Race Rats

Here's a rather savage review of a book by a Northern writer who takes the trouble to discover the ugly racist heritage of her northern hometown. While I applaud her effort, I also understand the reviewer's fury:

There is by now a great deal of scholarly material about the Klan in the Midwest, the brunt of it being not merely that white racism was every bit as virulent and widespread there as in the South but also that, for some who joined it, the Klan was an unbenevolent fraternal order. Carr's grandfather may well have been racist to the bone, but more likely he was just another man of his time and place: deeply prejudiced, but also searching for companionship and bonhomie. As Carr says of the remnants of the Klan still to be found in Indiana in the early 2000s, "These were failed, damaged people, and joining the Klan was how they made themselves feel better, and it was deeply sad."

"Deeply sad"? Perhaps so, but one does quickly tire of Carr's insistence on inserting her own opinions -- most of them banal and gratuitous -- at every turn. When she blurts out, at one point, "This is the unbearable part -- facing the fact that my grandparents went along with it," it's all the reader (OK: this reader) can do not to throw the book across the room and shout, "Get off it!" Self-righteousness is everywhere, and invariably it's self-serving. As was true previously of Ball and McWhorter, Cynthia Carr has written a book not about the subject ostensibly at hand but about herself.

Everything is me, me, me. Carr fusses over "what it would mean for me to truly witness, to truly own the history of my family and my Marion, and to take in the impact racism had had," and then, after splitting those infinitives, she bleats: "If I encountered something uncomfortable, I would have to stay with the discomfort. No guilt-tripping. No distancing." Like too many other journalists writing books these days, Carr is under the impression that how she got her story and how she feels about it are more interesting (and, implicitly, more important) than the story itself. She could not be more wrong.

I've spent some time encouraging the people in the North to get over their fixation with "Southern racism" and look homeward. You can't get history right unless you do, and you can't steer toward a chosen future without getting the history right.

And I'm afraid this is how it's going to look at first. Yes, with people such as we are (sensitive Northern liberals) it's got to pass through this pseudo-Kubler-Ross state on the way to getting a cold grip on reality.