The Californians running away from communities and towns they grew up in have Arizona, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada to run to. Where do their children run to, when the whole nation begins to resemble California?
POSTRACIAL AMERICA?
Tribal politics is not unusual, tribal politics is eternal. John F. Kennedy would not have gotten 78 percent of the Catholic vote had he not been Catholic. Hillary Clinton would not have rolled up those margins among New Hampshire women had she not been a sister in trouble. Mitt Romney would not have swept Utah and flamed out in Dixie were he not Mormon. Mike Huckabee would not have stormed through the Bible Belt were he not an evangelical Christian and Baptist preacher. The late city supervisor Harvey Milk did well in San Francisco’s Castro because he was “one of us.”
African Americans have voted 9–1 against Republican presidential nominees since Senator Barry Goldwater ran in 1964. But what, other than race, explains how Obama rolled up 9–1 margins among black voters running against the wife of the man Toni Morrison called “our first black president”? Even the New York Times seemed stunned by the solidarity of the black electorate and black radio. On The Tom Joyner Morning Show, The Michael Baisden Show, and The Steve Harvey Morning Show, which together may reach twenty million, wrote Jim Rutenberg, there is “little pretense of balance.… More often than not the Obama campaign is discussed as the home team.”110
Black Entertainment Television announced it would carry Obama’s acceptance speech to the Democratic convention live, but had no plans to carry McCain’s speech to the Republican convention. Barack’s speech “is an historic occasion,” said BET chair Debra L. Lee, “so that demands some special treatment from us.”111
And as the mainstream media have moved left, talk radio right, and cable TV has split on ideological lines, an ethnic Balkanization of the press has begun. On July 27, 2008, the final day of the quadrennial convention of UNITY: Journalists of Color, 6,800 were in attendance. Bush had been booed at the UNITY convention in 2004, while Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had received a standing ovation. In 2008, McCain declined an invitation. The featured speaker: Barack Obama.
The major concern of the journalists who run UNITY was that their colleagues might lift the roof off McCormick Place convention center. Said Luis Villarreal, a producer of NBC’s Dateline, “I don’t think it’s such a bad thing if for 15 minutes you take off your reporter hat and respond to [Obama] as a human being at an event where you’re surrounded by people of color and you’re here for a united cause.”112
What cause united the ten thousand journalists who belonged to UNITY?
Advancement of journalists of color, based on color. For UNITY is composed of four groups, each created to advance journalists of a particular race or ethnic group: the Asian American Journalists Association, the Native American Journalists Association, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and the National Association of Black Journalists. Leaving no doubt as to what UNITY is about, its July 22, 2008, press release was titled: “Aim of New UNITY Initiative Is More Diversity in Top Media Management.”113
“With more than fifty percent of the population projected to be people of color in less than a generation,” said President Karen Lincoln Michel, “the nation’s news organizations continue to generate dismal diversity numbers year after year.… ‘Ten by 2010’ is a significant step in the right direction.”114
What was “Ten by 2010”?
UNITY was demanding that ten major U.S. news organizations, by mid-2010, elevate to senior management positions in the newsroom at least one journalist of color and provide “customized training to help prepare them.”115 The chosen journalist might be Asian, African American, Native American, or Hispanic, but could not be Irish, English, Polish, Italian, German, or Jewish.
With Obama’s election, the spirit of UNITY came to the Federal Communications Commission in the person of “diversity czar” Mark Lloyd. Working at the Center for American Progress, Lloyd had hailed the “incredible revolution” of Hugo Chávez, praising his seizure of media outlets that opposed his Bolivarian revolution:
The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled—worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government—worked to oust him.… But he came back with another revolution, and then Chávez began to take very seriously the media in his country.116
By “taking very seriously the media in his country,” Lloyd apparently meant Chávez’s decision not to renew the license of RCTV, the nation’s oldest television network, replacing it, writes columnist Amanda Carpenter, “with a state-run station that showed cartoons and old movies while protesters marched in the streets against the shutdown.”117
Earlier, Lloyd had talked of how white journalists had to “step down” to open up positions of power for people of color.
There’s nothing more difficult than this because we have really truly, good white people in important positions, and … there are a limited number of those positions. And unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions, we will not change the problem. But we’re in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power.118
Lloyd added, “There are few things, I think, more frightening in the American mind than dark-skinned black men. Here I am.”119
Half a century after Martin Luther King envisioned a day when his children would be judged “not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character,” journalists of color are demanding the hiring and promotion of journalists based on the color of their skin. Jim Crow is back. Only the color of the beneficiaries and the color of the victims have been reversed.
TRIBAL POLITICS
Since the Home Rule Act of 1973 gave Washingtonians the right to elect their mayor, every mayor has been an African American. So, too, has every mayor of Detroit and Atlanta, since each city elected its first black mayor in 1973. The same is true of Memphis and Birmingham.
