. They knew the kind of books I’d done in the past, and of my tendency to kid around in print, and they suggested that in this instance that would be a very, very bad idea. As one bluntly put it, “You don’t make light about race in this country.” 

That was not my intention, I countered. My aim was to talk honestly about race, conveying views that, however legitimate or widely held, have been effectively branded as racist by defenders of the lamentable status quo, and so largely banned from public discourse. Indeed—credit where it’s due—the book’s title owes its existence to the famous Tea Party sign first spotted, as far as I can discern, in the hands of an anonymous witty soul at a 2009 rally in Cincinnati: “It Doesn’t Matter What This Sign Says, You’ll Call It Racist Anyway.” 

And, by the way, what’s wrong with a little irreverence on the subject? After all, there are those who make light about race all the time. Richard Pryor built a whole career on it, and so have dozens of his successors and imitators, more than a few of them wildly profane.

 Okay, I got it: What my solicitous friends meant is that white people can’t make light about race. Or, for that matter, say things in deadly earnest that violate the ever-evolving rules of what is permissible. And that holds especially true for white conservatives. 

I sincerely appreciated it all—I too live in the world of Al Sharpton and the New York Times, if only at its margins—but their concern also provoked a question: Why not? Aren’t the issues surrounding race, from the social fallout of single-parent families to the ways racial preferences distort the very meaning of equity and justice as embodied in the nation’s founding documents, of concern to us all? Moreover, hasn’t the impulse to ignore or justify or even celebrate behaviors that once would have been everywhere condemned as dysfunctional led to the collapse of standards generally? As a reformed white liberal I can say with complete assurance that white liberals share many of the same concerns, even if they’d be mortified to be overheard voicing them among strangers. 

Quite simply, the fear and unspoken prohibitions that have long governed the conversation about the single most important issue on the public agenda have served only to undermine genuine progress on the racial front. 

And the time has come to move past that. 

There are of course deeply compelling reasons that as a subject race is the extremely sensitive and awkward thing it is. As the historians aptly have it, slavery was America’s “original sin,” and in the century to follow, even second-class citizenship was a status denied to most of the nation’s blacks. The very terminology associated with the era—“separate but equal,” “poll taxes,” “lynching”—bespeaks a nightmarish state of affairs all but incomprehensible to the contemporary mind. It is wonderfully good (and quite remarkable) that, though that time was so recent that tens of millions living today vividly recall it, we almost universally look back upon it with shame and even incredulity. 

But shame is a psychologically complex thing, and never more so than when applied to Americans and race. For even as it has impelled us to examine our ugly past with unflinching honesty—with every elementary school kid nationwide versed in the horrors of the Middle Passage, and slave narratives all the rage with history grad students, and black oppression the leitmotif of every Ken Burns documentary—it has precluded anything approaching an honest view of race today; indeed, it has much to do with why such honesty has itself been routinely cast as racist. No one has written more compellingly about this deeply dispiriting phenomenon than the brilliant Hoover Institution scholar Shelby Steele. Since Steele is a conservative—and a black one, at that—people who read publications like the New York Times have mostly never heard of him, but he nailed the source of their racial attitudes more succinctly than anyone in the two-word title of his most important book: White Guilt. It is the widespread guilt over the terrible inequities of the past (and to a lesser extent, the obvious hardships faced by many blacks in the present) that causes white people, especially those who identify themselves as “enlightened” or “progressive,” to over and over, ad infinitum, give blacks a pass on behaviors and attitudes they would regard as unacceptable and even abhorrent in their own kind. This guilt has repeatedly, in fact, induced liberal whites—and even some not so liberal—to embrace policies that institutionalize not fairness but its opposite so as to appear to be on the right side of the racial divide. “The great ingenuity of interventions like affirmative action,” Steele writes, “has not been that they give Americans a way to identify with the struggle of blacks, but that they give them a way to identify with racial virtuousness quite apart from blacks.” 

Each of us, of course, has his own unique set of experiences with race, but having come of age during and in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement—that is, believing, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s most fundamental precept had it, that we should be seen as individuals rather than as members of a group—I suspect the ones that inform this book are representative of a great many well-intentioned Americans. That is why I raise Steele right up top. The moment I read him on white guilt, I experienced what certain feminists have taken to calling an “ah-ha moment.” I was in my late 30s at the time and, no question, he was describing not just me but pretty much every well-meaning white person I had ever known: All of us who had gone lazily along with the mainstream liberal racial flow. 

