Yet the conceptual leap from that probability to absolute certitude has been made -- with negligible resistance -- by an overwhelming majority of mainstream historians, educated laymen, and students. Jefferson has been called, in the pages of this very magazine, "a moral failure of the first rank" -- not only for denying his paternity of Hemings' children but also for failing to free his slaves even on his deathbed. (See "The Slave and the Intern," January 1999.) The "pedestals" Wilkins describes are long gone.
Which returns us to Wilkins' original dilemma: "Can I embrace founders who may have 'owned' some of my ancestors?" In fact, a different question needs to be asked first: Why is such an "embrace" necessary? Absent their pedestals, the Founders are still who they are. If you cannot honor the greatness of their accomplishments, their accomplishments are not diminished. Likewise, if you cannot recognize their personal failings, their failings are not erased. The idea that it's necessary to "embrace" a chunk of history is, at bottom, nothing more than psychobabble. It's like "owning" an experience. Or "coming to terms" with a loss. Whether you do or you don't, life goes on.
More annoying than the psychobabble, however, is Wilkins' habit of using gross generalizations to support his notion of an America that still betrays blacks at every turn. "There are 'decent' Americans," he writes, "who not only are unmoved by the fact that 40 percent of black children are living in poverty, but use that fact to buttress their own convictions about black inferiority." Who exactly is Wilkins thinking of? Who attributes black poverty to black inferiority? Wilkins cites no source.
For that matter, what does Wilkins mean by "living in poverty"? The comedian Chris Rock jokes that America is the only country in the world where the poor people are fat. To much of the rest of the world, "living in poverty" connotes starving babies lying dazed and motionless on their mothers' laps with flies circling their cheeks. By contrast, I suspect Wilkins' "40 percent of black children...living in poverty" includes many with extensive CD collections -- and more than a few with Nintendo sets and pagers.
Nevertheless, Wilkins continues, "There are Americans who think it reasonable that blacks should constitute 49 percent of America's bulging prison population and 35 percent of those who have been executed since that punishment was revived fourteen years ago. And there are those who ignore persistent disparities between black and white health, wealth, educational attainment, and employment. These same people regularly exert enormous efforts to destroy the fragile programs put into place in the sixties and seventies to compensate for the deep injuries done to blacks over the three and a half centuries of their legally sanctioned subordination."
Wilkins' political opponents would argue that the "fragile programs put into place in the sixties and seventies" are at least partially responsible for the inequities he cites. In the case of the swollen black prison population, for example, they would argue that cash benefit plans such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children precipitated the dramatic rise of single-parent households in the black community, which in turn led to a rise in criminal behavior among undersupervised black children. This is an oversimplification, to be sure, but the sophomoric sarcasm of Wilkins' phrase "decent" Americans fails to acknowledge that those who disagree with him might also be motivated by good will.
As for disparities between blacks and whites in "health, wealth, educational attainment, and employment," again, it's quite possible to regret these, to argue that the government must ensure equal opportunity and provide a minimal safety net for all its citizens, and still deny that the government should be in the business of redistributing goods and services or leveling individual attainment. Wilkins may be struggling to embrace history, but he is wholeheartedly embracing the cliché that the desire for less government is inherently racist.
The most troubling aspect of Jefferson's Pillow, however, is Wilkins' insistence that the sins of the Founding Fathers -- and of the generations that followed -- are still being felt today, that the past continuously and completely works itself into the present, shaping the lives lived by black people like a palm heel bearing down on wet clay. "For blacks," he writes, "there is the pain of slavery and the continual loss of dignity that accompanies our treatment as nonstandard citizens."
This is a serious issue -- and a difficult one to debate. If someone tells you he's in pain, how do you tell him he shouldn't be? Yet the assertion that African Americans in the 21st century feel the "pain of slavery" is patently absurd; rhetorically, moreover, it diminishes the suffering of actual slaves. The second half of Wilkins' statement raises the question: If blacks are "nonstandard citizens," who, in Wilkins' mind, are standard citizens? Does that group include Asians? Jews? Tunisians? If not, do they, like blacks, suffer a "continual loss of dignity" -- a conveniently subjective deprivation?
Wilkins has inadvertently struck upon a deeper problem than straw men and psychobabble. For surely many blacks do perceive in their daily lives the "continual loss of dignity" he describes. What's more, those who do not perceive it -- as Clarence Thomas or Ward Connerly or John McWhorter can testify -- tend to be written off by those who do as not authentically black.
A significantly more interesting book than the one Wilkins has written -- and one I've no doubt he's capable of writing -- would address the question of whether that feeling of persecution, that "continual loss of dignity," has entered into the very definition of being black. And if it has, what are the chances for an honest, rather than Clintonian, dialogue on race when telling black people that they are no longer being persecuted amounts to telling them that they are no longer black?
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