Necessary Satans

[posted by Callimachus]

In the wake of the recent death of Selma's notorious unrepentant segregationist ex-sheriff Jim Clark, Captain Ed notes in interesting passage in the Newsweek Q and A with Rep. John Lewis, the one-time civil rights leader who felt Clark's wrath.

Did he ever apologize for his actions, or express any remorse?

No, he never did. I know there were press people that tried to interview him in a little town near where he died and he never, ever showed any sense of remorse. He never asked to be forgiven for what he did. He even told one reporter that he didn't beat John Lewis, that he never hit anyone, that some of us were beaten because we were trying to date some of the local peoples’ wives and girlfriends. He was never able to see the light; he was just never able to come around. There were other people in Selma—the mayor—who called us troublemakers and agitators at the time, [who] came around and said he thought I was one of the bravest human beings he had ever known and if he had been black he would have been doing the same thing. And when we went back to Selma for an anniversary a few years ago as honorary mayor, he hosted a luncheon for us and gave me the keys to the city. Gov. [George] Wallace, who was a friend of Sheriff Clark, asked to be forgiven, but Sheriff Clark never did. ...

To some extent it was the brutality of people like Sheriff Clark that brought the country around on civil rights. Is their some level of appreciation for what his actions did for the movement?

I can appreciate that. I think it was President Kennedy who said that if we ever passed a Civil Rights Act, and he was talking about the act he didn't live to see passed, he said we would have to give credit to Bull Connor. I think we have to give a lot of credit to Clark and other people who beat us because Americans were able to see the contrast. They saw unbelievable, brave, courageous people believing in a dream and participating in nonviolence being beaten and brutalized. And it was the contrast that I think did change America and hasten the day of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. In early 1965, President [Lyndon] Johnson told Dr. [Martin Luther] King we didn't have the vote to pass the Voting Rights Act, but with the reaction of people like Sheriff Clark he created the environment to get the votes to pass the act. That cannot be denied.

Healing Bias

[Posted by reader_iam]

This article was just sent to me by my best girlfriend, who works for a mental health agency in Austin, Texas (she's worked in this field for years), along with a note: "This was sent out by an administrator in our agency. What a better place the world would be if all were so conscious as this doctor...." From the Washington Post article, written by Manoj Jain, "an infectious disease physician in Memphis and a medical director of Medicare's quality improvement organizations in Tennessee and Georgia":

At our hospital in Tennessee not long ago, I saw my picture on the hallway message board alongside those of other doctors in a display thanking us for our service. My Asian-Indian complexion set me apart -- it's something that I am rarely conscious about in everyday life. It got me thinking: When I walk into the room, do my patients see me as a foreigner?

Then I wondered: When I walk into a room, how do I see my patients?
...

The mental processing goes something like this:

When I enter the room in which a patient is waiting for me, I do four things.

First, in the seconds before our initial greeting, I automatically and often unconsciously activate my stereotype. Thus, I assume a young Hispanic man is likely to be an uninsured construction worker.

Second, even though I believe that I do not judge people based on stereotypes, the data show it is very likely that I do. When I see an elderly black woman I am more likely to ask her about church as a support structure than I am to ask a white man the same question because I assume she is church-going.

Third, after the encounter, my stereotyping affects how I recall and process information. A white man complaining of pain receives more attention than a Hispanic woman with the same complaint because I stereotype white men as being more stoic.

(Remember that stereotyping is different from medical profiling based on disease epidemiology. A young black woman with anemia is more likely to have sickle cell disease than an elderly white man is, based on biology and racial background.)

Fourth, my stereotypes probably guide my expectations and handling of the patient, resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy. An elderly black man is unlikely to understand the details of a diagnosis, I assume, so I spend less time explaining his disease and its consequences. Ultimately, such a patient is less informed about his illness.

The most glaring result of black-white inequality in health care was found in a 2005 study issued by former surgeon general David Satcher. He estimated that closing the black-white mortality gap would eliminate more than 83,000 deaths per year among African Americans.

Meanwhile, there's this, in response to a psychotherapist writing about patients seeking therapist who are "like" themselves in some key way (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc).

