Racism Isn't Just Acting Like John Derbyshire

This Thursday past, longtime National Review contributor John "Derb" Derbyshire published a column about how black people are stupid and dangerous and should be avoided except for, maybe, the smart ones. This wasn't on the National Review's website, but elsewhere, Taki's Magazine, which bills itself as "Cocktails, Countesses, and Mental Caviar." Here are some of those intellectual fish eggs on which to feast. Note that this is a sub-list of item ten of how to interact with black people:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

After at first only tut-tutting the article, National Review editor Rich Lowry gave Derbyshire the boot. The reasons for doing so should by now be obvious, but it's worth reprinting the official explanation of their ways-parting:

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,” or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.

The first thing that should be noted is that the nature of the column in question is not new. The Atlantic Wire has a good roundup of Derbyshire's long history of proud racism, but suffice it to say it's hard to imagine anyone else having a career as a opinion writer in a mainstream magazine after telling the University of Pennsylvania's Black Law Student Association, in person, that as African descendants they should collectively resign themselves to being dumber than whites. John Derbyshire often comes off as a terrible human being, but he is compellingly terrible, and both refreshingly and alarmingly upfront about his white supremacy.

So really, this whole fracas is just "Derb being Derb." And that's part of the problem, for "Derb" has some qualities, if not redeeming (there's no redeeming the unrepentant), then that at least help explain why he lasted as long as he did. His cranky pessimism (his most recent book was titled We Are Doomed) led him to butt heads with his erstwhile National Review colleagues ever so often, on issues like George W. Bush, creationism, and Terri Schiavo. This was amusing, if nothing else, but it also made him idiosyncratic and not at all a mere conservative apparatchik. He also has a way with words and on occasion put them to good use, such as his account of how he ended up playing an uncredited thug in a Bruce Lee movie.

Derbyshire's mixture of qualities both compelling and repelling, then, tends to trip up even (especially!) folks who we would like to think would know better about this sort of thing, but hate to see someone with otherwise admirable qualities as so morally deficient. I myself will admit to not saying anything when certain acquaintances have made ugly, racist remarks, for risk of jeopardizing the relationship. If we are to grant President Obama's understanding for his white grandmother, who feared black men passing her on the street, we can on some level feel that Lowry and company being slow to action regarding Derbyshire (whose bigotry is much, much worse) is understandable, if not acceptable.

The sad fact is most people don't grapple with these issues enough to have an informed opinion. To the casual observer, racism is a skinheaded, swastika-tattooed Edward Norton curb-stomping a black guy--not some crusty old Englishman who writes for a magazine the average American has never heard of. Thus the depressing number of people--if the comments on some of these pages are any indication--who echo Derbyshire's sentiments and claim they aren't being racist (though, notably, Derbyshire has before admitted his racism straight up). I don't wish to defend such ideas, but I do think it important see where the people who espouse them are coming from, that they may just possibly be corrected.

Regarding National Review, it's perhaps uncharitable to say Derbyshire got fired for being too obviously racist, but Lowry's statement that "Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise," even though Derbyshire said plenty of other nasty things under the National Review banner, suggests he was fired because of the shitstorm he brought to their doorstep rather than their understanding of why the shit was storming. It's not only Derbyshire's ridiculously offensive prescriptions that are the problem. They are the symptoms of the disease: a rotten dehumanization and objectification that is palpable in the very words he employs.

Consider the "intelligent and well-socialized blacks," which Derbyshire finds so remarkable as to require a category unto themselves. He encourages his hypothetical children to befriend these "IWSBs," because these ostensible friends are an "amulet" to guard against charges of racism, like a crucifix to ward away the devil. ISWBs are furthermore, "something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous." Black people were once literally white people's property, and today John Derbyshire argues they are at best a commodity good.

That black people aren't really even people to him, just "blacks," just objects and things that are without agency or feelings or lives outside of a general incompetence and hostility to whites, is inherent in the very premise of the article. The piece is a tongue-in-cheek response to "The Talk" that black parents give their (male) children about interacting with trigger-happy and negligent law enforcement and the culture at large. This is a horrific and persistent issue, with the Sanford Police Department's botched handling of the death of Trayvon Martin (and Geraldo Rivera's subsequent declaration that Martin brought it on himself for wearing a hoodie) being only its latest and most visible iteration. Derbyshire's response is to treat the death of innocent youth as a joke and write a "Nonblack Version" of The Talk that proves its point by getting the issue precisely backward; in response to a talk about how to maneuver in a world of prejudice, we have a "talk" on how to perpetuate prejudice.

