Devil's Advocate
Bill Bennett & The Politics of Race
I’ve always admired Bennett,
a frequent political commentator and analyst. So far as
Republicans go, Bennett always seemed rather level-headed and
rational to me, often flying in the efface of his more extreme
right-wing pals anxious to turn back the clock to Ozzie and
Harriet and I Like Ike. I’m tempted to refer to Bennett as a
moderate, though I suspect he’s more conservative than he comes
across, so I’ll stick to my assertion that he’s at least
rational. He’s not a mouth-breather like his buddies to the far
right. And, now outside the Beltway spin machine, he’s free to
part company with political extremists. Which is why Bennett
comes across as both thoughtful and rational. Until last week.
Until he got suckered into an absurdist what-if conversation
about lost tax revenue due to the number of abortions since Roe
v. Wade (which is utterly ridiculous as, even Bennett himself
points out, this hypothesis assumes the aborted people would
have been productive citizens and not, say, poor or die by some
other means). It was the last call of Bennett’s radio show, and
a clearly tired Bennett, ready for a weekend of golf or hedge
trimming or whatever he does, got taken for a ride by this
caller who clearly wanted to beat the dead horse of Roe v. Wade
yet again (Republicans: *please* find another issue. The
single-note thing is so played now).
This was a call, a show, a moment in time that would have
drifted by, unnoticed to the world at large, and Bennett would
be on Pebble Beach (or wherever he goes) sipping Margaritas (or
whatever he sips) by now. Until, for reasons I’ll never
understand, Bennett decided to change his life forever. Bennett
veered off into quoting from the new hot statistics book
Freakanomics, to say the book posits that crime is down because
abortion is up. Absurd? Sure. But Bennett was still on his way
to tee-off because he was quoting the book and not suggesting
this himself.
But, Bennett took things a step further.
“But I do know that it’s true,” he said, now speaking for
himself, “that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that
were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this
country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an
impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do,
but your crime rate would go down.”
And, just like that, Bennett changed his life forever. For the
rest of his life, and forever thereafter, this quote will be
stapled to Bennett’s legacy. Even the widest stretch of the most
liberal lefty finds it difficult to believe Bennett put those
words together in quite that way—even if he didn’t mean any
racial bias by them. The hurtful bias was there nonetheless.
White America always seems shocked
when these kinds of idiot eruptions happen, the kind of
eruptions peppered throughout Bringing Down The House. But,
Black America knows those thoughts, those concepts and ideas,
remain unspoken in polite conversation but surely are expressed
in private. Bennett’s comments did not shock Black America
because Black America has always known racism is alive and well
in this country, even among intellectuals and liberals who
purport to be our friends.
Racism is a lot like sexism in the sense that a woman knows,
instinctively, the difference between a man offering her a
genuine compliment and a man acting inappropriately towards her.
The difference can be as subtle as an inflection, a feeling, a
mood, a vibe if you will. Black people instinctively recognize
racism because ever black person in this country suffers from
racism every single day of their lives. Not every woman is
sexually harassed every day of their lives (but, many are), but
every single black person in this country is discriminated
against in some subtle way every single day of our lives. It is
a sad part of our landscape, this curse of Shem, that we are
forced to navigate through daily because, what other choice do
we have?
And that’s why I refuse to move. It won’t matter where I move
to, racism is there. Hatred is there. At least, twenty years
from now when I am their age they’ll all be gone and I can
finally have a quiet morning around here. But moving and fleeing
oppression is silly because oppression, like fog, moves around
and non one can accurately predict where it will go or when it
will pop up.
Bennett has suffered angry condemnation and his own conservative
buddies, already reeling in horror from the absolute mess of
things their party’s leader, President George W. Bush, has made
of this country, are scrambling to save their own skins and
distancing themselves from Bennett as quickly as possible. Which
really isn’t fair. Bennett got sucker punched. It’s fun to jump
up and down on the guy, but, in context, I understood the point
he was trying to make, but realize this country is far too
hypocritically involved in burying racism—as opposed to
eliminating it—to deal with comments like his.
