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Liberal Racism

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I worked for an "affirmative action bureaucrat (my choice of words) for five years in civil rights law. He was a middle class black man, an army brat, who got the job because he's black, and held onto it until he retired young. Because of the crowd he surrounded himself with, and because of his "status" as a black man, he made himself a far greater victim than he ever was, or than some white, working class individuals are. Further, my daily exposure to whining from those other self-designated "victims" of racial or sexual oppression made me extremely wary of claims of "racism," something I, a long-standing liberal, called a "mantra" long before Limbaugh--whom I despise--called it that. Sleeper points out the many dimensions of what I've called a most insidious racism: "the minorities can do no wrong" approach to race relations. And he does so in an organized and succinct way. He offers examples of how the racism claim has become an industry unto itself, with many of its representatives booked solid and making a healthy living speaking on behalf of it. Many of my fellow leftists need to read--and discuss--this. After all, do we aspire to equality or just a redistribution of entitlements to people based on the ostensible status of their entire class? Do we free the ostensible victim of any responsiblity at all for his or her actions? And end up with more O.J. Simpson fiascos? No, Sleeper doesn't free the "Right" of its racist policies. Nor does he advocate them. But he examines effectively the fallacies of those who claim to be fighting racism, while actually perpetuating it in a different form. Many of his references are black and other liberal scholars who have some of the same questions as to where the "liberal racism" is taking us. Read it, fellow leftists! And, for the first time in years, heed your own warnings! Thanks, Jim Sleeper!

Toughly argued; unafraid to be contentious; very difficult to ignore

Jim Sleeper's Liberal Racism shares the strengths and weaknesses of several similar books by apostates from the Left (Norman Podhoretz's
several memoirs, In Defense of Elitism by the late William Henry, How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy by Harry
Stein and Radical Son by David Horowitz all come to mind): he's very good when analyzing the precise problems with modern Liberalism
that drove him to question its orthodoxy, but he falters when it comes time to follow his doubts to their necessary conclusions. One can
sympathize with, or at least understand, all these men's shared reluctance to fully embrace the conservative logic of their own writings, and
their residual need to demonstrate to their old comrades on the Left that drifting Right hasn't made them uncaring, but this hesitancy does
diminish each of their books.

In Mr. Sleeper's case, he starts from a very basic and astute observation :

[L]iberal racism patronizes nonwhites by expecting (and getting) less of them than they are fully capable of achieving. Intending to turn
the tables on racist double standards that set the bar much higher for nonwhites, liberal racism ends up perpetuating double standards by
setting the bar so much lower for its intended beneficiaries that it denies them the satisfactions of equal accomplishment and opportunity.

He proceeds to deliver chapter and verse indicating that this is the case : from an excellent demonstration of how the 1964 Voting Rights Act
was perverted into a way of guaranteeing a few seats for black Congressmen; to an explanation of how "root causes" excuses for criminal
behavior and opposition to vigorous law enforcement had helped to make places like New York City more dangerous for blacks, until Rudy
Guliani came along and ignored both; to a devastating indictment of the NY Times and its racial politics, both as it plays out in politically
correct company policy and as it functions to distort the paper's news coverage; to a depiction of how Alex Haley's novel Roots helped
create a false African consciousness in black America, which has gradually created an unhealthy distance between blacks and the Western
values they need to succeed in this culture.

In all of these instances, liberals (black and white) have sought to explain away black underachievment as a phenomenon whose sole cause
is white racism and whose only solution lies in government action (i.e., white benevolence). Even setting aside the question of whether
racism is really this powerful and is still pervasive, framing the situation in this way can only harm blacks : by removing incentives for
self-improvement, since government aid is promised for every ill; by lowering self-esteem, since all progress will be a result of government
(Liberal) intercession; and, by imposing artificial limits, such as the Congressional scheme, which packed gerrymandered districts with black
voters, thereby gaining black Representatives while diminishing black power in all the surrounding districts.

So far, Mr. Sleeper is right on the money. But when he moves beyond the critique he gets himself in trouble, because his stated intent is an
impossibility :

This book's premise is 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.

He seems oblivious to the fact that the project he's set himself is to make Liberalism into Conservatism. For Liberalism's very raison d'ętre
is to remove societal inequalities via government action, to force egalitarianism down our throats at the cost of our freedom. You see, the
dirty little secret that Mr. Sleeper does not allow himself to face is that you could just replace "black" with "poor" in the entire prior analysis
and leave most of the rest of his argument unchanged. It is a mere sad circumstance of American history and our unfortunate legacy of
slavery and Jim Crow that so many blacks are part of the underclass. Liberalism may focus on them in particular, but it patronizes, and
thereby debilitates, all of the poor. Liberalism always resorts to government action, always excuses social pathologies as not the fault of the
perpetrators, always blames oppression for inequalities, always asks (and expects) little of those it claims to serve, while promising much.
Small wonder that the epoch of Liberalism (1929-1980, in other words, from the Depression to the election of Ronald Reagan) turned the
poor into dependents of the Welfare State.

