berube on d'souza

8/10/2019 Berube on D'Souza

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W E B Du Bois Institute

Extreme PrejudiceThe End of Racism. by Dinesh D'SouzaReview by: Michael BrubTransition, No. 69 (1996), pp. 90-98Published by: Indiana University Press on behalf of the W.E.B. Du Bois InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935241 .Accessed: 09/10/2014 17:33

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(~ Under Review

X T R M PREJUDI E

Dinesh D'Souza and the coarsening fAmerican onservatism

Michael Berube

Strolling through the Detroit Interna-tional Airport on my way to my parents'home in Virginia Beach, I came upon anewsstand-bookstore that was devotingeight or ten shelves of space-roughlyone-quarter, I believe, of its "new best-sellers" wall-to Dinesh D'Souza's TheEnd of Racism. I had heard a great dealabout the book before it was published,and had just recently been asked (twice,

actually) by the Chicago Tribune to re-view the thing. I declined, partly on the

grounds that I've already read moreD'Souza than any human should, havingperused both Illiberal Education (I99I)and his rarely mentioned first (and best)effort, Falwell: Before the Millennium

(I984). That's the book where D'Souza

writes, "listening to Falwell speak, one

gets a sense that something is right about

America, after all." So why would I want

to read the new seven-hundred-pageD'Souza, the magnum opus, the D'Souza

Ulysses? Do I really have any obligationto keep plowing through the book-shelves of the Right, demonstrating

again and again that there's no therethere?

Within hours I was in my parents'liv-ing room, asking my father whether he

thought a Tribune eview from me wouldmake any dent in the media campaignbringing bulk shipments of The End ofRacism o airport bookstores, or whetherI wouldn't just be giving the book

greater visibility and credibility simplyby agreeing to treat it as a serious objectof some kind. "Well, Michael," my father

replied, "you may not have to worry.From what I hear, the book isn't doingvery well, in reviews or in sales." WhenI asked where my father had heard sucha thing, he turned to me and asked, witha straight face, if I hadn't seen the new

"desperation" ads the Free Press was run-

ning for the book. "Two for one deal,"he said. "Buy The End of Racism at the al-

ready low, low bargain price, and receiveThe Mark Fuhrman Tapes for free."

Of course, it's manifestly unfair to

compare D'Souza and Fuhrman. To myknowledge, D'Souza has never person-

90 TRANSITION ISSUE 69

Discussed

in this essay

The End of

Racism,Dinesh D'Souza,New York

The Free Press

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ally beaten or framed a black person, nor

has he suggested creating a large bonfire

of black bodies. In The End of Racism, he

merely proposes a theory of "rational

discrimination" based on the recogni-tion that there are vast "civilizational

differences" between black and white

Americans. At the close of his first chap-ter, D'Souza offers a brief catechism on

the subject: the main problem for blacks

is not racism, but "liberal antiracism"; he

civil rights movement failed because

"equal rights for blacks could not and

did not produce equality of results"; and,

consequently, the cause of "rational dis-

crimination" is "black cultural path-

ology." D'Souza's middle chapter ("IsAmerica a Racist Society?") expands on

the premises of rational discrimination,which may be unfair to individuals but

valid about groups-as-wholes:

Only because group traits have an empiricalbasis n shared xperience an we invoke hem

withoutfear of contradiction. hink of how

people would react f someone aid that "Ko-

reans are lazy" or that "Hispanics are con-

stantly trying to find ways to make money. "

Despite the prevalence f anti-Semitism,Jews

are rarely ccused fstupidity. Blacks are neveraccused f being tight with a dollar, r of con-

spiring to take over the world. By reversing

stereotypes e can see how their ersistence e-

lies, not simply on the assumptions of the

viewer, but also on the characteristics f the

group being described.

