Dinesh D'Souza

Race remains the unsolved dilemma in the United States, and the current polarization over the issue will persist as long as there is a national taboo restricting honest discussion of group differences. The End of Racism was written to end the obfuscation, euphemism, posturing, and prevarication that frequently characterize the race debate. Yet the book is more than an exercise in candor and realism; it attempts to raise the discussion to a new level. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, the book makes ambitious claims about the origins of racism, the legacy of slavery and the future of liberalism and of the civil rights movement. Some of these claims are well known to scholars in the field, and others are original; yet virtually all represent a challenge to the conventional wisdom about race that has dominated American thought for at least a generation.

In brief, The End of Racism refutes the widely shared belief that racism is the primary explanation for black failure in the United States today. I argue that the main problem faced by blacks is neither deficient IQ, as suggested in The Bell Curve, nor racial discrimination, as alleged by Jesse Jackson and other civil rights activists. Rather, the book contends that African Americans have developed a culture that was an adaptation to historical oppression but is, in several important respects, dysfunctional today. I point out that some pathologies, such as extremely high African American crime rates, have the effect of legitimizing “rational discrimination,” as occurs in the case of the white woman who crosses the street when approached by a group of young black males. The book exposes as fatally flawed two contemporary policy remedies: multiculturalism and proportional representation. I argue that such liberal programs as affirmative action have little to do with fighting racism; rather, they are aimed at camouflaging the embarrassing reality of black failure to meet merit standards of academic achievement and economic performance. One of my main conclusions is that even though we now have substantial numbers of Hispanics, Asians, and Middle Easterners in this country, racism remains primarily a black-and-white problem. Many people may not like Korean or Mexican immigrants, but there is no systematic belief today that holds these groups to be inferior. Yet four centuries after blacks were brought to this country against their will, the suspicion of black inferiority persists. This suspicion helps to keep racism alive and so hinders progress toward a race-neutral society. Only by recognizing and confronting cultural pathology and becoming fully competitive with other groups, I argue, can African Americans discredit racism and join whites and other ethnic groups in claiming the fruits of the American dream.

If the main thesis of The End of Racism is true, then it follows that many of the prevailing assumptions about racism are wrong, current policies for fighting racism are counterproductive, and a new approach is required. Consequently, I was not surprised when the book—landing in stores at the time of the 0. J. Simpson verdict and the Million Man March—became an object of heated national debate. Yet even I, no stranger to controversy since my campus activist days, was struck by the hysterical note in some of the initial attacks. “One of the creepiest books to appear in recent years,” fumed Time magazine’s Jack White, who in a revealing display of liberal intolerance called for readers to “begin by boycotting [this] book.” Anthony Lewis of the New York Times dubbed the book the latest example of “racist chic.” Writing in the Washington Post, David Nicholson found The End of Racism “maddening ... in places unspeakably vile” and earnestly contemplated the return of the Nazis. “I hear the tread of heavy jackboots, faint and far away, but steadily approaching.”

These are extreme examples, yet with the exception of a half-dozen favorable reviews in places like Forbes, the Chicago Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor, the general reaction to the book was one of indignation and outrage. To meet these accusations, I found myself catapulted from one television show to another, from the “Today” show, where I was interrogated by an openly disgruntled Bryant Gumbel, to the “Donahue” show, where I sought to avoid the staged ambush of the ideologically aggressive host. In many different forums, I debated leading defenders of contemporary civil rights orthodoxy such as political scientist Andrew Hacker, author of Two Nations; Mary Frances Berry, head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; literary scholar Michael Eric Dyson, author of books on Malcolm X and gangster rap; and legal scholar Christopher Edley, who headed the Clinton administration’s affirmative action review. One positive benefit of this publicity was that the basic argument of The End of Racism reached a wide audience and the book became a national bestseller.

Many people were puzzled that harsh criticism of The End of Racism did not come merely from the usual suspects of the civil rights establishment but also from two well-known black conservatives, community activist Robert Woodson and economist Glenn Loury, who resigned their unpaid affiliation with my employer, the American Enterprise Institute, to register their protest against the book. Both Woodson and Loury professed to agree with many of the book’s conclusions. But they angrily dissented from others, and they joined critics from the political left in taking strong exception to the book’s tone, parading examples of what they considered offensive and outrageous assertions that imposed on them the moral duty of public condemnation.

I have pondered this question of tone in rereading the book, and I must say that I am still a bit flummoxed about the source of such indignation. Many others who have read The End of Racism have confessed that they are equally bewildered. Yet there is no doubting the genuineness of those who claim to be deeply offended. Here we have, in miniature, the perception gap that continues to make an American conversation about race so difficult. I say one thing, and some people hear me saying exactly that, but others take me to be saying something quite different, even the precise opposite. I present a position in one way, intending to generate a certain type of intellectual curiosity and provocation, and am seen by some to harbor entirely different motives, such as gleefully slaughtering sacred cows in order to sell books.