This mindset, viewing vast swaths of people as cultural grindstones and other mere tools, goes beyond this single episode. Recently leaked documents from the National Organization for Marriage revealed a strategy to court conservative blacks and Latinos--the latter of which must have their assimilation into the culture interrupted for fear of losing their conservatism--purely as a means of attacking gays. Nor is this at all restricted to conservatives. Bill Maher's recent declaration that he can't be a racist because he gave a million dollars to Barack Obama (as a follow-up to an Alexandra Pelosi video that 'documented' dumb, poor, liberal New York City blacks in response to criticisms of her footage of dumb, poor, conservative Mississippi whites), displays a similar reductiveness.

The whole episode, and the Martin case more broadly, is a depressing reminder of our discourse's gross immaturity. Racism is not demonology. It is, at heart, like a great many problems, a failure of empathy. To miss this crucial point and focus on the obviously outrageous is, pardon the term, so much thinking in black-and-white.

See For Yourself

Andrew Sullivan posted an excellent and moving poem, "Reverse: A Lynching," accompanied by a photo of the Duluth Lynchings. I hadn't heard of this event and so followed the Wikipedia link, and there came across this photo, of the lynching of Henry Smith, used in the Lynching portal:



The imagery is stunning: a sea of Paris Texans come to elevate the dejected only to debase and destroy him. Behind them an indefinite swirl of color, with a particularly bright burst behind the victim, bound and head-down, giving him an especial visual gravity. Written on the platform on which he stands, "Justice," a mockery of the concept.

I always have to stop and absorb such pictures, with their horrid juxtaposition of the dead or dying victims and their killers' ghoulish indifference or glee. Scenes like these grab me because they are so alien to my experience and because they are even now terribly novel. We all supposedly know what a lynching is, but to see it is something else entirely. (A long time ago I wrote something similar regarding public executions.)

Part of what makes such a scene so foreign is a failure of education, but another part is, to be frank, race. A white American simply has no collective memory of mob violence and slavery like a black American does, and so beyond the shock of lynching imagery there is a narrow blindness that settles over considerations of and assumptions about other issues. The ex-slaves were as much of the South as their white former owners, but they are scarce referred to when discussing "Southerners." The Civil War killed 600,000 Americans, but it freed four million.

This makes it easy for otherwise well-meaning people to be taken in by Confederate apologia that whitewashes blacks out of all consideration of the war and its aftermath. Consider this link, posted to Facebook by a friend of mine (my emphasis):

Even after Lincoln’s death, and for twelve years after the war had ended, Reconstruction further proved that the fighting had little to do with slavery. If the North cared primarily about freeing slaves, soldiers would have vacated the South shortly after Lee’s surrender. Instead, there was nation-building in Dixie. Anyone connected to the previous regime or military (essentially all Southern males) could no longer vote, run for office, or exercise any of their constitutional rights without pledging support for the Union. A Southerner was forced to surrender his dignity and vow allegiance to the conquerors who had ravaged his people and his land. Southerners had their right to a representative government suspended indefinitely, their dignity trampled, and over a quarter million of their citizens killed by foreign invaders from the North, then were forced to suck it all up and like it. Not surprisingly, the vanquished South held onto its anger for generations after Appomattox. Even now, in the modern, post-industrial South, being called a Yankee is no compliment. And it has little to do with the Emancipation Proclamation.

It's easy to complain about federal interference in the South when one airbrushes away the evils that flourished in its absence--Jim Crow laws, lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, Mississippi Appendectomies. Nothing beats education on these matters, but a haunting and revolting image, like the ones the lynchers themselves captured for posterity, are an important start to shaking one out of complacence.

Two's Company

About the only thing I can add to the discussion on the Juan Williams kerfuffle that I don't think has been pointed out yet: in taking a $2 million dollar contract from Fox News, Williams will be joining Glenn Beck, who made headlines a couple years before his star blew up, by making remarks on CNN Headline News expressing almost exactly the same general fear of Muslims. Except he did so to the first Muslim Congressman, Keith Ellison.



