A Lott's Enough

By Crispin Sartwell

I have certainly enjoyed seeing Trent Lott twist in the wind; his existence as a hyperpartisan twit has been a continuous low-level irritant to me for many years.

And it would hardly be a surprise to find that Trent is a racist. Um, there are a lot of southern politicians out there who are still the product of political machines that were states rights/segregationist organizations shortly before this generation arrived.

But what I will revile on this occasion is the way matters of race are handled in our public discourse. Lott's crime is not attitude or action; it's that he violated, very slightly, the hegemony of euphemism that rules our lives in the matter of race. There is no subject on which our discourse is more dishonest. And there is no subject on which white people are less honest with ourselves.

Conservatives (George W. Bush, Andrew Sullivan, the Wall Street Journal, and Linda Chavez, among many others) are bashing Lott merrily or calling for his ouster. First of all, there turn out to be a variety of scores to settle within the conservative movement, and suddenly the conservatives who were never very taken with Lott are emerging. Second conservatives had better bash Lott if they don't want their conservatism to acknowledge its sources in American racism. Relatedly, bashing Lott is an occasion to declare that you yourself are not a racist. No American passes up an opportunity to do that.

Many, many of the attacks on Lott are very simple self-exculpation by non-association. Indeed, self-exculpation has been an obsession of white people since the civil rights era or before. I actually do not believe that Lott is any more of a racist than the average white American: but he seems to be one of the few white Americans who still hasn't reached a complete understanding of what you say and what you do not say.

Marcus Garvey's black nationalist organization negotiated with the Ku Klux Klan, and Malcolm X once said that he preferred to deal with a straight-up southern segregationist than a northern liberal. The racist at least tells you what he's thinking. The liberal not only does not tell you what he's thinking; he has no idea what he's thinking.

As regards race, we are all liberals now. As it happens, our society is riddled with systematic racial inequalities: in poverty, law enforcement, imprisonment rates, education. But this appears at this point to have no cause whatever, because white folks have floated utterly free of reality and into the fantasy world of our own ideology, in which we have all come to believe the declarations of ourselves and one another that we're all about equality.

The one way that conservatives have been able to turn over the race card with regard to Lott is to urge him to maintain his opposition to affirmative action. Michelle Malkin, for example, in her syndicated column about Lott, argues explicitly that affirmative action is the biggest problem of racial prejudice in our culture (Sullivan calls it "the new racism"): that is, the primary victims of race prejudice in the US are whites folks who, though they are in, say, the bottom 5% of acceptable applicants to the University of Michigan Law School, don't get in because the school admitted a black student.

Malkin suggests that Lott could benefit from a good talking-to from anti-affirmative action advocate Ward Connerly, if he wants to understand the race problem.

If your view is that American culture is not pervasively racist despite the obvious systemic inequalities - and that is presupposed in Malkin's argument and perhaps in Sullivan's - then you know and we know that somewhere under there you have an explanation of those inequalities. That explanation could take two forms: the biological or cultural inferiority of black people. You can't say that, and we can't hear it. But if you look deep within, into the dark recesses of your own brain - the part you have dedicated yourself to hiding from yourself - you know you believe it, and we know you believe it too.

I'm actually not a big fan of affirmative action. But to claim that the itty-bitty barriers to white people in college admissions is the American race problem - or, really, any problem at all - is either entirely disingenuous, or just raw racist ideology. In a country where black people are so much more likely to experience violence, to be addicted to drugs, to be abused by police, you cannot sit there and whine to me that Susie Whitegirl had to go to Michigan State.

That is the argument of a racist privilege so utterly pervasive and unconscious as to be comical, a kind of "let-them-eat-cake" casual presumption of the rightness of one's own power to which the only respectable human response is insurrection.