Good intentions. These have long been the currency in which liberal whites have traded, and where race was concerned, the family into which I was born boasted some of the best. Though by the time I was aware of such things my parents were Stevenson Democrats, they had been Communists, and remained proud of that fact (though for a time secretly) the rest of their lives. And in good measure—indeed, this is a large part of the romance of the left in general—it was because in the twenties and thirties the Communist Party was way ahead of the curve on the big social issues: fighting (and incessantly sloganeering) against poverty, sexism and especially racism. Nor was this merely a theoretical or tactical pose. For instance, it was CP lawyers who led the fight to save the Scottsboro Boys, the nine hapless black teens unjustly accused of raping a pair of white girls in Depression-era Alabama. My mother for a time worked as the secretary for James Ford, the black former postal worker who in the thirties twice ran for vice president on the Communist ticket. Decades later, she would tell us of hearing the stories of indigent blacks who’d journeyed to New York from the rural South to tell rapt young Communists of taking their lives in their hands organizing their fellow sharecroppers. “There was one fellow,” she recalled, and I have this verbatim, because I got it on tape before she died, “who looked like the Hollywood stereotype of what a Negro should look like, very black, huge ears, white teeth—like Stepin Fetchit. But this man had such dignity! I never forgot what he said about this dual life he had to live: ‘The only reason I’m alive today is that down South I shuffle, I say, Yassush, yas m’am.’ Otherwise, he said, they’d have lynched him a long time ago. It made such an impression on me!” 

And when my parents told such stories, they made quite an impression on my two brothers and me, too, as did what we heard from our more progressive teachers. My fourth-grade teacher in particular, the wonderful Mrs. Levin, talked ceaselessly about prejudice. She’d have us sing “You’ve Got to Be Taught” from South Pacific, and her rendition of the poem “Incident,” by Countee Cullen, had such a powerful effect on me I can still recite it by heart more than 50 years later. 

Once riding in old Baltimore, 

Heart-filled, head-filled with glee; 

I saw a Baltimorean 

Keep looking straight at me. 

Now I was eight and very small, 

And he was no whit bigger, 

And so I smiled, but he poked out 

His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.” 

I saw the whole of Baltimore 

From May until December; 

Of all the things that happened there 

That’s all that I remember. 

Still, by then my father had a successful career going in capitalist America, we were living in an affluent, all-white neighborhood in suburban New Rochelle, and the only two black kids in Mrs. Levin’s class and my elementary school were the sons of the United Nations ambassador from Ghana. So my brothers and I couldn’t help wonder sometimes: What’s going on here? Because pretty much the only Negroes our family had anything to do with on a day-to-day basis were the ones who worked for us—Edward, who did occasional odd jobs around the house and drove my older brother to Little League practice, and the various young women from the South who were our housekeepers. Among these, we grew especially fond of one who stayed a couple of years with us when I was approaching my teens. Her name was Del, and one evening my older brother and I, partly to be pains in the ass, but also because we meant it, began pressing our parents about her. Why was it that she was “Del,” while they were “Mr. and Mrs. Stein”? Why, for that matter, did Del serve us dinner, but never sat with us at the table? In their youth my parents had picketed Gone with the Wind for its portrayal of black people in general, and the black servants in particular, and it was clear this line of questioning made them extremely uncomfortable, which was highly gratifying. But to my mother’s credit, she at least tried to formulate coherent answers. That wouldn’t be the kind of relationship Del wants either, she said, such familiarity would make her uncomfortable. When we went on to press them about Del’s salary—if memory serves, less than a hundred dollars a week—she argued that that was the going rate, in fact more than the going rate, and infinitely more than she could make down South, and let’s not forget she also got room and board. 

At that point, we relented. It was fish in a barrel and just too pathetic.

Listen, I don’t want to overstate this—both my parents are gone now, and can’t defend themselves. And no one can doubt their good intentions. For in this regard, as in many others, my liberal parents truly were par for the course. Just about everyone we knew had a black maid, which is surely why within their circle their small hypocrisies were so rarely challenged. This is not to say that the young black women living inside those large white homes were ever demeaned or mistreated. To the contrary, many were almost members of the family—emphasis on almost. The family of one of my friends had a “girl” named Willie Mae—it always made me think of the great center fielder for the Giants—who stayed with them for decades, so couldn’t really have been a girl at all. Nor, apparently, was it all that different even in parts of the country where most people’s parents regarded Communists with roughly as much sympathy as did Joe McCarthy. Alabama-born Howell Raines, the deeply unpleasant individual who would go on to become the top editor of the New York Times, wrote a 1991 piece for the paper’s Sunday magazine about what he had learned of life as a child from his family’s devoted black maid. His “early relationship with Grady,” as Raines later recalled, “prepared me for the civil rights story and made me receptive to it perhaps in a way many white Southerners might not have been.” The piece won a Pulitzer Prize, and it may truly be said that, in all the long history of that degraded award, none was ever more of a gimme. (It is somehow—what’s the word: fitting, ironic, unsurprising?—that the ever-smug Raines would ultimately lose his vaunted Times post in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal for having tolerated in a black reporter practices that would have led to instant dismissal had he been white.

