For the moment, while the racial grievances of 2014 have
chilled on the polar vortex, and no unarmed black teens have been shot by
cops for a couple of weeks, it might be a good time to continue that honest
discussion about race that the media nabobs — such as Charles Blow and
Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times and Don Lemon of CNN — demand
when some incendiary event goes down and tensions across the country become
unbearable. That demand, of course, is a political booby-trap because any
discussion not founded on the presumption of white malice is instantly deemed
inadmissible and “racist” — which is just cheap demagogic despotism designed
to shut down the very discussion they asked for. So that is exactly what I expect
in response to this essay.
I bring these matters up because it seems to me that the
long, arduous, costly battle for “civil rights” which began in my childhood a
half century ago is beginning to look like a lost cause. The movies and TV
are full of black / white buddy stories, and commercial images of a shared
American experience as if there really was a common culture that blacks and
whites felt an equal investment in. These stories and images are largely
wishful, though I believe the dream of a common culture that would nurture
all types of people in America stood at the heart of civil rights idealism of
the sort represented by Martin Luther King and the white public figures who
marched in solidarity with him.
Something went terribly wrong in the early going, and I
don’t think there has ever been an honest discussion about it by American
social thought leaders of any race, though I have raised the point more than
once in passing. It was the paradoxical rise of black separatist politics at
the exact historical moment of civil rights triumph when the two landmark
civil rights bills were passed: the Public Accommodations Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Black separatism had been around since the late 19th
century as a counterpoint to the earlier post-slavery idea represented by
Booker T. Washington, which proposed that black earnestness would eventually
be recognized by white America and rewarded, at least with economic
participation. That idea was opposed by less patient, younger figures such as
W.E.B Du Bois and Marcus Garvey who promoted what was then called
“Pan-Africanism.” But the debate was superseded by the crises of the Great
Depression and Second World War. By the early 1960s, black separatism had
revived, personified first by Malcolm X (assassinated by rival Black Muslims,
1965), and the disillusioned former Freedom Rider Stokely Carmichael, who
coined the slogan “black power,” and then by scores of public players and
followers.
What I think happened is that the sudden prospect of true
legal equality produced deep anxiety across black America, so that opting out
provided a comfortable alternative. I saw it play out at my college in 1970
when the “militant” black students organization demanded a separate black
student union. In the face of the civil rights acts passed only a few years
earlier, this should have been regarded as a sort of outrage, but
pusillanimous college administrators caved in and bought a house for that
purpose. And of course the same thing happened all over the country, so that
a new form of separate-but-equal was reestablished by popular
demand.
That blunder by academic leaders set a tragic tone for
the forty years that followed. To rationalize the new separate-but-equal
ethos, these people of liberal good intentions constructed an elaborate
ideology of “multiculturalism” and “diversity” that had the tragic unintended
consequence of obliterating the foundational idea of a common culture that
had animated the struggle Dr. King gave his life to, as well the basic notion
of what it meant to be an American.
A common culture did exist in America before the 1960s,
at least in terms of manners, standards of decent behavior, and even
language. It was what allowed people of good will in the 20th
century to believe in “one nation indivisible.” Hence, the question America
needs to ask itself: do we have enough moral focus to revive the idea that a
common culture actually matters? If not, expect unending strife.
Note: JHK’s 2015 Forecast is available now at this
link: Forecast
2015 — Life in the Breakdown Lane