This, perhaps, is right-wing sociology's

finest moment: reversal f stereotypes hydidn't we think of that? OK, now let's getthis straight. Koreans are not lazy, His-

panics do not try to make money, Blacks

are spendthrifts, and . . . hey wait a

minute those clever Jews really are try-

ing to take over the world Get me Pat

Robertson

Many of my black friends were under-

standably alarmed to hear that D'Souza's

book endorses the practice of "rational

discrimination." One told me that she'd

read only so much of the book-up to

the point at which, on page I 69, D'Souza

notes that the civil rights movement

failed because it did not consider its po-litical consequences, namely, that "racism

might be fortified if blacks were unable

to exercise their rights effectively and re-

sponsibly." After that, she decided the

book might as well be called The NegroA Beast, after Charles Carroll's best-seller

of 1900. Such a title, I replied, would al-

most surely keep the book out of major

airport bookstores, and so was probablyrejected by the Free Press's marketing

department. But then again, I added,there's no reason to think of D'Souza as

antiblack; on the contrary, the theory of

"rational discrimination" may proveeven more dangerous to white Ameri-

cans than to any other group. It doesn't

take a Malcolm or an Ishmael Reed to

figure this one out: White people blow

up federal buildings. White people pil-lage savings and loans. White peoplebuilt Love Canal.White people commit

horrid, unthinkable murders of helplesschildren and pregnant women, and then

they blame them on black men. All the

great serial killers of the West are white

people. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm

not saying that all white people are crazy

or greedy or dishonest. Some of myclosest friends are white. But would youwant your daughter to marry one?

EXTREME PREJUDICE 91



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I presume that many of my readers arefamiliar with some of D'Souza's more

extraordinary arguments in The End ofRacism. Still, it may be worth pausingbriefly over some of the highlights. For Ibelieve this book, together with The Bell

Curve, is an instance of a wholly new

genre of encyclopedic pseudoscience,and it is fundamental to the workings ofthis genre that the books in question betoo bloated and overstuffed for the ordi-

nary reader to fathom. In this new genre,measured commentary, reportage, and

scholarship are blended with ultracon-servative and even fascist policy recom-

mendations, regardless of the logical re-

lation between the scholarship and therecommendations. (D'Souza's book dif-

fers from Herrnstein's and Murray's inthat it also includes extended hallu-cinations masquerading as "historicaloverview." More on this below.) The au-

thors of these books then appear, calmand composed, on national media, say-ing they know their work is bound tocause controversy but should at least be

granted an honest hearing. (See also, un-der this heading, David Brock's The RealAnita Hill.) Phase two of their mission

accomplished, they then head back tobase camp at Commentary magazine to

write assessments of their reception,showing that despite their honesty andall-around reasonableness, hey were sav-

aged and brutalized by the knee-jerk lib-eral press. All of which demonstrates a

fortiori the liberal stranglehold on politi-cal discourse in the United States; for asthe ever-reliable Eugene Genovese

memorably put it in a recent issue of the

National Review, surveying the public re-sponse to The Bell Curve, "once againacademia and the mass media are strain-

ing every muscle to suppress debate."So much for the new genre and its

characteristic media-saturation strategy.Now for some of the highlights of TheEnd of Racism.

"The popular conception seems to bethat American slavery as an institu-tion involved white slaveowners andblack slaves. Consequently, it is easyto view slavery as a racist institution.But this image is complicated whenwe discover that most whites did notown slaves, even in the South; thatnot all blacks were slaves; that severalthousand free blacks and AmericanIndians owned black slaves. An exam-ination of these frequently obscured

aspects of American slavery calls into


Dinesh D'Souza

Len Be Pas



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question the facile equation of racismand slavery."

* "The American slave was treated like

property, which is to say, pretty well."* "Most African American scholars

simply refuse to acknowledge the

pathology of violence in the black

underclass, apparently convinced thatblack criminals as well as their targetsare both victims: the real culprit is so-cietal racism. Activists recommendfederal jobs programs and recruit-ment into the private sector.Yet itseems unrealistic, bordering on the

surreal, to imagine underclass blacks

with their gold chains, limping walk,obscene language, and arsenal of

weapons doing nine-to-five jobs atProcter and Gamble or the State

Department."