In part, I suppose, the reaction to The End of Racism’s tone reflects the very different sensibilities of those who lived through the civil rights movement and those who came after it. Younger readers seem quite conversant with the language and tone of the book, which reflects the world as they experience it. Yet some older readers, both liberal and conservative, are uncomfortable with the way I express certain opinions. I acknowledge that as an immigrant in my mid-thirties I do not have the same perspective and insight as a civil rights veteran who marched on Selma. Yet while this is an obvious disadvantage, freely acknowledged in The End of Racism, I believe that my own geographic and generational background also gives me some advantages. As an immigrant, I bring a fresh viewpoint to an often narrow and parochial American race debate. As a young writer who is neither white nor black, I am not easily charged with nostalgia for the bad old days of the past, nor can I be effectively pigeonholed or excommunicated through the familiar accusations of “racist” and “Uncle Tom,” although, as reaction to the book confirms, I am hardly immune to criticism.

Yet while I am candid in acknowledging my limitations, I cannot find an equivalent willingness on the part of veterans of the civil rights movement to recognize that their own traumatic involvements might also impose certain shortcomings. One of these shortcomings is a limited ability to think critically about the historical events they have experienced. This is also true of some conservatives who, having opposed aspects of the civil rights movement, are now possessed of a stuttering moral insecurity on racial issues. Across the ideological spectrum, those who lived through the civil rights era tend to speak in a somber, almost devotional language. Now I will admit that much of this rhetoric strikes me as both pompous and posturing. The End of Racism is almost entirely devoid of such language, preferring instead a more direct and frank tone. Regrettably, this candor is so rare in American public discourse that to some readers it seems incredibly jarring, even suggesting a lack of decency or sensitivity. Yet in my view, what is needed now and in the coming generation is not another lachrymose rendering of ‘We Shall Overcome” but precisely the kind of honest, tough-minded argument that will help the country to break through the contemporary racial paralysis, acknowledge victories that have been won but also mistakes that have been made, and develop a bold new agenda for the next century.

Let us consider the two most widely cited cases of alleged insensitivity, both from my chapter on slavery. “If America as a nation owes blacks as a group reparations for slavery, what do blacks as a group owe America for the abolition of slavery?” And further: “Slaves developed widely different personalities on the plantation: the playful Sambo, the sullen ‘field nigger’... the sly and inscrutable trickster. Some of these personality types are still recognizable.” I will admit that, read in isolation, these statements sound strident and insensitive. In retrospect, I would have written them differently, because when a topic is so susceptible to distortion on the fields of public controversy, one needs to be especially careful not to allow one’s argument to be vulnerable to intentional or unintentional misreading.

At the same time, I will not repudiate these formulations, because I am convinced that fair-minded readers will see that, read in context, they are well within the bounds of civil and rational debate and make serious points that cannot be dismissed. The issue of reparations, or what social debts have been inherited on account of slavery, is not one that I have invented; rather, I was simply discussing the merits of claims raised by Afrocentrists, black nationalists, and the Nation of Islam. My skepticism regarding the validity of reparations claims arises from the knowledge that slavery was a universal institution practiced in virtually every society, including all of sub-Saharan Africa. Americans who imported slaves purchased them from Africans, frequently using Arab middlemen who brokered the transaction.

What was distinctively Western was not slavery but the moral crusade to end slavery. That movement developed only in the West and had to be exported to Asia, Africa, and the Near East, sometimes over the vociferous objections of brown and black slaveowners whose livelihood depended on the trade in men, women, and children. These are facts that no serious scholar of slavery has challenged. My point is not to minimize the oppressiveness of slavery or to diminish its moral horror, but to question the dogmatic assumption that slavery was a uniquely Western institution that imposes financial obligations on successive generations of Americans more than a century after its abolition in the West. A contemporary balance sheet would have to take into account the fact that hundreds of thousands of whites died in a war to free the slaves, and that (against the wishes of the slaveowners) slavery itself proved to be the transmission belt that brought future generations of Africans into the orbit of Western political freedom and economic opportunity. Thus my question about the historical debt imposed by slavery is no mere provocation, but rather a prelude to an argument: to my knowledge, the first serious discussion of the issue of reparations as a proposed form of white atonement for the legacy of American slavery.

My statement about tricksters and “field niggers” also calls for elaboration. It is certainly true that the servile and childish Sambo figure is nearly extinct in black America today The trickster tradition, however, is very much alive, and the work of African American scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been devoted to tracing the historical evolution of the trickster style that is evident in rap music and inner-city repartee, not to mention in several of Eddie Murphy’s movies. These scholars report that the trickster figure has his origins in the tales of the ancient African griots, although the tradition persisted through the periods of American slavery and segregation.

