Well, that was interesting. Last week’s two big news stories were both about race: the dropping of all charges against the Duke lacrosse players, and the defenestration of Don Imus. Over in the Mother Country, Prime Minister Tony Blair created a separate kerfuffle by asserting, in a speech, that the very high rates of violent crime among young black men in Britain are not a consequence of poverty or racial discrimination, but arise from something in black ghetto culture itself.
And back in the U.S.A., we are coming up to two race-significant anniversaries. Ten years ago, on June 13, 1997, President Clinton issued Executive Order No. 13050 which — I am quoting from
the document that emerged a year later — “created the Initiative on Race and authorized the creation of an Advisory Board to advise the President on how to build one America for the 21st century.” And 15 years ago, on April 29, 1992, there occurred
the Los Angeles riots, remembered by most Americans for Rodney King’s plaintive question (May 1, 1992): “Can’t we all just get along?”
Fifteen years on, does Rodney King’s question have an answer yet? That depends on your definition of terms. There have been no more race riots as dramatic as those in 1992, though
the 2001 Cincinnati riots came close. On a very broad, general impression, I would say that the racial situation in the U.S. is less fraught now than it has been for decades. We have settled into some kind of rough equilibrium. In that sense, yes, we can get along.
One of those terms that needs defining is “race,” of course. I used to start off my own columns on this topic by arguing that, to a good first approximation, there are really only two races in the U.S.: black, and nonblack. The issues between black Americans and all others were huge; the issues among all those others were tiny by comparison.
I don’t think this is any longer a tenable position. The swelling numbers and assertiveness of Hispanics have made this a three-cornered issue. (As to whether Hispanics are a race in the same sense that African Americans are — well, I leave you to discuss that among yourselves, noting only that the
National Council of La Raza, which is the main lobbying organization for Hispanics, plainly believes they are. “La Raza” means “the race”!)
It may in fact be that racial conflict in the years to come will mainly be between blacks and Hispanics. It is already the case that black-Hispanic frictions are a major cause of
trouble in our jails and
in our schools. The recent great wave of Hispanic immigrants is fast generating
a new underclass, and it is not at all clear that our country has room for more than one.
Setting that aside and concentrating on black-white relations — which have been the ones in the news these past few days — how are things going?
Can we all get along?
On a personal level, we surely can. Most of us have individual colleagues, neighbors, or acquaintances across the black-white divide whom we like and respect. We get on just fine with them. Often we date them. Increasingly, according to
a recent survey, we marry them.
The trouble is that this amity doesn’t scale up. One black person can get on cheerfully and happily with one white person. Unfortunately that does not get us very far with America’s problem, which is: Can 36 million black persons get along with 224 million white persons? That is a different question, about different things, and it has a different answer.
Numbers, numbers. A self-conscious, easily identifiable collection of a million people is not just one person multiplied by a million, appealing as that notion may be to an individualistic nation like ours. As with any large aggregation of atomic objects, it has
emergent properties that are by no means easy to deduce from the properties of the individual component atoms. It has broad statistical features, which the human brain, employing that statistical computer that is one of its most potent and remarkable means for assuring the survival of its host organism, renders as
stereotypes. It has a
culture. And the statistical features that differentiate one culture from another may do so in troublesome ways.
In the U.S. today, the most glaring differences between black America and white America are in education and in crime. The terrible academic statistics for young black Americans, and the equally appalling statistics on black crime, are well known to everyone. Wishing, as most of us do, to live in a more harmonious country — or, as President Clinton’s 1997 advisory board urged the president, “to build one America” — we’d like to do something about this. The first step is of course to identify causes. What are the causes of those disparities?
Americans have come up with two broad categories of answers to that question, what I shall call the Folk Biology and Social Science categories. The Folk Biology explainers all assume that there are innate and intractable differences between populations that are descended, or mostly descended, from different, small founder-groups in the remote past, inhabiting different environments. Social Science explainers deny such differences and assume that all group disparities arise from social mechanics.
In the particular case of black-white disparities in education and crime here in the U.S., Social Science explanations are spread across a spectrum according to how much, or how little, importance the explainer assigns to the malice of white Americans — i.e. to racism — as opposed to cold impersonal or historical factors.
In the world of politics, acceptable discourse about black-white disparities is all conducted in terms of Social Science explanations. There are many reasons for this, not the least of them being that politicians get our attention by promising to fix things. If the Folk Biologists are right, the thing is unfixable, and politicians are left saying: “You’ll just have to make the best of it, I’m afraid. Nothing I can do.” This is not a thing that politicians say.
A politician can still position himself on the Social Science spectrum, though, assigning more or less of the problem to white malice. In his speech at Cardiff last week, Tony Blair repositioned himself on that spectrum, to a point further from “It’s all the white man’s fault,” and closer to “Black British people — look at yourselves.” In the British context, that was sufficiently sensational to make headlines. (What if Blair had dumped the Social Science model altogether and embraced Folk Biology? The imagination reels.)
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