* "Increasingly it appears that it is lib-eral antiracism that is based on igno-rance and fear: gnorance of the truenature of racism, and fear that theracist point of view better explains the

world than its liberal counterpart."Almost as striking are D'Souza's inci-

sive rhetorical questions:* "If America as a nation owes blacks as

a group reparations or slavery, whatdo blacks as a group owe America for

the abolition of slavery?"* "How did [Martin Luther] King

succeed, almost single-handedly, in

winning support for his agenda?Why was his Southern oppositionvirtually silent in making counter-

arguments?"

* "Historically whites have used racismto serve powerful entrenched inter-

ests, but what interests does racism

serve now? Most whites have no eco-nomic stake in the ghetto."

Yet these are merely the book's mostnoticeable features-the passages that

make a reviewer suppose that the easiest

way to slander D'Souza is to quote him

directly. The End of Racism s not, how-

ever, the sum of its pull quotes. More

important are its characteristic tics and

tropes, which are harder to convey but

crucial for an understanding of how histext operates. There is, for instance, the

repeated insistence that behind everycivil rights initiative looms the specter ofcultural relativism, and that the father ofcultural relativism is Franz Boas. The last

time I encountered this argument-andI am not making this up -I was readingneo-Nazi pamphlets on the cultural in-

feriority of the darker peoples. D'Souzais unique, however, in finding the evilBoas everywhere he looks, from the

founding of the NAACP to the unani-mous majority in Brown v. Board ofEducation.

Indeed, the only figure who comes in

for as much abuse as Boas is W. E. B. Du

Bois, apparently because Du Bois was so

simplistic as to blame white people for

lynchings, Jim Crow, and the race riotsof 1906 (Atlanta) and 1908 (Springfield).

Once you've been tarred by D'Souza as

a cultural relativist, there is no hope for

you. Everything you say testifies only to

your moral turpitude

(Actually, to be fair to D'Souza, his

book nowhere mentions those riots.) AsD'Souza explains at some length, Du

Bois was a cultural relativist. And once

you've been tarred by D'Souza as a cul-

tural relativist, there is no hope for you.




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Everything you say testifies only to yourmoral turpitude. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.suggests that it's racist to say to him,

"Skip, sing me one of those old Negro

spirituals" or "You people sure candance," and D'Souza replies, "Why are

[these statements] viewed as racist? Be-cause contemporary liberalism is con-structed on the scaffolding of cultural

relativism, which posits that all groupsare inherently equal." A century earlier,Du Bois had called for "anti-lynchinglegislation" and "enfranchisement of the

Negro in the South"; D'Souza remarksthat "this represented a program stronglyinfluenced by Franz Boas and Boasian

assumptions." Johnnetta Cole writesthat the "problem" with single-parenthouseholds "is that they are deprived ofdecent food, shelter, medical care, and

education," and D'Souza writes that

"Johnnetta Cole finds nothing wrongwith single-parent families"-and that,more broadly, "leading African Ameri-can intellectuals abstain from criticizingand go so far as to revel in what theydescribe as another alternative lifestyle."Houston Baker writes a book claimingthat 2 Live Crew was rightly banned inBroward County for obscenity, and sure

enough, D'Souza cites him (and his

book) as one of the Crew's leading de-fenders. How can this be? You guessedit-cultural relativism. "Instead of

seeking to counter the cultural influ-ence of rap, leading African American

figures unabashedly condone and cele-

brate rap music as the embodiment ofblack authenticity."

