The Future of Racism
In the wake of National Review’s decision to part ways with its longtime contributor John Derbyshire over a frankly racist provocation published in the far-right website TakiMag, the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf exhumes a long-ago Derbyshire interview in which he discussed the generational divide in conservative attitudes on race:
… I frequently meet college students who tell me they are conservative, who have all the attributes of what seems to me a broadly conservative outlook on life and society, who want to read conservative publications… yet who have a deep dislike of many of the topics - not just the point of view, the actual topics - that interest older readers.
This shows up most especially in the area of race, and the penumbra of issues - immigration, for instance, or crime-fighting - that are associated with it. The kind of thoughtful and intelligent young people that NR would like to have as readers understand that there are problems and absurdities connected with race in our public life, and are happy to hear arguments pro and con about racial profiling, affirmative action, and so on. They laugh with us when we lampoon the more outrageous kind of black race hustler - a Sharpton, a Farrakhan, a Johnny Cochran. They are, however, determined to make the multiracial society work, they believe it can be made to work in spite of the hustlers and liberal guilt-mongers, and they are unwilling to read, say, or think anything that could be construed as unkind towards people of other races. The pessimism and cynicism on this topic that you rather commonly find among conservatives - including NR readers - born in 1930, or even 1950, are profoundly unappetizing to these younger conservatives.
Which prompts Friedersdorf to write: “Parting ways with Derbyshire isn’t going to do anything to improve race relations in America. But it has brought National Review a step closer to relying on the younger rather than the older generation of conservatives. On subjects related to race that’s a very good thing.”
I agree that the parting-of-the-ways was a good thing. But I also wonder if using Derbyshire as a type in an older/younger, benighted past/enlightened future dichotomy doesn’t reflect a touch of over-optimism about what that future is actually likely to bring.
If we think of racism primarily as an ideological and political problem that’s specific to a particular time and place - an artefact of chattel slavery and segregationist culture, nurtured by racist institutions and propped up by comprehensive theories of racial inferiority, and sustained into the present by the enduring influence of Jim Crow - then it’s relatively easy to spin a narrative in which Derbyshire’s racial attitudes, and those of many older whites, are just the byproduct of the thought structures that they grew up with and haven’t been able to escape, but that their heirs are well on their way to overcoming. But if we think of racial prejudice as a more diffuse cultural phenomenon, common to almost every society and region where different ethnic groups coexist, then perhaps Derbyshire’s anti-black sentiments - which are the sentiments, not of an aging Lost Cause partisan, but of an English-born, web-savvy world traveler with a Chinese wife - are less of an anachronism and more of a harbinger of a post-post-racial future.
This future is unlikely to be as ugly as the past, because the case for formal segregation and overt racial discrimination isn’t going to come back. Nor, as I’ve said before, do I think that race is going to be the controlling cleavage of 21st century America: Already, I think religion, political ideology and social class can trump the color line as a source of polarization and division, and I expect that pattern to continue.
But I can think of a half-dozen reasons why public expressions of race-based hostility (of all sorts, not just against African Americans) might become more common, not less, as the America of the Boomers gives way to the America of the millennials. These reasons include the Internet’s tendency to make the taboo not-so-taboo anymore, our growing chronological distance from the institutional injustices whose successful overthrow made racism taboo in the first place, our culture’s obsession with genetic theories of just about everything, the fracturing of the Christian common ground that undergirded at least some of the belief in human equality, the way that diversity seems to increase social mistrust, the social gulf that increasingly yawns between upper-class whites who are invested in a multiracial society and lower-class whites who feel like losers in it, the potential growth of a grievance-based white identity politics as America becomes majority-minority, and the fact that white guilt over slavery and segregation - the foundation of the anti-racist consensus at the moment - will necessarily be a weaker cultural force in a country that’s more Hispanic, more Asian, and more non-white in general.
In this regard, it was interesting to read Isabel Wilkerson’s essay, just over a week ago in the Times, which used the Trayvon Martin shooting as a window into relations between blacks and Hispanics in present-day Florida. Taking note of studies showing that Hispanic immigrants “actually reported higher negative feelings toward blacks than most native-born whites,” she treated these findings as evidence of the long shadow of Jim Crow:
… in central Florida, a region whose demographic landscape is rapidly changing, where unprecedented numbers of Latino immigrants have arrived at a place still scarred by the history of a vigilante-enforced caste system and the stereotypes that linger from it. In this context, newcomers - like previous waves of immigrants in the past - may feel pressed to identify with the dominant caste and distance themselves from blacks, in order to survive.
Maybe this is the whole story, and Latinos are just adapting to social pressures created by America’s history of white racism. But note that the Hispanic respondents in the survey weren’t just a little more likely than whites to characterize blacks as shiftless and untrustworthy; they were much more likely to embrace those stereotypes when prompted by the pollsters. And blacks, for their part, were also significantly more likely than whites to characterize Hispanics as untrustworthy. So while it’s possible that this is all a second-order (or third-order, or fourth-order) consequence of the hierarchies that segregation established, it’s also potential evidence for what’s probably a more pessimistic view - that racial bias and stereotyping would be resilient even absent the legacy of segregation, and that the current eclipse of overt racism has been made possible by a level of self-policing that may be not sustained in a more ethnically fragmented culture where the civil rights era seems increasingly long ago and far away.
Source
I've seen this article floating around on facebook, and I'm curious about what people here think.
