Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (6 page)

In this, as in other aspects of contemporary racial cant, bell hooks is an unfailing guide. Like Farrakhan, she prefers the term "white supremacy" to "racist" when describing enemies of the people — because the latter term suggests a search for individual culprits, while sophisticates know that it is the system that is at fault. Professor hooks, in fact, tells us that her own moment of truth came when she encountered white women in the feminist movement who sought the comradeship of blacks but who "wished to exercise control over our bodies and thoughts as their racist ancestors had." Whatever specifics lie behind this paranoid image (hooks fails to provide details), the emotional bottom line is clear: insofar as hooks feels less powerful in any relationship she has with whites,
for whatever reason,
she will regard herself as a victim of racism. Thanks to the widespread acceptance of the politics of victimhood, there are many successful blacks who see racists under the bed, and for similar reasons respond positively to demagogues like Farrakhan.

The concept of institutional racism not only insulates blacks from the charge of racism, but actually exculpates them in advance for any racial crime they might commit. Thus hooks, in a kind of preemptive jury nullification, finds herself innocent of the airplane murder she wanted to commit: "Had I killed the white man whose behavior evoked that rage, I feel that it would have been caused by . . . the madness engendered by a pathological context." In other words, even if she had done it, she did not do it. In fact, white people did it.

When blacks commit crimes, the truly guilty party is the white devil who made them do it. Even when hooks does not fully identify with an odious act committed by an African-American, she still finds a way to mitigate it. She disavows Farrakhan and his antiSemitic screeds, but nonetheless asks: "From whom do young black folks get the notion that Jews control Hollywood? This stereotype trickles down from mainstream white culture. . . . Indeed, if we were to investigate why masses of black youth all over the United States know who Louis Farrakhan is, or Leonard Jeffries, we would probably find that white-dominated mass media have been the educational source."

In other words, if blacks are anti-Semitic, it is the white devil who taught them to be so. Of course, hooks's reasoning is so circular, she could just as well praise the "white-dominated media" for imposing the leftist view on the public that America is
institutionally
racist, since the media have generally embraced this canard. A representative front page "news article" in the
Los Angeles Times
, for example, purported to show that the traditional ladder of upward mobility for America's minorities no longer exists for blacks and Hispanics, thanks to institutional racism:

WHITES EARN MORE AT ALL LEVELS, CHALLENGING BELIEF THAT EDUCATION IS THE KEY TO PARITY DATA SHOWS

Whether they have dropped out of high school or invested years in a graduate degree, whether they have struggled to master English or not, California's minorities earn substantially less than Anglos — a disparity that challenges the long-held tenet that education is a key to equality . . .

This
Times
report was probably more powerful in persuading middle-class blacks who read it that the system is stacked against them than all the speeches of Louis Farrakhan. But the
Times
study, which was conducted from census figures by the
Times's
own analysts, showed nothing of the kind. The term "Anglo," its euphemism for "whites," included minorities — Jews, Armenians, Arabs — who are victims of ongoing prejudice and hate crimes and yet (for reasons unexplained in the study) are successful and thus provide the
Times's
yardsticks of "privilege." The category "Hispanic" — though ideologically useful — is sociologically spurious, since it includes South American Indians, Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, low-earning Puerto Ricans and high-earning Cubans.

The
Times's
analysts made no allowance for the kind of educational degrees, graduate or otherwise, that its target groups possessed. It is well known that more blacks and Hispanics seek college degrees in low-paying fields like education rather than in higherpaying professions like physics or engineering. The
Times's
analysts also failed to take into account age or on-the-job experience, obviously critical to earning potential. Yet the editors of the
Times
chose to print essentially meaningless but racially inflammatory statistics and to weave them into an analysis that corroborated the existence of "institutional racism." The article appeared on January Io, 1993. After reading it, I called the reporters responsible. They sheepishly admitted that they did not have the data to make the claims they had, but defended the decision to print the story anyway.

The theory of institutional racism, devised by radical academics and promoted by an irresponsible media, has also led to a religious expression of racial rage called "black liberation theology." Its chief text, written by the Reverend James Cone, was published by the Maryknoll press, an imprint of liberation theologians, who in the 1980s found Christ among the Sandinista dictators and El Salvador's communist guerrillas: "This country was founded for whites and everything that has happened in it has emerged from the white perspective. . . . What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world."

This kind of Afro-Nazism would seem hard to swallow even for a bell hooks. But she manages with little difficulty: "Cone wanted to critically awaken and educate readers so that they would not only break through denial and acknowledge the evils of white supremacy, the grave injustices of racist domination, but be so moved that they would righteously and militantly engage in anti-racist struggle." Or simply take out their aggressions on the nearest white available.

According to hooks, of course, such aggression doesn't happen. "It is a mark of the way black Americans cope with white supremacy that there are few reported incidents of black rage against racism leading us to target white folks. . . . [Whites] claim to fear that black people will hurt them even though there is no evidence which suggests that black people routinely hurt white people in this or any other culture." Actually, there is. In 1993, for example, Justice Department statistics show there were 1.54 million violent crimes committed by blacks against whites. By contrast, there were only 187,000 violent crimes committed by whites against blacks. Taking population into account, a white was fifty times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime committed by a black than vice versa. (The fact that there are many more white targets in the population may account for some of the disparity.) The crime of rape — an act of anger and aggression — stands by itself as a statistic. In 1994, there were twenty thousand rapes of white women by black men, but only one hundred rapes of black women by white men.

