Mark Steyn: Keepin' it real is real stupid

Faced with some problem or other, one of Margaret Thatcher's colleagues proposed creating a special cabinet department to deal with it. "Good God, no," said the Prime Minister. "Then we'll never get rid of it."

That's good advice in any situation. Whatever good it might once have done, America's racial-grievance industry is now principally invested in its own indispensability. Lavishly remunerated panjandrums such as the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have a far greater interest in maintaining racism than any humdrum Ku Klux Klan kleagle, assuming there still are any. One consequence is that so-called black "community leaders" will talk about anything rather than what's really screwing up their "communities." In 2003, congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee was reduced to complaining about the racist nomenclature of hurricanes. If I recall correctly, her argument was that blacks were being discriminated against because hardly any devastatingly destructive meteorological phenomena are given African-American names. Apparently, the black community can't relate to some white-bread wind like hurricane Andrew blowing in and tearing up the joint. Why are there never any hurricane Leroys or Latifahs? It's deeply racist and insulting to imply that only forces of nature with effete WASPy appellations are capable of inflicting billions of dollars of coastal damage. In fairness to black leaders, they did not reprise this line of attack when Katrina swept in a year ago, preferring to argue instead that not merely the name but the very hurricane was racist, deliberately deployed by Karl Rove's offshore Republican wind machine to total only black neighbourhoods.

Yawn. Whatever November's elections bring, there will be no political consequences from Katrina for President Bush, the fondest hopes of Democrats, the U.S. media and virtually every commentator in Canada and Europe notwithstanding. Most Americans looked at what was happening in New Orleans and concluded that it's a great place to enjoy a margarita with a topless transsexual Mardi Gras queen, but you wouldn't want to live there: a deeply dysfunctional city exclusively controlled by Democrats for generations, it's a welfare swamp with a lucrative tourist quarter. More to the point, its citizenry seem reluctant to learn the lessons. Despite the embarrassingly inept performance by Ray Nagin, the city's Mayor Culpa whose Emergency Management Plan consisted of finding the nearest TV camera and pointing fingers at everybody else, his electorate nevertheless returned him to office out of the most feeble racial solidarity. In his book Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America -- and What We Can Do About It, Juan Williams observes that, for the duration of Katrina, Mayor Nagin moved his family to Dallas: aside from his role as public servant, he's a successful black businessman and thus, like most others of his class in New Orleans, could insulate himself from the depredations of the hurricane. "People with cars, credit cards, bank accounts, family," as Williams puts it, had a way out. If you're poor and black in the Big Easy, you'd be better off paying attention to what a man like Ray Nagin does for himself rather than what he promises to do for you.

At the heart of Enough is a sad but unarguable proposition: "We've made it taboo," says the writer Shelby Steele, "to talk about the words 'black' and 'responsibility' in the same breath." Four decades of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society as mediated by the presidents-for-life of the white-guilt shakedown industry have destroyed the black family and mired it in a culture of self-victimization. From the present wreckage, there are two ways to go: the black leadership can pursue the mirage of slavery reparations, which is a kind of über-welfare and would likely prove just as destructive; or blacks can sideline the present "phony leaders," as Williams calls them, and begin the hard work of rebuilding their families and communities.

Juan Williams is a certified liberal, but he's not a certifiable liberal. And so he's looked at the numbers -- 70 per cent of black children are born out of wedlock, a higher proportion of black men are in prison than of any other racial group (two statistics that are not unrelated) -- and concluded that the post-civil rights black leadership and its policies are a total bust. For having the impertinence to wander off the Democrat victim-culture plantation, he's been damned as merely this season's "black conservative"; a black man who's no longer authentically black, in the way that Colin Powell and Condi Rice's success within the Republican party in effect negates their race; or, if you like, the latest "Oreo" -- a black man who's white on the inside, like the famous cookies, which were supposedly hurled at Michael Steele, a black Republican candidate in this year's Senate race in Maryland.

The concept of "authenticity" -- that one's skin colour mandates particular behaviours, such as voting Democrat and supporting "affirmative action" -- is, of course, racist. But the peculiar touchiness of the black community on this question recurs again and again in Williams's book. "The defence of gangster rap, with its pride in guns and murder, was that it was all about 'keepin' it real,' " he writes. "In that stunning perversion of black culture, anyone who spoke against the self-destructive core of gangster rap was put down as acting white."