Similarly, the “bad Negro” archetype is not only a social reality but also a politically significant one. One of America’s leading scholars of slavery, the black sociologist Orlando Patterson, argues that some of the pathologies of the inner-city underclass have their roots in the plantation culture of the antebellum South. Patterson writes, in a passage quoted in The End of Racism, “There was a distinct underclass of slaves. They were the incorrigible blacks of whom the slaveowner class was forever complaining. They ran away They were idle. They were compulsive liars. They seemed immune to punishment. We can trace the underclass, as a persisting social phenomenon, back to this group.” Black scholars such as John Ogbu have taken Patterson’s point further, contending that there is an “oppositional culture” in the inner city, inherited from slavery and segregation, which valorizes the outlaw or “bad nigger” as someone who refuses to allow his spirit to be crushed by oppression, while reviling the person who plays by the rules as a sellout and an “Uncle Tom.” The crucial question, which The End of Racism raises, is whether these cultural orientations that once represented reasonable adaptations to historical oppression are now dysfunctional and obsolete. To this question the otherwise loquacious critics of the book have responded with a hushed silence.

In taking seriously the extensive commentary on the book, attempting to learn from constructive criticisms while rebutting those I cannot agree with, I am compelled to distinguish irresponsible and misleading characterizations of my arguments from constructive and fair-minded disagreements with them. The distortions of the book’s positions have not, for the most part, been generated by scholars but rather by political writers and activists. At first I found myself responding to such egregious errors with frustration and resignation; but now I read them with mild amusement, recalling Churchill’s statement during the Boer War, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” Let me chronicle some of the misrepresentations of the book’s argument before examining the more substantive criticisms leveled by serious scholars.

The most widely circulated canard about The End of Racism is the claim that I deny that American slavery was a racist institution. Writing in USA Today, Dennis Cauchon attributes to me the view that “slavery in the U.S. couldn’t have been about race.” What I do say is that slavery existed all over the world (from China to India to sub-Saharan Africa to pre-Columbian America) and that historically it had nothing to do with race. I freely admit that in America slavery developed into a racist institution, and the interesting question is, why? My answer is that the practice of slavery contradicted the moral ideals of the American founding. If you believe that “all men are created equal,” as Jefferson did, and if you own black slaves, as Jefferson did, then at some level you are forced to deny that blacks are fully human.

Writing in the Washington Post Book World, reviewer David Nicholson charges me with claiming that “Africans may be more intelligent than African Americans because the smart Africans ran away from slave traders.” In fact, this is the view of psychologist Hans Eysenck, an ardent hereditarian whose IQ theories I reject. At another point I attribute to legal scholar Richard Epstein the view that “it is not unjust for an employer to refuse to hire even the most qualified black because the job is the employer’s to give.” Nicholson quotes the phrase as if I were speaking myself, rather than citing another source. In case after case, Nicholson ascribes to me views that I have clearly attributed to other sources, with detailed footnotes. Nicholson also faults me for denying that slavery was an immoral institution, whereas I say explicitly, “Whatever its functional relevance in a world utterly different from our own, slavery was a moral crime. People should not own other people.” Nicholson concludes his mistakes by alleging that my mentors are two white supremacists whom I denounce in the book and who have responded to The End of Racism as Dracula reacts to a cross.

In his nationally syndicated column, William Raspberry writes that I “strive mightily” to convince readers that there “aren’t any” racists left in America. In fact, as even the casual reader can verify, I repeatedly stress that racism continues to exist and cause harm. One chapter, “Bigotry in Black and White,” is devoted to identifying white and black racists and exposing their attempts to camouflage their doctrines. Raspberry also accuses me of asserting that “a natural hierarchy of racial abilities would predict and fully account for” the lower status of blacks in America. This phrase occurs in my discussion of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. “If Murray and Herrnstein are right,” I argue, then our society is condemned to live with racial hierarchy.” Yet far from making common cause with Hermstein and Murray, I proceed to challenge their genetic hypothesis, arguing instead for a cultural explanation.

