LIBERAL RACISM
By Jim Sleeper
Viking, 195 pages, $21.95
Nineteen sixty-eight was, in many crucial respects, the watershed year in American racial politics and, particularly, the moment of truth for white liberalism. In that year, three major white political figures emerged who galvanized white resentment over black urban unrest and encoded white anger as a legitimate and powerful presence in American political discourse. These three figures were Richard Nixon, the California Cold War conservative who rose from the ash-heap of his 1960 presidential defeat and his 1964 gubernatorial loss to win the presidency on a law-and-order platform, representing the will of “the silent majority”; George Wallace, the Alabama governor who staunchly defended segregation in the early 1960s and who, through his independent presidential campaign in 1968, reorganized as a potent political force something called the white South; and Frank Rizzo, the supercop from Philadelphia who, a year earlier, had become the police commissioner, and who would, three years later, become the first Italian-American mayor of the city. In 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis that April, Philadelphia was one of the few major East Coast cities that had no civil disturbances then or later that summer. This was largely due to the law-and-order tactics of Rizzo, who represented one of the last resurgences of white ethnic power in the big city.
What we learn from this is, first, white working-class and middle-class resentment and anger became a potent conservative, not radical, political force in America in response to black anger and resentment. The black anger and resentment had been a response to the white hypocrisy and violence over the issue of integration and the ending of officially sanctioned racism. In short, what had happened in American black-white relations since World War II was accelerating responses of hatred and violence by blacks and whites as blacks tried to press their citizenship claims through pressure-group politics. Of course, blacks baited whites to be violent during the civil rights demonstrations of the early 1960s as a way of revealing racism, not merely as an odious ideology, but as a form of psychopathology. And of course historically whites had used violence, both intraracial and interracial, as a way of controlling blacks.
Second, we learn that white liberalism, and certainly the white Left, had lost all hope of ever being able to speak to, let alone organize, the white working and middle classes. The liberals and the rest of the Left had little choice but to ally themselves with black anger, as it was nearly the only form of ethnic resentment that was anti-status quo, nearly the only form of ethnic anger in this country that had some depth–historical and moral–of useful political dissent.
What 1968, the year of our republic’s nervous breakdown, teaches us is that an American class struggle is certainly impossible, because it was as it had always been impossible for blacks and whites to transcend racial differences to effect class solidarity, and that a liberal civic culture that can transcend race is equally impossible, for the simple reason that this civic culture generates the very rounds of racial resentment and violence that it wishes, through its rhetoric and vision, to transcend.
In Jim Sleeper’s often eloquent defense of a colorblind civic culture in his book “Liberal Racism,” he seems to oversimplify the truly ironic and complex nature of it. There are two larger, competing cultures in the United States: our popular culture, where everything is intensely racial and sexual, and our welfare-state culture, where patronage and power, claims and favors, are distributed usually according to group and ethnic affiliation. Our civic culture is not only pressured by these two larger cultures, it partakes of both of them. What has been inescapably a part of our civic culture is a vision of a colorblind society where people can transcend any kind of group identity. But what also has been part of our civic culture is a vision of black-white contention that would ultimately end in race war.
“Liberal Racism” is based on the premise “that precisely because the United States is becoming racially, ethnically, and religiously more complex than institutional color-coding can comprehend, liberals should be working overtime to nurture some shared American principles and bonds that strengthen national belonging and nourish democratic habits.” In short, liberals, by supporting such public-policy devices as affirmative action, racial gerrymandering to create black voting districts, and other such group-coding methods to dispense the nation’s goods equitably, have betrayed their ideal of colorblind civic culture. “If we have trouble thinking about race,” Sleeper writes, “it’s because we no longer know how to think about America itself.”
All of this is true, and in this short, highly accessible and often insightful book, Sleeper scores several strong points. Liberals acquiesced to a now-nearly-intractable system of race categorizations (called variously “diversity,” “multicultualism” and “inclusion”) in which it is insisted that our society must see race as the most important aspect of a person’s identity and that people must see their race as their major group identification. This has led, as Sleeper points out in his opening chapters, to a great deal of pernicious nonsense recently, including racial division over the verdicts in the O.J. Simpson trials (a tragedy in which Simpson was found, by two racially different juries, both innocent and guilty), the flap over Ebonics, special congressional districts for blacks, and a great deal of patronization of blacks by white liberal intellectuals like Howell Raines, Andrew Hacker and Benjamin DeMott, and publications like The New York Times.
All of this might easily be dismissed as repetition, as most of these observations have been made by conservatives such as Linda Chavez, Dinesh D’Souza and others. But the two telling observations that Sleeper makes in the first four chapters are, first, that the liberal Left has always been compelled to use race instead of class to bring about social change in the U.S. and has become trapped by this strategy by a combination of genuine puritanical fervor about racism and sheer political opportunism. Second, it is nearly impossible to have community in America for blacks and whites together, so liberals have given up any hope of bringing them together as one interdependent community, with the vision of one unified civic culture. By undermining the idea of a unified civic culture, Sleeper argues, liberals, paradoxically, hurt blacks by taking away from them their greatest hope for inclusion and the most compelling strategy and rhetoric for it. As far a it goes, this argument is intelligent and persuasive.
The last chapters of “Liberal Racism” deal more explicitly with the nature of American civic culture and varieties of black encounters with it. The chapter on Alex Haley’s “Roots” seemed confused. Sleeper argues against blacks’ trying to make any real connection to Africa. Yet it would seem obvious in a country dominated by the myth of the immigrant as an essential part of its civic culture that blacks need to retrieve their African past, not in order to be more foreign, but ultimately, more American. They need to retrieve this if only to be able to do what European and other immigrants have done in this country: reject their origins on their own terms. Sleeper does not fully see this. This leads to flawed thinking about W.E.B. Du Bois and his upbringing in Massachusetts. Doubtless, Du Bois was part of a vital New England culture, as Sleeper says, but his inclusion was accidental, and that broad civic culture that provided him an education also put into place, through its philanthropy to black Southern schools, an incredible machinery that educated blacks to be inferior, second-class citizens with imperfect access to white institutions and complete access to second-rate black ones. America, in effect, has two civic cultures, one black and one white. And blacks have had to battle for their own civic culture as much as they had to battle through it to reach the larger culture. Sleeper does not see this fully either.
Sleeper would have profited from reviewing some of the books of Walter Lippmann, who wrote on civic culture with more intelligence and grace than nearly anyone. It was Lippmann who wrote that “a code of the right and the wrong must wait upon a perception of the true and the false.” Sleeper is strongest when he insists that liberalism has lost its ability to discern reality truly and thus has lost its ability to judge it. But “Liberal Racism” rightly insists as well that we must ultimately retrieve liberalism from its errors, for it is worth saving.