Still, mixed as Raines’s motives surely were, his enthusiasm for the civil rights movement was certainly genuine, for it was the great moral crusade of all our young lives. As a 14-year-old, in 1962, I joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to do my bit, which consisted of occasionally picketing the speaking appearances of alleged racists, but more often of getting together to hold hands with other young activists to sing songs like “Down By the Riverside” and “We Shall Overcome”; and it was exhilarating to believe we were connected to the earth-shaking events unfolding every evening on TV in places like Mississippi and Alabama. My father, for his part, actually flew down to Alabama to take part in the final leg of King’s legendary Selma to Montgomery march. 

As it happened, we had our own mini-civil rights crisis in my hometown of New Rochelle, precipitated when a cohort of parents at the all-black Lincoln School insisted that the city, instead of erecting a new building for their elementary school-aged kids, bus them to the all-white schools in the better parts of town. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People soon came aboard on their behalf, and the battle lines were drawn: the black parents, the NAACP and their liberal white allies, including us, versus the other white parents, whose arguments for preserving the neighborhood school system we naturally brushed aside as cover for racism. In short, it soon got ugly, literally neighbor against neighbor. In the end the fight went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the busing advocates at last prevailed. By then I was in high school, long gone from the schools in question—and within a system where, ranked by academic merit, kids like me rarely had more than a couple of Negroes in our classes. But stories of the newly integrated elementary schools were everywhere being spread by wide-eyed younger siblings, a fair number of whom were regularly getting the crap beaten out of them by their new classmates. 

Still, as good liberals, who had time to dwell on actual consequences? We were caught up in the grand sweep of history, change, even when it was just for its own sake. 

Actually, the rough stuff wasn’t nearly as much a surprise to us kids as it seemed to be to our parents. Though we’d been raised to believe Negroes were like us in every vital respect—why else would you have to be carefully taught to love and hate?—somewhere along the way we’d come to grasp that some of them weren’t exactly like us. I’d personally figured this out back when I was eight or nine, and our parents would drop us off Saturday afternoons at the movies on Main Street. More than once, I was accosted at the soda machine by black kids demanding, with a show of menace, to “borrow” a quarter. The first time this happened I remember thinking, in my naiveté. Borrow? But we don’t know each other, so how will you pay me back? But I was quickly led to understand that was not the transaction they had in mind. Relatively painless as those encounters were, at the time they were pretty scary. I mean, there were some crummy kids in our neighborhood—chronic liars, cry babies, bullies, and fools—but no actual robbers! 

Not that I ever bothered to tell my parents. I must’ve understood on some level that while I’d get some sympathy, there’d be no satisfaction, and I might have to endure an “explanation”—a suburban version of the young Woody Allen’s father’s defense of the cleaning woman caught stealing in Annie Hall: “She’s a colored woman from Harlem! She has no money! She’s got a right to steal from us!” 

In any case, in the immutable way these things happen, I came to share their understanding that, having been so deeply wronged by history, black people were always to be given the benefit of every doubt. By the time I was in college, Vietnam may have been atop the agenda as an animating campus issue, but race was not very far behind. Like every other right-thinking white kid, I seamlessly went with the new direction dictated by posturing black activists. Sure, King had been fine in his day, but that day was done—now it was Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, the Panthers, and all the other strutting Black Power types who commanded our awed respect, even if (and maybe also because) they scared the hell out of us. 

Of course, later we would come to recognize that all along they’d been pretty thuggish, but that was also only when everyone else did, and it was safe to do so. Anyway, by then there were new positions to be taken on the racial front, like, for instance, supporting black studies and affirmative action and otherwise pushing diversity in its assorted and nefarious forms. 

I only began to question—no, actually, think about—any of it when I began moving to the right; a move prompted by a number of things, not least becoming a father. It was around this time that, exploring an intellectual universe into which I’d otherwise never have dared venture, I ran across the aforementioned Shelby Steele, among other conservative thinkers. In due course, I joined them in questioning my own long-held liberal assumptions in print, eventually doing so at book length. 