ETA: The author of this article (Ross Douthat) is the same guy who wrote this pile of garbage: The Roots of White Anxiety. So I'm suspicious of anything he says about race from the get-go, but his main point (that racism has not gone away, but rather evolved)appears to be a sound one. However, something about this article rubs me the wrong way, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is. :/
… I frequently meet college students who tell me they are conservative, who have all the attributes of what seems to me a broadly conservative outlook on life and society, who want to read conservative publications… yet who have a deep dislike of many of the topics - not just the point of view, the actual topics - that interest older readers.
This shows up most especially in the area of race, and the penumbra of issues - immigration, for instance, or crime-fighting - that are associated with it. The kind of thoughtful and intelligent young people that NR would like to have as readers understand that there are problems and absurdities connected with race in our public life, and are happy to hear arguments pro and con about racial profiling, affirmative action, and so on. They laugh with us when we lampoon the more outrageous kind of black race hustler - a Sharpton, a Farrakhan, a Johnny Cochran. They are, however, determined to make the multiracial society work, they believe it can be made to work in spite of the hustlers and liberal guilt-mongers, and they are unwilling to read, say, or think anything that could be construed as unkind towards people of other races. The pessimism and cynicism on this topic that you rather commonly find among conservatives - including NR readers - born in 1930, or even 1950, are profoundly unappetizing to these younger conservatives.
Which prompts Friedersdorf to write: “Parting ways with Derbyshire isn’t going to do anything to improve race relations in America. But it has brought National Review a step closer to relying on the younger rather than the older generation of conservatives. On subjects related to race that’s a very good thing.”
I agree that the parting-of-the-ways was a good thing. But I also wonder if using Derbyshire as a type in an older/younger, benighted past/enlightened future dichotomy doesn’t reflect a touch of over-optimism about what that future is actually likely to bring.
If we think of racism primarily as an ideological and political problem that’s specific to a particular time and place - an artefact of chattel slavery and segregationist culture, nurtured by racist institutions and propped up by comprehensive theories of racial inferiority, and sustained into the present by the enduring influence of Jim Crow - then it’s relatively easy to spin a narrative in which Derbyshire’s racial attitudes, and those of many older whites, are just the byproduct of the thought structures that they grew up with and haven’t been able to escape, but that their heirs are well on their way to overcoming. But if we think of racial prejudice as a more diffuse cultural phenomenon, common to almost every society and region where different ethnic groups coexist, then perhaps Derbyshire’s anti-black sentiments - which are the sentiments, not of an aging Lost Cause partisan, but of an English-born, web-savvy world traveler with a Chinese wife - are less of an anachronism and more of a harbinger of a post-post-racial future.
This future is unlikely to be as ugly as the past, because the case for formal segregation and overt racial discrimination isn’t going to come back. Nor, as I’ve said before, do I think that race is going to be the controlling cleavage of 21st century America: Already, I think religion, political ideology and social class can trump the color line as a source of polarization and division, and I expect that pattern to continue.
But I can think of a half-dozen reasons why public expressions of race-based hostility (of all sorts, not just against African Americans) might become more common, not less, as the America of the Boomers gives way to the America of the millennials. These reasons include the Internet’s tendency to make the taboo not-so-taboo anymore, our growing chronological distance from the institutional injustices whose successful overthrow made racism taboo in the first place, our culture’s obsession with genetic theories of just about everything, the fracturing of the Christian common ground that undergirded at least some of the belief in human equality, the way that diversity seems to increase social mistrust, the social gulf that increasingly yawns between upper-class whites who are invested in a multiracial society and lower-class whites who feel like losers in it, the potential growth of a grievance-based white identity politics as America becomes majority-minority, and the fact that white guilt over slavery and segregation - the foundation of the anti-racist consensus at the moment - will necessarily be a weaker cultural force in a country that’s more Hispanic, more Asian, and more non-white in general.
In this regard, it was interesting to read Isabel Wilkerson’s essay, just over a week ago in the Times, which used the Trayvon Martin shooting as a window into relations between blacks and Hispanics in present-day Florida. Taking note of studies showing that Hispanic immigrants “actually reported higher negative feelings toward blacks than most native-born whites,” she treated these findings as evidence of the long shadow of Jim Crow:
… in central Florida, a region whose demographic landscape is rapidly changing, where unprecedented numbers of Latino immigrants have arrived at a place still scarred by the history of a vigilante-enforced caste system and the stereotypes that linger from it. In this context, newcomers - like previous waves of immigrants in the past - may feel pressed to identify with the dominant caste and distance themselves from blacks, in order to survive.
Maybe this is the whole story, and Latinos are just adapting to social pressures created by America’s history of white racism. But note that the Hispanic respondents in the survey weren’t just a little more likely than whites to characterize blacks as shiftless and untrustworthy; they were much more likely to embrace those stereotypes when prompted by the pollsters. And blacks, for their part, were also significantly more likely than whites to characterize Hispanics as untrustworthy. So while it’s possible that this is all a second-order (or third-order, or fourth-order) consequence of the hierarchies that segregation established, it’s also potential evidence for what’s probably a more pessimistic view - that racial bias and stereotyping would be resilient even absent the legacy of segregation, and that the current eclipse of overt racism has been made possible by a level of self-policing that may be not sustained in a more ethnically fragmented culture where the civil rights era seems increasingly long ago and far away.
Source
I've seen this article floating around on facebook, and I'm curious about what people here think.
ETA: The author of this article (Ross Douthat) is the same guy who wrote this pile of garbage: The Roots of White Anxiety. So I'm suspicious of anything he says about race from the get-go, but his main point (that racism has not gone away, but rather evolved)appears to be a sound one. However, something about this article rubs me the wrong way, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is. :/