Update: First link fixed. Also, Neo-neocon has some good commentary on both Althouse's post and the original article about understanding empathy, written by Dr. Richard Friedman.

Happy Netted Nose

[posted by Callimachus]

So saith Sully:

The culture has changed since Imus started in radio. White straight men don't control everything any more, and they don't get to set the rules for public discourse with the same finality they once did. What we've seen here is, I think, a genuine reflection of the new American mainstream. Most Americans simply find the spectacle of a rich white bigot beating up on young black female achievers after a crushing tournament loss to be gratuitously cruel and unfair. Punishing someone for calling college women "whores" -- especially those who have beaten the odds and are role models for other back girls and women -- is not a new step in political correctness. It's applying a very old American standard of fairness and decency, which now applies to all Americans, regardless of race or gender. This was the voice of mainstream America speaking. It's not what it once was. I wonder whether many of Imus's buddies realize that yet.

The "mainstream" didn't drive Imus out of his job. The market didn't drain his voice. He was done in by a handful of corporate executives, spurred by two self-appointed censors (in the old, Roman sense of the word). If we're to have speech codes, can we at least settle on them democratically? If we are to be afflicted with censors, can they at least not appoint themselves?

I thought guys understood this stuff: You can say whatever you want, to whomever you want, but you'll risk consequences. You can say the same sentence to a friend and get a laugh, and say it to a stranger and you better be ready to duck a punch. Speech has consequences; words are potent. Handle with care.

It is deeply satisfying now for some people to see only tables turning on the "rich, white, straight guy." Rich, white, straight guy whines that he can't say the "n-word" but Snoop Dogg can. No sympathy, because we all know what kind of white person is itching to say the n-word.

But freedom in a civil society isn't simply about the things you would personally do. Otherwise why would the ACLU defend the Nazis' right to march, or why would some people defend the right of others to buy and own pornography that personally repulses them? Why would people turn out to school board meetings to save "Huck Finn" in the library, even though they don't personally use such language?

Life is a bit more complicated than what you learned in sophomore year of college.

Sullivan's assertion that this new standard "applies to all Americans, regardless of race or gender" is risible. Rather, Imus must suffer under the reversed standards precisely because he is the archetype of the old racist patriarchy. He looks the part and he is the part. In the past (as it is taught in some circles) the Imuses held all the power and the Sharptons had to crawl and plead for his mercy. Very well. Is reversing that a step toward justice and equality? Is it what Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted?

So what would Imus have had to have been to make his remark acceptable -- that is, to allow him to survive in his job? If he was young and working-class? If he was black? What if he was old and rich and black? What if he was Latino? What if he was a descendant of West Indian or Ethiopian immigrants, but not of U.S. slaves? What if he was mulatto?

What if a woman had said it? The remark was as much racist as sexist. Are white women exempted from the new standard? They come out of the victim class, too: black men could vote and shape their political destinies in the U.S. 50 years before white women could. Where do they come down in the Snoop/Imus dichotomy?

This is not a double standard. This is a standard that splatters over the map of modern American culture like a rotten tomato. It is a standard that can be jiggered at will, to suit the target. And never forget who holds its strings.

Back in the bad old days when "white straight men" controlled the airwaves, you couldn't say any of this stuff. I work in the dinosaur media, still under the firm grip of white straight males, and the newspaper where I work has yet to print the three words Imus said that sparked all this, despite running a dozen or more stories on it. It has been scrupulously scrubbed out of every wire story, in some cases by me personally.

If anything, in the last generation the country has warmed to people who spew bile -- doing so now can get you a lucrative talk radio career or a job as John Edwards' personal blog queen. People who objected to every step down into this meanness were hooted as prudes.

“Thanks for your piece on dirty comedians. It blew a fresh breeze across a smutty section of America. Freedom of speech is one thing, but these gents are overdoing it.”

Groucho Marx, writing to a columnist in reference to Lenny Bruce and his sort, in a letter dated June 25, 1963. Each generation of comics makes its mark by going further over the line than the one before. Add forty years to that letter, and you arrive where we are.