Only then did I come to fully understand how dangerous such apostasy could be, especially when it came to race. I’ve written the story before, so I’ll be succinct. While giving a speech about my political journey in Dallas, I made a light reference to how in my family we used to root for sports teams based on how many blacks were on the roster; then compounded this misdemeanor with a Class-A felony by closing the speech with a story about an argument between my 15-year-old son and his politically correct white high school English teacher over Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Pointing to Mark Twain’s strategic use of the n-word, the teacher claimed, to my son’s exasperation, that this classic of anti-racist literature was racist, and when he took her on, he guaranteed, as he put it, that “I’m starting off with a C in that class, and working down from there.” Except in telling the story I made the mistake—which I will not repeat here, so as not to give other idiots easy ammunition—of using not the weasel term “the n-word,” but the actual word itself. This grievously offended a black man in the audience, who rose during the question and answer portion of the program to say so. We had a spirited back and forth, and I thought that was the end of it. Except that he, or one of his friends, immediately went to the local Fort Worth Star-Telegram with a grossly distorted account of the episode, which led to a grossly distorted article coming as close as legally feasible to calling the “conservative speaker”—me—a racist; and in due course, the story was picked up by a number of other papers. 

Actually, as these things go, the gruesome experience ended reasonably well. After I wrote about it in City Journal, a Wall Street Journal columnist followed up, leading a gratifyingly high number of people to cancel their subscriptions to the Fort Worth paper, and I choose against all odds to believe the liberal writer of the piece and his even more liberal editor were duly chastened. But for all my subsequent bravado, it was a searing experience and one I would only wish on my worst enemies—which, since they’re all liberals, is wishing for the impossible. 

What’s ironic about being branded a racist at this point in life is that, in fact, I have more and better genuine black friends than ever before. True enough, they’re almost all on my side of the political spectrum—but, hey, isn’t friendship most fundamentally about shared beliefs and values? 

All of this background is by way of lending context to all that will follow; and, yes, I suppose also as a means of rebutting some of the ugliness likely to come. 

The ways in which this book will be anathema to the racial enforcers are many and varied. Start with double standards—the kind that may also be filed under “liberal-white bigotry,” i.e., the bigotry of low expectations, and how it cripples and demeans those it supposedly aims to help. It will look into the supposed sin of racial profiling—and the statistical evidence establishing that, in fact, the disproportionate arrest and incarceration rates of minorities usually reflect nothing more than disproportionate rates of criminality. Too, it will discuss how American business has long been subject to blackmail by the racial grievance industry in the name of social justice; as well as the many other ways in which the regime of racial preferences has sowed division, corruption, and resentment in this country. 

Speaking of double standards, nor can the role of the media be discounted in any of this. How is it okay for liberals to endlessly belittle Clarence Thomas as an Uncle Tom, or for liberal cartoonist Ted Rall to get away with calling Condoleeza Rice a “house nigga”? Why, even after the Duke University rape fiasco, does the media continue to give credence to every charge of racism? 

But beyond the manifold particulars, I aim to make a larger and overarching point: The idea that it is racism that has millions of underclass blacks mired generation after generation in physical and spiritual poverty is not just false, but the greatest impediment to fundamentally altering that dreadful state of affairs. What must be faced—above all, by its victims—is that the real problem is a culture of destructive attitudes and behaviors that denies those in its grip the means of escape. 

Alas, rather than fully confront the all-too-obvious deficiencies of underclass culture, we play an elaborate, multi-faceted game of let’s pretend; one that begins with the fiction that racism is the all-encompassing explanation for black (and other) social dysfunction and moves on seamlessly to the fraud that even the most soul-crushing anti-social behaviors can constitute “authenticity.” 

In the end, comforting lies are no better than any other kind—arguably worse, for being so seductive. Societies that invest too heavily in them invariably reap the whirlwind. (See former Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plans or Greece circa 2012.) 

In brief, this book aims to unequivocally say the sorts of things that for too long have been deemed unsayable in the public square—even when widely acknowledged in private among Americans of goodwill. Its intent is not to offend or shock, though it will likely do both, but to provoke the sort of serious thinking that liberal enforcers have heretofore rendered impossible; and by facing up to those difficult truths, to begin looking toward genuine solutions. 

For all the remarkable progress this country has made on race in the past half-century, unprecedented in human history, liberals insist, for their own political and psychological purposes, on clinging to the notion of America as irredeemably racist. We—and especially black people—for too long have been living with the terrible consequences of that cruel canard. 

