Legal Commentary

More Contributions To The Racial Conversation From Non-Cowards

Most of the criticism of Attorney General Holder?s recent speech lamenting that ?Black History Month? was separate and unequal has concentrated on his accusation that we (or at least those of us who are pigment-impaired) are a ?nation of cowards.?

Now a second wave of criticism has begun to appear, and it is even more devastating than the first. A good example of this second wave is Abigail Thernstrom, who writes in National Review Online: ??A nation of cowards?? ? those attention-grabbing words have been much remarked upon. In fact, the rest of the speech is even more disturbing than that mud-slinging phrase.?

Thernstrom begins with Holder?s charge that ?outside the workplace? there is so little racial interaction that ?[o]n Saturdays and Sundays? America today ?does not, in some ways, differ significantly from the country that existed some 50 years ago.? Really?
A little fact-checking is in order. Saturdays and Sundays looked quite different even less than 50 years ago. In 1964 only 18 percent of whites said they had black friends; the figure today is 87 percent. Raise the bar to ?a fairly close personal friend? and the proportion jumps from a mere 9 percent in 1975 to 75 percent in 2005. The share of blacks with close white friends has soared from 21 percent to 82 percent over that same period.

We don?t have much in the way of historical data on interracial dating because, not so long ago, the figure would have been too low for pollsters to bother tabulating. But we do know that in 1963 only 10 percent of whites approved of it. In 2006, however, a Washington Post/Kaiser poll found that 59 percent of black men and 41 percent of black women had dated someone who is white. And 41 percent of white women and 36 percent of white men had crossed the racial-dating divide. Today, the number of black-white marriages is up to almost half a million ? still low, but a steep rise over the last 40 years. Presumably, these couples generally spend Saturdays and Sundays together.

Holder says that on the weekends blacks and whites lead separate lives. That?s not so easy to do, given the racial composition of many American neighborhoods. Half a century ago, only 20 percent of whites reported having black neighbors; today the figure is above 60 percent. Blacks, on average, live in communities that are only half black. Do blacks and whites living in close proximity never chat about common concerns ? the schools, the traffic, and the life of their kids in and out of school? Do the whites who voted for  Barack Obama refuse to talk to the blacks who live on their street?
Another second-waver is Stuart Taylor, in the National Journal. Holder?s speech, he writes, in the form of an open letter to the Attorney General, was ?embarrassingly misinformed, hackneyed, and devoid of thoughtful contributions to racial dialogue.? And that was just for starters.
The one point that you developed in a bit of detail in the February 18 speech was especially silly: ?Black history is given a separate, and clearly not equal, treatment.... Until black history is included in the standard curriculum in our schools and becomes a regular part of all our lives, it will be viewed as a novelty, relatively unimportant and not as weighty as so-called ?real? American history.?

Bosh. The reality is that our high schools and universities are quite clearly focusing disproportionate attention on black history.

The proof includes a poll published last year in which 2,000 high school juniors and seniors in all 50 states were asked to name the 10 most famous Americans, other than presidents and first ladies. The top three finishers were black: Martin Luther King Jr. (67 percent), Rosa Parks (60 percent), and Harriet Tubman (44 percent). So is the only living finisher, Oprah Winfrey (22 percent).

As for the universities, ?the almost obsessive emphasis on race, class, and gender in the humanities and social sciences means that, if anything, black history is overrepresented in college history curricula,? in the words of professor KC Johnson, a distinguished scholar of American history based at Brooklyn College....

It?s true that college black-studies courses are often ?separate.? But the reason is hardly to slight black history. It is to satisfy demands for hiring more black professors, who tend to specialize in black studies. Some of them also use their platforms to spread the lie that America is still pervaded by white racism.
Moving on, Taylor argues:
Your unelaborated assertion that ?this nation has still not come to grips with its racial past? is also way off base, Mr. Attorney General.

To the contrary, this nation has adopted numerous civil-rights laws. It has replaced the once-pervasive regime of discrimination against blacks with a benignly motivated but nonetheless wide-reaching regime of discrimination against whites, euphemistically known as ?affirmative action.? It sometimes seems more interested in teaching children about slavery and segregation than about math and science. It has elected a black president.
On affirmative action:
If you really want an honest conversation and if you don't share the opposition of the vast majority of Americans (including me) to large racial preferences, please clarify specifically why you disagree. Also, please come to grips with the fact that these preferences do very little for truly poor people; that a substantial percentage of them go to middle- and upper-class blacks at the expense of less affluent Asians and whites; and that preferences harm some of their intended beneficiaries.

On this last point, please address the social-science research showing that virtually every selective college and university in the country discriminates so heavily in admissions that most black students cluster toward the bottom of the class and the best black students see their accomplishments stigmatized -- and that alarming percentages drop out. And that more than half of entering black law students never pass the bar and never become lawyers. And that many blacks might do much better and get better educations at the less selective schools they would attend if the racial preferences were not so large. And please state whether you support the racial-preference lobby's efforts to deny researchers access to the empirical databases that would cast more light on the magnitude of these problems
If Holder really wanted an honest conversation, Taylor writes, he would state his views on the large and growing number of black babies born out of wedlock; on underperforming black students who avoid ?acting white? and graduate from high school having ?learned no more in school than the average white eighth-grader?; on the ?dominant cause? of current problems, which is not continuing white racism but rather ?the misguided welfare policies and cultural trends that did so much to destroy work incentives, foster irresponsible child-bearing and dependence on the dole, and break up poor families in the latter half of the 20th century.?

Maybe in future comments Thernstrom and Taylor will say what they really think of Holder?s speech.

Full post as published by Discriminations on February 27, 2009 (boomark / email).