This is a fascinating theme whose significance extends far beyond music -- or, in this case, "music." We're encouraged these days to disdain ethnic stereotypes -- the Scots are stingy, the Germans humourless, etc. -- but, if one were to ascribe certain characteristics to particular ethnic groups, you'd be hard put to burden African-Americans with as many disabling pathologies as are currently touted under the justification of "keepin' it real." "Violence, murder, and self-hatred were marketed as true blackness -- authentic black identity," says Williams. "Keepin' it real" means the rapper Nelly making a video in which he swipes a credit card through his ho's butt. "Keepin' it real" means men are violent and nihilistic, women are "sluts, bobbing chicken heads, and of course bitches." "Keepin' it real," noted the writer Nick Crowe, equates, in effect, to "disempowerment." Because if being black means being a self-destructive self-gratifying criminal rutting machine, and building a career, settling down, getting a nice house in the suburbs, raising a family is acting white, that would seem to hand whitey an awful lot of advantages.

"Authenticity" is surely a more reductive view of the black experience than your average 19th-century minstrel show would try to pass off. A few years back, arguing for the teaching of "Ebonics" as a distinct language, professor Ron Emmons of Los Angeles City College produced a list of black America's contributions to the English language: hip, cool, gig, jiving around, get high, gimme five, hot, baby, mojo, fine, mess with, thang (as in "doin' my," he helpfully explained), take it easy, slick, rip-off, bad . . . Hmm. Does that list really testify to the vitality of "Black English"? By comparison, India via the Raj gave English (to pluck at random) pajamas, bungalow, jodhpurs, cheroot, cummerbund, veranda, khakis, karma. Despite the best efforts of the late Tupac and the Rodney King rioters to copyright them, even "thug" and "looter" come from the subcontinent. Doesn't that list make "jiving around" and "get high" look a bit weedy?

Williams recalls that in 1956 "a gang of white men dragged the famous black singer Nat 'King' Cole off a stage and beat him because they said he was singing love songs to white women." They weren't wrong about that: my mom loved him. In the early sixties, he called up his record company, whose coffers he had enriched for many years, and hung up in disgust when the receptionist answered: "Capitol Records, home of the Beatles." I think we can guess how Cole would have felt about gangsta rap. Duke Ellington has more in common with Ravel than with Snoop Dogg. Scott Joplin would have regarded today's "black culture" as an oxymoron. To eliminate a century and a half's tradition of beauty and grace from your identity isn't "keepin' it real"; it's keepin' millions of young black men and women unreal in ways the most malevolent bull-necked racist could never have devised.

Correction: Last week I mentioned, hot off the presses, that a deeply wicked man, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, had been captured in Afghanistan. Well, they caught someone, but after they ran the tests they concluded that it wasn't him. He's still out there, alas. But not to worry; his day will come.

Juan Williams has always "got it."

He's one of those lefties who has an honest streak. That makes it hard to dismiss him out of hand.

Fifteen years ago in his WaPo column he blew the whistle on how the left was unleashing the smear machine on Clarence Thomas.

From the Congressional Record...

[FROM THE WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 10, 1991]

(BY JUAN WILLIAMS)

The phone calls came throughout September. Did Clarence Thomas ever take money from the South African government? Was he under orders from the Reagan White House when he criticized civil rights leaders? Did he beat his first wife? Did I know anything about expense account charges he filed for out-of-town speeches? Did he say that women don't want equal pay for equal work? And finally, one exasperated voice said: `Have you got anything on your tapes we can use to stop Thomas.'

The calls came from staff members working for Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. They were calling me because several articles written about Thomas have carried my byline. When I was working as a White House correspondent in the early '80s, I had gotten to know Thomas as a news source and later wrote a long profile of him.

The desperate search for ammunition to shoot down Thomas has turned the 102 days since President Bush nominated him for a seat on the Supreme Court into a liberal's nightmare. Here is indiscriminate, mean-spirited mudslinging supported by the so-called champions of fairness: liberal politicians, unions, civil rights groups and women's organizations. They have been mindlessly led into mob action against one man by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Moderate and liberal senators, operating in the proud tradition of men such as Hubert Humphrey and Robert Kennedy, have allowed themselves to become sponsors of smear tactics that have historically been associated with the gutter politics of a Lee Atwater or crazed right-wing self-promoters like Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

During the hearings on his nomination Thomas was subjected to a glaring double standard. When he did not answer questions that former nominees David Souter and Anthony Kennedy did not answer, he was pilloried for his evasiveness. One opponent testified that her basis for opposing him was his lack of judicial experience. She did not know that Supreme Court justices such as liberal icons Earl Warren and Felix Frankfurter, as well as current Chief Justice William Rehnquist, had no judicial experience before taking a seat on the high court.