Of course, radical professors have an institutional explanation even for this extreme statistic. In
Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile and Unequal,
a book that has already become a classic of anti-white scholarship, Andrew Hacker attempts to explain the fact that while blacks constitute only 12 percent of the population, they commit 43 percent of the rapes, including rapes of white women even though, as he observes, the risk to the black perpetrators is greater:

Eldridge Cleaver once claimed that violating white women has political intentions. . . . Each such act brings further demoralization of the dominant race, exposing its inability to protect its own women from the worst kind of depradation. Certainly, the conditions black men face in the United States generate far more anger and rage than is ever experienced by white men. To be a man is made doubly difficult, since our age continues to associate 'manliness' with worldly success.
If black men vent their frustrations on women, it is partly because the women are more available as targets, compared with the real centers of power, which remain so inchoate and remote.

For this white apologist for black rage, as for the 1960s radical, the act of rape is not a vicious act against a defenseless individual but an understandable attempt to strike at the real culprit: the white supremacist system.

In the last analysis, all this sophistry is of a piece with the Kerner Commission's original decision to use the concept of "institutional racism" to justify a criminal riot. It should come as no surprise that leftists would applaud the 1992 race riot in Los Angeles and similar outrages as "uprisings," as though they belonged in a pantheon with Lexington and Valley Forge. In the Los Angeles riot, individuals and establishments were targeted simply because they were not black. Inner city businessmen posted "black owned" signs wherever possible out of sheer self-protectiveness. Two thousand Korean businesses that could not post such signs were destroyed
because
of their Korean ownership. A typical leftist defense of this outrage was offered by Harvard Professor Cornel West, who called the race riot a "monumental upheaval [that] was a multi-racial, trans-class, and largely male display of justified social rage." If that is not an incitement to future racial pogroms, what is?

Racism, as bell hooks thoughtfully informs us, hurts. But racists also often hurt themselves. Indeed, in hooks's own case, a selfinflicted wound is revealed to be the trigger of her "killing rage."

The incident on the plane flight that inspired these meditations began, in fact, with a series of familiar urban frustrations, which the professor's politically sensitive antennae quickly converted into a racial casus belli: "From the moment K and I had hailed a cab on the New York City street that afternoon we were confronting racism. The cabby wanted us to leave his taxi and take another; he did not want to drive to the airport. When I said that I would willingly leave but also report him, he agreed to take us." There is hardly a white New Yorker, however, who has not had the same experience.

Hooks and her companion face "similar hostility" when they stand in the "first-class line" at the airport: "Ready with our coupon upgrades, we were greeted by two young white airline employees who continued their personal conversation and acted as though it were a great interruption to serve us."

She interrupts the employees' conversation and is rebuffed by one of them, who reacts with something like the following: "Excuse me, but I wasn't talking to you." Professor hooks's aggressive response then shifts into radical gear and becomes an actual racial confrontation: "When I suggested to K that I never see white males receiving such treatment in the first-class line, the white female insisted that 'race' had nothing to do with it, that she was just trying to serve us as quickly as possible."

Even the effort to smooth over the situation is taken racially by hooks. She looks over her shoulder and sees that a line of "white men" has formed in back of them, and concludes that now her tormentors "were indeed eager to complete our transaction even if it meant showing
no
courtesy." To spite them all, hooks makes everyone wait anyway, summoning a supervisor to whom she complains about the racism of the airline employees. The supervisor listens and apologizes, while the tickets are processed by the "white female." When the transaction is complete, hooks glances cursorily at the tickets she has been given. She raises her eyes just in time, however, to catch the hostility of the employee she has humiliated. "She looked at me with a gleam of hatred in her eye that startled, it was so intense."

Somewhere in these emotional minefields, hooks's friend, fails to get her ticket properly marked for upgrade, and both of them then fail to catch the error. It is this confluence of mistakes (wholly understandable in light of the ruckus hooks needlessly creates) that later causes K to be "ejected" from her first-class seat. Her upgrade has been given to the white male, who probably waited patiently in the same line behind them and had his ticket processed correctly.

The entire incident and commentary on it reveal bell hooks to be a woman driven by racial resentments she has not begun to come to terms with, and in over her head on a university faculty. But she is also typical of the tenured left that has come into its own in the last decade in the American academy, a perfect expression of the misery the "multicultural" university has inflicted on itself and on the nation as a whole. In the real world, the term "institutional racism" is properly applied only to race-specific policies such as affirmative action itself. Its current vogue is an expression of racial paranoia — and little else. It is true that even paranoids have enemies. But it is also true that by projecting their fear and aggression onto those around them, paranoids create enemies, too.

^*
The lower-case affectation is hers.

^†
Among the self-styled critical race theorists (and "critical race feminists") are Derrick Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Regina Austin, and Anita Hill.

^‡
Of course this is maliciously faulty history. It was the slaveholders at the constitutional convention whose representatives wanted to count each slave as a full human being so as to maximize the slave states' voting power. It was the anti-slavery faction that did not want the votes of slaves to be equated with free votes. Eventually a compromise was reached to count a slave's vote as three-fifths that of a free person's, whether white or black (there were more than three thousand black freemen who owned slaves in the United States). Nowhere in the Constitution are the words "black" or "white" to be found, and nowhere is race specified or mentioned.

D
URING THE DARKEST DAYS OF THE COLD WAR, the Italian writer Ignazio Silone predicted that the final struggle of that great conflict would be between the communists and the ex-communists. And so it seems to be among civil rights activists in the war over affirmative action.
^*
Jesse Jackson and the opponents of California's Proposition 209, which outlawed government race preferences, claim for themselves the mantle of the civil rights movement. They even staged a protest march in San Francisco on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous Washington event to make the point. But, on the other side of the barricades, the architects and principal spokesmen for Proposition 209 are also veterans of King's movement. It is no accident that Proposition 209 was called "The California Civil Rights Initiative" by its proponents or that its text was carefully constructed to conform to the letter and spirit of the landmark Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.