Race to the Bottom

The conservative fixation on racial categories

Virginia Postrel from the December 1995 issue

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Gaiter's anger didn't make it into the Spectator . Indeed, the only source of middle-class black anger D'Souza recognizes in that excerpt is "the frustration of pursuing unearned privi leges and then bristling when they do not bring something that has to be earnedthe respect of one's peers." Gaiter, one might suppose, is angry simply because he knows he didn't deserve to go to Harvard; having patronizing white liberals lump him in with murderers, because he shares their skin color, has nothing to do with it.

The whole point of the National Review excerpt is that such stereotypes are justified. "Only because group traits have an empirical basis in shared experience can we invoke them without fear of contradiction," writes D'Souza. "Think how people would react if someone said that 'Koreans are lazy' or that 'Hispanics are constantly trying to find ways to make money.' Despite the prevalence of anti-Semitism, Jews are rarely accused of stupidity. Blacks are never accused of being tight with a dollar, or of conspiring to take over the world. By reversing stereotypes we can see how their persistence relies, not simply on the assumption of the viewer, but also on the characteristics of the group being described."

The most amazing thing about this passage isn't that D'Souza wrote it. The most amazing thing is that to reinforce the notion that blacks are stupid (orthe subject of most of the article criminal), William F. Buckley's once-fastidious magazine now blithely insinuates that "shared experience" and the "characteristics of the group being described" suggest that Jews are not only tight with a dollar but conspiring to take over the world! And people think militias are wacky.

By contrast, in an excerpt published in The Washington Post , D'Souza concludes that Americans should unite behind "a universalist ideology that regards 'race' as a trivial aspect of identity and that seeks to transcend it with policies that are not based on color or ancestry." That excerptwhich includes critical portrayals of overt white racists, including sometime National Review contributors Lawrence Auster and Samuel Franciswas not one that conservative publi cations chose to reprint. It would have undoubtedly disturbed their readers.

You cannot get to a colorblind society by constantly reinforcing racial categories. You can't get justice by playing the race card. Conservatives make those arguments when they oppose affirmative action or denounce the Simpson verdict. They don't, however, appear to believe them. And that is America's loss.