Even the final vote of the Senate Judiciary Committee on whether to recommend Thomas for confirmation turned into a shameless assault on Thomas by the leading lights of progressive Democratic politics. For example, in an incredibly bizarre act, Chairman Joseph Biden stood up after a full slate of testimony and said Thomas would make a `solid justice,' but then voted against him anyway.

At the time of the vote, two of the committee's Democrats later explained to me, the members of the Judiciary Committee figured it would make no difference, since Thomas had the votes to gain confirmation from the full Senate. So, they decided, why not play along with the angry roar coming from the Leadership Conference? `Thomas will win, and the vote will embarrass Bush and leave [the Leadership Conference] feeling that they were heard,' explained one senator on the committee

Now the Senate has extended its attacks on fairness, decency and its own good name by averting its eyes while someone in a position to leak has corrupted the entire hearing process by releasing a sealed affidavit containing an allegation that had been investigated by the FBI, reviewed by Thomas's opponents and supporters on the Senate committee and put aside as inconclusive and insufficient to warrant further investigation or stop the committee's final vote.

But that fair process and the intense questioning Thomas faced in front of the committee for over a week were not enough for members of the staffs of Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and Howard Metzenbaum. In addition to calls to me and to people at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, they were pressing a former EEOC employee, University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill, for negative information about Thomas. Thomas had hired Hill for two jobs in Washington.

Hill said the Senate staffers who called her were specifically interested in talking about rumors involving sexual harassment. She had no credible evidence of Thomas's involvement in any sexual harassment, but she was prompted to say he had asked her out and mentioned pornographic movies to her. She rejected him as a jerk, but said she never felt her job was threatened by him, he never touched her, and she followed him to subsequent jobs and even had him write references for her.

Hill never filed any complaint against Thomas; she never mentioned the problem to reporters for The Post during extensive interviews this summer after the nomination, and even in her statement to the FBI never charged Thomas with sexual harassment but `talked about [his] behavior.'

Sen. Paul Simon, an all-out opponent of Thomas, has said there is no `evidence that her turning him down in any way harmed her and he later recommended her for a job [as a law professor].' Hill did say that because Thomas was her boss, she felt `the pressure was such that I was going to have to submit . . . in order to continue getting good assignments.' But by her own account she never did submit and continued to get first-rate assignments.

The bottom line, then, is that Senate staffers have found their speck of mud to fling at Clarence Thomas in an alleged sexual conversation between two adults. This is not the Senate Judiciary Committee finding out that Hugo Black had once been in the Ku Klux Klan (he had, and was nonetheless confirmed). This is not the Judiciary Committee finding that the nominee is an ideologue incapable of bringing a fair and open mind to the deliberations of the court. This slimy exercise orchestrated in the form of leaks of an affidavit to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is an abuse of the Senate confirmation process, an abuse of Senate rules and an unforgivable abuse of a human being named Clarence Thomas.

Further damaging is the blood-in-the-water response from reputable news operations, notably National Public Radio. They have magnified every question about Thomas into an indictment and sacrificed journalistic balance and integrity for a place in the mob. The New York Times ran a front-page article about `Sexism and the Senate' that gave space to complaints that only two of the 100 members of the Senate are female. The article, in an amazing leap of illogic, concluded that if a woman had been on the Judiciary Committee, more attention would have been given to Professor Hill's report. But attention was given to what she said. A full investigation took place. Why would a woman senator not have reached the conclusion that what took place did not rise to the level necessary to delay the vote on Thomas in the committee or to deny him confirmation?

To listen to or read some news reports on Thomas over the past month is to discover a monster of a man, totally unlike the human being full of sincerity, confusion, and struggles whom I saw as a reporter who watched him for some 10 years. He has been conveniently transformed into a monster about whom it is fair to say anything, to whom it is fair to do anything. President Bush may be packing the court with conservatives, but that is another argument, larger than Clarence Thomas. In pursuit of abuses by a conservative president the liberals have become the abusive monsters.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley said on the Senate floor Tuesday that the smears heaped on Thomas amounted to the `worse treatment of a nominee I've seen in 11 years in the Senate' Sen. Dennis DeConcini said it `is inconceivable, it is unfair and I can't imagine anything more unfair to the man.' And Sen. Orrin G. Hatch described the entire week's performance as a `last-ditch attempt to smear the judge.'

Sadly, that's right.

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Juan Williams says enough with the culture of failure that's undermining Black America