Jonah Goldberg: While We're on the Subject of Race and Class

FOR REASONS good and bad — mostly bad — the media establishment has decided that Hurricane Katrina should be a “teaching moment” about race and class issues.

One might be more inclined to think this is a teaching moment about our preparedness to respond to a major terrorist attack — presumably Osama Bin Laden isn’t boning up on his Barbara Ehrenreich because of the fallout in New Orleans. But, hey, that’s what the cognoscenti have decided. And that’s OK, I guess.

One of the remarkable things about the Bush Presidency is that all of his predictable enemies hate his guts even though the usual class and race cards haven’t been dealt very much. Oh sure, the left doesn’t like his tax cuts or his economic policies generally, but compared to the relentless class warfare assaults his dad or Ronald Reagan endured, Bush has gotten off nearly scot-free.

Meanwhile, race has been next to a non-issue during his Presidency. Bush appointed better qualified and higher ranking blacks to his cabinet than anyone before him. He punted on affirmative action, for fear of sounding “insensitive.” His “soft bigotry of low expectations” rhetoric on education sent the message that he cares.

And despite the NAACP’s best efforts to demonize him, Bush has avoided the usual traps set for Republican Presidents.

So it should be no surprise that some folks feel the need to vent, particularly given the natural instincts for rage and blaming when we see those images from New Orleans.

But here’s the problem: As of right now, all the demands for a “new conversation” or “national discussion” on race and class are fairly one-sided.

This is the same old pattern. Liberals, white and black, lecture conservatives, white and black, about how conservatives are racist (or race traitors) if we don’t agree with them.

Anybody who lays any significant measure of blame with any but the usual culprits — institutional racism, white racism, white institutional racism, etc. — is denounced for “blaming the victim.”

What we’re hearing right now isn’t even the sound of one hand clapping, it’s the sound of one finger wagging.

For example, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof informed his readers that the tragedy of New Orleans is almost entirely about poverty. He wrote that “in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations.” He then proceeded to run through some of America’s embarrassing statistics on immunization and the like, laying the blame firmly at Bush’s feet.

Kristof’s finger-wagging is indiscriminate, leaving out the fact that, for example, vaccination rates in the United States hit a record high on Bush’s watch in 2004.

“If it’s shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets,” he intones, “it’s even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America’s capital is twice as high as in China’s capital.”

First, China requires parents to abort their “extra” children (the quota being reached at one). Perhaps that has something to do with the extra care Beijing’s parents put into child-raising.

Second, China is a very different place. The poor of Beijing are indisputably poorer than the poor of Washington, and yet they take their children to get immunized.

And this raises the larger point: Cultural factors are enormously important. For example, the U.S. vaccination rate for toddlers in 2003 was only seven points higher for those above the poverty line than it was for those below it. Whatever that says about America, it says more about culture than it does about class.

More to the point, since the days of the Great Society, the U.S. government has thrown literally trillions of dollars at the poor. It undoubtedly helped some and it indisputably hurt others.

The people it hurt most are poor blacks, helping to erode social and family bonds. We are told, for example, that out-of-wedlock births are a uniform cultural phenomenon these days. This is simply a lie. Seventy percent of blacks are born out of wedlock, most of them poor.

Murphy Brown notwithstanding, upper-income women overwhelmingly wait to get married before they have their kids. Nothing is a better predictor of a child’s success in life than if he comes from a stable, two-parent family. It doesn’t matter if they’re rich or poor.

The problem, as the University of Pennsylvania’s Amy L. Wax recently noted in the Wall Street Journal, is that there’s a shortage of poor black men willing to take on the serious responsibilities of marriage and parenthood. Of course, many are. But nowhere near enough of them.

Of course, welfare policies that encouraged family breakdown are not the only villain. We’ve witnessed a profound cultural transformation over the last 40 years, in which social and personal customs have been rewritten.