I'm not one of the prudes. I loved those Richard Pryor and Sam Kinison and Eddie Murphy routines in their day. Every one of them succeeded by stepping just over the line, where it then was drawn, and looking back at us and being so funny we laughed in spite of our dismay and discomfort. What better way to prove your chops as a comedian?

The trouble is, for the next one to come along, the line is a little further out there.

Imus is cruel and unfair. To anyone and everyone. Surprise! That's how he got his job. That's how he kept his job all these years. He was lauded and rewarded for it until one particular day.

Chaos or Community

Almost half a century after the event, many people are still familiar with the Little Rock desegregation picture of a neatly dressed young black girl walking to school with a white girl following her, her face twisted into a mask of spitting hatred, shouting, "nigger, nigger, nigger!" Americans who weren't even alive then have seen it in their school textbooks and on PBS specials. How many have seen the photo taken years later, by the same photographer, of the same two women, now matronly? They are chatting cordially on the high school steps about mutual friends. Apologies, on the one hand, and forgiveness, on the other, have long since been exchanged. They embraced, and they live together in the same city.

Both pictures are true. It says something that we cling to the earlier one.

The Civil Rights movement, from, say 1949 to 1969, was a process of tearing down. It tore down legal and institutional barriers that kept black Americans from participation in society. It tore down the "whites only" signs from water fountains. It tore down the rotten trappings and symbols of injustice as well as the legal machinery of it.

In reading memoirs from the '60s, and in the movies, the music, the books, you get a sense of the thing called "the movement." It was self-conscious good (mostly young) fighting evil (mostly mature). People seemed to feel they could tell truth from injustice, freedom from repression. And the "good" side seemed to be winning. Hunter S. Thompson writes about it as a wave cresting -- a sensual, urgent metaphor.

The world clarified. On one side, little Rosa Parks. On the other, police dogs and burning crosses and burning men.

So much was accomplished; it was fast and amazing work, and by the early '70s the goal seemed in sight. Jim Crow was dead, and it must have seemed that one more push would bring America to racial equality.

And we've been stalled on the edge of that dream for more than 30 years now. Busing was a deadly wrong turn. Nothing much since then has panned out. One wonders if we haven't abandoned the dream altogether. What would Martin Luther King make of our fetish for "diversity" and "multiculturalism"? Can we claim to be honoring his legacy, which had integration (of hearts and minds as well as bodies) as its goal, while we chant these new mantras of separationism?

Some people are still trying to push America. Others are waking up to the fact that it's not going to be that simple, and that what is needed now is not the activists' pushing but the quieter, unglamorous work of building communities.

When you've torn down something decrepit and dangerous, you've only done half the job. You have to build something to replace it. And the tactics and organizations that did the tearing down are not usually suited to building up. You don't call the wrecking crew when you want to add a deck to your house.

Government can encourage it from the sidelines, but it can't pass laws to force people to sit down and get along. The good thing is, people tend to do that on their own, if left alone. They do it one by one, as individuals, not as demographic blocs, not as census statistical brackets. They go to school together and they work together and they meet in public places and hash out respect for one another amid their differences. That's what people do, unless they're sociopaths. It happens on the level of a neighborhood -- the 5,000 or so people who live within walking distance of some public swimming pool or library.

* * *

May 17, 1954, is supposed to be the day everything changed in the South. That's when Earl Warren delivered the unanimous opinion in Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, and destroyed all the legal foundations of segregation.

In fact, it changed nothing. The court took its time in writing the decree of implementation, which did not come until May 31, 1955. And that decree set no deadlines for compliance, was sympathetic to local issues, placed responsibility on local school authorities, and put federal district courts in charge of assuring "good faith implementation."

Segregationists rejoiced, because those district court judges were in many cases home-grown men who might easily decide a "reasonable time" for desegregation was 200 years.

But they didn't. By January 1956, in 19 decisions, the lower courts upheld the end of segregation and stressed the need for a "prompt and reasonable" beginning to the process. In Louisiana, for example, J. Skelly Wright, New Orleans born and bred, shot down the state legislature's plan to circumvent Brown and save segregation. And the work of desegregation began in ernest in school districts in many place.