Ignoring this distinction between genes and culture, Robert Woodson accuses me of purveying a biological view of black inferiority, which is explicitly rejected in the book. He claims to be disturbed that “D'Souza justifies slavery as a product of the Enlightenment.” In fact, I argue, drawing on the work of Winthrop Jordan and numerous scholarly authorities, that racism (not slavery) is a product of the Enlightenment, and that it received its strongest reinforcements from science. Since slavery existed all over the world from the dawn of human history, it could not possibly be a product of events that occurred only in the West in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Admittedly Woodson is a political activist, not a scholar, yet what are we to make of similar erroneous characterizations of The End of Racism by Glenn Loury? Loury’s review of this book in The Weekly Standard is the original source for the myth that I hold the view that “slavery was not a racist institution.” He also charges me with asserting that “most middle-class blacks owe their prosperity to affirmative action.” Nowhere does this line appear in the book. What I did write was much more subtle and entirely defensible: “The effect of affirmative action has been to accelerate the growth of the first sizable middle class in the history of African Americans.... The group constituted a distinct social phenomenon by the 1960s, as desegregation and antidiscrimination laws went into effect. Yet although scholars debate their precise effect, racial preferences have undoubtedly helped to solidify the black middle class.” In another review Loury writes, “D'Souza says black social pathology represents a revival of barbarism in the middle of Western civilization.” By contrast, I wrote that “for many whites the criminal and irresponsible black underclass represents a revival of barbarism in the midst of Western civilization,” a distinction that is entirely lost on Loury. In another case Loury charged me with ignoring the moral truth that “the fault line between civilization and barbarism runs through every human heart,” neglecting to inform his readers that he was, in fact, using against me a line that I myself first uttered on a public-television show on which we both appeared.

Perhaps I sound churlish in offering this catalog of errors. Yet readers can appreciate the predicament of an author who is hectored by rash and apoplectic critics demanding that he defend views that are not his own. What we are dealing with here is a kind of neurotic blindness that is the peculiar legacy of race-based thinking. In America, race is a subject on which normally sensible people lose their reason. Among some black writers, this problem is compounded by the bitter and complicated politics of racial posturing that is required to maintain credibility in the African American community. Thus I am forced to conclude that the critics named above have read The End of Racism through the distorting lens of their own ideological and racial prejudices, and they have worked themselves into such a frenzy that they have been unable even to give a straightforward account of what the book says, let alone refute its positions.

Yet it would be too convenient for me to escape criticism so easily. Buried beneath the rubble of Woodson’s bombast and Loury’s fulminations is an important substantive issue concerning the meaning of the color-blind principle which needs to be excavated and discussed. In addition, there have been serious examinations of The End of Racism in such places as the New Yorker, the New York Times, National Review, the Public Interest, and The New York Review of Books. These reviews, which come from ideologically diverse quarters, have questioned the central claims of the book in a civil and constructive manner. Thus I am grateful for the opportunity to state, as fairly as I can, the case against The End of Racism and then to meet these criticisms head-on.

The first serious criticism concerns the origins of racism. This issue is important because if racism had a beginning, it is conceivable that it can have an end, and the fatalistic view that racism will always be a systemic part of human, or at least Western, society is called into question. Moreover, by distinguishing between ethnocentrism and racism I seek to differentiate two phenomena that have quite different social implications. When groups unite to preserve their own economic and cultural interests, this expression of ethnocentrism is not only universal but sometimes desirable. Ethnic groups from the Jews to the Koreans have succeeded in America by helping their own. Of course ethnocentrism can lead to tribal conflict, and this is where a liberal society must act to contain and channel it, since ethnocentrism cannot be eliminated. Racism, on the other hand, has no redeeming features. In my view it is a destructive modern ideology that originated in the Western voyages of exploration.

Writing in the Public Interest, political philosopher Clifford Orwin confesses deep skepticism about my contention that racism is not universal but developed in Europe between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. This conclusion, Orwin worries, will “gratify contemporary enemies of the West.” Orwin correctly points to hostilities between Japanese and Korean, between Indian and Eskimo, between Iroquois and Huron, between Hutu and Tutsi. It does not matter, Orwin argues, that these adversaries belong to the same race. “The question is not whether D'Souza regards the Chinese and their neighbors as being of the same race but whether they themselves did. They did not.” Orwin alleges that “D'Souza has taken a principle of racial classification that originated in seventeenth-century Europe... and has foisted it on the ancient civilizations of the East.” The distinction between racism and ethnocentrism, Orwin writes, “is simply anachronistic when applied to premodern peoples.” Orwin draws a conclusion about racism that mirrors my conclusion about slavery: racism is universal, in his view, but the movement to fight and end racism is Western.

Orwin is right that the concept of race and racial classification is modern and Western, and therefore there is something inherently awkward and anachronistic about applying it to premodern and non-Western peoples, somewhat akin to asking whether medieval Arab traders were capitalists or whether Indian tribes in pre-Columbian America enjoyed participatory democracy. Orwin seeks to avoid this difficulty by locating the concept of superiority entirely in the eye of the beholder. The fatal flaw of this approach is that it reduces virtually all conflicts between groups throughout human history to racial conflicts. Does Orwin really believe that the Hindu-Muslim struggle is “racist” because each group considers itself separate and superior? Was the Hundred Years War between England and France “racist”? Is the current war in Bosnia “racist,” even though the Serbs and Croatians belong to the same race and cannot be easily distinguished by appearance? I think these conflicts are much better understood as religious and cultural and territorial battles; it is Orwin who is projecting a racial interpretation onto them.

