The Cure for Racism

By LANCE MORROW

In 1966, Vermont's Senator George Aiken proposed that the U.S. disentangle itself from Vietnam by declaring victory and withdrawing. America should think < about a variation on the Aiken scenario in order to begin leaving behind its fatal domestic quagmire of race. The nation should decide that, in order to rescue everyone's honor -- above all, that of African Americans -- it is time to withdraw from an untenable dynamic, from the racial equivalent of what the French generals in Indochina called "bad country."

The legal and rhetorical overemphasis on race in the past generation (busing, affirmative action, quotas, punitive political correctness) has ended by compounding the oldest American melodrama. What should have been, at most, a temporary tactic (like Lincoln getting Congress to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War) has become a permanent installation of bad principle -- a way of life.

The supposedly virtuous high road of race preference has taken the nation into dubious terrain. America's chattering classes have been beguiled by the idea of compensatory unfairness. They have not recognized it for what it is: a flirtation with the devil, a deepening reliance on the principle that formed the foundation of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. This was the poison at the center of apartheid and Hitler's Nuremberg Laws.

What affirmative action affirms, covertly -- the hidden premise, growing more powerful -- is a proposition not distant from the conclusions of Messrs. Herrnstein and Murray in The Bell Curve. In an America where all the genes of the world have settled and hope to succeed, the only way to justify open-ended affirmative action for blacks is to shake one's head and say, "Well, you know, we have to do this: African Americans are inherently inferior." Who would have thought the mind-set of a Kluxer would turn up as U.S. government policy?

We must presumably distinguish between the good, official racism (which is polyunsaturated) and bad racism (which is the saturated fat of the redneck). Well, good racism does not drive out bad. It is weak-minded and dangerously innocent to think one can enlist an immoral principle (sorting out individuals by race) in the service of social justice. The battle against bad racism becomes (like the war in Vietnam) not only unwinnable but self-perpetuating. And worse: the effort to combat racism grows evil in itself.

ldeological corruption flourishes in government agencies, as it does in the universities -- a kind of moral hiv. It destroys immune systems. A liberal icon teaching at Harvard whispered to me one day, "Affirmative action poisons the university for everyone. The students, both black and white, know it is crooked. The professor knows it is crooked. You cannot teach in these circumstances." The Federal Reserve Board at the moment is considering a new regulation that would require all small businesses applying for bank loans to identify themselves by race and gender. To what one-thousandth will the Fed measure my bloodline? (Was there a trace of some pristine, nonwhite, non- European victimness four generations back?) All is well. Subdividing bureaucratic determinism files away more millions of citizens in its racial pigeonholes.

If I were something like the Pope of black America and had the moral authority to make such suggestions, I would propose that no African American use the terms racism or racist. The words are a feckless indulgence, corrosive to blacks and whites alike and to relations between them. Such rhetoric has given blacks a leadership that has built its career upon mere race-grievance agitation, and is therefore profoundly, almost unconsciously committed to its perpetuation. As in a hateful Strindberg marriage, each party somehow requires the abuse of the other. It is a catastrophic pattern. The lingering ghost of the plantation haunts it.

The word racism has degenerated to being a mere ritual term of abuse and self-pity, part of the Kabuki of manipulation. Any grownup knows there is racism in America. There is racism almost everywhere in the world. The Chinese refer to Africans as hei gwei, or "black devils." (They refer to whites, by the way, as "white devils.") The Chinese were used as virtual slaves in the American West during the 19th century. In Egypt (which many African Americans embrace as the founding mother of black civilization), even people with moderately dark skins refer to themselves as "white." In the Dominican Republic, citizens despise Haitians with an appalling frankness. Racists? Try Russia. Visit Japan. Tour the world. Racism is an evil constant. America stacks up better than most societies on this subject.

At the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King said he looked forward to the day -- his "dream" -- when his four little children would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. He was right then, and now. But from the time of King's death to the present, the country has sunk deeper into the swamp, the essential error.

It is time to regress to Martin Luther King's ideal. The content of one's character, not the color of one's skin, is the sole decent American criterion.