Charles Blow, the NY Times very own Bob Herbert in waiting, pleads for his possibly-precarious professional position and calls for renewed respect for the race hustling business. Seriously:
The quote helps support a broader sentiment that the current racial discontent is being fueled by a black liberal grievance industry that refuses to acknowledge racial progress, accept personal responsibility, or acknowledge its own racial transgressions. And that the charge of racism has become a bludgeon against anyone white and not in love with President Obama, thereby making those whites the most aggrieved — victims of the elusive reverse-racism Bigfoot.
Hmm - "the elusive reverse-racism Bigfoot"? Does that mean we can't actually find examples of reverse racism? So the New Haven firefighters case exemplified what? And since we have drifted there, Jeffrey Rosen in TNR told us that Sonia Sotomayor had a "compelling" personal biography:
A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Sonia Sotomayor’s biography is so compelling that many view her as the presumptive front-runner for Obama's first Supreme Court appointment. She grew up in the South Bronx, the daughter of Puerto Rican parents. Her father, a manual laborer who never attended high school, died a year after she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of eight. She was raised by her mother, a nurse, and went to Princeton and then Yale Law School. She worked as a New York assistant district attorney and commercial litigator before Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended her as a district court nominee to the first President Bush. She would be the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, if you don’t count Benjamin Cardozo.
I take away the notion that being Hispanic is part of what makes this biography so compelling. Isn't that reverse racism?
Let's press on:
The argument of these whites minimizes the victimization of others while magnifying their own victimization. While their argument may hold for some individuals, when you look at blacks writ large, the argument falls apart.
The next passage strikes me as gibberish, but have at it:
According to an ABC News poll conducted last year, blacks are even more likely than whites to admit that they “have at least some feelings of racial prejudice.” Thirty-eight percent of blacks admitted to those feelings while only 34 percent of whites did. I use the word admit because people notoriously underreport negative behaviors on polls, and knowing which groups may underreport and to what degree is impossible to gauge. For more objectivity, we need more scientific measures like Project Implicit, a virtual laboratory maintained by Harvard, the University of Washington and the University of Virginia that has administered hundreds of thousands of online tests designed to detect hidden racial biases. Tests taken from 2000 to 2006 found that a whopping three-quarters of whites have an implicit pro-white/anti-black bias, while 40 percent of blacks had a pro-black/anti-white bias, about the same amount as those admitting racial prejudice in the poll.
Furthermore, a January poll by the Pew Research Center found that most blacks agree that blacks who can’t get ahead are most responsible for their own condition. Only about a third said that racial discrimination was the main reason.
This whole hollow argument is further evidence that many whites are exhibiting the same culture of racial victimization that they decry.
The Project Implicit site is interesting. Since (I have read) the human brain is hard-wired to prefer its own group, that "whopping three quarters" may reflect basic neurology rather than conscious discrimination. Consequently, it may have no predictive power as to hiring decisions and the like.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that I took the test and apparently have a tendency to lean slightly in favor of African-Americans. No pictures of Charles Blow were included in the test, however.
More weirdness:
There’s a mound of scientific evidence a mile high that documents the broad, systematic and structural discrimination against minorities. Where’s the comparable mound of documentation for discrimination against whites? There isn’t one.
Huh? Are affirmative action and the EEOC "structural"? General Motors (p. 22) made a special attempt to keep minority-owned car dealerships afloat - structural?
As to the science, I am sure some of it is impressive. I am also sure some of it looks like the silly study from 2002 that liberals like to cite - the theme is that "equal" resumes with black sounding names got fewer call-backs. The objections are obvious, but not to libs.
OK, I will end rather than conclude. Dismal time management...
START ME UP!
OK, I am back for a Big Finish. Blow concludes his comfort food for the left with a bit more righty-bashing:
In fact, some on the right seem to be doing with the race issue what they’ve done with the climate-change issue: denying the basic facts and muddying the waters around them until no one can see clearly enough to have an honest discussion or develop thoughtful solutions.
I had thought that the reflexive denials and defenses of many on the right were simply an overreaction to, in their view, being unfairly accused of racism on too broad a scale. My present worry is that denial may be the new normal and that the hot language of the past summer has cooled and hardened into a permanently warped perception of the very meaning of discrimination and racism. I worry that the last bit of distance between where we are and where we want to be on racial reconciliation is being drawn through an ever-narrowing, ever-more-treacherous terrain.
Blow has a tiny audience on the right and even less credibility, so there is zero chance of him winning converts from that side. But speaking as a person who instinctively favors blacks (albeit slightly), I have some constructive advice - Blow might actually be able to change minds and change behavior if he identified behaviors among his audience on the left that could be changed for the better.
He gives tiny nods in that direction (e.g., by identifying, but not affirming, the possibility that some accusations of racism are overdone), but Blow has no apparent interest in providing leadership or challenging his readership. His goal is to bang out a column that libs can enjoy over their coffee, sagely bemoaning those wacky Tea-Partiers and deplorable righties. He only falls short by failing to bash Sarah Palin; otherwise, it's Mission Accomplished.
He closes with a chorus of Kumbaya:
Racism isn’t everywhere we imagine it, but it is in far more places than we admit. If we can start from common points of agreement, we can come much closer to common ground. But to do that, everyone must step out of the shadows of denial and into the brutal light of honesty.
Booker T. Washington was right that there are some who may not “want the patient to get well.” Those people exist on all sides of the debate, and they will always be there. But they’re a minority. Cast them aside. Let the rest of us start with this point of agreement: The patient is doing better but is still sick.
To be clear - everyone on the right must step forward into the brutal light of honesty and confess their shortcomings, after which Mr. Blow and the left will offer forgiveness and redemption. Maybe. Nobody on the left has to do anything more difficult than look into their heart to find forgiveness.
NOT REALLY RELATED: The deplorable racism of Adam Serwer, who lives under the illusion that only blacks join criminal gangs, has not to my knowledge been addressed by The American Prospect.
TRUST BUT VERIFY:
Well, this explains what's going on with the voice-activated stereo in my car. When I say, "Beethoven's Ninth" it starts playing Ode to Joy. Or if I say, "Let it be," it plays the Beatles song of the same name.
The other day another driver cut me off in traffic. "You clown!" I yelled.
And the stereo played, "Hail to the Chief."