Sorry, Tavis, You're Not America's Conscience
By Richard Davis (03/04/05)
During his annual race rally, which he calls the State of the Black Union Forum, black talk-show host Tavis Smiley made a comment that was picked up by AP and run in hundreds of newspapers. “Black folks,” he said, “have always been the conscience of this country.” That’s both racist bombast and bad history -- which also seems to pretty much describe the actual state of the “Black Union ” today, if his forum was any indication.
Blacks are not America’s conscience so much as they are its reductionists. Like most blacks and all race peddlers, Smiley believes that American history is essentially one long narrative about race and nothing else. Though that view has become orthodoxy to liberal educators and the media, enforced with a vengeful political correctness, the truth is that race has never been the predominate storyline in American history. The American conscience has always been much broader than that.
To be obsessed with race is by definition to be a racist, and the black mind today is consumed by it. One would be hard put to find a black web site, book, radio or television program, column, seminar, forum or any other form of public expression by blacks that wasn’t about race. Virtually all black intellectual energies are being funneled into racially oriented endeavors of one sort or the other.
That is not healthy for blacks or the rest of us. History makes that abundantly clear, no matter how you revise it. If race obsession was a bad thing for the Nazis, the KKK and the Hutus of Rwanda, why are we looking the other way with African Americans? Would we tolerate a State of the White Union with white equivalents of Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Julian Bond, Maxine Waters, Harry Belafonte and Cornel West? Of course not. The David Dukes are shunned in America, not given standing ovations.
Watching successful, affluent blacks sermonize pompously about the evils of whites as if it were still summer 1965 in Selma raises a host of socio-pathological questions, foremost among them being one that strikes at the very heart of the black victimization project: If success and integration only stimulate black racism -- that is, if blacks respond to increasing racial interaction with hatred and bigotry and escalating calls for separation -- then it turns out, after a century of demonizing the white race, that we’re not so different after all. It’s only a question of power. When it comes to racism, we’ve finally achieved equality. Which is to have achieved nothing, of course.
One lesson learned repeatedly during the past 100 years is that racist rhetoric should not be ignored, regardless of political correctness or other excuses (such as the need to build self esteem). Rhetoric of hate and resentment leads eventually to violence. The movie Hotel Rwanda examines a gruesome example of the consequences of ignoring such rhetoric.
Unknown to most whites today is the struggle within the black community among three opposing rhetorical forces: the so-called “integrationists,” the Black Nationalist separatists, and the slowly emerging conservatives, who are viewed by the other two as literally race traitors (a leading black web site this week includes the lead story, “New Crop of Self-loathing Black Conservatives Undercut the Black Agenda.” Why would editors of any self-respecting journal permit such hate-mongering? How far is that rhetoric from actually inciting violence?).
The nationalists are avowed racists who want both separation from whites and the destruction of white America, not necessarily in that order. As one black writer, Min. Paul Scott, stated on a web site while commenting on the Smiley forum, “The division has always been there between those who are determined to nudge their way into building the white man’s heaven on earth and the Bad Boy, Black Nationalist outcasts who would have just as soon seen Babylon burn down… The paramount issue has always been segregation vs integration, whether Black folks would determine their own destinies or would forever be satisfied to accept the crumbs form ‘massa’s’ table.”
The integrationists have numbers on their side, but there’s no doubt that the nationalist rhetoric rules the day. It is seen as more legitimate, more authentically black than the moderate cadences of a Martin Luther King. Thus black writers and academics, most well-heeled, tenured and long gone from black neighborhoods, routinely spout Malcolm X invective as proof of their bona fides. In fact, it’s the only voice permitted. Those who don’t hate, don’t understand.
With the triumph of the nationalist rhetoric has come increasing acceptance of a nationalist proposition: that black and white cultures are incompatible. Suddenly to black elites Africa and Europe seem to be very distinct places, with an unbridgeable gulf between. After decades of demanding entry into mainstream America they’ve begun to wonder whether that’s really desirable or even possible.
In truth, there doesn’t seem to be a choice, so whatever accommodation it takes to live together is the accommodation that must be made. If blacks sincerely believe another way is feasible then let’s hear about it in a constructive voice that moves us forward, even if that moves us apart.
The first accommodation in any relationship is to watch what you say. Race baiting makes a fortune for people like Smiley, Jackson, Farrakhan, West, et al, but it also encourages and sanctions the self-destructive behavior that continues to plague the black community. And by promoting racial discord it is making true racial harmony, a difficult proposition at best, virtually impossible.
That’s the state of black America today, and the true conscience of America is remiss to ignore it.
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