A second criticism of The End of Racism concerns its analysis of cultural relativism as the philosophical grounding for the civil rights movement. Writing in the left-leaning Jewish magazine Tikkun, anthropologist F. Allan Hanson contends that relativism simply means being sensitive to how other people view the world—like trying to understand why the Hua people of New Guinea would eat the bodies of their dead—with no specific relevance to multiculturalism or American civil rights laws. Hanson is joined by philosopher Richard Rorty, writing in the New York Times Book Review, who dismisses the relationship between relativism and the civil rights movement, insisting that the latter “was an expression of naked moral outrage at unnecessary human suffering.” In the New Yorker, political scientist Sean Wilentz maintains that the leader of the civil rights struggle, Martin Luther King, was certainly no relativist and “actually supported... racial preferences.”

It is true that, toward the end of his life, King became increasingly disenchanted with the American political system and issued a radical call for economic redistribution. It is important to note, however, that King’s recommended jobs programs and antipoverty policies were strictly race neutral, which is to say, their benefits would go to disadvantaged persons regardless of color. Consequently those who continue to cite King as a champion of the color-blind principle are right. Yet the deeper question remains: did the civil rights movement’s later embrace of race-based policies such as affirmative action constitute a thoroughgoing rejection of King, or was it a logical development of ideas that were implicit in King’s cause from the outset?

Here is where cultural relativism enters the picture. In philosophical terms, relativism is an ideology that has been expressed in many variations. There are soft relativists who argue that relativism means nothing more than trying to understand other cultures on their own terms. There are hard relativists who insist that other cultures are inaccessible universes of meaning and that there is no way that a person from one culture can hope to understand another culture “from within.” And there are relativists who try to understand the doctrine in terms of its simplest and clearest definition: all cultures are presumed equal. It is this last expression of relativism that became central to the thinking of the civil rights movement. Hanson and Rorty are right that there is no necessary connection between relativism and contemporary race policies. All I am saying is that there is a demonstrable historical connection.

That cultural relativism was introduced to the United States by anthropologists of the Franz Boas school is widely accepted by historians. That the Boasians played a crucial role in shaping the political and legal strategy of the NAACP and the early civil rights movement is also beyond doubt. I believe I have documented in the book how relativism shaped the expectations of activists like Martin Luther King, who held that because cultures and racial groups are basically equal—equal in ability, talent, and aptitude—therefore equality of rights for individuals should lead to equality of results for groups. When this equation did not hold true over the next few decades, and blacks proved uncompetitive with other groups on various measures of academic achievement and economic performance, many civil rights activists automatically concluded that racial discrimination could not have abated; rather, it had merely burrowed underground and now expressed itself in covert and “institutional” forms. Consequently, rejecting King’s color-blind strategy, they gradually became advocates of using racial preferences to enforce the relativist goal of group equality. This attempt to mandate equality between racial groups is the governing principle of contemporary liberal policies such as multiculturalism and proportional representation, and it is a direct outgrowth of cultural relativism.

A third major source of controversy raised by The End of Racism is the book’s extensive discussion of “rational discrimination,” a subject that is familiar to economists and statisticians, but which I have now introduced into the public debate for the first time. Writing in Newsweek, author and journalist Ellis Cose protests the book’s stance on the subject, because in his view it “leads largely to a defense of prejudice by presumably intelligent people.” Cose refers to my argument that taxidrivers, including nonwhite drivers, may be reluctant to pick up young black males, especially at night, not because they harbor irrational prejudices toward that group but because they know that young black males have a much higher crime rate than young white males or any other group. Consequently, these cabdrivers may simply be watching out for their property and security. Yet Cose refuses to extend this reasoning to employers and bank loan managers, because “the universe of black men looking for work may be different from the universe of black men looking for trouble.”

Unless we assume that those two universes do not overlap—that there are no black men with criminal records who seek jobs or loans—then employers and loan officers are faced with the following question: all other things being equal, is there a risk differential in selecting a candidate from the pool of black men applying for a job or loan, as opposed to the pool of white men in the same situation? If there is no difference between the two groups, then the question of rational discrimination does not arise, and blacks who have a harder time getting employment or loans are victims of irrational prejudice. If, however, there is a difference between the two groups, then employers and loan managers who have to make predictive judgments, and are not in a position to gain complete personal knowledge about their employees and clients, are going to find themselves strongly tempted to make group judgments. I am not saying that this is desirable; I am saying that it may be reasonable and, under some conditions, inevitable. Unfortunately, Cose and others seem to ascribe my description of the way in which human decisions are made to a moral defense of such actions, which it is not. Precisely because I am disturbed about the individual injustice perpetrated by rational discrimination, I advocate strategies that are aimed at changing group behavior so that there will be no empirical grounds for such discrimination to continue.

