Unamusement Park

Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, bless his heart, has called for “The End of Identity Liberalism” in The New York Times [1].

In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

Katherine Franke, a professor of law at Columbia University and an expert on critical race theory, responded that her colleague was actually carrying out the “nefarious background work of making white supremacy respectable” [2].

Let me be blunt: this kind of liberalism is a liberalism of white supremacy. It is a liberalism that regards the efforts of people of color and women to call out forms of power that sustain white supremacy and patriarchy as a distraction.

In a follow-up piece, defending his theory — and himself and his career — in Vox, Professor Lilla lays out his vision for the future of black-white race relations in America: “I want to get to a point where a white working-class guy in Flint, Michigan, with his lousy water, sees a black man being beaten by police on the television and says to himself, ‘That could be me.’ I want him to sympathize” [3].

While that was going on, pseudonymous guest blogger “Ammo Grrrll” of Arizona offered a less-than-sympathetic counterpoint over at Power Line [4]:

The civil rights movement eliminated all legal impediments to success decades ago. Untold billions have been spent to fight “poverty.” And what has changed in the inner cities? That’s because none of these BandAids can cover the wound of fatherlessness. Or make up for one terrible life decision after another.

So what the grievance peddlers are left with is a wholesale attack on “whiteness” itself. This might work with a few intimidated college students and guilty liberals, but it is not going to be a winning strategy for the vast majority of white people who will say:

You want success? Here’s the secret to our white “privilege”: Do what we did — stay in school, work for fifty years, don’t do or sell drugs, don’t commit crime, don’t have babies you have no ability to support, and get married. Speaking on behalf of all white people — since virtually every angry black person feels qualified to speak on behalf of all black people — unless you do those simple, “common-sense” things, we are really no longer interested in anything you have to say.

Hey, as long as we’re coming up with exciting new ways to make “a white working-class guy” sympathize with “a black man being beaten by police on the television,” it might be worth revisiting Carleton Putnam’s famous open letter to President Eisenhower in 1958, as reprinted in Putnam’s classic apology for Southern segregation, the excellent Race and Reason: A Yankee View (1961).

Neither the North, nor the court, has any holy mandate inherent in the trend of the times or the progress of liberalism to reform society in the South. In the matter of schools, rights to equal education are inseparably bound up with rights to freedom of association and, in the South at least, may require that both be considered simultaneously. (In using the word “association” here, I mean the right to associate with whom you please, and the right not to associate with whom you please.) Moreover, am I not correct in my recollection that it was the social stigma of segregation and its effect upon the Negro’s “mind and heart” to which the court objected as much as to any other, and thus that the court, in forcing the black man’s right to equal education was actually determined to violate the white man’s right to freedom of association?

In any case the crux of this issue would seem obvious: social status has to be earned. Or, to put it another way, equality of association has to be mutually agreed to and mutually desired. It cannot be achieved by legal fiat. Personally, I feel only affection for the Negro. But there are facts that have to be faced. Any man with two eyes in his head can observe a Negro settlement in the Congo, can study the pure-blooded African in his native habitat as he exists when left on his own resources, can compare this settlement with London or Paris, and can draw his own conclusions regarding relative levels of character and intelligence — or that combination of character and intelligence which is civilization. Finally, he can inquire as to the number of pure-blooded blacks who have made contributions to great literature or engineering or medicine or philosophy or abstract science. (I do not include singing or athletics as these are not primarily matters of character and intelligence.) Nor is there any validity to the argument that the Negro “hasn’t been given a chance.” We were all in caves or trees originally. The progress which the pure-blooded black has made when left to himself, with a minimum of white help or hindrance, genetically or otherwise, can be measured today in the Congo.

[…]

It seems clear that for 94 years — from the horrors of Reconstruction through the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision — the North has been trying to force the black man down the white Southerner’s throat, and it is a miracle that relations between the races in the South have progressed as well as they have.

Perhaps the most discouraging spectacle is the spectacle of Northern newspapers dwelling with pleasure upon the predicament of the Southern parent who is forced to choose between desegregation and no school at all for his child. It does not seem to occur to these papers that this is the cruelest sort of blackmail; that the North is virtually putting a pistol at the head of the Southern parent in a gesture which every Northerner must contemplate with shame.

Indeed, there now seems little doubt that the court’s recent decision has set back the cause of the Negro in the South by a generation. He may force his way into white schools, but he will not force his way into white hearts nor earn the respect he seeks. What evolution was slowly and wisely achieving, revolution has now arrested, and the trail of bitterness will lead far.

Sources

1. Mark Lilla: “The End of Identity Liberalism” in The New York Times (2016)
2. Katherine Franke: “Making White Supremacy Respectable. Again” in the Los Angeles Review of Books (2016)
3. Sean Illing: “This professor set off a war of words over ‘identity politics.’ We debated him” in Vox (2016)
4. Ammo Grrrll: “Thoughts from the ammo line” in Power Line (2016)