Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (69 page)

The increasing genetically inferior “underclass” was having the most children, and as they had the most children, the great White and wealthy “cognitive elite” was slowly passing into oblivion. “Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality,” Hernnstein and Murray concluded. “Trying to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to disaster.”
¹

In fact, it was the resistance to egalitarian measures by those all-powerful beneficiaries of inequality and their producers of racist ideas, like Hernnstein and Murray, that had led to disaster. The book was well marketed, and initial reviews were fairly positive. It arrived during the final straightaway to the 1994 midterm elections, around the time the New
Republicans
issued their extremely tough “Contract with America” to take the welfare and crime issue back from Clinton’s New Democrats. Charles Murray started the midterm election cycle whipping up voters about the “rise of illegitimacy,” and ended by rationalizing the “Contract with America,” especially the New Republicans’ tough-on-crime “Taking Back Our Streets Act” and tough-on-welfare “Personal Responsibility Act.”
²

The term “personal responsibility” had been playing minor roles for some time. In 1994, Georgia representative Newt Gingrich and Texas representative Richard Armey, the main authors of the “Contract with America,” brought the term to prime time—to the lexicon of millions of American racists—targeting not just Black welfare
recipients. The mandate was simple enough: Black people, especially poor Black people, needed to take “personal responsibility” for their socioeconomic plight and for racial disparities, and stop blaming racial discrimination for their problems, and depending on government to fix them. The racist mandate of “personal responsibility” convinced a new generation of Americans that irresponsible Black people caused the racial inequities, not discrimination—thereby convincing a new generation of racist Americans to fight against irresponsible Black people.

It made sense to encourage a Black
individual
(or non-Black individual) to take more responsibility for his or her own life. It made racist sense to tell Black
people
as a group to take more personal responsibility for their lives and for the nation’s racial disparities, since the irresponsible actions of Black individuals were always generalized in the minds of racists. According to this racist logic, Black people and their irresponsibility were to blame for their higher poverty and unemployment and underemployment rates, as if there were more dependent and lazy Black individuals than dependent and lazy White individuals. Slaveholders’ racist theory of African Americans as more dependent had been dusted off and renovated for the 1990s, allowing racists to reside in the hollow mentality of thinking that African Americans were not taking enough personal responsibility, and that’s why so many were dependent on government welfare, just as they used to be dependent on their masters’ welfare.

It was a popular racist idea—even among Black people who were generalizing the individual actions of someone around them. In the 1994 midterm elections, voters handed Republicans and their dictum on personal responsibility control of Congress. After the New Democrats got tougher than the New Republicans by passing the toughest crime bill in history, New Republicans pledged to get even tougher than the New Democrats. Both angled to win over one of the oldest interest groups—the racist vote—which probably had never before been as multiracial as it was in 1994.

As 1995 began, the critical and affirming responses of
The Bell Curve
began to cross fire. It is hard to imagine another book that sparked
such an intense academic war, possibly because the segregationists, in their think tanks, and the assimilationists, in universities and academic associations, and the antiracists, in their popular Black Studies and critical race theory collectives, were all so powerful. In his revised and expanded 1996 edition of
The Mismeasure of Man
, Stephen Jay Gould maintained that no one should be surprised that
The Bell Curve
’s publication “coincided exactly . . . with a new age of social meanness.”
The Bell Curve
, said Gould, “must . . . be recording a swing of the political pendulum to a sad position that requires a rationale for affirming social inequalities as dictates of biology.” He criticized the proponents of this new meanness for their calls to “slash every program of social services for people in genuine need . . . but don’t cut a dime, heaven forbid, from the military . . . and provide tax relief for the wealthy.” British psychologist Richard Lynn defended the social meanness and
The Bell Curve
, asking, in an article title, “Is Man Breeding Himself Back to the Age of the Apes?” The “underclass” was only “good” at “producing children,” and “these children tend to inherit their parents’ poor intelligence and adopt their socio-pathic lifestyle, reproducing the cycle of deprivation.” The American Psychological Association (APA)—representing the originators and popularizers of standardized intelligence testing—convened a Task Force on Intelligence in response to
The Bell Curve
. “The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socio-economic status,” the assimilationist and defensive APA report stated in 1996. “Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far there is little direct empirical support for them. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At this time, no one knows what is responsible for the differential.” No one will ever know what doesn’t exist.
³

While congratulating and lifting up Hernnstein and Murray for
The Bell Curve
, Republican politicians tried to unseat Angela Davis after UC Santa Cruz’s faculty awarded her the prestigious President’s Chair professorship in January 1995. “I’m outraged,” California state senator Bill Leonard told reporters. “The integrity of the entire system is
on the line when it appoints someone with Ms. Davis’ reputation for racism, violence, and communism.” Davis, he said, was “trying to create a civil war between whites and blacks.” Southern segregationists had said that northern integrationists were trying to create a civil war between the races in the 1950s. Enslavers had said that abolitionists were trying to create a civil war between the races back in the 1800s. Both northern and southern segregationists had regarded Jim Crow and slavery as positively good and claimed that discrimination had ended or never existed. As much as segregationist theory had changed over the years, it had remained the same. Since the 1960s, segregationist theorists, like their predecessors, were all about convincing Americans that racism did not exist, knowing that antiracists would stop resisting racism, and racism would then be assured, only when Americans were convinced that the age of racism was over.
⁴

