restless reformer

Bill Kristol, neocon par excellence (if you can even use the word “excellence” when talking about a neocon, which you can’t…I’m still irritated that the NYT picked that guy as the “conservative,” though I’m not surprised. It is the NYT, after all.) has written an abysmal response to Obama’s speech. In the first few paragraphs, Kristol noted that he “didn’t shudder” at all the things that he considered disingenuous political positioning on the part of Obama (accusing him of not addressing difficult questions, using “ridiculous and unfair comparisons” to make a point, and “doing a disservice to the best” in the black community). No, none of those things bothered Mr. Kristol. That’s politics as usual, and that’s how he’d like to keep things. Here’s what really bothered him:

The only part of the speech that made me shudder was this sentence: “But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.”

Allow me to paraphrase: “Please, Mr. Obama…stick to politics as usual. Lie, propagandize, whatever. Just don’t make us talk about race. We need to ignore that discussion.”

Allow me to sarcastically dissect the rest of this piece:

As soon as I heard that, I knew what we’d have to endure. I knew that there would be a stampede of editorial boards, columnists and academics rushing not to ignore race. A national conversation about race! At long last!

“Endure.” Oh, poor Mr. Kristol. You’ll have to “endure” a discussion on race. What will you do? How will you survive?

Of course, memories are short. In 1997 President Bill Clinton announced, with great fanfare, that he intended “to lead the American people in a great and unprecedented [if he did say so himself] conversation about race.” That conversation quickly went nowhere. And just as well.

Phew! We dodged a bullet that time. Hopefully we can do the same this time.

Alright, I’m not going to go through the entire rest of the article. But, look. Mr. Kristol is, I’m sure, weary of the political positioning of the left, which has done every bit as much to perpetuate racism as (and perhaps even more than) many on the right. The answer to not having the conversation at all is NOT doing another rehash of the liberal side of the conversation.

Here’s what bothers me: he cites Moynihan in 1969 - which is, what, 5 years after Civil Rights legislation? - saying that “the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect,’” and says Moynihan was right.

Folks, that is shocking. Let’s do a quick review of American history up till that point - White Europeans showed up here a few hundred years before, and then stole and enslaved countless Africans in the process, many of them dying along the way, the rest being treated as less than human to varying degrees until, at least legally, 1964. By just five years later, a white guy in power was saying, “It’s time to stop talking about race now, isn’t it?”

Over forty years later, the effects of hundreds of years of racism continue, and folks like Kristol are just weary…why do we have to keep talking about this? Come on, we white folks made everything equal back in the 60s.

I’m a libertarian. I look forward to and pray for and hope to work for a time when Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “dream” is fulfilled. But you can’t do that by not talking about the problem, or pretending it’s gone. You can’t do it with a welfare state, either. What I’m suggesting is that there is a different option available to us - something other than either a welfare state or a “color-blindness” that has to be just as blind to the ongoing walls of racism that still exist. Even Kristol admits, “problems remain” (though I’m wondering if he’s ever taken the time to think about and write about those problems with the passion with which he writes against any discussion on race…or perhaps he’s too busy plotting American Empire…). If “problems remain,” then we still need to talk. I’m kindly suggesting that it’s a lot easier for a white man like Kristol to say, “We don’t need to have that conversation.” It’s a lot harder for a poor black man to say the same thing.

I’ve been reading John Perkins, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of that, because I’m looking for a distinctly Christian way forward - one which eschews the welfare state but still recognizes a deep, ongoing racial problem in the U.S. that needs to be addressed. Perkins seems to be the man for that discussion.