Diversity Peddlers, Expect No Thanks
The modern civil rights movement, born in the bosom of every black American, nurtured in Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, embraced with fervor by white liberals, is 40 years old. From it came the most profound changes in American life in this century. It was the fullest expression of the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence, and what irony that its principal beneficiaries were those whose bondage was overlooked by the signers of the Declaration.
It was a fine time to be a liberal, 40 years years ago. It was still a fine time 30 years ago, after President Lyndon Johnson ramrodded historic civil rights legislation through a mossbacked Congress.
It is no longer a good time to be a liberal, and hasn’t been for years. How many office seekers today openly and avowedly call themselves liberal? Conviction has wavered, courage wilted.
How many political columnists are unapologetically liberal? A bare few, and they are of no consequence.
Liberalism is discredited - done in by its own intolerance, by its contempt for what most Americans believe to be right - and yet the beliefs of everyday Americans would once have been called “liberal.” The most central of those beliefs is the one the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. enunciated - that the content of one’s character matters more than the color of one’s skin. What liberal still stands by that?
Jim Sleeper is an old-fashioned liberal who still believes in those words. But how quaint, even trite, they sound now, when tribal affiliation is primary, when “difference” is exalted and commonality is scorned.
Sleeper’s new book “Liberal Racism” is a powerful indictment of liberalism for defaulting on its own colorblind ideals and for championing the new racism of identity politics. He sees corporate diversity training programs for the shams and charades they are; he eviscerates the media for its hypocrisy on race; he sees self-delusion and fantasy in the notion of racial destiny.
Sleeper will be called a whiner, a bellyacher, even a racist. Of course, of course. But he is a liberal whose knee does not jerk. Sleeper, a former editorial writer for Newsday and the author of “The Closest of Strangers,” has been examining liberals’ rejection of a common American culture for several years, but nothing he has written is as candid as what he gives us here.
Race still matters.
Forty years after King and others marched so that all would be treated without preference, the color of our skins has never mattered more. We are all color coded. The government has seen to it, the schools and the media enforce it aggressively and most Americans resent it deeply. Add to this the O.J. Simpson trial and you can see why 55 percent of respondents in a Gallup Poll this month - both black and white - said relations between the races will “always be a problem.” Even if that assertion is too vague to mean much, you can read into it a weariness and a loss of hope.
Liberals have brought it about by renouncing genuine integration, by trying to rationalize away the reality of crime and violence, by making dogma of “diversity,” and by endorsing racial separatism. “So deep is the liberal default,” Sleeper writes, “that Barry Goldwater has become a better friend of racial integration than Benjamin Chavis Muhammad, the former president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Newt Gingrich is less prone to exploiting racial fears and resentments than is Congresswoman Maxine Waters of South-Central Los Angeles. When it comes to race, some conservatives are more ‘progressive’ than liberals.”
These are words liberals need to hear. They need to hear them because they are true. Sleeper’s arguments are anything but the pouting of another middle-aged white male. To the contrary, they draw upon the work of black scholars such as sociologist William Julius Wilson, author of “When Work Disappears,” and Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, whose new book “Race, Crime and Law” rebuts the notion that race confers a privileged legal status.
Having abandoned faith in a common civic culture, Sleeper argues, liberals have repudiated everything they once stood for. They have become the new nihilists, clothing their contempt in rhetoric that comes straight out of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
“In the name of ‘diversity’ - but in deference to race hustlers, ideologues and opportunists - liberals are chasing phantasms of racial difference, shrinking from the new America that is unfolding before our eyes. Racism endures, of course, and it is duplicitous and cruel; that only makes liberals’ own complicity in it all the more fateful and unforgivable.”
The truths Sleeper speaks in “Liberal Racism” are truths the guilty alone would deny. They are people who can no longer look themselves in the mirror. If they could, they would see nothing but the color of their skin.
(Liberal Racism, published by Viking, is available at local bookstores.)
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