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To the Editor:
Linda Chavez argues quite plausibly that black-white relations have never been better, adducing among other things the fact of Barack Obama’s candidacy for President [“Let Us by All Means Have an Honest Conversation About Race,” June]. But she then takes this claim much further, stating that “barriers on race have essentially disappeared.” She concludes by rehearsing a number of problems with black racial politics that in her view Obama has failed to confront. Thus, too many African Americans deny the role that the “decline of the black family” has played in African-American violence, poor educational performance, and poverty. Instead, they fasten onto destructive conspiracy theories that blame whites for everything from AIDS to drug distribution to poor school performance.

I would like to address the final portion of this argument. Collective responses to “victimhood” have always been fraught. Jewish communities generally reacted to the Holocaust with resolve against victimhood itself (“Never Again!”).

This commitment has been expressed in numerous ways, from memorializing the Holocaust to vigilance about anti-Semitism to countering stereotypical images of the Jew, including especially the image of the defenseless Jew. Such reactions found fertile ground for development in the new Jewish culture of the state of Israel. But the determination never to be victimized has raised new problems: as a national majority in Israel, Jews could now be victimizers. Although this might be regarded as a negative development—and it has been at times—the rejection of victimhood is a necessary moment in the struggle against persecution.

African Americans have had their own great history of revolt against victimhood. The Christian call to turn the other cheek found its breaking point with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. From that moment, African-Americans doubted that the reason and decency to which they were exhorted could protect them. Movements for “Black Power” and “Black Beauty” were born. But unlike Israeli Jews, African Americans could have no army of their own. The fate of the Black Panthers proved that: their toughness was criminalized.

The process of reclaiming African-American pride was sometimes in tension with nationalistic appeals for American unity. As the most discriminated-against minority of a cold-war power, African Americans attracted allies (often unsought) from the U.S. “enemy camp,” and Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban Communists called for solidarity with their plight. Black politicians became vulnerable to the accusation of anti-Americanism.

We find distant echoes of this dynamic in the Reverend Wright affair, but we should remember that easy identification with the nation is never possible for long-discriminated-against minorities, in the U.S. or anywhere else. Persecuted groups retain a sense of their vulnerability.
So, while dealing with “paranoia” that is out of step with contemporary reality is critically important, denying its basis in historical fact and in contemporary fears is not productive. I find little sensitivity to this matter in Linda Chavez’s article, which suggests that racism in the United States is basically a thing of the past.

Besides aiding the process of racial conciliation within the U.S., Obama’s candidacy has also had a powerfully ameliorating effect on the troubling growth of anti-Americanism abroad. The latter has been fanned by the obscene American habits of memorializing only America’s own dead while ignoring all others, of counting only its own losses, and of celebrating only its own victories. As the product of a new racial dispensation that Linda Chavez at least partially acknowledges, the Obama phenomenon demonstrates that the U.S. can still be a wellspring of transformation and improvement.

Claudio Lomnitz
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Columbia University
New York City

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To the Editor:
Linda Chavez’s invitation to a no-holds-barred conversation about race in America should be welcomed by all who seek genuine solutions for the persistent racial divides that continue to threaten the national fabric. But the terms of such a conversation are substantially more complex (and potentially reputation-threatening) for anyone daring to challenge deeply fortified taboos surrounding how this oldest of national dilemmas may be discussed.

For the past half-century, we have tottered between two mainstream approaches to the race issue. On the whole, liberals have concluded that an activist welfare state that focuses on uprooting all vestiges of past and current white prejudice will eventually lead to a generation of African Americans being endowed with the full scope of opportunity that was promised by the founders to all of America’s sons and daughters.

Beginning in the 1960’s, this liberal consensus has been challenged by a number of factors, including the findings of the Moynihan Report and other important studies of the black community; a decidedly militant, anti-integrationist turn in segments of the civil-rights movement toward separatism and “Black Power”; exploding urban race riots and the rise of inter generational welfare dependency; and the divided liberal conscience regarding the justice of race-specific preferential treatment.

Collectively, these developments radically deflated the euphoric expectations maintained in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision and the 1964-65 civil-rights legislation. Yes, governmental action had by all accounts been effective, but it had hardly brought about the liberal utopia of an equal-opportunity society. New divisions had also hardened with worsening indicators of illegitimate births, incidence of crime, and educational deficits in the black community.

Lying in wait and yet to be fully implemented has been the second paradigm, the libertarian/conservative one, whose roots go back to Booker T. Washington and forward to the likes of Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Walter Williams, Ward Connerly, and Linda Chavez herself. For them, the principal culprit for the lingering problems in the black community is self-defeating attitudes and behaviors such as have led to the disintegration of the black family unit.

Thus, to foster a truly colorblind and equal-opportunity society, Linda Chavez would like to see the dismantling of racial preferences in education, employment, and contracts; the avoidance of scapegoating white America; and a revivification among blacks of the values of work, industry, and familial responsibility that have worked for America’s other successful racial-ethnic groups.

This paradigm certainly deserves its due, and is likely, owing to the exhaustion of liberal remedies, to experience a near-term renaissance. But a broadened conversation on race might suggest even more forcefully that her libertarian vision is not supported by evidence, or at the very least has not yet contended with scholarly research that questions its applicability to persons of all racial groups. 

Is it possible, one might ask, that Linda Chavez’s recipe is unrealistic, as well as undesired by the very black Americans she seeks to win to the cause of a race-blindness? Is it possible that both liberals and libertarian conservatives mistakenly oppose a race-conscious approach? Should our national conversation not include voices who on the basis of scientific evidence question whether the integrationist ideal of white liberals is feasible, or voices who presume that the biological and genetic reality of race differences has compelling sociological and policy consequences?

Paul Kamolnick

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