The Paradox of Civil Rights: The Ethos and Language of Reform Incites Racist Reaction
How each step forward may make us go two steps backward
By
David Gottfried
A word of caution for the reader:
At times, I fear I approximate an aging, graying and fading neo conservative who has read too much Norman Podhoretz and is deranged with dyspepsia from six decades of undigested chopped liver sitting in my gut. At other times, after a few jolts of café bustello (and in my glory days, the other stuff; just remember those lyrics from the Grateful Dead, “riding that train, high on …” ) I feel young again, and I exude the wrath of Robespierre and imagine myself the incarnation of the spirit of the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, and the anti-Vietnam demonstrators shitting on American pieties and propriety and shouting “1, 2, 3, 4, We don’t want your fucking war.”
I have been advised that a polemicist or writer should always strive for consistency. Indeed, some of my fellow writers on the substack platform have said to me that one should not only always write about the same thing but should always arrive at the same conclusion. However, if one’s writing were to always say the same thing, I think that anything scribbled after the first post would be utterly superfluous, just as all of Fox News and MSNBC is superfluous because they have trotted out the same tedious, plebian, platitudinous bullshit for years and it is time for them to go.
Also – and this is relevant to all scholarship and not just politics – if one studies only one thing, one’s knowledge of that one thing, one’s chosen specialty, will suffer. For example, philosophers were only able to truly recognize the importance of existentialist philosophy when they became aware of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, a concept which all too often is only known among physicists (Footnote 1)
Very simply, I have a yen to say that which I believe is true. And if the truth as I see it is impolitic or inconvenient, so be it.
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When I went to Hebrew School, many years ago, I got the idea that one should always voice disgust with persecution, especially persecution against minority groups. For me, this ethic became an indispensable corollary to the ten commandments. If necessary, one should rise-up and rebel against the oppressor. If one did not rise-up and overthrow the oppressive force, one still had to do something and that was to speak-up.
Accordingly, when ACT UP came onto the political scene and howled, “Silence equals Death,” the chant was, to me, a veritable reverberation from the synagogue, an encapsulation, into three words, of one’s cardinal calling. These three words were my trinity.
However, I now wonder if I was mistaken.
As I have aged, I have come to listen to the sounds of other people, people outside of New York and minorities and the modern urban landscape.
And I have come to one overwhelming, inexorable conclusion: The great majority of white, Christian men are sick and tired of hearing about the plight of blacks, women and non-Christians and are becoming more and more hostile to blacks, women and non-Christians whenever they hear the familiar refrain of complaints -- However there are a few dramatic exceptions; keep reading.
I first came to this conclusion by listening to the rumble of discontent, that has occasionally blossomed into full blown rage, within my brain. I heard my brain shout louder than Archie Bunker when someone on social media, on the eve of the 2016 election, said that my ideas were invalid because I was, in her words, “an old white man.”
Upon hearing that I was “an old white man,” it suddenly dawned on me that I had been hearing the same thing since at least as far back as the Summer of 1964, when I turned 7. At that time, I was a camper at the JCH or Jewish Community House Day Camp in Brooklyn, New York. It had been characterized as the poor Jew’s conception of a summer camp for kids. We had an itty-bitty square lot on which we played ball, and an itty-bitty tiny room (without air conditioning, of course) in which we could paint. At noon, they gave us lunch which often consisted of Kasha and Kishka and Kasha Varnishkas. We commuted to the day camp on the city bus. Of course, there was no pool.
At that camp, I was instructed to hail the civil rights movement. More specifically, after our aforementioned classically Ashkenazic Jewish lunch, we were taught the songs of black agricultural workers. I can still sing them:
Gotta jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton
Gotta jump down, turn around, pick a bale of hay
Hey, Lordie, pick a bale of cotton
Hey Lordie, pick a bale of hay
Actually, the songs were good. They had a gnawing insistence that felt so true, and, after all, Schwerner and Goodman and Chaney had just been killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi (And Ronald Reagan, may he burn in the hottest recesses of hell, began his 1984 reelection campaign by visiting Philadelphia Mississippi and symbolically murdering Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman all over again.)
Please listen to the lyrics of this song:
“And here’s to the Churches of Mississippi
Where the cross once made of silver now is caked with rust
And the Sunday mornings sermons pander to their lust
Woe, the fallen face of Jesus is choking in the dust
And heaven only knows in which god they can trust
Here’s to the land you tore out the heart of
Mississippi find yourself another country to be part of”
By the late Sixties, complaints about the persecution of women were raised with vigor and intensity. And I seemed to hear complaints of discrimination and persecution every day.
