Letters

From the April 1996 issue

The Case of Race

I want to congratulate you on your editorial on race, "Race to the Bottom" (December 1995). I have been quite disturbed by the racial overtone that has surfaced within conservative, and I should add libertarian, rhetoric in recent years (especially from the paleo-libertarian crowd). The critique of government race-based public policy must not be confused with racial intolerance. I appreciated your call for a consistent liberalism that celebrates the virtues of tolerance and the cosmopolitan vision that sustains the social cooperation of the liberal order.

Peter J. Boettke
New York, NY

It is indeed, as Virginia Postrel in her December editorial points out, "hard to lead a crusade for treating people as individuals when you're busy lumping them together by race." Her point is absolutely fundamental, and I have seen it made nowhere else. Conservative colorblindness rhetoric is often greeted with deep skepticism, and Ms. Postrel tells us why: Colorblindness advocates too frequently "wallow in stereotypes and omit coun tervailing experience." They complain that group-obsessed liberals are blind to individuality, but, in fact, it's an infirmity that crosses ideological lines.

Racial equality in American society awaits the day when blacks as well as whites are seen as individuals. The categories appropriate to a caste system that racial stereotyping creates are a poor basis on which to build a community of equal citizens. If con servatives want to shed their reputation for racism, it's a point they need to understand.

Abigail Thernstrom
Lexington, MA

Virginia Postrel, relying on Dinesh D'Souza's luridly distorted account of the 1994 American Renaissance conference at which I was a speaker, refers to me (along with columnist Samuel Francis) as an "overt white racist," without bothering to give a single example of my "racist" beliefs. Presumably Ms. Postrel makes this damaging but unsubstantiated charge because I argued at the conference that there are "large and enduring differences in average intelli gence between blacks and whites," resulting in different levels of civilizational abilities. D'Souza himself specifically defines racism as the belief in such racial differences.

However, D'Souza's definition of racism is profoundly misleading. It makes racism sound like an intellectual or scientific theory, whereas in actual usage (including D'Souza's or Postrel's) to call something "racist" is to say that it is morally bad . These meanings contradict each other.

An idea stating a possible fact, whether it is the existence of gravity or the existence of inherited group differences in intelligence, cannot be morally bad, though it may turn out to be false. An idea can only be bad if it is knowingly false and hurtful. To take an extreme example, the statement "Group X are devils are created in a laboratory 5,000 years ago by a mad scientist" (which is what the Nation of Islam teaches about whites) is so implausible that the speaker must know it is not true. This suggests that his motivation is not to arrive at truth but to dehumanize Group X.

Based on the above, I'd like to propose what I think is a coherent and useful (though not exhaustive) definition of racism. A person is being racist if he 1) attributes a negative trait to an entire group; 2) does this out of ill will; and 3) is indifferen t to evidence. By this definition, Ms. Postrel has the right to argue that assertions of racial differences in intelligence are untrue or socially harmful, if that is what she believes. But (lacking proof of either ill wil l or indifference to evidence) she does not have the right to call them racist.

Lawrence Auster
New York, NY

After reading Virginia Postrel's editorial, I went back to reread the Dinesh D'Souza articles she mentioned. The charge that "they seem designed not to elucidate the complexities of race in America but to justify readers' preconceived notions of black inferiority" is not only insulting to the editors and readers of The American Spectator andNational Review , but, more importantly, is without basis in fact.

The National Review article "Myth of the Racist Cabbie" in particular discussed the critical observation that people of all races let racial stereotypes play a role in their treatment of other people (even people of their own race), and the article attempted to address why th is is true. Although you might with some cause ridicule at least one of D'Souza's illustrations of stereotypes with "an empirical basis in shared experience," you never addressed his arguments about the public's common use of r acial stereotypes, nor did you bother to suggest any source for the stereotypes other than the one D'Souza suggested.

Even in The American Spectator article, D'Souza raises the important question of how many of black Americans' problems are self-imposed by the lifestyles they choose to follow rather than externally imposed by white racism. Complaining about the lack of balance in his portrait of black Americans' culture totally misses the basic problem with his article--that is, that he simply assumes that a common culture is shared by all black Americans. Rather, to the extent that black Americans share common life experiences, most of these experiences largely stem from the common American culture in which all of us participate and contribute regardless of race. To the extent that many black Americans share the pathologies and dysfunctional characteristics about which D'Souza writes, these problems are largely the product of a drug-infested, violent subculture whose nucleus is certainly in the black lower c lass but whose scope clearly encompasses many Americans (including whites) outside that population segment.

Ms. Postrel writes, "You cannot get to a colorblind society by constantly reinforcing racial categories." True. But one also cannot get to a colorblind society by ignoring inconvenient facts and black Americans' problems, like the lack of academic ambition in many of their children. I must say that I laughed out loud at the suggestion in Ms. Postrel's editorial that attending Harvard University is part of "the black experience." (It is not even part of the white experience.) Perhaps she should join me at the convenience/liquor store near my old residence in Inglewood one evening. She will find remarkably few Harvard graduates loitering around its parking lot. She will unfortunately find all too many examples of people exhibiting the dysfunctional behaviors about which D'Souza writes.