This gets us back to where we started. One friend took me out to lunch to warn me off this book: It’s career suicide, he assured me, if not the regular kind. I’d get savaged, massacred— scalped, castrated, my body burned to such an unrecognizable crisp that no one but my dentist and that gorgeous forensic anthropologist on Bones will be able to identify it. Hadn’t I noticed that in the Age of Obama, the racism charge, rather than abating, has become more prevalent than ever? 

Yes, I’ve noticed. 

I’ll confess that did give me pause. So let me conclude, for safety’s sake, with a comment with which I wholeheartedly agree made by a reader called Extraneus on the excellent JustOneMinute website: 

“For the record, I have no problem with Obama’s black half. His white half is the most incompetent, anti-American asshole ever to inhabit the office of the presidency, but his black half is fine.”

 RACISM TODAY, RACISM TOMORROW, RACISM FOREVER 

For many of us who grew up during the civil rights movement, Alabama Governor George C. Wallace was the vilest figure in the rogues gallery of Southern bigots blighting the nation. True, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett was for a time equally obstructionist, but he had the look and milquetoast manner of an accountant. While thuggish Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor of Birmingham, Alabama shocked evening news watchers nationwide by siccing attack dogs on peaceful protesters, he was so stupid and oblivious he seemed less a multidimensional human being than a pot-bellied racist sheriff out of a Herblock caricature. But Wallace—the former bantamweight fighter, chin outthrust in snarly defiance as he stood literally blocking the schoolhouse door—was smart and canny and utterly self-assured; which is to say, he seemed the embodiment of all that was ugly not just in America, but in humankind itself. 

Wallace’s June 1963 refusal to allow two black students to enter the hallowed halls of the University of Alabama was the fulfillment of the infamous pledge he’d made at his inauguration five months earlier. Standing at the precise spot where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office as president of the Confederate States of America a century before, he declared, “I say segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” 

So despicable was the thinking represented by that pronouncement that for millions of Americans it will forever remain Wallace’s epitaph; this, despite his late-career disavowal of racial bigotry and his strong support from black Alabamians in his last campaigns. In fact, in retrospect Wallace was a complicated and even a tragic figure, in many ways representative of the lightning-fast transformation of the Old South to the New South. (Hardly incidentally, he anticipated the mass disillusionment with traditional liberalism that would lead to the wholesale exodus of working-class whites from FDR’s New Deal coalition and the rise of Reagan Democrats.) I myself, very much later, came to appreciate his bizarre yet somehow apt characterization during his 1968 presidential campaign of the liberal elites as “pointy heads who can’t park a bicycle straight.” But that’s another matter. 

It was the indelibility of Wallace’s earlier racism, expressed as it was with such callous and intractable certainty, that made a declaration by Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick more than 40 years later so startling. Appearing at an NAACP dinner on April 30, 2006, in the middle of a campaign launched by affirmative action opponents for a Michigan state proposition aimed at ending government racial and gender preferences in education and hiring, the mayor pledged: “Affirmative action today, tomorrow, and forever.” 

Ultimately, Kilpatrick and his allies were unsuccessful, as that November Michigan’s Proposal 2 passed overwhelmingly. Nor did the mayor himself fare any better: Charged three years later with 10 felony counts of corruption, he resigned his office, and for a time found himself federal inmate No. 44678–039. 

But what’s far more significant is that among his fellow liberals his eerie, repulsive echo of Wallace elicited absolutely no criticism. To the contrary, hearing it, his NAACP listeners erupted in cheers; and they, too, went without censure in the press and elsewhere. Indeed, campaigning at Kilpatrick’s side in 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama bestowed upon him a particularly heartfelt helping of boilerplate, declaring him “a leader, not just here in Detroit, not just in Michigan, but all across the country people look to him. We know that he is going to be doing astounding things for many years to come. I’m grateful to call him a friend.” 

Welcome to the wide world of civil rights activism in a time when all the meaningful battles have long since been won. Which is to say, an activism that—largely for purposes of reaping liberal support and government dollars—tirelessly promotes the fraud that today’s version of racism constitutes a moral crisis nearly on a par with the virulent kind once represented by Wallace. 

Which brings us to Eric Holder. 