In The End of Racism, we find thatsuccessful black people are especiallywhiny (unless they're conservatives); ac-

cordingly, they draw from D'Souza ascorn that is indistinguishable from ha-tred. In 1993, Senator Carol Moseley-Braun argued that the Senate should not

recognize the Confederate flag as the of-ficial symbol of the United Daughters ofthe Confederacy; D'Souza calls her pro-test "histrionic"-and, because he knowswho pays his bills, fails to mention that

Jesse Helms made a project of tauntingMoseley-Braun thereafter. In his penul-timate chapter he takes up the narrativesof middle-class blacks who deal with

countless racist slurs and slights everyday, and reacts with disbelief to their

professions of resentment:


Charles Murray



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These are the observations f relatively well-

placed men and women: an executive, gov-

ernment worker, nd a college rofessor. inceno reasons are given that would ustify suchreactions i.e., D'Souza did not cite them],one might conclude hat we are dealing withcases of people who live in a world of make-

believe, n mental prisons of their own con-struction. or them, antiracist militancy s car-ried to the point of virtual mental nstability.It is hard to imagine whites eeling secure

working with such persons.

D'Souza's ability to empathize with be-

leaguered white persons is admirable,and no doubt if he continues to succorthe hurt feelings of his powerful white

colleagues who don't see why Skip getsso huffy when he's asked to sing "Roll,Jordan, Roll," his career as a prominent

right-wing intellectual-and his fellow-ship from the American Enterprise In-stitute-is pretty much guaranteed. Itwas not long after the book was pub-lished, in fact, that the Wall Street ournaldevoted half a page of op-ed space toan excerpt from D'Souza's concludingchapter-the part where he finally getsaround to delivering his payload, hisbrief for the

repeal ofthe

I964 CivilRights Act.

D'Souza's rationale for repeal is clear:ever since the passage of the Fourteenth

Amendment, he claims, the federal gov-ernment has been "the primary threat toblack prospects." In a truly free market,by contrast, racial discrimination wouldnot exist, since "discrimination is onlycatastrophic when virtually everyonecolludes to enforce it." D'Souza's case in

point is major league baseball, aboutwhich he poses a truly novel thought-

experiment: "Consider what would hap-pen," he writes, "if every baseball team

in America refused to hire blacks." Lestwe are unable to imagine such a thing,D'Souza guides us step by step:

Blacks would suffer most, because hey wouldbe denied he opportunity oplay professionalbaseball. And fans would suffer, because he

quality of games would be diminished. Butwhat if only afew teams-say the NewYork

Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers-re-fused to hire blacks? African Americans as a

group would suffer hardly at all, because hebest black players would offer their servicesto other eams.The Yankees nd the Dodgerswould suffer a great deal, because hey wouldbe deprived of the chance to hire talentedblack layers. Eventually competitive ressurewould orce the Yankees and Dodgers either

to hire blacks, r to suffer osses n games andrevenue.

There's something disingenuous aboutD'Souza's plans for integration, sinceD'Souza had argued earlier, citing JoelWilliamson, that Jim Crow laws were

"designed to preserve and encourage"black self-esteem. But let's assume, for

the nonce, that D'Souza is serious here,and let's assume also that franchises likethe Celtics or the Red Sox of the I98oscould not win games without a sizable

contingent of black ballplayers. How

precisely is this argument supposed towork in American society at large? Arewe supposed to believe that bankers andrealtors don't discriminate against blackclients for fear that their rivals down thestreet will snap up all those hard-hitting,base-stealing young Negroes? Or is itthat when black motorists are tired of




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being pulled over in California, they will

simply take their business to the more

hospitable clime of Arizona?

Few commentators have noted thatDinesh D'Souza is himself the most vis-

ible contradiction of the right's majorpremise in the culture wars-namely,that campus conservatives are persecuted

by liberal faculty and intimidated into si-

lence. For here, after all, is perhaps themost vocalYoung Conservative of them

all, a founder and editor-in-chief of the

Dartmouth Review who's since gone onto Princeton University, the Reagan ad-

ministration, and lucrative fellowshipsfrom the Olin Foundation and the

American Enterprise Institute. He is, in

short, a phenomenon. No matter how

diligently his critics pore through hiswork, demonstrating time and again thatthe stuff doesn't meet a single knownstandard for intellectual probity, he is

taken seriously. iberal heavyweight champRichard Rorty is tapped to take his book

