Dinesh D’Souza is currently the perplexed benificiary and victim of an uproar over his book “The End of Racism,” which emerged in the midst of a momentous furor over the centrality of race in America. Except for the always bravely Olympian sage Thomas Sowell, even conservative blacks have fiercely renounced much of his argument along with his intemperate language. How can anyone deny the power of racism in the face of the taped ruminations of Mark Fuhrman, the rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan the indignant voices at the Million Man March, the radical split between the races reacting to the acquittal of O.J. Simpson?
I know how Mr. D’Souza feels. In 1979, I published a book called “Visible Man: A True Story of Post Racist American.” Now this book is being republished by the ICS Press in San Francisco. “Visible Man” showed that white racism was not a significant problem for American blacks in the late 1970’s. If white racism was not much of a problem in 1978, it is manifestly not a problem in 1995.
Black Achievement
Neither I nor Mr. D’Souza denies the existence of racial feelings in America and throughout the world. But far from being hostile to black achievement, American whites celebrate blacks at every opportunity. In the truest test, governed by messive voluntary choices in the marketplace, Americans have made the National Basketball Association, 80% black, the most popular sports league, Whitney Houston the most popular and richest American singer, Bill Cosby the most popular and richest comedian, and Oprah Winfrey the most prosperous entertainer. Far from showing racism, American employers, mostly white, have given black women higher earnings, on average, than comparable white women. Between 1973 and 1994, the current-dollar revenues of the top 100 black owned industrial companies, as listed by Black Enterprise magazine, rose from $473 million to $6.7 billion, plus $4.9 billion in revenues from auto dealerships. Blacks in America have far outperformed blacks in any other society with a substantial black population.
In my view, the most important finding in “The Bell Curve” by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray was that after controlling for age, IQ and gender, the average full-time worker actually out-earns the average white by 1%. Let the IQ number stand for real educational attainment (as opposed to degrees in easier subjects and from less rigorous institutions), and it is clear that racial discrimination no longer limits black earnings. A more appropriate standard, though, would include a correction for marital status, since married men of all races earn some 30% more than single men of the same age and credentials. Correcting the Murray figures for marital status gives black men a dramatic edge in earnings over white men. Although such comparisons are full of pitfalls, it is safe to say that black men in the U.S. today earn more, not less, than truly comparable whites.
Rather than admit this reality, the intelligentsia, black and white, would rather pusue fantasies of racial hatred. As I discovered during appearances related to the original publication of “Visible Man,” and as Mr. D’Souza is now learning, denial of racism today is widely seen as evidence of it. In the face of the fury of the charges of bigotry, whites find it easier to go along than to tell the truth.
Public opinion polls, for example, show that the beating of Rodney King galvanized a newly intense feeling of alienation among blacks in America. Yet anyone, regardless of race, who took the police on an eight- mile, high-speed chase, and then charged at them at the end, should be grateful if he is not shot (rather than beaten). Sensible people learn not to defy or insult police officers who are performing an inevitably messy and treacherous job under tremendous strain. Yet the white media almost unanimously confirmed the black outrage. Today whites indulge the idea of reasonable doubt in the Simpson trial, as if it were possible that a team of policemen would or could contrive an instant frame-up of a supremely popular black athelete.
In effect, all America treats blacks as children who cannot be told the truth. From Harvard Law School deans to ghetto social workers; from the chairman of the New York Times to the editors of Time magazine, to the steady drumbeat of three broadcast networks, eminent whites are constantly confirming blacks in the crippling comfort of their belief in white racism.
If racism explains next to nothing about black poverty and crime, what does explain it? What is the real cause, so unspeakably unwelcome that it drives opinion toward almost any other explanation, however false or unsavory? The chief cause of black poverty is welfare state feminism. Thirty years of affirmative action programs have artificially elevated black women into economic power over black men.
This regime prevailed from the highest levels of the economy, where black female college graduates with five years on the job significantly outearned black men in 1991, to the underclass, where a typical package of welfare benefits produced disposable income 28% above a typical job in 1994. It prevailed on college campuses, where more than 60% of the blacks are women. It dominated government job training programs, where girls are found to benefit far more than boys. It even invaded such male bastions as the cockpits of fighter planes, police squad cars, fire stations, construction sites and university athletic teams. In a grotesque abuse of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, judges have interpreted Title IX of the 1972 amendments as requiring academic institutions, in effect, to retrench scholarships and opportunities for superior black male athletes to advance the careers of measurably inferior female athletes, white and black, soley on the basis of sex.
It is an unpopular fact of life that in all societies and in all races monogamous marriage is based on patriarchal sex roles, with men the dominant provider. Welfare state feminism destroyed black families by ravaging the male role of provider.
Some observers claim that black communities benefit from matriarchal institutions. Looking more closely, however, you will find inner cities implacably ruled by gangs of young men, with the “matriarchs” cowering in their triple bolted apartments in fear of them.
Men either dominate as providers or predators. There is hardly any other option. The key problem of the underclass – the crucible of crime, the source of violence, the root of poverty – is the utter failure of socialization of young men through marriage. The problem resides in the nexus of men and marriage. Yet nearly all the attention, subsidies, training opportunities and therapies of the welfare state focus on helping women function without marriage. The welfare state attacks the problem of the absence of husbands by rendering husbands as entirely superfluous. “Welfare reform” continues the policy giving welfare mothers new training and child care benefits and further obviating marriage by pursuing unmarried fathers with deadbeat dad campaigns.
Today, in large American cities, fully 40% of young black men between the ages of 17 and 35 are in prison, on probation, or on the lam; and some 40% of young black women say they have been forced into unwanted sexual activity. To fear young black males has become a mandate for survival on the streets of many American cities. This unspeakable social tragedy – with all its infuriating reverberations on law-abiding balck citizens – is the inevitavble harvest of government policy.
The Great Fiasco
Even Margaret Mead recognized that in all cultures family values depend on religious supports and male providers. The effort to unculcate ethical behavior and sustain marriage without religious faith is the great fiasco of the modern age. In order to relieve the pain of the poor, our society must come to recognize that their problem is not lack of jobs or lack of money but moral anarchy originating with the establishment and most sorely victimizing blacks.
With both the black and white establishments and even the leading Christian churches succumbing to the siren appeal of unisex policy, what could be more predictable than the emergence of patriarchal religion — however offensive in some ways — as a galvanizing force among black men. If Mr. Farrakhan is deeply culpable for his ethnic fanaticism, surely the entire U.S. establishment is equally culpable for its fanatical assault on family roles. For all races, patriarchal religion has played a central role in human civilization. Patriarchal black churches, from Father Divines’ mid-century movement to Christian fundamentalists and Black muslims today — have served more as part of the solution than as part of the problem of black poverty.
These lessons have become increasingly relevant to whites who imagine that they can sustain a civilization based on secular liberation from monogamous sex roles. As the white illegitimacy rate moves toward the level reached by blacks at the time of the Moynihan Report — and decisively surpasses it in Britain – the events of recent weeks should ring a tocsin for all Americans.
Read a response to this article by Washington Post columnist William Raspberry