The End of Racism is firm in its demonstration that today it is merit, not racism, which is the main culprit producing group inequality, so that on virtually every measure of academic achievement and economic performance, whites and Asians come out on top, Hispanics in the middle, and African Americans at the bottom. The interesting and important question is why this is so. My rejection of the genetic explanation and my delineation of the dangers posed by such an approach have met with understandable approval from liberals but have not entirely pleased all my conservative friends. Implying that I have sold out to the liberals, author Peter Brimelow contends that while my disagreements with Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray make me “more palatable” to opinion elites, in his view I offer no evidence that The Bell Curve is wrong; rather, I “just sort of hope that it is culture that accounts for the IQ gap.”

Not so. I concede the importance of the data presented in The Bell Curve, and acknowledge that it is impossible to prove definitively that group differences in IQ have no genetic basis. What I do say, with supporting evidence, is that there are good reasons to believe that a cultural explanation can account for the most significant differences between groups—differences in test scores, crime rates, family structure, and so on. Why seek a genetic cause for social variations that can be adequately accounted for in cultural terms? The Bell Curve, in my view, strains too hard to prove that group characteristics are immutable and therefore, quite probably, genetic in origin. For instance, Herrnstein and Murray make much of the alleged superiority of Asians. Yet they downplay studies by psychologist James Flynn and sociologist Sanford Dornbusch which show that little separates the test scores of whites and Asians at an early age, even though Asians on average do better on test of academic performance in later years. There is no mystery as to why this is so: Asian students study more. Cultural factors such as intact families and an orientation toward hard work and deferred gratification are undoubtedly central to the greater academic success enjoyed, on average, by Asian American youngsters.

This brings us to the fundamental issue of culture, and it is here that The End of Racism makes its boldest and most controversial contribution to the national debate. Most hotly disputed are the questions of whether there is such a thing as “black culture,” whether it can be held responsible for holding back the black community, and whether public policy can assist in rehabilitating the inner city and raising the competitive standards of African Americans. Writing in The New York Review of Books, historian George Fredrickson faults me for assuming that “there is a determinate entity called ‘black culture’ and another called ‘white culture,’ and the latter is clearly superior to the former,” a position that he decries as “cultural absolutism.” Cultural absolutism is not “technically racist,” Fredrickson concedes, because it implies nothing about immutable biological characteristics, yet it is the “functional equivalent” of racism because it inferiorizes the behavior of a whole people. Fredrickson is especially critical of my recommendation that blacks learn to “act white,” which he says is a “prescription that explicitly identifies what is virtuous and commendable with the possession of white pigmentation.”

In retrospect, I believe that my use of the term “black culture” was a mistake, because I certainly did not mean to imply that there is something about being black that gives one a certain kind of culture. Indeed, it is precisely the false equation of race and culture that is the terrible legacy of racism, one that The End of Racism was written to challenge and refute. At the same time, Fredrickson and other historians who have correctly pointed out that the experience of American blacks in this country differs from that of whites and other immigrants seem peculiarly reluctant to concede that, as a result of this experience, blacks as a group have developed certain distinctive orientations, attitudes, and behaviors. Thus it is meaningful to speak of “African American culture,” with the appropriate caveats and qualifications that attend any generalization.

No reasonable person would maintain that all blacks share certain cultural traits in equal measure or that no whites possess these traits. Cultural differences can be seen in terms of statistical averages and frequency distributions, and when I write about African American problems such as illegitimacy, crime, or dependency on the government, what I mean is that blacks suffer these pathologies in much greater measure than any other group. And I am quite sure that no reader of this book will fail to recognize that I make crucial distinctions between the black middle class and the black underclass. These groups are quite different in some respects: the black middle class has far lower crime rates and much greater access to economic opportunities, including affirmative action. Yet at the same time these two groups are surprisingly similar in other respects: middleclass blacks and poor blacks have very similar voting patterns, both groups have high rates of government dependency, many middle-class blacks feel no less alienated from society than poor blacks, and the illegitimacy rate for middle-class blacks, while considerably lower than that for poor blacks, is considerably higher than that for middle-class whites and Asians. In summary, ethnic groups do differ in cultural patterns of behavior—not simply in the fevered perceptions of racists—and no social understanding is possible which seeks to deny this fact.

Cultures are not better or worse in the absolute; they are better or worse in relation to certain goals. Alexis de Tocqueville observed more than 150 years ago that blacks and whites have shared goals in America, unlike American Indians and whites of the early nineteenth century, and I believe this is still true. As a group, African Americans want to be in the boardroom of General Motors, they want to enroll in selective and prestigious universities, they want to share in the same social rewards that whites aspire to enjoy Consequently, one can speak of the functional superiority of cultural strategies that are aimed at attaining shared goals. For example, the Korean practice of setting up rotating credit associations to generate capital for small business is an effective way to escape the deprivations of the inner city. One of the benefits of a multiracial society, in my view, is that as individuals and groups, we can learn from one another.