apart in the New York Times Book Re-

view; Harvard's Stephan Thernstrom

weighs in with a trenchant critique in

the Times Literary Supplement. On theother side of the aisle, both Genovesesstand up to testify to the book's impor-tance, calling it "impressive" and "coura-

geous." D'Souza is denounced and cel-

ebrated, defended and reviled. He appearsin Forbes, he Atlantic, he American Schol-ar. Meanwhile, over on page A4 of thehometown paper there's a story about

how the Philadelphia police have ter-rorized the city's black citizens for years;on page Bio, an NFL star's brother, a

young black businessman, has been

stopped by highway police and beaten to

death. No probable cause, no previousrecord. No one notices.

Not long ago Michael Lind wrote

about what he called "the intellectual

death of conservatism," recounting howhe watched in amazement as HeritageFoundation founder Paul Weyrich sug-gested lacing illegal drugs with rat poi-son-and no one in the room demurred.

The publication of The End of Racism

seems to me a larger version of the same

phenomenon: not only a deliberate andat times terrifying attempt to move the

center of political gravity as far right as

possible, but also so egregious an affront

to human decency as to set a new and

sorry standard for "intellectual" debate.It is remarkable, I think, that this latest

and most virulent brand of postwarAmerican conservatism has so far pro-duced only one prominent defector, onlyone conscientious objector-the afore-mentioned Michael Lind. And it is sim-

ilarly remarkable that D'Souza's book

has provoked only one resignation from

the AEI-that of prominent black con-

servative Glenn Loury.Still, however much one might lament

the resolute ideological conformity on

the right, it strikes me as a gesture of po-litical impotence for commentators on

the left to criticize The End of Racism or

failing to meet any reasonable standard

for sound scholarship, informational ac-

curacy, or logical coherence. It's ratherlike complaining, after your arms havebeen removed from their sockets, that

your opponent has failed to abide by

Robert's Rules of Order. Does anyone se-riously expect that Lynne Cheney, say,will tender her resignation to the Amer-

ican Enterprise Institute as well, on the

grounds that D'Souza has flouted the




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intellectual standards of which sheclaims to be the defender? And what ofAdam Bellow, son of Saul, who, accord-

ing to D'Souza, "worked closely withme throughout the preparation of the

manuscript"? Wasn't there anything hecould have done to make The End ofRacism a saner, a more respectable book?Or was he too busy searching the worldover for the Tolstoy of the Zulus?

I think it is important that the Amer-

ican right is now so supremely self-con-

fident, so assured of its control over thedirection of public policy and politicaldebate, that no one at the Free Press orthe AEI worried whether The End ofRacism might damage the credibility ofconservatism. Such self-confidence is al-

together impressive, even sublime. Whatdoes it betoken? The Wall Street ournal

excerpt of the book should probably beour guide. It's significant that the Journaltrumpeted only D'Souza's call to repealthe Civil Rights Act of 1964; apparently,the time is not yet right for the Journal o

reprint neo-Nazi pamphlet material onthe omnipresent cultural influence ofFranz Boas. But outright repeal of theCivil Rights Act is still unthinkable in

American politics; the most the Ameri-can right can do, for the moment, is toshoot holes in the Voting Rights Act of

1965, and torpedo those liberal intellec-

tuals, like Lani Guinier, who actuallytake the legislation seriously. The "raceissue" of 1996 wasn't supposed to be civil

rights in toto; it was supposed to be the

abolition of affirmative action, spear-

headed by the so-called Civil Rights Ini-tiative in California. Isn't D'Souza jump-ing the gun? Isn't the Civil Rights Acttoo ambitious a target?

