Black Liberals And Oklahoma's Video Racists
Most Americans were disgusted by the racist ditties, but some pundits reacted almost with glee. Why?
The emergence last week of a cellphone video that shows University of Oklahoma students singing a racist ditty about lynching blacks disgusted people nationwide. But the reaction among some black liberals was closer to glee.
“See, I keep telling you that old-fashioned racism is alive and well in this country,” wrote Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. “After the fraternity bus sing-along at the University of Oklahoma, do you hear me now?”
Liberals tell us that they long for a post-racial America, yet they push an agenda predicated on keeping race front and center in our national discussions. They advocate social policies like affirmative action, which amounts to a racial spoils system. And they practice an identity politics that divvies up voters by race and ethnicity and then pits separate groups against one another.
The black left, meanwhile, specializes in scouring America for signs of remnant racism and seizing on them as evidence that little or nothing has really changed. So long as we have to live among the Donald Sterling and Cliven Bundys or those frat boys on the bus, the argument goes, racial gaps in academic achievement, employment, criminal behavior and other areas will persist.
“This was just video confirmation of a racism that envelops us like a fog, often just as evanescent and immeasurable,” wrote Charles Blow, a black columnist for the New York Times. “It is in this environment of dualities that today's young people exist, dealing with the growing pains of increasing diversification grinding against unyielding racial attitudes.”
Our majority-white country has a twice-elected black president who, in 2008, outperformed both John Kerry (in 2004) and Al Gore (in 2000) among white voters in states such as Texas, Georgia and the Carolinas. Hispanics govern New Mexico and Nevada, and Asians govern Louisiana and South Carolina, which also has a black senator. Yet Mr. Blow cites the University of Oklahoma episode as proof that white racism in the U.S. today is “immeasurable” and “unyielding.”
Mr. Robinson took the argument even further, asking his readers to “imagine” that the video never surfaced and the students went on to graduate and later occupy executive positions with the “power to hire and fire” blacks. “What chance would an African-American job applicant have of getting fair consideration?” he wrote.
We don't have to use our imagination because we can look at black history, which shows the rate at which blacks were entering the skilled professions during periods when labor-market discrimination was open, rampant and legal. Between 1940 and 1970, the percentage of black white-collar workers in the U.S. quadrupled. “There was a substantial black middle-class already in existence by the end of the 1960s,” write Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom in their book “America in Black and White.” “In the years since, it has continued to grow, but not at a more rapid pace than in the preceding three decades, despite a common impression to the contrary.”
History shows that faster black progress was occurring at a time when whites were still lynching blacks, not merely singing about it. Liberals want blacks to ignore the lessons of this pre-Civil Rights era, which threaten the current relevance of groups like the NAACP and call into question the Democratic Party's belief that there is a federal solution to every black problem.
Moreover, this history reveals that what we see today in black America is not lack of progress due to white racism but retrogression due in large part to post-Civil Rights era social pathology and misguided government interventions. The problem isn't the attitudes and behaviors of the boys on the bus so much as those of the boys in the 'hood.
Black elites are eager to blame bad black outcomes on bigotry and quick to denounce or mock anyone who offers an alternative explanation. But we should be thankful that black leaders of yore didn't pretend that racism must be vanquished from America before blacks could be held primarily responsible for their socioeconomic circumstances. “We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too,” Martin Luther King Jr. told a congregation in St. Louis. “We can't keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.”
I mentioned that King quote, which comes from a 1961 profile of him in Harper's Magazine, in a column for this newspaper several years ago. Some readers accused me of fabricating it. In the era of Al Sharpton, apparently it is hard for people to believe that leading civil-rights leaders used to speak so frankly about black self-help and personal responsibility. Which may be all you need to know about the quality of those black leaders today—and the commentators who carry water for them.
This piece originally appeared in Wall Street Journal
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal