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In the wake of the Trayvon
Martin shooting, the excellent Bill Moyers hosted political activist Angela
Glover Blackwell on his weekly interview show, Moyers & Company (April
13; "An Activist for Our
Times") and in the course of things (12:18 in
the program) Ms. Blackwell said, "America does not want to talk about
race." In point of fact, we'll talk about it all the live-long day, just
not very honestly.
The Trayvon
Martin incident certainly provoked a broad media conversation about race all
over the cable TV networks and the Internet. It's been an inconclusive
discussion because the facts of the case are so muddled and the truth may
never be known, or may not satisfy anyone if it becomes known. Mostly, the
talk followed predictable patterns of grievance, accusation, and especially
hand-wringing - the latter well represented by Bill Moyers, the embodiment of
1960s-vintage idealist Democratic liberalism, who came on the scene as a
close aide to President Lyndon Johnson at the height of the civil rights
struggle.
The reason the race conversation remains
so constricted in America is because the central question makes everyone so
uncomfortable. That question is: what accounts for the failure to thrive of
such a large percentage of black America? It is uncomfortable for whites
(especially Progressives) because it implies a failure of the social justice
movement itself, and in particular the watershed civil rights struggles of
the 1960s. It's uncomfortable for blacks because it stirs up immense anxiety
over the stigma of racial inferiority.
The crucial moment in this recent
history of race relations, it seems to me, must be located in the events
between 1966 and 1970. This was the historical moment that followed the
deconstruction of legal race codes with the passage into law of the Public
Accommodations Act of 1964 and then the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These two
legislative milestones, promoted and signed by Lyndon Johnson, were supposed
to conclude the unfinished business of the Civil War and emancipation, which
had festered so long in the Jim Crow inurement.
The expectation was that the removal of
legal obstacles to full citizenship would hasten economic justice and
cultural equality, but just then something curious happened: the youth revolt
of the late 1960s was underway and young black America immediately opted for
separatism. Opposition to anything and everything was the motif for my
generation back then. A few years after the 1964 Public Accommodations Act
passed, the black students at my college demanded (and were given) their own
separate student union building. During the riots that followed the Kent State
shootings in the Spring of 1971, somebody burned the building down - a
mystery never solved.
I believe the black separatist movement
of that time derived largely from anxiety around the issues of cultural
assimilation - that is, of black and white America forming a true and
complete common culture. In any case, it was at this moment of history that
the multicultural movement presented itself as an "out" for white
America. Multiculturalism allowed white America to pretend that common
culture was not important. It also promoted the unfortunate idea that we
could have a functioning civil society with different standards of behavior
for different ethnic groups. It has left the nation with the unanswered
question of black America's self-evident failure to thrive, and an enormous
body of narrative affecting to explain it away as "structural
racism."
Bill Moyers did not even attempt to
address the failure to thrive question in his interview with Angela Glover
Blackwell. Both of these people are about as well-intentioned as anyone in
the country where race relations are concerned, but neither of them were able to honestly confront the issue. My own opinion
is that it's about behavior at least as much as its about race and probably
more, and we continue to make tragic decisions in this country about what
behavior is okay and what's not. Are there proportionately more black men in
prison than members of other races in America? Yes there are, and most of
them behaved badly enough to get locked up, whether our drug laws are stupid
or not. Is something preventing black children from learning in school?
Probably a number of things, but I would begin absolutely with the duty to
teach them to speak English intelligibly - something that nobody expresses
any interest in, especially white Progressives. Do white people fear black
males who affect to act as if they are dangerous? Maybe black men should stop
trying to scare people. Are these "racist" observations or
exercises in reality-testing?
I doubt even that question can be settled
conclusively in our time. The truth is that white America is too
uncomfortable with the discomfort of black America and white America will do
anything, and will bend any view of reality, in order to avoid the most
frightening outcome of all, which is the possibility of race war. Well it's
hard not to sympathize with that, but it still leaves us with the burden of
all the tragic choices we made since those heady days of 1964 and 1965 when
Bill Moyers could stand behind President Johnson signing those landmark civil
rights bills, basking in the broad-based belief that real human progress was
being made.
I don't know for sure what Trayvon Martin was doing in the moments before George
Zimmerman shot him in the Florida condo cluster. The public may never learn
what really went on, even after Mr. Zimmerman's trial. People don't get shot
for no reason, though sometimes it is not a good
reason, or one we want to talk about.
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