After Hernnstein and Murray decreed that racial inequality was due not to discrimination, but to genetics, Murray’s co-fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, almost on cue in 1995, decreed “the end of racism” in his challenging book, which used that phrase as its title. “Why should groups with different skin color, head shape, and other visible characteristics prove identical in reasoning ability or the ability to construct an advanced civilization?” asked the former Reagan aide Dinesh D’Souza. “If blacks have certain inherited abilities, such as improvisational decision making, that could explain why they predominate in certain fields such as jazz, rap, and basketball, and not in other fields, such as classical music, chess, and astronomy.” These racist ideas were not racist ideas to D’Souza, who wrapped himself in his Indian ancestry on the book’s first page in order to declare that his “inclinations” were “strongly antiracist and sympathetic to minorities.” D’Souza, the self-identified antiracist, rejected the antiracist notion that racism was “the main obstacle facing African Americans today, and the primary explanation for black problems.” Instead, he regarded “liberal antiracism” as African Americans’ main obstacle, because it blamed “African American pathologies on white racism and opposes all measures that impose civilization standards.”
⁵

With D’Souza’s incredible writing and speaking and marketing talents—and powerful backers—he had managed to get many Americans to ponder the issues discussed in
The End of Racism
. But discrimination was everywhere in 1995 for people who cared enough to open their eyes and look at the policies, disparities, and rhetoric all around them. How could anyone claim the end of racism during one of the most racially charged years in US history, with racist ideas swinging back and forth like Ping-Pong balls in the media coverage of the criminal trial of the century? From the opening statements on January 24 to the live verdict on October 3, 1995, the O. J. Simpson murder trial and exoneration became the epitome of softness on crime for upset racist Americans.
⁶

The O.J. case was not the only evidence for the progression of racism that D’Souza wisely omitted. Florida’s Don Black established one of the earliest White supremacist websites,
Stormfront.org
, in 1995. Informing the views of this new crop of “cyber racists,” as journalist Jessie Daniels termed them, were segregationists like Canadian psychologist J. Phillippe Ruston, who argued that evolution had given Blacks different brain and genital sizes than Whites. “It’s a trade-off; more brain or more penis. You can’t have everything,” Ruston told
Rolling Stone
readers in January 1995. In March, Halle Berry starred in
Losing Isaiah
as the spiraling debate over interracial adoptions hit theaters. The film was about a Black mother on crack whose baby is adopted by a White woman. And while the idea of Black parents adopting a White child was beyond the racist imagination, assimilationists were not only encouraging White savior parents to adopt Black children, but claiming that Black children would be better off in White homes than they were in Black homes.
⁷

When asked in 1995 to “close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me,” 95 percent of the respondents described a Black face, despite Black faces constituting a mere 15 percent of drug users that year. But racist Americans were closing their eyes to these studies, and opening them to pieces like “The Coming of the Super Predators” in the
Weekly Standard
on November 27, 1995.
Princeton University’s John J. Dilulio—a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where Charles Murray had resided in the 1980s—revealed the 300 percent increase in murder rates for Black fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds between 1985 and 1992, a rate six times greater than the White increase. He did not explain this surge in violence by revealing the simultaneous surge in unemployment rates among young Black males. Nor did Dilulio explain the violent surge by revealing that drug enforcement units were disproportionately mass incarcerating young Black drug dealers, in some cases knowing full well that the consequence of breaking up a drug ring was a violent struggle for control of the previously stabilized market. Dilulio explained this violent surge by sensationalizing the “moral poverty” of growing up “in abusive, violence-ridden, fatherless, Godless, and jobless settings.” When we look “on the horizon,” he said, there “are tens of thousands of severely morally impoverished juvenile super-predators” who “will do what comes ‘naturally’: murder, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, and get high.” What was Dilulio’s solution to “super-predators”? “It’s called religion.”
⁸

In the eyes of Dilulio, in the eyes of millions of people of all races, the baggy-clothes wearing, Ebonics-swearing, Hip Hop–sharing, “Fuck tha Police”–declaring young Black male did not have to wear a costume on Halloween in 1995. He was already a scary character—a “menace to society”—as a 1993 film had depicted (
Menace II Society
). And his young mother was a menace for giving birth to him. The main female and male prey of predatory racism were effectively stamped “super-predators.” As an antiracist teacher in
Menace II Society
told young Black males, “The hunt is on and you’re the prey!”
⁹

In the midst of all of these proclamations about the end of racism in 1995, African Americans engaged in the largest political mobilization in their history, the bold Million Man March on Washington, DC. It had been proposed by Louis Farrakhan after the smoke cleared from the 1994 midterm elections. March fever quickly enraptured Black Americans. Antiracist feminists, Angela Davis included, ridiculed the gender racism of the march’s unofficial organizing principle: Black men must rise up from their weakened state of emasculation to become
heads of households and communities and uplift the race. “Justice cannot be served, by countering a distorted racist view of black manhood with a narrowly sexist vision of men standing ‘a degree above women,’” Davis said at a Midtown Manhattan press conference on the eve of the march. But some critics went too far. As some Black feminists were erroneously calling march organizers sexist for mobilizing just Black
men
, some White assimilationists were erroneously calling march organizers racist for mobilizing just
Black
men.
¹⁰

Some activists who split over the Million Man March did come together in the summer of 1995 to defend the life of the world’s most famous Black male political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who had been convicted of killing a White police officer in Philadelphia in 1982. “These are America’s death row residents: men and woman who walk the razor’s edge between half-life and certain death,” Mumia said in
Live from Death Row
, a collection of his commentaries. “You will find a blacker world on death row than anywhere else. African-Americans, a mere 11 percent of the national population, compose about 40 percent of the death row population. There, too, you will find this writer.”
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