By 2006, every congressional district in America with a black majority had a black congressman. That year, however, Congressman Harold Ford chose to run for the U.S. Senate and state senator Steve Cohen won the Democratic primary in a field with twelve black candidates. Cohen went on to become the only white to represent a majority black district in the U.S. House and the first Jewish congressman ever from Tennessee.
Cohen went to Washington and became sole primary sponsor of a Congressional apology to black America, pledging the House to rectify “the lingering consequences of the misdeeds committed against African Americans under slavery and Jim Crow.”120 Cohen thus opened the door to reparations for slavery. And as he promised his constituents, he applied for membership in the Black Caucus. The door was slammed in Cohen’s face.
“I think they’re real happy I’m not going to join,” said Cohen. “It’s their caucus and they do things their way. You don’t force your way in. You need to be invited.”
But no white congressman has ever been invited. All who dared to apply, like Pete Stark of California, were rejected. As Representative William Clay Sr. said, it is “critical” that the Black Caucus remain “exclusively African-American.” Clay’s son and successor, Representative William Lacy Clay, affirmed the Black Caucus’s restrictive covenant: “Mr. Cohen asked for admission, and he got his answer.… It’s time to move on. It’s an unwritten rule. It’s understood. It’s clear.”121
Indeed it is. No whites need apply. Yet the Black Caucus conducts its business in federal offices on U.S. government grounds.
Running in the 2008 primary in his 60 percent black district against African American Nikki Tinker, Cohen was featured in a TV ad beside a hooded Klansman. The justification for this outrage? Cohen had opposed removing the gravesite, statue, and name of General Nathan Bedford Forrest from a Memphis park. The Confederate hero had later become a founder of the Klan. Another ad attacked Cohen for going into “our churches clapping his hands and tappi
ng his feet,” while being the only congressman who “thought our kids shouldn’t be allowed to pray in school.”122 At a meeting of the Memphis Baptist Ministerial Association, Cohen was booed and jeered.123
“Anti-Semitic fliers—‘Why Do Steve Cohen and the Jews Hate Jesus?’ one asked—written by an African American minister from outside the district” were circulating in Memphis, said the New York Times.124 The purpose of these fliers was to drive home the message to black voters that Cohen is a Jew, not “one of us.” Had Republicans conducted such a campaign, there would have been a nationwide uproar. The Lincoln Review, published by conservative African American Jay Parker, detailed what has been done to Cohen and decried those who apply the double standard of former Representative Gus Savage of Illinois, who once said, “Racism constitutes actions or thoughts or expressions by white Americans against Afro-Americans.… racism is an attempt by powerful people to oppress less powerful people—Blacks don’t have the power to oppress whites. Racism is white. There is no black racism.”125
Although Cohen’s resolution apologizing for slavery was passed by the House in 2008, Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton decided to run against him in 2009. Even though Herenton was under investigation by a federal grand jury, Rhodes College professor Marcus Pohlmann predicted the mayor could win: “One of the motivations may be that he or his supporters feel that a majority minority district should be held by a minority.”126
Herenton was blunt about why Cohen ought to be dumped: his race. “[I]t remains a fact that the 9th Congressional District provides the only real opportunity to elect a qualified African-American to the all-white 11-member delegation representing Tennessee in Washington.”127
“To know Steve Cohen is to know that he really does not think very much of African-Americans.… He’s played the black community well,” said Herenton, when he announced for the Cohen seat.128 Herenton’s campaign manager Sidney Chism added, “This seat was set aside for people who look like me.… It wasn’t set aside for a Jew or a Christian. It was set aside so that blacks could have representation.” Herenton, a former Golden Gloves boxer, promised, “This Congressional race” is “going to be about race, representation and power.” Cohen’s sheepish reply: “I vote like a black woman.”129
This was the ugliest political race in America in 2010. So nasty did Herenton’s attacks become that Obama himself stepped in to endorse Cohen, who then cruised to victory.
White congressman Chris Bell did not fare as well. After redistricting turned his district into a majority black district, a dozen Democratic colleagues of Bell’s in the Black Caucus contributed to his black challenger, Al Green, who then crushed Bell in the primary.130 For members of Congress to contribute to the defeat of a colleague on racial grounds is extraordinary.
What happened to Cohen and Bell is similar to what happened to Jewish leaders in the civil rights movement when blacks gained power, access to the media, and federal money. They were shoved aside. Black folks took over. Those who believe the rise to power of an Obama rainbow coalition of peoples of color means the whites who helped to engineer it will steer it are deluding themselves. The whites may discover what it is like to ride in the back of the bus.
“BLOOD RUNS THICKER”
Early in 2008, veteran Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a hero of Selma Bridge, was threatened with a primary challenge if he did not recant his endorsement of his old friend Hillary Clinton and switch his support to Barack Obama. Lewis got the message. As he abandoned Hillary to enlist with Obama, Lewis claimed a road-to-Damascus conversion: “Something’s happening in America, something some of us did not see coming.… Barack Obama has tapped into something that is extraordinary.… It’s a movement. It’s a spiritual event.… It’s amazing what’s happening.”131
During Obama’s streak of a dozen straight primary victories, the late Geraldine Ferraro, a feminist icon since her nomination in 1984 as first woman to run for vice president on a major party ticket, expressed frustration at what was happening to Hillary: “If Obama was a white man he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman [of any color] he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up with the concept.”132 Ferraro did not say race was the sole reason Obama was succeeding. She said that being black was as indispensable to Obama’s success as being a woman had been to hers. Said Ferraro, “Had my name been Gerald rather than Geraldine, I would not have been on that ’84 ticket.”