That said though, Mr. Sleeper is right when he suggests that the appropriate alternative to this kind of ineffectual patronizing and
counterproductive governmental meddling is a restoration of civil society, of non-governmental social organizations, of family, church,
community, etc., structured around common traditional values and standards of behavior. Central to all of this is a revival of the ethos of
personal responsibility, combined with a sense of communal obligation. We, all of us, need to stop depending on government and seeking
excuses for our own shortcomings. We need to learn once again how to rely on ourselves and how to provide for those around us.

Meanwhile, Liberalism, as Mr. Sleeper says, deserves great credit for its role in the fight against institutionalized racism in America (forty
years ago) , but as he quotes Thurgood Marshall as saying :

The law can open doors and knock down walls, but it cannot build bridges.

For America to fulfill its own purpose, it was vital to include all our citizens in a society of opportunity, to allow them the freedom to make
what they can out of their own lives without any interference due to race, creed, or color. We can, and must, make the law colorblind, so
that each of us is judged only by what Martin Luther King, Jr. called "the content of our character", but as Justice Marshall suggested,
government isn't capable of removing the prejudices in each of our hearts. To achieve that entirely commendable goal we will require a
healthy civil society, one that builds character, one in which we are individually free but mutually dependent and where government is only
a last resort. Unfortunately for Mr. Sleeper, that is all antithetical to Liberalism.

...

In an intellectual climate where the questioning of highly personalised left wing attitudes towards race issues is responded to with instant dismissal, it is a difficult task writing a book like this. Jim Sleeper has managed to speak ten times louder, and argue tens times better than the liberals he is confronting. This is a superbly researched book, and Sleeper is a highly sophisticated critic.

"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today." That quote by columnist Thomas Sowell neatly illustrates how the world has turned from under the feet of old-line liberals like Jim Sleeper, who is the author of this book. He decries the progressivist idiocies about race he sees in urban policy, in the media, and in race relations, not much differently than in similar books by conservatives. But who is he talking to? The leftist ideologues for whom thoughtful liberals like Sleeper served mainly as beards have long since completed their Long March through the institutions, and don't need to pretend to take their counsel anymore. Nor would race warlords who make their living from racial strife care to lend an ear. Periodically throughout the book, he pauses and fires a blast at conservatives, for "balance", maybe. But a conservative reader could easily reply, "Well, we told you so." For example, Sleeper in an aside deplores the vulnerability of helpless minorities to the amoral market forces of capitalism. This is true, but not exhaustively true. Maybe, if liberals and their allies hadn't worked might and main to weaken ("transform", in their parlance) intermediary institutions like the family, the church, the educational system, etc., these people might be bettered buffered against the storms of life.

None of this is to suggest that the book isn't good--it is. Jim Sleeper is an accomplished magazine writer, and has done a great job marshalling his arguments in this very readable and thoughtful book. Declining the role of savant, he includes excerpts of material from experts including Glenn Loury and legal scholar Randall Kennedy. Students of issues like these have simply read this particular catalog of ills many times before, is all.

There is a surprise, though. In the inevitable section where we are urged to re-embrace the vanished values of old, Sleeper offers the example of the New England village. And who personifies this Yankee resilience? Of all people, W. E. B. Dubois. Dubois is like the soldier who threw himself onto the barbed wire so that other men could run up his back and advance. He fought American racism for most of his very long life, only to give up on America and fall into the pan-African and communist delusions just as his efforts were succeeding back home. Sleeper tells Dubois' tragic tale, ingeniously illustrating how his starchy small town values sustained him, and suggesting that those sound virtues would sweep away a lot of liberal racial hypocrisy. He may be right. But who's listening?

Liberals are supposed to believe in an inclusive society, where we take advantage of the contributions from everyone in it. And where each person has equal rights.

That surely does not mean lowering standards. A doctor still has to meet standards to practice. A university student still has to pass exams to qualify for a profession.

But it does mean letting people into that university independent of their race, religion, gender, sexual preference, creed, and so on. Maybe age discrimination would be an interesting question, but discrimination in favor of or against people of a specific skin color? That's supposed to be illiberal.

A century ago, the bar was set higher for non-whites than for whites. That was racist and counterproductive. Jim Sleeper asks if we are setting the bar so low for non-whites today that we are denying non-whites the satisfaction of equal accomplishment and opportunity. Given my Asian background, I find this question interesting.

Sleeper asks if, not out of malice but out of folly, many liberals have overemphasized black identity and thus behaved in a racist manner themselves. The author explains that conservatives still have some of the same exclusionary problems they've always had. This is not an apology for conservatism. It is a plea for genuine liberalism.

As Sleeper explains, blacks have much to profit from a truly color-blind society.

The first main topic Sleeper deals with is individual responsibility, as seen in court cases. In the past, blacks simply did not get treated justly in white courts. But there is still a threat of some of the same problems if we keep looking carefully at skin color in court cases. What is legal for whites must be legal for blacks and what is illegal for whites has to be illegal for blacks. The author gives some examples in which many liberals have strayed from this idea.