One will recall that on February 18, 2009, less than a month into Obama’s supposed “post-racial” presidency, U.S. Attorney General Holder commemorated Black History Month by declaring the American people “essentially a nation of cowards” for not talking more about race. “If we are to make progress in this area,” he piously intoned, “we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”

This was so utterly, indisputably, laughingly wrong that those of us not reduced to outright mockery were left flabbergasted. Too little discussion of race? Race has long been our national obsession, a pastime more widely followed than football—which, in fact, itself regularly gives rise to mini-racial conflagrations—or Oprah Winfrey (who’s never averse to fanning the conflagrations). Liberal commentators refuse to shut up about race; college students have it pushed in their faces from the first day of orientation on through to the de rigueur pieties about “diversity” and “social justice” at graduation; of necessity, most every Fortune 500 company has instituted policies aimed at hiring and promoting minorities, and woe be to recalcitrant managers who too adamantly adhere to more traditional standards of merit. 

Seemingly each day we must endure some new illustration, large or small, of the ludicrous lengths to which this insanity has gone. Hall of Fame quarterback Warren Moon charges Pro Football Weekly with racism for describing up-and-coming star Cam Newton, a fellow black, as “very disingenuous” and “very scripted” with a “me-first” attitude—never mind that the publication had used exactly the same words to describe spoiled white players. According to the tabloids, “many” believed that So You Think You Can Dance judge Mia Michaels was a racist, based on her decision to vote AdéChiké Torbert from the show. (Not to worry: A distraught Michaels defended herself by revealing she has dated black men.) Even the lunatic at a Connecticut beer distributorship who gunned down five coworkers after getting fired for theft cried racism, claiming he’d been subject to racist taunts. 

As national obsessions go, this is quite a bizarre one, since most of us, left to our own devices, would prefer to take those we encounter in life as they come, on the merits In many cases we would scarcely notice race at all if it were not for the fact that we are constantly being harangued about it by our progressive betters. Indeed, as Ann Coulter put it in one of her more spot-on observations, “Liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race.” 

Happily, white supremacists have largely gone the way of the dodo. Liberals, on the other hand, remain all too much with us, daily wielding the racism charge with all the subtlety of a caveman’s club. 

Is there still white racism out there? Absolutely, there remains a scattering of genuine unreconstructed bigots hanging out in the damp cracks and crevices of the sub-basement of the grand American edifice, embarrassments to themselves and the human species. Every critic of the racial status quo readily acknowledges as much, if only in preemptive self-defense. 

Then, again, one’s answer to the question depends upon one’s definition of the term. What most of us see, and celebrate, is how little there remains of the old kind, the cretinous Wallace kind, in which millions—and even the law—defined others as loathsome or inferior based on the meaningless superficialities of ethnicity and race. Today, the vast majority of Americans, almost all of us, embrace King’s admonition to judge others solely by “the content of their character.” 

Yet many liberals will tell you the term carries a broader meaning—that it also has to do with what’s in people’s hearts, what we say behind closed doors. On the face of it, this view sounds reasonable enough, and it deserves its fair-minded due. For instance, to summon up perhaps the most obvious manifestation of such supposed racism, it is true that lots of white people tell racist jokes, including many who would never think of repeating them in front of a black person, and, for that matter, plenty of liberals. 

Recently heard examples: 

What do you call a white man surrounded by 100 black guys? Warden. 

What do you call a black hitchhiker? Stranded. 

True enough, in the spectrum of ethnic jokes, these are on the relatively mild side—many are frankly noxious—and, also true, they are grounded in an unpleasant stereotype about blacks and criminality. And, yes, we’d probably be better off if they never got told—as liberals will surely legislate if they can get away with it. Indeed, having grown up in a scrupulously left-of-center home, I recall being shocked at some of my supposedly enlightened college friends’ love of The Amos ’n Andy Show; my own childhood must-see TV ran from Leave It to Beaver to Wagon Train. Yet listening to them recall certain beloved episodes—like the one in which the shyster Kingfish sold the credulous Andy a “house” in Central Park that was a stage backdrop, so you went through the front door and were outside. I must say, stereotypes and all, they sounded pretty damn funny. 

Call it racism if you want—by the broadest definition, maybe it is—but, if so, it’s the most benign sort of racism. Does it even need to be said that we also tell mean and ugly jokes about Poles and Italians, women and transvestites, Southerners and blondes—most based on exaggerations of presumed characteristics? I’m not exactly delighted by non-Jews telling Jewish jokes that feature penny pinching or the Holocaust. (For example: How do you get 100 Jews into a car? Toss a dollar bill inside. How do you get them out again? Mention Hitler is driving.)

