Bennett Flap Proves We Need To Talk About Race
By Richard Davis (10/05/05)
Race is one of the defining issues of our age, though as everyone knows it is extremely perilous to discuss the matter in public, unless you are black, in which case you have tribal immunity to speak as you wish. Blacks are the only Americans with absolute freedom of speech. The rest of us have to watch what we say.
As a public figure and basically a liberal on race, Bill Bennett certainly knows the rules. His comments last week on his radio show were by definition racist in that they fell outside the parameters of racial discourse allowed to nonblacks. You don’t want to get caught outside those parameters.
(For those who don’t know, Bennett was criticizing a book that equated a decrease in crime with the rise in abortions when he said, "But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." That, he went on to say, would be "impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible.")
Current PC codes expressly forbid the mentioning of blacks and criminality together, as mainstream journalists would tell you if they were honest. They help maintain the codes. Blacks themselves won’t even mention the two in the same sentence, which might help explain why the violent crime rate for blacks remains so high. But we can’t talk about that.
The Cincinnati Enquirer editorialized on Monday that Bennett’s comments were racist, adding, “It apparently didn't occur to him to say that crime could be suppressed by eliminating poverty, or educational disadvantages, or disease. No, the thought that he came up with was eliminating crime by eliminating a race.”
This excerpt displays the proper PC usage when discussing crime. That is 1) don’t mention blacks and crime together, 2) exaggerate white racist attitudes, and 3) always reference poverty (education is fine, too, though I’m a little puzzled by what diseases they’re referring to. Kleptomania?).
Poverty causes crime, period, case closed, and whites are solely responsible for both creating and not alleviating black poverty, the most notable white responsible being George Bush. That crime has gone up in the black community as poverty has gone down, that whites have transferred trillions of dollars to blacks, that more than twice as many whites as blacks are poor and at least an equal number of Hispanics are too and yet their violent crime rates … well, that’s all wandering outside the parameters.
Note what the Enquirer didn’t cite -- what many consider the principal-though-now-unmentionable source of the high rate of black crime -- illegitimacy and the dissolution of the black family. One could also mention welfare dependency, which helped destroy the family, community and personal values, and the absence of male moral guidance in the community -- that is, if one could mention them, which one can’t.
To make his matter worse, Bennett has swum directly into the gaping jaws of the Democratic Party’s new race initiative, which consists entirely of preventing any more blacks from moseying into Republican territory. Condoleezza Rice looms on the horizon. Time to ratchet up the rhetoric.
No better way to keep blacks at home politically than to increase their perceived alienation from the rest of society. You do that by bolstering their hatred for and resentment against whites, i.e. Republicans. Ergo Rangel, et al. For Democratic race mongers, Katrina was a godsend. Bennett is a lesser one. There’ll be more. God is bountiful before an election.
Were Bennett’s comments racist? I think he crossed that proverbial line, but then I don’t believe he did so consciously. It was a classic Freudian slip, the expression of the unconscious, which is where race resides with liberals and neocons today. It’s called repression. They talk the talk, but they walk in their own neighborhoods, and sometimes they stumble.
These subconscious breaches of the peace -- and the harsh, pitiless retribution they provoke: public humiliation and banishment -- are the consequence of surrendering this issue to the irrational and emotional. Reason and rationality account for less and less in our public dialogue, as rhetoric itself becomes territorial, tribal, brutal.
For the record, all Americans, white, black or other, fear violent black crime more than they fear anything else. They fear being attacked, raped, robbed, carjacked or murdered by young black males. It’s been an evil blight on American society for decades, a destroyer of our quality of life, particularly in the cities, and an impediment to improving race relations. All crime degrades a culture, but the fact is blacks commit violent crimes at a rate far disproportionate to their numbers.
That is forbidden thought and speech today, but every person who lives or visits here keeps it in the forefront of their minds. Sometimes it slips out of their mouths. Fear is hard to censor.
I don’t know if that explains Bennett, but he can defend himself. Sometimes you say stupid things. Sometimes they’re insensitive to others, even racist. Welcome to the human family. Let those blacks who are without any racist sentiments throw the first stones.
Conservatives should take from this fray a lesson in the terrible costs political correctness is exacting on our society. It is making repressed hypocrites out of all of us, and you don’t need a Freudian psychiatrist to tell you that’s not healthy. We are wrong to cede race issues to blacks and liberals. We can see where that is taking us. Either we fight for our right to free and open speech, or we’re going to continue to lose that right, either in fact, as Bennett has, or in law, as liberals would have it.
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