The next issue is voting rights, where the threat by those who simply will not be color-blind is racial districting. After that, Sleeper discusses the media. He tells us that "good journalists are not crusaders or missionaries. Their job is to uncover the truth, even when it hurts." He contrasts the coverage of a 35,000 person Promise Keepers rally to the 400,000 person Farrakhan "March." Both of these events could have been treated sympathetically, fairly, or critically. But they were treated very differently.

I wanted to see a more thorough discussion of affirmative action. I think there ought to be a clear and beneficial policy here. Namely this: everyone needs to meet the same standards to serve the community, independent of race. But those who are having trouble meeting standards should get some extra support. That is help so that they can meet standards, not a lowering of standards that renders those with credentials suspect. Giving some students extra help in high school makes sense. Kids are required to go to high school by law. Letting people into college who do not actually qualify seems counterproductive to me. But this is not a major criticism of the book. The author has shown that some of us have been lowering standards on the basis of race, and that's the main issue here.

I think Sleeper has made some valuable points. Liberal racism may be more patronizing than malicious, but it is part of a problem in our society. We'll all be more prosperous and happier if we can have a colorblind attitude and reduce racial divisions rather than enhance them.

Sleeper's criticism of the corrosiveness of (generally) well-intended white liberal political interventions is astute, but his proposed solution - the (re-)adoption by all Americans of New England puritan values (capitalist vigour + personal thrift + rigid church-based moral codes), while sounding 'tough talking', is simply naive.

He assumes that vigorous free-market consumer capitalism is compatible with such traditional values, whereas the reality world-wide would seem to be the opposite: Traditional and local values get lost in a blur of glossy consumer indulgence and hedonism. What does he propose replacing this money-making, money-spending search for pleasure with? Thrift as a good in itself? But if we don't spend then the system comes crashing down, especially in post-industrial, service-oriented economies.

Moreover high personal moral values of the sort he praises in the last section of the book have always been compatible with beliefs that we now see are terribly immoral - slavery, for instance. The men who wrote that it was self-evidently true that all men are created equal owned slaves. If it seems banal to restate that, it's a reminder that one can't just step into the values of a time gone by, cherry-pick the ones one likes, and then try to browbeat the poorer members of society into adopting them: they come with historical baggage. Hence they may be impulsively resented and deserve to be seriously interrogated.

Mr Sleeper believes that the 'true' American values on which the communal spirit should be rebuilt are New England Puritan ones, but weren't the values of the Southern slave-owners equally 'truly American'? To step outside the reality of history is to step away from reality in all its cluttered complexity, and engagement with reality is what is so often lacking in the discussion of race issues.

In the end Sleeper's proposal that if everyone knuckled down - especially the poor - and conformed to a single vision of the life well-lived then society would be more harmonious, is little more than a conservative platitude. It has the added bonus of letting white people and those in power off the hook as regards racism and racial disadvantage, hence its appeal to comfortably-off right-wingers, who feel themselves terribly put upon by the notion that their skin-colour still gives them privileges in 21st Century America.

Sleeper's book Liberal Racism portrays his ideas about modern american racial tensions in a brutally honest and clear manner. The book deals with liberal's failings in their ideas about race, but Sleeper is careful not to make it an attack of the left, nor a support of the right, but rather an encouragement and constructive criticsm of liberal ideologies about race. In doing this he mantains objectivity by brilliantly refusing to take sides with any political entity, supporting equally the ideas of people as disparrate as race radicals of the 1960's to Newt Gingrich. In addition to Sleeper's careful structuring of his stance, he argues the book with sharp and clear logic, his language and structure flowing beautifully not only within chapters and subjects, but throughout the whole text, as he categorically examines ideas relating to crime, voting, the media, and culture, among others. This book is a valuable text in today's modern racial context because it is not only enlightening, it offers a fresh and concise viewpoint on an often less than clear topic.

This is a smooth book that goes about its business with devastating efficiency. The book neither shouts nor even exclaims. It is quiet and non-confrontational, all the better to send shivers down one's spine. The ffect it can have on liberals is shown by reading the critique by "A Reader from New York:" this person is all ad hominem, wishing that "Liberal Racism" will be the author's last book and that he will be drummed out of journalism forever; the reviewer has nothing to say about the content of the book, perhaps because such content is unassailable. If, as a person with common sense, you are frequently irritated by the mushy reasoning of liberal friends, this is the book you should consider giving them. In its quietly unassuming way it will save you from attacks of fury and high blood pressure and keep your friendhip intact.

The author says his conversion to objective thought, from self-congratulatory liberal bias, occurred when he heard a black representative tell an audience, "Liberals can be the biggest racists of all." It took years for the author's thoughts to evolve to the point of realizing the truth of that statement. He says he wrote the book to "save others some time." An effective, truthful book.