But this is the price of living in a multiethnic society that places maximum value on freedom; one that also lets middle-aged women parade around in T-shirts that ask “Who Needs Big Tits When You’ve Got an Ass Like This?” Hardly incidentally, as a means of acknowledging difference, and maybe of letting off steam, it has it all over the simmering ethnic hatreds so common elsewhere in the world. 

Is it channeling Pollyanna to suggest that even Holder might be well served by spending as much time celebrating how far we’ve come as he does on our supposed cowardice? Not long ago, catching Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner on TV, I was reminded that a mere 40 years ago the notion of a white woman marrying literally the most accomplished black man in America would’ve been considered shocking even by an exceedingly liberal San Francisco couple like that played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. These days, Sidney Poitier’s Dr. John Prentice—rushing off from a high-level conference in Hawaii to an even more prestigious one in Geneva, making even the words “What’s for breakfast?” sound like Shakespeare—would be a catch in almost any household anywhere in America. Nor is it a surprise that 2009’s best loved film, resonating like no other, was The Blind Side, about the love of a conservative, upper-crust Mississippi family for the black man-child they took in as their own. 

In a society that decades ago reached a consensus that legal discrimination is an abomination, and has grown in innumerable other ways as a result, one can choose to be endlessly aggrieved about the incidental stuff. Or, quite simply, not be. Alas, far too many black people, as well as legions of white liberals, have opted for the former, embracing a definition of racism so expansive that almost anything—from the failure of too few blacks to pass an exam for promotion to a perceived slight at a social function—can be made to fit the bill.

 Think of it as chip-on-shoulder racism, a.k.a., the kind that can never end; the all-purpose explanation and excuse. What’s continually curious, given the hyper-sensitivity of such people to the merest hint of racial bigotry, real or imagined, is how blithely indifferent they are to racial animus when it is directed at white people by blacks. White America was stunned when it learned of Obama’s longtime association with the vile Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 campaign, but what’s just as telling is that in the south side of Chicago, the odious black liberation theology on offer to Wright’s 8,500-strong congregation at Trinity United Church of Christ was not seen as a big deal; for variations on the same doctrine are heard in black churches each Sunday in many parts of urban America. Indeed, just sticking to Obama’s hometown, in today’s America can anyone even imagine a white equivalent of unhinged racial rabble rouser Louis Farrakhan garnering so remotely large a following? 

In fact, throughout black America can be found those with a considerably less-than-generous view of white people, one grounded in the assumption that no matter the face they present to the world, on some level most are irredeemably racist. Whether expressed in anger or bemusement or resignation, there is no hesitation in airing such a view, and certainly no embarrassment. It’s just how things are. Nurtured by the omnipresent grievance industry, a pervasive sense of resentment and ill usage cuts a wide swath across educational and class lines, as evident in a black dorm at an elite university as on any street corner in urban America; and informing the thinking of many educated and successful blacks very nearly as much as that of Wright or Farrakhan. As David Mamet perceptively has his upper-crust black lawyer put it to a white colleague in his play Race: “Do all black people hate whites? Let me put your mind at rest. You bet we do.”

That may be an overstatement, but it is inevitable that the incessant message that racism lurks at every turn would breed distrust and deep antipathy toward white people among many in the black community. 

While the O.J. Simpson verdict may have been the most striking instance of black solidarity trumping justice, the cogent observer of modern America will not be entirely surprised to learn it is not the only one; or that these days black racists are likely to be a good deal more candid about their biases than their white counterparts. In fact, I have before me a story from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about a black judge in the Pittsburgh area who recently rejected a plea agreement for a white man with no priors convicted of scuffling with a cop after a traffic stop. From the bench, Allegheny County Judge Joseph Williams called the deal “a ridiculous plea that only goes to white boys,” adding that “if this had been a black kid who did the same thing, we wouldn’t be talking about three months’ probation.” The shocked assistant district attorney on the case, rightly noting that “the court has essentially called me a racist,” protested “I don’t make offers based on race. I make offers based on facts.” 

It is not coincidental that among Holder’s other notable early acts was his astonishing decision to drop a case, which was against members of the New Black Panther Party who’d intimidated white voters at a Philadelphia polling place, that his predecessors at the Department of Justice had already won. Though Holder never offered a plausible reason for this, it is entirely consonant with the lunatic theory, which is nonetheless advanced by seemingly serious people, that blacks cannot be racist by virtue of their experience as victims of racism and lack of institutional power. 