My use of the phrase “acting white” can be understood only in context. Earlier in the book, I cite the relevant scholarly literature on the “acting white” phenomenon, which refers to the hostility to academic achievement shown by many inner-city young people. If you go to the Smithsonian, borrow books from the library, play chess, or study hard, you are regarded as a sellout to the white oppressor. It is in this sense that blacks need to “act white,” by which I mean to boldly and unreservedly embrace the cultural strategies that are necessary for success in America. Obviously there are no virtues inherently associated with white pigment; I could just as easily have coined the metaphor “acting Asian.” My rhetorical purpose was to turn the “acting white” bogeyman on its head, to call for black activists to abandon their oppositional rhetoric and to encourage African Americans to take advantage of opportunities that were once extremely scarce but are now readily available.

With clarity, intelligence, and judiciousness, D'Souza portrays racism as a vigorous Western intellectual concept that can only be defeated by a more vigorous and profound idea to explain human differences, not by treating it as a pathology that must be cured or by bathing its victims in a romantic pathos that denies the complexity of their humanity or history. The End of Racism is a book that should be read, discussed, and debated, with the hope, as D'Souza himself believes, that we might be able one day to do away with the idea of race in the United States.

—GERALD EARLY, Director, African and Afro-American Studies Program, Washington University, St. Louis

These prefatory remarks about culture bring me to my most resolute and persistent critic, Glenn Loury. Loury’s substantive critique of The End of Racism is that it embodies what he terms a “racialist” or “racially essentialist” vision. Loury frets that I insist upon describing social pathologies in terms of African American culture, whereas I fail to recognize that these are really American problems. Loury inquires, “What, exactly, is ‘underclass culture’ and where does it diverge from ‘American culture’?” Moreover, Loury contends that the principle of color blindness imposes on those who write about race a moral obligation to avoid describing social problems in racial and ethnic terms. ‘We should be colorblind as we gaze upon welfare mothers, juvenile felons and the cognitively deficient,” Loury writes, adding for lyrical effect that such social pathology is “a problem of sin not of skin.” Loury says that he recognizes the disproportionate impact of social problems on the black community, but he insists that only a collective assumption of national responsibility, rather than the specific identification of cultural pathology with African Americans, is the morally correct and politically viable response. Books like The End of Racism, Loury warns, demonize black culture and thus “give encouragement to white racists.”

There is an element of truth to Loury’s claim that blacks are part of the larger American culture and that African American problems are national problems. Indeed, I say as much in The End of Racism. Discussing cultural breakdown I write, “This is not merely an African American problem; it is a national problem.... The American crime rate has risen dramatically over the past few decades, and juvenile homicide has reached catastrophic proportions. Alarming numbers of high school students use drugs, get pregnant, or carry weapons to class.” I further point out that the illegitimacy rate for whites today is not far from the black rate that Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote about in his famous report on the black family in the 1960s, leading Charles Murray to warn of a “coming white underclass.” I am in complete agreement with Loury that the celebration of drug use during the 1960s has produced a bitter harvest of addiction across all sectors of society. Unfortunately, glamorization of violence and promiscuity continues to pervade popular culture in the 1990s.

Yet to pronounce all social ills as American problems is to ignore the differential concentration of many of these problems in particular communities. If it is American culture as a whole that is so debilitating, why is the illegitimacy rate for whites approximately one-third that for blacks? Even controlling for socioeconomic status, blacks are far more likely to bear children out of wedlock than other groups. Similarly, although crime rates for young people have risen nationwide, young black males are several times more likely to be arrested and convicted of burglary, rape, or homicide than their white counterparts. The results of tests of academic achievement show that while there has been a decline in standards across the board, its effects are especially severe when it comes to the performance of African Americans. Data from the College Board, for example, show that whites and Asians who come from families earning less than $20,000 a year consistently score higher on the SAT than blacks who come from families earning more than $60,000 a year. These are ethnic, not merely socioeconomic, differences.

Color blindness as a matter of public policy makes sense. Indeed, Loury and I are on the same side in insisting that the government should be strictly race neutral, permitting our pigment to count neither for us nor against us. In the book I call this approach “separation of race and state.” Moreover, in our private dealings with others, we should seek as much as possible to evaluate people on their merits as individuals, not on aggregate group characteristics. Very often it is feasible to do this. It rarely makes sense for an employer to refuse to hire a black person because blacks, as a group, have a high crime rate; in the vast majority of cases, the employer can simply check to see if this particular applicant has a criminal record. Technological advances are making it easier for employers and lenders to gain quick access to information, thus enabling them to judge candidates based on their own credentials and merits. At the same time—and here is where Loury and I seem to part ways—we have to recognize that, in a world of limited information, there are situations where group judgments are unavoidable. To return to my famous example, taxidrivers cannot be blamed for being afraid to pick up a young black male carrying a baseball bat. The driver who refuses to exercise caution, and thus places his life at risk in order to prove a point or please Glenn Loury, is not a color-blind hero, but a blind fool.