That's when the mass segregationist backlash began: After the white Southern courts and white Southern school boards began to work (without a National Guardsman in sight and Ike all but publicly saying he wouldn't use them), not after the Brown decision itself. All that's left out, along with the fact that more than 1,000 black students were admitted to formerly all-white colleges and universities in the South without a hint of violence before the University of Alabama riot of Feb. 6, 1956.

Yet as the story is told now, the entire white South was dragged into the Civil Rights movement by the Freedom Riders, the Supreme Court, the NAACP, and federal bayonets.

A few years ago I had the honor to work with the family of one of the central, if relatively unsung, heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. Frances Freeborn Pauley, whose lifework was mostly done in Georgia, happened to die up here in Lancaster, Pa., where her daughter lives. I helped them put together the obituary notice for the local newspaper. I confess, I had not heard of her before.

Her daughter gave me a copy of Pauley's autobiography, and it's delightful reading: direct, positive, determined. Pauley grew up in segregated Georgia and became a champion of civil rights. Friend of Martin Luther King Jr., consummate political organizer and activist. She had already been at it for more than a decade by the time Julian Bond, former NAACP head, got to know her. Bond was the source of the quip that became the title of her autobiography: "Everybody's Grandmother & Nobody's Fool."

Among the things that impressed me about Pauley: after desegregation was achieved, she didn't go to work dragging down Confederate symbols wherever she found them; she devoted the last decades of her life to battling poverty, AIDS, and the other real scourges of the families of poor Southerners.

I picked a passage from her book, literally at random, to show you the Civil Rights movement through her eyes. It is in the chapter where the struggle to integrate schools has moved from Georgia to Mississippi.

I always used to say they had three Mississippis. They had one Mississippi in the Delta, and they had another Mississippi on the coast, and another Mississippi around Jackson. You can't summarize something as being typically Mississippi, and I had cases throughout the state. There were various kinds of superintendents and various kinds of school boards.

The coast was always the easiest place. They were the most tolerant of each other, and you'd find real desegregation. You'd find some places where blacks and whites would really be living on the same street. It seemed to me that the southern part of the state was much less rigid and much less prejudiced than the Delta. The Jackson area was a lot more like Georgia; it was pretty much the same as integration in Georgia -- some powerfully mean segregationists, and also some other people that were trying really hard to have the situation smooth and that weren't really prejudiced.

I found Mississippi better than Georgia, by the way. Usually they didn't want conflict; they wanted everything to be smooth. It wasn't that they weren't dedicated to integration or segregation; they just wanted a good school system and they wanted it to move smoothly. In Mississippi I found fewer of what I call the armchair liberals. Very liberal in their talk, but they weren't going to get out of their chair and do anything. In Mississippi it seems to me that more people, if they felt that way, were apt to try to put it into motion. It was easier to work with white people in Mississippi, because you knew what side they were on.

I remember one man who was on a school board who helped us work out a plan for his district. He had sent his children to some kind of integrated summer program with black and white teachers. His son had some words, got into some trouble, and came back. This man took his son back to find out what happened. He found out his son had been rude to a black teacher. He went back home, and he said, "We're teaching our children to lie, and we're not teaching our children the truth. My child is going to apologize to that teacher and my child is going to the integrated school." This man's whole sense of values was good and honest. Lots of people were like that, and some of them were brave enough to stand up, like he did, and work for it. And his community desegregated schools smoothly.

You see, everyone had been brought up under "separate but equal," and that was the law. If you were a law-abiding citizen, you'd been taught that the blacks eat here, and sit there, and drink out of this fountain. You didn't think about it in any moral, or immoral, way. At least I didn't as I came up. You just hunt for the restroom that says, "White Women," just like you hunt for something that says, "Restroom." It doesn't have any moral effect on you until you begin to think about it and work on it. And then you see how crushing it was. The man who was just a good citizen obeying the law, going along, and then all of a sudden he saw, with a flash maybe, that segregation was wrong. A lot of them helped to change it.