In the hours and days that followed, Bennett has been given many
opportunities to dig himself out, but he only dug himself in
deeper, trying to assert some journalist’s creed or some other
nonsense:
“I was putting forward a hypothetical proposition. Put that
forward. Examined it. And then said about it that it's morally
reprehensible. To recommend abortion of an entire group of
people in order to lower your crime rate is morally
reprehensible. But this is what happens when you argue that the
ends can justify the means,” he told CNN.
"I'm not racist, and I'll put my record up against theirs,”
referring to Pelosi and other critics. “I've been a champion of
the real civil rights issue of our times — equal educational
opportunities for kids.”
“We've got to have candor and talk about these things while we
reject wild hypotheses,” Bennett said.
“I don't think people have the right to be angry, if they look
at the whole thing. But if they get a selective part of my
comment, I can see why they would be angry. If somebody thought
I was advocating that, they ought to be angry. I would be
angry.”
"But that's not what I advocate.”
Asked if he owed people an apology, Bennett replied, “I don't
think I do. I think people who misrepresented my view owe me an
apology.”
It’s insane.
When you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is to stop
digging. Bennett’s assertions about an apology are correct in
the pristine sense of journalism and ethics. But that's not the
world we live in. Our world is one of visceral reaction to the
Band-Aids being tugged off of the festering open wound of
racism. The reason so many whites—liberals and conservatives—are
trying to bury Bennett is it is easier to bury him than it is to
deal with the real problem. If racism no longer existed in this
country, if this really was the enlightened society we pretend
it is, then Bennett’s clumsy banter would have been dismissed as
a silly intellectual argument and not a statement of purpose or
veiled hatred of blacks.
The reason Bennett will now be castigated is he must now be
scapegoated for this great sin of racism, which this country by
and large continues to medicate and bandage up while refusing
the strong antibiotics of education and enlightenment. The
religious right, the Republicans’ strongest allies, whom this
president has both played like a fiddle and sold out, is,
incongruously, a monolith of intolerance and, yes, racism. It’s
far easier for whites to make it to the upper ranks of large
black organizations than it is for blacks to achieve much
elevation within the major white conservative Christian
organizations.
Many of these organizations continue to want to turn the clock
back to Stacey Adams and sweater vests, without realizing or
perhaps not caring that the “moral” climate of that era and the
evoking of the same in turn evokes a visceral response from
blacks who, in that fine and bygone era, had to drink from
separate faucets, use separate restrooms and sit well behind the
sign marked “Colored Section.”
The pasty, smiling, feel-good right-wing Christian conservatives
are all about morality, which means they are anti-just about
everything. But, worse, their idea of Christian love and
fellowship is Christian love and fellowship so long as you do it
on their terms. Blacks are welcome but they are, in fact,
welcome to assimilate into their culture, as many if not most
major right-wing Christian organizations routinely practice the
cultural elimination of entire peoples, taking the scripture
about “From one flesh…” (Acts 17:26) to mean, everybody should
act like them. Everybody should wear sweater vests and behave
the “proper” way.
Bennett is the new foster child for racism because kicking him
and ruining his life is much easier than dealing with actual
racism. In this politically-correct and over-sensitive world,
litigating against men who sexually harass women is much easier
than simply training boys better so we educate that behavior out
of society. Our problem is not Bill Bennett. Our problem is
racism. Our problem is that racism is there, and that Queen
Latifah’s movie isn’t quite as absurd today as it was yesterday;
that whites still think these things even if they don’t say them
in polite company. Latifah simply had her characters saying what
she believed much of White America actively thinks each and
every day.
Bennett’s blunder was in getting tied up in rhetorical
arguments, but his biggest blunder was his saying out loud what
many white folks in this country surely believe: that blacks are
the major problem with crime in this country. It was a sin of
truthfulness; an intellectual getting caught up in his own
intellect and assuming the country was further along and better
enlightened than it actually is. It was a meaningless,
rhetorical, intellectual exercise that Bennett surely should
have been allowed to conduct. And, if white liberals and
conservatives were truly beyond racial bias, he surely would
have. Their stampede to hang him only hammers home the fact
racism is alive and well in this country. After all, if it
weren’t, so many people wouldn’t be rushing to once again
bandage the wound.
Making a scapegoat of Bill Bennett for his perceived racism only
makes the job of eradicating actual racism that much harder.
Christopher J. Priest
3 October 2005
editor@praisenet.org
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