It seems to me equally naive to demand that, in evaluating social problems, scholars and writers shut their eyes to the racial and ethnic dimensions of the social problems that we as a nation face. If a pathology such as violent crime or single-parent families is more heavily concentrated in Chicago than in Cleveland, or more in the inner city than in the suburbs, what is to be gained by denying this fact? The only way to develop sound remedies for social ailments is to diagnose them where they are most prevalent. Is it racial essentialism to notice that despite the hardships imposed by life in the inner city, many immigrant groups—including black immigrants from Haiti, the West Indies, and Africa—are overcoming obstacles, outcompeting African Americans, and claiming their share of the American dream? Loury’s approach may have the short-term benefit of saving himself and other African American leaders some embarrassment, but it also has the very high long-term cost of postponing a serious project in cultural rehabilitation, one in which everyone contributes his share but the dividends disproportionately go to the poorest African Americans.

Tightly drawn and passionately argued, The End of Racism is an invaluable contribution to our raging national debate on race and justice.

—CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, Syndicated Conumnist

Finally let me address the charge that The End of Racism gives aid and comfort to racists or assures whites that they can forget about their historical responsibility to blacks. People like Loury who have made this charge need to explain the furious denunciations of the book at the hands of certain white supremacists. Moreover, although it was my intention only to criticize him, it seems that columnist Samuel Francis lost his job at the Washington Times at least in part for racist remarks of his that I quoted. The people who have welcomed and praised this book are not the David Dukes of this world but rather leading civil rights activists, including a former chairman of the NAACP, black conservatives like Thomas Sowell and Emanuel McLittle, and eminent scholars like Eugene and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.

Regardless of the caliber of its friends and foes, I believe the book’s effect to be profoundly antiracist, because it identifies the strongest contemporary force that supports and deepens white racism and offers a concrete strategy to deal with it. In my view, nothing perpetuates white hostility to blacks today more than the scandalous pathologies of the African American underclass. These pathologies reinforce racism by giving it an empirical foundation, a foundation in experience. The best way to address these pathologies is not through a public pretense that nothing distinguishes the African American underclass from the rest of society— this is the big lie that Loury is trying to intimidate other conservatives into proclaiming—but through bold and realistic enterprise to identify the entrenched behavioral problems of poor blacks and work to change them.

Far from excusing white neglect of disadvantaged African Americans, I am trying to specify the best way to spur white involvement. Whites are most likely to help when they see that blacks are taking a leadership role in a project of cultural renewal, for the simple reason that people are much more disposed to help those who are helping themselves. Reforming the attitudes and behavior of the black underclass is the best form of antiracism, as well as the most compassionate solution for those who live in the inner city. In the black community, as in American society, we need imaginative strategies to strengthen what the urban anthropologist Elijah Anderson calls the “culture of decency” and to transform what he calls the “culture of irresponsibility.”

The American race debate is full of surprises. While Glenn Loury, whom I praise in the book as a man working for civilizational renewal, attacks my argument with a crudeness and venom of which I and many others previously believed him incapable, another figure whom I sternly criticize in the book, Ice T, has apparently embraced some of my positions. In a recent book introduction, this hard-nosed rapper who once celebrated the gangster lifestyle as the embodiment of black soul now has this to say: “The mind-set of black folks has to change.... The first thing is that you have to admit that you’ve been messing up.... One of the best comments I’ve heard was ‘the best weapon against racism is excellence.’” Rhetoric comes more easily than action, of course, and there is no way to know how seriously we can take this seeming change of heart, just as we cannot foresee the long-term effects of the Million Man March. Yet when Ice T says something that could be lifted right out of The End of Racism, and when hundreds of thousands of black men gather on the Mall in Washington to emphasize atonement, self-help, entrepreneurship, strong families, and taking responsibility for their actions, the world is changing and there are grounds for hope.

The American dilemma has been with us now for a long time, yet its particular form varies from era to era. Our contemporary challenge is to rethink old assumptions and to develop new initiatives for transcending the invidiousness of race. The End of Racism was written in part to clear the minefield of taboos that have made candid and serious racial discussion in this country virtually impossible. Walking through this treacherous terrain, one can see the explosions, and it is not always easy to be heard over the noise. Yet I am convinced that when the dust has settled, The End of Racism will have accomplished its mission, because the American debate about race will be a bit more coherent, a bit more honest, and a bit more free.

Tell a Friend | Contact | Home The content of this site is ©2005 by Dinesh D'Souza, all rights reserved. Privacy Policy | E-mail Webmaster

Tell a Friend | Contact | Home

The content of this site is ©2005 by Dinesh D'Souza, all rights reserved.
Privacy Policy | E-mail Webmaster