But whites? In the eyes even of some blacks who themselves wield vast institutional power, the behavior of white people is always presumed to be governed by deep-seated racism. “I do not understand what I think is the maligning and maliciousness [toward] this president,” as Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee complained bitterly during the contentious negotiations on raising the debt ceiling in the summer of 2010. “Why is he different? And in my community, that is the question that we raise. In the minority community that is [the] question that is being raised. Why is this president being treated so disrespectfully?” 

The questions leaping to mind were enough to leave one sputtering in stupefied frustration. Disrespect?! Wasn’t the partisan sniping Barack Obama faced just par for the course in such a circumstance? Was she actually pretending to have forgotten George W. Bush, or that she herself sought to have him impeached? Why was race being dragged into this already bitterly divisive matter at all? 

Indeed—as long as she dragged it in—had she truly not noticed that Obama, woefully unprepared for the job though he was and increasingly revealed in office as scarily inept, had long been uniquely protected from anything approaching routine scrutiny by virtue of his race? 

I remember picking up the Amsterdam News back in the early eighties, when Ed Koch was New York’s mayor, and being shocked by the none-too-subtle insinuation in a publication generally regarded as respectable and mainstream that the white (Jewish) mayor had it in for the city’s black residents simply on the basis of race. As the lauded black novelist James Baldwin titled a famous 1967 essay, without irony (and, indeed, in justification of such a view): “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.” 

Obviously, no decent soul would have expressed that sort of contempt for black people even then. Yet in September 2010, (to light upon a particularly blatant recent example), the Village Voice ran a cover story titled “White America Has Lost Its Mind.” Basically a rehash of the by-then standard trope (though one accepted as fact in much of black America) that cast all opposition to Obama’s agenda as racist, it attracted significant attention for its, shall we say, vigor of expression. Its author, black staffer Steven Thrasher, claims such opposition “seemed to have taken root deep in the lizard part of the white nervous system … the lies and distortions of the rat-fuckers are being soaked up by the damaged crania of the country's drooling white masses.  What sort of senility is softening up the frontal lobes of America's palefaces that the can't see through the black hatred of a wanker like (Andrew) Breitbart?  ... Is there any hope?  Can the white man be cured?   And what -- other than a massive lobotomy -- can salvage it?   It's hard to imagine a cure when -- at this point -- the patient doesn't seem to realize that he is sick."

Robert Ebert pretty much summed it up the reaction of white liberals to the piece with his tweet:  "Just got around to reading "White America Has Lost Its Mind."  Pulls it all together and just makes sense."

Why does black racism, unlike white racism, get away with it scot-free?  Why does something as odious as flash mobs of wilding black teens that have in recent years  terrorized  Milwaukee, Detroit, and Chicago, among other cities, targeting only white and Hispanics for robberies and brutal beatings go largely unremarked by the media and society at large?   Because the elites who decree cultural norms (and once did so with a fair amount of rigour) today bring to any matter involving black behavior a toxic mix of condescension and excuse making.   Black people are not the same as us, so the implicit thinking goes, and given that tragic past, it is not just reasonable but understandable that they not be held to the same high standards.

Of course, occasionally unavoidable, an especially high-profile instance of anti-white bigotry will cause a serious stir.  The Reverend Jesse Jackson gave rise to much hand wringing in left-liberal circles when he was caught on tape in 1984 referring to New York as Hymietown.  And then there was Wright, the plus ultra in black racial demagoguery. 

Yet, in such cases, the denouement is predictable.   A lot of anguished commentary, followed by  explanations/apologies and the earnest determination to put it all behind us.  In brief, the usual double standard on vivid display.

What too rarely gets observed is how profoundly damaging this endless nursing of resentments is to blacks themselves in alienation from the American mainstream, or the incalculable damage the victim mind-set does to race relations in general.

Then, again, for some,  it is a damage with a purpose, and the costs more than justify the reward.  For it is also only the specter of racism that keeps in business a civil rights establishment long since given over to economic and moral corruption.   The NAACP and other "social justice" outfits need the racism charge every bit as much as in their day the George Wallaces and Ross Barnetts needed the bugaboo of integration:  as a means of holding and exercising power.  They depend for their very existence on the perpetuation of the notion that white racism in its various and nefarious forms remains the overriding impediment to minority progress, and so must be confronted via the expenditures of bottomless amounts of government cash and corporate capital until the source of vile inequity ceases to be or the end of time, whichever comes last.

Stein, Harry (2012). No Matter What ...They'll Call This Book Racist. Encounter Books. Kindle Edition.  Reprinted with permission of publisher.

Buy Harry Stein's book.  It is EXCELLENT.