The Conversation About Race

Hundreds of thousands of young American men were transported to England in the early 1940’s, to take part in the D-Day Invasion. Given the national demographics of the time, many of the troops were Irish American, the children or grandchildren of refuges from  hundreds of years of British tyranny.

Anticipating the possibility for trouble when great multitudes of young Irish Americans descended on the island they had been taught to hate, the military issued them pamphlets titled “Forget What You Learned at the Kitchen Table.”

As one who spent some time in such a kitchen table—though further down below the generational salt—I can attest that England wasn’t high on the list of favorable dinner table topics at the time.

But the military, as is commonly the case, was actually fighting the last war. Irish Americans had already begun to set aside the enmities of their fathers as they made their way in the new world. As things turned out, there was no particular problem with Irish American soldiers in England and the invasion was conducted successfully.

What brings the now long-forgotten incident to mind is the current call for an honest dialogue on race. It seems that every time someone near Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign stubs his toe on some racial issue we hear about the need for a long-delayed conversation about race. 

It all started with the widely televised racist rants of Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, causing many people to wonder just how much the seemingly affable Obama agreed with his pastor.

Then there was the reaction to Obama’s call for black men to take responsibility for their families, echoing similar remarks by Bill Cosby and others in recent years. Most recently it was the off-mike comments of Reverend Jesse Jackson, disparaging Obama in obscenely racist terms.

There were immediate calls in each instance for a dialogue about race. But any attempt by non-black commentators to enter the discussion with other than the party line is greeted with loud rejoinders papering over criticism of any black, however outrageous the behavior being criticized is.

There seems to an ever-ready cadre of black commentators to inform us that high school drop-out rates, astronomical rates of teen pregnancy, paternal child abandonment, and rampant criminal violence in the black community are all somehow the responsibility of the majority society, despite the trillions of dollars of national treasure spent to level the racial playing field in recent decades.

Any disagreement claiming that some of the responsibility for the failures might lie in the culture of some segments of the afflicted community, however it came to be there, is angrily shouted down. Whites, we are assured vehemently, don’t understand the black experience and are thus not qualified to discuss the subject

Indeed, some of what passes for righteous anger can best be construed —dare we say it ?—as racial hatred of the sort that concerned military authorities in their preparations for D-Day.

The anger/hatred manifests itself in many obvious ways. Witness the televised joy in some quarters of the black community when O.J. Simpson was freed for the murder of his white wife.

And it wasn’t just Pastor Wright’s hate-filled diatribe that comes across in the endless loop of Cable TV’s replays of his ranting. It was the picture of his mostly-black audience cheering him on, outbursts resembling nothing so much as the Middle Eastern celebrations after the 9-11 bombing.

We wonder about the seemingly intractable rates of violent black crime, most of it black on black, to be sure, but a goodly portion of it black on white. Blacks rob whites disproportionately, we are told, because blacks are poor and whites have the money.

That doesn’t explain black on white rape. Rape is a crime of aggression, the experts tell us, not just a sex crime, so maybe hateful feeling might contribute to the vastly disproportionate incidence of black on white rape.

One troubling image lingers from the TV coverage of Pastor Wright. During one of his hate-filled rants, the camera panned to a pre-teen African American boy, about ten, sitting in the upper level of what appeared to be bleacher seating. The young boy can be seen hooting and gesticulating joyfully as Wright spewed his hate on the sound track. 

We are daily confronted by a steady media diet of the stories of abuse of blacks by whites—urged on by some black “leaders” who cultivate and nourish a sense of grievance and victimization for their own purposes—stories which recount the evils of slavery, the lynchings in the Jim Crow era, down to charges of police profiling and unequal justice in our own time.

By all means, let’s have the history, but let’s have it all. If all we get is the down side, and any disagreement is shouted down, how can we expect that boy in the bleachers to grow up other than filled by hate? 

It’s not for an old white guy to tell black Americans how to act or think, but what I can say is that until the conversation is truly broadened to honestly include all points of view, the hate and mutual distrust will not be dissipated and conditions for all will not improve.

(Declined by the San Francisco Chronicle, July 2008)