Beck was with CNN for two more years before joining Fox. Williams had already been a Fox commentator for awhile, but he was canned (too glibly and hastily) on the spot by NPR, and has been fully welcomed into the Fox and Friends family. It's progress, albeit flawed, and yet still we've come full circle.

"Of Course It Was Written By a Minority."

This was my immediate response to this Slate piece on unconscious bigotry. Just seeing the author's name, Shenkar Vedantam, spawned a nasty little thought, before I had time to scold myself.

I was essentially proving its thesis:

Our conception of prejudice is fearfully wrong. Psychologists Andrew Scott Baron and Mahzarin Banaji once conducted a study evaluating the conscious and unconscious attitudes of 6-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults. The 10-year-olds reported less prejudice than the small kids, and the adults reported no prejudices at all. But that was at a conscious level. At an unconscious level, the three groups had identical attitudes.

Other research has shown that at an unconscious level, huge majorities of Americans (including sizable numbers of African-Americans) are biased against blacks. Huge numbers of women, as well as men, value men's professional contributions more than they value women's professional work. Large majorities of gays, Arabs, and people with disabilities have unconscious biases against people from those groups.

I immediately thought of a nugget buried in Andrew Sullivan's response to Leon Wieseltier's accusation of anti-Semitism:

Look, I am not one to dismiss any notion of anti-Semitism in me or anyone else. I believe it is such a toxic theme in human history and such a grave strain in the human soul that no one should be sublimely confident that he or she is free of it entirely. I take the moral demand to guard against it very seriously. And I have indeed searched my conscience these past few years to take stock if anything like this is unconsciously entering my soul, as I try to guard against my many other sins. I certainly think I have written and thought some things about Muslims and Arabs over the years that are not always carefully parsed, conditioned or measured. I'm not immune to homophobia either.

Anyone is capable of such thoughts, but the issue is often what is done about it. Liberals can err, and badly, on the side of multicultural reductiveness (see: Crash). But more often today we see conservatives papering over their baser instincts by, for example, hiring a black leader, any black leader, to counter the opposition's black leadership, and think it's sufficient. Or, worse, they'll proudly voice their sub-rational prejudices and explain them away as just entertainment.

This is not to say humor does not have a role to play in dealing with these dark thoughts. In fact, it may be the best way. By drowning the malice in irony, one can turn a bigoted thought into an excoriation of bigotry, a harmless exercise in knowingly bad taste, like a dead baby joke. Stephen Colbert is premised on not taking what he says at face value. The same is not true of Glenn Beck.

In a way, its the same mode of thought at work in getting a thrill from lurid horror fiction, which Stephen King once described as 'feeding the alligators in the cellar so they don't get loose.' From this derives the appeal of South Park, and Dave Chappelle.



The knowingness that one has stepped over the line is also what elevates Bill Hicks' tirade against a female heckler over Michael Richards' meltdown:



Whatever strategies social science may bring about to mitigate the practical consequences of our vilest, most unconscious sentiments, completely vanquishing them may well be an impossible task. Best then to be honest with ourselves of the alligators' existence, that they may be defanged.

CARTMAN: Of course it was written by a minority.

Much better.

The Inmates are Running the Asylum

So let me get this straight:

- Andrew Breitbart releases video of Shirley Sherrod saying she didn't want to help white farmers
- Fox News spreads the video hither and yon
- NAACP condemns Sherrod
- Tom Vilsack (vil)sacks Sherrod
- NAACP gets ahold of the full video--in which Sherrod's not wanting to help the white farmers is preceded by the story of her father being murdered with impunity by a white man, and followed by seeing the white farmers get screwed by the white lawyer she recommended and learning that it's not about white vs. black but rich vs. poor--and apologizes for being "snookered"



- Vilsack stands by his decision
- White House stands by Vilsack
- Fox News, by way of Glenn Beck, attacks the White House for firing Sherrod

Remember those boisterous town hall gatherings last summer? Those were nice, weren't they? I imagine we'll be looking on this episode equally fondly this time next year, when the Republicans have gained seats in the House and the Senate, and Breitbart and his horde have trashed the careers and organizations of countless others in the meantime.

It's not like Obama's going to stick up for them.