Now, this woman is no apologist for anything. She went toe-to-toe with Herman Talmage and the hardest of the hard-core racists, and she didn't flinch. But so much of this book is stories just like those told above. Native-born Southern white woman working with native-born Southerners, black and white, reasoning together with a shared sense of decency to accomplishing the work of desegregation. Not a Freedom Rider in sight. Not a bullhorn or a German shepherd or a firehose water cannon in the chapter.

Where is this side of the story in the textbooks? Where is it told in the museums or the PBS specials? How many times did it happen like that, for every time it exploded in bombs and blood?

In the interest of historical truth, I'm for telling Pauley's stories of thousands of decent, average white folks in the South who did they part in the transition from segregation to integration. Just like I'm for telling more about the role of blacks in the Underground Railroad, which has been historically over-weighted on the side of the white folks of the North (including at least one of my ancestors) who took a hand in it.

* * *

Too many of the Americans who who defined themselves in the tearing-down phase of the Civil Rights Movement, who found identity and purpose in it, find ways to prolong it. Maybe for some it's a cynical attachment to a well-evolved fund-raising machinery. Maybe others are old soldiers who can't give up the intoxication of fighting a good fight. Still others, perhaps, just can't believe the enemy is gone. The injustices had stood for so long, far older than the Confederacy, far older than the Constitution itself, that some people are suspicious whether they're really gone. Just like the Cold Warriors who will go to their graves believing the Soviet Union is just playing dead.

America has awakened. The evidence is in the majority shifts, not in the radical fringes. In 1940, more than two-thirds of whites believed blacks were less intelligent. Today, less than 6 percent think so. Before World War II, in the North as well as the South, fewer than 40 percent supported any kind of desegregation. Today, between 95 and 100 percent of Americans support the idea of integration. That percentage among whites is actually higher than among blacks.

But the activists persist, finding more and more that needs to be torn down, going over and over the ground they purged 30 years ago, seeking something they overlooked. They find increasingly dubious examples of repression and prejudice to mobilize against. Thus the perverse importance of the KKK. Miniscule in numbers, politically powerless, the Klan yet exists. As long as there are pictures of white-robed men to be published, those who insist on tearing down more and more will publish them to galvanize support.

This not only retards the rebuilding, it prevents it. Another generation is raised to hate, to see the other color as the enemy. The wheel of resentment consumes another graduating class. Inner cities more devastated than those Sherman left behind stay that way another year.

So where do you want to live? Do you want to build cities and towns where whites and blacks can live together as they choose to live, where all races, white included, feel involved, respected, at home. Or do you want to stir the pot, keep anger alive, keep whispering to blacks who will listen, "they don't like you; they're out to get you; you can't trust them." Keep the wheel of resentment turning. Rub salt in old wounds in the name of fostering color consciousness. Teach people what to hate about each other.

Black paranoia about the criminal justice system, which shocked a lot of white folks who saw the reaction to the first Rodney King verdict and to the O.J. Simpson acquital, is not going to be helped by misguided white impulses to win blacks' favor by encouraging them to dwell on their alienation. A people who are alienated and convinced that they need special help are going to be angry. Anger is what we don't need. It doesn't heal, it doesn't help. It tears down. It burns.

Since the '70s, Whites of good-will, reacting with compassion and indulgence, have reached out to make allies with black community leaders, and ironically often met hard-core race men. The sort of constructive, gradualist black leaders who would have helped foster true integration had little credibility with the black public. Patronizing white elites who don't know the difference between appeasement and compromise have left ugly stand-offs wherever they've stepped in.

As a result, we have a different kind of white bigotry in America today. It's not segregationist screaming; it's quiet resentment. There's bitter resentment against what is seen as "special treatment." About half of whites tell pollsters "blacks could do better if they tried harder." Rap singers shout the "N" word everywhere, while "Huck Finn" is yanked from library shelves, and a man is rebuked and punished at his job for using the innocent adjective "niggardly" in conversation. Now the same people who made "intolerance" anathema had to invent a new phrase, "zero tolerance," to cover the intolerance they approve of. Resentment builds.

