[PEN-L:647] Time's Review of "The End of Racism"

[John Charles <jcharles@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This message was originally posted on the African American Research Net-
work. peace, patrick l mason
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
     Check this out folks. It's a pleasure to see D'Souza pilloried in the
     mainstream media.

     jc

     DIVIDING LINE

     THE BIGOT'S HANDBOOK

     BY JACK E. WHITE

     Back in the 1970s, Richard Pryor had a routine about a group of Asian
     boat people being
     introduced to American life. Lesson No. 1: How to pronounce what is
     now commonly known as
     the N word.

     Last week a real-life version of Pryor's comedy sketch was played out
     among a rarefied band of
     right-wing intellectuals. At its center: Dinesh D'Souza, a 34-year-old
     Indian-born conservative
     wunderkind who has made a name for himself by bashing women, gays and
     minorities ever since
     he presided over the Dartmouth Review, a fecklessly racist student
     publication, in the early '80s.
     Today he is a case study in assimilation through bigotry, an ambitious
     immigrant who has achieved
     minor celebrity in his new homeland--and a sort of honorary status as
     a white man--by taking
     advantage of opportunities created by the civil rights movement, then
     turning his guns on it.
     Nothing could be more American.

     D'Souza's latest manifesto, The End of Racism, is one of the creepiest
     books to appear in recent
     years. Even more than D'Souza's previous book, Illiberal Education,
     which savaged the campus
     vogue of multiculturalism, it contains so much sophistry, half-baked
     erudition and small-minded
     zealotry that even right-wingers who share many of D'Souza's ideas are
     outraged by its, well,
     political incorrectness.

     Last week Robert Woodson and Glenn C. Loury, two of the country's most
     prominent black
     conservatives, "disaffiliated" themselves from the American Enterprise
     Institute, where D'Souza is
     a research fellow, in protest over the book. Sounding more like the
     Rev. Al Sharpton than a
     conservative Republican, Woodson denounced D'Souza as "the Mark
     Fuhrman of public policy"
     and called on conservatives, black and white, to "publicly disavow the
     racist ideology" his book
     espouses. "This is a moment of truth for the conservative movement as
     to where they stand on the
     issue of race," says Woodson. "The only time you hear from white
     conservatives is when there is
     a white fireman aggrieved over affirmative action. If they want to
     have any influence in this area,
     they have got to speak out when blacks and Hispanics are aggrieved.
     This is one such occasion."
     So far, says Woodson, not a single white conservative has responded.

     What's taking so long? Like Camille Paglia in the feminist literary
     sphere, D'Souza will say
     whatever it takes to attract attention, no matter how tasteless,
     irresponsible or distorted. He
     contends that white racism is no longer much of a problem in the U.S.
     Instead, all our racial
     troubles can be traced to the fact that "black culture" is so
     dysfunctional it amounts to a
     "civilizational" gap between African Americans and the rest of
     society. He does not bother to
     differentiate between the crime-ridden urban underclass and the
     middle-class high achievers such
     as Woodson, head of the Washington-based National Center for
     Neighborhood Enterprise, and
     Loury, a professor at Boston University.

     D'Souza also argues that because racism had its origins among
     intellectually gifted Europeans
     during the Enlightenment, it can't be all bad; that American slavery
     was not a racist institution; and
     that segregation was merely a well-meaning attempt by paternalistic
     whites to help blacks
     "perform to the capacity of their arrested development." He urges the
     repeal of every major civil
     rights law in the land, including those that allow blacks to sit at
     lunch counters and use the same
     water fountains as everyone else. Thenceforward the government would
     be required to function in
     a race-blind manner, but private citizens and institutions, from
     taxicab companies to huge
     corporations, would be free to discriminate.

     Why would any respectable publisher choose to purvey this bunk? The
     answer, I'm afraid, is that
     bigotry sells books. New York City's Free Press has published a long
     list of first-rate works on
     political and social issues by writers from every point on the
     spectrum, yet so far the only
     blockbuster among them (with 400,000 copies in print) has been Charles
     Murray and Richard
     Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, which argues that blacks are genetically
     stupider than whites. On the
     jacket of D'Souza's latest, the Free Press high-mindedly says its
     publication will further expand
     "the range of acceptable discourse about race" by "setting forth the
     principles that should guide us
     in creating a multiracial society." But judging by the initial 100,000
     press run, the largest by far in
     the company's history, the Free Press also sees D'Souza as a
     moneymaker and is willing to
     profiteer on the obscene ideas he has packaged in the plain brown
     wrapper of specious
     scholarship.

     The U.S. certainly does need a searching debate on racially tinged
     issues from affirmative action
     to welfare dependency and crime. It is quite clear, for example, that
     racism alone cannot account
     for the sorry plight of the underclass and that traditional civil
     rights remedies can do nothing to
     solve it. But such a dialogue stands little chance of being productive
     if it is polluted by the
     nonsense D'Souza is peddling. Those who want to deal honestly with
     race can begin by
     boycotting his book--not because it's politically incorrect, but
     because it is just plain wrong.

     Copyright 1995 Time Inc. All rights reserved.