Subjected to a forty-eight-hour barrage of allegations of racism by Obama’s political and media allies, Ferraro resigned from the Clinton campaign. Yet what she said was transparently true. Was the fact that Obama was black irrelevant to the Democratic Party’s decision to give the Chicago state senator the keynote address to the 2004 Democratic national convention? Did his being black have nothing to do with Barack’s winning 91 percent of the black vote against Hillary in Mississippi the previous Tuesday?
Bill Clinton was charged with racism for saying Obama’s claim to having been consistent on Iraq was a “fairy tale,” and for implying that Barack’s victory in South Carolina was no big deal because Jesse Jackson had carried the state twice. Yet both statements were relevant and both were true.
Harvard professor Orlando Patterson sniffed out racism in the Hillary ad that portrayed her picking up the red phone in the White House at 3:00 a.m. How so? None of the sleeping children in the ad were black. The red phone ad, said Patterson, reminded him of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which lionized the Ku Klux Klan.133
Two weeks before the election, Colin Powell, who had risen from army colonel to national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of state under Republican Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II—the first African American to attain these heights—turned his back on his party’s nominee and friend of twenty-five years, John McCain, and endorsed Obama. Thus did Powell embrace, over a fellow Republican and fellow Vietnam vet, a liberal Democrat who owed his nomination to his denunciation, as the worst blunder in American history, of the war Colin Powell had himself sold to the country.
Was race Powell’s reason for defecting to Obama?
Powell did not deny it, contending only that race was not the only or decisive factor. “If I had only that fact in mind,” he told Tom Brokaw, “I could have done this six, eight, ten months ago.” Yet, in hailing Barack as a “transformational figure” whose victory would “not only electrify our country but electrify the world,” Powell testified to the centrality of race to his decision.134 For what else was there about this freshman senator with zero legislative accomplishments to transform American politics and electrify the world—other than that he would be the first black president?
Republicans were as intimidated by Obama’s race as Powell was attracted. When North Carolina Republicans ran an ad linking Obama to the Reverend Jeremiah (“God-damn-America!”) Wright, who had married Barack and Michelle and baptized Sasha and Malia, McCain asked the state party to pull it. In the fall, the GOP pummeled Obama for his association with the 1960s Weatherman Bill Ayers, but shied away from pounding Obama for his twenty-year close friendship with the race-baiting Wright, for fear of being accussed of “playing the race card.”
Organizing a fund raiser for Democratic Governor Bill Richardson in 2007, fellow Hispanic Lionel Sosa of San Antonio, a strategist for Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, said it all, “Blood runs thicker than politics.”135
“AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BABY”
Affirmative action is becoming an increasingly onerous burden for white males in America. The reason, in Steve Sailer’s phrase, is the changing “racial ratio.” When the Philadelphia Plan was adopted in the Nixon era, imposing racial quotas on unions working on federally funded contracts, there were eight white Americans for every African American.136 The burden of race preferences in hiring and promotions and admissions to colleges and graduate schools was correspondingly light.
However, the black communi
ty has since grown to where the ratio is five-to-one. More critically, Hispanics, though they never suffered slavery or endured Jim Crow, have been made beneficiaries of affirmative action. And there are now fifty million Hispanics. Add in Asians, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders and there are fewer than two white Americans for every person of color. And, now, there is affirmative action for women. This leaves white males, a shrinking third of the nation, to bear almost the entire burden of reverse discrimination.
This is not a formula for social peace. It will lead to repeated conflicts like the New Haven firefighters case, in which Frank Ricci and fellow firemen were denied promotions they earned in competitive exams because they were white and no black firemen had done as well. Race preferences will either be abolished by state referenda or declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, or America will become another Malaysia or South Africa with an established and enduring regime of racial and ethnic entitlements.
The backlash has already arrived. In Michigan, California, and Washington, majorities have voted to abolish all racial, ethnic, and gender preferences. In 2010, Arizona followed suit with 60 percent of the electorate voting to outlaw affirmative action. Opposition to race, ethnic, and gender preferences was behind the thirty-one GOP Senate votes against Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. On the only two previous court nominations by Democratic presidents in forty years, the Senate voted 87–9 for Stephen Breyer and 96–3 for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. To conservatives, the Sotomayor nomination was an Obama declaration that affirmative action is forever.
Judge Sotomayor was herself a lifetime beneficiary, who once called herself an “affirmative action baby.” If she had gone through the “traditional numbers route” of Princeton and Yale Law, she said, “it would have been highly questionable if I would have been accepted.… [M]y test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates.”137
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 16