"Just what accounts for this new resentment is not easy to untangle," writes Newsweek reporter Tamar Jacoby in "Someone Else's House," a study of race relations in modern America, "but it is not always the same as out-and-out bigotry. A white man who thinks a black woman on welfare should get a job may in fact be responding to her color, voicing an ugly and unthinking assumption about black attitudes toward work. Or he may be reacting to something he didn't like in the racial rhetoric of recent decades: the claim that white society is responsible for the problems blacks face. Thirty-five years of color-coded conflict have taken a huge toll on both sides, and fairly or not the showdown has left many whites embittered. Their feelings may be an obstacle to harmony, but they are not necessarily prejudice in the conventional sense.

Far more damaging today than the old bigotry is the condescension of well-meaning whites who think that they are advancing race relations by encouraging alienation and identity politics. After three hundred years of unfulfilled promises, it's not surprising that even the most successful blacks mistrust whites and that many hesitate to cast their lot with the system that held their people back for so long. But no one is served by a mainstream culture that spurs this estrangement, encouraging blacks to believe that the system is inherently racist and that all responsibility for change lies with whites. Well-intentioned as such deference is, it will not lead to inclusion. It will not empower blacks or make them feel more welcome. On the contrary, it can only delay the kind of push that is still needed to bridge the gap, particularly for the poorest blacks with the fewest chances and the most meager skills.

What have we learned? Jacoby writes, "...integration will not work without acculturation." This is the kind of suggestion that makes a lot of people squirm. Many blacks don't like the idea of adopting a set of values from outside. A lot of whites can empathize with that. But, as Jacoby writes, "That's part of why we couldn't win the War on Poverty: when it turned out that it required extensive acculturation -- programs to change people's habits, their attitudes toward school, work and the law -- many otherwise well-meaning whites lost the will to fight the battle. For more than thirty years, we tried to ignore the development gap, and those who dared to mention it were written off as bigots. But the difficult truth remains that people who cannot speak standard English or have never seen anyone hold down a regular job have little hope of fitting into the system or sharing its fruits. If anything, the past few decades have taught us that the preparation gap is wider than we thought, and more needs to be done than we ever imagined: everything from getting poor mothers into prenatal care to teaching job applicants about deferring to a boss's authority. What makes this hard is that acculturation is along, slow process -- one that will require a kind of patience till now largely lacking on race matters."

Should we work to reconcile ethnicity with citizenship, or the other way around? In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. offered us a choice: "chaos or community." Which are we choosing?

Bennett's Race Problem, and Mine

Like Bill Bennett, I probably should just keep my mouth shut.

I confess, I've completely lost track of what "racist" means in contemporary American political discourse. I know what I think it means, but evidently I'm one of the people who are disqualified from knowing anything about it because I am a racist.

That is, I get called a racist at least once a week by people who don't know a thing about me, because I ask certain questions or make certain statements (like Bennett's, the truth of them is never questioned) or simply because I voted for candidate X. In spite of what Justin would like to believe, race is off-limits in politics if you voted for candidate X. Which, by the way, is why Republicans have a bee in their collective bonnet about Bob Byrd's long-ago Klan membership: Candidate X is never from Byrd's party. There's a double standard, as there is in public speech with certain words having to do with race, gender, and sexuality. Some Americans are allowed to use them without consequences, some aren't.

Let's face it; the social aspect of race is a shifting quagmire. It provides endless fodder for Spike Lee movies. I've recently been reading a kerfluffle over some right-leaning blogger's use of the word "articulate" to describe a black leader (I now forget which one). Left-leaning black blogger Oliver Willis jumped all over him for it, because it suggests most blacks aren't (he might have added, it has a dubious historical heritage in American racial dialogue, and that it begs the question articulate to whom?). Then I'm reading a profile of the (black, female) president of Brown University, by Frances Fitzgerald, in the painfully politically correct "New Yorker," and there's that same word -- "articulate."

The people who slap that "racist" label around do so with utter conviction of moral authority. Often the label is slapped before the question is even out my mouth. Like the "chickenhawk" meme among anti-war folks, it's not meant to advance an argument or answer one, it's meant to shut you up at once, de-legitimize you as a political person. Those of you who are not in this situation, those of you who work assiduously and carefully to avoid drawing the attention of the people who wield the "racist" stamp, might not appreciate how that word, which seems such a crushing indictment, loses its sting with too frequent exposure.

