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Time's Review of "The End of Racism"] (fwd)
marta henriksen (henrik@UNM.EDU)
Thu, 12 Oct 1995 14:08:05 -0600
Thought this might be relevant to the discussion of race currently on the
list.
Marta Henriksen | "Mr. Fool Bull, are you teaching what you know
Department of Anthropology | to others?"
University of New Mexico | "No, my friend. There is no one of my people
Albuquerque, NM | ready or willing right now to learn all
henrik@unm.edu | this. But it will not be forgotten. Truth
| may sleep, my friend, but it never dies."
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 09 Oct 95 11:42:03 EDT
From: Rodney Coates <coatesrd@casmail.muohio.edu>
To: Racial-Religious-EthnoNationalist Violence Studies
<revs@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: Time's Review of "The End of Racism"]
Check this out folks. It's a pleasure to see D'Souza pilloried in
the
mainstream media.
DIVIDING LINE
THE BIGOT'S HANDBOOK
BY JACK E. WHITE
Back in the 1970s, Richard Pryor had a routine about a group of
Asian
boat people being
introduced to American life. Lesson No. 1: How to pronounce what
is
now commonly known as
the N word.
Last week a real-life version of Pryor's comedy sketch was played
out
among a rarefied band of
right-wing intellectuals. At its center: Dinesh D'Souza, a
34-year-old
Indian-born conservative
wunderkind who has made a name for himself by bashing women, gays
and
minorities ever since
he presided over the Dartmouth Review, a fecklessly racist
student
publication, in the early '80s.
Today he is a case study in assimilation through bigotry, an
ambitious
immigrant who has achieved
minor celebrity in his new homeland--and a sort of honorary
status as
a white man--by taking
advantage of opportunities created by the civil rights movement,
then
turning his guns on it.
Nothing could be more American.
D'Souza's latest manifesto, The End of Racism, is one of the
creepiest
books to appear in recent
years. Even more than D'Souza's previous book, Illiberal
Education,
which savaged the campus
vogue of multiculturalism, it contains so much sophistry,
half-baked
erudition and small-minded
zealotry that even right-wingers who share many of D'Souza's
ideas are
outraged by its, well,
political incorrectness.
Last week Robert Woodson and Glenn C. Loury, two of the country's
most
prominent black
conservatives, "disaffiliated" themselves from the American
Enterprise
Institute, where D'Souza is
a research fellow, in protest over the book. Sounding more like
the
Rev. Al Sharpton than a
conservative Republican, Woodson denounced D'Souza as "the Mark
Fuhrman of public policy"
and called on conservatives, black and white, to "publicly
disavow the
racist ideology" his book
espouses. "This is a moment of truth for the conservative
movement as
to where they stand on the
issue of race," says Woodson. "The only time you hear from white
conservatives is when there is
a white fireman aggrieved over affirmative action. If they want
to
have any influence in this area,
they have got to speak out when blacks and Hispanics are
aggrieved.
This is one such occasion."
So far, says Woodson, not a single white conservative has
responded.
What's taking so long? Like Camille Paglia in the feminist
literary
sphere, D'Souza will say
whatever it takes to attract attention, no matter how tasteless,
irresponsible or distorted. He
contends that white racism is no longer much of a problem in the
U.S.
Instead, all our racial
troubles can be traced to the fact that "black culture" is so
dysfunctional it amounts to a
"civilizational" gap between African Americans and the rest of
society. He does not bother to
differentiate between the crime-ridden urban underclass and the
middle-class high achievers such
as Woodson, head of the Washington-based National Center for
Neighborhood Enterprise, and
Loury, a professor at Boston University.
D'Souza also argues that because racism had its origins among
intellectually gifted Europeans
during the Enlightenment, it can't be all bad; that American
slavery
was not a racist institution; and
that segregation was merely a well-meaning attempt by
paternalistic
whites to help blacks
"perform to the capacity of their arrested development." He urges
the
repeal of every major civil
rights law in the land, including those that allow blacks to sit
at
lunch counters and use the same
water fountains as everyone else. Thenceforward the government
would
be required to function in
a race-blind manner, but private citizens and institutions, from
taxicab companies to huge
corporations, would be free to discriminate.
Why would any respectable publisher choose to purvey this bunk?
The
answer, I'm afraid, is that
bigotry sells books. New York City's Free Press has published a
long
list of first-rate works on
political and social issues by writers from every point on the
spectrum, yet so far the only
blockbuster among them (with 400,000 copies in print) has been
Charles
Murray and Richard
Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, which argues that blacks are
genetically
stupider than whites. On the
jacket of D'Souza's latest, the Free Press high-mindedly says its
publication will further expand
"the range of acceptable discourse about race" by "setting forth
the
principles that should guide us
in creating a multiracial society." But judging by the initial
100,000
press run, the largest by far in
the company's history, the Free Press also sees D'Souza as a
moneymaker and is willing to
profiteer on the obscene ideas he has packaged in the plain brown
wrapper of specious
scholarship.
The U.S. certainly does need a searching debate on racially
tinged
issues from affirmative action
to welfare dependency and crime. It is quite clear, for example,
that
racism alone cannot account
for the sorry plight of the underclass and that traditional civil
rights remedies can do nothing to
solve it. But such a dialogue stands little chance of being
productive
if it is polluted by the
nonsense D'Souza is peddling. Those who want to deal honestly
with
race can begin by
boycotting his book--not because it's politically incorrect, but
because it is just plain wrong.
Copyright 1995 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
=========END FORWARDED MESSAGE=========
UMOJA,
Still in the struggle
Rodney D. Coates
Director of Black World Studies
Associate Professor of Sociology
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio - 45056
PH: 513-5291235
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