But perhaps the jumping of the gun is

precisely the point. D'Souza's not writ-

ing for 1996, or even for 2000; he's writ-

ing for generations yet to come. LikeBob Dornan's presidential candidacy,The End of Racism may be a short-termdisaster but a long-term success in push-ing the rightward edge of the envelopefor what can be plausibly considered as asubstantive contribution to public de-bate. It is a disgraceful book by any mea-

sure, but it may yet be a landmark-

even though, like the Lyrical Ballads,Fauve painting, and, say, Mein Kampf, tbe maligned and ill-understood upon itsfirst appearance. And who knows? May-

The End of Racism may yet be a

landmark, even though, like the Lyrical

Ballads, Fauve Painting, and Mein

Kampf, it be maligned and ill-understood

upon its first appearance

be the times they are a-changing, andsoon it will be as common as rain to hear

Dornanesque presidential candidates calltheir opponents "pot-smoking, triple-draft-dodging adulterers" and to see pol-

icy analysts guffawing about how ridicu-lous it would be to create jobs programsfor gold-chained, limping black men.Once upon a time Barry Goldwater wasconsidered an extremist-so much sothat the presidential race of 1964 was the

only election since 1852 in which a De-mocratic nominee other than FDR won

more than 50 percent of the popular

vote. Now, with his defense of gay mili-tary personnel and his dismissal of per-sonal attacks on Clinton, Goldwater hasalmost become the custodian of the

party's "liberal" wing.What if The End of




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Racism, ike Goldwater's nomination, is

merelya shot across a bow? What

if, bythe year 2016, the American right has

carried out Rush Limbaugh's jocular

suggestion that a maximum of two lib-erals be kept alive on each college cam-

pus-and those few thousand of us who

remain amidst the rubble are sighing

nostalgically for the days when there

The Wall Street JournaFs editors are willing

to flirt with anything, even crypto-fascism,

so long as it promises to unwrite federal

commitments to social justice

were still liberal Republicans like Dan

Quayle who were at least ambivalent

about the prospects of sterilizing popu-lations with measurable "civilizationaldifferences" from whites?

Allow me my phantasmic scenarios. I

now live in a nation where a main-

stream, nationally syndicated columnist

like George Will can defend Bob Dor-

nan's candidacy on the grounds that it's

exciting and will shake things up. I livein a nation where it is not considered

"extreme" to eliminate capital gains taxes

or to turn social programs over to thestates so that Republican governors canundo the deleterious effects of the Four-

teenth Amendment. I live in a nation

where Dinesh D'Souza is considered a

"courageous, insightful, and eloquentcritic of the American social scene"

(Linda Chavez) and a book like The End

of Racism appears on airport-bookstore

shelves festooned with no fewer thaneight testimonial blurbs-includingthose of Chavez, Eugene Genovese,Charles Krauthammer, and a few token

liberals like Andrew Hacker and Gerald

Early, who really ought to have known

better.

What, finally, does the publication of

The End of Racism ay about the relations

between the "responsible" right and the"extreme" ight? In the wake of the Okla-homa City bombing, American conserv-atives were outraged that anyone couldhave drawn a connection between Rush

Limbaugh's or Gordon Liddy's mirthful,

hypothetical incitements to murder, andthe deadly explosives used by right-wingfanatics. Many on the American right, totheir credit, denounced the bombing-usually a few hours after denouncingthose few pinkos and bleeding hearts

who had had the gall to suggest that thebombers might not have been Islamicfundamentalists. Not a single white con-

servative, however, has voiced any reser-vations or regrets about the publication of

The End of Racism. Adam Bellow has not

stepped forward to admit that mistakeswere made; Bob Dole has not chargedthat the book will erode our moral

fiber; Gertrude Himmelfarb and Lynne

Cheney have not confided to Commen-

tary heir worries that the book may notmeet the ideal of scholarly objectivity.Perhaps it will not be considered outra-

geous, then, for liberals like me to drawthe obvious conclusions-that there areno rightward boundaries for what con-

servatives will consider acceptable publicdiscourse on race, and that the Wall Street

Journal's editors are willing to flirt with

anything, even crypto-fascism, so long asit promises to unwrite Federal commit-

ments to social justice. As I contemplateThe End of Racism, I await the requisite

soul-searching on the right. But in all

honesty, I'm not holding my breath.


berube on d'souza

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