Of course, much of this rhetoric did not come from blacks and women. Some of it was in the form of public service announcements aired by Our Great and Benevolent Corporations which told us to be nice to blacks and women, and these public service announcements a) enabled corporations to get tax deductions for posting such “worthy” announcements decrying bigotry, b) made poor blacks more and more apolitical as the corporate bullshit was so readily apparent, and c) gave poor whites the belief that a lot was already being done for the blacks and that it was time for a moratorium on liberal reform. And this shows you how certain right-wing forces have their cake and eat it too: They get tax deductions for advertisements preaching about civil rights, and these advertisements hurt civil rights and liberal reform in general for the reasons stated above.
(Incidentally, if someone has the time, I have a research assignment for them. Haven’t you seen a bunch of advertisements sporting black doctors and nurses. Those advertisements are not there to sell products because they alienate both poor blacks (who resent the portrayal of a promised new era, of black doctors aplenty, that they have not experienced) and poor whites (who see this as further evidence that too much is being done for blacks.) I would bet that certain federal regulations give corporations tax benefits for airing these sorts of ads. If you have the time, check the code of federal regulations. I must warn you though: It is tens of thousands of pages long and very, very hard to navigate as it was purposefully designed to trip up and rip off everyone not privy to a charmed and special world of grafters and governmental hand maidens of corporate power.)
Also, sometimes when aggrieved groups proffer their complaints, they have a terrible predilection toward voicing their least important grievances.
I want to give these civil rights groups some advice I was given in law school. Find your most important argument and develop it, enrich it and hit hard with it. The very first page of your brief, and the first words of your oration during oral argument, should drive home your strongest argument in the most pungent way possible.
For example, at the end World War Two, in a case in which “ex” Nazis sought to become American citizens, counsel for the government began his oration with one stark, harsh statement:
The issue in this case is whether a good Nazi can be a good American.
And so I say to blacks and all advocates for oppressed groups. Do not give us meandering, mushy, and excessively intellectual dissertations. Stop trying to sound like an academic and start sounding like a lawyer out to win.
Because when you talk about microaggressions and a pot pourri of vague phenomena, none of which hits one in the gut with painful immediacy, you simply lose support.
And so if I were in the command structure of a black civil rights group, I would say hit home hard on police brutality. Police brutality is the nightly torture that sometimes makes the boys in blue a latter-day Nazi Gestapo.
For crying out loud, once and for all you must adopt a strategy and a plan to bring about effective action. Instead of taking effective action, you have implemented measures which will exacerbate your problems. Example:
Today, the New York Times noted that a) after the George Floyd murder, the University of Virginia advocated sweeping liberal changes, including increases in black enrollment and the number of black Professors and b) the liberal changes advocated by the University of Virginia has aroused the ire of the right and may lead to the suppression of DEI programs, or Diversity, Equality and Inclusion programs.
The proposals for liberal reform posited by the University of Virgina did not do a damn thing to fight police brutality. Those proposals could however make matters worse for blacks. What happens to a black man who has a Verbal SAT of 450 who enters a university where most white students have a verbal SAT of 650. Do you really think you are doing that black student, or the black community, any fucking favors. That student will find it painfully difficult to keep up, may express his disaffection by getting involved in the sort of pseudo progressive politics that only hurts progressive causes, does not become financially successful or even viable, is a symbol to his community of the intractability of change, becomes more sullen, disaffected moody and depressed and sooner or later his morose and angry facial expressions will prompt a cop to attack him with deadly force. (Why can’t the lords and ladies of Cambridge, salon-inspired liberalism get it through their thick fucking heads: Don’t lower the entrance requirements for black people. Have the determination to educate blacks and bring up their scores. Winston Churchill was forced to repeat the first grade twice and his eventual mastery of the most basic and simplest first grade English made him one of the finest writers of English prose and his words rallied the English-Speaking World to Victory in World War Two.
Footnote 1: Heisenberg held that whenever we measure anything, we change the dimension of that which we measure. (For example, whenever we check our weight, we lose weight because we burn up energy while getting on the scale.) Because it is impossible to garner exact measurements, we can never really know for certain where anything is going. This was a boon to existentialists and their anti-determinist conception of life.