Rule 1 of Politics and Race: Never be Honest About Your “Feelings”
By
David Gottfried
About once every six months, a colorful, crass media personality will invite us to have “An honest conversation about Race.” One of the many multitudes of vulgar media platforms will convene a conference, or symposium or kvetch (Kvetch means complain in Yiddish) fest in which a gaggle of nincompoops will whip themselves into a lather spouting the most predictable blather about race. Whenever a speaker does not know what to say, or fears that he has offended a sacred canon of the liberal gospel, he will utter one of the verbal candies of the creed of Joy Behar, alluding to diversity, multiculturalism and micro aggressions like a buddhist chanting “ohm.”
If the speaker is afraid of offending commissars of the political right, he will robotically exclaim that he wants to “Make America Great Again,” and that he wants to “lock her up,” with the alacrity of a lederhosen-wearing member of the Hitler jugend extending his arm to salute Der Fuhrer.
In short, no one will ever talk about race honestly. They will simply repeat the tired nostrums and platitudes, used since the onset of the Modern Civil Rights movement in the 50’s, that have been so unflaggingly unsuccessful in combatting racial hostility.
However, there was a time, in the early days of the modern civil rights movement, when someone dared to talk honestly about his personal feelings.
The year was 1963. Norman Podhoretz, the editor of “Commentary,” wrote an article entitled “My Negro Problem.” Podhoretz said that racial antagonism often had psychosexual roots, and he suggested that people honestly discuss their feelings about other races. He proceeded to do so as he recounted his interactions with blacks when he was a boy in the New York City public schools.
Podhoretz said that he was envious of black boys because he thought they were more macho, were less constrained by parental supervision, and more apt to aggressively glide through life, doing whatever felt good. Also, he was afraid of black boys because he thought they were better fighters and a threat to his safety in the school and on the streets.
He did not say this was good or bad, or that his feelings were bad, or that he thought his feelings were valid or invalid. He simply delivered a reminiscence tinged with sorrow, envy and regret. Most of all, he seemed like a man who wanted to get something off his chest.
Leading black intellectuals, and their white allies, promptly beat him to a pulp. Lorraine Hansbury, who authored the masterpiece “A Raison in the Sun,” said that his essay was a regurgitation of perfectly ancient, racist stereotypes. James Baldwin chimed in with a similar denunciation. Soon he was persona non grata in every assemblage of left-leaning Jews (And he was the editor of “Commentary”)
The ostracism of Podhoretz was akin to slashing a man who has the honesty to say that he committed a crime. (And he hadn’t committed a crime) Podhoretz did not say that he was proud that as a child he believed that black men had a monopoly on virility; he simply wanted to tell us that this is how he felt as a child, and he suggested that white envy of black male virility might engender white racism.
Also, he suggested that so much of life is, for want of a better term, a mixed bag: He said that black boys felt freer because they suffered fewer parental restraints, and this suggested that some forms of neglect have fringe benefit, i.e., when your parents neglect you, you may be bereft of their protection and their intellectual stimulation, but you learn to live on your own and this is a boon to maturation, self-confidence and becoming a man. Hence, he was one of the few analysts of race who had a nuanced view of race and psychology.
Things have only gotten worse since Podhoretz’s ejectment from the Left in 1963. Nowadays, people are not only incapable of nuanced thought. Now, their cognitive style can only be described as primitive and hysterical.
I have heard people decry a book because it dealt with slavery, or male chauvinism, or promiscuity. The book in question may have condemned slavery, or any one of a number of misdeeds, but the condemnatory view of the evil did not suffice to rehabilitate the book. These sorts of critics assume the stance of the 3 monkeys who “Hear no evil, see no evil or speak no evil,” afraid that even mentioning something like slavery will tend to rehabilitate the crime even if it is discussed with the most caustic criticism.
As the editor of Commentary, Podhoretz had, perhaps, been one of the instigators of the New Left and the Counterculture. For example, he published pieces by and about Paul Goodman, whose major work, “Growing Up Absurd,” skewered sanctimonious Fifties America like a shish ka bob, and Herbert Marcuse, a descendent of the Frankfurt school of Marxist thought and mentor to Angela Davis of the Black Panthers. In his bookish, restrained fashion, he sort of laid the intellectual foundation for the lifestyle and escapades of the beatniks and the hippies.
However, after the left busted his balls for harboring politically incorrect thoughts at the age of nine, he began his steady, inexorable trek to the Right. Podhoretz, clearly embittered by the denunciation of former comrades from the left, mythologized his journey to the right as something rivaling Chairman Mao’s Long March. In his grandiose telling, he took his gang of secular Trotskyite Yeshiva boys to the Ranches of George Bush and Ronald Reagan.
In a little while, he was nothing but an urbane, Jewish version of Archie Bunker. In the 70’, when Arab petro states went wild with the price of oil, he suggested that if America had any balls, as it once did, America would conquer Saudia Arabia, Iraq, Libya, etc. etc., and simply take all the oil it wanted. And when he didn’t imagine that he was Errol Flynn bashing racial inferiors in an old movie about the glories of the English Empire, he was bashing Jews who were unreconstructed lefties. I read at least two, or maybe three, books in which he said something like this: I used to be friends with people like Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer, but I soon learned to realize that they were immature, crazy lefties who only wanted to make trouble.
In conclusion, I think that having an honest conversation about racial and political problems may prove perilous to one’s professional life. I have heard many people say they welcome an honest conversation about race, but their rhetoric is sugar-coated horseshit. People don’t want an honest conversation; an honest conversation may offend the biases they enshrine as gospel truth. These talking heads who pretend to welcome candid conversations only want a brain-dead rehashing of everything that want to believe is true.