In some cases, the increase in personal liberty has been welcome. In other cases, it came at an enormous cost for those without the resources to cope when the bill for risky behavior comes due.

And while we are on the subject of race in N.O. Jury Says New Orleans Prosecutor Discriminated Against Whites By ADAM NOSSITER Associated Press Writer NEW ORLEANS (AP) _ New Orleans' first black district attorney discriminated against 43 whites when he fired them en masse and replaced them with blacks upon taking office in 2003, a federal jury decided Wednesday. The jury awarded the employees about $1.8 million in back pay and damages. The jury _ made up of eight whites and two blacks _ returned the unanimous verdict in the third day of deliberations in the racial discrimination case against District Attorney Eddie Jordan. Jordan acknowledged he wanted to make the office more reflective of the city's racial makeup, but denied he fired whites just because they are white. In fact, he said, he did not know the race of the people fired. Under U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval's instructions, jurors had to find Jordan liable if they concluded the firings were racially motivated. The law bars the mass firing of a specific group, even if the intent is to create diversity. Jordan, stoic in the courtroom as the verdict was read, told reporters he was disappointed and will appeal. ``We thought the facts as well as the law favored us. I still maintain that I did not use race as a factor in my hiring practices,'' he said. Jordan said the District Attorney's Office, which is liable for the award, cannot afford to pay the verdict. It was not immediately clear whether state or city, or both, would ultimately be responsible for paying the money. Plaintiffs' attorney Clement Donelon said he was elated. ``The plaintiffs' civil rights, every single, solitary one of them, were violated,'' he said. ``You may be able to fire people, but don't do it because of race. That goes both ways,'' the attorney said. Clemens Herbert, a former investigator who among those fired, said: ``What I wanted was a win. Money was not the issue. He was trying to disguise racial discrimination through politics, and the jury saw through it.'' The judge could order that the fired white workers be reinstated, but lawyers consider this unlikely. Such mandates are rare, as they require continuing court supervision. One of Louisiana's most prominent black politicians, Jordan was U.S. attorney before getting elected district attorney. As the chief federal prosecutor in New Orleans, he won a corruption conviction against former Gov. Edwin Edwards in 2000 for taking payoffs in return for riverboat licenses. Eight days after taking office, Jordan fired 53 of 77 white non-lawyers in his office _ investigators, clerks, child-support enforcement workers and the like _ and replaced them with blacks. Months later, most of the whites sued him, and the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission later made a preliminary finding that Jordan had been racially biased. Jordan and a top deputy who testified admitted that experience was not necessarily their top consideration in filling openings. Instead, they made it plain they were looking to populate the office with loyalists. The whites' lawyers argued that many of those who were fired had far more experience and scored higher in job interviews than blacks who were either hired anew or kept on. The whites testified that they found themselves suddenly jobless, in late middle age, after years of working in law enforcement agencies, including the New Orleans Police Department.

Eight days after taking office, Jordan fired 53 of 77 white non-lawyers in his office _ investigators, clerks, child-support enforcement workers and the like _ and replaced them with blacks.

I have seen this repeated time and again, but on a more subtler level: 1) a black is elevated to a supervisory position; 2) as attrition occurs, the new employee is always black, never any other minority, let alone white; 3) when there is a majority of blacks, the discrimination, overt and otherwise begins - hypersensitvity over some comment, slurs of their own, nit-picking about quality of work, poor performance reviews, etc., until finally, the non-blacks quit.

My wife has seen this at banks in Georgia and Florida. We had a friend who was a little "slow". The state social services landed him a job at a franchise steakhouse. All went well for about a year until they hired a new manager, from Jamaica in the Caribbean. One by one the other non-blacks were replaced with brothers - then it was my friends turn. Of a sudden, his work wasn't up to par, he didn't follow orders correctly, etc. Once a list of faults had been built up (the standard procedure) he was let go in a "personnel reduction" move. Two weeks later, we saw another brother doing my friend's old job.

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