I'm a racist? Yeah, I'm a racist, fine, whatever.

The thing is I am aware of being far more cognizant of race than I ever have been in my life. I've had the usual suburban white guy string of black friends and co-workers back through junior high school (I once played back-up guitar in a country band with a dynamite black woman lead singer -- whip-smart, funny, and very "articulate"). But for the past 15 years I've lived in a very edgy, racially mixed urban neighborhood, which is forever on the brink of falling into complete chaos. I've learned to be very pro-active with trouble in my block, and when trouble comes to my block it always has the same look, the same profile: young, black, male. I wish that weren't so. But the statistics override my wishes after 15 years. And I now feel myself, internally, reacting differently to a couple of young black guys moving into the apartment across the street than a couple of Asian college girls. I notice things differently, based on race. That is one of my definitions of racism: the failure to ignore race.

None of that is why I get called a racist. Never. Not once. Instead, I get slammed as a racist if I write about how the Civil Rights Movement took America so far toward equality, but we've been stalled at that point for thirty years now, and some decent people are beginning to wonder if perhaps the social dysfunction of the underclass is as much the obstacle as is white racism. Or because I think the Southern states were constitutionally justified in seceding from the American federal union in 1860. Or because, as a historian, I notice certain statistics that indicate the nutritional intake and life expectancy of slaves in New Orleans the 1850s was better than that of free blacks in New York in the same period.

As if learning that justified slavery. As if writing that meant I wish slavery would return. Never mind. Those who hold the label stamp must have their own way of knowing at once. And the word "racist" has been through some radical deconstruction that I fail to understand. Bob Byrd isn't a racist, though he was a Klan leader. I am a racist, though I've championed black history in the community where I was born and raised and written articles that brought attention to certain racial wrongs that might never otherwise have come to light. Fine, whatever.

So I don't care a damn about Bill Bennett either way, but I look at what he said. It just doesn't make my hair stand on end the way it does some people.

Either he's a moron who agrees with a proposition in one breath and disagrees with it in the next, or he disagreed with the proposition, and to further discredit it he offered a botched example of the proposition taken to an extreme (a logical tactic called reductio ad absurdum). The latter seems to me to be the sensible way to read the transcript.

It would have been clearly so if he then had said, "That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do." Oh, actually, he did say that.

He didn't say this ought to be done. He didn't advocate it. I don't think he thinks there ought to have been an abortion genocide. If he had said it laughingly, or said "and that would be a great idea," I'd call that racism. Nor was he wrong, as far as I know, about the statistical relationship between race and spending time in the criminal justice system.

So we're left with a curiously inept comment, by a man who has been in politics long enough to know what he ought not to say, true or not. A hurtful comment, no doubt, to some. Perhaps a comment that suggests a fixation with race above other issues. When Bennett defended himself with “It would have worked for, you know, single-parent moms; it would have worked for male babies, black babies,” the follow-up question would be, "so why choose that one example?"

And then, "are they more criminal because they're black, or because so many of them are born into a dysfunctional underclass?" And then, "why is that underclass in this country so overwhelmingly black?" And I think I know his answer to that: it's right up his alley: single-parent households, absent fathers, a legacy of counter-productive government social programs, failing public schools, etc.

Interestingly, that does circle back into a pro-abortion rights argument, which naturally would appal Bennett, an ardent anti-abortion type. I've seen abortion supporters make the "unwanted children become a burden to society" argument. It goes right back to Margaret Sanger herself.

It was a ghoulish thing to say. It makes me squirm just to read it. But that doesn't make it racist. It reminds me of Bernie Shaw's jaw-dropper question to Mike Dukakis during the 1988 presidential debates: how would you feel about the death penalty if someone raped your wife, Kitty? What kind of man thinks of that kind of question? But we learned a lot about the Duke from his answer.

So, go on and stamp me with the racist label one more time. If you can find an un-stamped square inch of me to take the ink.